Background and Audio

Think about the experience of listening to very beautiful music. For example, think of a violin virtuoso playing Bach’s Violin Partita No. 2 in D minor. If you are not familiar with this piece of music, you can listen to an excerpt of it (play below).

If you do not like this style of music, imagine a piece of music that you think is very sad but also very beautiful. In the Bach partita, our ears are responding to differences in frequency, tempo, rhythm, and loudness as we hear the sound of the lone violin. Our toes may move in time to the music, and our eyes may cloud with tears at the poignancy of the music. These movements may be considered action. But why does the piece affect us emotionally? Why do we find music beautiful in the first place? How is it that we feel Bach’s grief at losing his wife through his music nearly 300 years after the piece was written? If you are a music theorist, this speaks to the power of Bach’s music. But for our purposes, it introduces us to the issue of phenomenology. Phenomenology is our subjective experience of perception. Phenomenology refers to our internal experience of the world around us.