Imagopoetics as an imagological vision of a contemporary musical work

Abstract

The academic paper considers the imagological approach to musical works, characterized by priority attention to the identification of stereotypes used by the author. Imagology entered the postmodern discourse in the middle of the XX century; however, it was limited to the literary sphere for a long time. The present research explores the possibility of applying an imagological approach to musical art and its specifics. In contrast to literature, music operates with its own semiotic system based on intonation, a complex of pitch, rhythmic, and other features that determine the semantic content of musical constructions. This feature suggests supplementing the transduction of the concept of “imagology” with the transduction of the literary concept of “poetics” to the immanent features of a musical composition. From the perspectives outlined, the definition of the concept of imagopoetics in relation to musical art is derived in the academic paper. It is revealed that both the author’s European audience’s perception of non-European musical cultures and a wider range of images, which in the imagological discourse are called “imagothemes” and “imagotypes”, can be considered as stereotypes in the modern scientific discourse. At the same time, the issue of the correlation between the author’s authentic immersion in the relevant figurative sphere and the orientation to the stereotypical perception of the relevant figurative spheres by the author’s audience is actualized for each “imagotheme” and “imagotype”. The author also touches upon the controversial issue of the possibility of using the imagological approach to deny the existence of an objective difference between artifacts of different peoples, which is most clearly manifested in the musical art.