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Christian Vassilev

This essay asks what it means to lose yourself in music, and sketches a phenomenological answer. Beginning from listener and performer testimonies — including accounts of dissolving subject-object boundaries and Edwin Fischer’s description of music “streaming through” the performer — it distinguishes a phenomenological approach from naturalistic ones, which explain musical absorption through cognitive or biological mechanisms. The essay then draws on Heidegger’s account of everyday selfhood — structured by thrownness, attunement, and projection into a biographical future — to establish what, exactly, gets lost. The largely overlooked philosopher Günther Anders provides the key concept: the musical enclave, a situation in which historical time is suspended and replaced by a different mode of being, which Anders calls *Mitvollzug* (co-enactment) — the self and music enacted as one, without remainder. To lose oneself in music is not to disappear but to be displaced from one’s everyday self and reconstituted within the relation between self and music — a relation that, in the author’s ongoing research under the concept of musical identification, is prior to both.

Кристиан Василев

Настоящата статия предлага начално въведение в полето на феноменологическата педагогика. Изследва се феноменологията като подход в педагогическата наука, като се представят философските и епистемологическите ѝ основи. За пример са изложени идеите на Ото Болнов – един от първите мислители, интегрирали феноменологията в педагогическата теория. Разгледани са две ключови теми от неговото творчество: критиката на идеята за непрекъснато развитие и акцентът върху „кризите“ като част от израстването, както и понятието за „педагогическа атмосфера“ – съвкупност от нагласи, отношения и настроения, които правят възможни възпитателния и образователния процес. Статията показва как феноменологическата перспектива осветлява смисловата тъкан на педагогическия опит и предлага ориентири в условията на нарастващо отчуждение в образованието.

Christian Vassilev, Emil Devedjiev

This paper explores the fundamental tenets of Plato’s philosophy of education, particularly his views on a practice of great educational potential: communal musical participation. According to Plato, music can attune the individual and the community to cosmic harmony and this, in turn, is the only way to form and maintain a community. The paper explores how the concepts of ethos and nomos are utilized to explain music’s role in community cohesion. It argues that Plato’s understanding of the power of immediate and prereflective participation in music can provide valuable insight for contemporary philosophy of music education. The concept of nomos, in particular, allows music educators to take this frame of thought to better understand the role of music in creating communities.

Christian Vassilev

The book is an introduction to Eero Tarasti’s works on music, as well as musical semiotics in general. It covers a wide range of sources from multiple disciplinary fields in order to familiarize the reader with the basic language and common references of semiotic inquiries in music. Starting with the basics of structural and Peircian semiotics, theories of discourse, topic theory and others, and their application to music, the book moves on to discuss their interpretation in Tarasti’s decade-long oeuvre.

Christian Vassilev

The starting point of the following article are statements by various prominent musical performers of the 20th century who have testified to the life-experience of musical identification, i.e. the experience of unity and oneness with music. The purpose of the article is to explore the phenomenological implications of this experience on the basis of Martin Heidegger’s early phenomenological work. The article compares Heidegger’s early view of phenomenal givenness with that of Edmund Husserl. While Husserl sees phenomenal givenness as constituted by (transcendental) consciousness, Heidegger finds primary givenness in the resonance (Mitschwingen) between the I and its lifeworld. I argue that in Heidegger’s early phenomenology it is not the subject, but rather the relatio between I and world, which “constitutes” givenness. This viewpoint allows for the exploration of musical identification as a life-experience. Musical identification suspends the difference between subject and object. In musical identification, it is the relation between “I” and music, which is constitutive of both. Thus, music cannot be adequately grasped in phenomenological terms if it is regarded simply as an object, which is the premise of more traditional phenomenological approaches to music such as Roman Ingarden’s and Mikel Dufrenne’s. Ingarden and Dufrenne both position music at a...

Емил Деведжиев, Кристиан Василев

Колективната монография изследва връзката между психологията на музикалното развитие и теорията и практиката на музикалното образование. Нейната основна цел е да покаже как изследванията върху развитието, познанието и социокултурната обусловеност на музикалния опит могат да бъдат превърнати в ориентир за съвременната педагогика. Книгата е организирана около поредица от взаимосвързани проблеми, сред които всеобщите познавателни структури, бихейвиористките и когнитивните модели на развитието, ранното музикално възприятие, музикалната енкултурация, музикалната компетентност и умение, отношението между музика и език и връзката между музика и емоция. В различните си части тя синтезира основни теоретични позиции, реконструира ключови понятия и тълкува емпирични резултати по начин, приложим към образователната практика. Основният принос на монографията е, че превежда постиженията на музикалната психология в цялостна педагогическа рамка, полезна за учители, студенти по музикална педагогика, психолози и изследователи.

Christian Vassilev

A major theme in Adolf Bernhard Marx’s work is the idea that music has sense only to one who “participates” in it. According to Marx, musical Antheil – i.e. participatory belonging-to – is at the foundation of every musical activity, such as composing, performing, or listening (including listening analytically and critically), in its authenticity. The German word “Ant(h)eil” reflects on the participatory nature of this relation – the person or I, who relates to music, “has a part” in music, is fundamentally partial to it. In Marx’s thought, musical Antheil embraces both the spiritual and the sensual part of the person, i.e. it engages the totality of the person. Conversely, music also has an “inner”, spiritual side, its content or Idee, and an “outer”, sensual side, its form. The musical whole is, according to Marx, the unity of musical content and form, which, however, always involves the Antheil of the I to this given whole. Thus, Antheil is a fundamental aspect of musical wholeness itself – it is only within the I, which participates in music and is “partial” to it, that music can be “whole”. Thus, Marx’s account of musical Antheil is arguably a reflection of what in the...

Клаус Стиве

Каква е разликата между една змия и една ролетка? Ако някой ни зададе този въпрос, бихме предположили, че започва да разказва шега, и все пак бихме приели за саморазбираемо, че разлика съществува: змията е живо същество.