Professional Documents
Culture Documents
ANALYSIS
EXPERIENCE
New Perspectives in Musical Semiotics
Edited by
Costantino Maeder and Mark Reybrouck
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Table of Contents
Preface
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Table of Contents
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Editors 349
Contributors 351
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Preface
Costantino Maeder and Mark Reybrouck
tudying music, in all its forms and uses, contributes to the understanding
of how our brains work and how (and why) we communicate, interpret
and judge. Western music has undergone several centuries of profound
unification and common exchange and development. Today, most of us are
continually exposed to music. Music has become all-pervasive. We listen to
music, even unwillingly, in shops, on TV shows, on the radio, when strolling
through a town, when sitting next to an audiophile in a plane. The very
absence of music in a TV serial creates a kind of surreal, alienated effect. Even
in the womb of our mothers music probably conditioned our growth and the
development of our brain. We get accustomed to clichs, to correlation of
particular musical signifiers, closely tied to signifieds: even today in Hollywood
movies, in pop music, classical music and TV serials, we encounter musical
words that were forged very early in Western musical history. Common
structures and musical solutions within an intermedial and transmedial
framework were repeated for centuries and this cultural preparation and
imprinting allowed the creation of a common ground that enables the listener
to understand music. This very understanding, however, stems from some
basic, cognitive faculties that define us.
Poetry, narration, paintings are crucial to the understanding of what we
are, and certainly not superfluous and negligible hobbies. From the very
beginning, these art forms were typical of our human being, as archeological
and historical data suggest. This is also true for music, which, more than any
other art form, is all-pervasive. It serves as muzak in stores, as apparent and
often unnoticed background in movies, serials, documentaries, and even on
the news. Only one century ago, music was rather rare. People could sing when
working or perhaps in their leisure time, but they had few opportunities to
actually listen to a wealth of music. Today, music has conquered our complete
human sphere: people listen and make music, enjoy TV serials, make photos,
create interactive web pages with their homemade movies. Semiotics and
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Preface
sense that can be transmitted. We simply state that musical semiotics has to
continue also to develop analytical strategies that take into account input that
does not stem (directly) from non-semantic and non-syntactical data.
Communication as a complex, multi- and transmedial phenomenon, does
not rely solely on language as a closed systembe it musical or linguisticbut
includes several other dimensions (Eco 1975, 1979, 2000). Grice and many
other pragmaticians and recent cognitivists (for example Grice, 1975; Sperber
& Wilson, 2005) claim that the interpretation of the outer world and most
communicative means (production and reception) relies on a handful of basic
cognitive faculties and acquired skills that stem from them. When making
music or listening to music, be it alone or within an intermedial context,
we negotiate the outcome by comparing what we perceive to what we know
already (norm, cultural memory, expectancies); we make use of our mindreading abilities (the so-called theory of mind, or ToM described for example
in Zunshine, 2006); we divide percepts into categories and construe systems;
we identify patterns, we try to foresee the future, and we expect and look for
sense-giving difference. When we listen to music, our behavior is not different
from what we do when we try to make sense of a dialog or any discourse we are
listening to; we assume that the counterpart wants to communicate with us
Grices principle of cooperationand we assume that in one way or another
what we perceive is significant, to us or to others. This allows us to develop
interpretation strategies, even for cases where our usual schemes apparently
do not work, as is the case with violation of conversational maxims, such
as be pertinent or give as much information as needed. If this is not the
case, we will proceed with hypotheses that will enable us to find a convincing
explanation for a possible puzzling answer. We will consider the context of
enunciation, we will try to attribute mental states (emotions, intents, beliefs,
etc.) to our counterpart, and so on. When we listen to music, we conjecture
that what we listen to is significant to us and that the interpreters want to
express something; we assume as well that the principle of cooperation is valid
here. By virtue of simple mechanisms, the audience can make meaningful
and sound hypotheses on the sense of the music, the possible meanings it
transports (Maeder, 2011; Reybrouck, 2012, 2015).
The ideas promoted in this book pay tribute to these claims. They are
about musical sense-making and the way music works. They aim at providing
new ways of musical understanding in defining music as a phenomenon that
calls forth an integral experience. As such they are not restricted to structural
descriptions of canonical music (the common practice tradition) but aim at
encompassing also ways of capturing the music-in-action as exemplified in
popular and intermedial kinds of musical performances. In semiotic terms this
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means a shift from musical syntax over musical semantics to musical pragmatics.
Music, in fact, is not merely a sounding structure but something that impinges
upon our body and our mind. This pragmatic turn, so typical of cognitive
sciences, is also characteristic of todays semiotics. It points to a paradigm that
turns away from the traditional representation-centered framework toward a
paradigm that stresses the role of action and experience and which was also the
starting point for an international conference on musical signification (ICMS
XII
) that was held in Louvain-la-Neuve and Brussels in Belgium in 2013 with
Music, semiotics and intermediality as its conference theme. The conference
had six major topics:
the tension between traditional musicology with its emphasis on a struc
tural approach to music (music as structure, score analysis) and sensemaking by the listener (music as heard, music as experienced),
the working of music within this context,
musical sense-making, narrativity and music reception,
the role of the semiotic point of view: moving from syntactics over semantics
(self-reflective or extramusical) to pragmatics (effect on listener),
encompassing actual and emerging new topics of music research such as
music and emotion, music as experience, music and the body, musical
universals and music and evolution,
interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches to music in an attempt
to bring together traditional musicology, musical semiotics, cognitive
sciences and (neuro)biology.
The present volume is an outcome of this conference. It is not a proceedings
book but a self-sufficient and coherent contribution that should be accessible
also to a broader readership. It contains 19 contributions, selected from about
120 submissions. The contents were chosen on the basis of their generic and
innovative character; the authors were selected with the aim of presenting a
balanced mixture of music theorists, music analysts, composers, conductors
and performers. The list of contributors, further, shows both established and
renowned scholars as well as young and promising scholars with challenging
and provoking new ideas, in order to guarantee some fruitful dynamics in the
choice and elaboration of the overall contents.
The selection of the contributions was no easy task, but still more
demanding was the ambition to make something coherent out of them. The
first idea was to split the book into two major parts: a theoretical part with
broad generic claims and an analytical part with case studies in the domain of
music, movies, stage, songs and popular music. This division, however, was
not tenable as many of the contributions are theoretical as well as analytical,
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Preface
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References
Eco, U. (1975). Trattato di semiotica generale. Milano: Bompiani.
Eco, U. (1979). Lector in fabula: la cooperazione interpretativa nei testi narrativi. Milano:
Bompiani.
Eco, U. (2000). Kant and the platypus: Essays on language and cognition. New York: Harcourt
Brace.
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In J. L. Morgan & P. Cole (Eds.), Speech acts
(pp.41-58). New York: Academic Press.
Maeder, C. (2011). Argumentative, iconic, and indexical structures in Schuberts Die schne
Mllerin. In P. Michelucci, O. Fischer, & C. Ljungberg (Eds.), Iconic investigations
(pp.389-404). Amsterdam, New York: Benjamins.
Reybrouck, M. (2012). Musical Sense-Making and the Concept of Affordance: An Ecosemiotic
and Experiential Approach. Biosemiotics, 5(3), 391-409.
Reybrouck, M. (2015). Real-time listening and the act of mental pointing: deictic and indexical
claims. Mind, Music, and Language, 2, 1-17.
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Preface
Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (2005). Pragmatics. In F. Jackson & M. Smith (eds), Oxford
Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy (pp.468-501). Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Zunshine, L. (2006). Why we read fiction: theory of mind and the novel. Columbus: Ohio State
University Press.
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