Music and mimesis

Without concepts and devoid of images, musical mimesis is singular: partially invisible in its manifestations, its effects are nevertheless eminently powerful. One of the musical qualities that we would like to address in this text is the category of the link as musical mimesis, starting from the idea that we find this fundamental quality in all dimensions of the musical. It is important to add that these are dynamic links, which evolve over time, which construct the experience of duration.

The first dimension of the link must be considered as a set of relationships to oneself, through the musical act, perhaps even more through the instrumental gesture as an extension of oneself, but also an alteration that provokes a listening on the lookout, ready for an almost immediate reaction. This listening of course engages all of history and society in the most elementary gesture of the instrumentalist. According to Gunther Anders, this dimension is much more complex, since it is understood as a co-realization that transforms the relations between subject and object.

The second major territory of this set of links is the domain of “playing together”: we will present here the ideas of the sociologist Alfred Schütz who analyzes, with the process of syntony (relationship of mutual agreement), how music - played together or even simply listened to - forms a context of meaning and supposes a deep temporal sharing. Finally, drawing on Adorno’s writings on musical reproduction, we will explore the dimension of the internal links in the work, both those inherent to the composition, but also the links necessarily deployed by the act of interpreting.