Quali macerie? Il riciclo della musica e il tempo sociale.

The meaning of music crosses the historically conceived concept of time. This article focuses on the the works of Johann Sebastian Bach and Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy as cases ponting out the resistence of musical signs (semiotically speaking) to functionalist readings, which would transform them into ruins (to be precise, rubble of the past acquiring their real beauty in the present, as Marc Augé try to display, in his recent essay, with regard to heritage of some culture). Mendelssohn's role was central, in the debates of his time, about the new perspectives of lutheran sacred song, because he suffered the resistence opposed by some contemporary composers and critics to his Paulus, the oratorio addressed to the concert halls and not to the sacred service. Bach's thought endured several misinterpretations during the romantic era. The case of Two and three part Inventions shows that the sense of arising musical culture of the past has to be corrected (translated) to prove the linear historical development of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]