Musika: The becoming of an artistic musical metaphysics
Musicians spend a significant amount of time practicing. Over the years, intuitions and understandings accumulate that may be difficult not only to share, but also to make sense of. 'Musika', a research by Stanimira Withers, is an exercise in musical metaphysics, which attempts to articulate and contextualize some of these intuitions and understandings, expanding the territory on which thinking about music is familiarly performed. With the presumption that consciousness is fundamental, this dissertation proposes that music is a form of consciousness, which enters in a mutualistic relationship with sentients to acquire experience and to propagate its evolution. ‘Musika’ is defined as a consciousness organization cultivating sound-based forms and intelligences. Incorporating and integrating insights from physics, philosophy and psychology with a cultural-musicological attitude, 'Musika' is concerned with contextualizing and validating the artistic experience and its practice-derived tacit knowledge. A contribution to the fields of philosophy of music and music ontology, and specifically, to the musicological discourse of musical meaning, the study explores how music and consciousness trace the same fundamental process of evolution, constructing different information-based realities.
Author: Stanimira Withers
