Abstract

The term empathy (Einfühlung) is rooted in philosophical aesthetics. It was used by German philosophers toward the end of the nineteenth century to describe our ability to imaginatively “feel into” works of art, which speak to us in a certain humanlike way insofar as they contain traces of what Mikel Dufrenne calls a “quasi-subjectivity” (1973, 393). In this chapter, rather than looking to art as an object of empathy, we instead consider art—and more specifically, music—as a resource that can facilitate empathy. More precisely, we turn to two cases in which music seems to establish spaces that enable and sustain empathic connectedness, as well as the ability to explore and experiment with different forms of social understanding and affective sharing. The first case comes from the music tradition of free improvisation. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with the saxophone player, Torben Snekkestad, we become acquainted with an approach to performance that does not concern music primarily as an aesthetic product, but as a shared process of communicating and connecting nonverbally with others—a process that is essentially about exploring and experimenting with different forms of intersubjectivity and empathy. The second case comes from music therapy and autism, which can involve listening, singing, or joint music-making. We discuss studies indicating that musical interventions positively address core impair- ments in capacities required for empathy: for example, joint attention, social reciprocity, and verbal and nonverbal communication, as well as comorbidities of atypical perception, motor performance, and behavioral problems. Although these two cases are different, they share the trait of using music to establish spaces of nonverbal communication and empathic understanding. Drawing on these two cases, this chapter analyses how musical-empathic spaces emerge and how these spaces solicit the integration of both low-level affective and bodily resonance mechanisms as well as high-level acts of meta-reflection, imagination, and planning that contribute to different forms of empathic understanding