Abstract

Music as perception and creation is processual in nature. Its nature is development, succession, dialogical processes of reaching out and harmonizing. Not one process, in fact, but many. Among these processes that make music, author would like to focus on a very specific process of human self development which occurs during listening to music (in any music experience). The entanglement of different ways, in which musical processes appear in the world, author feels, suggest reaching out for Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of chiasm and the phenomenological tradition. Finding a possibility of resolving seemingly chaotic image of music lies in proceeding gradually along the way of one of the processes while acknowledging at the same time the chiasmatic character of multiple experienced processes. In the course of the paper author stresses that the understanding of music as a process addresses both creative and receptive [aesthetic] experiences of music, and more specifically the process of [self] development, that can be found the both of these experiences. Process of changing through knowledge and growing through building an imaginary society; through reaching out to the other and explaining oneself in a process of self presentation but most importantly through listening-in to the world around.