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Clayton, Martin (2001) ’Introduction : towards a theory of musical meaning (in India and elsewhere).’, British
journal of ethnomusicology., 10 (1). pp. 1-17.

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Introduction: towards a theory of musical meaning (in India and elsewhere)

Martin Clayton

Nb. diacritical accents to be added later

… the meaning of a heard musical phrase consists primarily in the emotional and other

affective mental processes and in the impulses to movement which it evokes, and in the

cognitive awareness of its structure. Charles Myers (1937:59)

The hypothesis of the unity of the notion of meaning is not an insistence on a single unified

literal concept "meaning"; rather, it is a commitment to the existence of a series of

connections among the various senses of "means". Mark Johnson (1987:176)

Abstract

This article introduces a special issue of the British Journal of Ethnomusicology on 'music and

meaning'. It does so by offering some thoughts on 'meaning' in the context of North Indian

raga music; and by sketching the outline of an approach to musical meaning influenced by

perspectives from ethnomusicology, psychological anthropology, cognitive science, and

cultural studies. The article proposes that all music is necessarily meaningful insofar as it

offers to the perceiving subject possibilities for action and imagination, and that meaning is

neither wholly dependant on semiosis, nor on the apprehension of formal or structural

relationships.1

Introduction

In what ways is music meaningful? The essays in this volume address some of the many

possible answers to this question. My purpose in this introduction is to offer a framework

capable of accommodating all of the approaches represented within these covers. This

1
Acknowledgements…

introduction… 10/03/2011 1
introduction places stress on aspects of meaning not given detailed attention elsewhere, and is

thus intended as a complement to the other contributions. I offer these thoughts as a small

contribution towards the development of an ethnomusicological theory of musical meaning -

something I consider to have been a pressing but unfulfilled need for many years.

The volume which you hold in your hand has a history too long and convoluted to relate

here in full, but a quick sketch may help illuminate the issues it considers. First, it emerges as a

tentative step forward from the study published last year as Time in Indian Music (Clayton

2000) – an attempt at a theoretical model of rhythm, metre and form in North Indian raga

music. This book‟s later accretions betray my increasing fascination with the relationship

between music‟s manipulation of the human experience of time, and the discourses many of us

employ in order to rationalise and interpret that experience – the discursive realm to which the

constructions of metre and rhythm, tal and lay belong. What, I began to wonder, is the

relationship between that experience of raga music in the moment, and what we might call its

meaning?

Centuries of theoretical discourse can be traced (in principle at least), which considers the

affect of Indian music, its bhava (roughly speaking, emotional expression) and the rasa

(aesthetic essence) which that bhava engenders in the listener.2 There seems to be broad

agreement within modern North Indian music culture that of crucial importance to bhava, and

therefore to rasa, is the melodic entity raga (with other features such as metre, tempo, timbre,

song text and so on performing ancillary roles). Raga has been described by musicologists

2
The term bhav is sometimes used by North Indian musicians to refer to emotional expression

in general. In the classical rasa, theory various aspects of bhava, their subdivisions and their

relationships are described: of central importance are the eight sthayibhavas, each of which

evokes a corresponding rasa. Sthayibhava is translated as 'emotive stereotype'

(Sanyal1987:166) or 'permanent emotion' (Rowell 1992: 329).

introduction… 10/03/2011 2
within and without India as possessing numerous aspects (scale type, transilience, tessitura,

characteristic motion and so on), and yet performers and scholars seem agreed that the essence

of raga – that which gives rise to bhava – is not reducible to those features, but is knowable

only through direct experience (performance or listening). I wondered, and continue to do so,

about the extent to which bhava and rasa (or rather the experiences which those terms describe)

are effected through the manipulation of participants' temporal experience through the

experience of organised sound.

Indic musicology and criticism has also long recognised another, associational level of

meaning: thus for instance Yaman is an evening rag, Miyan ki Malhar a raga of the rainy

season, and Pahadi evokes the hill regions from which it takes its name. Associations of

performance time and context are related both to a historical role of music as accompaniment

to drama and to the origins of (part of) the modern raga repertory in seasonal and/or functional

vernacular songs. It is a small step, nonetheless, from the recognition that Malhar is a melody

performed during the monsoon, to the interpretation that the raga itself (whatever „itself‟ may

mean) invokes the rains, or that its performance elicits emotional responses characteristic of

the season (for instance, that of longing for an absent lover). The raga does (or at least it can)

give rise to such a response, although one may wonder to what extent this is because listeners,

knowing its associations, expect it to do so. The relationships between the sounds people make

and experience, discourses of various types, and what people come to believe the music

„means‟ are as endlessly fascinating as they are complex.

In the course of pondering these issues, a number of other influences came together.

Editing a video on the khyal singing of Veena Sahasrabuddhe, one of the genre's finest

performers, I had to cut together footage from two cameras, one focusing on Veena and the
3
other on her student and daughter-in-law Jayanti Sahasrabuddhe. Watching the two singers,

3
See Clayton 1999.

introduction… 10/03/2011 3
as well as others who came into shot (including myself), I came to conceive of all participants

in the session as being somehow locked into the same experience – focussed on the same

events in the same space and time, at some level synchronised together. The music, I

speculated, was somehow facilitating this synchrony, what might be termed a process of

entrainment.4 What if we turned a standard interpretation on its head: what if, instead of

believing the timing aspects of the music to be instrumental (in allowing the essence of the

music to create its affect), the timing was the affect? In other words, what if the very

experience of an interactional synchrony - listener with musical sound - was the experience

which the discourse of bhava and rasa sought to interpret? What if our (musicologists')

concentration on discourse (however 'emic') habitually blocks a deeper appreciation of what

goes on in the experience of music?

I was reminded of the splendid exchanges between Leonard Meyer and Charles Keil,

originating more than 30 years previously, contests between musical meaning as the syntactic

coding of emotional response and as the direct experience of feeling through synchronised

action (Keil‟s „groove‟).5 I began to consider the „groove‟ of raga performance - this aspect of

synchronous interaction - as an elemental level of musical „meaning‟, logically prior to

(although in practice inseparable from) interpretive discourses. The same ideas also

suggested the theme for a one-day conference, entitled „Music and Meaning‟, which was held

at the Open University in November 1998.6

4
My thinking on these questions has been influenced by the work of various earlier scholars,

including Mari Riess Jones (see e.g. Jones and Yee 1993) and William Condon (see e.g. 1982,

1985).
5
See in particular Meyer 1956, Keil 1994 [1966]).
6
Organised by my colleagues Kevin Dawe and Tony Langlois on behalf of both the British

Forum for Ethnomusicology and the Open University's Musics and Cultures Research Group.

introduction… 10/03/2011 4
 An early proposal for a themed issue of BJE was put aside, for a variety of reasons, but this

idea was resurrected on hearing Timothy Rice‟s brilliant keynote paper to the British

Musicologies Conference in July 1999. It seemed to me that Rice, in his engagement with the

role of metaphor in the construction and negotiation of meaning, was attacking related issues (I

will discuss this relationship below). I am delighted that he accepted the invitation to

contribute to this volume.

The rest of this volume has fallen together in a haphazard, but (I think) felicitous manner:

Frank Kouwenhoven‟s thoughts on the programmatic discourses around Chinese qin music

were presented at the 1998 conference; Gregory Barz‟s thoughts on meaning, temporality and

a variety of social processes were (to some extent at least) a response to that conference‟s

challenge to reconsider Keil‟s groovology and what it might still have to offer. I invited Anna

Morcom to contribute to the volume after discussing with her the relationship between music,

song and dramatic meaning in Hindi film music, while Jochen Eisentraut‟s paper landed on my

desk quite by chance – his discussion of an adopted music, samba as performed by a group of

enthusiasts in north Wales, provides yet another approach to the always entagled domains of

sound, experience and discourse, and the way they combine to construct „meaning‟.

The meaning of meaning

So much for the prelude - it falls to me to try to establish, however provisionally, a theoretical

basis and context for this volume's debates. A good place to start might be with the meaning of

the term 'meaning'. What, you might reasonably ask, do I and the other contributors to this

volume mean by „meaning‟?

My first thoughts towards answering this question were of the necessity of keeping the

definition broad, given the wide range of perspectives it should accommodate. On the face of it

Leonard Meyer provided such a definition when he suggested back in 1956, that music has

introduction… 10/03/2011 5
meaning if it refers to something outside of itself [ref] - a broad and apparently helpful

definition, but nonetheless one that is problematic in that it reproduces a basic ontological

fallacy: that music is essentially a thing which refers to another thing. The problems inherent in

such an idea have been discussed often, and by writers of very different methodological

training and ideological orientation. I cite below four examples: from John Blacking, Nicholas

Cook and Roger Scruton (writing specifically about music) and Paul Ricoeur (writing more

generally, but I think with relevance to music nonetheless).7

The "objective facts" of musical structures may seem to be there for all to hear and see; but

in reality they are not. The meaning of musical signs is ambiguous… (Blacking 1995:229)

… a musical culture is, in essence, a repertoire of means for imagining music; it is the

specific pattern of divergences between the experience of music on the one hand, and the

images by means of which it is represented on the other, that gives a musical culture its

identity… I argue that the structural wholeness of musical works should be seen as a

metaphorical construction […] (Cook 1990:4,5)

In one sense the work of music has no identity: no material identity, that is. For the work is

what we hear or are intended to hear in a sequence of sounds, when we hear them as music.

And this - the intentional object of musical perception - can be identified only through

metaphors, which is to say, only through descriptions that are false. (Scruton 1997:108)

Meaningful action is an object for science only under the condition of a kind of

objectification which is the equivalent to the fixation of a discourse by writing. […] In the

same way that interlocution is overcome in writing, interaction is overcome in numerous

situations in which we treat action as a fixed text. (Ricoeur 1971:537-538)

7
For further discussion on musical ontology see for instance Bohlman 1999, Goehr 1992,

Ingarden 1986, Levinson1997, Small 1998 and Smith 1979.

introduction… 10/03/2011 6
 I might then be forgiven for thinking that the ontological argument does not need to be

repeated here. Nonetheless, I'm not sure that the implications for musical meaning of this

realisation have been worked through satisfactorily (Scruton, for instance, goes on to treat

music as quasi-material – his 'intentional object' – despite his own philosophical queasiness.) If

(objectified) music is not a natural fact but a construction, an aspect of cultural knowledge,

then where can its meaning be found? If meaning is to be found solely in the ascriptions of

listeners, as some would hold, in what ways (if at all) is it generated or communicated by

music?

Is it possible to devise a definition of meaning - a definition useful for music studies - that

problematises music's ontological status while also accounting for our intuition that musical

experience is meaningful? A definition that takes account of the temporal, experiential aspects

of music to which I referred above, as well as the kinds of structural, syntactical and semiotic

aspects of meaning described by musicologists? Can we talk of music being meaningful both

in relation to its apparent ontological status, and in relation to processual aspects of lived

musical experience? It seems to me that these questions have not been satfisfactorily answered

to date.

Perhaps it is necessary, after all, to paraphrase the citations above. Music's apparent

existence as text or as form is made possible only by the exercise of the human imagination in

rationalising and attempting to fix experience. Music as text (music as form, etc) is an artifact

of discourse, brought into being through the operation of metaphor: yet most accounts of

meaning in aesthetic, semiotic or structural terms presuppose the existence of this imaginary

artifact.8

8
I am influenced here by Lakoff and Johnson's classic account of the role of metaphor in

human thought (1980), and by these authors' later publications.

introduction… 10/03/2011 7
 What we call 'music' then, is in fact better described as an abstraction from the processes of

ritual interaction Small describes as 'musicking' (1998). Whatever else musicking is about, we

should not forget that it is experienced by people, in time, physically as well as mentally,

embodied as well as imagined. Generations of musicologists have puzzled over the

relationship between form and meaning, in many cases trapped by their own mentalism and

unable to escape their own ontological assumptions - and thereby frequently mistaking the

wood for the trees (if you will forgive the metaphor).

Musical experiences - experiences of 'musicking' - can be imagined as bounded entities

(the ritual framing of musical 'events' enables this process).9 These entities can be explained

metaphorically as 'structures', 'forms' or 'works', which can in turn be imagined as networks of

relationships between bounded musical 'elements'. An account of musical meaning should

consider the processes by which these 'elements' operate, rather than taking their result as a

given: this is especially important in ethnomusicology, where we cannot take it for granted that

such processes work in similar ways for people in all times and places.

It may be that for musicking humans, the impulse to provide analogical or metaphorical

interpretations for musical experience is something close to universal. Be that as it may, these

interpretations must be terribly transient and unstable - unless and until, that is, we start to fix

them through paramusical discourse. This is precisely what happens through the fixing of

those imaginary entities notes, chords, motives and the rest, and the imaginary relationships we

call symphonies, ragas and the like.

What we conventionally describe as musical meaning is the way in which musical

elements and structures are understood to relate to the world – which seems to me a futile

endeavour so long as we fail to recognise that these elements and structures are themselves

imagined by means of metaphors derived from the relationship between individual and

9
On the framing of musical/ritual events, see for instance Stone 1982, Turner 1986.

introduction… 10/03/2011 8
environment.10 And further, I would contend that a great deal of aesthetic and semiotic

analysis falls into just this trap, as does any structural analysis which fails to take account of the

contingency of musical structure. In all of these fields, our scholarly imagination is

constrained, as Steven Feld pointed out back in 1974, by the linguistic analogy (either directly

applied, or adopted indirectly via its application in other social sciences). This remains a

problem, and the need Feld identified – to build theories in ethnomusicology which transcend

the linguistic analogy – remains acute.

The perception of meaning

Are we any closer to that sought-after definition of meaning? One of the most significant

problems is the gap in existing models between perception and meaning, and the apparent need

to link the two through formal understanding. One possible way around this problem is offered

by the ecological theory of perception put forward by James Gibson - a somewhat

idiosyncratic approach to perception which has had little impact on musicology.11 Gibson's

approach completely rethinks more established views of the processes involved.

The views Gibson criticises describe perception in terms of the processing of information:

in visual perception, according to information-processing models, light strikes the retina and is

transformed into information which can be processed by the brain; this cognitive processing

allows us to recognise objects, their properties and relations; and finally, having processed all

this information, we can make judgements about objects and events in the world and take

appropriate action. This paradigm has carried over into music psychology: sound waves strike

10
See Johnson 1987.
11
Although I am indebted to Eric Clarke for his interpretation and application of Gibson's

ideas (forthcoming). The influence of Gibson is also acknowldeged by Marc Leman in his

study of schema theory in music (1995).

introduction… 10/03/2011 9
the ear and are transformed into information which the brain can process, recognising notes,

chords, motives and so on… until finally, at some (usually indeterminate) later stage a listener

may interpret the music's meaning and respond appropriately.

Gibson viewed the process rather differently: in his view perception is best viewed as the

interaction between animal and environment. The way an animal perceives is by actively

scanning available information for the possibilities it affords. The animal does this by

recognising patterns of change and invariance. For example, according to Gibson's model

when we see a glass of water we can perceive directly from the patterns of change and

invariance in light energy, the proximity of something which affords the possibility of

drinking. As Gibson says,

The world of physical reality does not consist of meaningful things. The world of

ecological reality […] does. If what we perceived were the entities of physics and

mathematics, meanings would have to be imposed on them. But if what we perceive are the

entities of environmental science, their meanings can be discovered. (p33)

For Gibson then, what we perceive is a world of meaningful things - meaningful in the

sense that they have what he calls 'affordances' for the perceiving subject. The implications of

such a view for music psychology, if accepted, are profound: ecological perception offers the

possibility of a direct - and instantaneous - apprehension of what a musical experience means

for us.

In The senses considered as perceptual systems (1966), Gibson considers the particular

properties and affordances of auditory information, particularly in comparison with visual

("Compression waves from a vibratory event", pp.15 ff). "The correspondence of sound waves

to their source […] means that information about an event is physically present in the air

around the event." Sound, he continues, passes around obstacles and conveys little information

about the surfaces from which it is reflected (in contrast to light), whereas "the information

introduction… 10/03/2011 10
about the temporal structure of the event that caused it and the vibratory frequency of this event

are given with great precision." Furthermore, animals (including humans) themselves are

sources of sound: "each animal is often surrounded by a vibratory field and […] the waves

specify a great deal about the animal." (1966:17). Our auditory system is moreover particularly

well developed in allowing judgement of the direction from which sound originates.

It follows from this that – to the extent to which the senses can be isolated – auditory

information is particularly meaningful in terms of what it tells us about events and living

creatures, the temporal dimension of events and their spatial orientation. Extrapolating from

Gibson, I suggest that as a result, auditory information has a number of obvious pragmatic

applications. One simple example is that it can specify the location and identity of an animal

that we might wish to hunt, or fear being hunted by. Another is that the production and

reception of sound may be a priviledged medium through which we can coordinate action with

other people. By synchronising our attentional rhythms to those we detect in an auditory

stimulus (such as sounds produced by another human), we can achieve not only

synchronisation of action (as in dance) but a profound sense of connectedness to other people,

and (in our imaginations at least) to spirits, Gods and the like. The particular affordances of

auditory information should therefore be considered as such (allowing, of course, for the fact

that they are almost always available simultaneously with visual, haptic, taste-smell and other

kinds of information). This is an important reason why it is potentially misleading to interpret

the nature and significance of music primarily through visual representations.

According to Gibson's theory, musical experience (including but not restricted to auditory

information) can be considered as directly meaningful, inasmuch as it affords directly

perceivable possibilities to the listener. This position makes intuitive sense for me, since my

own experiences of music include many instances in which I have realised, extremely rapidly,

that music afforded possibilities… of dancing, singing along, annoying a parent, or whatever:

introduction… 10/03/2011 11
introspection suggests that this realisation can occur well before I have had a chance to come to

definite conclusions, even subconsciously, about that music's tonality, motivic or formal

structure, or metrical regularity. As Nicholas Cook puts it:

To write music, to understand its techniques, or even to play an instrument requires time,

application and specialized knowledge. But when music is heard, the results of all this are

somehow synthesized into an immediate and intrinsically rewarding experience that does

not, as a precondition, depend upon the listener having any kind of trained understanding

of what he hears. (Cook 1990:2)

The possibility that this "immediate and intrinsically rewarding experience" is in fact due

to the perception of patterns of change and of invariance in auditory information of a kind

normally overlooked, deserves serious investigation.

What other kind of things can a musical experience afford? I don't think there can be such a

thing as a finite list, but here are a few possibilities:

musical experience affords the experience of groove

musical experience affords a sense of belonging to a community

musical experience of certain kinds affords the imagination of abstract formal structure

and the conceptualisation of 'musical works'

musical experience affords the possibility of argument with friends over the relative

merits of rock bands or symphonies

musical experience affords the possibility of imagining oneself to be in communion

with one's gods or ancestors

and so on… It may be, indeed, that this approach has particular benefits in addressing

micro-level processes of the kind described by Keil - processes which are particularly hard to

describe in words precisely because they are the least closely related to linguistic modes of

signification. Of course, exactly what kinds of patterns we recognise in auditory information

introduction… 10/03/2011 12
(and in the information available simultaneously through other senses) which allows these

kind of perceptions, is a subject for much further research.

The ecological view has a number of consequences which accord with my intuitions

regarding musical meaning, namely: meaning is interactional, in that it is generated in relation

to the perceiving subject; a single event can have multiple affordances for each perceiving

subject; and music can be directly perceived as meaningful, independent of formal

understanding. I believe that this offers a useful way of looking at musical meaning. Insofar as

the category 'music' is a cultural rather than a natural fact, anything which we call music is

necessarily meaningful. Any musical event is meaningful in so far as it offers affordances to an

individual: it may offer multiple affordances to each individual simultaneously, and it offers a

more or less different set of affordances to each indivudual.

Between perception, semiosis and discourse

My purpose in this paper is not, I should make clear, to dismiss the potential of music to do

semiotic work: study of the the things which music can signify and the ways in which it does so

is of course a hugely important dimension of the study of meaning. The potential of music to

signify could, indeed, be listed as amongst its 'affordances'. What I do intend, however, is to

help to redress a balance which has tilted overwhelmingly towards semiotic approaches and

away from more phenomenological, experiential and/or non-symbolic studies.12

The potential of music to signify, then, is not in question. What we need to consider is the

mechanism by which a continuous flow of auditory information can come to be experienced as

a sequence of signifying musical 'elements'. This has certainly yet to be answered

satisfactorily: nor is it likely to be, so long as many musicologists and psychologists persist in

the belief that the conventional 'elements of music', music's notatables, comprise the

12
See Leman (1995:180-185) on non-symbolic approaches to meaning formation in music.

introduction… 10/03/2011 13
building-blocks of musical cognition. A number of recent applications of cognitive science do

hint at future directions nonetheless: for instance, Zbikowski's application of categorisation

theory and its relation to motivic analysis, or Leman's application of schema theory to what he

calls 'tonal semantics'.13

Again, Gibson's work suggests ways in which we might approach the conceptualisation of

musical 'elements': "The judgement of "same" reflects the tuning of a perceptual system to the

invariants of stimulus information that specify the same real place, the same real object, or the

same real person. […] only the information required to identify a thing economically tends to

be picked up from a complex of stimulus information. All the other available information that

would be required to specify its unique and complete identity in the whole universe of things is

not attended to." (1966:278, 286).

Recent work in psychological anthropology aimed at bridging the gap between cognitive

models and schemas on the one hand and 'cultural knowledge' on the other are also helpful in

pointing a way forward.14 Nonetheless, relatively little of this work gives serious attention to

music, or auditory information in general: I would suggest therefore that far from offering

ready-made paradigms for application to music research, these theories really need to be

developed further with music in mind. In other words, I believe that (ethno)musicology ought

to be doing more to contribute a phonocentric perspective to the development of the human

sciences, rather than continuing to address its subject through the distortions of visual and

linguistic analogies (as argued, in the former case, by F. Joseph Smith).

13
See Lakoff (1987) on categorisation theory.
14
See e.g. Shore (1996) on culture as meaning construction; Strauss and Quinn (1997) on the

relationship of schema theory and connectionism with anthropological conceptions of

meaning.

introduction… 10/03/2011 14
 In my view, semiotic theories developed in a phonocentric context are likely to give more

convincing accounts of musical meaning than those which remain too closely linked to

linguistic or structural models. (For the purposes of this paper, a highly condensed survey of

current semiotic theories would serve little purpose: my silence should not be taken as

dismissal however, but as an attempt to direct attention to the question of how we recognise

'things' in music which may signify, and to consider whether music may also be meaningful in

ways which resist semiotic description.

A further area of concern for this volume is the role of paramusical discourse in the

construction of musical meaning. Many ethnomusicologists would agree that we should

transcend a situation in which musical meaning is seen only in relation to music imagined as

objective fact. Yet this is a trap which many ethnomusicologists have also fallen into: even an

ethnographic study which eschews notation or technical vocabulary will often address

structural relations between musical and social 'facts'. It is worth thinking a little more about

the processes through which musical 'facts' and their meanings come to be fixed (or at least,

how boundaries for their negotiation come to be set).

Even if linguistic discourse is not necessary to meaningful experience, it plays an essential

role in the fixing of meaning - discourse of various kinds can be deployed in the limitation of

imagination, in persuading people that a musical experience offers certain affordances and not

others (for instance, in the case of a symphony concert, dancing in the aisles). Discourse can be

both creative, in revealing ways of hearing and understanding music, and limiting. In either

case it is linked to the exercise of power, as in the case of the music academy or university

department. It is well worth our considering our own inescapable role in this process, as

academics, researchers and writers of authoritative texts.

A chain of argument

introduction… 10/03/2011 15
Perhaps it would be helpful if I were to summarize my argument up to this point.

1. What we call 'music' is an abstraction derived by interpreting an experience in which our

attention has been focussed primarily on auditory information. (Of course, we cannot focus

totally on sound, while conversely anyone with access to sound information will attend to it to

some degree. Experience which we call 'musical' is thus distinctive in the degree of our

attentiveness to sound; and perhaps in the extent to which sound information is understood in a

non-linguistic mode.)

2. We do not passively perceive and subsequently decode sonic information, so much as

actively scan sound energy for patterns of which we can make sense. Auditory information

which contains recognised patterns of invariance and change can be perceived as offering or

suggesting affordances, and therefore as meaningful. Thus, music is directly meaningful in so

far as it offers an individual perceptible affordances.

3. Some of the ways in which we can make sense of auditory information - some of music's

affordances - are well known to musicology. These ways are all dependent on the application

of metaphor (in particular the ontological metaphors by which we describe 'music' as an

aesthetic object comprising structural relations between elements; also important are spatial

and orientational metaphors such as the 'height' of pitch). If we understand music according to

these metaphors, it can be analysed in structural or semiotic terms, either of which can describe

some of the apparent musical 'meaning' of musical 'texts'.

4. It is common - perhaps especially familiar within Western classical music culture - for

people to try to fix these metaphorically imagined structures (for instance through notation)

and the meanings which those structures afford (through critical or scholarly discourse). These

discourses, which attempt to fix meanings and to constrain or direct imagination, are

profoundly connected with the exercise of power. (Hence the notion that music can only truly

introduction… 10/03/2011 16
be understood through the medium of music theory, and the institutional barriers which

exclude alternative readings - or, indeed, the construction of alternative texts.)

5. The process by which we come to comprehend a continuous flow of musical sound as a

segmented flow of musical elements needs to be better understood, as does the relationship of

this process to other areas of cultural knowledge. Whether addressed in terms of cognitive

models and schemas, image schemata, categorisation, or the perception of invariance, it is

clear that any stream of musical sound affords the perception of musical elements, and that

these identified elements can act as signifiers which relate music to other dimensions of human

experience. This is the subject matter of semiotic analysis.

6. Accepted forms of discourse nonetheless hide dimensions of meaning - other

affordances - independent of or contradictory to these basic ontological assumptions. They

also make the contingent nature of those assumptions invisible to many of those who

contribute to that discourse.

7. The debate as to whether musical 'texts' have meaning or not; and if so what kind of

meaning they have (representational, associational, etc) misses the point in some essential

ways. This kind of debate assumes the literal existence of a musical text or structure, whose

'meaning' is the subject of debate. A more open and productive definition would say that

whatever people can make sense of in music, whatever it affords, is its meaning. A piece of

music exists as a form of cultural knowledge, its conceptualization afforded by the experience

of organized sound and fixed by paramusical discourse.

8. Ethnomusicologists have described a variety of ways in which sound information may

be understood as meaningful. All are (necessarily) metaphorically imagined, but not all are

dependent on the notion of a structured text. Examples of attempts to describe musical

experience in such alternative terms are Charles Keil's notions of 'groove' and 'participatory

discrepancy'.

introduction… 10/03/2011 17
 9. There are almost certainly many more ways in which musical experiences afford

understanding - in other words, are meaningful. These include the ways in which auditory

information can be understood metaphorically as patterned movement independent of its

parsing into elemental notes, chords and the like. This kind of meaning may be radically

different from the kinds of meaning uncovered by structural or semantic studies, in that it may

be more akin to gestural communication - continuous, imagistic and non-hierarchical.15 As

David McNeill puts the distinction: "Language has the effect of segmenting and linearizing

meaning. What might be an instantaneous thought is divided up and strung out through time

[…] Gestures are different in every way. This is because they are themselves multidimensional

and present meaning complexes without undergoing segmentation or linearization. Gestures

are global and synthetic and never hierarchical." (McNeill 1992:19, emphasis in original)

As Timothy Rice points out elsewhere in this volume, we need to clear what we mean

when we write about meaning, and I have addressed several different aspects in my argument

thus far. I subscribe, nonetheless, to Mark Johnson's 'unity of the notion of meaning' (see the

epigraph to this article), believing that ultimately we need to recognise that musical experience

is meaningful in a variety of ways, that these ways are interconnected, and that the

relationships between different dimensions of meaning are important.

Epilogue I: back to rasa

Having begun this discussion with a reference to the Indian theory of rasa, it might be useful to

return to that same theme now. How does rasa relate to the ideas discussed above? Does it offer

insights from which modern ethnomusicology can learn? I think the answer to this last

question may be affirmative, but before explaining how, I should offer a disclaimer. The few

15
The incorporation of the idea of 'gesture' into accounts of musical meaning is discussed by,

for instance, Coker (1972) and Middleton (1993).

introduction… 10/03/2011 18
references in this article are hardly adequate, and nor can they be, as a discussion of the

concept of rasa, its background, application, and relationship to the traditions of Sanskrit

philosophy in general. My references are highly selective, and highlight those dimensions

which seem to me particularly pertinent to my own speculations.16 I should also point out that,

although often discussed in relation to music in India, the rasa theory developed in the context

of dramaturgy, and no serious attempt has been made to adapt it to musical performance per se.

To my knowledge, no scholar, Indian or otherwise, has ever offered a convincing explanation

of how particular melodic entities (ragas) afford the perception of particular rasas (to borrow

Gibson's language for a moment).

Having said all that, I do think there are features of rasa theory which seem consistent with

the approaches described above. Rasa could be described as suggesting a kind of

phenomenological approach to musical meaning and affect, and one which privileges sound

itself rather than visual analogy. I am thinking of the following aspects in particular:

rasa theory highlights the role of the perceiving subject, and the importance of empathy

or sensitivity17

rasa theory priviledges experience and affect: the work of art succeeds or fails by its

ability to evoke aesthetic response in the listener/viewer

the word rasa, meaning literally juice or essence, suggests something flowing and

dynamic, rather than a solid and static entity (Sharma 1970:57, Rowell 1982:368)

16
Perhaps neither more nor less so than is Martinez, when he attempts to recast rasa as a kind

of Peircian semiotic theory (1996).

17
sahradaytva: interpreted by Sanyal as "sensitivity […] literally the quality of having a heart"

(1987:168); by Rowell as "empathy…'to be at heart with' " (1982:328;, and (perhaps

fancifully) by myself as a kind of proto-entrainment theory.

introduction… 10/03/2011 19
 rasa resists the linkage of affect to structure (proper structure is considered important in

musical and dramaturgical theory, but not – pace Meyer – as the primary means for

generating affect)

the perception of rasa is described in terms of a metaphor of 'tasting'; this metaphor is

used as a means for resisting reductionism (Bharata's Natyashastra draws an analogy

between rasa and the taste of a delicacy, which is distinct from the individual tastes of

its ingredients) (Sharma 1970:58-9)

Furthermore, while the application of rasa theory to music remained underdeveloped, it is

worth remarking that the theory emerged within a culture not given to downplaying the

importance of sound – the highest category to Hindu scripture is that referred to as shruti,

literally 'the heard', while there is no Indian equivalent to the 'tablets of stone'. Perhaps it is for

this reason that theorists allowed the affective power of music to remain within the irreducible

domain of sound – something from which Western musicology could certainly learn.

Epilogue II: finally, back to this volume

I have deliberately concentrated in this introduction on issues not covered in detail elsewhere

in this volume, but nonetheless - as I hope will become clear - each article's concerns are

related to those I have outlined above. The sorts of issues with which this volume is concerned

are the role of metaphor and of discourse in the construction and contestation of meaning; the

ascription of meaning to music and its problematic link to 'structure'; the multiplicity of

possible and concurrent meanings generated by any performance; the possibility that music

sounds and practices afford similar meanings in quite different cultural environments; and the

exercise of power in the fixing of meanings by social elites and scholars.

The issues addressed by contributors cluster around a number of themes, namely:

introduction… 10/03/2011 20
 a. the plurality of metaphors available for musical understanding, and the ways in which

they underpin different ascriptions of 'meaning'. (The main theme of Rice's article.)

b. the phenomenon of similar music (particularly, in the age of recording, similar patterns

of auditory information) being understood, that is affording meaning, in very different social

situations. How can studying this help us to understand the interplay of the affordances of

sound and the metaphorical imagination of socially-situated listeners? (This theme is

addressed by Rice, besides being the main focus of the articles of Eisentraut and Morcom.)

c. the various ways in which people attempt to fix musical meaning through analytical and

interpretive discourses, the contingency of the meanings so fixed and of their relationship to

'structure', and the exercise of power in the fixing. (This theme is central to Kouwenhoven's

article, and implicit in most others.)

d. the ways in which a musical experience refers beyond itself to experiences in other times

and places, thus perhaps affording a kind of comprehension of the relatedness of different

spheres of activity (An important theme of Barz's article).

If the articles published here can play a part in stimulating future work on 'meaning' in

(ethno)musicology, then this volume will have achieved its objective.

introduction… 10/03/2011 21
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Note on the author

to be completed

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