Let’s continue to examine what Kimura claims about music ensemble.
The important feature of the ensemble experience is that the virtual place between
persons gains its autonomy through interactions. He also writes,
In an
ensemble, the whole echoing music has got an auto-productive autonomy, which is
independent of each individual player’s will, freely “anticipates” the
subsequent sound to come by its own (virtual) noetic intentionality and each
player seems to follow it realizing this “anticipation”.
[Kimura, B. (2005). Aida.
Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, p.55 (translation by ST)]
Thus, aida in music ensemble functions as the “inter-subject”,
which coordinates each player’s performance. Since he describes the
subjectivity of the living organisms in general as “the noetic”, he terms this “inter-subject”
function of aida as “the meta-noetic” or “the meta-noesis”.
What Kimura claims would not necessarily be limited to the experience
of music ensemble. In fact, he tries to illustrate the experience of giving a
public lecture or reading a book from the same perspective.
What we can find here is the “double subjectivity” of the self.
Through interactions between a person and a person, a certain context emerges
(Kimura names this context as “ma”) and the context itself starts to function
as the second – but virtual – subjectivity which anticipates and regulates the
each subject’s action.
So, on the one hand, the self as a “subject” (the noetic) takes a
certain action (e.g., creating a sound). On the other hand, the self as a part
of “inter-subject” (the meta-noetic) takes a certain action, which is
anticipated by the interactional context.
