De la «percepción» musical y de la música

Abstract

When it comes to music, the word «perception» must be placed in phenomenological brackets: it cannot be neither a succession of sounds in which each of them would be present, nor a sort of integral of the aforementioned succession (according to a mathematical model), but rather, within the framework of the suspension of the material reality of sound, of a «perception» through phantasia (which is not imagination, rather an imaging) of that strange immaterial «reality» (Sachlichkeit) which is music as a phenomenon of language ―which says something other than itself as purely sonorous by temporalizing the sense (or senses) in a presence in becoming and without an assignable present, beyond the limits of any instituted musical language. In this sense, the composer, if he is truly creative, seeks to say something, while the listener understands the music through an active, non-specular mimesis from within, and the performer is the mediator who, through their own mimesis, of the same kind, reinterprets the music by fusing their own living body and their affectivity ―and thus surpasses both the «mechanics» of their physical body and the virtuous affectations of their narcissism. Thereby, music has nothing to do with the physical and psychic production and reception of signals.