Tempus Fugit: Voice, Intentionality, and Formal Invention in Augustine and Monteverdi

Abstract

Whenever we hear a voice, we hear someone speaking to us, or at least speaking to someone. Our conception of a voice is inseparable from assumption that someone is addressing something to someone. The same goes for musical utterances. We often say that music speaks. But what do we mean by saying that music speaks? The statement directs our attention toward performative dimension of musical utterance, as much as toward what it might say. We are made aware of speakers who address themselves to audience, or of singers in action, a situation that might be considered basic position of rhetoric: of speech and music as actio. Music takes shape by addressing itself to someone. It unfolds in time inscribed within a figure of intentionality. What does it mean, then, to direct oneself to someone in music? I will attempt to address this question with help of two canonical authors and three of their works: St. Augustine's Confessions (ca. 397-401ad) and Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna (1608) and Lamento della Ninfa (1638). In all three cases protagonist speaks in a most profound tone of voice, directing himself or (as in Monteverdi's case) herself emphatically to a listener who in fact is not present, drawing upon their different experiences of life. All three struggle to afford their temporal existence an adequate form. As a brief interlude, we will also consider Dante and his attemptin Vita Nuova (1292-1295)to work out his life in writing. Thus, as title of this essay indicates, it is concerned with question of temporality in music, and how it takes shape as speech or as narrative when articulated by a voice. My main concepts will revolve around temporality and intentionality, latter concept understood as the condition in which something directs, points to, or refers to something beyond itself.1 That is, I am concerned with form understood as some-