Music vs Cinema - Mimetic Loops & Aesthetics
Thoughts On: Music & Cinema
A consideratioun of the difference between two artistic mediums.
My key area of interest concerns cinema and its use of narrative. However, to understand cinema, one must attempt to understand art. Art contains a myriad of processes, many of which unify the numerous mediums produced by the phenomenon. Equally important as the unifying aspects of artistic mediums are those elements that allow discrimination. To my mind, I then do not see how art could ever be understood to a satisfactory depth. Whilst there must be a universal structure and character of the artistic, there is embedded within the artistic the possibility of new mediums, and therefore there may emerge innovative and new aspects of art. The problem becomes fractal when one comes to realise that mediums themselves contain a similar process. Mediums change, grow, evolve; with innovation within a medium, there comes new characteristics, new definitions of what it is, what it can be and do. The chance that a certain medium may one day be understood is far larger than that of art, generally, being understood. We may consider mediums a smaller set of infinities within a larger order of infinity that is art generally. One may postulate that there are certain limitations that mediums face, and so may see their potential for evolution to be exhaustible. This is due to the fact that a certain medium may be changed so much that it becomes another. However, whilst these limitations of mediums confine them, I would not suggest that any artistic medium has exhausted itself yet. I could be wrong, of course. I have not investigated the concept.
What I mean to draw from this consideration of art as a phenomenon and concept is a means of better understanding cinema via its incapabilities. Whilst it is maybe questionable to define cinema by what it is not rather than what it is, I think it can prove valid to follow this line of investigation shortly. I would like to attempt this with a brief consideration of a medium I possibly engage more so than cinema - though very rarely from a theoretical perspective. That medium is music. Recently, I have found myself returning to two characteristics of the medium that distinguish it from, in particular, cinema: its aesthetic capabilities and its mimetic processes.
In my estimation, cinema can be understood via mimesis. The medium - most evidently the aspect of it that utilises narrative - centralises drama. Drama is, most fundamentally, action. Drama provides cinema many of its temporal characteristics and dictates its ability to manifest what can tentatively and ambiguously be called meaning. In such, drama is the manifestation of mimesis, or imitation. I believe that this imitation has two crucial related levels or faces. There is known mimesis, which is concerned with the representation of that which is known and can be known physically and tangibly. Then there is unknown mimesis: an imitation of that which cannot be known. Where known mimesis is embodied by the physical world, unknown mimesis can be traced back to that which exists beyond, within or under the physical. I conceive of this via the concept of Tao. In such, I see there to be a pattern of a certain logic and reason that propagates through space and time, conceivable only as a way of things. It is this way, Tao, that cannot be known, but nonetheless manifests that which can be known. Known and unknown mimesis share an interplay that allows the known world to be conceived of as an index of the unknowable way of things - what you may be so inclined to think of as the truth (though such an idea may not be particularly relevant here).
Cinematic mimesis emerges as drama that is then manipulated by the mode, logic and style of a film. Cinematic mode is concerned with methods of representing drama; cinematic logic assigns reason to drama; cinematic style manages convention. I do not understand these three processes. I am quite uncomfortable with how little I know of them. However, they seem to be the means through which drama is manipulated so that it may reach out to a spectator and affect them. This affect is unique to both cinema generally and individual cinematic works, which is to say, cinema affects the individual quite unlike music. We may realise the significance of this when we consider certain aspects of musical mimesis. My thoughts here are limited to small conceptual satellites with no apparent connection, but musical mimesis is characterised significantly by the fact that it generates a pronounced mimetic loop between artwork and listener.
Music's mimesis is heavily ambiguous. It produces a certain drama, but it is very difficult to make intelligible. Music is best understood technically. Where one would find little interest in the measurement of light frequencies and time signatures in cinema, these concepts (and many related and alike) are the primary way through which music may be understood. That which music imitates is far less tangible than that which cinema imitates. Voice and sound are indeed attached to the body and nature, but their representation of it is not visually coherent nor logically apparent. Language within music provide it its most accessible, knowable mimetic qualities. But, language is highly conceptual. It is quite unlike imagery. Images communicate or evoke aesthetically before they do cognitively - we see them spatially, and then understand what is occurring within them temporally. Language, you may suggest, reverses this. One must understand the meaning of a word before they can properly process the perceptible, aesthetic reception of it. That is to say the sound of words means less than the meaning of (the concepts within) words in many contexts. How true this is in music, I cannot be certain. What matters more, the sound of lyrics, or their meaning?
I am inclined to suggest that, in many musical modes, semantic process are subordinated by sonic aesthetics. After all, how important is it to understand the lyrics of a song? I listen to music in languages I do not understand, and what is more, I listen to a lot of heavy metal - which can be very difficult to comprehend semantically. Such suggests that musical is heavily defined aesthetics. However, we will return to this point. One of the primary effects of this aesthetic dominance in music is that music's affect is defined by sense more than reason. Here we return to the difference between image and sound. Images so often affect us, especially in a narrative cinema context, by the fact that we come to understand what they mean. One is then so often moved by cinema because they see the reason, logic or meaning presented by its succession and culmination of images; one understands and so they are affected. In a musical context, one need not understand: they feel aesthetically. What they feel does not matter, and it often cannot be moved into consciousness. The presence of feeling is primary in music. Therefore, the mimetic loop of music is completed by mimesis: dance and song. The key signification that music affects an individual is then that they begin to move their body and make noises that are related to and further evoke the feeling awakened by the sounds they hear. One does not react to cinema in a particularly comparable manner. Good cinema so often produces silence and stillness; the body is forgotten in its quietude. Music awakens the body, cinema, you may suggest, awakens the cognitive sensibilities and emotions, but traps them within the mind.
I do not suggest here that music is incapable of interacting with the listener cognitively, nor that cinema cannot physically affect and move us. Music has a complex relationship with images, personas and performance. And, as said, music utilises language. Cinema has its haptics. What is more, though cinema functions so that images culminate and interact so that they are to be ultimately understood, images must be aesthetically sensed before they can be understood. Alas, what I am attempting to suggest is that what is primary in music is secondary in cinema, and vice versa. Again, sounds are felt, images are understood, in their respective mediums. Such produces unique mimetic loops or types of affect. Cinema is mindfully meditative, where music is physically meditative. One returns to the unknown mimetic source of a song through movement and a physical involvement in a song; they return to an unknown mimetic source of a film through an emotional and cognitive immersion in understanding.
Related to this is the aforementioned place of aesthetics. Recently, aesthetics have become of major interest to me. For a long time, I have contemplated drama as it is bound to symbolic and semantic meaning. However, I have recently come to see the importance of the relationship between experience and meaning. Aesthetics complete mimetic evocation - in the cinema - in that they control the potency of lyrosophy: not just knowledge, but the feeling of it. Aesthetics provide information to the senses that cannot be fully transformed into concepts for cognition: they provide a certain experience. This is key to understanding the difference between the mimetic loops of cinema and music. Music, as so far suggested, provides experience as primary by presenting unknown mimesis. It is then concerned less with conceptualisation, and more so with abstraction. Cinema presents known mimesis before unknown mimesis, and whilst abstraction and an interaction with unknown mimetic qualities is key, cinema engages conceptualisation before abstraction. Such is the result of the fact that aesthetics follow drama in cinema. Without this, lyrosophy would not exist as it does. I then do not know how to think of lyrosophy in a musical context. Music is predominantly aesthetic - I am incapable of describing it in greater detail than this.
It is now that I bring this brief exploration to a close. Music is a profoundly interesting artistic medium. One can learn untold things about it, and through it, I think cinema can be better contextualised within itself. The same goes for other artworks. My mind drifts now to what one could learn about cinema from the art form of cooking and bakery...
A consideratioun of the difference between two artistic mediums.
My key area of interest concerns cinema and its use of narrative. However, to understand cinema, one must attempt to understand art. Art contains a myriad of processes, many of which unify the numerous mediums produced by the phenomenon. Equally important as the unifying aspects of artistic mediums are those elements that allow discrimination. To my mind, I then do not see how art could ever be understood to a satisfactory depth. Whilst there must be a universal structure and character of the artistic, there is embedded within the artistic the possibility of new mediums, and therefore there may emerge innovative and new aspects of art. The problem becomes fractal when one comes to realise that mediums themselves contain a similar process. Mediums change, grow, evolve; with innovation within a medium, there comes new characteristics, new definitions of what it is, what it can be and do. The chance that a certain medium may one day be understood is far larger than that of art, generally, being understood. We may consider mediums a smaller set of infinities within a larger order of infinity that is art generally. One may postulate that there are certain limitations that mediums face, and so may see their potential for evolution to be exhaustible. This is due to the fact that a certain medium may be changed so much that it becomes another. However, whilst these limitations of mediums confine them, I would not suggest that any artistic medium has exhausted itself yet. I could be wrong, of course. I have not investigated the concept.
What I mean to draw from this consideration of art as a phenomenon and concept is a means of better understanding cinema via its incapabilities. Whilst it is maybe questionable to define cinema by what it is not rather than what it is, I think it can prove valid to follow this line of investigation shortly. I would like to attempt this with a brief consideration of a medium I possibly engage more so than cinema - though very rarely from a theoretical perspective. That medium is music. Recently, I have found myself returning to two characteristics of the medium that distinguish it from, in particular, cinema: its aesthetic capabilities and its mimetic processes.
In my estimation, cinema can be understood via mimesis. The medium - most evidently the aspect of it that utilises narrative - centralises drama. Drama is, most fundamentally, action. Drama provides cinema many of its temporal characteristics and dictates its ability to manifest what can tentatively and ambiguously be called meaning. In such, drama is the manifestation of mimesis, or imitation. I believe that this imitation has two crucial related levels or faces. There is known mimesis, which is concerned with the representation of that which is known and can be known physically and tangibly. Then there is unknown mimesis: an imitation of that which cannot be known. Where known mimesis is embodied by the physical world, unknown mimesis can be traced back to that which exists beyond, within or under the physical. I conceive of this via the concept of Tao. In such, I see there to be a pattern of a certain logic and reason that propagates through space and time, conceivable only as a way of things. It is this way, Tao, that cannot be known, but nonetheless manifests that which can be known. Known and unknown mimesis share an interplay that allows the known world to be conceived of as an index of the unknowable way of things - what you may be so inclined to think of as the truth (though such an idea may not be particularly relevant here).
Cinematic mimesis emerges as drama that is then manipulated by the mode, logic and style of a film. Cinematic mode is concerned with methods of representing drama; cinematic logic assigns reason to drama; cinematic style manages convention. I do not understand these three processes. I am quite uncomfortable with how little I know of them. However, they seem to be the means through which drama is manipulated so that it may reach out to a spectator and affect them. This affect is unique to both cinema generally and individual cinematic works, which is to say, cinema affects the individual quite unlike music. We may realise the significance of this when we consider certain aspects of musical mimesis. My thoughts here are limited to small conceptual satellites with no apparent connection, but musical mimesis is characterised significantly by the fact that it generates a pronounced mimetic loop between artwork and listener.
Music's mimesis is heavily ambiguous. It produces a certain drama, but it is very difficult to make intelligible. Music is best understood technically. Where one would find little interest in the measurement of light frequencies and time signatures in cinema, these concepts (and many related and alike) are the primary way through which music may be understood. That which music imitates is far less tangible than that which cinema imitates. Voice and sound are indeed attached to the body and nature, but their representation of it is not visually coherent nor logically apparent. Language within music provide it its most accessible, knowable mimetic qualities. But, language is highly conceptual. It is quite unlike imagery. Images communicate or evoke aesthetically before they do cognitively - we see them spatially, and then understand what is occurring within them temporally. Language, you may suggest, reverses this. One must understand the meaning of a word before they can properly process the perceptible, aesthetic reception of it. That is to say the sound of words means less than the meaning of (the concepts within) words in many contexts. How true this is in music, I cannot be certain. What matters more, the sound of lyrics, or their meaning?
I am inclined to suggest that, in many musical modes, semantic process are subordinated by sonic aesthetics. After all, how important is it to understand the lyrics of a song? I listen to music in languages I do not understand, and what is more, I listen to a lot of heavy metal - which can be very difficult to comprehend semantically. Such suggests that musical is heavily defined aesthetics. However, we will return to this point. One of the primary effects of this aesthetic dominance in music is that music's affect is defined by sense more than reason. Here we return to the difference between image and sound. Images so often affect us, especially in a narrative cinema context, by the fact that we come to understand what they mean. One is then so often moved by cinema because they see the reason, logic or meaning presented by its succession and culmination of images; one understands and so they are affected. In a musical context, one need not understand: they feel aesthetically. What they feel does not matter, and it often cannot be moved into consciousness. The presence of feeling is primary in music. Therefore, the mimetic loop of music is completed by mimesis: dance and song. The key signification that music affects an individual is then that they begin to move their body and make noises that are related to and further evoke the feeling awakened by the sounds they hear. One does not react to cinema in a particularly comparable manner. Good cinema so often produces silence and stillness; the body is forgotten in its quietude. Music awakens the body, cinema, you may suggest, awakens the cognitive sensibilities and emotions, but traps them within the mind.
I do not suggest here that music is incapable of interacting with the listener cognitively, nor that cinema cannot physically affect and move us. Music has a complex relationship with images, personas and performance. And, as said, music utilises language. Cinema has its haptics. What is more, though cinema functions so that images culminate and interact so that they are to be ultimately understood, images must be aesthetically sensed before they can be understood. Alas, what I am attempting to suggest is that what is primary in music is secondary in cinema, and vice versa. Again, sounds are felt, images are understood, in their respective mediums. Such produces unique mimetic loops or types of affect. Cinema is mindfully meditative, where music is physically meditative. One returns to the unknown mimetic source of a song through movement and a physical involvement in a song; they return to an unknown mimetic source of a film through an emotional and cognitive immersion in understanding.
Related to this is the aforementioned place of aesthetics. Recently, aesthetics have become of major interest to me. For a long time, I have contemplated drama as it is bound to symbolic and semantic meaning. However, I have recently come to see the importance of the relationship between experience and meaning. Aesthetics complete mimetic evocation - in the cinema - in that they control the potency of lyrosophy: not just knowledge, but the feeling of it. Aesthetics provide information to the senses that cannot be fully transformed into concepts for cognition: they provide a certain experience. This is key to understanding the difference between the mimetic loops of cinema and music. Music, as so far suggested, provides experience as primary by presenting unknown mimesis. It is then concerned less with conceptualisation, and more so with abstraction. Cinema presents known mimesis before unknown mimesis, and whilst abstraction and an interaction with unknown mimetic qualities is key, cinema engages conceptualisation before abstraction. Such is the result of the fact that aesthetics follow drama in cinema. Without this, lyrosophy would not exist as it does. I then do not know how to think of lyrosophy in a musical context. Music is predominantly aesthetic - I am incapable of describing it in greater detail than this.
It is now that I bring this brief exploration to a close. Music is a profoundly interesting artistic medium. One can learn untold things about it, and through it, I think cinema can be better contextualised within itself. The same goes for other artworks. My mind drifts now to what one could learn about cinema from the art form of cooking and bakery...
