Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 91. kötet (1990)

Tanulmányok - Péter, Mihály: Once again on Language and Music (A semiotic approach) 163

164 MIHÁLY PÉTER from determinate ideas to sensations ("von bestimmten Ideen zu Empfindungen") (Kant 1790. §53). In connection with musical mimesis we must hâve a brief look at émotions. Emotions are extremely important regulators of human activity; they are specific internal signais which reflect not the external reality in a direct way, but man's relationship to that reality; more precisely, they reflect the relationship of man's need to the possibility of fulfilling those needs (Simonov 1975. 26ff). Emotions permeate all sphères of the mind (thinking, volition, attention, memory, etc.) and are inextricably interwoven with them. From this it follows that the émotions in everyday life are always concrète, individualized, closely linked to a sensitive subject and to a particular situation in the life of that subject. Without knowing all these circumstances, émotions are hard to distinguish: "... it will only be possible to distinguish one emotional state from another by taking account of specific psychological, specific cognitive and specific behavioral patterns—and then only in conjunction with given eliciting conditions". (Encycl. of Psych. 1972.323). Now it is precisely this objectivity linked to the external world that musical expression radically removes from the émotions, cancelling "the hie et nunc of what elicits them" and thus representing them "in their uninhibited completion and entirely undisturbed purity". In this way "music is simultaneously as far as possible from life and also as close as possible to it" (Lukács 1963. 366). Although musical expression is divorced from the concrète circumstances which elicit émotions, the language of music becomes neither vague, nor an unarticulated éruption of emotion. The peculiarity of music is in the fact that it gives form to the typical as such, without "reaching down" to the field of individuality for it (Lukács 1963. 368). This is possible because music itself is socially-historically determined, just as well as its subject-matter, the inner world of man, is a product of social-historical évolution. After all, even our most individual émotions reflect a host of diverse social relations. Music, then, is not emotional in generál: it always expresses the emotional tone of a particular period and in a socially determined code. As a conséquence of the indeterminate objectivity of music, différences in the interprétation of musical content are, in principle, inévitable. However, it would be a mistake to consider the différent interprétations as mer*.: associations arising from the "occasion" of the pièce of music (Lukács 1963. 391). The language of music, liké that of poetry, "has to be learnt". but this learning is a différent process from the acquisition of the vocabulary oi syntax of a natural language; it is rather the developing and drilling in or a particular skill of interprétation (Lukács 1963. 122). Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 91. 1990.