Philosophy is a discourse. It is communicated in words in accordance with reason. Music, on the other hand, while it may contain lyrics, is non-verbal and seemingly non-rational. What might we learn by considering music and philosophy together. This panel considers various methodological issues that arise from the comparison. One presentation suggests that although music is non-discursive, it nevertheless teaches us something about life. Two of the presentations discuss jazz improvisation, suggesting that it bears some commonality with philosophical intuition or that it sheds light on lived religion. Two of the essays discuss polyrhythm as a kind of complex ordering. The presentations draw from affect theory, Islamic philosophy and practice, and African American history, as well as music theory.
This paper examines the role of music in the work of 20th-century Jewish philosopher and musicologist Vladimir Jankélévitch. Within his philosophical work, nostalgia emerges a malady that is paradigmatic of the human condition. It is something like an affective response to our own finitude, and thus can never be cured once and for all. However, music reflects our—temporal, irreversible—situation, and in so doing makes it bearable and perhaps even beautiful.
In this paper, I will analyze the significance of the concept of intuition in the context of the philosophy of religion by examining the relationship between intuition and the role of improvisation in jazz music, with particular reference to the intersection of musical and religious intution in the work of John Coltrane. Improvisation, like philosophical intuition, is a rationally grounded practice through which a soloist freely interacts with the musical themes of the composition, composing "on the fly" on the basis of the melodic and chordal qualities of the composition, and yet not strictly constrained by those qualities. Particularly within the bop and avant-garde genres, the soloist may follow their musical intuition far beyond the musical base defined by the chorus of the composition, seeking ever deeper expressions of musical truth revealed within the composition.
In 1819, Anglo-American architect Benjamin Latrobe observed an “Assembly of Negroes” in New Orleans, engaging in singing, dancing, and drumming. Dismissing the event's sacred and social dimensions rooted in Africana religious practices, he characterized it with terms such as “noise” and “brutally savage.” This paper leverages affect theory to reinterpret this historical moment, highlighting the non-discursive interplay between race, religion, and music. Affect theory, which posits knowledge as emerging from the junctures of thinking and feeling, unveils new analytical avenues for 1) deconstructing the economies of white racialized “logic,” and 2) framing Afro-diasporic music and rhythm as intellectual and corporeal counterpoints to the logic of racial oppression. It argues that Latrobe’s account exemplifies how racism is rationalized through affective means, and positions Afro-Creole rhythm as a multifaceted and embodied affirmation of black life, capable of articulating political, scientific, and social ways of knowing against the denial of black humanity.
Agamben wrote, "Just as, for a soldier, the trumpet blast or the drumbeat is as effective as the order of a superior (or even more than it), so in every field and before every discourse, the feelings and moods that precede action and thought are musically determined and oriented." Such theorization of music, or perhaps, a musicalization of theory, has been taken up productively recently by thinkers like Fred Moten in his In the Break, and CJ Uy’s deployment of free jazz to theorize the dizzying rhetorical stylings of Sa‘d al-dīn Hammuya. In this paper, I would like to propose an exploration of the sonorous foundation of the Arabic maqām tradition (employed in the recitation of the Qur’an, poetry, and classical Arabic music) in the works of Ibn al-‘Arabī and Ibn al-Fārịd, the most influential Sufi authors of Arabic prose and poetry, respectively, followed by an investigation of that of Yorùbá ritual music used for òrìṣà worship in Yorùbá cosmologies as expressed in festivals and the performance of Ifá divination.
This paper develops jazz as a theoretical framework for the study of medieval Sufism. Recent work by Paul Berliner, Ingrid Monson, Fumi Okiji, and Dan DiPiero frame jazz improvisation as a way of being that unfolds fluidly across embodied, social, affective, and theoretical dimensions of diverse musical contexts. The paper will bring these insights to bear on the work of Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240), a renowned Sufi shaykh whose writing left an indelible impact on almost all dimensions of Sufi thought and practice. By reading Ibn ʿArabī's Sufi training manuals, litanies, hagiographies, and philosophical treatises in dialogue with jazz, the paper will explore methods for textured analyses of the interwoven textual, embodied, and social performances of medieval Sufis. Put simply—if read training manuals as exercise books and philosophical treatises as scores and transcriptions, how might we imagine (and analyze) the dynamic improvisations of lived Sufi knowledge?