Neumic Mimesis and Audio-Scripted Reproduction

An Adornian Reading of Sandeep Bhagwati’s “L’animal que donc je suis

In his sketches for a “theory of musical reproduction”, Adorno distinguishes three aspects that are in play when a musician interprets a score: the material, the idiomatic and the neumic aspect. The neumic aspect concerns musical gestures that are hinted at in the score and are mimetically reproduced by the performer while playing. In my contribution, I would like to consider the potential of this conceptual distinction with regard to the elaborate audio scores developed by Sandeep Bhagwati, especially in his “Exercises in Estrangements II: L’animal que donc je suis”.
My working hypothesis is that audio scripts allow for a particular kind of timing that is intimately related to the mimetic-neumic aspect of musical reproduction. Furthermore, this specific formal quality might be connected to Adorno’s more general considerations about mimesis in modern art and to the expressive content of Bhagwati’s piece pointed at by quoting Derrida. In both endeavours — Adorno’s concept of artistic mimesis and Bhagwati’s new forms of musical reproduction —, there is an ambition to articulate a relation between subjectivity and nature that goes beyond the instrumental rationality of mastery, control and exploitation.
The attempt to find a non-instrumental relationship to nature, however, always falls the risk of romanticising and celebrating irrationalism. Musically, it risks turning into sentimentality and ambient kitsch. To criticise instrumental reason without falling into irrationalism is the crucial challenge of the mimetic reproductions of nature, and this challenge concerns the artistic works as much as their theoretical interpretation.