Singing the World: towards a Phenomenology of Nineteenth-Century Lied

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This project investigates a selection of Romantic lieder through a phenomenological lens, adopting, in particular, the ideas of Merleau-Ponty. I argue this framework renews a musical knowing that rectifies the tendency of some contemporary musicology to turn music into 'empty trucks for the carrying of semantic freight' (Johnson 2020: 9). The lied, a quintessential medium for Romantic subjectivity where the personal and the social, the somatic and the semantic are in constant dialogue, resonates with Merleau-Ponty's body oriented ontology, formulated through concepts such as silence, depth, enlacement, the imaginal, felt solidarity, singing the world and 'the flesh of the world'. These concepts, when used as analytical tools formusical emergence, dismantle the gulf between subject, object and predicate, providing a new paradigm of musical meaning that reshapes the debate between music as 'music' (Hanslick, Zangwill) and music as'discourse' (Wagner, Kramer). This thesis draws on existing literature on Romantic song/subjectivity/philosophy, musico-textual analysis and carnal musicology while adding an overt phenomenological dimension.