Mussorgsky's Sensory Journey: Pictures at an Exhibition as a kinaesthetic Musical Ekphrasis

Ekphrasis is a rhetorical figure that, in some instances, has evolved into a literary genre focused on elegantly describing a work of art. In the context of music, ekphrasis explores how music can evoke emotions, atmospheres, or narratives without directly representing them as visual art does. Unlike visual arts, music suggests imagery without denoting it explicitly. A prime example of musical ekphrasis is Modest Mussorgskij’s Pictures at an Exhibition, where the music not only evokes Viktor Hartmann’s paintings but also conveys the sensory experience of walking through the exhibition itself. This piece allows listeners to engage with the art not only through auditory perception but also through the embodied experience of the exhibition. The study of musical ekphrasis in this context integrates cognitive sciences to deepen the understanding of musical phenomena, in the light of a renewed humanism, advocating for an approach that connects the works of human intellect with perception and cognitive processes. This shift moves the focus from viewing musical works solely as historical documents to appreciating them as expressions of cognitive, emotional, and social processes. Music, in this context, becomes a tool for understanding the societies, bodies, and minds that produced it. To explore musical ekphrasis, the concept of "affordance" in music is introduced, based on Gibson’s original theory. Affordance refers to how an environment offers possibilities for interaction, not as intrinsic properties but as features that emerge through the subject’s engagement with the object. While Gibson originally applied affordance to the visual domain, it can also be extended to music, where it refers to sensorimotor responses elicited by sound, distinct from responses to other types of noise. Moreover, music activates not just auditory but also motor and sensory areas of the brain. Musical listening stimulates not only the auditory sense but also motor responses, even without explicit physical movement. The concept of mental imagery is crucial for understanding this interaction, particularly kinaesthetic imagery, which involves the internal sensory experience of movement, such as changes in heart rate or breathing, triggered by music. This multidimensional engagement of senses makes music an embodied medium for experiencing art.