Mythopoetics

The concept of mimesis allows us to access the deepest nature of music, especially when we compose it with the concept of "Will." I am going to approach this concept from the point of view of Schopenhauer, as the best and probably the first Western representative of Advaita Vedanta, the knowledge of non-duality. Musical mimesis occupies a key place in Schopenhauer's philosophical system. From the analogy of music with the other arts - says Schopenhauer - we can infer that music must be in relation to the world as the representation to the thing represented 1 . Its imitative reference to the world must be very deep, infinitely true, and really surprising, because it is instantly understood by the whole world, and presents a certain infallibility by the fact that its form can be reduced to fairly definite rules expressible in numbers, out of which cannot move away without ceasing to be completely music 2 . In this passage our attention is first drawn to t