Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 8 Number 3, December 2007

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Some Remarks on Musical Meaning

by

Michael Woods

European School in Luxembourg 

The effect music may have on us and the reason for this may be summed up by a letter which Arnold Schoenberg wrote to Rudolf Kolisch who had himself written an exhaustive analysis of set structure in the Third String Quartet. He said this:

“You have gone to a great deal of trouble, and I don’t think I’d have had the patience to do it. But do you think anyone is better off for knowing it? I can’t quite see it that way. My firm belief is that for a composer who doesn’t yet quite know his way about with the use of series it may give him some idea of how to set about it – a purely technical indication of the possibilities of getting something out of the series. But this isn’t where the aesthetics reveal themselves, or if so, only incidentally. I can’t utter too many warnings against overrating these analyses, since after all they only lead to what I have always been dead against: seeing how it is done; whereas I have always helped people to see: what it is!”[1]  What is it then, it may be asked?

The labours of musicologists, musicians and practitioners of every persuasion to explain that ‘what it is’ has invariably been fraught, contentious and often bitter: after Hanslick’s (and Nietzsche’s) famous turn from Wagner both for different reasons but expressing their loathing for the composer’s espousal of what was considered to be a non-music in its supposed dependence on extra-musical elements, Hanslick was pilloried for this (“Veit Hanslick”) as a foolish poet in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. Hanslick’s Leipzig formalism in musical analysis and his insistence on the purity of musical form sat uneasily with those who claimed that musical meaning derived, in the main, from elements outside of itself, the so-called ‘referentialist’ theory of the nature of musical significance, as opposed to the austerity of formalist theories which sometimes seemed to verge on mathematical abstractions in their rarified expositions. Perhaps we might remember Pythagoras as being the precursor of these theorists of the synonymity of music and harmonious arithmetical relationships. The problem of music’s emotional effect, however, never seemed to go away. So between formalism and referentialism there are those who have incorporated many variegated further areas in their investigations such as psychological, anthropological, expressionist and symbolist to present what might be thought to be a fuller explanation of the power of the musical effect. And that is what Schoenberg in his letter to Kolisch was insistent about. It is all very well and painstakingly laborious to explain how precisely the effect is achieved for the musicologist. But for the composer, much more crucial is the question: what is it that I have done?

The power of music must be construed as being more than a concatenation of aural physical elements, themselves essential but accidentally colligated, but which cannot be uniquely transformative as a composition which affects us in the way that it does. When Schoenberg referred to what it is, he was talking of something other than that which is materially there and which transcends that necessary materiality in its fundamentally essential physical construction, however sophisticatedly expressed the interpretation by musicologists may be. What is that which is above and beyond the physically evident? What are we doing when we seek to articulate it?

 It is because we are aware that there is something more, that the representation of a physically colligated sound series makes a transcendent experience possible. How does this take place? Given the finite nature of musical materials, that is to say of sonorous matter and its necessary recurrence and repetition either in the factual (but retained) past of the musical event at once evanescent yet at the same time held fast to, what happens is this: in the elusively compelling “now” of discreet apprehension of disparateness or in the anticipative possible nature of its resolution, time unfolds in the experience and makes the experience possible, being its necessary and indispensable condition. Time is the key to the mystery of the musical experience. But I shall come to that presently, however briefly.

It has been said that sound, the stuff of music, is as calculably measurable as any Cartesian substance, “out there”, occupying a spatio-temporal nexus and physically apart from us as thinking things. The composition of a piece of music concerns the (presumably intelligent, which is to say goal-directed) organization of the stuff itself, its amplification, pitch, frequency and duration. This can be scientifically analyzed into electrical impulses, oscillation and further vibrational and acoustic quantification. The full implementation of electronic apparatus will, presumably, be brought to bear in its registration on electronically produced data and the digitally faithful reproduction of the entire sonic event,  which still, as yet, and taken in its scientific and technological bearing, has no musical meaning. These events have all taken place in time but they are not yet temporal in the sense of human (phenomenological) apprehension, an event of understanding without which there can be no grasp of what the occasion is about. It is therefore evident that the listener, which is to say the attentive, musically intelligent human being, implicitly accepts that the sonic patterns of pitches, whatever their acoustic organization, are necessarily but not crucially determinable for the musical experience and it is precisely this experience that the listener (presumably) is there to attend to and, further, to derive pleasure from.

So there are two principles of musical identity running together here, as it were: firstly the acoustic presentation of sets of sounds always susceptible to technically quantifiable assessment. These will nonetheless be variable (and this is where evaluative judgement comes into play, peripherally or even essentially) in relation to discernible and necessary transformations which will need to take place. And secondly, acoustics will be drawn, interpretively, into music: the performer fills out the tonal field for the listener. The listener may be aware of sheer pleasure, discomfort, surprise and may hear an inestimable number, possibly, of tonal distortions which may also lead, in extremis, to annoyance and even outrage.

It must be said, however, that the exact interpretation of acoustical impression belongs to musical cognition, revealing the beauty of its spontaneous acceptance and the universal capacity of the aesthetic imagination to be at once critical and at the same time sensing the exuberance of what is given in sound, time and space. And this will demand musical intelligence, the presumed disposition of a human being for whom time, in the particular way we are referring to it, is of the utmost and obvious significance.

But what is it that comes into play regarding temporal musical intelligence? Do we have to know to be able to listen? And what has all this to with time?

Time can be understood in a number of ways in relation to the musical composition:  (1) The score of a composition, or its material sign, is in world time and as such is subject to ageing, disintegration and destruction. This score can be the original, or any copies of it or any tapes or recordings of the composition.

(2) The performance of a composition takes time. This can be understood in two different ways: firstly, and more trivially, we can measure, objectively, the time it has taken for a composition to be performed (just the same there is a considerable difference in the length of time it took Toscanini to conduct Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony compared to, say, Karajan); secondly, in its chronological unfolding, a composition is temporally synthesized in the listener’s pre-reflective sense in such a way that the unfolding of a composition is an act involving perception, retention and anticipation which results in the holding together of the composition as a unity: in effect, a wordless argument.

(3) As well as taking time, a composition presents time: This also can be understood in two ways: firstly, it can be understood designatively or programmatically in which, for example, Mahler’s Second Symphony has as its programme the passing on from the time of human history and its events to death, judgement and resurrection; secondly, it can be understood as immediately presentative in which are evoked such phenomena as beginning and end, continuity and interruption, simultaneity and succession.

Because I think the first aspect of time, exemplified in the ageing of a score, is of little more than incidental interest, I shall ignore it, as I shall ignore the first aspects of the second and third ways of understanding, namely, the measurable time which elapses in the performance of a composition, and the designative aspect of time as a musical programme. Instead, I shall outline the experience of a musical composition in two distinct, but related ways: its temporal constitution by and in the pre-reflective synthesizing act of the listener; and the evocation of time in the composition itself. These are at once the subjective and objective aspects of the same phenomenon: a succession of tones is “run through and held together” subjectively in such a way that it is constituted as a unity. This unity objectively exhibits or evokes time in having the necessary characteristics of beginning and ending, for example, or continuity and interruption. The object and the experience are therefore two distinguishable but not necessarily one, unitary phenomenon.

In his Critique of Pure Reason[2],  Kant demonstrated that time is not merely the pure form of inner sense, by means of which inchoate impressions are taken up into intelligible or potentially intelligible order by submitting to a successiveness, but that in being brought to bear upon experience through the productive imagination, objectivity as such is possible. For Kant, therefore, time is not a measurable flux which is “out there” but is the indispensable and fundamental condition by means of which “out there” and hence, correlatively, subjectivity and ultimately objectivity, are possible at all. Adapting this general account to the experience of music we can see that, once it is accepted, it will follow that time is not merely something which music is “in”, in the sense that music takes time, but that music is temporally constituted.

The question might be: how is experience of a present, let us say, musical, event possible? There are three “moments” in this: (a) the perception of an immediately given particular, for example, a melody, the opening measures of Brahms’ Romance op.118 No. 5 the upper voice of which, on the face of it, looks like a descending F-Major scale. But what we are hearing is not the note F, then the note E, then the note D and so on (however these might be physically/acoustically represented) but rather, what we are hearing is the opening melody of the Romance. If we were listening to a concatenation of discrete tones which constitute the abstraction called the descending scale of F the Romance as a composition, and in particular its opening melody, would have little worth as a composition nor melody.

The phenomenal present must be distinguished from what is factually present: empirically speaking, a pitch of a particular frequency and intensity is struck in a given time to be succeeded by another pitch struck at a subsequent time. But such an interpretation cannot account for our experience of music which consists, at least in part, of our associative capacity to perceive a melody unfolding of which this tone, sounding now, is a constituent part. In other words it is the melody, not the tone, which has a logical and experiential priority.

(b) “When a temporal Object has expired”, according to Husserl[3],  “when its actual duration is over, the consciousness of the Object, now past, by no means fades away, although it no longer functions as perceptual consciousness, or better, perhaps as impressional consciousness. To the ‘impression’, ‘primary remembrance’, or as is said, retention is joined.”

What this means is that the retained (or in the Husserlian sense of “retended”) object, the just sounded tone, is modified by the actually present sensations of the object. Retention is a form of memory and is responsible for the relationships we make within a composition which confer upon it its identity: in this way one discrete tonal event is synthesized with those linked with it so that I am conscious of the melody and the unified totality of the composition itself.

(c) The third aspect of synthesis is similar to what I have been calling (with Kant)

 “anticipation”. Unlike retention it is fundamentally indeterminate so that, except in the case

of certainty in repetition, that which is to come cannot be ascertained from what is now given.

 And yet we cannot help actively anticipating what is to come even though we may not be

fully conscious of this. On the basis of what has gone before, for example from a familiarity

 with the style of the piece, through familiar resolution of given tensions, through rhythmic

 consistency, and so on, we “fill out” the future by means of anticipation .

Leonard Meyer bases an evaluative theory of music on this aspect of the musical experience. In his Meaning and Emotion in Music[4] he derives from ‘Information Theory’ the proposition that the more probable an element in a piece of music, the less information it carries and the less valuable it is. I would like to explain this briefly.

Speaking of ‘designative’ and ‘embodied’ meanings he broadly alludes to a distinction made by St. Augustine but in a way in which neither distinction is originally made or assumes predominance. Both appear to be symbiotic in so far as the designative functions (but not exclusively) he may be making a gesture toward apparently extraneous (potential) experiences whilst the embodied meanings fall back in upon their own immanence. Both, therefore, appear to operate in a round-dance of mutual signification where the meaning of this successive trajectory is created by the thwarting of tonal development. Hence the greater the surprise in the growth of the musical idea and the more intense the experience. It is this which is constitutive of the musical meaning itself.

The implication of this ‘Information Theory’ is of course that the more obvious the trajectory of the composition the less information and therefore meaning it carries. Complexity of development and the ensuing frustration of expectations leads through, initially, an apparent auditory labyrinth. Given sufficient information and presumably the musical wherewithal to make it intelligible, the exit from the maze will be reached. The composition has presumably been appreciated and the experience enjoyed, although what should happen on multiple hearings (does the composition become tiresome because the originally fresh musical surprises have become banal?) is an immensely complex question. To a certain extent an apparently sonic manifold but with a clearly implicit auditory telos has to make sense. And if it doesn’t it may simply rebound on our musical intelligence, on our incapacity to apprehend aesthetic value delivered through information theory or on our unawareness of what we are supposed to be doing when we listen to music. There is, in the avoidance of such problems as these, a universe or discourse of musical style which we are expected to be familiar with so that a multitude of surprises doesn’t amount to complete incoherence. That way out, however, is nothing more than question-begging, which is to say  that we know already what to expect. Even musical shock, such as it exists, is already anticipated and even repudiated, even in its expectation. And this casts a shadow, not on the music itself, but on the capacity on the listener to want to understand it.

In sum, then: given the pattern of expectation which a musical composition creates with its inherent tensions, the more obvious the resolution of these tensions, the more immediate the satisfaction which the music yields and the poorer its value. But in order to ameliorate the possibility of the inevitable frustration of one’s expectations, we must, for Meyer, become acquainted with style which constitutes the universe of discourse within which musical meanings arise. In this way we are relieved of spontaneous apprehension: we are supposed to check style (spontaneously, I would imagine) in some dizzying musical seizure which is what we are supposed to be listening to. Is this “What it Is”?

Quite apart from this, for Meyer, if it is to be such, music connotes, or even embodies, objectless feelings and again we are confronted by the compartmentalization of a human being whose specific areas of being are scattered to unique areas of “interest”. By this I mean that contemporary aesthetic understanding is no longer coherent in the sense that it infuses itself with a felt life which is its own in the experience of the listener, but objectifies it in ways which are objectively categorial and subjects itself to modes of value which are external, in a Cartesian sense, to “things” which are outside of ourselves. We are separate from what is not us. The musical experience is not a real experience at all: it concerns just another external thing, valued for its listenability, not for what it is: who we are.

Much of what can be made of this procedure of “matching” response-theory cannot adequately account for complex music, such as serial music, nor indeed can it explain the persistence of simple melodies. Moreover, based on a naïve psychological interpretation of musical expectation, the theory gives insufficient weight to musical context and ignores not merely the role of perception and retention in the musical experience but its affective dimension.

Hanslick, in his The Beautiful in Music[5] (4) argued that musical meaning is to be identified solely in the formal characteristics of a composition because it is impossible for any definite emotion to be represented in music. Does seeking it referentially or symbolically, as he seems to imply, result in either sentimentality or irrelevance and this, therefore, cannot be the source of its value although, it may be argued, that it cannot be the source of its own value? But does the formalism of musical analysis get us to the heart of “what it is”? And how are we to understand the relation between the life of feeling and music, structurally considered in its a priori aspects, if that relation cannot be essentially referential?

Following St. Augustine I would like to suggest that there are broadly two kinds of meaning: designative or referential meaning, and natural or embodied meaning. Assuming that there is a necessary relation between music and the life of feeling I would wish to argue as follows:

(1)   Emotions are that class of feelings which are distinguished by their transitiveness

which is to say which they are intentionally and hence characteristically related to particular objects or particular kinds of objects.

(2)   Because there can be no objectless emotions or emotions then they cannot properly be the objects of musical expression and if music can be said to refer at all it refers to states of affairs or objects where these states of affairs or objects my be the intentional relata of emotions (e.g. in programme music).

(3)   Those feelings which are not emotions are intransitive and objectless but may be said to have a logic or structure whose form is characteristically describable in such expressions as ‘conflict and resolution’, ‘excitement and calm’, ‘growth and attenuation’, ‘dynamism and rest’, descriptions which are clearly compatible with the articulate structure of the a priori unity of the composition expressed in musical experience.

(4)   Music therefore embodies, but does not refer to or symbolize, objectless feelings for  which embodiment is a necessary and sufficient condition for musical meaning and, a fortiori, understanding.

I shall briefly explain this: Somebody experiences an emotion if and only if there is an object of that emotional experience, where “object” here is broadly construed as the reason for that emotional experience. For example I experience grief at the distress or loss of someone who is dear to me. The experience is not separable from that of which it is an experience although a conceptual, or ontological, distinction may made between the episodic and the intentional aspects of the experience. Pride, embarrassment, anger, shame, sadness, love, remorse and fear are all examples of emotions whose distinguishing characteristic is the objects to which they are intentionally, and therefore essentially, related.

The specification of these objects, moreover, is sufficient to distinguish one emotion from another and it follows, as a consequence, that musical expressions cannot refer to and specify emotions where those emotions are wrongly conceived as being in abstraction from their objects. The properties of emotions as intentional states are inherent in the emotions themselves: emotions therefore bear a necessary relation to objects and cannot be interpreted as being sui generis. The value of music, therefore, is not to be sought in the evocation or excitation of emotion in the listener nor is the value of a musical work ever dependent on its capacity to arouse “definite emotions” (Hanslick); It is not a necessary condition of understanding the meaning of the Marche Funebre in Beethoven’s Eroica symphony that we should be familiar with the circumstances of the death of Napoleon. In any case even if it were possible to express grief in a piece of music, we could not properly be said to be attending to the music if our attention is drawn to that emotion and its circumstances.

Not all feelings are of this kind, however, that is, are such as to require objects. Examples of such feelings are pain, pleasure, excitement, contentment, happiness, anxiety. Such feelings do not have objects and are therefore not intentional states. They have a content, however, whose generality is such that, whilst it provides any feeling with a cognitive dimension, is not sufficiently specific to be able to count as a principle of individuation. To have such feelings is to be affected by something and therefore is a cognitive awareness of a content of experience even though this cognitive awareness may not be conceptual. Feeling is the immediate awareness of a content which may or may not be conceptually specifiable but is essentially the feeling of “life-in-the-world”. That is to say, we feel something in the nature of the experience of the world itself, a disposition which is always with us, sometimes receding, sometimes at the forefront of consciousness.

It is with this more general concept of feeling that we are concerned when we talk of music being expressive of feeling, and when we talk of the experience of music as being a felt experience. When we are merely attending to our own feelings as we listen to music we are not properly attending to the music. Full aesthetic attention must be given to the music itself, to its embodied meaning, even though this is apprehended through and along with our own feelings which can be said to be tacitly functioning. The tensions and dynamics of music and its intrinsic temporal unity express the tensions of the dynamics of felt experience but in such a way that we can talk of music as an autonomous art which is not reducible to the life of feelings. Since the content of feeling is always immediate and particular it cannot be exactly reproduced. Therefore music cannot exactly express the feelings of life: it can express, and in so doing transform, implicit life-meanings without being reduced to them and it is in this sense that musical meaning is embodied so that feelings are suggested but not reproduced.

The musical work is not the successive presentation of symbolic or referential elements but is a single unity in which is grasped its indivisible embodied meaning. I would wish to argue that this view of musical meaning accords with our experience of music, not as a disparate sonic object with feelings fused into it ab ultra, but as a felt whole whose complex temporal and affective constituents are spontaneously grasped in a unifying act.

“What it Is” (Schoenberg) is precisely what it is Not.

Endnotes