Embodiment, consciousness, and space-time: Hannes Taljaard’s Setudes for piano

Abstract

This tribute to the music of Hannes Taljaard, more specifically his Setudes for piano, takes sensory cognition as its point of departure. The performer’s immediate embodiment of the music and the intuitive auditory awareness of the listening experience facilitate two different ways of perceiving and understanding a kind of music that is not aligned with traditional tonal structures and processes. Insight into the composer’s craft as a vehicle for artistic expression represents a third route towards understanding. Allowing for diverse overlapping of actions, the kinetic-tactile connection with music during performance and unmediated experience that allows music to speak directly to the listener’s consciousness recreate the composition, thereby completing Ernst Gombrich’s ‘magic circle of creation’. Sensory experience is linked with the idea of craftmanship in the service of the art by finally considering the composer’s shaping of music in time and space. This essay deals with the fourdimensional concept of space-time in the discussion of Taljaard’s Setudes in order to show how the static idea of the moment is transformed into the dynamic idea of becoming in musical perception.