Social Space and Its Varieties in Music: To the Problem of Archetypes

Abstract

The problem of social space has been actively developed in philosophy, sociology, art history and related humanities from the end of XIX century, but still it has not been reflected adequately in the musicology. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the existence of archetypes “intimate” and “personal” space as varieties of the social space as exemplified by musical works XVII - XX centuries, to identify their features in the music and determine the ways of expression. In science the archetype traditionally implies “patterns” of the collective unconscious. The concept of the archetype of in the form of “historical model” can be interpreted as a reflection of different social structures and their corresponding behaviors, in which a variety of space-time representation, such as “intimate”, “personal” space should be used. We have applied the methods of differential psychophysiology, proxemics, hermeneutics, epistemological method and musicological analysis in our work. As a result of the study the intimate space features in the music were established: modeling of human inner life processes. The ways of expression include a monologue-reflection and a monologue-self-reflection. The intimate space structure is characterized by inwardness, closedness, by the reproduction of features having the same volume. The personal space features in the music mean the presence of something unusual, ingenious in the “behavior” of a musical character. The ways of expression of the ingenious include departure from the usual genre and stylistic norms of the musical language of the epoch; the presence of various forms of dialogue; high extent of the energy message transmitted through the intensity of the experienced emotion directed to the outside world; thematization of the musical texture layers. The structure of personal space is open, discrete and depends on the behavior of the character and the events taking place in it expressed using an intonation contrast, a conflict. Clear differentiation of features of the different social spaces in the music simplifies their identification in the content of musical genres. It is through the character understanding that comprehension of the character’s person in the history of the culture of a certain epoch and its reducing as a carrier of history of human communities transferred in the musical sound occurs.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n5s1p553