THE DIALECTICS OF THE GENESIS OF THE MUSICAL PHENOMENON

Abstract

Introduction: We can imagine the field of the cultural phenomenon, which is defined as a unifying function of the syncretism principle. That is similar to a vegetal structure, even a tree-like structure where the functioning of the primordial principle – the syncretism – would serve as an analogy for what is to be globally received as a tree – its stem, the crown and the roots. However, the crown and the roots respectively, would symbolize the area of the infinite realization of the conjuncture possibilities of a multitude of variants of the possible. Here, the evidence of the syncretism principle would be diminished, why not, fractal to an almost total dissolution without ever disappearing altogether in a fatally definitive mode. In this image, the stem would serve as a “bridge” or “deck” or “ligature” between the two “zones of multiplication” or the circular “spreading” and, in the same time, “the hemispheric one”.

In the same time, the tree-like analogy and the image of the “antinomy” relationship that is established between the crown and its roots can be regarded as a fundamental analogy of the main ideate thread of this text. In one first moment, we can distinguish the polarizing significance of this relationship all the time when the crown is opposed to its own roots as both are structured as poles or, in other words, they can be found at the extremities of the stem. The polarizing and dichotomising significance and, in the same time, the implicitly antithetic one is conferred to them through the visibility of the crown and the invisibility of the roots. These are two “ontology”[1] that are articulated through the extremely radical division of the two fields as two divergent “ontology” (“hemispheres”).

However, a much more adequate image is that where these two ontologies are, as a matter of fact, convergent. When both of them exist, they survive and function due to the stem, which is a “bridge between the worlds” which is imposed in its quality of a world. In this way, the image of the “tree” of the cultural phenomenon could represent, in the real sense of the world, a symbol, for the syncretism unit of its three elements. The trinity of the stem, the crown and its roots – as an osmotic super-ontology that defines, in essence, the truth of the communication between the spheres that are the Earth and the Sky[2].

Once with the idea of the two natural habitats, which symbolize the crown and the roots, we get access to the image of the ghosts that are part of the existence of the tree. So, the roots will symbolize the ghosts of the earth and the water, the humidity and the steepness of the depths, whereas the crown in the same time with the image of the sky, would symbolize the attribute of a ghost-like which are the air, the light, the celestial fire which will define the “upside-down” depths of the heights.

Only from this short hermeneutics of the image of the tree, which we use in its archetypal quality, we find a sum of criteria. These define the representation modes of the articulation of the syncretism phenomenon in the field of the musical phenomena both on the horizontal axis of the actuality moment and also through the vertical of the stylistic epochs.

[1] The preference of the tree as an analogy for an ontological structure can be found in the Nordic cosmogony of the Scandinavian people under the form of a cosmic ash-tree, Yggdrasil, which covers with its branches numerous worlds – Jotunheim, Nijtheim, Asgard- the Middle and the People World, and Aesir. the Scandinavian cosmology proposes a tri-morph image of the cosmos, where its roots correspond to the underworld, the stem – the Middle Worlds, and the crown has the Above Worlds (see: Borbely, Şt., Mitologie generală (General Mythology),  Editura “Limes”, Cluj-Napoca, 2004, pp. 113-114).

[2] What will be in a total conformity with one of the basic principles of the laws of the Emerald Table that were formulated by Hermes Trismegitus: “What it is up it is down also”, the celestial things are mirrored in the earthen and the other way round.