O que expressa a música senão a própria música: observações sobre a natureza da expressão na arte

Abstract

This paper was developed as a consequence of the reading and discussion of the text Language and expression in musicwritten by Ricardo Barbosa and presented by him at the meeting of the Aesthetics GT held in March 2021. I seek to present, in a summarized form, Barbosa's thesis on the expressive character of music and his analysis of the relationship between music and language. The answer I propose, far from defining whether there is a relationship, and what kind, between language and music, simply seeks to show that there is no direct equivalence between sounds, meanings and expression in music. Furthermore, I sustain, there would be a type of expression specific to the work of art that necessarily presupposes the intentionality of express something artistically. The “something” would be the meaning of the work, its intensionality, identified by the audience with the intencionality express in the work of art. This would be a general scheme for all artistic expression and therefore for music.