“Music, much as people take snapshots during vacation”: An Outline of Mimetic Prospects in Musical Modernism

It has often been said that after 1900 formal modernism diminished the role of the mimetic (i.e., imitation or representation) in all arts. This article opposes such a general conclusion. Formal modernism in art did not represent any general relationship to the mimetic; rather, it questioned the traditional relationship to forms of representation within each particular art form. Although a traditional notion of mimesis indeed makes it possible to see a good deal of literature and the visual arts as less mimetic after 1900, twentieth-century music discovered unprecedented representational possibilities, which are illustrated with the case of musique concrète. In the last section, the article reflects on its thesis with a comparative perspective on the postmodernist turn in various arts.