‘Self-Expanding Information’ as an Intrinsic Property of Musical and Artistic Work

Abstract

The article is aimed at better understanding the essence of art, and primarily, music, — applying the set of concepts developed by the most prominent Russian humanities scholars: Y. M. Lotman, A. F. Losev, M. M. Bakhtin and A. V. Mikhaylov. The concept of “self-expanding information” introduced by Lotman is examined in this article in a broader context. The author illustrates that it is a feature not only of canonical art, as asserted by Lotman, but an inherent characteristic of Art at large, and, first and foremost, of music. The article also demonstrates why the essence of music as an expression of numerical development in time (Losev) and the fixation of meaning in itself (Mikhaylov) necessarily require an informational process in exactly such a form. The essence of music understood in such a way is presented as truly artistic in various forms of art (literature, visual arts, cinema, etc.), which in contrast to music also contains extra-artistic information (concerning events, facts, people, etc.) that may be conventionally separated from artistic information per se. Artistic (musical) is understood as a program to influence personality for the purpose of organizing (transforming) this personality in a certain direction. The incentive to reach such a goal is to express deep underlying subconscious perceptions of a human being in the world, to understand the human’s place in the Universe and Eternity through the formation of numerical (musical and quasi-musical) structures having no other value except their functions in an artistic message as a whole. Finally, the article shows that the way to increase the information received from an artistic message is the dialogue (the key concept used by Bakhtin) of the artistic text’s recipient with the text itself.