Phenomenology

This chapter argues that phenomenology can be methodologically enriched by engaging in second-person methods, exemplified by this chapter’s interviews with the Danish String Quartet about “losing oneself” in music. It points to the importance of relinquishing control in order to enter into an intense absorption and “losing oneself.” The chapter criticizes existing accounts of expertise and absorption for getting stuck on the question of whether one can reflect while performing, at the expense of overlooking the sense of relinquishing control or “letting the music play itself.” It elucidates the meaning of this relinquishing by pointing to the importance of bodily habitualities, the sense of agency, and affective intentionality, and concludes how this perspective can account for the conditions of possibility of playing sophisticated music while having “lost oneself.”