T. Sidneva

The Dialectics of the Border as a Key Factor of Understanding Music

Category «border» is one of the most important in cognition the processes of the modern music science. Reliable definition of the meaning of the border is inseparable from the awareness of its volume, mobility and non-linearity. As a «cultural universal» (Lotman), the border is based on separation and connection, isolation and dialogue dialectic. Simultaneously it is also the area of ordering (stabilization) and the zone of chaos (the destruction of the order). The border determines the features of behavior of the subject, forms the «border consciousness». Art, exhibiting increased sensitivity to the «limits», «frontiers», «destructions», «transitions», is the sphere in which the role and importance of the border are revealed in all their diversity and completeness. Exceptional acuity and paradoxical character of the border problem are typical of music. The following factors are their reason. First of all, the music itself arises overcoming the border from silence to sound. There is a reverse process: the conversion of silence into music, which resulted in the «emancipation» of silence and quietness. The natural condition for music is also its «isolation» from noise: a musical sound is created under the influence of aesthetic and semiotic criteria. At the same time search of new ways of expressiveness causes a continuous process of penetrating noise effects into music. The isolation manifests itself at all levels of musical art: consonance and dissonance, horizontal and vertical, regulation and improvisation, completeness and openness of a form etc. At all levels of music these oppositions find «refutation»: at a certain stage of its development music comes to the emancipation of dissonance, a fixed pitch loses the domineering role even in the Western tradition, «melting» in the layers of electronic sounds and sound fields of sonority; a text specificity overcoming is embodied in aleatoric. Flexibility of music borders confirms its dissipativity and nonlinearity that enables a deeper understanding of the nature of music and its mission in the modern world.

Key words

music, artistic creativity, the dialectics of the border, isolation, dialogue.

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