Torbjørn Eftestøl
NORENSE funding: 80.000 NOK in 2015

Background and motivation for the project
 The purpose of my research is to investigate the relation between musical practice and meditative work in relation to perception, in the Goethean sense of developing a ”delicate empiricism”. This will be explored from a theoretical perspective in the current article (to which a more educational perspective will follow later).Research question
The fundamental research-question pursued is: As a musician and teacher, how can I develop and deepen the listening experience? This will lead to the more methodological question of how a phenomenological pathway can be developed and grounded in theory and philosophy of perception?

Sources, methods and theoretical perspectives
The question of method will explore the interplay between thinking and sensing in the constitution of experience, and ask how this dynamic can be developed and enacted in a practical way. I will deal with the question of how a phenomenology of art needs to develop a different kind of thinking which work immanent within the sensible experience, a theme common to many phenomenologists. This will compose a trajectory which goes through three stages. First I want to discuss the insight that perception is conceptually saturated. Then I will espouse the Deleuzian theory of sensation and his concept of how art requires a ”thinking in terms of percepts and affects”. This will be exemplified with compositions from contemporary music. As a third stage I want to relate this conception of aesthetic experience to Rudolf Steiner’s method as it is presented in Grenzen der Naturerkenntnis, and elaborated by Yeshayahu Ben-Aharon in his The New Experience of the Supersensible. On the basis of this I will discuss if this can be viewed as the first step in developing a conscious and scientific super-sensible experience based in artistic work.

Intended form of publication
The writing will be published both in a peer-reviewed journal and in a relevant popular journal. 

Publication
Torbjørn Eftestøl. (2018). Listening to History. A phenomenon-based approach to teaching music-history. RoSE – Research on Steiner Education, 8(2). Link to article.