UC Santa Barbara

This thesis reconsiders the nature of musical meaning through the lens of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, proposing an embodied framework that challenges traditional approaches in music theory. Whereas conventional analysis often treats music as a static, symbolic structure to be decoded, this study argues that music is a dynamic, lived phenomenon enacted through bodily perception, movement, and intersubjective engagement. Drawing on feminist critiques (Cusick, Abbate), embodied cognition (Cox, Lakoff, Johnson), and phenomenological music scholarship (Lewin, Lochhead, Kozak), the study critiques the persistent dualism in music analysis and proposes a shift toward understanding music as an event of being, rather than a fixed object. Central to this reorientation is Merleau-Ponty’s concept of operative and motor intentionality, which situates perception as an embodied act rather than a detached intellectual operation. Building on this, the thesis develops a three-dimensional framework—ontological, perceptual-motor, and intersubjective—for analyzing music as an enacted structure of meaning. This framework is applied to Morton Feldman’s Palais de Mari, a work that exemplifies the kind of fragile, temporally suspended musical experience that resists conventional analytical methods. Through this analysis, the study demonstrates how a phenomenological perspective not only enriches our understanding of musical temporality, gesture, and silence, but also reframes analysis itself as a participatory, performative act. Ultimately, this research advocates for a music theory that accounts for the fullness of musical experience—not merely as a cognitive or structural phenomenon, but as a deeply embodied, intersubjective, and perceptual mode of being-in-the-world.