Approaches to Meaning in Music available in Hardcover
- ISBN-10:
- 0253347920
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253347923
- Pub. Date:
- 11/01/2006
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0253347920
- ISBN-13:
- 9780253347923
- Pub. Date:
- 11/01/2006
- Publisher:
- Indiana University Press
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253347923 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2006 |
| Series: | Musical Meaning and Interpretation |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.12(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Approaches to Meaning in Music
By Byron Almén, Edward Pearsall
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2006 Indiana University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34792-3
CHAPTER 1
The Divining Rod: On Imagination, Interpretation, and Analysis
Edward Pearsall and Byron Almén
Musical meaning has become a seductively compelling topic for music scholars over the last few decades, with works by Lawrence Kramer, Daniel Chua, Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Robert Hatten, Kofi Agawu, Carolyn Abbate, and countless others pushing the question of signification to the forefront of the discipline. That this is so can partly be attributed to the semantic slipperiness of the term "meaning," which we fill with so many hopes and expectations. It suggests a special kind of knowledge, a privileged insight into our fascination with the experience of music. Indeed, explorations into musical meaning lay claim to embodying the central core of our discipline, justifying its very existence by revealing the source of music's power, by translating its implicit message.
And yet that source is as opaque as it is compelling. Philosophers, artists, and theorists from the time of Pythagoras have wrestled with the concept of musical meaning, always to come up short. There are so many intractable problems to be solved. Is meaning entirely mediated by culture, or are there identifiable universals? Is meaning communicable from one person to another, given the vagaries of subjective response? For music to communicate, must it also be beautiful? Does music convey anything at all beyond its play of sounds? What, indeed, does "meaning" mean? What methodological tools are appropriate? Is music like a language, a natural object, an article of faith? Or is meaning more like a subjective confession, an idiosyncratic recognition of meaningful patterns? Is there any common ground at all on which to lay a foundation for a theory of meaning?
In the title of this chapter, we allude to an unusual metaphorical analogy between the study of meaning and the traditional folk practice of dowsing for water, analytical method being correlated with the dowser's tool — the divining rod. This analogy fruitfully illuminates the unusual character of musical meaning as an object of inquiry in several respects:
1. The object of search is, in both cases, precious and fundamental: water is essential for life, and music exists only through the significance we give it.
2. The mechanisms through which either is achieved are opaque and mysterious. Just as there is no apparent effective relationship between wood and water, so, too, is there no indisputable connection between our theoretical tools and their object of interest.
3. There is some question whether either process actually works, or whether something akin to a magical sleight-of-hand is involved. Approaches to musical meaning have often been rejected as being products of wishful thinking, not amenable to proof.
4. In both cases, the difficulty lies not with the object but with the means of apprehending it. Meaning, like water, is manifestly present — although some might even question this position — but it may be that we can have no access to it unless it is immediately apparent.
5. The practice of dowsing, as with the discovery of meaning, seems to involve the complicity of the seeker's personality. Meaning in music appears only through the processes used to construct it. Hence musical signification is emergent, contingent on researchers and their methods.
This analogy would likely appear unwelcome to a researcher interested in establishing the legitimacy of musical meaning as a scholarly subject. Yet this is the situation facing us today: the mystification surrounding musical meaning as a subject is a great stumbling block to research. For a theory of musical meaning to succeed, it must attempt to demystify the mysterious without robbing it of mystery. Further, if it cannot place the entire phenomenon within one frame, it must attempt to identify that portion of the phenomenon which can be comprehended, and reveal it in the face of seeming arbitrariness, self-contradiction, and contingency. This book, featuring a variety of voices from our contemporary musical community, is intended to display the rich variety of ways in which musical meaning is today being divined.
In this collection of essays, written by theorists, musicologists, and cultural scholars, we present a survey of the problems and issues inherent in pursuing meaning and signification in music, one we hope will take into account the instability of the interpretive landscape as well as the complicity of the researcher in generating the content of his or her scholarship. Within these pages a provisional taxonomy emerges for mapping the terrain of current approaches to meaning, with a sufficiently large sample so that significant landmarks within that terrain are revealed. Within these pages a range of positions, ideas, and approaches representing both established and emerging scholars are displayed. More than this, however, the collection embodies an ideal of cross-disciplinary and intra-disciplinary collaboration that is a hallmark of the hermeneutic standpoint shared by all its contributors.
As we have indicated, music is a complex phenomenon, one involving a host of cultural, phenomenological, cognitive, cultural, and music-artistic factors. To understand music in its fullest sense, then, is to be willing to entertain a variety of perspectives. But the nature of academic inquiry resists such an approach. How can one give equal emphasis to all aspects of a problem without losing focus? Indeed, how can we even identify all the influences that might apply? It is out of practical necessity, therefore, that each perspective concentrates on a particular interpretive feature of music. This does not preclude, however, the existence of multiple viewpoints, even ones that are equally tenable. Nor are multiple perspectives necessarily mutually exclusive. Rather, each can be seen to contribute to some aspect of our total understanding without claiming to have arrived at a conclusive, once-and-for-all understanding of music.
Viewed in this way, meaning in music resembles the elephant in the Buddhist parable in which three blind men, together, come upon an elephant: the first man grasps the elephant's tail and thinks that the elephant is a rope; the second feels the elephant's trunk and believes the elephant is a snake; the third touches the elephant's foot and imagines that the elephant is a tree. Like the blind men in the parable, we music scholars, in our analysis of music, grope around the various aspects of music and then, as William James observed, we "substitute the aspect for the whole real thing" (1977: 100). Like the elephant, however, music is not understood so easily.
By taking a few steps back, we can begin to identify certain methodological similarities in the approaches used by scholars who address the problem of meaning in music. Among other things, we see that many scholars — including those already mentioned and those whose work appears in this volume — often discover meaning through a dialogic process, via the interaction of contrasting ideas. Indeed, that so many theorists and musicologists, independently of one another, have employed this approach gives credence to the idea that the dialogic process lies at the core of the hermeneutic enterprise and arises from a psychological imperative.
These contrasting ideas that give rise to "meaning" arise both within and among scholarly works. The former, "intra-essay" approach is more typical, occurring when an author counterpoises multiple perspectives in a single essay or treatise. The latter process — the bringing into contact of disparate approaches through multiple treatments of a single subject — is, in our view, less frequent but equally fruitful. We have chosen to model this "inter-essay" approach: by juxtaposing a variety of perspectives in our volume, we hope to promote a more diversified environment for the study of music. In doing so, we propose a methodological middle ground between presumed and unquestioned orthodoxy, on the one hand, and dogmatically centrifugal relativism, on the other. We proceed from a shared assumption that the articulation of meaning — whether sanctioned through tradition and conventional usage or emerging from the unique dynamics of the work or the cultural milieu — is possible and realizable. Indeed, it is only on the basis of shared assumptions that a cross-disciplinary discussion might take place at all. It is our intention, therefore, to balance a healthy respect for traditional hermeneutics with a desire to avoid sealing off theoretical discourse from fresh ideas and approaches.
The various chapters in this volume cover a broad spectrum of approaches to musical meaning, involving issues of gesture, narrative, discursiveness, temporality, symbol, association, collage, and social utility. These topics offer a wide variety of perspectives and cut across disciplinary boundaries, but they share a common intent: that of showing how music is informed by its cultural, political, and artistic influences. On one level, then, the volume functions as an introduction to various approaches to music analysis, and, on another level, it draws these approaches together to form a more complete picture of the interpretive landscape and the possibilities inherent in collaborative discourse.
Toward a Multidimensional Approach to Music Analysis
It is probably impossible at this point to articulate an entirely satisfactory taxonomy of musical meaning. For one thing, neither of the most appealing organizational options — logical or conventional divisions — is without its problematic features. Logical division lends itself to a certain elegance of presentation and, potentially, a greater degree of comprehensiveness, but its success depends on the willingness of a significant proportion of musical meaning scholars to adopt a single terminology and epistemological paradigm. More important, the criteria through which the domain might be organized are not obvious: should one classify according to parameter (melody, harmony, etc.); scope of application (global, medial, local); sign type (icon, index, symbol); degree of idiosyncrasy or consensus; level of simplicity or complexity; degree of universality; relation to a particular style or time period; paradigm (cognitive theory, sociology, semiotics); range of application (personal, interpersonal, cultural); or something else altogether? Perhaps a classification system combining some or all these criteria is necessary. The more features we include, however, the more we trade elegance for comprehensiveness.
Conventional groupings, by contrast, have the advantage of deriving from relatively cohesive communities of scholars who work with a shared terminology. A classification system based on traditional terminology has a self-evident and readymade efficacy. But there is no guarantee that these communities, taken together, are adequately accounting for the full range of signifying phenomena. Further, without a universally agreed-upon set of principles, advances in one area may not filter through to inform advances in other areas. Indeed, disciplinary barriers and mutual distrust often prevent the clear exchange of ideas.
Perhaps, at this stage, it is too early to force a solution to this problem. The proliferation of approaches and methodologies in the area of musical meaning, though perhaps working against the immediate likelihood of a unified field, has the advantage of drawing in a larger interested audience. A critical mass of material is accumulating which may itself provide the nucleus for a diverse yet coherent subdiscipline. In such a climate, scholarly anthologies of the sort represented by this volume are one way to move this process forward. While largely adhering to a variety of traditional or conventional approaches to meaning, then, we hope to provide the impetus for a more focused and barrier-free disciplinary community to emerge.
Among the primary musical parameters, melody has the longest history as a locus of meaning. The ubiquity of its association with the human voice has indelibly marked it as the premiere embodiment of expressive communication, even when, in instrumental music, the voice is mute. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1981 [1825]: 95) hints at the connection between melody and human agency when arguing for the primacy of melody: "everyone takes pleasure in listening to beautiful sounds, but if the experience is not animated by melodious and familiar inflections it will in no way be delightful or sensually pleasing" Modern treatises on melody have continued in the same vein, often emphasizing the fundamental cognitive or psychological features underlying it. Eugene Narmour (1977: 7) asserts that the basic principles of his implication-realization model "operate independently of any specific style structures, of any learned, replicated complexes of syntactic relations" Narmour bases melodic perception on Gestalt categories, in some quarters thought to lie at the root of human perception. These categories include similarity, proximity, and common direction, the latter derived from the common-fate principle in Gestalt psychology (1977: 6). Leonard Meyer (1973) cites a similar premise in his well-known book Explaining Music — although, for Meyer, stylistic conventions also play a role. Meyer expresses melodic perception in terms of a single overriding principle: "patterns tend to be continued until they become as stable as possible" (130). Building on this principle, Meyer identifies a number of specific melodic types, axial melodies, gap-fill melodies, neighbors, and the like. In Meyer's paradigm, these melodic gestures form the foundation for melodic structuring in music.
To Meyer's basic melodic gestures, Patrick McCreless, in chapter 2, "Anatomy of a Gesture: From Davidovsky to Chopin and Back," adds another. McCreless's gesture is a four-part melodic idea consisting of (1) increased intensity in the highest register (increase in rate of events, thickening of texture, crescendo); (2) suddenly, at the peak of this increase, a quick, precipitous drop to a low register; (3) a "thud" at the bottom of the second part of the gesture; and (4) a "rebound" in the middle register. McCreless traces the origins of this gesture to Romantic piano music, where it constitutes a closing pattern in works by Chopin, Liszt, and their contemporaries. He then traces the gesture and its modifications through musical history, culminating with a discussion of modified four-part gestures in the music of such disparate twentieth-century composers as Tatum, Copland, Messiaen, Boulez, and Davidovsky. In this way, McCreless's essay incorporates a two-level analysis centering on both the structural properties of the gesture and its development as a cultural-historical object.
The concept of gesture — a class of musical events sharing common morphological and, by implication, semantic features (often, but not exclusively, including aspects of melody and register) — is also one of the traditional categories used by music scholars to approach the issue of meaning. Its genesis might be traced back as far as the early seventeenth century, when rhetorical Figuren began to be associated with certain musical phenomena. The term has since acquired various resonances from similar but non-overlapping concepts: leitmotiv, Schoenberg's musikalische Gedanke, and various semiotic entities. McCreless's four-part gesture is thus also meaningful: it has a psychological component that motivates its historical propagation and accounts for its compelling quality. McCreless appeals to the physicality of this gesture for an understanding of its semantic content, correlating the motion between registral, dynamic, and timbral extremes with corporeal motion. This in turn suggests dramatic content, as we come to imagine "action sequences" that might correspond to this gesture. And, of course, the more precise content of the gesture depends on how it fits into specific networks of sound. The resulting spectrum of possibilities is amply fleshed out by the numerous examples McCreless provides. Even within a limited scope, complexities of meaning emerge from a single gesture through its acquisition of contextual associations, the extent to which it invokes historical predecessors (see also chapter 5, J. Peter Burkholder's essay on associative meaning), and its strategic deployment in a given work (see chapter 4, by Robert S. Hatten, for a discussion of stylistic and strategic coding).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Approaches to Meaning in Music by Byron Almén, Edward Pearsall. Copyright © 2006 Indiana University Press. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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