Lorenzo Mammi e Agostinho: a música do tempo

We then start from the musical premise to understand the concepts that largely extend in Lorenzo Mammi's text and, therefore, develop philosophically the shift between the arts. The author begins his argument by proposing a historical retrospective that contextualizes musical activity as a tradition and also the result of a social and linguistic understanding.

It is from the thinking of the theologian Saint Augustine that the plot develops – here the term used is justified by the human complexity of the narrative – of the temporal understanding that is common to all men and, in Augustinian thought, it is treated by the sensory bias to exemplify what escapes matter.

By facing Augustine's work as a succession of propositions that develop throughout the author's life, Mammi establishes a perspective that is similar to the subject dealt with in the text. As a narrative composition, he proper view of the Saint's books as parts of a whole give didactic meaning to the understanding of form.

When the latter then questions early on about music and its place in the spatial or temporal imagination, he proposes the idea of ​​God Modulator while talking to the aesthetic object:

“A well-proportioned movement that has its end in itself is modulatio. In modern terms, any beautiful movement that has an aesthetic purpose.”

Concept presented here in consonance is the presentation of time as a human questioning and its answer, also human, for that is music.

No wonder the fidelity with which the apprehension of the temporal abstract is plausible through the senses and especially the melodious sounds.

"When I sing I know the form of the melody, although this form is never present in its entirety in the sounds I pronounce"

Form is understood from the tension that is established in the will, in the intention itself, and ends when there is no longer anything to intend.

The God Singer thus encompasses the circumstantial will of human existence. It is He who in his will determines, as in a song and its successive sounds, the natural path not only of man but of everything that inhabits his creative universe. When we open a parenthesis with the biblical narrative, when in the book of Genesis it is stated that God created man in his image and likeness, creativity is also presented as a characteristic not only inherent to the human but also divine. Or for that, every event is the result of a voluntary action, whether it comes from God (his song of human existence) or from divine sounds, humanity itself.

Reference: MAMMI, Lorenzo. Singer God. In: NOVAES, Adauto (Org.). Artthought. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1994. p.43-5