The Interpretation of a Musical Language from the Perspective of a Compositional Unit

THE INTERPRETATION OF A MUSICAL LANGUAGE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A COMPOSITIONAL UNIT CIRO SCOTTO INTRODUCTION O UNDERSTAND AND APPRECIATE Robert Morris’s music, I’ve found it helpful to contemplate the relation of syntax to semantics in natural language, as postulated in philosopher Donald Davidson’s theory of meaning. It is not intended that our understanding of each sentence be based wholly on the truth-conditional for it which the theory entails. Rather, the theory purports to interpret each sentence by locating its position on the lines of truth determination for the language as a whole, by stating its truth conditions in the framework of the general principles by which the truth conditions of any sentence are determined by its structure. The meaning of each T 326 Perspectives of New Music sentence S is given not by that unique theorem which refers to it, but by that infinite set of theorems which refer to all sentences that contain any S-component. In effect, the interpretation of S is the interpretation of the whole language in the perspective of that sentence. This gives an interesting slant to the dictum that the meaning of a sentence depends on the meanings of its elements, a slant in which the lines of dependence run in both directions. The meaning of a sentence does depend on the meanings of its elements , but, on a T-theoretical view, the meaning of each element consists in what it contributes to the truth conditions of the sentences which contain it.1 This is J. A. Foster’s explanation of how “biconditionals” do their interpretive work according to Davidson’s theory.2 I find the relation of array subunit to whole in Morris’s music bears resemblance to this relation of sentence structure to semantic content. In his theory of meaning, Davidson circumvents issues of syntax yet maintains that the meaning of the whole sentence depends on its parts. He does this by formulating a theory of meaning based on truth conditions . For example, given two sentences (assumed to be translations of each other), one in an object language and the other in a metalanguage (or when the object and metalanguages are the same, one sentence is a structural description of another sentence), put them into a biconditional relationship using the connective “is true if and only if,” rather than the connective “means that” (e.g. “Snow is white” if and only if Snow is white). Each side of the biconditional can now be related by means of its truth value rather than a semantically undefined intentional connector. The truth value of the biconditional (i.e., its state of being true vs. false) is derived from the known truth conditions of the sentences and their parts.3 Consequently, when the truth value of the biconditional is true, according to Davidson, one knows the meaning of the sentence.4 However, Davidson is not implying that only knowing the truth conditions of sentences is sufficient for interpreting those sentences. His biconditionals interpret a sentence in the context of the language as a whole. That is, he believes that the meaning of any sentence or word can only be given through the meaning of every word and every sentence containing the words in the language.5 In Morris’s works, the meaning of an element in a composition (the description of its structural function) is what that element contributes to the meaning of all the structures in the work. As I’ll suggest below, in each of Morris’s all-hexachord chain compositions the function of a The Interpretation of a Musical Language 327 compositional element is given through (1) the element’s syntactic connection to the chain, (2) the function of the element in relation to the other elements in the chain, and (3) the function of any and all compositional elements that contain or allude to the referential compositional element. The holistic view of a composition’s structure is, on the one hand, overwhelming because of the vast number of possible relationships contributing to the structural function of an element in a composition, but, on the other hand, exciting and rewarding, because the vast number of...