de nora, tia. how is extra-musical meaning possible, music as a place and space for 'work

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HOW IS EXTRA-MUSICAL MEANING POSSIBLE? M USIC AS APLACE AND SPACE FOR "WORK" *

T i A D E N O R A

University of California

Th e Problem:

It is a pervasive idea in Western culture that musicis in some way capable of symbolizing emotions,images or ideas. Equally pervasive however,within the fields of philosophy, musicology, socialpsychology and linguistics, is the view that, inspite of increasing attention devoted to the topic,attempts to explain empirically music's communi-cative ability have met with relatively littlesuccess. Thus, from the outset, the issue of

musical meaning is characterized by paradox: atthe level of the listening experience music seemsinfinitely and definitely expressive while, at thelevel of taxanomic analysis, the same music seemsperpetually capable of eluding attempts to pin it tosemantic corollaries. There is, in other words, atension between the apparent validity (at the levelof listening) and the apparent invalidity (at thelevel of empirical analysis) of music's symboliccapacity.

This "gap," as John Rahn (1972 p. 255) has putit, "between structure and feeling," is not

necessarily problematic for the study of musicalmeaning. It can, as I shall argue below, be seeninstead as a resource, making the study of musicalmeaning all the richer. Yet the conventional waysin which the paradoxical aspect of musicalmeaning has been attended to, have consisted, forthe most part, of attempts to collapse the issue intoone or the other of two equally unsatisfactoryextremes. On the one hand the formalist positiondescribes music as essentially abstract and expres-sionless whereas on the other, the expressionistposition likens music to language in that its

compositional elements may be said to possessextra-musical referents of one kind or another. Asthe sociologist of music Ivo Supicic has argued:

The scientific flaw of all formalist and expres-sionist concepts lies in their readiness togeneralize, to put forward one principle andaspect and exclude all others, or at least to playdown the value of other principles and aspects(pp. 198-199).

The major consequence then, of framing the studyof musical meaning in terms of formalism and

expressionism is that the initial richness of theissue is lost.

The general intent of this essay is therefore toarrive, via a re-evaluation of some of the basicpremises of each side, at a "resolution" of theformalist and expressionist positions. I shall arguethat the factors which impede such a resolution arerelated to the way in which the initial question hasconventionally been formulated (i.e. "does musichave extra-musical significance and can it therefore

be conceived of as a language?") and that thisformulation is a product of a fundamental miscon-ception of language predicated upon a referentialtheory of meaning. Taken together, these twofactors have constrained the debate over musicalmeaning by focusing inquiry upon the music itselfas the locus of meaning. My fundamental task is toreformulate the initial question of whether music isor is like language by redirecting it at the source oftension itself, that is, to the issue of how it ispossible that music is experienced as inherentlymeaningful when there may be no one-to-one corre-

spondence of meanings to musical elements.

To this end, what follows is organized in threeparts: (1) an over-view of the formalist-expressionist debate with an emphasis on previousexpressionist explanations of musical meaning, (2)a critique of the fundamental conception oflanguage shared by both expressionists and formal-ists and (3) a proposal of an alternate approach tothe question of musical meaning which builds uponrecent work in the area of sociolinguistics,cognitive sociology, ethnomethodology and espe-

cially, social construction theory as it locates socialand cognitive structures in the interaction betweenpeople (Mehan 1983). The purpose of thisalternative approach to the topic of musicalmeaning is to redirect the force of the initialdescriptive (and implicitly linguistic, musicologi-cal or psychological) question of what musicmeans to an explicitly sociological question of ho wmusical meaning is possible. Finally, in fulfillingthese three aims I hope to show, first of all, thatthe study of musical meaning has implications forthe study of conno tative meaning and interpretation

more generally and, second, that these implicationsare in turn consequential for the way in which the



MUSIC FOR "WORK" 85

The E xpressionist-Formalist Debate:

To speak of expressionism as a unified theorectical"block" is, of course, misleading for there iscertainly as much difference of opinion within theexpressionist position as there is between it and the

formalist view. In the first place, expressionistscan be classified according to methodologicalapproach (see, for example, Lippman 1981):semiotic (Nattiez; Ruwet; Dunsby; Coker; Cooke);hermeneutic (Plavsa; Duisberg; Harris and Sandresky;Kretchmar); phenomenological (Schutz; Clifton;Blacking). However these classifications are prob-lematic in that they are to some extent arbitrary,not always mutually exclusive and not, in everycase, self-proclaimed. The "loose" (and notself-acknowledged) semiotics of, for example,Ferguson or Coker bears little resemblence to the

more rigorous version practiced by Ruwet orNattiez and, for that matter, Ferguson's approachis quite different from Coker's in the first place.For these reasons, a survey of expressionism usingas its dividing principle methodological approachis , ultimately, of little use.

More productive would be a classification whichcontrasts expressionist theorists according to intel-lectual influences. In this way, distinctions be-tween, for example, the semiotics of Coker on theone hand (as it is steeped in the tradition of CharlesMorris and George Herbert Mead) and Nattiez on

the other (as it is derived from the work of NicolasRuwet and Zellig Harris) can be preserved. Onecan understand, given these differences, why it isnot surprising that Coker is explicitly concernedwith extra-musical or, as he calls it, extra-genericmeaning and Nattiez tends to focus upon what heterms the "neutral level" or purely musico-logicallevel of a piece (what Coker terms "congenericmeaning") and the way in which this level isrelated to music's formal intelligibility.

It should be clear then, that any study of"expressionism" as a body of thought would need

to emphasize the ways in which expressionism canno t be thought of as a unified approach. For thepurposes of this paper however, I shall do exactlythe opposite. In this section, I wish to examine,first of all the way in which the work of allexpressionist theorists is unified by a commontheoretical assumption that the locus of extra-musical meaning is in the musical object itself, andsecondly, I shall explore the ways in whichdifferent expressionist theorists come to "operational-ize" this assumption according to their particularmethods and intellectual infiuences.

Essentially, the aim of expressionist theoristsconcerned with the issue of extra-musical meaning

between musical symbols and extra-musical refer-ents, notations and connotations. Given then, theseoperant terms, "symbol" and "referent" asterminological "constants," one can classifyexpressionist theories (and formalist theories aswell) along two "axes": first, the way in which

the symbolic unit is defined (whether it it a note ofthe scale, an interval, a phrase, the entire piece)and second, that unit's degree of specificity(whether it refers to a particular object, image oridea—such as the "cuckoo" in Beethoven'sPastoral symphony—or whether it alludes in amore general way to a less precise object ofreference—for example, the more general sense of"the countryside" to which Beethoven's sym-phony allegedly refers).

In The Language of Music, for instance, DeryckCooke argues:

In some way or other, we feel (music) conveysto us the subjective experience of composers.But in what way? . . . how can it be done inmusic which can only represent a few physicalobjects, vaguely suggest a few others, and makeno explicit description of anything at all? To tryand find the answer to this question we mustturn to a consideration of the analogy betweenmusic and literature and an investigation of theproblem of music as language (p. 10) . . . Thetask facing us is to discover how music functions

as a language, to establish the terms of itsvocabulary and to explain how these terms maylegitimately be said to express the emotions theyappear to (p. 34).

Cooke then proceeds to define music's (and it isimportant to note, tonal music's) expressiveframework as it is constituted through intervals. Aminor second, for example expresses "spiritlessanguish" (p. 90) while a major second is equatedwith "pleasurable longing," a minor third, "stoicacceptance" and so on through to the octave,"neutral; finality" (p.89). Using this "dictio-

nary," Cooke's method of analysis consists oftoting-up intervals in order to arrive at a compositepicture of the emotional content of any givenpiece. Although he admits that his linguisticcorrelates are far from precise " . . .1 am only toowell aware that by using the simple everydaywords for human emotion to make my classifica-tion of the terms of musical language, I have onlyscratched the surface of a problem of will-nighinfinite depth . . ." (p. 272), Cooke concluded thatit is or will one day be possible to arrive at acomplete lexicon of musical significance:

A pyschologist of deep insight and great



86 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

Although Cooke's approach is not nor has everbeen received by music scholars with particularlyhigh regard, it is worth noting because it is one ofthe few attempts to account for fairly specificemotional reference at the "micro" musical-structural level of intervalic relations.

Taking a slightly larger unit of analysis, thephrase, Donald Ferguson (1960) puts forward theAristotelian argument that, "melodies which aremere sounds resemble dispositions" (p. 123). Thecrux of his argument is that, "Emotion (is) . . .conveyed by the musical substance" (p. 79), or inother words, the musical structure "communi-cates" non-musical content. Music is able tofunction communicatively, Ferguson argues (alongthe same lines as Meyer, 1954 260 and Coker,1972 34) because purely physical aspects ofmusical processes are analogous to types of

experience. On the basis of this idea of contiguousmeaning, Ferguson rekindles the Mendelssohnianargument that music is actually more expressivethan words precisely because it is able to offersonic parallels of types of unmediated experience(for example, music does not signify the feeling ofsudden-ness, quiet, confusion, etc., by telling thelistener about an instance of any of these feelings;rather it recreates the feeling through the mediumof sound). Tones, Ferguson suggests, are "a truerprofundity than is possible with the machinery ofnouns and verbs" (p. 123).

With a one and a half bar fragment fromWagner's Ring . . ., Ferguson attempts todemonstrate that the type of tonal relations foundin it posses "verbal counterparts", by which hemeans, "one or more affective words, such asecstasy, anticipation, warmth, poignance . . . If weattempt to fuse all these factors together in a singleimpression of feeling character it will not bedifficult to identify the experience with which thismusic must be associated. This is patently a type oflove music" (p. 95). And, in spite of the fact thatone could come to the same conclusion based upon

the libretto Ferguson argues that the sameconclusions could be arrived at even if one hadabsolutely no idea of what the particular fragmentwas meant to accomplish (a point which hedevelops in an analysis of one of the fugues fromthe Well Tempered Clavier).

As a final example it is worth looking at therecent work of Catherine Harris and ClemensSandresky (1985) who use as their unit of analysisthe entire piece. This work consists of an unusual"synthesis" of Schenker's structural approach,Meyer's use of information theory, the Meadian

theory of gestures and significant symbols and theformalist idea of music as "unconsummated

hand, harmonic and melodic structural relation-ships and, on the other, social typifications ofcollective meanings. Through a series of examples,they draw parallels between musical structure andextra-musical phenomena in order to explain whycertain musical works connote some things and not

others. Along the lines of Ferguson, they put fortha theory of meaning by contiguity. Where theydiffer from Ferguson (and for that matter fromCooke as well,) is that they make explicit the ideaof cultural mediation of musical meanings or, intheir words, of typifications and it is this whichgives their approach slightly m ore of a sociologicaltilt. They argue, in other words, that the musicaltone as such does not necessarily have any defmitea priori meaning but, given contiguous constraintsand set in a cultural context (by which they mean,or seem to mean, a pre-existing set of shared

meanings, cognitive, moral and aesthetic) it comesto seem, for all practical purposes as if its meaningis intrinsic. For instance:

Music plays a remarkable role in communicatinga notion of the 'character' or style of emotionalexpression of a particular people, nationalitiesand historical periods. It has symbolized collec-tive feelings of grief and joy, excitement anddespair . . . The list could go on. Someexamples are in order (p. 296).

and to take of their many examples:

The exuberance of our national anthem. TheStar Spangled Banner, gives form to one aspectof patriotic feeling; the quieter radiance ofAmerica, another. When sung with conviction,who among us can resist a feeling of pride andcommunity? (p. 296, emphasis mine).

With this example, Harris and Sandresky seemto have made a progressive move away from theimplicitly psychological thrust of Cooke andFerguson only to re-establish a priori meaning byrelocating it at the level of culture or, in other

words, by relocating the objectivity of musicalreference in the cultural mediation of the tone itself(as if culture closes off what would otherwise be,to use a term from Berger and Luckman, a "worldopen" relationship between social actors and theirsocial environment, by making that environmentseem "given," "natural" or "world closed") .What this determinist (and essentially Durkheim-ian) conception of culture tends to obliteratehowever, is the contested aspect of culture,implying instead a naive, anthropological pictureof culture as a "ground" in which social actors or

more accurately, enactors (in this case musiclisteners) are embedded (and also implying a naive



MUSIC FOR " W OR K" 87

It seems reasonable, for example, that for manylisteners, The Star Spangled Banner may notconnote a "feeling of pride and community."Think, for instance of tjie Jimi Hendrix versionof this piece. Or, even allowing for the qualifica-tion, "sung with conviction," would any version

of the Star Spangled Banner evoke or connotenational pride and community spirit among all, oreven most, Jimi Hendrix devotees? Unless theanswer to this question can be an unequivocal" y e s , " we must reconsider the fruitfulness ofattempting to enunciate lexicons (whether univer-sally valid or culturally circumscribed) of extra-musical meaning as it is found in the music itself. Itis about here then, that one can begin to see whythe formalist position is often perceived as themore "intelligent" side of the musical meaningdebate, aloof as it is from this morass of

expressivist issues.In a review article of semiotic approaches tomusic, Patricia Tunstall observed that the useful-ness of semiotic inquiry as it has been developed inother fields is called into question in music becauseof the problems involved in elucidating thesemantic connotations of music:

Music seems to involve primarily syntactical,not semantic relationships; it does not exhibit asystematic one-to-one correspondence of eachspecific musical element with a specific non-musical meaning. According to Saussure's

definition, then, music must be considered not asystem of signs but a system of signifierswithout signifieds. Therefore musical analysiscan make only limited use of the particularvirtues of the semiological approach , , , Itselement are not signs, but the relations betweenthem are coherent and meaningful. It is theserelations themselves, the formal operationsperformed upon sonorous elements, that are theessence of musical structure. Perhaps, then, thatstructure is a uniquely lucid and unmediatedrefiection of the formal operations of cognition

(1979, p, 62),

What is important to note here is that Tunstall, likethe expressionists she criticizes, directs her atten-tion to the musical object itself, and, by virtue ofthe fact that she concurs with Saussure's definitionof music as a system of signifiers withoutsignifieds, she reaches a dead-end with respect tomusic's semantic content. As an alternate route,she suggests that musicologists pursue a kind ofsyntactical structuralism, which is what she meanswhen she argues that music study ought to focus

upon the "formal operations themselves" (aconclusion which, as Jonathan Dunsby has pointedout in his 1983 review of music semiotics, Nattiez

Beautiful in Music (1885), Hanslick's approach isworth noting since he remains one of the fewwriters to appreciate the paradoxical aspect ofmusical meaning, namely that music may beperceived as expressive, yet simultaneously eludeanalytic attempts to pin it to semantic corrolaries,

Hanslick challenged the appropriateness of apply-ing the metaphor of language to music by objectingto the idea that there exists any one-to-onecorrespondence between the musical symbol and aspecific, external referent:

The fundamental difference consists in this:while sound in speech is but a sign, that is, ameans for the purpose of expressing somethingwhich is quite distinct from its medium, soundin music is the end, that is, the ultimate andabsolute object in view. The instrinsic beauty ofthe musical in the latter case and the exclusive

dominion of thought over sound as a meremedium of expression in the former are soutterly distinct as to render the union of thesetwo elements a logical impossibility (1957, p,67),

and for this reason, he thought it philistine toattempt to pin music to an interpretation since thisultimately destroyed the musical beauty which wasnot so much a product of intrinsically meaningfulsymbols mechanically strung together but due tothe fact that music was a kind of polymorphous,

sonorous logic in a pre- or unconscious, tactilesense (this is more or less the same argumentMendelssohn made). Hanslick did not want toreduce what he called the "beauty" of a piece ofmusic to verbal concepts. He was objecting to theidea that music expresses things to a listener,which he believed was a quality of language butnot of music. Music, he arguedr had, over thecourse of the nineteenth century, been subsumedunder an essentially inappropriate model of verballanguage based upon a correspondence theory ofmeaning.

We have now come full circle back to the initialparadox. Music cannot satisfactorily be analyzedas a language because it lacks sufficient examplesof what David Osmond-Smith (1971) has called"double articulation" (i.e. music is best conceivedof as a system of signifiers without signifieds).Nevertheless, it is frequently experienced as if itwere a type of language, capable of extra-musicalreference. As Jacques Barzun has described it:

The issue then, boils down to: sounds with orwithout connotation, those voting aye to "With-out!" being divided into pure sensualists andpure Platonists; those voting aye to "With!"being still at a loss to account for music's



SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

question of interest is not so much psychological,musicological or linguistic as sociological, not somuch what any given music means as ho w it ispossible that music can be experienced as inher-ently meaningful when, in fact, there may be noone-to-one correspondence of meaning to musicalelements.

What remains is to attempt to answer thisquestion and in so doing, attempt to resolve theformalist objection of extra-musical meaning andthe expressionist sense of it. In order to do this,however, it is necessary to back up a bit andexamine the model of language implicit in bothformalist and expressionist theories, for it is thismodel, I wish to argue, which is responsible formany of the problems identified by each positionwith regard to the other.

Problems with the formalist and expressionistconception of language:

First and foremost, all the writers so far reviewedshared the tacit and unchallenged premise thatverbal language is characterized in practice by an"ideal speech situation," as it has been describedby Habermas (1976) and Grice (1975), in whichwhat is said is equal to what is meant is equal towhat is understood. Leonard Meyer (whose ideasabout the nature of musical meaning are particu-larly hard to classify) for example, argues that the

listener, "must respond to the work of art as theartist intended . . ." (1956, p. 41). Dusan PlavSa(1981, p. 67) hypothesizes that, if the programs toSibelius' Swan ofTuoneta, Strauss' Tilt Eutenspiegeland Smetana's Sarka were exchanged, listenershearing these pieces for the first time would still beable to find that the programs would evokeassociations, "which simply cannot be related tothe music one hears," the point being that music isrepresentative because the "w ro ng " tones, like the"wrong" words, will not convey the initial intentof their author. In other words, formalists and

expressivists alike tend to assume that language ischaracterized solely by a referential theory ofmeaning in which form (the symbol or utterance)and function (the "received" meaning of thatutterance) are inextricably linked. Yet this ishardly the way that actual day to day speechsituations proceed, as Wittgenstein (1953), Austin(1962) and more recently, speech act theorists(Labov and Fanshel 1977, Searle 1967 andparticularly Streeck 1980 in his critique of speechact theory) have recognized in their respectivediscussions of "language games," "performa-

t ives" and "speech acts."The performative utterance looks like a state-

ment and grammatically, it would be classified

means is that a statement or utterance may functionin a way that has little to do with its actual form.(For example, the statement, "It's hot in here,"may be understood as a request that a window beopened.) In this regard, Wittgenstein made ananalogy to chess: speakers use words like chesspieces in a simultaneous multiplicity of languagegames (of which there may be an infinite variety).It is important to note here that, as Jurgen Streeckhas argued in his critique and extension of speechact theory, the meaning or function of speech actsrelies upon the hearer as well as the speaker, beingassigned to some extent in retrospect according tothe type of response it provokes. Thus, thestatement, "It's hot in here" would only beunderstood as a request to open the window if thehearer actually acknowledges it as a request.Otherwise, it will (ostensibly anyway) be definedas a statement of fact (Though there may, on thepart of speaker and/or hearer be a tacit recognitionthat the initial function of the statement was one ofrequest).

The point then, is that speech is not nearly asreferential in practice as it is conceived of inidealized terms. Therefore, rather than comparingmusic to formal speech and grammatical rules itmay be more productive to compare it to speech inpractical contexts, to study meaning in use, inwhich case both music and speech may exhibit theproblem of being perceived as connotative in cases

where there is no explicit link between form andfunction.

In fact, it may be that the conception of music asreferential language is doubly confused because itis founded upon an initial misconception oflanguage and verbal meaning itself, one whichimplies an over-determined (and sociologicallyunder-determined), idealized view of composer-listener interaction which over emphasizes com-poser intentionality on the one hand, and underval-ues listener participation on the other. At thispoint, it is worth examining in greater depth some

of the assumptions upon which these misconcep-tions of meaning and language are based and theimplications for the study of meaning in generaland musical meaning in particular which theycarry.

First of all, most conventional approaches to theproblem of meaning take, implicitly or explicitly,what some scholars have called a "theoreticalshort-cut" (Bittner: 1965; Dore and McDermott1982) based upon a metaphor of meaning transmis-sion or meaning exchange, as if bits or pieces ofmeaning may be arranged in mosaic-like pictures

according to the rules or regularities of what maybe "done" with any given bit or of how it can betreated (see also, Mehan 1983, for a discussion of



MUSIC FOR " W OR K" 89

come equipped (or are equipped by their culture; inother words, "socialized") with a kind ofdecoding device or lexico-grammar (Dore andMcDermott 374 and Bittner 246).

Whenever a theorist states that, for somespecified universe a particular utterance, object,

act has a corresponding set of functions which, inturn, correspond to a finite set of interpretations onthe part of the hearer, s/he m ay be said to be takingthis short-cut which, simply put is the belief in theabsolute referentiality of meaning and a denial ofmeaning through use (and as such the theoreticalshort-cut may be seen as a form of stimulus-response theory). This is not, however, to denythat objects, utterances or acts may possessseemingly greater and lesser degrees or referential-ity, or in other words, that they will provide theirinterpretors with varying degrees of interpretative

constraint and that, in some cases, that constraintwill be so great that, for all practical purposes, theproblems implicit in taking the theoretical short-cutwill be "merely theoretical." In many caseshowever, the implications of assuming that "sharedmeaning" facilitated by culturally coded signifi-cances is a general feature of all "co mm un ication "are far from trivial. For one, it implies that themeaning "transmitter" or speaker (or composer)must have access to or have internalized thelexico-grammar in order to "transmit" meaning.For another, it implies that what is "transmitted"

corresponds to (a) specific meaning(s) (whichimplies means-end intentionality on the part of thetransmitter) and further, that the meaning receiveris essentially passive in that s/he has no impactupon the meaning of the object, utterance, act butrather that s/he merely receives it in its completeform. One should now be able to see how, giventhese assumptions about meaning and language,there could be only one implied methodologicaltask for the study of any type of meaningfulactivity: to provide a thorough enunciation of thatactivity's lexicon of culturally coded significances.

My point in this section has been to argueagainst determinist explanations of meaning (whetheruniversalist —in which the meaning of the utter-ance cuts across cultural or sub-cultural bound-aries—or particularist —in which the meaning ofthe utterance is determined by the cultural,sub-cultural or even psychological context ofwhich it is a part and in which it may be said to be"hermetically sealed") though this is in no way todeny that there are, within certain contexts as theseare conceived by actors, probabilistic distributionsof the ways in which utterances, acts and objects

are interpreted. Rather, I wish to call attention tothe fact that there is a fine line between speaking ofobjects, utterances or acts as if they possess

argue below) presents an implicit picture of cultureas uncontested whereas the latter does not. To putit in other words, my point has been to move awayfrom idealized conceptions of speech and meaning"transmission", as they characteristically assume(and as Streeck has enumerated): 1) that the

meaning of an utterance is constituted by thespeaker (or "author") of the utterance (and not atall by the hearer or interpreter) 2) that meaning istherefore a function of the sentence uttered andtherefore that function is linked to and dependenton the form of the words uttered and 3) that, atleast at a deep structural or cultural level there is arule which can account for the way in which theutterence was used. These assumptions imply adyadic relation between object and interpretation(or between object and subject) grounded in alogical view of language which has come under

increasing criticism in recent years, in that itdepicts actors as enactors or "cultural dopes" whoare frozen in to their cultures without thepossibility of refiexive behavior (or insincerity,alienation etc.), a depiction Streeck describes astreating "context as given" (p. 144).

Both musical meaning and verbal meaning (atleast in the case of implicit verbal meanings) maybe best considered as what D'Andrade (inreference to other types of meanings) has called"count as" phenomena, by which he means thattheir meaning does not correspond to a concrete or

"brute factual" category which exists objectivelyoutside of the interaction in which it is constructed(as it does, for instance, in the case of nouns suchas "tree," "hand," or "stone") . Instead, i tsmeaning is assigned through an enacted process.So, for example, a musical utterance takes onmeaning because an individual or group adheres toa constitutive rule which constructs a sort of auraof significance around that utterance. This in turnenables it to be "counted as" an example of thatcategory of meaning, and the maintainance of thatsignificance is dependent upon actors who continue

to perceive and act toward the phenomenon as"counting as" what it "counts as" (or it will failto count and, perhaps, count as something else).Thus, as with all "institutionalized facts" the"instance" perceived under the proper felicityconditions" (D'Andrade refers here to Austin'swork on speech acts) counts as an exemplaryinstance of an "objective" category. What themeaning of "count as" phenomena depends uponis not transmission/reception of pre-coded informa-tion (which would appear and reappear to thereceiver) but upon the active social and social-

psychological intersubjective processing of thatinformation which transforms (and therefore "pro-duces") it (and I use the term transform here to




nomic distributions of musical meaning attempt totreat music as a species of language, when itactually may be more appropriate to treat language"a s a species of m us ic," a point brought up by theEnglish poet and essayist Sidney Lanier in theseventeenth century (see Hollander 1973, p. 11).

Bearing also in mind the implications of W ittgenstein'ssuggestion that language may be something onwhich to "hang tones" or, in other words thatwords may be moulded in such a way as to have amultiplicity of forces (19 53), one might be temptedto add, "and tones are something upon which tohang words." The implication is that the imputedillocutionary force of tones may rely, in part, uponthe perceived context supplied by the wordsimputed to these tones by composers, performers,listeners and critics. Thus what taxonomic ap-proaches fail to realize is that musical meaning

may be achieved or realized through the com-positional "work" of the very listeners who mayact "as if" they are merely "receiving" thatmeaning. And because of this failure, any lexiconwhich an expressionist approach may proposewould be little more than an artifact of themethodology used to "discover" or "reveal" thatmeaning in the first place. In other words, musicscholars posses the same "tools" or "folkmethods" of sense-making as music listeners andperhaps the greatest of these tools is the assump-tion (and its retinue of implied sub-assumptions)

that the locus of meaning is in the music when itseems more likely that it is not "received" but isachieved, the product of interactive work.

The perspective of "Interp retive Studies"; Social

Construction and its Constraints:

Given then, that there appears to be, or actors actas if there exists an objective system of over-lapping meaning—a core culture or collectiveconscience or culturally-coded lexicon—which is

shared to some degree by all members of thecultural setting and which is defined by thatsetting, the Interpretative Studies question asksho w does objectivity get socially constructed. Withrespect to music, the question is therefore: how dolisteners conie to recognize a piece as embodyingsome qualities but not others or, more generally,how is it that an audience comes to define anypiece of music as meaningful in the first place?

To answer this question requires a focus uponcohort production, the idea that the social world orLebenswelt (or "Nature") is produced through the

scenic practices, interpretive procedures, members'methods or "work"; how through interaction

practices which construct the illusion of idealizedmeaning transmission and inherent meaning.

What these practices consist of is a process of"filling in" of objects (including others' identities,one's own identity, one's "subjectivity") at thelevel of interaction. The task of Interpretive

Studies then, is to tell the "local history" of howthe phenomenon was "realized," and that historywould consist of a chronicle of all aspects ofmeaning "production": the (to use a Marxiananalogy) mode of that production as it ischaracterized by \\s, forces, relations and availabletechnology or in other words, all of the seemingly"objective" constraints upon the process ofnaming or meaning production.

With regard to the "tools" of sense-making,then, it is important to recognize at the outset thatwe, as social actors, approach objects with what

may perhaps be best described as a "systematicbias" in favour of meaning; we are perhaps, asMerleau-Ponty has put it, "condemned to mean-ing." For this reason, we need to have someunderstanding of the types of interpretive proce-dures (Cicourel 1974) which operate beneath thelevel of normative con straint. Social action may , tovarying extents be seen as a process of ad hoeingwhereby actors attempt to align their informalprocedures with formally defined rules and mean-ing categories (a process similar to Berger's notionof "ideological work" (1981) and C. Wright

Mills' idea of "situated vocabularies of motive,"(1940)).

First of all, we assume that there is, betweenactors, a "reciprocity of perspectives" throughwhich each is able to overcome his/her individualbiases due to physical or mental position in orderto establish with others the objective features ofphenomena. We assume that, if a reversal ofperspective were possible, we would each see theworld through the eyes of the other (a propositionwhich is of course merely hypothetical). Secondly,we assume, according to a kind of "law of good

continuation" that the phenomena we encounterwill possess an internal logic and completionwhich we will be able to perceive. And third, weinterpret "historicismically," letting unclear infor-mation pass and later, returning to interpret itaccording to the "n e w " light shed upon it fromour present perspective. (So, for instance, if weperceive something in an object which stronglycontradicts our interpretation of the object up-until-then, we may re-interpret all of what we hadencountered of it previously in order to bring it intoline with the new "fact.")

Perhaps the main reason we have so little troublemaking sense out of just about anything, as



MUSIC FOR " W O R K " 91

reflexively reacts (see Dore and McDermott oncontext, not as a surround or ground, but asinteractively and reflexively related to the objectwhich it "fr am es" ). Thus, one can say that what isproduced is constrained by the forces and relationsof that production or, by the way phenomena are

perceived to be framed and how they in turn frameeach other. Thus meaning categories emerge or areconstructed according to their perceived contextualconstraints, i.e. according to how, where, whenand why they are framed and who is involved inframing them (the relations of meaning produc-tion).

Framing then, becomes a crucial constitutivetool of meaning construction since it helps toinspire the belief necessary to "drive" themachinery of what has been called in differentcontexts, "oracular reasoning" (see Evans-

Pritchard 1937 and Mehan forthcoming). Mehandescribes this process as the way in which an initialemotional, aesthetic or religious commitment to abasic premise or "incorrigible proposition" isfurther buttressed by "secondary elaborations ofbelief" which both rationalize the validity of theinitial premise and fend off contradictory evidence.In this way then, the phenemenon is "fleshed ou t"(or transubstantiated"— remem bering that this con-cept was initially used to describe a religiouscontext) as a meaningful or coherent whole. Theflrst step then, to flnding meaning in an object is

believing that the object in question is inherentlymeaningful and that it deserves to be takenseriously, that it is significant. The primary objectof study then, when focusing on musical meaningis to examine the way in which belief is inspired sothat the listener listens "in good faith" and thus,cooperates in fleshing out the sketchiness of themusic so that it appears to mean something (or sothat it will mean something or, that it is meaningsomething but that the listener is unable torecognize the meaning at that moment).

Leonard Meyer's discussion of the "preparatory

set" (1954, p. 75) refers to essentially this sameidea. Regarding the importance to the object'smeaning of the perceived fram e, he argu es that it isthe belief that we are about to have an aestheticexperience that is responsible for the fact that wedo, subsequently, have such an experience; tone orsounds as such do not produce an emotionalresponse. For example, hearing someone practicescales on the piano may "evoke" or "transmit"nothing, yet hearing these same scale patternsplayed by the same pianist who is now on stage,acting as a soloist may "evoke" quite a lot: "Once

the aesthetic attitude had been brought into play,very few actions actually appear to be meaning-

which help prepare the listener or "warm up" themachinery of oracular reasoning so that s/he willlook and iisten for, or "work" toward realizing themeaning of the piece. The preparatory set then, ispart of what is required to inspire belief or trustnecessary for the collaborative, cooperative rela-

tionship between listener and composer which getsthe "work" of constituting meaning done inmusic. Essentially, these cues consist of variousconventions or ritual practices that, throughexperience, come to carry certain con-notationswhich, one could say, serve as "tools" for thework of sense making and meaning construction.(It is worth noting here that this perspective canexplain how instances of self-borrowing amongcomposers can work successfully: for if PlavSa's(1981) hypothesis were generally true—that pro-grams of programmatic pieces could not success-

fully be exchanged—how then, could we explain,for instance, that a piece such as the well-knownbarcarolle from Offenbach's Tales of Hoffman wasoriginally conceived as the Goblin's song DieRheinnixen (Barzun 1980, p. 17), and see ibid foradditional examples of self-borrowing).)

In the case of "war horse" pieces (pieces in therepertoire which are programmed year after yearand with which even "naive" or musicallyuneducated listeners are familiar—pieces like thefirst movement of Beethoven's fifth symphony,Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, Ravel's Bolero,

Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun) where the listenerhas easy and frequent access to what the idealizedmode of response consists of (i.e., the preparatoryset is comparatively larger than for a "first-time-through" world premiere) and therefore some ofhis/her work has already been done by others.(S/he has perhaps read about the work, heardothers discuss it, listened to it with others andalready been through the interactive process ofconstructing its meaning. S/he is offered, prior tolistening, a sketch or cognitive map of how to getthe work done.) Thus, one could say that listening

to "1812" is like assembling something from a"kit": one goes to work with one's pre-fabricatedparts and a set of (indexical) instructions tellingone what to do. (This is not to say that one willalways succeed in one's assembly work or that,given the "kit" one may not discard theinstructions, dismantle the parts and proceed fromscratch in order to produce a different "o b je ct ," aprocess not unlike that which Willis (1977) hasdescribed as "penetration.")

In the case of new or unfamiliar music, thebelief inspired by the preparatory set or the

contextualization cues is crucial. These cues arealso more likely to consist of extra-musical devices




gestures of the performers (and perhaps particu-larly of the conductor—see Adorno (1975, p. 105)on the subject of conductors: "The conductor actsas though he were taming the orchestra but his realtarget is the audience . . .") One could generate along list of possible exam ples of these con textualiza-

tion cues but in order to describe the tools oravailable technology, forces and relations of anygiven listening situation one would have to turn toan ethnographic account of the "setting" or "workplace" in which the music's meaning is produced,as aspects of that setting function in the preparatoryset of perceived constraints upon the process ofmeaning construction.

In general, however, the types of things onewould look for would consist of: (1) aspects of themusic itself-to what other pieces, composers, etc.does it bear family resemblance? is it familiar or

unfamiliar? in what ways might it resemble sentic,physical or onomotopoeic processes through rhythm,melodic relations (upward or downward trend,wide gaps or step-wise motion, etc.), harmonicrelations (open or closed, "consonant" or "disso-nant," chordal or polyphonic) (2) the listener'srelation to other listeners (who they are, howmany there are, their perceived or imaginedstatuses, actions, utterances and attempts atdefining the musical meaning) (3) the listener'srelation to the composer (whether s/he is alive ordead; his/her biography and degree of fame and

supporters; how prolific s/he is) (4) the listener'srelation to the conductor and to the musicians (5)the listener's relation to (and the composer'srelation to) critics (6) the music's relation toprogram notes and other scholarly materials (7)props and physical aspects of the setting (such asseating, clothing, decoration).

Thus a sociology of musical meaning is also asociology of styles or modes of work done by thelistener and as such it should ask questions abouthow much work the music requires of the listener.For instance, does s/he find many contextualization

cues, as occurs in highly ritualized situations (inwhich cases s/he need only re-affirm a conven-tional interpretation of the piece). Or, does s/hefind so few contextualization cues that s/he must"on the spot" as it were, manage his/her ownproduction by not constructing the interpretationbut the cues of context as well? In this regard, itseems reasonable to say that in settings which arenot highly contextualized (where perceived cuesare scarce) the actor may be offered more latitudeor scope for the work of interpreting the object or,in other words acts to a greater degree as a

"co m -po ser ." In a sense then, this question is oneof interpretive "worker control" over the produc-

imputed or "hung on" to it. Thus the more themusic will seem untouchable, sacred or "given."

Further, one could compare the cues presentedby the speaker/artist/transmitter, the "vertical"axis, with the cues or resources for meaning"recognition" provided by the hearer(s)/audience/

receivers, the "horizontal axis." It seems reason-able to suppose that the greater the ratio of cuesprovided by the speaker and his/her colleagues tocues provided by the hearer and his/her colleagues,the more the hearer will feel "constrained" to"find" the right or "true" or "real" meaning ofthe object, by which I mean that s/he will attemptto discover what the speaker meant by his/herutterance/act. Thus, it seems sensible to say thatthe more the contextualization cues of the setting,object or situation are made by the speaker, themore the hearer will feel compelled to conform to

what s/he perceives is the right interpretation of the"object" and thus, the more the actual process ofmeaning construction or "work" will be obfus-cated or concealed, or, in other words, the morethe actual "labour" of meaning construction willseem "invisible." Thus, a crucial aspect of anypreparatory set is its characteristic division oflabour, whether and to what degree there is"worker control" over the tools and resources ofmeaning construction.

Implications for the way in which C ulture isconceived:

In summary, the meaning of objects, utterancesand acts is neither inherent nor invariant butsocially constitued. With regard to social orconceptual meanings (that is, "count as" phenom-ena), this implies a dissolution of the subject/objectdichotomy as it is generally implicit in conven-tional theories of meaning "transmission" and"reception." In other words, the perceivingsubject constitutes, given perceived constraints,the "object" through interpretation, and further,

the meaning of this response or interpretation is inturn constituted by the response to the response,and so on. What this in turn implies is that the"field" of meaning generated by speaker/hearers'utterances/objects/acts and responses ought not beconceived of as a bounded linear or additiveprogression (as if actors move along a column ortube of meaning) but as a multi-dimensional space.This space may be retrospectively reduced to alinear account for the purposes of use, as, forexample, an account of what happened or ahistory.

Thus it is not only music which is characterizedby the "problem" of a lack of double articulation



MUSIC FOR "WORK" 93

the way in which culture is conceived. For if musicmay, to some extent be conceived of as a sonicversion of a rorschach ink blot, upon which various"words may be hung," then to argue that" . . . poetry (one could substitute music) makesnothing happen (as Clifford Geertz, quoting

Auden, does, 1973, p. 443) is to put forward, atleast implicitly, a view of culture as distinct fromor disinterested in what Geertz seems to see as the"vulgar" aspects of interests. These interestsinhabit the realm of social structure as defined byaccess to various resources, symbolic and material.

Rather, we should see (as Bourdieu has argued,1983, p. 92 and throughout) that culture representsa struggle over the definition of social reality andtherefore, the issue of the meaning of objects isalso an issue of who defines or appropriates them,where, when, how and for what purpose. A

group's or nation's culture, in other words, shouldnot be conceived of as a set of "cultural goods,"but rather as set of tools, conditions, alibis, etc.,whose meaning is reflexively related to the ways inwhich it is appropriated. Given this perspective,one can see why, for instance, thinkers from Platoand Aristotle through Tolstoy (and continuingtoday) saw music as a "dangerous art" (Cooke1960, p. 272) which required legislation, not forthe reasons Cooke argues:

" . . . whatever else the mysterious art known asmusic eventually be found to express, it isprimarily and basically a language of emotions,through which we directly experience thefundamental urges that move mankind, withoutthe need of falsifying ideas and images—wordsand pictures" (p. 272).

but because it provides a forum, par excellence,for the "work" of appropriation, that is, a placeand space for "work."

We should therefore be interested in the socialstructure which characterizes this appropriation (its"relations of production" between composers as a

group; listeners and composers; composers andcritics and listeners; and listeners themselves),which we may be able to describe by distinguish-ing greater and lesser degrees of author-ity on thepart of the composer and his/her colleagues on theone hand and response-ability on the part of thelistener and his/her colleagues on the other. Weshould be willing to consider that these socialstructural "relations of meaning production/construc-tion" may provide "subliminal" or pedagogicmessages which relate to taken-for-granted assump-tions about meaning, musical and other: where it is

and how it is (or should be) conveyed. ThesubjectVobject dichotomy for example, and the

Dumpty explains his theory of language, the"use"-based theory, to Alice, an adherent of thereferential theory,) aptly illustrates:

"when / use a word, "Humpty Dumpty said, inrather a scornful tone, "it means just what Ichoose it to mean—neither more or less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether youca n make words mean so many differentthings."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty,"which is to be master—that's all."

If, as Humpty Dumpty seems to suggest, thequestion is "who is to be master?" then perhapsthe way to gain mastery in "work" situations is tohave control over the rhetorical means of makingone's interpretations of objects, utterances or actsseem "as if" they are "objective" ("good,"

"beauitful" or "true"). This would also be themeans of "persuading" the hearer to act towardthese things " a s if" they are inextricably linked toand signify specific things in an absolute, non-negotiable sense, as if their meaning is determinedby some higher authority than mere interpretative"work." (In this regard see Bourdieu, 1983 andMehan's modified version of W.I. Thomas'theorem: "All people define situations as real; butwhen powerful people define situations as real,then they are real in their consequences" (Mehan,forthcoming).) It is here, then, that one begins to

see why music aesthetics has been and is a"political" issue, political in all the senses of thatword.

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de nora, tia. how is extra-musical meaning possible, music as a place and space for 'work

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