Approaches to Meaning in Music

5. A Simple Model for Associative Musical Meaning

5 A Simple Model for Associative Musical Meaning J. Peter Burkholder This whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, “Is there a meaning to music?” My answer to that would be, “Yes.” And “Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?” My answer to that would be, “No.” Therein lies the dif¤culty. Aaron Copland, What to Listen for in Music For years, the meaning of music was a topic that musical scholars were reluctant to discuss, because it seemed intractable. People obviously ¤nd music meaningful. But the meanings people attribute to music often seem idiosyncratic, depending as much on the person as on the music. To a cautious scholar, this makes ¤nding an objective truth about the meaning of a piece or passage of music seem impossible . In addition to the dif¤culty of deciding what meanings are conveyed, the mechanism by which music conveys meanings has seemed obscure. In recent years, however, there has been new interest in the question of musical meaning, and it has become one of the hottest topics in music scholarship.1 Approaches have drawn on philosophy, music theory, musicology, and cultural history , as well as trends in literary criticism such as semiotics, intertextuality, in®uence studies, deconstruction, and postmodernism. This discussion has brought new and valuable insights, but it has not yet resulted in a clear description of the mechanism by which music conveys meanings. This chapter proposes a model for one signi¤cant contributing element to musical meaning—the principle of association. Using this principle as a foundation, the model is designed to work within certain constraints: (1) the model must be simple; (2) it must be broadly applicable to a signi¤cant proportion of musical phenomena ; and (3) it must be congruent with existing theories of associative musical meaning. In what follows I ¤rst introduce the model and show how it can work in a series of examples. I then discuss its relation to other approaches to musical meaning and address some rami¤cations of the model. Language and Music Many approaches to meaning in music use the metaphor of language.2 Like language, music involves sound and unfolds in time.In most musical systems,there is something parallel to grammar and syntax in language, in that segments of the music play certain roles and normally take particular positions; for example, one segment provides a good conclusion but sounds out of place as a beginning, while another does the reverse.3 Several aspects of musical meaning can be understood primarily in syntactic terms, such as the feeling of closure produced by a cadence, the completion of a formal design, or the ¤nal descent of an Urlinie to the tonic, or the way the evasion of such closure can evoke feelings of frustration, delay, or desire.4 But the comparison to language has always foundered on the ability of words to name or mean something speci¤c, the process called denotation, and the lack of such speci¤city in music. Despite this problem, language is the right metaphor in my view. Music is widely understood as a form of communication. Nicholas Cook’s comparison of music to material artifacts in his recent article, “Theorizing Musical Meaning,” is a helpful way to discuss meaning if one accepts his ¤rm statement that “music is not language , at least in more than a partial and analogic sense” (2001: 177–78).5 But the analogy to language can be rescued and the discussion of musical meaning placed on a ¤rm foundation if we can ¤nd a good analogue to denotation in language. I believe we can: there is a mechanism that we intuitively follow, in which music denotes something in particular, which carries connotations, which in turn lead to interpretations, in a pattern similar to the way in which we understand ¤ction, poetry , drama, or other linguistic artworks. I do not apply the terms “denotation”and “connotation” to musical meaning in their strictest sense, but only insofar as they convey the analogous impression that associations emerge with greater or lesser degrees of probability, variability, and consistency. Let me begin by noting what I do not mean to say. It has often been asserted that music is the universal language. This suggests that anyone can listen to a piece of music and understand it in the same way as everyone else. The concept comes from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when musicians often traveled throughout Europe and the Americas and had developed...