Bartókiana - Abstracts
“The Long Echoes (II): Poetics of Transformation
in Bartók and Brancusi”
ABSTRACT
In his opening lecture at the XIV Congress of the
International Musicological Society (Bologna, 1987),
Umberto Eco addressed both the ancient question of music
as language, and the more recent problem of music as
a semiotic concern. The latter arose from the attempt
"to define music by means of another semiotic system,
while it is music that has probably offered itself as
a model to all other semiotic systems." [All quotations
are taken from the published version of U. Eco's address
in Intersezioni, VIII/2, August 1988]
Eco was speaking at a congress devoted to musical re/ception
('ricezione') and he stressed the fact that
one could indeed base "the specific of semiosis"
upon interpretation, given the connection between the
semiotic object and the moment of re/ception.
In the "Pythagoric vision" of classical
musicology from antiquity to its subsequent development
in Western culture, the experience of sound as a "perceptible,
physical, sensible and sensuous phenomenon" was
abandoned. recalled Eco, the executor/performer being
considered but a "slave, a mechanic," as compared
to the music theorist. Thus in the Middle Ages Boethius
would praise the theorists for approaching music "relicto
aurium judicio" and by so "abandoning
the ear's judgment," not only "the possibility
of explaining the concrete phenomena of musical reception"
was lost, but even “ possibilities of attributing
signification to the musical discourses.”…The
history of music, concluded Eco, is not only the story
of Pythagoras observing the blacksmith as he strikes
his hammers, and deriving a science of proportions from
it, but "it is also the history of the blacksmith
and of those who heard him…"
The purpose of my contribution to this Symposium is
to explore – as a 'slave, a mechanic,' i.e., as
a performer of music – certain categories
of musical signification whose nature can only by perceived
by the ear. They do not depend upon the disposition
of tones that can be submitted to traditional analysis
and classification, nor can they be simply described
by methaphorical analogies. They manifest themselves
to the ear at the moment of re/ception as possibilities
of semiosis, when both the transmittor and the recipient
of the musical discourse become the faber/artifex
of musical signification.
The subject of my audio-visual presentation is a juxtaposition
of two different 'languages' that manifest a common
source of symbolization. It was around 1907 that both
the Hungarian composer Bartók and the Rumanian
sculptor Brancusi adopted ancient structural and formative
elements – hence the allusion in the paper's title
to Baudelaire's poem Correspondances.
It was already a vanishing world, said Bartók,
when he reclaimed its "mother tongue" and
its power of signification as his own; a world that
had been, he said, “beautiful both to the ear
and the eye.” Bartók and Brancusi shared
psychological 'correspondences’ and a concern
with incorporating in the 'fabric' of their work elements
from the Eastern and Western world; both treated their
peasant material in accord with its intrinsic 'codes;'
both accomplished in their work that anamnesis described
(regarding Brancusi) by Mircea Eliade.
[Adapted for the proposed INDO-CANADIAN SYMPOSIUM in
Mysore, India. Pending]
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