Second Monday Music

Reflections on musical signification

By Geoffrey Dean

During the first week of April I attended the 12th International Congress on Musical Signification (ICMS). The 2013 edition of this biennial forum of the International Project on Musical Signification took place in Louvain-la-Neuve and Brussels, Belgium.
I was especially excited to see and hear for the first time one of the world’s most active personalities in music semiotics, Prof. Eero Tarasti of the University of Helsinki, who is the ICMS director and spoke about the history of the Project. He succinctly defined music’s pertinent branch of semiotics [the theory and study of signs and symbols and their use] as being concerned with the sense-making of sound, and credited Marcello Castellana for coining the broader term “music signification” to allow the Project to embrace approaches that are not strictly semiotic. As Tarasti has stated elsewhere, what unites the presenters at these congresses is “a view that music is not only acoustic material…but the production of sense and meaning as well…the problem of music signification unites scholars even from different schools and is pertinent for so-called traditional musicologists.”

The main theme of the 12th ICMS was intermediality, which encompasses the interaction of music, language, acting, performance, surrounding events, and audience response. (Chuck Smythe's engaging account yesterday of his recent performance experience could be read as intermedial, with Chuck himself mediating between the event as observed and the event as performed.) Academics representing Belgian institutions who helped organize the congress spoke on intermediality at the opening session.
    Prof. Andre Helbo of the Belgian Academie Royale proposed steps towards an international language of intermediality, emphasizing the importance of cooperative process and the need to put the listener at the center of new research that treats the variables of performance scientifically.

    Prof. Mark Reybrouck of the Leuven University invoked American philosophers William James and John Dewey as pragmatic founding fathers and Irish philosopher George Berkeley’s principle that the sign must be perceived in order to exist in arguing for “end-user” oriented research combining both analytical and empirical approaches.
    In an intriguing example of how music pervades contemporary culture, Prof. Constantino Maeder of the Catholic University of Louvain showed how a recurring musical-psychological pattern in Italian opera scenes, in which the character gets worked up emotionally and then makes an irrevocable decision that invariably has unfortunate consequences, is taken up by Italians (repeated end-users of these operas) in everyday life.

Most of the ICMS presenters at the sessions I attended (there were usually at least three, sometimes as many as five, sessions running concurrently) tried to confront issues of music in performance and to treat the listener as a sense-making participant in an intermedial event. Most seemed to do so in the context of the three central foci of the International Project on Music Signification: musical sense-making, narrative, and reception.

Ricoeur

    The semiotic approaches tended to apply analytical tools borrowed from literary theory, such as Paul Ricoeur’s theory of narrative or the idea of traditional literary topoi [motifs or conspicuous elements], to the analysis of the form and content of musical compositions in determining how the signification of music operates on the listener.
    I came away with a general sense that the presenters had moved decisively beyond the idea of music as a static text to be interpreted (akin to language “on paper”), to approaches that see music as a dynamic form of living communication (akin to language “in action”).
    This need to “move beyond” has been resisted for decades by traditional musicologists dealing with classical music, and it’s easy to see why. Classical music is almost always written down, so its works can be conveniently isolated from how they actually “live” in the world (through performance and being listened to) and treated as cultural artifacts of the past. More recent music scholarship has gotten much more creative in searching for links to the world in which these works were created, looking to the composer’s life situation and to literature of that time and ways of listening then current that might reveal, if not what was meant, at least how it was meant. This approach ideally leads to new insights on how the music affects today’s listeners.
    One semiotic thread of this approach takes its cue from the time of Haydn and Mozart, the first great “Viennese Classicists.” These and other composers of the late 18th Century intentionally used specific pitch-rhythm combinations that the informed listener of that time recognized as representing specific topoi. The listener’s recognition of, or even his or her intention to recognize, the composer’s “signs” was the listener’s contribution to a kind of conversation, and over the course of the 18th Century the development of this type of participatory listening moved classical music from its former status as a persuasive art akin to rhetorical speaking (i.e., the composer/performer’s monologue) to a new status as an art the goal of which was to communicate (i.e., in a dialogue between composer/performer and listener). How topoi are used in classical music and how related melodic motifs emerge from the tonal progress of a given composition and act on the listener are central concerns of the American scholars (and ICMS keynotes speakers) Lawrence Zbikowksi and Robert Hatten.
    Another thread also considers the likenesses of music and language as communication tools, but approaches music as a part of a complex of traditional human interactions, often also including storytelling and dance. In such settings the music has no fixed written form, so it can be more profitably studied in terms of function and process. This type of study allows researchers to confront the question of what music—classical or, more likely, not—actually does as social practice.

Cross

    For Cambridge University music researcher and IMSC keynote speaker Dr. Ian Cross, music surpasses language in “managing situations of social uncertainty” without conflict. Taking the practices of primitive cultures as his guide, Cross explains that as soon as words are uttered, the possibility of misunderstanding their meaning emerges. The communal act of listening to music allows each participant to imagine that he or she is in a group of people where the interests and thoughts of each of the other members are in complete alignment with his or her own. The meaning of music then becomes allowing this perceived group unification—or “mutual affiliation” as Cross put it—to take place and function to encourage empathic behaviors among members of a group. Cross’s own studies in music group interaction have shown that listening to music as a coordinated group activity among school-age children does result in an increase in empathic behaviors.

This is the kind of news that classical music performers like myself are always eager to hear, because it offers some renewed justification for our existence, for the “greater necessity” of what we can give to society. Conversely, it points up the need for us to be able to rethink how we do and can operate in the real world. In many ways the classical performer has inherited the same isolated “artifact” status that characterizes an antiquated view of the self-contained work of art somehow unrelated to the life of our everyday experience. To think that music is about the work is like thinking it’s about me (all too easy to do, especially when “self-expression” takes priority over “being understood”).

Wittgenstein

    Philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein and the American pragmatist John Dewey in the 1930s, and the German hermeneutic Hans-Georg Gadamer somewhat later, independently argued to the effect that art has its basis in and ultimate meaning as shared experience. The signs have been pointing toward the same general conclusion—wherever and however music is made, it is about us, after all.
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Copyright © 2013 by Geoffrey Dean

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