ARTICLE
TITLE

A Fragment on the Emotion, “Mathesis” and Time Dimension of the Purely Musical. Marginalia with Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun by Claude Debussy

SUMMARY

In the dialogue What Is Music? between Carl Dahlhaus and Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, music is defined as a “mathematized emotion” or an “emotionalized ‘mathesis’”. As emphasized by Marija Bergamo, this is the way of underlining its equal and unavoidable constitution, based on emotion and rational organization in the time dimension. So, Marija Bergamo is continuously searching for those music determinants in a musical work as an “autonomous aesthetic fact”, whose base and real essence lie “within the nature and essence of music itself”. In other words, the starting point of the author’s concern with (art) music is her reflection on that which is “purely musical”, that is, on “the very nature of the musical”.The attempts to determine what the purely musical is and to understand the nature of the sense and inevitability of man’s musical dimension have been made since the beginnings of music and musical thinking. In that context, more recent knowledge and thinking about the phenomenon of music, which are derived from various disciplines, correspond closely to Marija Bergamo’s views. In a narrower sense, the notion of purely musical is closely related to aesthetic autonomy, that is, autonomous music or musical autonomy. From such a viewpoint – and in conformity with Marija Bergamo’s view – I would say that the purely musical in an art music work exists independently of non/autonomy (that is, independently of any function, except an aesthetic one), as well as independently of the origin of its content (musical or extra-musical), and that it always, whenever “one thinks in the sense of music and is seized by it” (in terms of emotion, mathesis and time), creates, brings and possesses its specific (non-conceptual perceptive) musical-semantic stratum. This is shown, at least partly, on a characteristic and (in many respects) paradigmatic example – the music of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun by Claude Debussy. Therefore, rationalism of the magic inspiration of music (and/or: in music; by music; and possibly /by music/ about music), as a “mathematized emotion” or “emotionalized mathesis” in the time dimension, makes it – in a purely musical sense, based on purely musical logic – a unique form of non-conceptual cognition.

 Articles related

Diego Giménez    

This paper correlates the aesthetic theorization of sensation with the materiality of sensation in The Book of Disquiet. The different editions of Fernando Pessoa’s work have, in the text or fragment, a unity of expression that the publishers put in orde... see more


Gerard Torres Rabassa    

This article analyses the representation of the Spanish Civil War and fascism in the novels O ano da morte de Ricardo Reis, by José Saramago and El siglo, by Javier Marías. Both texts respond to a desire to recover national history and at the same time t... see more


Niall O'Loughlin    

Throughout the history of music there has often been a conflict between the old and the new. This applies very much to the music of the English composer, Hugh Wood (b.1932). Studying history, and later composition with Anthony Milner, Iain Hamilton and M... see more


Marija Bergamo    

An 1802 issue of the Leipzig musical magazine Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung reads: "Die Komponisten für Instrumentalmusik, vornehmlich die Verf. von Sinfonien, Quartetten und Klavierkonzerten, haben... einen etwas harten Stand. Wir haben und kennen Moz... see more


Mira Omerzel-Terlep    

The sound-forming (predominantly perforated) bones from the Paleolithic period of man's history marks the beginning of the history of musical instruments on the present-day Slovene ethnic territory, of the musical history of the European man, and accordi... see more