The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays (review)

The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays. By Raymond Monelle. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. [xvi, 248 p. ISBN 0-691-05715-X (cloth); 0-691-05716-8 (pbk.). $65 (cloth); $26.95 (pbk.).]

In a recent article in the New York Review of Books (29 March 2001), Oliver Sacks describes a form of high-functioning autism (Asperger syndrome), the victims of which "cannot read the expressions on people's faces or the intentions in their voices"; they are "generally blind to social meanings" and create instead their own networks of correlations "that bring to mind the elaborate pseudoscientific systems of numerology and astrology" (Sacks, 4). Within the neurological sciences in which Sacks works, this inability to comprehend human gestures counts as pathological. But the opposite more frequently obtains within musicology, in which skeptics scoff at those who would impose affective significance onto musical patterns. The subfield of music semiotics arose to address the "problem" of meaning in music, but its proponents often restrict the scope of their inquiries to formalist correspondences--as though they were attempting to decipher texts in an unknown tongue without the benefit of a Rosetta stone. The advent of topic-oriented interpretation has advanced the range of justifiable statements a bit. Yet the mere labeling of topics in masterworks produces in me the kind of dismay I would feel if an art critic were to explicate Picasso's Guernica by proudly identifying the "horsie," without somehow noticing the creature's anguished grimace or the other figures on the canvas.

When I first picked up Raymond Monelle's The Sense of Music, the book fell open to a section devoted to none other than the "horse" topic, and I almost shut it before I had begun. Had I done so, however, I would have missed out on a most stimulating experience. Not only does Monelle find formalist semiotics and the topics mania at least as frustrating as I do, but he has set out to transform those projects into something that moves far beyond the usual limitations.

I might have written that he goes about this task systematically, except that "system" itself serves as one of his principal targets. Monelle starts and ends his book with a certain Dr. Strabismus (borrowed, he notes, from the writings of "Beachcomber," aka J. B. Morton), who seeks to crown his career by producing "a comprehensive theory of music" that would include semantics as well as syntactics. "He would describe how music comes to signify things to its listeners; how it participates in the whole signifying life of a culture, echoing the meanings of literature and the fine arts, and reflecting the preoccupations of society." But our fictional theorist has trouble systematizing his intellectual allegiances--postmodernism, deconstruction, anthropology, social history, literary theory. "Try as he would, his grand theory always fell apart into a bundle of essays. Apparently, consistency was the enemy of insight" (p. 3).

And so Monelle gives us that bundle of essays, each of which moves in its own provocative direction before yielding to the next cluster of insights. Take, for instance, his discussion of the horse topic in chapter 3. Like many of the topics that appear in inventories by Leonard Ratner and others, the horse rarely receives direct confirmation from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers on music. Yet we would surely qualify as culturally illiterate if we did not recognize a web of references connecting the characteristic rhythm of a galloping horse with (depending on context) the military, the hunt, the masculine. Monelle demonstrates how to substantiate those connections through a series of music examples, which moves from the explicit (Franz (von) Suppé's Light Cavalry Overture or Schubert's setting of Erlkönig) to works that employ that rhythmic impulse in the service of "absolute" music (say, the opening of Brahms's Symphony no. 3). But rather than stopping with the process of labeling, he goes on to ask why galloping horses suddenly appear in European art music of the nineteenth century. And...