Emotion in Musical Meaning: A Peircean Solution to Langer's Dualism

Emotion in Musical Meaning: A Peircean Solution to Langer's Dualism Felicia E. Kruse η 1854, the Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick1 sparked a controversy about the meaning of music that has shaped the terms of the issue to this day. In his On the Beautiful in Music (Vom Musikalisch-Schönen), Hanslick argues that musical meaning consists entirely in "tonally moving forms" (tönend bewegte Formen). Musical meaning is entirely autonomous; it is constituted by the relationships among tones in the musical work, and it signifies or "refers" to nothing outside itself and its musical properties . Hanslick's purpose in developing this formalist account of musical meaning is to refute the commonly held stance that the aim of music is to represent emotions. Hanslick rejects both the view that the purpose of music is to arouse emotions in the listener and the position that its aim is to express the emotional content of a composer's extramusical lived experience.2 Ever since Hanslick's time, musicologists and aestheticians have struggled with the question of what role emotion plays in the experiences of performing and listening to music, and, more specifically, in the understanding of musical meaning. I propose to address this question by critiquing Susanne Langer's account of musical meaning through a Peircean lens. Langer maintains in Philosophy in a New Key that the purpose of music is to offer a formal representation of human emotions, not to express emotions directly or to bring about emotive responses in listeners. In arguing thus, Langer, despite her intention to secure a place for emotion in accounting for musical meaning, perpetuates the dualistic assumptions concerning the relations between reason and emotion that have tended to dominate musical aesthetics since Hanslick. But Charles S. Peirce's concept of the emotional interprétant, along with his suggestion that a piece of music is the quintessential example of a sign that is interpreted by TRANSACTIONS OFTHE CHARLES S. PEIRCE SOCIETY Vol. 41, No. 4 ©2005 feeling, provides a means to refute Langer's position and overcome the dual- 51 ism by showing how musical meaning can be both derived from and ° intended for affective experience on the one hand and properly conceptual g on the other.3 g· To understand what is at stake for the philosophy of music in this issue, it ^ is necessary to have a grasp of the terms of the debate. These terms were iden- » tified by Leonard Meyer in his influential 1956 work, Emotion and Meaning in 51. Music, and they have changed little in the subsequent fifty years. Meyer identi- ^ fies two distinct but overlapping debates. The first is between absolutists, who, g like Hanslick, "insist that musical meaning lies exclusively within the context o of the work itself, in the perception of the relationships set forth within the musical work of art," and referentialists, who maintain that "music also com- ^ municates meanings which in some way refer to the extramusical world of ™ concepts, actions, emotional states and character" (Meyer 1956: I). Meyer 2 correctly notes that this debate reflects a false dichotomy concerning musical ^n meaning: absolute and referential meanings "can and do coexist in one and „ the same piece of music, just as they do in a poem or painting" (ibid.f The sec- g ond debate is engaged on the basis of a somewhat more subtle dichotomy, m that between formalism and expressionism. Formalists contend that musical meaning "lies in the perception and understanding of the musical relationships set forth in the work of art and that meaning in music is primarily intellectual ": expressionists maintain that "these same relationships are in some sense capable of exciting feelings and emotions in the listener" (ibid: 2—3). All musical formalism is, of course, musically absolutist, but a musical expressionist can be either absolutist or referentialist. Absolute expressionists "believe tihat expressive emotional meanings arise in response to music and that these exist without reference to the extramusical world of concepts, actions, and human emotional states," whereas referential expressionists "would assert that emotional expression is dependent upon an understanding of the referential content of music" (ibid.: 3). Despite Meyer's recognition that the arguments between absolutists and referentialists "are the...