• Reception tests and VVA classification
• Intersubjectivity, reception tests, VVA classification and library music
• Interobjectivity: structures, musemes, IOCM, PMFCs
• Basic
• more stuff not there

This book contains neither musical notation nor muso jargon. The basic idea is that anyone can talk intelligently about music as meaningful sound once mystical beliefs are abandoned and replaced with no-nonsense theory and method. The book falls roughly into two parts. Part 1 (Chapters 1-5) clears the conceptual and theoretical ground for Part 2 (Chapters 6-11) which focuses on ways of analysing music ‘as if it meant something other than itself’.

Part 1

Chapter 1 —How much music?— estimates the importance of music in terms of time and money in the everyday life of people living in the urban West.

Chapter 2 —The most important thing…— starts with definitions of and axioms about ‘music’, including the concept of concerted simultaneity, the non-antagonistic contradiction between intra- and extrageneric notions of music, and the tenet that music is no more universal a ‘language’ than language itself. After an intercultural comparison of words denoting what we call ‘music’ and a short history of the concept in European thinking, music’s relation to other modes of human expression is discussed. That section includes observations from the anthropology of human evolution, from child psychology and from studies of cross-domain representation and synaesthesis.

Chapter 3 —The epistemic oil tanker— is one of the bulkiest vessels in this fleet of chapters. It confronts the notion of ‘absolute music’ head on, tracing its history, demystifying its articles of faith, including those of its latter-day ‘postmodernist’ counterpart, and deconstructing its ideological implications. The chapter’s second part identifies institutional splits in musical knowledge (poïetic v. aesthesic etc.) that exacerbate the polarities of dual consciousness. It also explains the central role of notation in conventional music studies.

Chapter 4 —Ethno, socio, semio— discusses the three main disciplinary challenges to conventional music studies in the twentieth century: ethnomusicology, the sociology of music and the semiotics of music. It highlights their contribution, real or potential, to developing the sort of music analysis covered in Part 2, underlining the importance of ethnomusicology and empirical sociology, and discusses the problems of music semiotics in dealing with semantics and pragmatics.

Chapter 5 —Meaning and communication— is the 'semiotics chapter'. It explains key concepts like semiotics, semiology, semiosis (object - sign - interpretant), semantics, syntax, pragmatics, sign type (icon - index - arbitrary sign), denotation, connotation, connotative precision, polysemy, transmitter, receiver, codal incompetence and codal interference. All these concepts are essential to the adequate treatment of the book’s main analytical question: how does who communicate what through music to whom and with what effect?

Part 2

Chapter 6 —Intersubjectivity— kicks off Part II of the book. It presents the first of two main approaches to discussing the meaning of a musical analysis object. Six reasons for prioritising the aesthesic rather than poïetic pole are followed by a brief presentation of how ethnographic observations can help in the semiotic analysis of music. The bulk of this chapter deals with reception tests, the categorisation of verbal-visual associations (VVAs), the establishment of paramusical fields of connotation (PMFCs) and other important steps in the collection and collation of response data. The chapter ends with a section on the use of library music in systematising reception test responses.

Chapter 7 —Interobjectivity— covers the second set of approaches to the investigation of meaning in music. After the definition of essential terms (object, structure, museme) the two-stage process of interobjective comparison is explained, complete with advice on collecting interobjective comparison material (IOCM) and on the establishment of paramusical fields of connotation (PMFC). Verification procedures (recomposition, commutation) are also explained and the chapter ends with a section that should definitely allay non-muso anxiety about the designation of structural elements in a piece of music as an essential part of analysis procedure.

Chapter 8 —Parameters of expression— INCOMPLETE!

Chapter 9 —A simple sign typology— INCOMPLETE!

Chapter 10 — Vocal persona— INCOMPLETE!

Chapter 11 —Analysing film music— FINISHED (April 2011)

Bibliography, List of Recorded References and Index will not be available until all chapters are written.
Preface already exists in a reasonable state.