Biography

Research

Publications

• Article / 2025

  Moritz Geiger’s Aesthetic Attitude and Its Musical-Phenomenological Dimensions

  In: Философски Алтернативи

  Abstract

  This article examines the main concept in Moritz Geiger’s aesthetics – the aesthetic attitude – which, as an extension of the phenomenological concept attitude, describes the art-oriented (art-attuned) self. The very concept of attitude always refers to the intimate turning towards (orientation) either the world or art. At the same time, however, there exists another third attitude, which is capable of describing the intimacy of both the aesthetic and the world attitude, and which is inferred as a logical necessity without any evidence of what precisely this third attitude is. This indicates the existence of methodological ambiguity in contemporary music philosophy and musicology. The possibility of elucidating it – by revealing the musical-phenomenological dimensions of Geiger's aesthetics – is one of the conceptual horizons of this article, while the relations between the three attitudes are part of the conditions in which its theme unfolds. In order to clarify the aesthetic attitude, Geiger introduces additional concepts, namely outer concentration and value perception. Geiger analyses their modus operandi phenomenologically, and this makes it possible to reveal the musical-phenomenological dimensions of the aesthetic attitude, which directly links it to themes and ideas in musical-philosophical literature. Musical-philosophical concepts such as musical nomos, transcendental musical synthesis, and the faculty of co-being enable Geiger's ideas to be developed and placed into a concrete musical-philosophical perspective that sees the relationship between the self and music as fundamental and autonomous.

• Article / 2024

  The Festive Musical Artwork and Its Topos

  In: Интегрална музикална теория

  Abstract

  This paper highlights the musicological (and practical) problem of the essential difference between a festive musical artwork and a concert-festive musical artwork. The former has a festive occasion and a topos (understood as a particular place and time defined by the meaning of a particular festival) where I am bodily present, while the latter has no festive occasion and its topos is the concert hall where I am bodily “absent”. As a performer, listener and involved in the concert musical artwork in general, I find myself left without a particular bodily situatedness which, in turn, is an indispensable aspect of the event festival and in this sense guarantees it. This means that in the concert-festive musical artwork the body has to be situated in music that is outside the festive topos that cannot be achieved. The consequence is that the festive musical meaning is altered and no longer determined by the particular festival but by something else. Accordingly, the way in which the musical meaning itself is bodily perceived needs to be reconsidered. To highlight the problem, the paper examines Dimitar Nenov's "Christmas" by means of phenomenological analysis and describes how this artwork is initially devoid of festivity, occasion and topos: it is composed outside the lifeworld of the particular festive topos. As a counterbalance to Nenov's oratorio is Johann Sebastian Bach's Weihnachtsoratorium, an example of an artwork with a concrete festival, occasion and topos, where the musician is quite definitely bodily present, namely, in a festive and eventful way. Here the festive musical sense is preserved (provided by a lived, festive world with a specific time and place). The implication of the analysis is that to such a concert-festive music must be found another “festival”, another occasion and another toposic corporeality from which one could sense it as whole.

• Article / 2023

  Music in Ancient Greek Philosophy and the Possibility of the Question of Musical Being

  In: Докторантски четения

  Abstract

  The question of what Being itself is finds its roots already in Parmenides, whose theses serve as the point of departure for Plato and, in this sense, for Aristotle and a large part of subsequent ancient Greek thought. At the foundation of this question lie two pairs of antithetical determinations: One–Many; Eternal–Temporal. When Parmenides, and after him Plato, attempt to understand Being through these essential characteristics, they encounter profound semantic ambiguities.

  Already at this initial level of problematizing Being, music plays a particularly important role for the human soul and its dispositions. In the Republic, it prepares the guardians either for battle or for rest; in the Timaeus, it is responsible for the proper tuning of the human soul according to the proportions of the celestial spheres. These spheres contain within themselves the proportions closest to perfection, being the first reflection of the Eternity of the One; thus, the role of music as the bearer and transmitter of these proportions—from the heavens to the human soul—proves crucial also for the understanding of Logos itself. The fallen human being struggles to return to its perfect Being, and it turns out that, apart from reason, music too grants access to that Being.

  In Plato, however, this access remains unexplained; the relation of music to eternity is abstractly clear but practically obscure. Music is presented as the art of correct proportion, yet also as the art of time, since it finds its concrete existence only during performance. How, then, do eternal proportions relate to the temporal nature of music? And why, in the Republic, is its function reduced to a merely ethical one, whereas in the later Timaeus its function acquires ontological significance—it tunes the soul according to perfect proportions?

  Already against the background of classical Greek thought, the problem of musical being is discernible and possible. The greatest example is Aristoxenus, a student of Aristotle, who was the first to ground theoretical knowledge of music in hearing (and not in reason). For the first time, he places the question of Being—initiated by Parmenides—on an entirely different foundation. In this short paper, I shall attempt to articulate precisely this musical foundation: the one Aristoxenus establishes, arising from the humus of an already developed classical problematic of Being, and the one that makes the question of Musical Being possible.

• Thesis/Dissertation / 2021

  An Attempt at a Hermeneutic Analysis of Music Education Based on the Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer
  Abstract

  In this text, I will use Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics as the basis for a music-educational position in which the place of music in human life and in education will be delineated. Proper philosophical hermeneutics deals with the limits of human knowledge and the methods through which it is acquired and interpreted. In a music-philosophical context, hermeneutics defends the idea that musical being comes alive only in the act of musical engagement, characterised by complete devotion and playfulness. In such an engagement, the state of lived experience comes to the forefront—an experience that presupposes a unique and concrete temporality.

  Time, however, is treated in multiple ways within philosophical hermeneutics. When it comes to the phenomenal temporality of musical experience, it is always here and now; in it, all subject–object relations fall away—the person and the musical share one and the same being. In music, this temporality is clearly perceptible, since music, as a temporal art, requires from everyone (performers, listeners) full devotion and inner activity in the present moment.

  But philosophical hermeneutics also includes another, equally important mode of time: historicality. To accept the tradition and culture (in their concrete and unique context) of each epoch, each time; to recognise their interconnectedness; and to understand how music and human thought about music change in different periods—this constitutes the hermeneutic perspective on historicality.

  Musical experience requires a sensus communis (common sense), through which one senses, internalises, and understands the musical. This sensus communis represents an inner disposition of the person, dependent on their social environment and concrete historicality. Such a sense presupposes an educated society in order to be realised, for society must serve as the soil in which the “common” of this sense can emerge. Building the education of society—forming this sense—is a task of utmost importance, assumed precisely by education.

  Education, in turn, needs a clear model through which to guide itself—a truth, a criterion by which a person becomes educated, that is, develops and sharpens this sense; and all educational means, through the path of experience, must direct the person toward an educated experience. Gadamer’s hermeneutics invites us to assume that if, in a game or an experience, something is disclosed to us that cannot be disclosed otherwise, then the experience itself contains knowledge. Aesthetic experience, characterised above all by such playful engagement, must therefore also contain knowledge, an image, and a model.

  Only music—as a bearer of aesthetic and moral value—can serve as the foundation for music education. The claim that music can provide a model, that one can be educated through it, can rest only on the foundations of a truly common sense. From this standpoint, play—as a mode of human relation to the world in which subject–object distinctions dissolve; play, which is the primary mode of being of the musical work and the very place where musicality lives—emerges as the essential means of education.

  Education must make use of musicality and play, which reside within lived experience, for its own purposes—but in such a way that the inherent purposiveness of the play act is not destroyed, for play itself can never be a means, but only an end. Any criterion imposed from outside appears contentless from the standpoint of play and experience.

   

  For an excerpt from the thesis, click “Download” below.