Mimesis - Is music an imitative art?

The first 200 words of this essay...

Mimesis - Is music an imitative art?

For centuries books and articles have been written about music, the arts in general and influences on the composers which led to deliberations whether music is actually a purely imitative art or whether it is a self-sufficient art form that is merely concerned with representation. It seems that from Plato onwards, the issue about mimesis and the arts became the most important basis for aesthetic theories: Plato himself developed a theory which states that all art is mimesis, i.e. representation or imitation of natural forms or features, which in turn are already copies of the ideal forms, the "real ones"1. Therefore the imitation is twice removed from the ideal2, the true original.

However, to argue Plato's point of this theory, we need to be clear as to what mimesis means exactly and whether the term should be applied to the arts, in order to find out if music really is an imitative art or not.

Mimesis and similar words that stem from the Greek word mimos are usually translated as imitation, copying, representation, reproduction or even expression3, depending on the era in which the term was used. Mimos and mimetes