Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 91. kötet (1990)

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

Once again on Language and Music (A semiotic approach) In order to be able to raise the question of the relation between music and language at ail, one has first to find a basis of comparison. Such a basis can be material, genetic, functional, etc. (cf. Harweg 1968). The présent paper is putting forward afunctional-semiotic basis of comparison and starts out from the opinion that "music is language, i.e. one of those Systems of communication whereby human beings can exchange meanings and values" (Ruwet 1972. 26). As a starting point, then, we hâve to admit that music, just like language, is a code with a specific Organization, which reflects the reality outside it in a specific way. In the past décades this récognition has proved fruitful in the phonological and syntactic approaches to the relation between language and music (see e.g. Jakobson 1932, Ruwet 1972), and later also in the development of a semantically oriented musicology. (This latter development lias been associated especially with the names of Asafyev in the Soviet Union, Zieh, Sychra, Jiránek and others in Czechoslovakia, cf. Doubraová 1981). Music expresses the inner world of man, i.e. primarily his feelings, émotions and the ideas dissolved in thèse. This statement is by no means new: it can be found in the ethos-theory of the Ancient Greeks, as well as in the philosophical and aesthetic literature of the 18th and 19th centuries (in Rousseau, James Harris, Twinning, Kant, Hegel, etc.; cf. the relevant places in Pfrogner 1954 Zoltai 1969). It is not a new idea either that music conjures up the inner life of man by imitating it as such, rather than by representing the external world: music is the mimesis of inner life (Lukács 1963. 346). The most important feature of this mimesis is what Lukács calls indeterminate objectivity. Needless to say, this notion also has its antécédents. For instance, when comparing music and the visual arts, Kant remarks that the path of music leads from sensations to indeterminate ideas ("von Empfindungen zu unbestimmten Ideen"), whereas the path of the visual arts leads Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 91. 1990.