Mimesis - Is music an imitative art?

But does classifying the arts as imitative not seem like an insult to the composers, painters or poets? Surely they had no intention of creating something emotionally harmful, probably quite the contrary: the arts – or in this particular case music – can stimulate, move and in a way also educate us: According to Du Bos, music is the only form of art which speaks “directly to the feelings”. It can stimulate the listener to think about a certain situation, maybe in his own life, maybe in someone else’s, and by involving himself more deeply with the subject, he might even come up with a solution to a problem. Alternatively, if the music stimulates positive thoughts it could also have an immediate effect on the listener, leaving him happy and reminiscent of the positive incident the music reminded him of. Obviously someone telling a story or reading out a poem which tries to depict the same emotions the piece of music is expressing to the same person would also make them think about the experience and the associations that naturally come with it, but in this example the feelings would probably not be as strong as they were when this person was listening to the music. Words can only say so much, but music, the language of the passions, has the power to go way beyond these limits, and since especially instrumental music does not pin-point the emotions exactly, it leaves something to the imagination as well as the interpretation of the listener as well, involving him even more intensively.

Another factor which has to be considered, and which brings us closer to the argument of mimesis, is how the work of art or the piece of music comes into existence. According to Plato the artist is inspired by something that exists for example in nature, which triggers his creativity, resulting in a work of art. So in a way the artist really is imitating what already exists, isn’t he? Well, to an extent this is probably right, because it is quite obvious that if we did not know any passions or feelings and could not define moods, music would not be the same. But if imitating an emotion means copying the copy of the original, as Plato suggests, surely this copy would not be anywhere near as true or good as the ideal of the emotion? After all, a copy of another copy is always worse in quality than the master copy, because smaller details tend to be missed out or are simply reproduced badly. If music was classified as an imitative art, however, the opposite seems to be the case. Why else would we use music in films for example? In the early silent films the role of music was to set the mood according to the happenings on the screen, while in our modern films music is used to reinforce emotional scenes, making sure the feelings the actors are trying to convey with words and facial expressions are interpreted right by the audience. And even in scenes where there is no real action, music can still set the general mood, evoking feelings of happiness, fear, etc in the

people watching. So really music is not entirely made up of imitation. It is a language just like any other, with the difference that it does not necessarily need words to express what it is trying to bring across. Moreover it seems that music, as well as poetry, was used for articulation purposes before ‘normal’ speech, since the first ever stories used to be in verse form and the first laws were sung. It also needs to be said that music is just as ‘original’ as language, because if we look at young children, or indeed babies, the first thing they do to try and articulate is make a noise, i.e. produce sounds. This is probably their way of trying to imitate the characteristics of the language they hear in their every day surroundings, but without great success at the start. But this nevertheless proves that music, even if in this case these sounds cannot exactly be described as what we consider to be music, is in a way more original than the spoken word. Before man learnt to communicate using words he used to communicate with sounds, and after all, in its simplest form, music is an arrangement of sounds, combined with rhythm and harmony. So really, music does not imitate the tones and features of the voice, it reinforces them. It combines the heart and the mind to create a full-scale expressive art form, capable of evoking all kinds of emotions.

Whereas melody takes care of the actual reinforcement of language or other natural sounds, harmony establishes the expressed feelings more clearly. While unison is the most natural, most original harmony, the arrangement of several parts add to the special harmony of a piece of music, making it more expressive and more effective in evoking the emotions the composer is

intending to convey to his listeners. Moreover, harmony strings the different

sounds of the melody together, making it more coherent and powerful, especially by adding different intervals to emphasise what the composer is trying to express. Tonal registers and the choice of instrument can also play an important role in the representation of emotions. A passage in a lower register, for example player on a cello, conveys a warm, soothing sensation which might express tranquillity to some people and safety or peace to others, depending on their associations with tones and registers like that. A passage in a particularly high register, for example played on the flute, may express fear, or on the other hand, represent otherworldly voices taking the listener to a higher realm. The role of rhythm on the other hand, sets the pace at which the recreated natural features are presented to the listener, maybe even influencing how intense they get involved in the piece of music or how they interpret it, while it also adds ‘reality’ to the music. Thus, structurally and functionally music can communicate as well as signify. We can identify what is being expressed through the signs we hear, since our senses are able to translate this universal language into our own and also into our very own and personal language of feelings, which is different and essentially unique to each one of us. Everyone knows the basic emotions like love, hate, fear and so on, but the finer nuances are special and can even be interpreted differently by different people.

Music is therefore strongly connected to human society, or more precisely to human thinking and in a way it aids communication. It represents the human spirit, language, emotions, attitudes, etc and transforms them into a language that speaks clearly without giving the completely wrong impressions. If a person gives us the impression of being angry, we can take it the wrong way and even feel offended because we do not see what is going on inside them. If a composer writes a piece of music that gives the impression of describing an angry person, or the emotion ‘anger’ itself, there is usually much more to it: The composer’s entire inner self is being translated into music, with the melody expressing “pity, cries of sorrow” and fury amongst others, so we might see some angry moments which in turn are interrupted by calmer ones where he maybe thinks about his anger and gets upset with himself. In a person these calm moments might not be shown physically, even thought they do happen mentally.

However, language is of course not the only thing that tends to be used to create a certain feeling in a piece of music. Nature or even man-made things such as church bells for example, also play an important role, and we know of many composers who used sounds that frequently occur in the world we live in. By representing something like a flowing stream of water or a thunderstorm in a composition, the composer adds something we all know to his piece, and he does so in a way that it will be unmistakably clear what he is trying to recreate. He is not just imitating something we know from our every day lives, he creates a kind of musical picture of a thunderstorm for example, a truthful image of one of nature’s most powerful features, which will obviously have an immense effect on the listener even though it is not the real thing. By combining the typical sounds we all associate with a real thunderstorm, just like the thunder, the roaring winds, cracking branches of trees, lightning and so on, the composer does not merely imitate this performance of nature, he presents it to his audience in such a way that it evokes the same, or at least similar emotions a real thunderstorm would evoke. The fact that it can pretty much have the same effect on us as the real thing proves that it is not only a copy of the copy – because the ‘ideal’ thunderstorm does not exist and as already mentioned, according to Plato the arts are twice removed from this ideal – but a very good representation created by the composer.

In conclusion to this short excursion into the powers of music, and indeed mimesis, it can surely be said that music is not really an imitative art form. Of course there are a lot of similarities between music and language for example, but I stand by my point that music, or sound, was the predecessor of the spoken word and that it is much more powerful than it. To us it might seem that it is the other way round and music really is imitating language, but this is probably only the case because we communicate with spoken words in our modern world. However, it should nevertheless be said that music reinforces or represents, rather than imitates or copies. After all it can express much more than speech and touch us on a completely different level, since it is aimed directly at our emotions. And just like language needs more than a single note or maybe even a sentence to express an emotion clearly, music has to consist of more than just a single note for us to realise what it is trying to tell us. But nevertheless, music is a lot less limited than the spoken word and the emotions which it expresses stir our feelings and can affect us in any possible way, whether positively or negatively like in the example of the drama. Successful representation of the passions moves and affects us and can in many instances also make us think about certain situations in our lives with which we associate the feeling described by the music.

In the case of music and nature, however, we do come closer to an imitative action. Even though composers do sometimes incorporate such things like thunderstorms or birdsong in their compositions, they are not necessarily copies of nature. Instead they are representations, which don’t even have to have precisely the same characteristics as the ‘originals’, the composer is free to exaggerate or hold back here and there in order to create the effect he wants to achieve, they only need to be realised as what they set out to be representing by the listener. Thus a thunderstorm in a piece of music can come about very rapidly, whereas in nature it might take a while for it to develop. It is not even necessary that the storm is represented perfectly, unless the composition is accompanied by a detailed programme in which it is stated that there will be a thunderstorm occurring at some stage in the piece.

Finally, in answer to the rather difficult question whether music is an imitative art or not, it has to be said that everybody probably thinks about this matter very differently. On the one hand music can very well be seen as being imitative and copying nature in order to have certain effects on the listener. But on the other hand music is more like a reinforcement or maybe even a beautification or criticism of nature’s features. The term ‘mimesis’ itself, however, is far too vague to be translated into one single word, so as long as there is still confusion as to whether it is ‘imitation’, ‘representation’, ‘expression’ or the like, there will be no single solution to the connection between music and mimesis. But for now it can surely not be said for certain whether music is imitative or not and it strongly depends on the interpretation of the individual – another possible translation of mimesis.