The thesis examines the phenomenon of “wholeness” in music from a musical-phenomenological perspective, while raising the question of the methodological foundations which make possible music phenomenology’s approach to this phenomenon. The main thesis of the dissertation is that in order to perceive wholeness in music, the I must first identify with it. Musical experience suggests that wholes in music have no musical meaning if the I perceiving them does not identify with them. In this identification, however, the I and music are no longer separate – for example, as poles in a subject-object structure – but are one. Hence, a musical-phenomenological analysis of the phenomenon of “wholeness” in music reveals wholeness not as a property of music as “object,” but as a property of the relation between I and music. Musical wholeness is the wholeness of the relation between I and music. The thesis confirms this position in the lifeworld testimonies of a number of prominent nineteenth- and twentieth-century musical practitioners and theoreticians, and then proceeds to a phenomenological analysis in order to highlight musical wholeness as a fundamental given of musical phenomenology.