The Communicative Action of Making Music Together: Revisiting Alfred Schutz's Social Theory of Music with the help of Video Analysis of String Ensembles

What characterizes music-making is the absence of speech. Nevertheless, it is meaningful. In the permanence of the flux of time, musical meaning unfolds and differs from the mean-ing of language in that music does not communicate through the meaning of words. Rather, audible sound events are structured in such a way that we can experience music.
While making music together the participants ‘even’ communicate simultaneously. Through the consonance of several voices, a collective phenomenon arises: shared music. This is an outstanding achievement that raises the question of how the participants succeed in synchronizing their individual actions continuously.
Building on his work “Phenomenology of Music” (1976 [1944]), Alfred Schutz raises the hope in “Making Music Together” (1951) that by investigating this communication, aspects of the structure of social interactions as such can be illuminated.
This paper argues that a theoretical development can be traced in these essays that is more than an addition to phenomenology. Based on videographic findings on string ensemble music-making, it is shown how this line of argument can be continued through developments of the social theory of “communicative action” (Knoblauch 2020), with reference to the con-cepts of “objectivations” and “sensuality”.