Signata
Annales des sémiotiques / Annals of Semiotics
6 | 2015
Sémiotique de la musique
Music and Meaning
Per Aage Brandt and José Roberto do Carmo Jr.
Publisher
Presses universitaires de Liège (PULg)
Electronic version
URL: http://signata.revues.org/1382
Printed version
Date of publication: 31 December 2015
Number of pages: 15-21
ISBN: 978-2-87562-087-3
ISSN: 2032-9806
Electronic reference
Per Aage Brandt and José Roberto do Carmo Jr., « Music and Meaning », Signata [Online], 6 | 2015,
Online since 31 December 2016, connection on 08 March 2017. URL : http://signata.revues.org/1382
This text was automatically generated on 8 March 2017.
Signata - PULg
Music and Meaning
Music and Meaning
Per Aage Brandt and José Roberto do Carmo Jr.
1
Music is omnipresent in the cultural life of human societies and has most probably been
so since our first cultures developed. According to recent research,1 it may thus have
preceded language. As a vocal, instrumental, and choreographic technique — through
collective rhythmic musicking,2 singing and dancing — it may have paved the way for
language in the linguistic sense. Remarkably, both music and language are based on the
particulate principle (also called generativity: unlimited pattern diversity obtained
through combinations within a finite set of distinct, discretized elements), which is not
biologically unique to humans, and in particular present in bird song, as Merker reminds
us. In our species, rhythmically produced vocal sounds became distinct as tones, different
by pitch and combined by tonal generativity into distinct sequences. In worded singing,
these sequences were typically paired with syllables. Syllables of words, however, offer
their own internal particulate organizations (a phonemic generativity) apart from their
melodic combinations in multi-syllabic phrases, and this phonemic phenomenon may be
related to the major difference, or rather chasm, separating musical meaning from the
semantics of language. The development of intra-syllabic morphemes modifying words to
signify their mutual relationships made sentences and sentence meanings possible in
language but not in music. Sentence structure is the basic unit that allows words to
consistently refer to content outside of the situational context of their enunciation. By
contrast, musical phrases predominantly unfold their emotional content with reference
to their present contexts of performance. Despite this important split in human sound
production, if that is what happened, the striking shared condition, in music and
language, of being built on discretized basic elements has inspired most theoreticians
looking for ways to describe musical meaning to seek analytic models in linguistics. The
semiology of music as conceived by Jean Molino (Molino 2009) and Jean-Jacques Nattiez
(Nattiez 1990), was thus elaborated on the grounds of F. de Saussure’s semiology and a
rich subsequent unfolding of both rhetorical and anthropological perspectives. Recently,
Philip Tagg (Tagg 2013) offers a monumental musical socio-rhetoric, whereas another
prominent theoretician of classical music, Eero Tarasti (Tarasti 1994), proposes a narrative
hermeneutics of music strongly influenced by A.J. Greimas’ semiotics of discourse, and in
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Music and Meaning
particular by Greimas’ analysis of the modalities. A different grip on musical narrativity is
present in Colwyn Trevarthen’s and Stephen Malloch’s work (2009), where musicking is
seen as a fundamental story-telling and communicative drive inherent in human
psychology and active from birth to grave.3 It is safe to place the creators of an
influential, extremely formalized generative theory of tonal music (GTTM), Fred Lerdahl
and Ray Jackendoff (Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983) on the list of musicologists influenced by
modern linguistics, in this case by Noam Chomsky’s generative linguistics. 4 As Halle
comments, this theory is related to the early post-structural and cognitively oriented
research in linguistics and more generally in cognitive science. This century has even
seen the spectacular emergence of a neuro-cognitive semantics of music (on the semantic
side: Zbikowski 2002, Sloboda 2005, Huron 2007, Levitin 2006 and 2008; on the
neuroscientific side: Avancini 2003, Patel 2008, Peretz & Zatorre 2005, Thaut 2005). 5 In
this line of research, the cognitive semantics of language, and in particular its iconic and
emotional aspects, including the new studies of conceptual metaphor, are extended to the
study of musical expressions and meanings. These studies may lead to a new view of
iconicity and — in an extended sense — metaphor as ‘analogistic’ semantic processes that
are active across the entire range of our expressive activities in all experiential domains,
whether they be gestural or consist in dancing, singing, playing, acting, conducting,
speaking, writing, composing, painting, or just showing emotion. 6
2
Other approaches show a more distant theoretical relation to linguistics but instead have
closer ties to an esthetics of non-tonal sound, as the ‘acousmatic’ art of objects developed
by Pierre Schaeffer (Schaeffer 1977). The phenomenal experience of sound as such,
especially in an artistic context, has been explored experimentally through the
technologies of communication and acoustics of the last half century. Schaeffer wanted to
build a phenomenology of the sounding object, and to create an art form that let the
concrete material objects communicate their ‘truth’ to us via the new recording and
composing techniques and possibilities under exploration. Both concert music and
rhythmic stage music have profited massively from the research of Schaefferian
laboratories. All audiovisual media today are massively influenced by ‘object music’ along
such lines. The semiotics of the non-abstract music7 of non-discretized, non-particulate
sound, a semiotics of the audible as such, is therefore an attractive, if also an extremely
challenging project.8 The continuous variables of the audible are partly measurable: pitch,
duration, intensity, partly non-quantifiable and as difficult to define by parameters as
odors and taste qualities: the dimension covered by the French term timbre. Descriptions
of timbre are often metaphorical and synesthetic,9 as we know from attempts to describe
the phenomenal qualities of singular human voices. As Roland Barthes said, about the
‘grain of the voice’, this quale of the sound that he wanted to apply to music in general:
“Le ‘grain’, c’est le corps dans la voix qui chante, dans la main qui écrit, dans le membre
qui exécute.”10 The grain is the body — the hand, the playing 11 body part, the singing
voice — and the body is the sounding object par excellence. It is therefore natural for
Schaefferian analysis to foreground the study of song and singing. 12
3
In order to approach signification and the question of meaning, this line of study
eventually, after all, does refer to a linguistic motif in semiotics, a fundamental
intentional property mainly (but not exclusively) known from language, namely
enunciation, l’énonciation.13 The sound qualities of the singing voice can thus be directly
compared to the prosody of the speaking voice. There is, in the timbre of the singing
voice, and equally in that of the speaking voice, a signature effect — “I am a person whose
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Music and Meaning
body sounds like this when I address you, and I mean what I sing or say”. 14 Auto-reference
and communicative intention go together. In language, auto-reference is partly
schematically encoded in morphemes such as the personal pronouns (I, we, you), the
demonstratives (this, that) and the shifter adverbs (here, there; now, then), the markers
of tense and person in finite verbs, etc. In music, by contrast, the particulate tonal
structure — as mentioned above — does not include morphemes and does not encode
enunciation in any other way, so the un-encoded ‘sound’ is doing the work. The absence of
encoded enunciation is interestingly an advantage, because it allows musical forms to
impersonally and yet distinctively express conventional situational meanings, such as
solemnity, festivity, grief, danger, eroticism, aggressivity … or conventional temporal
circumstances like time of day, week, calendar events. This fact makes music eminently
effective as an active social organizing instance and a marker of respected conventions; it
explains its compelling symbolic force.15 Musical enunciation ‘speaks’ in the name of times
and places, events and impersonal authorities rather than from a first-person
perspective, unless a piece of music carries a personal dedication worded in its textual
envelope and title. The distinctive situational meaning of music, that is, of each
performance within a distinct and recognized genre, for example a march tune played
during a military march or a parade, is due to its global symbolic function as a ritual. All
such ritual symbolic functions are as deontic as traffic signs: “You must/can/cannot do X
here and now!” Art music therefore has had to try to escape from the social genres of
music, which has led to the modern explosion of novel and complex forms in concert
music, and also, consequently, to the intelligibility crisis in written music of the 20 th
century. Atonal compositions heard as weird, cold, and academic, hence empty concert
halls, panic and close-downs, are common and in a sense unavoidable; this crisis is
omnipresent in all contemporary concert cultures. “So the ear has to change its habits”,
the musicians fighting for the art may think and say. Are they right?
4
The problem of musical intelligibility leads to a deep ontological question: How do we
hear music at all? We know that the human brain, independently of culture, in its very
architecture has different cortical and subcortical pathways for language, music, and
noise.16 It does not necessarily care for the difference between artistic and functional
sound production, but it does separate the streams for tonal, prosodic, and noise hearing.
It therefore makes sense to explore tonal hearing, or short: tonality, in a large sense, as a
prerequisite to the evolutionary and historical existence of music. For there is a direct
link between intelligibility and tonality: the musical ear is equipped with as much
plasticity as the linguistic ear, but there are, in both cases, limits to what can be produced
and perceived, outside of which the sounding artifacts become esoteric. So for example,
the following constraints are all universal and different from those of language: there are
scales in all tonal music;17 octave equivalence exists in all tonal music; all scales are
defined within the octave; some scales give rise to harmony and harmonic syntax; 18 all
scales give rise to melodic phrasing using its tones and unfolding them in countable time;
there are melodic themes in all tonal music; all phrases are either parts of a theme or of a
variation of a theme. Phrasal theme variation is the way music is immediately ‘speaking’,
it is therefore essential to musical enunciation, besides scale variation and harmonic
variation.
5
Enunciation in tonal art music is thus of two kinds: one is the sheer sound signature and
the other the structural-variation signature. The former is given in substance, the latter
in form, so to speak. When they unite, music is masterful. However, when this happens,
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Music and Meaning
musicians and music lovers will resolve the paradox of an ‘impersonal signature’, an
impersonal person, by referring to a feeling of the presence of masters long gone but
alive in the memory or legacy of their music, and alive in this present music.
Transmission in this sense19 is often or always an important part of the content of musical
emotion.20 The experience of continuity across lives and deaths, and between the living
audience and the voices from afar and from the past heard in the living artists’ present
music. This ‘existential’ or ‘spiritual’ trans-temporal aspect is, we think, an irreducible
metaphysical property of music.21 One day, which is unlikely to be tomorrow, some lucky
semiotician may be able to technically account for it; but whether known or unknown, it
certainly fuels the passion that lies behind our multifarious attempts to understand what
music is and what it means. That passion may be a particularly forceful manifestation of
our deep drive to want to understand what meaning means. Maybe it means, in some
sense: transmission.
6
The contributions to our inquiry into music and meaning published in this volume
admittedly form a very heterogeneous ensemble. Some are mainly theoretical, and only
some of these again are explicitly semiotical. Others are mainly empirical, and again only
some of these follow recognizable semiotic pathways in their analysis. This is due to our
choice, as editors, to privilege the object rather than the subject, that is, the target of
research and discourse: music and musical meaning, rather than the idiom characterizing
semiotics; to go for the ontology rather than the methodology, as Umberto Eco would
perhaps say. Music is a challenge to all methods of approach, and it is of great importance
to accept the challenge even where it means to think and work far outside the semiotic
boxes. As some of the essays presented here demonstrate, it is nevertheless equally
important not to forget what is in those boxes. An open attitude is particularly welcome,
and we invite our readers to adopt it, because of the enjeu, as the French say, for what is
at stake here is the understanding of the most fundamental factor in the constitution of
human civilisation: the object underlying all objects relevant to the human sciences, as it
underlies the daily lives of all of us: music.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
AVANCINI, Giuliano et al. (eds., 2003), The Neurosciences and Music, Annals of the New York Academy
of Sciences, Vol. 999.
BARTHES, Roland (1982), L’Obvie et l’Obtus. Essais critiques 3, Paris: Le Seuil.
BRANDT, Line (2013), The Communicative Mind. A Linguistic Exploration of Conceptual Integration and
Meaning Construction, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars.
BENVENISTE, Émile (1966), The section “L’homme dans la langue”. Problèmes de linguistique générale,
vol. I, Paris: Gallimard.
COQUET, Jean-Claude (2007), Phusis et Logos. Une phénoménologie du Langage, Paris: Presses
Universitaires de Vincennes.
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Music and Meaning
David (2007), Sweet anticipation. Music and the psychology of expectation, Cambridge, Mass.:
HURON
The MIT Press.
LERDAHL, Fred & Ray JACKENDOFF
(1983), A Generative theory of tonal music, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press.
LEVITIN
Daniel J. (2006), This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, New York:
Dutton.
LEVITIN
Daniel J. (2008), The world in Six Songs. How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature, New
York: Dutton.
MALLOCH , Stephen & Colwyn TREVARTHEN
(eds., 2008), Communicative Musicality. Exploring the Basis
of Human Companionship, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
MOLINO, Jean, Jean-Jacques NATTIEZ
& Jonathan GOLDMAN (eds., 2009), Le Singe musicien: essais de
sémiologie et d’anthropologie de la musique, Arles: Actes Sud.
NATTIEZ, Jean-Jacques (1990), Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, transl. by Carolyn
Abbate from Musicologie générale et sémiologie (1987), Princeton: Princeton University Press.
PATEL
Aniruddh D. (2008), Music, Language, and the Brain, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Isabelle & Robert ZATORRE (eds., 2005), The Cognitive Neuroscience of Music, (3 rd ed.), Oxford:
PERETZ
Oxford University Press.
SCHAEFFER, Pierre (1966, 2nd ed. 1977), Traité des objets musicaux, Paris: Seuil.
SLOBODA
John A. (2005), Exploring the Musical Mind. Cognition, Emotion, Ability, Function, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
SLOBODA
John A. & Patrik N. JUSLIN (eds., 2001), Music and Emotion. Theory and Research, Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
SMALL, Christopher (1998), Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, Middletown CT:
Wesleyan University Press.
TAGG, Philip (2013), Music’s Meanings, New York & Huddersfield: MMMSP.
TARASTI, Eero (1994), A Theory of Musical Semiotics. ‘Advances in Semiotics’, Bloomington &
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
THAUT
Michael H. (2005), Rhythm, Music, and the Brain. Scientific Foundations and Clinical Applications,
New York & London: Routledge.
WALLIN
Nils L., Bjorn MERKER, Steven BROWN (eds., 2000), The Origins of Music, Cambridge, Mass.:
The MIT Press.
NOTES
1. See Bjorn Merker’s contribution to this issue and the biomusicological volume edited by
Wallin, Merker and Brown (2000). This line of research links together two particularly intriguing
problems: how to understand in an evolutionary perspective the origins of language and the
origins of music.
2. From the verb ‘to music’, proposed by the ethnomusicologist Christopher Small (1998) in his
book thus entitled.
3. Colwyn Trevarthen summarizes his entire work for us in this volume.
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Music and Meaning
4. The influential project of GTTM is discussed epistemologically and methodologically by John
Halle in this volume.
5. Both Lawrence Zbikowski and David Huron contribute to this volume - rather on the cognitivesemantic side. On the other hand, Cynthia Grund and William Westney’s article demonstrates the
creative empirical methods that the neuroscientific approach introduces in the field of an
embodied esthetics of music.
6. In this volume, Frederico Macedo and Line Brandt discuss conceptual metaphor, the former in
particular two space-to-music mappings, the latter a significant set of mappings between
language, music and dance in various semantic domains. Iconicity is important in Zbikowski’s
and predominant in Lucia Santaella’s contribution. In Morten Schuldt-Jensen’s analysis of the
gestures of conducting, iconicity is crucial to the intelligibility of this curious and complex
theatrical form of communication between orchestra, audience, composer, and conductor.
7. One may question the use of the term ‘music’ for the new art of sound, but also see it as an
extension of the notion that therefore includes tonal music as a special case. John Cage’s piece
consisting of pure silence, as discussed in Peter Bruun’s text in this volume, is of course a case of
radical extension: an artistic framing of a slice of the world’s audible qualities, is music.
8. In this volume, Andrea Valle offers his prolegomena to a theory of the audible, while José
Roberto do Carmo Jr. and Thiago Corrêa de Freitas discuss as their four ‘primitives’ of music:
pitch, duration, intensity, and timbre, and Lucas Shimoda focuses on timbre description.
9. The German translation of timbre is Klangfarbe, or color-of-sound.
10. “The ‘grain’ is the body in the voice that sings, the hand that writes, the body part that
performs”. Barthes, in a conference from 1972. In Barthes (1982, p. 243).
11. This is the aspect studied experimentally in this volume by Cynthia Grund and William
Westney.
12. Martine Groccia, in this volume, presents her research on French song, and as a good student
of Schaeffer characteristically concentrates on l’écoute, the listening and its possible modes,
whereas Zbikowski, in his contribution, instead looks at the expressive integration of text and
music. To the former, songs appear primarily as sound, and to the latter, as a composite iconicosymbolic whole that can even perfectly well be experienced on paper (text and score).
13. This term stems from the linguist Émile Benveniste’s work (1966) and was further developed
in semiotics by a specialist of Benveniste, the literary scholar Jean-Claude Coquet (Coquet 2007).
On the concept of enunciation in the context of cognitive semiotics, see Brandt (2013).
14. In jazz music, themes are often called songs, even if there is no singer or they don’t have
texts. Playing jazz in fact comes close to singing because of the very personal way instruments
are used. Here, the ‘sound’ of a musician is explicitly a personal signature.
15. The composer Peter Bruun discusses in this volume the view of many of his colleagues,
probably including Stravinsky, that the problem for music as an art form may be that it already
means too much and is omnipresent in social life as a provider of circumstantial meaning; it has to
be emptied of that meaning in order to become an art form.
16. The frontotemporal system underlying auditory perception allows us in fact to distinguish
sounds as speech, music, or noise. Cognitive neuroscience of music has made enormous progress
in detailing the involved differentiating processes. See Avancini et al. (2003).
17. Therefore the ancient Greeks thought that music’s emotional meaning was inherent in the
particular scale, or mode. Maybe they were not so wrong. When the scale as heard is
irrecognizable, music is typically felt as ‘mysterious’ or ‘cold’.
18. William Benzon’s and Per Aage Brandt’s contributions to this volume are explorations of
certain tonal structures that seem pervasive to musical communication; both use jazz music as
examples; jazz is a family of genres built on real-time comprehension (hence intelligibility) of
tonal structure among performing musicians. The phenomenology of jazz is different in this
respect from ‘classical’ genres of written and played-as-read music.
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Music and Meaning
19. The theme of the Sorbonne Semiotic Seminar in 2014-2015: La question de la transmission:
institution et histoire. Music is a prominent case, yet to be discussed, but it could be claimed that
art in general possesses to some extent this striking transmissional force or effect. See also
Schuldt-Jensen’s analysis of the conductor’s tasks.
20. Emotions have narratively structured contents. Anger contains stories of offense; happiness
contains stories of relief; fear, stories of danger, etc.
21. It is a point that, surprisingly, T.W. Adorno totally missed, in his philosophy of music.
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