MAŁGORZATA GRAJTER

MUSIC AND MIMESIS: REVISITING TYPOLOGIES OF MUSICAL SIGNS BASED ON IMITATION

MAŁGORZATA GRAJTER

The Grażyna and Kiejstut Bacewicz Academy of Music in Łódź malgorzata.grajter@gmail.com

The principle of mimesis and tone painting as a vehicle of musical meaning was still considered one of the key vehicles of musical meaning in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century aesthetics of music, as reflected in the classification of musical by Johann Nikolaus Forkel in Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik (1788), which still includes “musikalische Malereyen.” Notwithstanding the “antimimetic breakthrough” and the prevalence of the idea of absolute music in the early nineteenth century, the Aristotelian principle never lost its significance entirely: many authors have continuously dealt with the problem of music imitating either itself, or other phenomena, from different perspectives, for example, August Wilhelm Ambros (Die Grenzen der Musik und Poesie: eine Studie zur Ästhetik der Tonkunst).

The present-day view on mimesis is affected by the still emerging field of musical semiotics. Many contributors dealing with the problem of musical meaning have expanded the theory with new categories, such as musical topics (Danuta Mirka, The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory). From the perspective of semiotics, the relationship between music and other sign systems also plays a significant role.

The goal of this presentation is to propose a typology of musical signs based on imitation, which covers not only tone painting or musical topics, but also musical arrangement and ekphrasis as signs representing other works of art. It seems that combining historical perspective with modern theories can be extremely productive and may result in creating more comprehensive systematics.

Keywords: mimesis, tone painting, topic theory, arrangement, semiotics.

Małgorzata Grajter is a PhD, music theorist, and pianist. She received her Master of Arts and PhD from the Academy of Music in Łódź, Poland, where she is currently an assistant professor. She is also a guest researcher at the University of Łódź. She has taken part in many international seminars and conferences, including the International Congress on Musical Signification, the International Beethoven Conference (Manchester), the Academy of Cultural Heritages (Syros), and the Beethoven-Perspektiven (Bonn). Her doctoral thesis, Das Wort-Ton-Verhältnis im Werk von Ludwig van Beethoven was published by Peter Lang Verlag (2019). She has also authored articles in Polish, English, German, and Portuguese, dealing with different aspects of the relationship between language and music.