MUSIC
a brief history of the Western musical thought
emanuel dimas de melo pimenta

English | português

	For 40 years, I've painted forgotten
languages. The meaning of each
pictograph changes every time you
read it.  It would have to, because
there is no dictionary.

The obvious conclusion: this is not
a language.

But we have a precedent. Music.
No one can say what it is, but we all
listen to it anyway. Think about
that.

Here is a place in the world, in all of
history, where we do something we
can't name, and we do it gladly.

How is it possible that a species
obsessed to the point of madness
with labeling every object, process,
and moment can, suddenly,
suspend that impulse and embark
on a vast unknowable excursion of
the psyche for an hour?

And then come back and pretend a
billion objects and names are all in
their proper places?

The grammatical Is of music has
always been missing. But the
Around and Inside and Through
have always been there.

This suggests that music is, among
other things, a kind of magic that
would, if we let it, transform what
we insist on believing a language
ought to be.

Emanuel Pimenta knows all that,
and a great deal more. I could say,
vaguely: he's a philosopher of
music and a musician of philosophy.
I could say: he circumnavigates his
subjects from the inside out, and he
penetrates them while floating at a
distance of thousands of miles in
space.

When I read his work, I'm in the
presence of a vast expanding
collage. It's useless to try to catalog
the fracturing and re-forming
dimensions.

His language is always the music of
spaces, and here it covers that
same subject. This is apt. This is
what we need. Liberation from the
tick-tock construction of brick walls
to explain what we are is just the
beginning of what he gives us.