ECONA
Centro interuniversitario di Ricerca
sull'Elaborazione COgnitiva in sistemi Naturali e Artificiali

Monday, June 19, 2017

Michel IMBERTY
Emeritus Professor at the University of Paris West - Nanterre - La Défense

will hold two seminars:

June 26, 2017 - 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Meeting Room of the Department of Psychology - Faculty of Medicine and Psychology, "Sapienza", University of Rome
Via dei Marsi, 78

The origins of human musicality
We know today that music is basically an activity registered in the genetic heritage of the human species. This means that the skills it requires develop with life and mark its most important aspects. Music develops in the very effort of human beings to communicate with each other in telling and building, exchanging and improvising the story of their experiences and their lives. Music is therefore the very essence of expression, expression of emotions, feelings, individual or collective, and this natural and spontaneous expression begins much earlier than verbal language, anchored in the body and body movements in human space and time. From birth, and probably a few months earlier, the baby thinks, acts and tries in a universe that perceives intentional, temporal and dramatic to the highest degree. The human voice plays a primordial role which lays the foundations for this inner temporal organization, as it lays the foundations for the temporal organization of music. The most important aspect of this temporal organization is its "narrative" or "proto-narrative" character. This means that our brain needs to put in order the events contained in subjective time in an oriented way and in the form of memorized sequences with a "beginning" and an "end". The most usual way to communicate with our congeners is to tell stories to them and to hear the stories they tell us. But I would like to add here the idea that this narrative organization of human time works in the lived experience, in the interactions and exchanges between people only if the guideline of the story (or proto-story) is a scenography, dramatized by the body, from his gestures, from his attitudes, from his physical as well as psychic intentions. Our spirit is so more creative and communicative that the body embodies it and in a certain way represents it (in the theatrical sense of the word).

June 27, 2017 - 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Meeting Room of the Department of Psychology - Faculty of Medicine and Psychology, "Sapienza", University of Rome
Via dei Marsi, 78

Proto-narrativity: a question from neuroscience to contemporary music
Music is the art of the time. Not only because it can only develop over time, but because the composer makes time. An imaginary time that shapes the intimate experiences of human subjectivity, but also cultural representations and communication between human beings. Now, after Wagner and up to Boulez, all the music of the twentieth century seems to increasingly deny time, fragmenting it, returning it to a utopian sound space. Would the 20th century have created a timeless music, a culture without history? Neuroscience today shows that our brain works in a "narrative" way. Our relationship to the world is narrative in nature and consciousness is itself temporal at the highest level. A journey through the music of the twentieth century will allow us to understand this paradox that allows us to guess the complex links between the musical knowledge embodied in the body and culture. This second seminar will be illustrated by numerous musical examples, from Schoenberg to post-serial composers.