Ragas and Raginis: A Pictorial and Iconographic Study of Indian Musical Modes Based on Original Sources c12.1.2

c12.1.2

Combarieu, music is a unique kind of thought and musical concept which connotes sensations unattainable in the other medium. Says M. Combarieu: "La musique est l'art de penser avec des sons sans concepts." ['Music is an art of thinking in terms of sound without concepts’]. The logical implication of this view is that music, unlike painting and sculpture and, like architecture, is incapable of rendering, or expressing a theme, a subject, or a topic. It is one thing to say that music is a language, having laws and logic of its own, and it is quite another, to suggest that music can only deal with matters peculiar to the Kingdom of Sound and is unable to utter, express, or deal with subjects of human emotion, or other thematic materials. According to this doctrine, music is a Non-representative Art,—an Art of production of certain dynamic shades, tempos, phrasings, tone colours—blended into a design of orchestration—having a significance other than that of intellectual, or emotional values. If it arouses any emotion,—the same is not akin to anything that can be imitated, or verbally described. To put it in the language of plastics, music is decorative rather than illustrative. Its patterns have dynamic rather than thematic motifs. There is a certain amount of truth in the doctrines indicated above.