On the familiarity of doubt Music for eight voices with a text by → Robert Musil approx. 5 min. 10 sec. composed in 2024 → Download score pdf 374 kB IntroductionA text by Robert Musil (1880-1942) from the posthumous appendix to Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften was chosen for the composition On the familiarity of doubt. In the passage, the siblings Ulrich and Agathe discuss the question of whether and how precisely colours, shapes, appearances and feelings can be described and named with concepts and words. Agathe believes that words can only ever approximate phenomena and will never be exact. She says:
I advise you to look at a mirror in the night: it is dark, it is black, you see almost nothing at all; and yet this nothingness is quite clearly something different from the nothingness of the rest of the darkness. You sense the glass, the doubling of depth, some residual ability to shimmer - and yet you realise nothing at all!
In my interpretation, the mirror here stands as a metaphor for the translation or transfer into the language of words, the night for ignorance, the doubling of depth and the shimmering for the sensing of phenomena. Agathe therefore does not deny that there is a connection between the language of words and the phenomena, but she doubts any form of congruence. |