Musica textualis. Word-made music in prose as a philosophical problem

Autor: Czarnecki, Jan Wawrzyniec
Rok vydání: 2017
Předmět:
Popis: Can music be made with words alone, artistically arranged? Can music be part of a novel or a short story? Can a novella realize a musical form, and does it mean it is a musical piece? Is being a piece of literature incompatible with being a piece of music as well? If so – in what way or ways? If not, for what reason? These simple questions are the conceptual starting point of the research developed in the present dissertation. It investigates the essential interrelation between music and artistic prose in cases of imitation of music within the latter. Musica textualis, its central concept, is introduced in the first part as a meeting point of two distinct traditions of study, namely Philosophy of Music, on one hand, and the Word and Music Studies, on the other. It is an aporetic field emerging organically in the course of the historical development and dissolution of the system of the arts. Mutual intermedial imitations on the level of artistic creation and appreciation are continuously counterpointed by parallel processes within the history of aesthetic thought, metaphysics of art and musico-literary criticism, influencing greatly ways of perceiving and understanding distinct artforms and the aesthetic experiences they elicit. One of the main aims of the present research was to establish the actual status of the literary incarnations of music in artistic prose. The initial hypothesis was that there are some special cases, where music is not only represented in words by means of description, evocation, allusion and other standard literary techniques, but is actually there in the text, strictly speaking. Such local cases are possible and instantiated: the paradigm example is (Mann, 1967) with its model interpretation in (Scher, 1967), but there are also antecedent cases such as (Woolf, 1921) interpreted in (Harmat, 2008) or very recent artistically outstanding realizations as (Libera, 2013), interpreted here. What emerges as a positive theory from this research is the category of musica textualis. It denotes a mixed form which unites word-made-music with literary prose in a compound whole sui generis. It is conceptually symmetrical to programme music, where the real presence of music and literature in a compound structure perceptually made solely of musical sounds without words is not contested. Through its complex nature and fragile statute, it functions as a regulative ideal for the above-mentioned eponymous aporetic field. The explanatory force, methodological and interpretative implications of this theory are significant. Especially, the very process of its historical emergence through the aesthetics of Romanticism, the development of programme music and R. Wagner’s musical drama technique and the “intermedia turn” characterizing Modernism, unveil its necessary place in the conceptual map of the complex interrelation of these two temporal allographic arts: epics and music. The dissertation takes into account the vast and problematic discussion internal to the Word and Music studies and similar branches of intermodal/interart/transdisciplinary studies in their classical Anglophone version cf. (Scher, 1970; Wolf, 1999; Petermann, 2014), as well as in their Polish counterpart, anticipated critically in the work of Tadeusz Szulc (1937), and recently developed in, e.g. (Balbus, 2004; Hejmej, 2008, 2012). Also French and other studies are taken into consideration, cf. e.g. (Pautrot, 2004; Picard, 2008, 2010). It can potentially contribute to some significant clarifications in these controversial fields, but it is methodologically autonomous. It combines some elements of conceptual analysis and argumentation typical of analytic Philosophy of Art with a broader “continental” contextual horizon and interpretative ambitions. The main source of its insight comes from the immediate aesthetic experience of prose containing crucial instantiations of what can be interpreted as musica textualis. These insights are confronted with the achievements of the classical Philosophy of Music on one hand and the Word and Music practice on the other. As far as it is known, this is a novel approach within Philosophy. This method, intended as facilitating future mutual dialogue between the disciplines, is potentially beneficial for both (and open for further dialogue with musicology, which today is keen on borrowing research tools from Literary Theory). For the philosophers of music it discovers a neglected area of study, through a meticulous polemics with the conceptualizations of music at hand in the analytic tradition. It shows that works of musica textualis are, at least in part (like operas or Lieder, for that matter) works of music, and that there are no substantial grounds for excluding them from philosophical scrutiny of music. It shows that only the most anti-essentialist, accidentalist philosopher could find a coherent reason to reject a work of musica textualis from the realm of music on contingent grounds of the communis opinio; even his reasoning, though, is ultimately proven fallacious. Other philosophers are invited to rethink the way they localize essential features of the phenomenon in question. For the literary scholars interested in the practices described as musicalization of fiction, intermedial transposition / translation / transfer, the musical novel, music in the words within the venerated tradition of the comparison of the arts on the axis Music – Literature and especially in the 20th Century born Word and Music Studies – musica textualis can become a helpful tool in the on-going methodological dispute. It helps to distinguish genuine problems of method within the Word and Music Studies from what emerges as the vital aporetical core of interart phenomena such as Mann’s Doctor Faustus. This core confronts us with questions which cannot be resolved through some consensus within the scholarly community, but are better accepted and cherished as fertile sources of artistic and intellectual inspiration. The dissertation is divided into three parts. The first part introduces the concept of musica textualis, and places it within the contemporary philosophical discussion on music, explaining in detail its Boethian pedigree as well as its relation to the state of the art within Word and Music studies, as discussed in the Introduction. In the chapter Music Beyond the Senses it offers some novel arguments against definitions of music that would exclude musica textualis a priori; it defends a slight modification of the definition of music advanced by (Kania, 2011). Problematic cases of silent music are discussed extensively and the notion of intentional calibration – inspired by stances taken by Husserl, Ingarden, Iser, Wittgenstein, Wollheim, Scruton and others – is introduced. The second part consists of three chapters consecrated to three Polish authors (Iwaszkiewicz, Libera, Bartnicki) whose work is interpreted as displaying three radically different modes of musica textualis. This choice, by no means exhaustive, is intended to illustrate the introduced concept at work in dissimilar cases, sharing though one property: all have been paid little or no attention by the international musico-literary scholarship (not to mention the philosophers of music). The third and conclusive part shows musica textualis as a genuine aporetic field.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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