Alfred Schütz’s essay, first published in 1951 and reprinted in 1964, examines musical activity to clarify the foundations of social communication. Relations among composer, performer, and listener lead toward the “mutual tuning-in relationship”: a sharing of temporal experience through which participants inhabit a common present.
Music is a meaningful context which is not bound to a conceptual scheme.
Music challenges accounts that identify communicated meaning with conceptual or linguistic expression. Schütz begins from the sociological understanding of interaction as mutually oriented action:
When sociologists speak of social interaction they usually have in mind a set of interdependent actions of several human beings, mutually related by the meaning which the actor bestows upon his action and which he supposes to be understood by his partner.
His question concerns what makes such understanding possible. Rather than treating a shared system of signs as sufficient, he investigates the social relationship presupposed by its use. Musical communication exposes this problem because its meaningful development cannot be replaced by a conceptual statement.
Schütz develops the argument through Maurice Halbwachs’s account of collective musical memory. Halbwachs emphasizes notation among trained musicians and words or socially acquired rhythms among lay listeners. The position under examination locates the intelligibility of notation in collective conventions:
The conventional character of the signs of musical notation and their combination consists in the fact that they have meaning merely by continuous reference to the group which invented and adopted them.
Schütz disputes the resulting separation of educated and uneducated musical experience, distinguishing musical thought from its notation and communication. Music can unfold meaningfully in solitary imagination, while improvisation can communicate without a score. Notation supplies instructions whose interpretation already requires musical experience; it does not provide an exhaustive equivalent of musical meaning.
A pianist sight-reading an unfamiliar nineteenth-century sonata illustrates this experiential background. Although the composition is new, its stylistic possibilities and formal organization are partly familiar. Interpretation draws on a biographically accumulated stock of knowledge transmitted through teachers, composers, and performers. Schütz thus preserves the social character of musical understanding while locating it more broadly than in written conventions. Socially derived experience and recognized authority organize what the performer anticipates.
This inherited knowledge differs from the relationship between composer and beholder. Understanding a work need not depend on knowing its creator’s biography, yet following its unfolding reconstructs the articulation of another person’s musical thought. This occurs in inner time, understood through Bergsonian durée, rather than simply in measurable clock time. Retention, recollection, and anticipation connect successive phases into a meaningful experience.
Musical meaning is consequently polythetical: it must be constituted through successive acts. Unlike a theorem whose result can be grasped without repeating its demonstration, a composition cannot be fully recovered apart from its temporal development. Composer and beholder participate in a quasi-simultaneity even when separated by centuries. Polyphony reveals how distinct temporal sequences coexist within one meaningful organization, while performance mediates this participation for listeners.
Ensemble performance supplies the decisive case. Players interpret their parts while anticipating their partners’ interpretations and responses. Each performer’s freedom is constrained by the freedom accorded to others. Coordination involves sound, gesture, posture, facial expression, and instrumental movement. Bodily activity can disclose an unfolding intention without being deliberately addressed as a message. Shared outer time and space enable distinct streams of inner experience to become synchronized. A conductor supports coordination where direct contact among all performers is impracticable; communal singing and jazz improvisation show that this relationship does not depend on notation or professional training.
The conclusion generalizes the musical case without equating all expressive conduct with intentional communication. Common codes alone cannot explain understanding: expression and interpretation must also unfold in a temporally coordinated relationship. Making music together renders this foundation visible as participants share a vivid present and grow older together. Schütz leaves a comprehensive theory of tuning-in and its mediated forms for further inquiry, establishing shared temporal experience as a central problem for the theory of social relationships.
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