Mirrors of Melancholy: Lourenço on Music and Musical Understanding

Abstract

In his writings on music, Eduardo Lourenço raises a number of questions concerning the meaning of music and musical understanding. By considering music ‘as the most incomprehensible of human expressions and at the same time the most sublime of all, as mysticism in a pure state’ (LOURENÇO 2012, 5.4), Lourenço develops different approaches to understanding music from philosophical, aesthetic and poetic perspectives. His understanding is guided by a musical listening anchored in a historical-temporal awareness of music and the work of art. Lourenço defines melancholy as a primordial feeling that affects our relationship with time and memory and has the ability to activate the perception of the infinite and unsayable. Music has a particular relationship with time that seizes the experience of atemporality and causes us to dive into the world of melancholy, which presents itself as a multitude of mirrors reflecting the ambiguity of the inner and outer world. In this paper, I examine Lourenço’s thinking on music, with the aim of bringing out the abundance of meanings reflected by the mirrors of melancholy while confronting his ideas with philosophical (Wittgenstein) and semiotic interpretations. On the surface of the mirrors emerge figures and themes that illuminate the work of various composers—Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, Schoenberg, Bartok, etc.—and make us reflect on the complexity of the forms of music and musical experience.