The adventure of the expressive, technical and semiotic practice of music during the archaic and cosmological periods.

Abstract

The following paper studies the first moments of the philosophical emergence of music as an art but also as a state of mind that guides and controls human symbolic action and composes its distinctive characteristics. The importance of this retrospective is directly linked to the demand of the modern West for a return to its spiritual roots, during the centuries when art and philosophy, expressiveness and concepts, were organically connected and manifested as common systems of experiences. This manifested experience of transformation, historically driven by a number of specific classifications of motives, values, rules and purposes, defined practicality as a fixed principle of wills and by extension of morality. Part of this principle is the self-consciousness of the West to return from time to time to its generative causes, seeking new connections and correlations of the then with the present, in order to evaluate its works: aesthetic and logical knowledge, forms and reflective function, now disconnected from their core of unified understanding, produce new connections and classifications, without renouncing their bond with the past. In this -as a rule- ethical condition, arts and concepts are defined as knowledge that complement each other. The work of the West is indeed difficult, especially in the contemporary environment of universalism, in which identifications and integrations cannot be supported by a unified system of understanding, as was the case in the distant past. Although philosophy and art, expressiveness and reason are understood as mutually complementary concepts, it is not possible to integrate them again into the same cognitive core, given that their purposes have become independent. Art seeks the overall expressiveness of form, while logic seeks segmentation and analysis. Is there therefore fertile ground today for highlighting expressiveness in terms of philosophy? Through the example of music, we will approach art according to the terms of its cultural past and examine its steps only in relation to its own world. The joint observation of the evolving characteristics of music and philosophy will give us answers, not only for evolution, but also for the definitions that would regulate the way of understanding this evolution in future generations.