P Tagg: Vocal Persona (Chapter 9 in Non-Muso, version 080225)

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SEX is as good a word as any with which to start this book. Thats not so much because the words an obvious attention grabber as because Western attitudes towards sex share much in common with widespread notions about music: both are characterised by the epistemic dissociation of public from private. Since such dissociation lurks behind key issues addressed in the first part of this book Id better explain what I mean.

No-one in their right mind would claim that sex, one of the most intimate aspects of human behaviour, has nothing to do with society because no society can exist without human reproduction and because different cultures regulate the relation between sex and society in different ways. Three simple examples serve to prove this obvious point. [1] Public figures like US ex-President Clinton can be publicly censured for intimate behaviour relating to their private parts. [2] A wife who has extramarital sex in private can, according to the law in some nations, be stoned to death in public. [3] In the West we are regularly subjected to the public display of private sexual fantasies in adverts plastered on billboards, or broadcast to millions of TV viewers, all of whom get to hear initmate voiceovers breathing in their ears and to see extreme close-ups of lips, legs, bellies and bums, all from the intimate audiovisual perspective of a a sexual partner in a private space and, at the same time, all mass diffused across the nation or around the globe.

Music also oscillates between private and public because musical experiences that seem intensely intimate and personal are often performed publicly or diffused globally. Media corporations rely on shared subjectivity of musical experience not just to sell as much of the same music to as many as possible but also to involve us emotionally in the films and games they produce, to help market the products they want us to buy, and even to sell us as a target group, defined by commonality of musical taste, to advertisers.

In contemporary Western culture the differences between private and public spheres in the fields of both sex and music involve a dual consciousness in that our sense of identity and agency in private is dissociated from whatever sense we may have of ourselves in the public sphere. Deep fissures can arise between how we see ourselves as sexual beings in private and how we respond to displays of sexuality in the media, just as our intensely personal musical experiences seem to be at the opposite end of the notional spectrum to all the technical, economic and sociocultural factors without which much of the music that so deeply moves us would not exist.

Having served its purpose to kick start the central issue of dual consciousness, sex can now be dumped and attention drawn to the rationale behind this book about music. Clearly, I must have thought there was a problem to solve, a lacuna to fill, or at least some error or half-truth to correct, otherwise I would have saved myself the bother of writing these words and you of having to read them. The point is that during my career in music studies I came to realise that the central problem in understanding how music works derives not from the dichotomies of private and public or of subjective and objective in themselves, but from the dual consciousness of individuals unable to link the two poles of those dichotomies. That is of course an epistemological observation. It means that over the years Ive repeatedly found prevailing patterns of understanding connections between the various spheres of human activity relating to music to be sorely inadequate. Now, if thats supposed to be a reason for writing a book, its also a statement in need of substantiation. In Chapters 2-4 I present evidence supporting the statement. Here in this preface, however, I think its better to explore the problem from a more down-to-earth and personal perspective.

Before concretising this books rationale with biographical detail, Id better first briefly explain what I mean by muso and non-muso. I use the colloquial term muso (without the non-) in a non-derogatory sense to denote someone who devotes a lot of time and energy to making or talking about music, especially about its technical aspects. A muso is in other words someone with either formal training in music, or who makes music on a professional or semi-professional basis, or who just sees him/herself as a musician or musicologist rather than as a sociologist or cultural studies scholar. Non-musos are simply those who dont exhibit the traits just described and it is they who feature in this books subtitle. The question is why a musicologist like me feels he has to write about music for them?

The basic idea behind this project started to take shape in the early 1980s when music videos, cable TV, and academics specialising in popular music were novelties. That bizarre conjuncture was, I suppose, one reason why I was asked on several occasions to talk about music videos, a topic on which Ive never been an expert. The invitations came mostly from people in media studies, linguistics, political science and the like, more rarely from fellow music educators or scholars. Those colleagues in other disciplines seemed to find music videos problematic because, if I understood them rightly, standard narrative analysis was unable to make much sense of audiovisuals that clearly spoke volumes to their (then) young MTV-viewing students. Some of those non-muso teachers had of course deduced that pop video narrative makes a different sort of sense when it functions as visualised music rather than as visual narrative with musical accompaniment. Those colleagues, all qualified to talk about socio-economic aspects of music and about Hollywood film narrative, seemed in other words to be asking me, a musicologist, to help solve epistemological problems relating to music as a sign system.

Aware of musicologys embarrassing inability at that time to help fellow educators and scholars outside our discipline solve an important problem, I have to admit that, faced with the task of deconstructing musical narrative for non-musos and their students, I felt at the best of times like the one-eyed man with severely impaired sight to boot in the land of the blind. Since then Ive gradually acquired partial vision in the other metaphorical eye. That slight improvement means I think I can now see enough, however blurred, to write this book, a task I wish were unnecessary and which I wouldnt have undertaken if I didnt think music was important. Trouble is that, judging from musics humble status in the pecking order of competences housed in most institutions of learning, its all too easy to believe that maths, natural sciences and language must all be more useful than music whose pigeonholing as art or entertainment implies that it is little more than auditory icing on the cake of real knowledge. As we shall see in Chapters 1-3, everyday extramural reality tells quite a different story.

Although this book will hopefully also interest musos, its primarily intended for people who, like the teachers mentioned above, are educated individuals without formal or professional qualifications in music or musicology non-musos and who want to know how the sounds of music work in the contemporary urban West. It is for those who want to understand: [1] how musics sounds can carry which types of meaning, if any; [2] how someone with no formal musical training can talk or write intelligently about those sounds and their meanings. To cover that territory in a single book, simplifications and generalisations will be unavoidable. At the same time, in order to make sense of that territory, it will also be necessary to summarise basic tenets of musics specificity as a sign system and to defuse such epistemic bombs as absolute music and music as a universal language (Chapters 2-3).

One thing this book will not tell you is how to make music, nor will it explain musical production terms like modulation depth or diminished sevenths; nor does it provide potted accounts of composers, artists, genres or of the music industry; nor will it be of any use to students cramming for music theory or history exams. It certainly wont help readers bluff their way through conversations about jazz, folk, rap, rock, classical music or world music. And under no circumstances will it claim the superiority of one type of music over another: there is plenty of literature of all the types just mentioned. This books job is to present, without resorting to more than a bare minimum of musical notation and in terms accessible to the average university student outside music[ology] departments, ways of understanding the phenomenon of music as a meaningful system of sonic representation.

The appearance of this book is further motivated by factors linked to the emergence of popular music studies as a field of inquiry in higher education. The majority of scholars in this field have tended to come from the social sciences and non-muso humanities (communication studies, cultural studies, film studies, political science, sociology, anthropology, cinema, literature, etc.) rather from departments of music or musicology. Like the teachers flummoxed by pop video narrative in the 1980s, these colleagues have understandably tended to steer clear of the music in popular music, leaving a methodological void which musicologists have only recently started trying to fill. Since the early 1980s, when I conducted reception tests on title tune connotations and, more notably, since the 1990s, when I started teaching popular music analysis to students with no formal musical training, I have seen repeated proof of great musical competence among those who never set foot inside musical academe. It is a largely uncodified vernacular competence that has with few exceptions been at best underestimated, more often trivialised or ignored, not only in conventional music studies but also by those individuals themselves. This kind of competence is discussed in Chapter 3 and used as one starting point for the method and analysis sections in this book.

It would at this stage be fair to ask, given musicologys embarrassing inability to help fellow educators and scholars outside [the] discipline, how a musicologist, with all the baggage of that discipline, can possibly explain anything useful about music to non-musos.

Although initially trained as musician and composer, my involvement in popular music studies, including music and the moving image, has brought me into contact just as much with non-musos as with fellow musicians and musicologists. That contact with non-musos ought, I hope, to have taught me enough to know what sort of things need explaining about the specifics of music as meaningful sound to those who have heard, enjoyed or otherwise reacted to it but who are not specialised in making it or in verbalising about how it is made. Nevertheless, since its impossible to gauge each readers prior knowledge in or about music, I have to apologise in advance if I overestimate or underestimate the readers intelligence or musical competence. I must also apologise to eventual muso readers if, in the interests of a projected non-muso readership, I oversimplify the complexities and subtleties of music making. With those two caveats out in the open, I have to mention a third risk of misunderstanding, particularly about the first part of this book (Chapters 1-5).

If one of the books aims is to help seal the epistemic fissure of dual consciousness in relation to music, then I will, like it or not, have to visit areas of knowledge in which I myself have no formal training. The trouble is that the notional gaps between music as subjective experience and everything else to which it is clearly related are more likely to be exacerbated than healed by disciplinary boundaries institutionally delineating distinct areas of competence. This means that if, as a mere muso, I cross the border into, say, sociology, semiotics, neurology or communication studies, I risk offending specialists whose institutional territory I enter without the mandatory visa of disciplinary competence because I may seem to be transgressing, albeit inadvertently, the foreign territorys taboos and breaking its disciplinary laws. In such instances I can only apologise and beg authorities in the territory I am judged to have violated to treat me no worse than they would an uninformed but inquisitive tourist with honourable intentions. Notwithstanding that apology, I would suggest that it might be more constructive to interpret at least some of my illegal entries in terms of a nave but potentially useful challenge to the foreign discipline. After all, challenges in the opposite direction against music studies from the non-muso outside world inform many of this books key issues.

When, as described above, those non-muso teachers asked me to explain how the music in pop videos worked they were indirectly questioning my discipline. They seemed to be assuming that musicology could come to the rescue at a time when the discipline rarely showed interest in either popular music or in matters of musical meaning. Their assumption could in that sense be considered nave because it didnt account for the institutional reality of conventional musicology; but it also indirectly and, I believe, justifiably questioned our disciplines usefulness and legitimacy. Be that as it may, their non-muso assumption about what musicology ought to be doing resonated with my own misgivings about the discipline, particularly in terms of its apparent reluctance to deal with matters popular or semiotic. My questioning was different from theirs only in that it derived, as I see it, mainly from muso experience. That experience is worth recounting for several reasons. [1] It helps me retrospectively sort out key events influencing my involvement in and ideas about music. [2] Some familiarity with that process makes my personal and ideological baggage more transparent to readers who can then see where Im coming from and apply whatever filter seems appropriate to any passage that may cause problems. [3] The account that follows also illustrates central problems in the epistemology of music and explains why this book has been such a long time in the making.

I cant have been much older than four when I first registered that music was as sound connected to things other than itself. I remember bashing clusters on the top notes of a piano and screaming lightning, then thumping a loud cluster on its lowest notes and yelling thunder as I sat under the keyboard in delighted trepidation at the threatening sounds Id produced. Not even then (1948) did I actually believe that the top notes were or even meant lightning and the bottom ones thunder, although I might well have said so if asked, but I was even then clear that the high sounds could not possibly be linked to thunder and that the low ones were unthinkable in terms of lightning. Having patiently put up with this sort of cacophony on the piano for a year or two, my parents decided, for the sake of the familys sonic sanity, that I should be given piano lessons.

In 1952, aged eight, I was blessed with a piano teacher, Jared Armstrong, who, identifying the motoric torpor of the fingers on my left hand, looked out of the window at snow falling from a grey sky and jotted down an eight-bar piece called North Street in a Snow Storm, complete with a mournful melody to exercise my left hand and bare, static sonorities to occupy the right. In the summer he swapped my hands around in By the Banks of the Nene, another eight-bar mini-piece which this time featured a quasi-folk tune in the right hand and a static bagpipe-like drone in the left. As with the thunder and lightning, I didnt think North Street in a Snow Storm was or even meant a snowstorm in the street outside our house any more than I believed the banks of our local river to actually be in By the Banks of the Nene. I just instantly recognised the sort of mood my piano teacher had intended to put across and was in no doubt whatsoever as to which title belonged to which piece. I knew in other words that the pieces neither sounded nor looked like what their titles denoted, but I did think they sounded like what it might feel like to see or to be in the scenario designated by each title, even though I was obviously incapable at that age of distinguishing, albeit in such simple terms, between that type of connotation and other sorts of signification.

One year later I had to take lessons from a different piano teacher who made me sit national piano exams for which I had to prepare pieces drawn mainly from the euroclassical repertoire. Then, aged twelve, I was awarded a music prize. It was in front of the whole school that a local classical music celebrity presented me with a cloying biography of Mozart the Wunderkind and made a short speech in which he seemed to be saying that the tiny classical parody Id recently written was something of which the young Mozart would not have been ashamed. Well, Mozart might not have been but I was. That the local celebrity had mistaken my facetious parody for a straight style composition was one thing; worse was the resentment I felt, caused partly the Mozart book prize and partly by the local celebritys words, at being compared to a sad freak in a powdered wig who used his boyish charm and pretty music to ingratiate himself among doting rich-and-famous grown-ups in late eighteenth-century Austria. It struck me that classical musics local representatives my piano teacher, the celebrity dishing out the prize, etc. were treating me too as a precocious freak, perhaps hoping that, if flattered enough at regular intervals, I would join their ridiculous ranks, and, like an obedient dog, perform more musical tricks for them. In retrospect I suppose that recruiting another circus animal might have helped boost their credibility in the artistic talent stakes of their own social aspirations, but at the time I felt angry and insulted. Wanting no part in their weird world I resolved to outrun everyone both in the 200 metres and on the rugby pitch, to go for longer bike rides, and to devote myself at the earliest opportunity to music that seemed to actually work, that had some real use and that didnt ponce about.

As luck would have it my next music teacher, Ken Naylor, held no fascination for freaks. He was an accomplished pianist, composer and church organist who ran choirs and orchestras with great skill, who wrote mean close-harmony arrangements and who taught me how to play jazz standards. He encouraged me to compose and improvise, and introduced me to Bartk, Stravinsky and Charlie Parker, as well as to the anthems and madrigals of Elizabethan composers. He also made me regularly transpose hymns into more manageable keys for the congregation, and showed me how to change their harmonies in the last verse to add a bit of drama to the drab routine of daily prayers. He even helped me overcome my Mozart trauma by drawing attention to the composers ability to transform prettiness and wit into passages of wondrously disturbing regret. Ken Naylors professional eclecticism was living proof that no type of music could be seen as intrinsically superior or inferior to another, and that music learnt and produced by ear was just as legitimate as what you played or sang from notation. Of more obvious direct relevance to the analysis parts of this book were his practical demonstrations of relations between music as sound and something other than itself, most strikingly the word-painting skills I learnt from him when accompanying hymns in the school chapel.

Following through on the vows Id made aged twelve, I joined a trad jazz combo while still at school and later, at university, a Scottish country dance outfit and an R&B/soul band. In those three ensembles, as well as in other non-classical groups I subsequently worked with, I was the only member with any formal musical training. Being in the minority I had to curb my specialist tongue whenever we needed to discuss the sorts of sound we wanted to make. Fortunately, verbal denotation of musical structure was rarely necessary because differences of opinion were almost always settled practically using actual or imagined sound to compare musical idea x with alternative y. At no time did I ever think that my fellow band members lack of formal vocabulary denoting tonal structure meant that their musical skills and knowledge were in any way less valid or less systematic than those I had learnt in formal studies of the European classical repertoire. On the contrary, it soon became clear that the arsenal of structural terms Id had to acquire in order to obtain a B.A. in music was quite inadequate, not least when it came to issues of rhythmic/motivic bounce and drive (as in grooves and riffs), even more so when denoting the details of timbre so important in so many types of popular music.

It also became clear that I was inhabiting at least two different sociomusical worlds with different repertoires, technologies, functions, values and modes of metadiscourse. However, I never really believed that I was myself living two musically separate lives. True, the institutional and social dividing lines between the official version of euroclassical music and all the other musics with which Id come into contact were real enough; but just as my personality remained basically in tact when I learned to speak other languages, I felt I was the same musical person regardless of whichever musical idiom I happened to be playing in or listening to. The problem, I insisted perhaps arrogantly, was not with me but on the outside. If that were so I would, in the social reality outside my head, so to speak, have to confront one sphere of musical activity with another. That sort of confrontation involved not only efforts to persuade fellow rock musicians to join me at a performance of Bachs Matthew Passion and fellow euroclassical music students to listen to my Beatles tapes; it also involved developing verbal discourse, comprehensible to members of whichever group I was arguing with, that could explain in their terms the expressive and creative qualities of whichever music was unfamiliar in their socio-musical sphere. This stubborn insistence, inspired in no small part by Ken Naylors living proof of musical eclecticisms obvious advantages, meant that I acquired practical training in verbal mediation between musos and non-musos, rockers and jazzos, classical buffs and pop fans, etc. That training was also useful preparation for writing this book.

The sort of confrontation just described seemed in general to go down better with popular music acquaintances than with their euroclassical counterparts. One probable reason, I think, is that the former had nothing to lose in opening up to the latter whereas those whose career or meta-identity depended on attaining or maintaining a higher sociocultural status did. As explained in Chapter 3 (pp. 83-86) the classical music = high class equation was fuelled by the metaphysical aesthetic of absolute music which, by theoretically locating the most noble of musical experiences outside the material world, enabled the privileged classes not only to feel culturally superior by appearing to transcend mundane material reality but also to divert attention from the fact that it was they who wielded the real power actually in the material world. Given that no-one likes losing their privileges, even if (or perhaps especially if) they are illusory, it was in retrospect nave of me, if not plain stupid, to expect those with a vested interest in maintaining the absolute music aesthetic as part of the classical = class equation to recognise equal value in other musics or to welcome the discussion of music as if it meant anything except itself. The difficulty was that the world of euroclassical music, as I knew it in 1960s Britain, was highly contradictory about these matters.

While I knew very well, from working at the Aldeburgh Festival and from frequent visits to Kings College Chapel, that art music was often performed with great expressivity as if it really meant something, the music degree programme I followed at Cambridge focused mainly on technical and archival tasks. We had to complete this motet in the style of Palestrina without considering the expressive imperative of words like crucifixus or resurrexit, to decipher lute tablature without sparing a thought for Dowlands word painting, and to write essays about Wagner without linking his work to the moral, philosophical or political ideas of the composer or his times. None of it seemed to make any sense. Meanwhile I carried on gigging sporadically with the R&B band in pubs, in clubs and on student dance nights, performing numbers like Ill Go Crazy, Walking The Dog and Route 66. That sort of musical activity, on the other hand, did make social sense to me.

It was with relief that I left the Renaissance theme park of Cambridge in 1965 to do a teaching diploma in Manchester where the pragmatics of music education, including its social implications, were clearly on the agenda. It was at the height of the pop boom in northern England and I was encouraged to submit an end-of-year mini-thesis about the possible uses of pop in music education (Tagg 1966). I also managed, during my teaching practice, to keep a class of usually rowdy pupils quietly and enthusiastically occupied writing horror film scenarios following the third movement of Bartks Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. Fourteen years later Stanley Kubrick repeated the same exercise, using the same music to underscore three scenes in The Shining (1980). If it was OK for Kubrick to link music and picture in that way, I argued retrospectively, it cant have been wrong for me or my pupils to have tried our hands at it, even if the scenarios we produced were nowhere near as good as Kubricks. It was in any case more grist to the mill of linking music to other things than just music, and it was further evidence of unquestionable musical competence among a non-muso majority that included both Kubrick and my secondary school pupils.

Despite considerable encouragement from my supervisor for what must at the time have seemed quite bizarre ideas for music education, other end-of-year examiners were more conservative and predictable. They seemed to dislike my lack of enthusiasm for subjecting boys aged thirteen through sixteen to intensive vocal training and they disapproved of my reluctance to make proper use of the schools Orff instruments. Then, when I looked in the Times Education Supplement for music teaching jobs, my heart sank deeper as I discovered I would be expected to run recorder groups in one school, enter pupils for Associated Board exams in another, to teach piano and at least one wind instrument in a third, and so on. I had to conclude that there was no job in education for someone passionate about the popular and semiotic sides of music, plenty for those plodding down the same old path of performing the classics. Thats why I dumped music education as a career option and took a job in Sweden teaching English as a foreign language, keeping music on as just a hobby (1966-68).

I was much happier with music on the sidelines, so, after two years at my new job in Sweden, I decided to retrain as a language teacher (1968-71). I enrolled at the University of Gteborg and changed my musical sideline from being in a rock band to singing in a choir. Now, one of the other choir members was married to a man called Jan Ling, who had recently been asked by the Swedish government to set up a new music teacher training college. Ling told me that popular music would be on the curriculum and that I was the only person he had met with the triaxial profile: [1] degree in music, [2] teaching diploma, [3] experience of making popular music. When asked to teach some music analysis at the new college in 1971 I leapt at the opportunity. I was eager to try out ideas that had lain dormant since abandoning music as a career option, but I soon ran into difficulties.

The main problem was that the ideas I had about meaning in popular music were mostly intuitive, informed by music-making experience, not by any process of analytical reasoning. I had no coherent theory codifying that intuitive knowledge and only very patchy empirical evidence of structural aspects relating to musical semiosis in any shape or form. It was clear that if those ideas were to be of any use in education, they would have to be tested in various ways until viable patterns started to emerge that in the longer term might together constitute an at least partially coherent body of theory and method. Most of the initial testing took place in analysis classes where the students recurrent mistakes, questions and insights forced me to formulate potentially useful patterns of analytical theory and approach. So, armed with my own experiences of music and music making, with comments and questions from music students, with Dave Laings appeal for a semiotic dimension to the study of popular music (Laing 1969: 194-6), and with a few rudimentary concepts imported into musicology from hermeneutics and semiotics, I ended up producing a doctoral thesis in 1979 about the meanings of the title music to the TV series Kojak.

The Kojak thesis generated plenty of encouraging reactions but it was also criticised for concentrating on one single piece of music and for its lack of empirical underpinning. Thats why, in the 1980s, I conducted numerous reception tests on ten title tunes (not just one) and, with Bob Claridas help, started dealing with response data, transcriptions and musical analyses. The idea was to investigate listener responses in relation to structural elements in the ten theme tunes and, in the process, to thoroughly test, fine-tune and improve the analytical methods proposed in the Kojak thesis. Due mainly to the wealth of listener responses and their often complex connection to the musical structures eliciting them, Ten Little Title Tunes (TLTT) proved to be a mammoth undertaking. In addition, logistical factors, including full-time teaching commitments, the academic imperative to publish a yearly quota of articles or die, and moving continents all meant that the 914-page book was not completed until December 2003.

Even though Id been encouraged, at various points during the 1980s and 1990s, by respected friends and colleagues to produce a book like this one, and even though Id been approached by a respected publishing house interested in a book with the working title Musics Meanings, I felt unable to start work on it before completing TLTT (Ten Little Title Tunes). It just didnt feel right to write, let alone publish, Musics Meanings until the theory and method I wanted to propose in it had been thoroughly tested. TLTT documents that process of testing in considerable detail. It is often used as a source for ideas and information in this book (see p. 16, ff.).

Just as important in laying the groundwork for this book are all the students who since 1971 have attended my analysis classes. Between October 1993, when non-musos first joined my MA seminar in Liverpool, and December 2009, when I retired, I spent over 2,000 hours teaching some sort of semiotic music analysis to around 800 students. That means lots of analyses marked, lots of questions asked, lots of discussion and lots of opportunity to observe which ideas and methods caused problems or led to good results. Much of this books second part (Chapters 6-11) relies heavily on that teaching experience and on the lessons I learnt about what did and did not work, what was unnecessary, what needed clearer explanation, etc.

Part 1 (Chapters 1-5) also relies heavily on teaching experience but less on the logistics of analysis classes, much more on decades of having to confront widespread assumptions, among both musos and non-musos, about music and musical learning, assumptions that often go against the principles of analysis theory and method presented in Part 2. These assumptions constitute a sort of received wisdom consisting of articles of faith according to which music is considered as an almost exclusively subjective, almost magical and irrational phenomenon of human experience that needs to be kept in a mentally separate compartment from any systematic or rational notion of how knowledge and meaning are created and mediated. My personal credo is that failure to be rational and objective about what is habitually pigeon-holed as irrational and subjective is tantamount to intellectual treachery in a culture and society which exploits our dual consciousness for short-term goals of political or financial gain. Therefore, in order to prepare the way for the sort of theory and method I present in Part 2, I have to examine, explain and deconstruct the articles of faith which have for such a long time obstructed the development and spread of viable and democratic ways of talking about music as if it meant something other than itself.

In short, extensive testing of analysis procedures in the classroom and repeated exposure to received wisdoms about music means that I now finally feel confident enough to present the background, theory and practice of those analysis procedures to a wider public.

TLTT (Ten Little Title Tunes; Tagg & Clarida 2003) is a 914-page tome to which I often refer in this book. To avoid having to explain the rationale and procedures of TLTT each time, heres a brief resum of information relevant to its use in this publication. My back cover sales pitch for TLTT included the following statements.

[TLTT] documents the associations of hundreds of respondents to ten extracts of music, each heard without visual accompaniment but used as film or TV title music. It deals with links between listener connotations and musical strutures in the global, Anglo-US-American mass-media culture of the late twentieth century, analysing musogenic categories of thought which own serious ideological potential.

Under headings like Minor Amen and crisis chords, Sighing sixths and sevenths, Country & Latin clip-clop, Big-country modalism, Ethnic folk lutes, anaphonic telegraphy, Busy xylophones and comic bustle, The Church of the Flatted Fifth and P.I. Cool, Latin percussion and eye shadow, etc., [TLTT] reveals how notions of gender, love, loneliness, injustice, nostalgia, sadness, exoticism, nature, crime, normality, urgency, fashion, fun, the military, etc. are musically mediated.

The basic story is that between 1980 and 1985, and for methodological reasons already mentioned (pp. 14-15), I played the ten title tunes to individuals attending one of my lectures or seminars. Most of the 600-odd respondents subjected to the this exercise were Swedish, but the tunes were also tested on 44 Latin Americans. Many respondents were students still in, or who had recently left, tertiary education, some were in secondary education, others in adult education. The representation of men and women as well as of musos and non-musos was roughly equal. The basic reception test procedures, including their construction, implementation and result classification are described in Chapter 6 (esp. p. 190, ff.).

TLTT involved a lot of statistical and analytical donkeywork. Since one main aim was to find out how much of what respondents imagined as associated with what in the ten pieces, each tune had to be painstakingly transcribed, not to mention all the relevant bits of IOCM (p. 219 ff.), and responses had to be grouped in categories so that, for example, the number of men or women imagined in connection with one tune could be reasonably compared with the number of men or women associated with another. That comparison provoked an enlightening but disturbing discussion of the representation of male and female through music. Suffice it here to say that response statistics from TLTT cited in this book can be interpreted using the following example.

Over 50% of respondents mentioned something in either of the categories love or male-female couple on hearing the first tune in the test battery. Bearing in mind that the average number of concepts reported per person per tune was greater than three and that the test was one of unguided association, 50% is a very high score indicating that every other respondent independently chose to write down words like love, romance or couple on hearing the piece and thats excluding responses like stroking, floating, slow motion, embracing, kissing, dreaming and wondering. Associations in the campestral category (grass, meadows, fields, etc.) were also common (15%), as were responses like walking through/over/across the scenario (14%), in spring or summer (13%) some time in the nineteenth century (8%), most likely somewhere in Northwestern Europe (5%), definitely not in Asia, Africa or anywhere on the American continent (all 0%). Nor were any detectives, spies, cowboys, villains, crime, streets, disorder, or modern times mentioned by anybody: there was nothing fast, cosmic, urban, inimical, threatening, eruptive, conflictive, military, asocial or anything else of that type evoked by one or more of the other nine pieces, in any respondents imagination on hearing the piece. The percentages simply represent the probability of any of the individual test subjects coming up with a particular connotation in unguided response to one of the ten test tunes, or of mentioning a connotation subsequently classified in one of the categories listed in the VVA taxonomy shown as Table 6-1 (p. 199, ff.).

This 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.

Chapter 1 How much music? simply explains the ubiquity of music in everyday life and estimates its importance in terms of time and money for inhabitants of 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 musics intra- and extrageneric aspects, and the tenet that music is not a universal a language. After an intercultural comparison of words denoting what we call music and a short history of the concept in European thinking, musics relation to other modes of human expression is discussed using observations from the anthropology of human evolution as well as from theories of cross-domain representation and synaesthesis.

Chapter 3 The epistemic oil tanker is one of the bulkier vessels in this fleet of chapters. It confronts the notion of absolute music, tracing its history, demystifying its articles of faith, including those of its postmodernist counterpart, and deconstructing its ideological implications. The chapters second part identifies institutional splits in musical knowledge (poetic 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 addressing the problems of music semiotics in dealing with semantics and pragmatics.

Chapter 5 Meaning and communication is the books semiotic theory chapter. It explains key concepts like semiotics, semiology, semiosis (incl. 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 books main analytical questions about musical meaning.

Chapter 6 Intersubjectivity presents the first of two main approaches to discussing the meaning of a musical analysis object. Six reasons for prioritising the aesthesic rather than poetic pole are followed by a brief presentation of how ethnographic observations can help in the semiotic analysis of music. The bulk of the 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 short 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 allay non-muso anxieties about the designation of musics structural elements as an essential part of analysis procedure.

Chapter 8 Parameters of musical expression [60% complete 2011-09-16] deals with poetic factors determining how any piece or passage of music sounds and what it potentially communicates. The first part presents paramusical parameters (audience, venue, lyrics, images, etc.) and their role in the construction of meaning. Most of this long chapter is devoted to simple explanations of the four main T-s of musical expression, i.e. the temporal-spatial (duration, speed, rhythm, metre, period, aural staging, etc.), the timbral (instrumentation, signal treatment, loudness, etc.), the tonal (pitch, register, interval, melody, tonal vocabulary, etc.) and the total (combinations of the other three T-s, including polyphony, harmony, counterpoint, texture, form).

Chapter 9 A simple sign typology [under construction]. With potentially meaningful musical structures (musemes) identified and linked to possible fields of paramusical connotation (Chapters 6-8), this chapter presents workable ways of checking the viability of those links. Does the museme relate to its PMFC as an anaphone through the process of gestural interconversion, or as a genre synecdoche by referring to other music and its connotations, or is it an episodic marker signifying start, end or and now? Or does it just identify a home style in relation to other styles of music (style indicator)? Or is it a combination of more than one of those four basic sign types?

Chapter 10 Notes on vocal persona [under construction] concentrates on one complex of parameters of musical expression whose meaningful details non-musos tend to identify and label more easily than musos do. These aesthesic and vernacular characterisations of spoken and singing voices are sorted into a taxonomy including descriptors of vocal costume, as well as those derived from demographics, professions, psychological and narrative archetypes, etc. Practical ways of relating vocal sound to posture and attitude are explained so that its meaning can be more easily grasped and verbalised as part of the semiotic analysis.

Chapter 11 Analysing film music. After a short description of the course Music and the Moving Image and a discussion of conceptual prerequisites to the subject, the rest of the chapter focuses on the student assignment Cue list and analysis of a feature film, concentrating on underscore and presenting ways of explaining how music contributes to the overall message of both individual scenes and to the film as a whole.

Chapter 12 Epilogue [not yet written] will contain final thoughts and comments, in question and answer form, summarising some of the books main issues and including a where do we go from here? section.

Terms that Ive borrowed, adapted or had to coin in order to designate phenomena relevant to the ideas presented in this book are listed alphabetically and defined in the Glossary (p. 469) which also explains abbreviations and other terms that may be unfamiliar to non-muso readers. The first time such terms occur in the book they are flagged with the symbol and, layout circumstances permitting, set in a different font to the surrounding text. For example, whole-tone scale means that the term whole-tone scale is defined under W in the Glossary.

There are two source reference appendices to this book: the bibliography (p. 441) and the list of recorded references (LRR for short, p. 453).

The bibliography should really be called a list of verbal references since it includes not only books (??????) and published articles but also online texts. Bibliographical conventions largely follow those set out in sections 11.2 and 12.2 (pp. 77-81, 88-89) of Assignment and Dissertation Tips at tagg.org/xpdfs/assdissv5.pdf. In-text references to the bibliography follow the standard Harvard system.

To save space, the initial http://www. in internet addresses (URLs) has been omitted when referring to online sources. To distinguish these sources from surrounding text and to save space, this font (Tahoma) is used. Dates of visits to URLs are formatted yymmdd and placed in square brackets after the relevant URL, for example tagg.org [100921] for a visit to my home page on 21st September 2010.

I was initially embarrassed by the number of references made in this book to my own work. However, suspicion of self-aggrandisement quickly gave way to the realisation that I have nothing to gain from self-promotion now that Im a pensioner and my career is over. No, the self-referencing is there because this book draws so much more on my own experience as a music practitioner, teacher and scholar than on anyone elses. Another reason is that several of the topics Ive brought together in this single volume have only appeared in writings scattered throughout dozens of different articles, books or course materials, and that those writings often go into greater musical-structural detail than would be appropriate in this volume with its projected non-muso readership. Thats why, rather than pretend that no such sources exist, I thought it better to refer to my own work so that those wanting more meat on the bone would know where to look. One final reason for the numerous self-references is that substantial parts of this book have not previously appeared in any written form. I simply decided to prioritise those previously unwritten parts and, where appropriate, to refer to what was already available.

The LRR lists all recorded sources referred to in this book. The LRR includes pocket scores and sheet music as well as phonograms, videograms, online and off-air recordings, etc. In-text referencing and the LRR layout follow the basic conventions set out in sections 11.3 and 12.3 of Assignment and Dissertation Tips (pp. 82-85; 89-90 at tagg.org/xpdfs/assdissv5.pdf).

In-text musical source references follow the same principles as bibliographical source references. For example, Norman (1962) refers uniquely to publishing details entered in the LRR for the original recording of The James Bond Theme (p. 461). On occasions where confusion might arise as to whether the in-text reference points to the bibliography or LRR, the books icon (b) will be used to indicate the former and the Play button (q) to indicate the latter. For example: Eisler (1973) could refer, depending on context, either to volume one of his writings collected under the title Musik und Politik (listed in the bibliography), or to a recording of his Solidarittslied issued by Balkanton after the fascist coup in Chile (in the LRR); in this case b Eisler (1973) would uniquely refer to the bibligraphy, q Eisler (1973) to the LRR. For more space-saving symbols, including F for a film, f for a film director, n for sheet music, v for a vocalist, C for a conductor, etc., see the table at the start of the LRR on page 453.

YouTube postings are referenced using the unique filename code appearing in their absolute URL address. For example, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msM28q6MyfY becomes simply E msM28q6MyfY, a 70% reduction of line space from 42 to 13 characters. To view any YouTube clip referenced in this way, just copy the unique code (e.g. msM28q6MyfY), paste it into the YouTube Search box and press Enter. Only that one single clip will appear in the YouTube display. Just click the Play button (q) to view/hear.

In text and footnotes H refers to an audio and to a video link on the page tagg.org/bookxtrax/NonMuso/AVrefs.htm.

Most of the musical works referred to in this book have at one time or another been issued as commercial recordings. It would in the 1990s have been absurd to expect readers to have access to more than a very small proportion of those recordings. In 2011, however, it is in most cases a very simple matter if you knew where to look. Fearing prosecution for inducement to illegal acts, I cant be more precise here than to say that there are several hugely popular websites where you can hear the majority of recorded works, audio or audiovisual, I refer to in this book. Some of those sites are pay-per-download and legal, some are legal and free, while other free sites may have posted recordings illegally. This much I can say: an online search for |Police "Dont Stand So Close To Me"| (with the inverted commas) produced 32,200 hits [2009-06-13], the first two of which, when clicked, took me to actual online recordings of the original issue of the tune (q Police, 1980). Using the on-screen digital timecode provided by the site hosting the recording, I was able to pinpoint the radical change from verse to chorus at 1:48. The whole process of checking a precise musical event in just one among millions of songs took less than a minute. Please be aware that while it is not illegal to listen to media posted on line, downloading works under copyright without permission or payment most probably is.

Referenced recordings that were at the time of publication not readily accessible are of two types: those in the public domain or which Ive produced myself and others. In both cases the recordings are listed as hyperlinks at tagg.org/bookxtrax/NonMuso/AVrefs.htm and housed on my website (tagg.org) and in the latter case only short extracts illustrating the relevant point are included.

Several of the YouTube files referenced in this book are, for reasons I have yet to discover, blocked in Germany. Those Ive produced myself can be alternatively accessed either via links at tagg.org/ptavmat.htm#Germany or by using a proxy server (see E jP87I2hNWDQ In Deutschland gesperrt).

The index includes page references to all proper names appearing in the book. That means it includes reference to authors, editors, performers, composers, etc., as well as to titles of musical works, songs, tracks, albums, films, TV productions and so on mentioned in the pages preceding the bibliography. The index also includes page references to all topics and to important concepts covered in the book.

1. Arial Narrow or Tahoma is used to save space, especially when internet URLs are presented, e.g. |tagg.org/mmmsp/index.html|.

2. Sans-serif is used for two purposses: [1] to distinguish computer keyboard input from the words around it, for example: a Google search for |Police "Dont Stand So Close To Me"| produced 32,200 hits; [2] to distinguish the headings of tables and figures from the surrounding text.

3. Bold Courier lower-case is used to distinguish note names (a b$ b8 c# etc.) from other uses of single letters, as well as from the very few chord names mentioned in this book and which are always given in upper-case (B$, C#m7$5, etc.).

4. A [f(U!nEtIk fOnt] (phonetic font) makes the occasional appearance for the reasons given on page 21 and in accordance with the symbols shown in Table P-1 on page 26.

CAPITALS are in general used according to the norms set out in section 6.9 of Assignment and Dissertation Tips |tagg.org/xpdfs/assdissv5.pdf|.

Small capitals are used for five purposes, the first four of which occur in the main body of text, the first two of those deriving from their usage in Lakoff and Johnson (1979).

1. To save space and to avoid having to insert a plethora of hyphens and inverted commas when introducing a short string of words, often adjectivally, to denote an integral concept, for example: The music is music myth is a symptom of dual consciousness.

2. To distinguish between typically authorial words and those of real or imaginary listeners responding to music, for example: its essential to know how much Austria rather than, say, Brazil or Japan, and how much shampoo rather than guns or cigarettes respondents imagined on hearing the reception test piece.

3. In Chapter 8, to highlight an important term introduced for the first time (roman font), or to refer to a term explained elsewhere in the same chapter or in the Glossary (italic font).

4. To save page space with frequently recurring capital-letter abbreviations, for example dvd instead of DVD, iocm instead of IOCM.

5. To facilitate quicker identification of alphabetically ordered entries in the Bibliography and List of Recorded References (lrr).

Italics are in general used according to the norms set out in section 6.10 of Assignment and Dissertation Tips (2001: 49-52) |tagg.org/xpdfs/assdissv5.pdf|.

Italics are also used to demarcate longer expressions that for reasons of syntax and comprehension have to be included as part of the sentence containing them and which would be even clumsier if delimited with quotation marks, for instance: you can also refer to musical structures in relative terms, for example the danger stabs just before the final chord, or the last five notes of the twangy guitar tune just before it repeats.

The pronunciation of some terms in the Glossary is presented using the international phonetic alphabet (IPA), e.g. [pO!jEtIk] rather than [p(U!EtIk] (poetic), for poetic, [!tQmbr(], not [!tImb(] (timber), for timbre, but [!tImbr9l] for relating to timbre. The phonemes of standard, southern UK English are set out in Table P-1.

Q hat, cat, map, Africa o: or, oar, awe, war, more, all, for, four, autumn, taught, thought

plough (cf. o: and 9U) ( about, better, tutor, tuition, currant, current, colour, fuel, little, liar, lyre, future, nurture, savanna, India, Italy, Europe, connect, persist, appoint

D the, that, breathe, clothes, although, weather (cf. T) (: circumspect, fern, fir, fur, learn,

dZ jazz, John, general, gin, footage, bridge, Fiji, Django, Giacomo (U no, know, toe, toad, cold, bow (knot), although, (cf. aU, o:)

i: eat, sees, seas, seize, Fiji, email u: food, cool, rule, rude, through, threw

N singing, synchronise, think, gong, incredible, Z genre [!ZA:nr0 Fr. Z1%], decision, measure, seizure, garage, Zhivago, Rzsa, Janeiro, iek, Dvo?k [!dvo:ZQk]

Space-saving icons like c (composer), m (performer), 0 (phonogram) and f (film director) are set out in the table at the start of the List of Recorded References (LRR) on page 453. Symbols used in the main text or in footnotes include: (see Glossary), b (Bibliography), q (LRR), E (YouTube file), H (audio example), (video example).

The software used to produce this book, Adobe FrameMaker v.8, has one irritating defect: if there isnt enough room at the bottom of the current page for the complete text of a footnote, FrameMaker puts the entire footnote text at the bottom of the following page, rather than starting the footnote text at the bottom of the same page and continuing it on the next one. Therefore, if there is no text at the bottom of the page on which a footnote flag number occurs in the main body of text, dont be alarmed. The complete footnote text will appear at the bottom of the next page.

You may also occasionally find the same footnote number occurring in the main text twice in succession, like this.30 Dont worry: both numbers intentionally refer to the same footnote.

Some readers find my use of footnotes excessive and annoying. Ive been accused of either flaunting or feigning erudition but more often Im told that footnotes interfere with the flow of reading. While I sincerely regret causing any reader any irritation, I persist in my struggle for the right to footnote for the following six reasons.

1. Many footnotes consist of either references to other work or of extended argumentation about, or exemplification of, a topic which, for reasons of space and clarity, cannot be included in the main body of text. The point is that readers sceptical about some of the things I try to put across need to know if I have any backing for what I write. Since it would be unfair to lumber all readers with that sort of extra evidence, I try to make it as unobtrusive as possible by consigning it to footnotes.

2. Some readers are simply inquisitive and may just want to know a bit more about a topic that I cant fully cover in the main body of text. I try to provide pointers for those readers if and when I can.

3. Since this book is written with a mainly non-muso readership in mind, I have painstakingly tried to exclude both musical notation and musicological jargon from the main body of text. On a few occasions, however, additional structural information potentially useful to musos has been consigned to footnotes.

4. Despite the donkeywork involved in writing footnotes (a good 30% of the effort invested in producing this book), I think that academic procedures for source referencing are important so readers know when the author is aware of using someone elses ideas. Its also important, I think, for readers to be able to find verbal, musical and audiovisual source materials relevant to what I write about. The main body of text would be much less readable if it included all those references and it would be even less user-friendly if readers had to turn to the appendices or go online each time they wanted to know, for example, which recording of a particular tune Im referring to. Footnotes provide a compromise solution to that problem.

5. As I try to explain in Chapter 2, music is a combinatory and holistic symbolic system involving cross-domain representation and synaesthesis. That in turn means that talking or writing about music can (and maybe should) go off in almost any direction. Although I make valiant efforts in this book to conform to the one-dimensional linearity of the written word, it would be dishonest to give readers the false impression that the richness and precision of musical meaning can be realistically explained using the linearity of verbal discourse and nothing else. Therefore, while I consider such linearity useful when discussing musics meanings, there are occasions when it becomes inappropriate and when going off at a tangent is the only viable discursive strategy. That said, if I were to put every possible tangent, every pertinent train of lateral musogenic thought, into the main body of text it would at best read like a bad parody of passages from Tristram Shandy (Sterne 1759-67). I therefore take the occasional liberty of putting some of the inevitably lateral thinking that comes with the territory of music into footnotes.

6. Contradictions between musical and verbal discourse are sometimes downright comical. Ive included a few such items in the main text, for instance the dubious assumption that music is polysemic and the implication that atonal music contains no tones. A few other jokes are peripheral to the main argument and have been relegated to footnotes. Typical examples of marginal frivolity are: [1] in the section on transscansion, where I suggest gormless words you could sing to the Star Wars theme (Williams, 1977); [2] in the section on sonic anaphones, where I raise the issue of whether or not live poultry was used in Psycho Chicken (The Fools, 1980).

Its for these six reasons that I fervently exhort those irritated by footnotes to treat them indulgently, to at least tolerate their presence and, if need be, to simply ignore them. Reading footnotes is after all an option. They arent forced on you and they dont treat you as an infantile moron like the adverts on commercial TV, Google or YouTube do. If the footnotes still bother you, just think of them like bonus features on a dvd: you dont have to watch those any more than you have to read my footnotes or open ad links on line. I dont decide what you read of this book: you do.

Given that most musical recordings exist in digital form, and given that digital playback equipment includes real-time display, the position of events within pieces of music discussed in this book is usually indicated in minutes and seconds. With 0:00 or 0:00:00 indicating the start of the recording in question, 0:56 indicates a point 56 seconds after 0:00 and 1:12:07 indicates a point one hour, twelve minutes and seven seconds from the start (see Unequivocal timecode placement, p. 246, ff.). Durations are expressed in the same form, e.g. 4:33 or 04:33 or 0:04:33 meaning 4 minutes and 33 seconds. To save space, simple timings may sometimes be expressed as follows (examples): 6" = six seconds, 12" or 12.5" = twelve and a half seconds, 4'33 or 4'33" = four minutes and thirty-three seconds.

Milliseconds are given either as an integer followed by the abbreviation ms (e.g. 5 ms for five milliseconds) or, when denoting exact points in a recording, as the final part after the decimal point following the number of seconds, e.g. 1:12.500 for one minute and twelve point five seconds, or 1:12:05.750 for one hour, twelve minutes and 5 seconds.

Frame counts in audiovisual recordings are expressed like milliseconds except that they consist of only two digits and are separated from the seconds count by a semicolon, e.g. 1:12:07;16 = one hour, twelve minutes, seven seconds and sixteen frames. Unless otherwise stated, frames counts are based on the NTSC rate of thirty (29.97) per second.

When abbreviated, dates are usually formatted yyyy-mm-dd (e.g. 2011-02-18) in the main body of text. In footnote references and appendices they also appear as yymmdd (e.g. 110218). The date in both cases here is the 18th of February, 2011. The 9th of November 1981 would be 1981-11-09 (main text) or 811109 (references).

Im indebted to my teachers and mentors who encouraged me to make music and to think about music as if it really meant something other than itself. Im thinking in particular of Jared Armstrong, Ken Naylor, Aubrey Hickman and Jan Ling without whom I would not have seen any of this through. Id like also to thank Wilfred Mellers for having blazed a trail for musicologists interested in matters popular and semiotic and both Line Grenier and Jean-Jacques Nattiez for provoking me to consider important theoretical issues. Thanks also to Simon Bertrand and Shawn Pitre for having so generously and competently acted as my teaching assistants in Montral and to Margit Kronberg without whom I would never have dared make connections between music and so many other sorts of something else.

I want to thank those friends and colleagues who asked me ages ago to write this book, particularly Dave Laing (London), Simon Frith (Edinburgh) and Franco Fabbri (Milan). Thanks also to Corin Aharonin (Montevideo), Bob Davis (Huddersfield and Leeds), Franco Fabbri (Milan), Serena Facci (Rome), Susana Gonzlez (Mexico City), Markus Heuger (Cologne), Bruce Johnson (Sydney), Andr Lambert (Montral), Laura Leante (Durham), Fred Maus (Charlottesville), Morten Michelsen (Copenhagen), Will Straw (Montral), Garry Tamlyn (Brisbane), Martha Ulha (Rio de Janeiro), Peter Wicke (Berlin) and Tim Wise (Salford) for recommending my methods and/or for letting me try out, over recent decades, my analysis teaching on their students.

Im also grateful to graduate students past and present, in particular to Karen Collins, Bob Davis, Laura Jordn, Serge Lacasse, Andr Lambert, Guillaume Samson, Luana Stan and Garry Tamlyn , as well as to other students (e.g. Alison Beck, Solne Derbal, Joanne Fellows, Anne-Laure Feron, Franois Gauthier, Marie Goffette, Hlne Laurin, Nicolas Masino, Jonathan Shave and Nick Thompson) for testing my methods to the limits and producing excellent analyses. In fact Im grateful to all students in Gteborg, Liverpool, Montral and elsewhere who enrolled for one of my classes in either Popular Music Analysis or Music and the Moving Image, who introduced me to so much music Id never heard before and whose insights, questions, frustrations, curiosity and enthusiasm taught me so much about how music communicates what to whom with what effect.

I realise that these acknowledgements may remind some readers of embarassing Oscar acceptance speeches but I honestly cannot avoid thanking the Dixie Chicks for having had the courage of their convictions, both politically and musically. Ladies, as documented in the film Shut Up and Sing! (Dixie Chicks, 2007), you demonstrate conclusively through your words and deeds how standing up for the right thing can make any of us grow and flourish musically, intellectually, professionally and personally. I have derived endless encouragement from your example and I was, at the time of the Shepherds Bush incident (the Bush pun is excellent) twice your average age. Thanks to all three of you, as well as to those who supported you, for showing so much musical and moral backbone.

Finally, sincere thanks to Bob Davis and his family for their warm welcome and generous hospitality when I finally returned home after so many years working abroad and to Bob in particular for his patience, intelligence and experience when I felt unsure about what I was writing. Last but not least, thanks go to my daughter, Mia Tagg, for keeping me at least half sane and for just being there wherever I was during the long trek of teaching, talking, thinking, learning, playing, arranging, arguing, ranting, editing, composing, computing, travelling, reading and writing that culminated in this book.

One simple way of understanding musics importance is to estimate the amount of time the average citizen of industrialised nations is exposed to music on a daily basis.

[1] If the TV monitor in the average household is switched on for over four hours a day, at least 120 minutes of music in the form of jingles, logos, advertising music, theme tunes and underscore, occasionally also as performances and music videos will pass through the TVs speakers into its viewers ears and brains.

[2] Music heard in shops, boutiques, malls, supermarkets, hotels, bars and lifts (elevators), or at religious and sporting events, or at the dentists, or in public spaces like airports and railway stations, or at the cinema, or in the theatre, occupies roughly thirty minutes a day in the life of the average citizen of industrialised nations.

[3] Some people wake up to a clock radio, some listen to weather and traffic reports and some just keep a the radio on in the background for large parts of the day. Another thirty minutes per day seems a reasonable estimate here, given that most radio time consists of music between bouts of news and weather.2

[4] Some people are exposed to music all day in their place of work, others arent. Another average of thirty minutes per day would hardly be an excessive estimate for this source of music.

[5] Most people listen to some music of their own choice at home, in the car or on a personal stereo system. We may also hear music performed at festivals, on the street, in clubs, bars, concert halls, theatres and so on. Many or us sing, whistle or hum in the shower or in the kitchen and parents still sing lullabies and nursery rhymes to their young children. Some of us go to karaoke bars and most of us join in Happy Birthday and other festive songs. Some of us even play an instrument or sing in a choir: if so, we have to practise. These voluntary acts of music will likely account for another average of thirty minutes per person per day.

[6] Young people in the USA spend an hour every day playing computer games with virtually constant audio. If young people constitute one fifth of the population, the average citizen will hear another twelve minutes of music per day while gaming.

[7] If you have to phone a large corporation or public institution, you will, after your call is important to us, be subjected to hold music before you finally reach a human being. On an average day you will also hear a fair number of mobile phone ring tones, as well as several musical attention-grabbers over P.A. systems in airports or train stations. You may even be within earshot of a belfry or carillon. It is not be unreasonable to estimate an average of another five minutes per day for hold music, ring tones and tonal signals, bell chimes, etc.

If these figures have any validity, average citizens of the Western world (including babies, pensioners and the deaf as well as pop fans and music students) hear music for more than one quarter of their waking life. Even if you think these figures are exaggerated, it is unlikely that any other sign system the spoken or written word, pictures, dancing, etc. can on its own rival musics share of our average daily dose of symbolic perception.

Musics share of our time budget is echoed by its economic importance. Despite doomsday declarations from the industry about the supposedly adverse effects of file sharing, global phonogram sales rose constantly to stay at over $40 billion (US) between 1995 and 2001, since when they have fallen back to 1990 levels of around $25 billion. This recent decline should be seen against the backdrop of substantial global increases in the following areas: [1] collection of publishing rights for recorded music; [2] sale of satellite/cable TV services and of computer games, both featuring more than their fair share of music; [3] digital delivery of music, accounting for 29% of industrial revenue in 2010; [4] the recent emergence of live music promotion as the industrys biggest money spinner (Cloonan 2011). All of these trends should in their turn be seen in the context of the financial meltdown of 2008 and of the resultant radical reduction of disposible income experienced by citizens of those nations on whose statistics the trends are based. Its also worth noting that music is an important source of revenue for the national economy of countries like the UK, the USA and Sweden. It can therefore be quite instructive to estimate how much money the average citizen of the industrialised West spends on music.

Lets say you buy a new sound system for your home every ten years and lets assume that the music you hear via the TV and DVD player you buy every ten years is worth one quarter of the purchase price value. Perhaps you have a mobile phone that plays audio and video, most likely also a sound card and audiovisual playback software on your computer. You may also be among the one in twenty who buys musical instruments, sheet music, etc. and you might be paying for private music lessons. Youll almost certainly have to buy cables, plugs and batteries for various items of your music equipment and youll definitely be paying for the electricity you use to run it all. Estimating all these costs at $3,600 over ten years works out at one dollar a day.

If you still buy recorded CDs, or if you regularly pay to download music files, or if you buy blank CDs or DVDs, or extra memory to store your films and music, youll probably be spending about $150 annually ($0.40/day). In addition to that, the share of the money covering music production and copyright costs when you buy or rent a DVD, or when you use pay-per-view, plus whatever musical activities, including public music education, your local and national authorities may see fit to provide or subsidise via taxation and levies, may well account for another $150 annually. All in all that makes another $300 per average year or $0.80 on a daily basis.

Much of our musical spending is indirect. Radio and TV license fees have to cover the costs of broadcasting copyrighted music as a public service while commercial broadcasters pay for the same rights with the money they get from the pedlars of consumerist propaganda who in their turn pass down their advertising costs to those of us who buy the goods or services in question. Marketeers use money they get from us to pay radio and TV stations to broadcast music that will make us want stay tuned to whatever channel diffuses their propaganda. This means that whenever we buy something advertised on broadcast media we arent just paying for propaganda production: were also paying for the very thing that exposes us to their propaganda, i.e. music on our favourite format radio station. Its very difficult to quantify what proportion of a commoditys retail price is devoted to its marketing, let alone determine what part of the advertising budget goes to musical production but there is little doubt that the amounts of money passing hands here are substantial.

Every time we visit a caf, restaurant, shopping mall, hospital, railway station, etc. where piped music is publicly diffused, the costs of licensing that music are once again passed down to the customer or user. Every time we visit a bar or club featuring live music or a karaoke machine we will either have to pay an entrance fee or more than the usual bar price for drinks. Even mobile phone ringtone rights and telephone hold music costs are ultimately paid for by us, the customers. Then perhaps you are a member of the Lady Gaga or Karlheinz Stockhausen fan club, in which case you might buy a T-shirt or other merchandising memorabilia. Add to these indirect payments for music the possibility of two visits each year to musical performances in a concert hall, theatre, opera house, entertainment complex or sports arena, plus your travel expenses for getting to and from the venue, and we are looking at another estimated $250 each year or $0.70 a day.

In short, we probably spend on average the best part of $900 each year on music, the equivalent of about $2.50 each day. In January 2007, $2.50 was roughly what you would pay in Canada for a standard loaf of bread or for a litre of milk.

If music is as important as the descriptions just presented suggest, why does it so often seem to end up near the bottom of the academic heap? The short answer is that education and research (including this book) are largely language-based while music is a non-verbal system for mediating ideas. We may like to talk enthusiastically about our musical experiences and tastes but we are often at a loss when it comes to explaining why and how which sounds have what effect.

Why and how does who communicate what to whom and with what effect is of course the million-dollar question of semiotics and the last part of this book will suggest ways of tackling that question in relation to music. Still, before launching into the treacherous waters of music semiotics it is essential to establish a workable definition of the word music according to its use in contemporary Western culture. We at least need to know what sort of boat were in before navigating those troubled seas, because some of our difficulties about explaining music come from culturally specific assumptions about its very nature.

Music as a universal language, as the language of love, or at least of body and feelings rather than of the rational mind, or as an art transcending the sordid social realities of everyday life, etc., etc. these seem to be some of the most commonly held assumptions about the nature of music in the culture I live in. Glancing through the estimates of musics everyday importance (pp. 33-38), you dont have to be a genius to deduce that those notions of music wont be much use in explaining how and why, in the everyday reality of most people living in our media-saturated society, music communicates what to whom with what effect. A more prosaic working definition of music is needed. Please note that the definitions and axioms that follow do not so much describe what I think the word music ought to mean as the sorts of thing it seems to me to mean in everyday usage.

In this book, music will be understood as that form of interhuman communication in which humanly organised non-verbal sound can, following culturally specific conventions, carry meaning relating to emotional, gestural, tactile, kinetic, spatial and prosodic patterns of cognition.

That rather convoluted working definition can be made clearer with the help of the following eight axioms.

1. Music cannot exist unless it is heard or registered by someone, whether out loud or inside someones head.

2. Although the original source of musical sound does not have to be human, music is always the result of some kind of human mediation, intention or organisation, typically through production practices like composition, arrangement and performance. In other words, to become music, one or more humans has/have to organise sounds (that may or may not be considered musical in themselves), into sequentially and synchronically ordered patterns. For example, the sound of a smoke alarm is unlikely to be regarded in itself as music, but sampled and repeated over a drum track, or combined with sounds of screams and conflagration edited in at certain points, it can become music.

3. If points 1 and 2 are valid, then music is a matter of interhuman communication.

4. Like the spoken word, music is mediated as sound but, unlike speech, musics sounds do not need to include words, even though one of the most common forms of music making entails the singing, chanting or reciting of words. Another way of understanding the distinction is to remember that while the prosodic, or musical aspects of speech tonal, timbral, durational and metric elements such as inflexion, intonation, accentuation, timbre, speed of delivery, timing, periodicity, etc., are all important to the communication of the spoken word, a wordless utterance consisting only of prosodic elements ceases by definition to be speech because it has no words: it is most likely to be understood as music.

5. Although closely related to human touch, gesture and movement fdancing, marching, strolling, jumping, hitting, tapping, shaking, breathing, blowing, stroking, scraping, wiping, etc., human touch, gesture and movement can exist without music even if music cannot be produced without the mediation of some sort of human touch, gesture or movement (even at the computer keyboard).

6. If points 4 and 5 are valid, music is no more equivalent to touch, gesture or movement than it is to speech, even though it is intimately associated with all four.

7. If music involves the human organisation and perception of non-verbal sound (points 1-6, above), and if it is closely associated with touch, gesture, movement and prosodic aspects of speech, it is close to preverbal modes of sensory perception and, consequently, to the mediation of somatic (corporeal) and affective (emotional) aspects of human cognition.

8. Although music is a universal human phenomenon, and even though there may be a few general bio-acoustic universals of musical expression (p. 45, ff.), the same sounds or combinations of sounds are not necessarily intended, heard, understood or used in the same way in different musical cultures (Tenet 3, p. 45).

In addition to these eight axioms it is important to posit three more tenets about the concept of music.

Particularly musical (and choreographic) types of communication are those involving a concerted simultaneity of sound events or movements, that is, between a group and its members, between a group and an individual or between two groups. While you can sing, play, dance, talk, paint, sculpt and write to or for yourself and for others, it is very rare for several people to simultaneously talk, write, paint or sculpt in time with each other. In fact, as soon as speech is subordinated to temporal organisation of its prosodic elements it becomes intrinsically musical, as is evident from the choral character of rhythmically chanted slogans in street demonstrations or in the role of the choir in Ancient Greek drama. Thanks to this factor of concerted simultaneity, music and dance are particularly suited to expressing collective messages of affective and corporeal identity of individuals in relation to themselves, to each other, and to their social, as well as physical, surroundings.

Direct imitations of, or reference to, sound outside the framework of musical discourse are relatively uncommon elements in most Western musics. In fact, musical structures often seem to be objectively related to either: [a] their occurrence in similar guise in other music; or [b] their own context within the piece of music in which they (already) occur. At the same time, it is silly to treat music as a self-contained system of sound combinations because changes in musical style are often found in conjunction with (accompanying, preceding, following) change in the society and culture of which the music is part.

The contradiction between music only refers to music (the intrageneric notion) and music is related to society (extrageneric) is non-antagonistic. A recurrent symptom observed when studying how musics vary inside society and from one society to another in time or place is the way in which new means of musical expression are incorporated into the main body of any given musical tradition from outside the framework of its own discourse. These intonation crises work in a number of different ways. They can:

refer to other musical codes, by acting as social connotors of what sort of people use those other sounds in which situations, for example an ethnic flute in the middle of a piece of mainstream pop or a pastoral drone inserted into a Baroque oratorio;

reflect changes in sound technology, acoustic conditions, or the soundscape, as well as changes in collective self-perception accompanying these developments, for example from clavichord to grand piano, from bagpipe to accordion, from rural to urban blues, from rock music to techno pop;

reflect fluctuations in class structure or other notable demographic change, such as reggae influences on British rock; or the shift in dominance of US popular music (1930s - 1960s) from Broadway shows to the more rock-, blues- and country-based styles from the US South and West;

Cross-cultural universals of musical code are bio-acoustic. While such relationships between musical sound and the human body are at the physical basis of all music, the majority of musical communication is culturally specific. The basic bio-acoustic universals of music can be summarised in the following four relationships:

between [a] the rate[s] at which notes or groups of notes are presented (pulse, surface rate, accentuations etc.) and [b] rates of heartbeat (pulse) or breathing, or footsteps when walking or running, or other bodily movement (shaking, shivering, waving, pulling, pushing, etc.). Put simply, no-one can musically relax in a hurry or stand still while running;

between [a] musical loudness and timbre (attack, envelope, decay, etc.) and [b] certain types of physical activity. This means no-one can make gentle or caressing kinds of musical statement by striking hard objects sharply and that it is counterproductive to yell jerky lullabies at breakneck speed. Conversely, no-one is likely to use smooth phrasing or soft timbres for hunting or war situations because those involved will be too relaxed to do their job;

between [a] speed and loudness of tone beats and [b] the acoustic setting. This means that quick, quiet tone beats are indiscernible if there is a lot of reverberation and that slow, long, loud ones are difficult to sustain if there is little or no reverberation. This is one reason why a dance or pub rock band brings its own adjustable acoustic space, in the form of echo and reverb units, to venues where carpets and clothes absorb the sounds the band produces.

between [a] musical phrase lengths and [b] the capacity of the human lung. This means that few people can sing or blow and breathe in at the same time. It also implies that musical phrases tend to last between roughly one and nine seconds.

The general areas of connotation just mentioned (acoustic situation, movement, speed, energy and non-musical sound) are all in a bio-acoustic relationship to the various musical parameters with which they are associated (pulse, volume, phrase duration, timbre, etc.). These relationships may well be cross-cultural, but it does not mean that evaluation of such phenomena as large spaces (cold and lonely versus free and open), hunting (exhilarating versus cruel), hurrying (exciting versus stressful) will also be the same even inside one and the same culture, let alone between cultures. One reason for such discrepancy is that the musical parameters mentioned in the list of universals (pulse, volume, general phrase duration and certain aspects of timbre and pitch) do not include the way in which rhythmic, metric, timbral, tonal, melodic, instrumentational or harmonic parameters are organised in relation to each other inside the musical discourse. Such musical organisation presupposes some sort of social organisation and cultural context before it can be created, understood or otherwise invested with meaning. In other words, only very general bio-acoustic types of connotation can be considered as cross-cultural universals of music. Therefore, even if musical and linguistic boundaries do not necessarily coincide, it is fallacious to regard music as a universal language.

To clarify this essential point about musics cultural specificity, it is worth mentioning a little experiment I conducted at a symposium on cross-cultural communication. I informed thirteen participants, all working in the sphere of immigrant cultures, that they would hear eight short examples of music which were all connected to one and the same thing: an important event in any culture and something which happens to every human being. The participants were asked to guess what the common denominator might be and, if they could not think of anything, to jot down on a piece of paper whatever mood, type of action, behaviour, images or thoughts the music suggested to them. All eight examples, each taken from a different non-Western music tradition, were connected with death, a universal phenomenon if ever there was because, with the exception of mass casualties in wars, natural disasters etc., the death of virtually every individual is marked by some form of ritual in all cultures. Did the thirteen cross-cultural experts manage to spot death in the music they heard?

Despite the obvious initial hint (an important event in any culture and something that happens to every human being), not a single respondent associated death or anything death-related (wake, funeral, mourning etc.) with any of the eight death-related music examples. True, connotations like complaint, wailing, sadness, serious and suffering occurred in response to two of eight extracts, but the most common descriptions of all the examples had to do with either [1] energetic action or excitement, for example work, war, fighting, hunting, agitation, dancing, adventure, gymnastics; or [2] happiness and celebration, including joy, confidence, feasting, abandon, contentment etc. There was even some love and tenderness as well as one wedding. More significant is perhaps that eleven of the thirteen respondents tried to identify the cultural origin of the music: there were two Africas (plus one jungle), two Arabs (plus one each for bazaar, desert, camels and Yemen), as well as one each for China, Greece, India and Turkey. Clearly, the examples presenting music for funerals, burials, etc. were considered foreign and associated with a variety of moods and events, the vast majority of which have no discernible link with anything death-like in contemporary urban Western culture.

Another way of understanding the Western concept of music is to compare it to different but related concepts in other cultures. Although no human society of which we have any knowledge has ever been without music in the sense defined on page 41, the concept of music is by no means universal. For example, the Tiv nation of West Africa (Keil 1977) and the Ewe of Togo and Eastern Ghana do not appear to have found it necessary to single out music as a phenomenon requiring a special word any more than the British have needed different words for the three basic types of snow that the Inuktitut language conceptually refines into several subcategories. To be fair, the Ewe do actually use the English word music, but only as an untranslated loan word to denote foreign phenomena like singing church hymns or listening to the radio. The music they make themselves in traditional village life has no equivalent label in the Ewe language. According to Ghanaian musicologist, Klevor Abo:

V really means drum and h is the word for club or association. A v h is the club you belong to in the village Voice is called b, so singing is v b. V is used to signify the whole performance or occasion: the music, singing, drums, drama and so on.

Having no exact verbal equivalent to our music clearly does not mean that the culture in question is without music any more than the English languages lack of verbal equivalent to the Hindi notion of rasa or to the German notion of Weltanschauung means that Anglophones cannot conceive of different types of feeling/mood/state-of-mind (rasa) or of different ways of looking at the world (Weltanschauung). Nor is a lack of equivalent to our word music connected to village communities in West Africa because the Japanese, with their long-standing traditions of music and theatre in official religion and at feudal courts, did not feel obliged to invent a word equivalent to the European concept of music until the nineteenth century. The Japanese translated music as ongaku (), on () meaning sound and gaku () enjoyment, i.e. sounds performed for listening enjoyment or entertainment.

In other words, neither the Japanese nor the Ewe needed a word for what we mean by music until confronted by us Europeans and our culture. It must have been strange to come across people like us who treated what we call music as if it could exist independently of a larger whole (drama, poetry, singing, dancing, ritual, etc.), and the Japanese went straight to the heart of the matter with the word ongaku, identifying the European notion of music as referring to the non-verbal sounding bits of what they themselves considered as part of a larger set of symbolic practices. The Ewe reacted similarly, using the untranslated English colonial word music to label European music which was not an integral part of their own traditional culture and which we Europeans conceptualise as distinct from other related cultural practices.

Both the Ewe (v) and Japanese (gaku) concepts resemble to some extent that of the ancient Greeks whose term techn? mousik? (texnh mousikh or mousik? for short) originally referred to the skills of all the muses: drama, poetry, dancing, etc., not just to playing instruments or singing. The musica of ancient Rome seems to have covered a similar semantic field. However, during the Hellenic merchant period, there seems to have been a shift in the meaning of Greek mousik? and Latin musica in learned circles, so that Saint Augustine (d. 430), worrying about the seductive dangers of music, seems to use musica in our contemporary sense of the word music.

It seems likely that this more restricted use of mousik? and musica prevailed amongst scholars and clerics in Europe from the fifth century onwards. Moreover, Arab scholars between the eighth and thirteenth centuries appropriated the Greek word mousik? (as al musiqi) to refer to what we mean by instrumental music today, not to the gamut of artistic expressions denoted by the mousik? of Plato or Aristotle. It should also be noted that Mohammed is said to have shown interest in music and that the Koran itself contains no directly negative pronouncements against music. However, orthodox clerics of Islam were later to warn, like St. Augustine, against the evils of music, the main controversy being whether the Prophets judgement of poets, including musicians, in the Korans 26th sura referred to music connected to infidel rites or to music in general. The point here is that influential ascetic patriarchs of Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern monotheism were worried about the sensual power of the non-verbal aspect of sonic expression and that they needed a concept to isolate and identify it.

What happens to music in the vernacular languages of Western and Central Europe before the twelfth century is anybodys guess. Perhaps, like old Norse or modern Icelandic, there was a blanket term covering what bards, narrators of epic poetry and minstrels all did. Certainly, the Northern French trouvres and the Provenal troubadours of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries were not only known as singers, players and tunesmiths (trouver / trobar = find, invent, compose) but also as entertainers, jugglers and poets.

Music enters the English language in the thirteenth century via old French, whose musique appears about a century earlier. The arrival of the word in the vernacular of both nations denotes more or less what we mean by music today. It also coincides with the granting of charters to merchant boroughs and with the establishment of the first universities. Unfortunately, there is hardly enough evidence to support the idea that the crystallisation of the term music connects ideologically with the ascendancy of a merchant class, even though the Hellenic period, Arab mercantile hegemony in the Mediterranean, and ascendancy of the European bourgeoisie, all seem to feature the new concept. Whatever the case, the European ruling classes were able to use the word music in its current meaning well before the eighteenth century: the semiotic field had been prepared by clerics and ecclesiastical theorists who had, by the eleventh century, established a metaphysical pecking order of musics. This type of hierarchy is, as we shall see the later (p. 70, ff.), important to the development of the Romantic notions, parodied at the start of this chapter, of musics supposedly transcendental qualities.

These brief cross-cultural and historical observations about the word music indicate that the concept denotes particular sets of non-verbal sound produced by humans and associated with certain other forms of symbolic representation, sounds which relate enough to physical and emotional aspects of human experience to be considered disconcerting by ascetic clerics. The question is: which sets of humanly produced sounds relate to which other forms of symbolic representation? One answer to that question is provided by theories of human evolution.

The oldest musical instrument discovered to date is a flute made from the femur of the now extinct European bear and found in a Neanderthal burial site in todays Slovenia. The flute, unearthed in 1995, is between 45,000 and 84,000 years old. Although (to split the difference) 64,000 years may sound like a long time ago, it is the mere twinkling of an eye in terms of the evolution of our species: the earliest hominid forms evolved from the higher primates at least 3 million years ago.

Evolutionist theories of music explain its origins in terms of adaptation, by which is meant the ability of a species to find effective survival strategies by means of adapting to their environment. One rather unlikely theory is that music derives from the synchronous chorusing of higher primates, while another argues more plausibly that it is in the evolution of affiliative interactions between mothers and infants that we can discover the origins of the competencies and sensitivities that gave rise to human music.

Several other theories stress the importance of what Brown (2000) calls musilanguage, i.e. that language and music, both sonic and both neurologically intertwined, stem from a common origin, evolving together as brain size increased during the last two million years in the genus homo (Falk 2000). Like the mother-and-infant theory, this explanation also seems quite plausible because both Homo sapiens and neanderthalensis had, if our knowledge of the Slovenian bone flute and other early human instruments of music are anything to go by, clearly started to treat oral language and music as distinct modes of sonic communication. Although neurologically interrelated, these two sonic systems were used for different functions. This aspect of evolution is important because the separation of music from language is often seen, rightly or wrongly, as a trait distinguishing humans from other animals.

One common objection to the theory of distinction between music and language as a basis for understanding the origins of music as a trait of human behaviour argues that if we, as humans, say that birds and whales sing, then we are talking about music, simply because that is how we hear it. The sonic habits of humpback whales provide fuel for this argument. As those great mammals migrate or swim around their breeding grounds, they piece together repeated phrases, singing song after song for up to twenty-four hours at a stretch. Humpback whales have a seven-octave range similar to that covered by the piano keyboard, i.e. a range of fundamental frequencies within the limits of what humans can hear, and much larger than the restricted range of pitches the human voice can produce. As the months go by, whales modify their song patterns and most males end up singing the same new song after a while. Moreover, humpback whale song contains rhythms and phrases which, strung together, build forms of a length comparable to ballads or symphonic movements. It also seems that their songs contain recurrent formulae which end off different phrases in much the same way as we use rhyme in poetry. One theory about rhymes in whale song is that they help in the breeding season when the males have to remember what comes next: the more elaborate the whales song pattern, the more likely it is to rhyme.

All these traits of whale song come across as typically musical to the human ear. But the music of the animal kingdom does not stop there: certain insects produce distinct rhythmic patterns which, like those of human music, vary and repeat in longer patterns. Moreover, eleven percent of primate species can produce short strings of notes that, though less musical to our ears than the songs of humpback whales, form a recognisable pattern in time. This behavioural trait, characteristic for most of our own music, is thought to have evolved independently four times within primates. Such evidence suggests that music is not exclusive to the human species.

One problem with the objections just raised is that they are anthropomorphic in that they interpret non-human behaviour on the basis of human experience, perception and behaviour. The animals make music standpoint assumes, in other words, that the whales, insects and primates just mentioned hear and react to the sounds they make themselves in the same way that we hear and react to them; it also assumes that animals produce those patterns of sound for the same reasons as we make what we hear as comparable patterns of sound in our music. For example, although we hear birds as the greatest songsters of the animal kingdom, they do not necessarily make, hear and use their melodies as we make, hear and use our music. Ornithologist Eugene Morton puts it this way:

Any analogy to human music is not interesting to me. It doesnt explain anything about how the world is, except how humans want to perceive it. Good on em, but I want to understand animals Birdsong constitutes an avian broadcasting network, letting birds minimise the arduous work of flying about during interactions.

If singing can replace the amount of flying around birds would otherwise have to do, it is certainly part of a symbolic system. Instead of physically repelling every potential invader of its own space, a bird can claim its territory by making sounds we call birdsong. Instead of flying round to see if local members of the family are all there before they shut down for the night and that they are all there again in the morning, an individual bird can join in the evening and dawn choruses. Birdsong is in other words a strategy for the survival of individuals within the group, because they all have to have a place to nest, and for the group as a whole, because they may all need to collect for foraging or migration. It seems that singing is just an energy-efficient way for birds to establish these relations essential to their survival.

It would in a similar way be unrealistic to expect whales, who have to cover huge distances in search of food but reconvene for breeding, to keep visual or tactile underwater checks on the whereabouts of each other, as individuals or as family groups, across vast stretches of ocean. In this sense, whale song, by replacing tactile and visual contact with sonic communication, also acts symbolically to facilitate the social cohesion necessary for the survival of their species. It is also highly probable that the various functions of sonic communication in the animal kingdom are linked with what we humans might qualify as pleasure and pain, tension and relaxation, etc., i.e. with what we think of as emotions and which are essential ingredients in the evolutionary process of most sentient beings. If such emotions are linked to situations in the animal kingdom where what we hear as their music is used to signal messages we might understand verbally in terms like get off my property! or its OK, were all here, then it is also probable that the sounds in question are accompanied by patterns of hormone production comparable to those found in humans when stimulated in certain ways by certain sounds in certain situations.

If there is any truth in the line of reasoning just presented, it would seem that there may be grounds for calling that animal music music. After all, such an argument would go, what we have described tallies quite well with the seventh of our eight axioms about music ( p. 42), with our observations about concerted simultaneity and collective identity ( p. 43), and with several other points mentioned under our working definition of music.

Whether or not zoomusicologists can demonstrate a separation between music and other forms of sonic communication produced by non-human animals, the point here is that we humans seem to have done so for at least 100,000 years. One sound-based symbolic system (language) is more suited, though not wholly dedicated, to the denotation of objects and ideas, while the other (music) is more closely, though not entirely, linked to movement, gesture, touch and emotion (see axiom 4, p. 42). As stated earlier, language and music, both neurologically intertwined and both using the sense of hearing, seem to stem from a common origin, evolving together as brain size increased during the last two million years of evolution in the genus homo. However, even though the oldest musical instrument found so far may be from a Neanderthal burial site, it is after we humans managed, some 50,000 years ago, to wipe out our Neanderthal cousins that we start to leave significant numbers of complex sonic objects behind us.

To summarise: the separation of sonic representation into two distinct but related spheres of activity language and music may have started to evolve in our hominid ancestors but seems to have developed dramatically after their demise. Cross (1999) goes as far as to suggest that this distinction between language and music may be the most important thing humans ever did. Ill return to this point after the next section which deals with musics importance for another fundamental aspect of human development.

At the age of minus four months most humans start to hear. By the time we enter this world and long before we can focus our eyes on objects at different distances from ourselves, our aural faculties are well developed. Most small humans soon learn to distinguish pleasant from unpleasant sounds and most parents will witness that any tiny human in their household acts like a hyperactive radar of feelings and moods in their environment. You know its no use telling baby in an irritated voice Daddys not angry because the little human sees straight through such emotional deceit and starts to howl.

But babys hearing is not what most parents notice first about sound and their own addition to the human race. They are more likely to register the little sonic terrorists capacity to scream, yell, cry and generally dominate the domestic soundscape. Babies are endowed with non-verbal vocal talents seemingly out of proportion to other aspects of their size, weight and volume: they appear to have inordinate lung power and unfailing vocal chords capable of producing high decibel and transient values, cutting timbres and irregular phrase lengths, all communicating messages that parents interpret as Im uncomfortable or Im irritated or Im in pain, or Im hungry, messages demanding action such as change my nappies! or comfort me! or provide immediate nutrition! Maybe these tiny humans have to yell not just because they cant speak but also because they need to dispel whatever state of adult torpor we happen to be in while watching TV, chatting, reading or, worst of all, sleeping. Babies instinctively use sharp timbres at high pitch and volume, sounds that carry well, cutting through whatever ambient hum and mumble there may be in the adult world, be it idle conversation, TV in the background, fridges, ventilation, etc. Also, irregular rhythms and intonation by definition avoid the sort of repetition that can gradually transform into ambient (background) sound: a babys yell is always up front, foreground, urgent, of varying periodicity and quite clearly designed to shatter whatever else mother, father, big sister or big brother is doing. That sonic shattering is designed to provoke immediate response. Desires and needs must be fulfilled now.

Now is the operative word here. Sonic statements formed as short repetitions of irregularly varying length are also statements of urgency, as well we know from news and documentary jingles important, flash, new, the latest update. Babies seem to have no conscious past or notion of future: all is present. The babys lack of adult temporal perspective in relation to self is of course related to its lack of adult senses of social space, which, in its turn, relates to babys egocentricity, essential for survival in the initial stages of its life.

Non-verbal sound is essential to humans. We monitor it constantly from inside the womb until deafness or death do us part from its influence. We use our non-verbal voices to communicate all sorts of messages from the time we are born until we die or turn dumb. Together with the sense of touch, non-verbal sound is one of the most important sources of information and contact with social and natural environments at the most formative stages of any humans development. It is vital to senso-motoric and symbolic learning processes at the preverbal stage of development and central to the formation of any individuals personality. Then we all have to experience the process by which we gradually learn that we are not the centre of others constant and immediate attention: we have to get used to being just one human subject and social object among many others. We have to have some sort of working relationship with whatever society and culture we belong to and we cannot live in the vain hope of returning to a state where we are the sonically dominant or foreground figures. We can never regain any lost paradise, whatever advertisers, spin doctors, religious fanatics or drug-pedling pharmaceutical corporations might have us believe.

Different cultures and subcultures develop different norms for what course the process from baby via child to adult should run. The ultimate goal becoming a fully functioning adult depends on whatever the society in question at any given time sees as desirable on account of its material basis and cultural heritage. Assuming we have all been babies and if babys power over the domestic soundscape in the early development of every human is a biological necessity that must be relinquished for that individual to survive among fellow humans in adulthood, then we ought to gain important insights into how any culture works by studying patterns of socialisation that relate directly to non-verbal sound.

Humans can emit an enormous variety of non-verbal sounds. We breathe, talk, cry, shout, yell, call, sob, sigh, laugh, giggle, burp, fart, crunch, slurp, gulp, swallow, yawn, groan, moan, growl, cough, splutter, slobber, wheeze, sniffle, sneeze, kiss, hiss, snort, spit, scratch our heads, smack our lips, blow our noses, clear our throats, cough up phlegm, etc. Our hearts beat, tummies rumble and intestines gurgle. We make noise, however weak or strong, whenever we move our bodies when we sit down or stand up, walk, run, stroll, tiptoe, limp, jump, hop, skip, drag our feet, stumble, fall, etc. We also shudder with fear, tremble with delight, or shiver with cold so that their our chatter. We make sound when we hit, kick, drag, push, cut, tap, pat, clap, caress, chop, saw, hammer, grind, scrape, slap, splash, smash, etc. Some of these sounds are loud, others soft; some are heavy, others light; some are fast, others slow; some are high-pitched, others less so; some are long or ongoing and repetitive, others short and discrete and so on. All these humanly produced sounds are made within a context that is itself full of sound. In urban industrialised societies we have fridges, freezers, computer drives, traffic, aeroplanes, mains hum, air conditioning and all sorts of other mechanical sounds; elsewhere we may be able to hear wind in the trees, rain, sea swell, animals, birds, insects, running water, thunder, earthquakes, ice breaking, crisp or slushy snow under our feet, waves breaking on the shore, etc.

Some of these sounds we make ourselves, others we just hear in a wide variety of acoustic settings, including those inside our own heads and bodies. Which (combinations of) sounds are evaluated as pleasant and unpleasant, which ones are deemed to be part of music and which ones not, will largely depend on the culture we belong to and on what sort of motoric and sonic behaviour prove to be generally compatible with the needs of that community, be it a youth subculture in late capitalism or a nomadic people using stone age technology.

All of us have been babies and all of us have had to learn that we cannot for ever remain at the centre of the world around us, acoustically or otherwise. We have to learn to cooperate, to negotiate social space and uses for ourselves in relation to the community we belong to. Music and dance provide socially constructed sonic and kinetic frameworks for that learning process: most of us learn to sing, hum and whistle in accordance with the norms of what our culture regards as music, rather than just yelling, laughing, mumbling, or bashing objects at will. As we acquire the gift of language we learn to distinguish between humanly organised verbal and non-verbal sound. More importantly, by repeated exposure, within the music culture to which we belong, to the simultaneous occurrence of certain types of musical sound with certain types of action, attitude, behaviour, emotional state, environment, gesture, movement, personality, people, pictures, words, social functions, etc., we construct a vast array of categories combining several of the constituent elements just mentioned into overriding and integral musogenic concepts.

Many of us also go on to learn how to play an instrument as a way of making sound whose functions are clearly different not only to those of spoken language but also to those we make when chopping wood, hammering nails, ironing clothes, doing the washing up, flushing the toilet, taking a shower, walking upstairs, driving a car, eating food, operating machinery, folding a newspaper, closing the door, etc., etc. It would, from the perspectives just presented, be absurd to regard music as some sort pleasant but parasitic appendage to human life, as auditory cheesecake as one writer put it.

There are other reasons for understanding music as an essential part of the survival kit for any human society, not as just cultural icing on the socio-economic cake. These reasons are presented by Cross (1999) and can be summarised in the following simplified terms.

Our capacity as humans to process signals from the world around us via different domains of representation (verbal, visual, motoric, emotional, etc.) seems to have been one of our species great advantages in the evolutionary struggle, in that we can sort out abstractions of cause and effect by distinguishing between visual, verbal, sonic and motoric impulses. Those domains of representation are even located in different parts of the brain so that what we hear at a particular time (a sonic event) does not have to represent the same phenomenon as a movement or emotion we may experience at that same time. Put crudely, having to rush up in a panic as the alarm clock goes off does not make us think the alarm clock is stressed out.

Of course, such domain-specific signal processing in no way prevents humans from making connections between several simultaneous domain-specific signals if they co-occur on a regular basis. For example, when a loving parent talks in a sing-song voice to a baby while holding and rocking it, the little one receives signals that are at the same time specific to the sonic, motoric and emotional domains of representation. As these combinations of domain-specific signals are repeated, the infant learns to make connections between them so that another, overriding or embodying type of representation comes into play. Such combinations of sonic, motoric and emotional signals are sometimes called proto-musical. They also relate to synaesthetic patterns of cognition.

The specific domains relating to (proto-) musical representation, shown in figure 1-1, partially overlap and need some explanation.

[1] The physical domain covers the ballistics, trajectory and kinetic relationship of a body (or bodies, including ones own) to the type of space through which it travels or in which it is motionless. Fast or slow, jerky or smooth, regular or irregular movement, or no movement at all, in an open or closed space; movement which arrives or leaves within that space, towards or away from a point inside or outside it, movement which waits or passes over or under, up or down, to the left or right, to the back or front, to and fro or in one direction, suddenly or gradually: these aspects of movement and space, when enacted by a human, are all part of the physical domain of representation. It also includes the enactment of some aspects of heaviness or darkness and lightness, of density and sparsity, as well as of multitude and singularity.

[2] The gross motoric domain of representation involves the movement of arms, legs, head, etc., e.g. walking, running, jumping, dancing, pushing, pulling, thrusting, dragging, waving, rolling, hitting.

[3] The fine motoric domain of representation involves the movement of fingers, eyes, lips, mouth, throat, etc. Blinking, glittering, shimmering, rustling, babbling, clicking, tapping, fiddling, dripping, etc. all exemplify movement requiring fine motoric representation.

[4] The linguistic domain is mainly concerned with prosodic patterning, with the musical elements of speech, i.e. with intonation, timbre, accentuation, rhythm, dynamics, etc., including the sonic characteristics of vowels and consonants.

[5] The social domain involves the representation of patterns of human interaction, for example of individuals to a group or vice versa. As we shall see later, particular strategies for structuring musical parts or voices can correspond to particular socialisation patterns.

[6] The emotional domain is self-evident. It involves evaluating a situation in response to different body states such as posture, muscular tension or relaxation, hormonal stimulation, adrenalin count, etc. It includes evaluation of experience whose verbal conceptualisation is often formulated in polarities like pleasing/painful, happy/sad, beautiful/ugly, love/hate, security/threat, etc.

It should be clear that these six domains of representation are in no way mutually exclusive. For instance, it is impossible to imagine a gross motoric activity like dragging (domain 2) without considering bodily movement in space and aspects of heaviness (physical domain 1). Moreover, any aspect of the emotional domain needs to be qualified by aspects from other domains. For example, is the expression of pain sharp and sudden? Is it relentless, throbbing and ongoing, or is it stifled in the background? Does the pain come in gradual waves or as violent shocks? Does it make you quiver, shudder, jump, fall over, fall apart, yell, scream, groan or grumble? Or does it hit, stab, pierce or poison you? Or does it make you depressed and apathetic? Is the pain repressed and under control, or is it up front and violent? Perhaps it paralyses or silences you altogether? Is it the pain of a solitary individual or does it more closely resemble a community of suffering?

Proto-musics six domains of representation also overlap in terms of synaesthesis. For example, some onomatopoeic pairs, like babble and bubble or rumble and tumble, are normally, though not exclusively, associated with the sonic and visual/kinetic aspects respectively of the same basic type of movement, as, indeed, are rustle and glisten. Other sonically similar words like bustle, hustle and hassle not only lend themselves to expression in visual or sonic terms: they also include aspects of social interaction and emotional evaluation. It is the combination of all these aspects that makes such concepts particularly musogenic.

Before going any further in this explanation of cross-domain representation, I ought to clarify that Im using the noun synaesthesis, not synaesthesia, to denote any normal use of two or more modes of perception at the same time. While synaesthesia is generally used as a clinical term denoting a specific neurological condition involving the disturbance of normal perception by the involuntary intrusion of impulses from more than one sensory mode, synaesthesis is no more than a transliteration of synaisth?sis (sunaisyhsiw), aisth?sis meaning perception and syn = [along] with, accompanying, i.e. simultaneous perception in more than one sensory mode. Synaesthesis is therefore not a pathological condition but a normal and essential part of human cognition. The only terminological trouble here is that synaesthesis and synaesthesia both give rise to the adjective synaesthetic. To avoid further confusion, then, synaesthetic will in this book qualify any type of perception using more than one sensory mode at the same time. In more concrete terms, we shall qualify, for example, the combined tactile, kinetic, visual and sonic aspects of babble, bubble, bumble, rumble, crumble, tumble, rustle, bustle, hustle or hassle as synaesthetic because they constitute instances of normally functioning synaesthesis.

To summarise the argument so far, music can, as we have defined it (p. 41), be understood as a specifically human type of activity which lets us mix elements from any of the six domains of representation (p. 61) into an integral whole. It is an activity allowing us to represent combinations of signals from its constituent domains in one symbolic package rather than in merely linguistic, social or corporeal terms. As a meaningful system of non-verbal sound, music lets us engage in interpersonal activity on many levels simultaneously, either by making the music or by responding to it individually or together with others. To express ourselves on all these levels at the same time, humans do not always need to confront each other with verbal outbursts, bodily display or physical interaction: we can use music instead. In other words, music provides relatively risk-free action to members of the culture producing and using it because it provides socio-culturally regulated forms of potentially risky interaction between humans. But music does more than that in that it can also help avoid confusion. Avoid confusion? How can that be when music is so often thought of as polysemic? I had better explain (see also p. 157, ff.).

Imagine, for example, the not uncommon state of mind characterised by a mixture of, say, irritation or resentment and the feeling that is nevertheless a nice day and good to be alive. Using the linguistic domain, you could express this single dynamic state of mind directly to a friend, partner, child, parent, or to the authorities, telling them first how strongly you disapprove of their behaviour: you could start by speaking with sharp timbre and choppy delivery, then switch to a smooth, mellifluous voice. Using the fine motoric domain, you could frown then smile, tap your fingers nervously then flutter your eyelids encouragingly, grit your teeth then relax your mouth. Socially, you might want to avoid the people causing the irritation and then make efforts to welcome them into your company. Using the physical and gross motoric domains of representation to communicate your state of mind, you'd almost have to first beat up the person or people concerned, then caress or hug them. Emotionally, youd probably want to first yell and stamp your feet, then sit down and relax; or perhaps youd first tense your shoulders and clench your fists, then lean back, open your arms and show the palms of your hands.

Although feeling irritation on a basically good day is hardly a symptom of emotional instability, expressing that dynamic using just one of musics constituent domains of representation, as described in the previous paragraph, would at best come across as contradictory and confused. It would more likely cause offence, perhaps even provoke a diagnosis of manic depression. However, thanks to its character of cross-domain representation, music is able to mediate that same sort of dynamic as a unified single experience in a socially negotiated and culturally specific sonic form. After all, we seem to readily accept that the single linguistic concept of love involves feelings of vulnerable anxiety and the fear of loss in addition to the occasional, indescribably powerful bout of euphoria. Similarly, it is totally impossible for us mortals to entertain the notion of human life without considering death.

These platitudes about love and life serve merely to illustrate the fact that while language only occasionally lets us conceptualise dynamic states of being as integral experiences, music almost always does so. Feeling angry on a good day, or desperately troubled in the midst of calm and beauty, or totally sick of the world and feeling alive because of that disgust these are no more than pale verbal hints of just part of three of the innumerable kinds of dynamic mood categories that music can create. We should therefore not be surprised that respected critics can describe the same piece of music in this case the first movement of Mozarts 40th symphony in terms of both deepest sadness and highest elation. Was Mozart confused when he wrote the music? Probably no more so than usual. Does the music make a confused or contradictory impression? Certainly not to modern European ears: its one of the most well-known, highly valued and widely covered pieces in the Viennese classical repertoire. Were the critics confused when they wrote about sadness and elation in the same breath about the same music? No again: they, too, were just giving pallid verbal hints of what they felt the music to be expressing.

By combining input from its constituent domains of representation, music forms integral categories of cognition that, from a logocentric viewpoint, would be qualified as contradictory, confused or polysemic, even though those categories seem to correspond more accurately with what we actually feel or imagine on a daily basis: angry on a good day, troubled in beautiful surroundings, sad and elated, vulnerable and euphoric, etc. This holistic aspect of musical cognition may well be one reason for musics ability to move us so deeply, sometimes even to occupy our whole sensory being. It may also be one reason for musics therapeutic usefulness. Furthermore, music helps cognitive flexibility, i.e. the ability to mix, switch and correlate across different domains of representation. Viewed from these perspectives, music may indeed be, as Cross (1999) concludes, the most important thing that we humans ever did.

[1] Humans may not be alone in having developed two systems of sonic communication (language and music), but we are probably the only species to distinguish so radically between the two (p.51, ff.)

[2] Music is a form of communication involving the emission and perception of non-verbal sounds structured or arranged by humans for humans. As such, music is a universal phenomenon in the sense that no human society has ever been without it, even though the word music may have no exact equivalent in many languages (p. 41, ff.).

[3] Music is no more a universal language than language itself. Being a universal phenomenon does not mean that the same sounds, musical or verbal, have the same meaning in all cultures. The fact that language and music do not trace the same cultural boundaries in no way means that any music or language can be understood by everyone on the planet (p. 45, ff.).

[4] Music often involves a concerted simultaneity of sound events or movements. Unlike speech, writing, painting, etc., music is particularly suited to expressing collective messages of affective and corporeal identity, since individual participating voices or instruments must relate to the underlying temporal, timbral or tonal basis of the particular music being performed (p. 43).

[5] By combining input from several domains of representation, music forms integral categories of cognition that, from a verbal viewpoint, may seem contradictory or polysemic but which correspond more accurately and holistically with states of mind as they are actually felt (verbal hints: angry on a good day, sad and elated, vulnerable and euphoric, etc.). Music also helps synaesthesis and cognitive flexibility (p. 60, ff.).

[6] Music is, in different ways and to varying degrees, essential to any human in the socialisation process leading from egocentric baby to collaborative adult (p. 56, ff).

[7] Music is important in contemporary everyday life in terms of the amounts of time and money spent on it: about four hours and the price of a loaf of bread or of a litre of milk per person per day (p.33, ff).

Given these seven points and the discussion they summarise, the next question to ask is why music, if it is important in so many ways to humans, seems so often to end up near the bottom of the academic heap. Although its status in Western institutions of learning may not be as lowly as that occupied by other important aspects of human existence like dance or domestic science, it is clearly not up there with mathematics, the natural sciences and language. This striking anomaly is explained in the next chapter.

IF the stopping distance of an oil tanker is measured in nautical miles and its turning radius in kilometres, the inertia of a cultural legacy loaded with social, economic, technological and ideological ballast is better calculated in centuries than in decades. This chapter identifies one such metaphorical oil tanker with a view to charting a less hazardous course through the troubled waters for which the vessel was not designed. The oil tanker in question is a certain set of Western notions about music, the troubled waters are those of the post-Edison era and the epistemological hazards are the anomalies relating to the unsuitability of that unwieldy vessel in those waters. Now, one of those hazards is the contradiction between musics humble academic status and its importance in everyday life. Its a contradiction that can only be seen from two angles: either music just isnt as important as Ive made out (in which case no contradiction exists) or else musics importance is underestimated and its character misunderstood. Assuming, on the basis of evidence given in Chapters 1 and 3, the second alternative to be more plausible, it will be necessary to examine the persistent belief system of which that contradiction is a symptom in order to clear the ground for the analysis methods presented later. Thats why in this chapter Ill try to identify and demystify some widely held articles of faith about music, which in its turn entails considering connections between ideology and musical institutions, as well as between notions of music and knowledge.

Compared to the visual and verbal arts, music in Western academe lives in a sort of conceptual and institutional isolation from the epistemological mainstream. This relative isolation in academe stands in stark contrast to musics much greater integration into media production and perception processes. Every time you put on a DVD, play a computer game, watch a music video or are subjected to consumerist propaganda on the TV, music is usually an integral part of what has been produced and of whatever it is you experience on hearing and seeing that multi-media production. Assuming that music makes a contribution to that experience, why, you might well wonder, in our tradition of knowledge, do we seem to lack the conceptual tools that could help us understand basic questions of musical meaning?

Ive already questioned the notion of music as a universal language (p. 45, ff.) and suggested that musics humble status in the pecking order of sign systems in a largely logocentric and scopocentric tradition of knowledge may be due to its essentially alogogenic character. As should be clear from the previous paragraph, there is, unfortunately, more to the problem than that.

One problem about understanding how music works as a sign system is that those who have written about such things have not always been transparent about their agenda. Another problem is that many sources we rely on for ideas about music date from before the advent of free public education and that verbal literacy was until then the preserve of an lite. These sources have a long historical legacy. They are also often normative, propounding, from particular standpoints in specific socio-historical situations, notions of musical right and wrong, good and bad, true and false, beautiful and ugly, elegant and vulgar, learned and ignorant, etc. Of course, the fact that literacy was until recently the preserve of privileged minorities in no way implies that societies with little or no division of labour have no musical norms, or that oral cultures have no notions of how their music should sound. It simply means that, in our largely scribal tradition of institutionalised and academically codified knowledge, we tend to rely heavily on written documents whose power agendas are rarely made explicit.

One recurrent trait in documents about music from ancient high cultures (Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Greece, etc.), is its link to official religious doctrine or to ostensibly indisputable physical phenomena. In ancient Mesopotamia for example (3,000-600 BC), music theory was connected to astrology and mathematics. The general idea was that if you knew the motions of the stars, if you believed in their sway over human destiny, then you understood the harmony of the universe. You could theoretically be at one with the universe by making music which abided by the rules of its harmony. Music of the court and of official religion was held to conform to such rules; that of other classes and peoples did not. It was through such metaphysical links that an oppressive political system could be identified with a system of musical organisation which was in its turn aligned with the immutable system of the universe. Like the deification of the worldly systems kings, metaphysical connections between the ruling classes, their music and the heavenly spheres created the illusion that their unjust political system was as divine, eternal, unquestionable and unchangeable as the universe.

Written records from ancient China are even more explicit. The tonal system of imperial music, based on observations about the relation of rising fifths to the perfect ratio 3:2, was put into a cosmic perspective. According to documents from around 450 BC, [s]ince 3 is the numeral of Heaven and 2 that of the Earth, sounds in the ratio 3:2 harmonise as Heaven and Earth. The importance of official music in ancient China and its connection with irrefutable truths is also demonstrated by the establishment of a Music Bureau (??, Yufu) under the Imperial Office of Weights and Measures (141-87 BC). The Bureaus brief was to standardise pitch, supervise music and build up musical archives. More importantly, for over 2000 years of Chinese imperial history (221 BC - 1911), one set of musical practices was identified by ruling-class ideologues as the right music: y?yu (??) or elegant music, as it was called, refers both to court music of that long period and, more particularly, to court music associated with Confucian philosophy.

The music of imperial Chinese courts, especially y?yu (elegant music), was, as we just saw, related to the cosmic values of the numerals 2 and 3 which, in their turn, were related to notions of heaven and earth, male and female, Yang (?, sun) and Yin (?, shade), etc. Y?yu was certainly regulated by strict rules of performance, not only in terms of detailed stage positions for instrumentalists and dancers, but also with regard to tonal norms. Intricate division and subdivision of genres in terms of both musical style and audience type illustrate further aspects of complex codification, as do all the ancient texts setting out the history, aesthetics and metaphysics of imperial music-making. These sources also imply that knowledge of such intricacies was important for those producing and consuming the elegant music, whose history could be traced back to what was, even then, the distant past of an ancient dynasty. Moreover, imperial Chinese music could be reproduced quite consistently from one performance or generation to another, not only because of the many treatises codifying its aesthetics and practice, but also because certain types of notation were used. Although such notation, either as ideograms indicating pitch or as tablature for string instruments, was probably used less prescriptively than the sheet music followed by euroclassical musicians, it at least helped ensure that singers and musicians could make the music they composed or performed conform adequately to prescribed patterns.

Similar hierarchies of music are found in written sources from other high cultures. For example, to qualify as art music (i.e. as belonging to the Great Tradition), Indian performing art, be it from the North or South, must, as Powers (1995:72) points out, satisfy two main criteria.

Firstly it must establish a claim to be governed by authoritative theoretical doctrine; secondly, its practitioners must be able to authenticate a disciplined oral tradition of performance extending back over several generations.

The important concept here is doctrine (??stra), more specifically sangita-??stra (musical doctrine). For Indian music to qualify as doctrinally correct, it must adhere to at least one canonical precept: melodic construction should be governed by one of the traditions r?gas. This rule is so important that the proper term for correct musical practices, ??striya-sangit (doctrinal music), is less frequently used than r?gdar-sangit (music based on a r?ga). Indians also often use the English word classical when distinguishing r?ga traditions from popular music practices. The Oxford Concise English Dictionary (1995) defines classical, qualifying the arts, as:

serious or conventional; following traditional principles and intended to be of permanent rather than ephemeral value representing an exemplary standard; having a long-established worth.

Calling ??striya-sangit or r?gdar-sangit classical music is in other words quite appropriate because not only do buzzwords of higher and lasting value occur in the connotative spheres of both terms: ??striya-sangit and classical music also both allude to notions of tradition, doctrine, convention and learning. Besides, ??striya-sangits qualification as scientific or knowledgeable rhymes well with European-language equivalents of classical music, like musique savante, musica colta, msica culta, msica erudita, E-Musik, serious music and art music. Unlike most types of popular and folk music, the musical practices qualified by such epithets as classical are all associated with doctrinal texts codifying the philosophy, aesthetics, performance, interpretation, understanding and structural basis of the music in question.

To cut a long story short, the division of music in Western culture into categories of art or classical and folk or popular has numerous parallels and forerunners. It is even possible that elements of Mesopotamian theory passed via Greek and Arabic scholars into the metamusical mindset of Europes medieval clerics and their trichotomy of musics. This trichotomy consisted of musica mundana (the music of the heavens, of spheres in the universe), musica humana (music providing equilibrium of soul and body and instilled by liturgical song) and musica instrumentalis (the singing and the playing of instruments that were at the service of the devil as well as of God). As Ling (1983: 97) explains:

[I]n the world of heavenly light, the harmonious and well-tuned music of eternity is heard. Its opposite is the unbearable noise and dissonant, discordant music of hell. Both heaven and hell exist on earth: the music of heaven is reflected in liturgical chant it is organised, well-measured and based on science and reason. All other music is of the devil, being chaotic, ill-measured and uneducated.

Since musica mundana was an entirely metaphysical idea (the music of the spheres, of heaven, of Gods perfect creation, etc.), the real world contained only two sorts of music according to the aesthetic and religious precepts of the church fathers: (1) musica humana as the uplifting liturgical song of Mother Church and of Gods representatives on earth and (2) musica instrumentalis as all other music, be it of the devil or of God. This basic dualism of musics changes character quite radically as part of the lengthy and complex process by which the value systems of feudal and ecclesiastical lites are supeseded by those of the ascendant bourgeoisie. These bourgeois music values are important to understand because theyve been at the basis of much discourse about music in Western institutions of education and research since the mid nineteenth century. They include notions of the musically Good, Beautiful and True that still hold sway in many of our musical institutions and still exert a strong influence on what sort of meanings, if any, those of us who see ourselves as educated think that music can carry.

The notion of absolute music and of its superiority is probably the most striking feature of institutional music aesthetics in the Western world. Hegel, for example, made the following distinction between the musical values of the initiated and those of the average punter.

[W]hat the layman (Laie) likes in music is the comprehensible expression of emotions and ideas, something substantial, its content, for which reason he prefers accompanimental music (Begleitmusik); the connoisseur (Kenner), on the other hand, who has access to the inner musical relation of tones and instruments, likes instrumental music for its artistic use of harmonies and of melodic intricacy as well as for its changing forms; he can be quite fulfilled by the music on its own.

The most famous absolute music aphorism was formulated by Austrian music critic Eduard Hanslick who, in his treatise On Musical Beauty (1854), wrote: Musics complete content and total subject matter is nothing other than tonal forms in movement. Since then, similar views of music have ruled the roost in Western art music circles to such an extent that some composers whose tonal forms in movement clearly relate to other subject matter have denied any such relation. Stravinsky (1882-1971), for example, once quipped that his music expressed nothing but itself, implying that stage works of his (Petrushka, The Firebird, The Rite of Spring, for example) were pure music. It may be true that Stravinsky, a bit like David Bowie, frequently recast his public persona but the very fact that he saw fit, even just once, to do so from the standpoint of musical absolutism suggests that adopting that view may have advanced his artistic credibility in influential circles. This is certainly what Mahler (1860-1911) once felt compelled to do: having already written programme notes to his first three symphonies, he is reported to have raised his glass at a soire with Munich illuminati in 1900 and to have proclaimed death to all programme music.

The pressure on composers to conform to the notion of absolute music throughout the twentieth century cannot be underestimated. For example, famous film composers like Korngold (1897-1957) and Rzsa (1907-1995) lived double lives, compelled to separate their music for musics sake from their work for the movies. Similarly, Morricone has on occasions expressed disappointment at the scant recognition he receives for his concert music, however widely acclaimed he may be as a musical pioneer because of his work for the cinema. The point is: if the institutional dominance of absolutist aesthetics can affect the lives of widely acclaimed figures like Mahler, Stravinsky, Korngold, Rzsa and Morricone, then such a view of music will have exerted at least as much influence on lesser figures in musical academe. For example, Francs (1958), in his pioneering research about musical reception, he received several indignant responses from his music student informants in which they expressed strong absolutist views of the following type:

No, no and no again. Music is music. I cannot conceive of it as a source of emotional or literary ramblings.

I still (2010) meet individuals who object to the idea that music can relate to anything except itself. Musical absolutism, it seems, continues to exert such a strong influence that it has, as well see later in this chapter, even spilled over into discourse about various types of popular music. Obviously, the notion of absolute music clearly conflicts with semiotic approaches to music analysis, but its apparent tenacity also suggests that it is an epistemic force to be reckoned with. If that is so, it would be foolish to simply write off the notion without first examining it in some detail, not least because, as already noted, musical structures can in one sense be objectively related to only either: [a] their occurrence in similar guise in other music; or [b] their own context within the piece of music in which they (already) occur (p. 44). In one sense is of course the problem here because the exclusively intrageneric stance of musical absolutism ignores everything else to which music can be related. In what comes next Ill try to explain the nature of and reasons for musical absolutisms epistemic lopsidedness.

Calling music absolute literally means that the music so qualified is neither mixed up with, nor dependent on, nor conditioned by, nor otherwise related to anything else. The first problem with this absolute definition of absolute is that not even the most adamant musical absolutist would claim such absolute music as a late Beethoven quartet to be 100% independent of the musical tradition to which it belongs. Since the quartet cannot have existed in isolation from the musical traditions to which its composer and audiences belonged, any notion of absolute music must be dependent on at least the existence of other absolute music for its own identity. Absolute is in this case relative, allowing the music in question to be absolute only in the sense of unrelated to anything else except other (absolute) music. Now, apart from the fact that the other absolute music would relate to more absolute music, either in a loop (circular argument) or, at some final point in an otherwise endless chain of absolute references, to something other than absolute music, the slight qualification, just proposed, of absolute as partly relative is problematic for two more substantial reasons.

The first reason is that absolute music relies on the existence of non-absolute music for its distinction as absolute. Since non-absolute music must, at least by inference, be related to other music and to phenomena that are not intrinsically musical, absolute music must also, even if indirectly, be related to other phenomena than music, thanks to its sine qua non relation to non-absolute music, and to that musics relation to things other than itself. Moreover, since those who distinguish one type of music from others by the qualifier absolute in no way make up the entire population, they are just one of many sociocultural groups identifiable by their specific musical values and opinions. This means that the term absolute music is, like it or not, linked to the sociocultural position, tastes, attitudes and behaviour of those that use it. It thereby identifies not only absolute music in relation to other music but also its fans in relation to users of other music. Due to such inevitable sociocultural connotation, absolute music is a contradiction in terms.

The second reason for refuting the notion of absolute music is its implication that the music thus qualified transcends not only social connotations and uses but also patterns of synaesthesis. If that sort of transcendence existed it would mean that demonstrable patterns of juxtaposition between music and pictures, between music and words, or between music and bodily movement (as in dance, film, opera, Lieder, pop songs, adverts, videos, computer games etc.) could never influence the production or perception of absolute music and vice versa. Moreover, if absolute music were indeed absolute, it would need no elements of biologically or culturally acquired synaesthesis to exist, with the consequence that non-absolute music (opera overtures, ballet suites, TV themes, dance tunes, etc.) would be pointless in a music only situation (at a concert, on the radio, on your mobile phone) where their visual, dramatic or choreographic accompaniment is normally absent. Conversely, it would mean that absolute music played in connection with anything but itself or other absolute music would also be useless because its autonomy would preclude any synaesthetic perception. This would in turn imply, for example, that the Taviani brothers were deluded when they used snippets from the slow movement of Mozarts Clarinet Concerto in A (K622) as underscore to key scenes in Padre Padrone (1977); it would also mean that Kubrick misunderstood the values of European art music in 2001 (1968), The Shining (1980) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999), or that Widerberg, not to mention his cinema audience, were musically incompetent when responding to the Elvira Madigan (1967) effect. In other terms, absolute music contradicts musics inherent properties as a site of cross-domain representation (pp. 60-66).

In short, if music called absolute has ever had any social connotations, if it was ever written or performed in given historical contexts by certain musicians, if it was ever heard in particular social contexts or used in particular ways by a particular audience, if it was ever related to any drama, words or dance, then it cannot be absolute. Absolute music can therefore only exist as an illogical concept or as an article of faith. If so, how can it have been so influential and why is it so resilient? A first clue to this enigma is provided in the next three quotes.

Passions must be powerful; the musicians feelings must be full-blown no mind control, no witty remarks, no clever little ideas!

This sort of statement could have been made by a dedicated jazz musician. In fact the words date from 1762 and are uttered by the rebellious main character in Diderots play Rameaus Nephew.

German romanticist Wilhelm Wackenroder had similar ideas. In 1792 he described the optimal music listening mode as follows.

[I]t consists in alert observations of the notes and their progression, in fully surrendering my spirit to the welling torrent of sensations and disregarding every disturbing thought and all irrelevant impressions of my senses.

[O]nce music is freed from having to depict finite, distinct emotions, it becomes the expression of infinite yearning, and this indefinite quality is superior to the exactness of vocal music, rather than inferior, as was believed during the Enlightenment.

Powerful passion, fully surrendering the spirit, infinite yearning etc. on the one hand and, on the other, mind control, disturbing thought, irrelevant impressions, distinct emotions and so on: the value dichotomy is clear in the three views of music just cited. Other important common denominators are that they all, like the Hegel passage that started this section (p. 75), come from the same period in European history and that they are all qualifiable as Romantic.

The rise of instrumental music in eighteenth-century Europe can be understood in the context of the Enlightenment, rationalism and the bourgeois revolution. The emancipatory values of these developments and the subjective experience of that emancipation found collective expression not only in emotive slogans like libert, galit, fraternit but also in a music that was itself thought of as liberated. Instead of having to make music under the constraints of feudal patronage and of the Baroque theories of affect associated with the ancien rgime, music could now, it was believed, be purely instrumental, free to express emotions without the encumbrance of words or stage action.

Of importance to this historical background is the fact that Romantic views of music were conflated with notions of personality and free will central to bourgeois subjectivity, both of which were treated as conceptual opposites to the external world of material objectivity. Individuality, emotionality, feelings and subjectivity came to be imagined as opposite poles to the social, rational, factual and objective. Music played a central role in this history of ideas according to which the subjects alienation from objective social processes was not so much reflected as reinforced, even celebrated. Since the humanist liberation of the ego from feudalist metaphysical dogma went hand in hand with the bourgeois revolution against the absolutism of the ecclesiastical and monarchist hierarchy, it is hardly surprising to find contemporary notions of music unwilling to tie down musical expression by means of verbal denotation or any other type of reference to anything outside itself. After all, as long as the musical ideals were emancipatory in relation to an outmoded system of thought they could lend support to the development of revolutionary forms of music and society. But what happened when those musical ideals became the rule and their advocates the rulers?

Perhaps the most significant change is that the radical instrumental music of late eighteenth-century Central Europe, initially dubbed Romantic, acquires the label classical. This rebranding was established by the mid nineteenth century, along with the musics institutionalisation in philharmonic societies, concert halls, conservatories, etc.

Another striking symptom of the same process was the adoption of recurrent buzzwords to signal aesthetic excellence: Art, Masterpiece, Genius, free, natural, complete, inspired, infinite, eternal, sublime, etc. Raised to the status of classical, the once emancipatory qualities of the music were mystified and its Great Composers mummified into those little white alabaster busts that classical buffs used to keep on top of well-polished pianos. Although the dynamic independence that the canonised instrumental music once possessed had been dynamic and independent in relation to older forms of music that were considered fettered by certain types of extra-musical bonding, it was, as classical music, stripped of that historicity. In its new state of sanctity it was conserved in conservatories that by 1900 had successfully eradicated anything that might upset the canon, including the improvisation techniques that had once been part of the tradition whose champions the same conservatories professed to be. This institutionalisation process left the seemingly suprasocial absolute music deep frozen as sacrosanct notation: a century-and-a-halfs worth of performers were subsequently conservatory trained to perpetuate it. At the same time, concerts included less and less new music. For example, the proportion of living to dead composers music on the concert repertoire in France fell from 3:1 in the 1780s to 1:3 in the 1870s.

Freedom of expression without verbal or theatrical constraint had been the revolutionary drive of the new instrumental music that was later canonised as classical. Once canonised, it needed theories that would identify and codify those special qualities. And if the new musics emancipatory driving power had been its unfettered emotional expression then that would be an obvious trait to conserve in conservatories and to expound upon in serious writings on music. One problem was that the new instrumental music had derived its perceived freedom of expression, its own internal musical rhetoric and drama, not from being devoid of words or dramatic action but from the fact that similar music had been repeatedly associated with particular words or stage action. When music went instrumental and crossed the street from the opera house or theatre into the concert hall, it simply carried those links to words and dramatic situations.

Still, even though the classical symphony could never have acquired its sense of dramatic narrative without a legacy of affects from the Baroque era, many experts still regard the European instrumental classics as absolute music. As Dahlhaus (1988: 56) explains:

Early German romanticism dates back to the 1790s with Wackenroders and Tiecks metaphysic of instrumental music, a metaphysic that laid the foundations of nineteenth-century music aesthetics and reigned virtually unchallenged even in the decades of fin-de-sicle modernism.

That metaphysic lived on through much of the twentieth century. Even Adornos hit list of listening types is clearly Hegelian and music is still sometimes taught as if it were at its best when divorced from words and the visual arts. Polarising the issue for purposes of clarity, it could be said that keepers of the absolute music seal condemned music, if deemed bad, to the aesthetic purgatory of entertainment or primitive ritual; if deemed good, they raised it to the lofty realms of Art. It is no exaggeration to say that a large proportion of musicological scholarship since A B Marx has been devoted to propagating an arsenal of terms and methods describing the complexities of European instrumental music in the classical tradition at the expense of other musics. Among those inferior others we find not only the music of peoples colonised or enslaved by the European capitalist classes (primitive), but also the light music (Trivialmusik) of the nineteenth-century European proletariat oppressed by the same ruling classes (entertainment). That deprecation of low-brow by high-brow is callous, to say the least, because the French Revolution of 1789 and the Code Napolon of 1804 would never have materialised without the support and sacrifice of the popular majority. Despite that support, the bourgeois revolution reneged on the promise of liberty and equality for all as it betrayed the fourth estate (workers, peasants, etc.). You do not have to be a professor of political history to work out that deprivation directly affects peoples relationship to music, as the following simple points demonstrate.

The less money you have, the less you can afford concert tickets, instruments, rehearsal and performance space, musical tuition, etc.

The less money you have, the more crowded your living conditions will be, the less room you will have for musical instruments, and the more likely you will disturb your neighbours when you make music or be disturbed by them when they make music.

The less leisure time you have, the less likely you are able to try out other musics than those readily accessible to you and the less likely you are to opt for music requiring patient listening or years of training to perform yourself.

The noisier your work and leisure environments, the less use you have for music inaudible in those environments, or for music demanding that you listen or perform in a concentrated fashion without disturbance or interruption.

Bearing these points in mind, Wackenroders right way of relating to music (see p. 80) would be out of the question under the conditions that many people had to endure in industrial cities across nineteenth-century Europe. Nor were the old musical ways of the countryside much of an alternative. Apart from the fact that music connected with the cycle of the seasons was not suited to life in an industrial town, most members of the new working class were refugees from semi-feudal repression in the countryside who had little reason to idealise their rural past in musical or any other terms. Instead, the old folk music was replaced by street ballads, low church hymns, music hall tunes, popular airs from opera and operetta, dance tunes, marches and so on. It was this musical fare that nineteenth-century music authorities branded as light, trivial, trite, crude, shallow, low-brow, commercial, ephemeral entertainment in contrast to the deep, serious, classical, high-brow, transcendental Art of lasting value which they prized. True, some charitable burghers registered that something was wrong and sought to provide opportunities for the masses to raise their musical standards, but that realisation of high and low in itself indicates that class differences were very much a musical as well as a political and economic matter. So, the first probable reason for the longevity of European art musics absolutist aesthetics is that it worked for a long time as a reliable marker of class membership. Even today, adverts for financial services are much more common on classical format radio than on pop or country stations. However, the classical music = high class equation did not just work as a sociocultural indicator.

Members of the new ruling classes faced a series of moral dilemmas, the most striking of which is probably that between the monetary profit imperative of the capitalist system and the charitable imperatives of Christianity. Sell all that thou hast and give unto the poor rhymed badly with paying your employees as little as possible to produce as much as possible or with sending children to work down the mine. As a businessman in a free market with free competition, it might ease your conscience if you could draw clear dividing lines between your business and your religion, between work and leisure, public and private, personal and social, morals and money, etc. Any conceptual system that could rubber-stamp such polarities would offer welcome relief and help you sleep at night. Seen in this light, even the most outr statements of Romantic music metaphysics have to be taken seriously because the institutionalised concept of absolute music provided a kind of get-out clause: if listening to music in the right way was a matter of the emotions, of the music itself and nothing else, then good business ought to be a matter of making money, business itself and nothing else. Or, to put it another way, feeling compassion or any other irrelevant emotion while making money would be as inappropriate as thinking about money when listening to instrumental music in the right way (see p. 80). To put it in a nutshell, music is music (absolute music) can only exist in the same way as orders are orders or business is business. All three statements are of course tautological nonsense, otherwise there would be no music industry, no War Crimes Tribunal and no International Monetary Fund; but that is not the point because the effects of the practices characterised by such conceptual absolutism and by the ideological purposes it serves are painfully real. The conceptual dissociation of money from morality, military orders from ethics, and the world outside music from music, all illustrate the way in which capitalist ideology can isolate and alienate our subjectivity from involvement in social, economic and political processes. We are in other words back to the issue of dual consciousness raised at the start of the preface to this book.

Refocusing on music is music, we need to mention one final reason for the staying power of musical absolutism. Im referring here to the way in which members of the haute-bourgeoisie, already at on top of societys monetary pyramid, could easily, by claiming the artistic high ground of musical taste transcending mundane material reality, convince themselves that they were superior to the masses in more than merely monetary terms: they cultivated what established experts agreed was good taste in music, they adopted the right way of listening to the right music; lesser mortals did not. By theoretically locating their musical experience outside the material world, the privileged classes were not only able to feel superior: they could also divert attention from the fact that it was they who exerted the real power, they who enjoyed the real material privileges, actually in the material world.

In this historical context, the Romantic metaphysics of music and its notion of absolute music, both of which became cornerstones in the capitalist states musical establishment, can be seen as essential supplies in the conceptual survival kit of bourgeois subjectivity. It is for such reasons hardly surprising if academic institutions in a society still governed by the same basic mechanisms of capital accumulation have until recently propagated conceptual systems validating dissociation of the subjective, individual, intuitive, emotional and corporeal from the objective, collective, material, rational and intellectual. It is also historically logical that this same dissociation should affect our understanding of music and dance, the most clearly affective and corporeal of symbolic systems, with particular severity. That dissociation lives on in our culture even outside the European art music sphere.

Remember Rameaus fictitious nephew back in 1762 and his ideal of music making with no mind control? Or Tieck and Wackenroders dream of music freed from having to depict distinct emotions and their ideal listener fully surrendering to the welling torrent of sensations, disregarding every disturbing thought? Now compare that with this.

[1] The point is [to] overthrow the power structure in your own head. The enemy is the minds tendency to systematise, to sew up experience. [] The goal [is] in OBLIVION. (Reynolds, 1987)

[2] [T]he power of pop lies not in its meaning but in its noise, the non-signifying, extra-linguistic elements that defy content analysis: the grain of the voice, the materiality of the sound, the biological effect of the rhythm, the fascination of the stars body. (Reynolds, 1990)40

[3] Rock and roll is corporeal and invasive [W]ithout the mediation of meaning, the sheer volume and repetitive rhythms of rock and roll produce a real material pleasure for its fans. (Grossberg, 1990: 113)

Its worth noting first that aversion to the idea of music mediating anything but itself is not the only common denominator between anglophone pomorockology in the year 1990 and the musical metaphysics of German Romanticism in the late eighteenth century because, as Table 4-1 (p. 89) shows, both trace a similar path from radical alternative to institutional norm with the following traits. [1] A canonic repertoire is established (row 4 in Table 4-1). [2] Subjectivity and individual freedom are promoted as key notions (row 7). [3] A strong relationship with political power develops (rows 9-10). [4] The educational institutionalisation of each body of music takes place a generation or so after the apogee of the original musical development subjected to subsequent canonisation (rows 1-2 in Table 4-1). For example, the city of Berlin saw its first high-ranking (classical) music academic a generation after Beethoven composed his fifth symphony and its first professor of popular music a generation after the Beatles Sergeant Pepper album.

Ossification (row 4 in Table 4-1) of the European classical repertoire causes few eyebrows to be raised: it is seen as the nature of the beast, so to speak. Less common knowledge is that similar tendencies developed in the anglophone world of pop: whereas album charts from the 1960s and 1970s included few re-issues, back catalogue accounted for the majority of pop sales in 2000. Such processes of repertoire consolidation and conservation occur after an initial period of musical innovation associated with social change (row 8). These processes also include the adoption and patronage by state or corporate power of music that was seen as at least inappropriate, sometimes even as a threat, in the recent past.

created conservatories, departments of music and musicology performing arts colleges, social science and media courses

tendencies Music by dead composers gradually dominates 1960s: few re-issues in charts; 2000: 60% of sales back catalogue

7. liberties and attitude to pleasure liberation of the ego, emotionality, postponed gratification liberation of the id, corporeality, consumerism, immediate gratification

movement rising capitalist merchant class against feudal aristocracy and abandoned fourth estate nouveau riche against old

9. examples of state appropriation and sanctioning in UK Hndel (mass appeal) becomes Handel, musical representative of UK state power Queens jubilee: Brian May, Eric Clapton, Brian Wilson; Abba songs on symphony orchestra repertoire

(selection) Sir: A. Sullivan, C.V. Stanford, C.H.H. Parry, E. Elgar, R. Vaughan Williams, A. Bliss, W. Walton, M. Tippett, P. Maxwell-Davies, R.R. Bennett, J. Tavener Sir: Cliff Richard, Andrew Lloyd-Webber, George Martin, Paul McCartney, Bob Geldof, Tom Jones, Elton John, Mick Jagger. Dame: Vera Lynn, Shirley Bassey. OBE: Van Morrison, Richard Starkey (Ringo), George Harrison

One obvious UK example of state sanctioning (row 9) is the concert held in Buckingham Palace gardens in June 2002, to celebrate Queen Elizabeth IIs fifty years on the throne. A succession of ageing rock stars, including Eric Clapton, Brian Wilson, Ray Davies and Sir Paul McCartney trooped on stage to perform a string of tunes from the late sixties and early seventies. Sir is perhaps a particularly reliable indicator of the process because popular music knighthoods (bottom of Table 4-1) didnt exist before Thatcher came to power in 1979, since when Brits have been presented with Sir Cliff Richard, Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Elton John, Sir Robert Geldof, Sir George Martin, Sir Andrew Lloyd-Webber, Sir Michael Jagger, Sir Tom Jones, Dame Vera Lynn and Dame Shirley Bassey, plus several pop-rock OBEs to boot.

If the incorporation of previously oppositional music into pre-established power structures had only been a matter of honorary titles, things would not be so bad. Unfortunately, the old epistemic patterns underpinning the dual consciousness that prevents individuals from integrating subjective and objective aspects of (musical) life have been much more substantially boosted by the way in which (not by the fact that!) various forms of popular music have become academically institutionalised on two fronts: knowledge in and knowledge about music (see p. 101, ff.). In the first of these (the rock/pop conservatoire) repertoire canons and national exams were established, first for jazz and later for rock performance, not just to legitimise those musics and those who rose socially with them (row 8 in Table 4-1), but also to meet the neo-managerial monsters insatiable appetite for assessment, accountability, enhancement, excellence, outcome, quality assurance, benchmarking, league tables and other Kafkaesque concepts created to bring the complex dynamics of teaching, learning and extramural reality into bizarre one-dimensional schemes of quantification. These standardisation mechanisms have often made it hard for educators to find room on the curriculum for music still in dynamic interaction with extramural reality, while budget restrictions often cause problems in keeping up with the changes in media technology that music technology graduates will have to confront in the outside world.

However, much more damaging to the development of analytical perspective presented in this book has been the inverted musical absolutism that was so fashionable, at least in the anglophone world, around 1990 and which, like the old-style art-music absolutism discussed earlier, exhibits avid aversion to making links between music as sound on the one hand and its meanings, uses and functions on the other. Inverted musical absolutism has its own articles of faith as part of an irrational belief system and still rules the roost in a significant number of institutions supposedly devoted to studies of culture, including music. Im referring here to what, in the context of popular music studies, I call pomorockology and whose tendencies are exemplified in the three numbered quotes on page 87.

Theres no room here to provide much detail about the rise of postmodernist approaches to music and I take the liberty of referring readers elsewhere for the a much fuller account. It is, however, important to understand its basic problems, not least because it circulated widely in the non-muso humanities and social sciences before gaining any foothold in musicology.

It was around 1980 that postmodernist approaches to music seemed to take root among intellectual would-be radicals who, through lack of anything else they could understand about music had, so to speak, nothing to read but Adorno. The most striking traits in Adornos writings on popular music are: [1] ignorance of the music on which he passes judgement; [2] absence of musical-structural levels of concretion; [3] absence of empirical evidence (sociological, anthropological, or otherwise) to support his theorising. More directly influential on rock criticism in particular was Adornos protg Herbert Marcuse who in the 1960s popularised the social-critical philosophy of the Frankfurt School among radical US students, including founding Rolling Stone columnist Jon Landau and pioneer rock historian Carl Belz (1969). It was from these origins among upper middle-class students of philosophy, literature and sociology not music that a literary style of rock journalism developed which promoted subversion and spontaneity as key criteria of authenticity. To cut a long story short, while in the 1960s and 1970s rock critics of this school concerned themselves with radicalism and alternative politics, using terms like the spirited underdog, or body music that entertains and provokes, the discourse shifts, as rock becomes part of the mass media establishment, in the direction of noise and oblivion, away from opposition and subversion. Characteristic is the insistence on, to use Reynolds own words, musics non-signifying elements that defy content analysis. Like Hegels connoisseur fulfilled by the music on its own and Wackenroders ideal listener disregarding every disturbing thought, pomorockology promoted a music is music aesthetic in which refusal to consider music as a meaningful sign system became an article of faith. The origins of this problem lie partly in the history of Cultural Studies.

Almost all Cultural Studies pioneers examined the verbal or visual media, i.e. the symbolic systems privileged in public education and those which were technically reproducible for teaching purposes at the time: literally, the sort of thing you could photocopy, as Simon Frith once put it. Their concern with music, at least as we musos understand the word, seemed with few exceptions to be sporadic, unsystematic or marginal. Indeed, there was little point in photocopying musical notation if neither students nor teachers could decipher it. More importantly, there was, as several colleagues in cultural and communication studies have pointed out, nothing much to read at that time about music except Adorno. For example, when asked over the phone in 2002 why he thought Cultural Studies scholars had engaged so little with music as text, Dave Laing replied:

[T]here wasnt much out there by musicologists, except for loners like Wilfred [Mellers]. But theres more to it. I think Adorno got in the way. He had high-art and left-wing cred that suited the way things were going in sociology, Cultural Studies and so on. [H]is On Popular Music reinforced a set of prejudices about the popular-classical split, [but] we knew that pop music had different values (intensional versus extensional and so on) and musicology seemed mostly to be about notes on the page. Besides, [popular music] was so much about style and clothes and a way of life, not just about the music and definitely not about notes. So, I dont think it even occurred to us to ask anyone in the Music Department [and] I dont think any of us were really aware of ethnomusicology either.

Laings retrospective ties in with the justified questioning of musicologys usefulness, as expressed by the non-muso colleagues who in the 1980s asked me for a musicological explanation of pop videos (p. 3, ff.) and which first prompted me to think about writing this book. That said, conventional musicologys general inability to deal with relations between musical text and context wasnt the only problem because it takes two to tango and at least two to decide not to. Nor does it explain the paradox whereby pomo rock critics developed their own variant of the same absolute music value aesthetics which characterised the conventional type of musicology whose legitimacy they criticised.

That music became and has largely remained a troublesome appendage to Cultural Studies is frustratingly clear to those of us who have worked as musicians. Apart from the fact that the last to be hired and first to be fired as staff member at Birmingham Universitys famous CCCS was its only musicologist, it has often been disheartening to register that the efforts we make as musicians to present sound x rather than y to produce effect z in contexts a, b or c are usually passed over in silence by non-muso colleagues supposedly studying music. Ive even felt like the inferior partner in an unequal marriage where Im expected to know about Bourdieu and embeddedness while very few of my Cultural Studies colleagues bother to find out what pentatonicism or synth presets are all about, or to understand how structuring sounds in different ways relates to the sociocultural contexts in which theyre produced and used. Still, however annoying such lack of reciprocity may be, griping about it will not improve matters. Its better to explain.

One problem with Cultural Studies was that it had by the 1980s become the victim of its own success. Having started with a democratic agenda, including studies of cultural identities formed around various types of popular music youth subcultures, the Birmingham school understandably attracted acolytes like moths to a flame from a wide range of disciplines. One symptom of the problem was the Centres need to maintain its identity by providing a common epistemological umbrella for all those recruits from all those different disciplines. The ensuing theoretical superstructure that swelled to unimaginable proportions was largely based on what Mattelart and Neveu (1996) call (in French) La French Theory and features the following heroes of the archetypal pomo bibliography: Barthes, Baudrillard, Bourdieu, Derrida, Deleuze, Kristeva, Lacan and Lyotard. Members of this disciplinarily heterogenous bunch of scholars (linguists, literary critics, philosophers, social theorists, but not a single muso) have featured as mandatory authorities to which countless writers seem obliged to refer in texts emanating from the postmodernist establishment. This practice has two deplorable side-effects: [1] those who dont comply with its imperatives can be ostracised from the institutional community it helps define; [2] theory sections of writings about any cultural phenomenon often swell to ludicrous proportions, leaving little or no room for empirical or structural investigation, that is assuming that such practices are allowed at all in extremist pomo circles. Mattelart and Neveu (1996 69) do not mince words about all that inflated meta-theorising.

Faced with a world whose complexity is no more than a convenient slogan, Cultural Studies took up the challenge by introducing an abusive inflation of meta-discourses rather than by investigating a theory of that complexity.

The fact that you are reading these words right now means that even this book is blighted by the problem. I cannot avoid the issue and cannot pretend that these obstacles to our understanding of music dont exist because they are still widely accepted in circles where, at least in anglophone academe, the very people Im writing for actually work and study. Its regrettable having to devote so much time to unravelling misconceptions in order to focus on what really needs to be written about, but I shall persevere.

The second problem relating to Cultural Studies in the 1980s concerns the subjects new recruits. Unlike the baby-boomer generation, they had no first-hand experience of the postwar changes in popular culture that were musically manifested in the form of rock and pop music and which were related to radical changes in patterns of subjectivity. Raised with a TV in the home and with access to 24-hour pop radio channels, the new Cultural Studies generation entered an intellectual environment that differed noticeably from what confronted baby-boomers when they had attended university twenty years earlier. The new scholars also lived in a very different political climate to that of the 1960s as the Thatcher and Reagan regimes unleashed their virulent strain of capitalism on the population.Working-class values of community and resistance suffered severe setbacks from anti-union and anti-welfare policies, while left-wing intellectuals were in a quandary about how to react as their own security was threatened by government crusades against sociology and by the imposition of monetarist management models on universities. The problem was compounded by the apparent inability of Cultural Studies to manage its own success inside an establishment to which it had been at least partially opposed and, perhaps most significantly, its loss of its social foothold outside academe. One symptom of this institutional malaise was that one of the subjects most influential theoretical models, that of subcultural opposition, became something of a paradox once it was itself part of a successful enterprise: it became more like an academic parallel to the more blatant anomaly of continuing to celebrate the subversive underdog when rock was already part of the big-business establishment.

The most obvious change in Cultural Studies in the 1980s is probably the shift in emphasis on popular agency away from active participation in sites of opposition to the celebration of mass-culture consumers as agents in the construction of meaning. Of course, information about audiences is vital to understanding the dynamic of any cultural exchange but, as Mattelart and Neveu (1996: 70, 76) explain, obsession with the notion of the audiences freedom to determine the meaning of mass-mediated messages easily obscures the relations of power that exist between members of the audience and the socio-economic order which imposes restrictions on the range of readings effectively open to negotiation. Such idealisation of alternative readings constitutes little more than an academic variation on the old freedom of choice theme chanted at consumers by zealots of the free market. This change of focus coincides with the replacement of a partially Keynesian economic policy by neo-liberalist monetarism. It also coincides with pomo-rockologys abandonment of the subversive underdog in favour of the sort of decontextualised body celebrated in the Reynolds quotes on page 87.

The decontextualised body is perhaps the most insidious article of faith to come out of postmodern Cultural Studies and rock criticism. Like the ideal of uninhibited full-blown feelings and the establishment of an absolute music aesthetic around the time of the bourgeois revolution, postmodernist bodyism also celebrates music in absolutist terms but with one significant difference: it believes in the liberation of the body rather than of the feelings and emotions (the id and the ego in row 7 of Table 4-1 p.89) and it celebrates the immediacy and oneness of musical experience so that the sound of the music is seen as inseparable from the body responding to it. This notion is extremely problematic because it implies that musical texts do not exist, as the following anecdote illustrates.

During a discussion I had in the mid 1990s with some popular music studies colleagues, two pomorockologists in a state of text denial held that the Percy Sledge hit When A Man Loves A Woman from 1966 was not the same in 1987 after its use in a widely diffused jeans commercial, even though the music used in the advert, not to mention the songs re-issue following the popularity of the commercial, were both identical with the same original recording from 1966. The pomo case against this empirically demonstrable fact started quite convincingly: since the record-buying and TV-viewing public are the ultimate arbiters of pops meanings and values, and since the context of the jeans commercial was different to that of the same recordings original release in 1966, different connotations and different values were perceived in relation to the song. I had no trouble with that. Then my pomo colleagues argued that if the same music did not come across as the same thing to those using it in the new context, it could not be the same as before because audiences are the arbiters of musical meaning. That, I thought, was a non-sequitur because according to their line of reasoning, music was defined only as the response it receives and/or as the symbolic values attributed to it in some context or other, not as and not even in relation to the sonic text which elicited that response or to which those meanings were attributed in that context. The fact that commercial exploitation of the original recordings connotations was dependent, twenty years later, on the TV audiences ability to recognise the music as that song (a musical text) with its own connotations for each listener in an earlier context rather than another song with other connotations from another time and place did not seem to matter; nor, apparently, did the fact that Atlantic (Sledges record label) cashed in on the same songs renewed popularity, under new circumstances and with new connotations, by issuing a simple re-release, i.e. without having to re-record a single track, without having to produce a new musical text.

By marginalising or disregarding the musical text or work, pomo-rockologists conflated specific sets of culturally organised sound with the activities and reactions they believed to occur in connection with those particular sounds under a particular set of circumstances, even if they presented neither evidence of those activities and reactions, nor details of the context they had in mind. Obviously, if no musical text exists there can be no relatively autonomous set of musical sounds which can exist in other contexts where those same sounds may or may not be invested with different meanings, give rise to different reactions, have different functions, etc. All that remains in other words is just one idealised and absolute context. Now, absolute context is of course just as much an aberration as absolute music (text), not only because a context must by definition contain a text to exist as such (just as no text can exist without a context), but also because no context can have a specific character if no other contexts exist with which to compare it (just as no text can exhibit specific traits if there are no other texts from which it can differ). Put in simple semiotic terms, whereas the old musical absolutism had potential signifiers but no signifieds, pomo absolutism had only potential signifieds but no signifiers. Whichever way you look at it, semiosis is out of the question. Such a standpoint is clearly of no use if you want to know how music communicates what to whom, but it must be a godsend to anyone with a canonic axe to grind: with semantics and pragmatics out of the picture, the coast is clear for propagating an authoritarian view of music, not so much because socio-semiotic evidence is inadmissible as because it has been abolished. By mystifying text and disregarding context, romantic music metaphysics could rank ways of responding to music on a scale of arbitrary aesthetic excellence compatible with bourgeois notions of subjectivity. By mystifying context and abolishing text, pomo-rockology did the same in reverse for the latter-day ideology of consumerism.

The gist of the argument is that pomo-rockologys socially decontextualised body in an idealised absolute context is no better than conventional musicologys idealised, socially decontextualised emotions expressed in an idealised absolute text. Bodyism may in fact be worse in one sense, because while conventional musicology relies at least on syntax, pomo-rockology speculates about pop/rock aesthetics, viewing semantics with great suspicion and throwing both syntax and pragmatics out the window. Indeed, if, as seems to be the case in extreme pomo-rockology, there is no musical text, then there can be neither pragmatics, nor syntax, nor even semantics because, so to speak, the music IS the body (or vice versa) in no specific social context; or rather (which amounts to the same thing), music IS the body in one implicit, idealised, absolute and seamless context. If that is the case, we are not so much dealing with a latter-day variant of Hanslicks absolutist claim that music is nothing other than tonal forms in movement (music is music), but with something even more metaphysical: the IS of pomorockologist aesthetics conflates music with the body instead of clarifying particular types of relationship between the two, while the body, devoid of social context, remains a culturally undefined entity.

The problem should be clear enough. By conflating signifier with signified, medium with message, message with response, response with text and text with context, pomorockology has, like the finance capitalism under which it grew and flourished, created an inscrutable black box whose contents are jealously protected from scrutiny. All those constituent parts of semiosis are conceptually imprisoned, inaccessible, invisible, nameless. All you get to see is the box, the packaging. This reification of an abstraction which obscures the material and social dynamics of music seems to mirror larger contemporary processes of reification too faithfully for it to be interpreted as a historical fluke, especially in view of other coincidences between, for instance, the celebration of rock intensionality and consumerisms dependence on immediate gratification, or between the abandonment of rocks subversive underdog and the dismantling of the welfare state. Viewed from this perspective, it seems that pomo-rockology has helped create the impression of an inscrutable monolith of power in which the political economy, its ideology, culture and patterns of subjectivity are fused into a seamless postmodern whole; for if one type of subjective experience of a musical text in a particular context is confused with the music as text, and if that experience is conflated with the specific cultural context in which it occurs, then there can be no negotiation of meaning between text and context. With the effective denial of such negotiation, individual and collective experiences of music are bound to be conceptualised as inscrutable and monolithic. It is in this way that canonic corporeal oblivion can be understood as a consumerist variation on the old absolutist theme of music as utter submersion, infinite yearning or eternal essence. In short, it should be obvious by now that postmodernist absolutism will be of as of little use as its euroclassical counterpart in getting to grips with matters of musical meaning.

The staying power of absolute music, be it packaged as classical or postmodernist, is reflected in and reinforced by the institutional organisation of musical knowledge. This symbiosis of institutional and value-aesthetic categories is fuelled by the intrinsically alogogenic and largely non-denotative nature of music. The problem can be understood in terms of five anomalies, one of which has already been mentioned several times: musics lowly status in institutions of education and research versus its obvious importance in everyday reality.

The second anomaly follows from the first. While, for example, critical reading and the ability to see below the surface of advertising and other forms of propaganda are considered essential to independent thought, and although such skills are widely taught in literary or Cultural Studies, equivalent skills relevant to understanding musical messages are not. This book is supposed to be a contribution to filling that gap.

The third anomaly is really another aspect of the second. It highlights disparity between the analytical metalanguage of music in the Western world and that of other symbolic systems. More specifically, it deals with peculiarities in the derivation patterns of terms denoting structural elements in music (structural denotors) when compared to equivalent denotative practices applied in linguistics or the visual arts. This third anomaly requires some clarification.

It is possible at this stage, using a simplified version of terms explained at the start of Chapter 6 (p. 145), to equate the notion of a meaningful musical structure or element with Peirces sign, i.e. that part of musical semiosis which represents whatever is encoded by a composer, performer, studio engineer, DJ, etc. (the signs object) and which leads to whatever is decoded by a listener (the signs interpretant). For example, the final chord of the James Bond theme (EmD9), played on a Fender Stratocaster treated with slight tremolo and some reverb, is a structural element (sign) encoding whatever its composer, arranger, guitarist and recording engineer intended (object) and decoded as listener response (interpretant) verbalisable in approximate terms like an excitement/action cue associated with crime, spies, danger, intrigue, etc. The musical structure (sign) is described here from a poetic standpoint: EmD9 (E minor major nine) designates how the chord is constructed, Fender Stratocaster the instrument on which that chord is played and so on. The description is not aesthesic because it is not presented in terms of its interpretant: it is not identified as a danger cue, spy sound, crime chord, detective chord etc. X 00

Poetic will qualify terms denoting a structural element of music from the viewpoint of its construction in that such a term derives primarily from the techniques and/or materials used to produce that element (e.g. con sordino, glissando, major minor-nine chord, analogue string pad, phasing, anhemitonic pentatonicism). Aesthesic, on the other hand, will qualify terms denoting structural elements primarily from the viewpoint of perception (e.g. allegro, legato, spy chord, Scotch snap, cavernous reverb).

In the analysis of visual art, it seems, at least from a laypersons point of view, that it is just as common for the identification of structural elements to derive from notions of iconic representation or of cultural symbolism as from concepts of production materials and technique. For example, structural descriptors like gouache or broad strokes clearly derive from aspects of production technique and are therefore poetic, while the iconic representation of, say, a dog in a figurative work of art would be called dog, an aesthesic term, rather than be labelled with details of how the visual sign of that dog was produced. To put some meat on the theoretical dogs bone, the dog in Van Eycks famous Arnolfini marriage portrait could also be considered a sign on indexical as well as iconic grounds, if it were established that dog was consistently interpreted in a similar way by a given population of viewers in a given social and historical context: the dog might be understood as recurrent symbol of fidelity, in which faithful dog would work as an aesthesic descriptor on both indexical and iconic grounds.

In linguistics there also seems to be a mixture of poetic and aesthesic descriptors of structure. For example, the phonetic term voiced palato-alveolar fricative is poetic in that it denotes the sound /Z/, as in genre [!ZAnr], iek [!Zi:ZEk] or Zhivago [ZI!vA:gU], by referring to how it is produced or constructed, not how it is normally perceived or understood: it is an etic (as in phonetic) rather than emic (as in phonemic) term. One the other hand, terms like finished and unfinished, used to qualify pitch contour in speech, are aesthesic rather than poetic: they refer to what is intended by the particular sound or to how it is interpreted, not to technicalities of its construction.

Given these perspectives, it should be clear that, compared to the study of visual arts and of spoken language, conventional music analysis in the West exhibits a predilection for poetic terminology, sometimes excluding aesthesic categories from its vocabulary altogether. This terminological tendency may be fine for formally trained musicians but it is usually gobbledygook to the majority of people and prevents them from verbally denoting musical structures.

The fourth anomaly involves inconsistency in Western thinking with regard to the status of aesthesic competence in language compared to other symbolic systems. Whereas the ability to understand both the written and spoken word (aesthesic skills) is generally held to be as important as speaking and writing (poetic skills), aesthesic competence is not held in equal esteem when it comes to music and the visual arts. For example, teenagers able to make sense of multiple intertextual visual references in computer games are not usually dubbed artistic, nor credited with the audiovisual literacy they clearly own. Similarly, the widespread and empirically verifiable ability to distinguish between, say, two different types of detective story after hearing no more than two seconds of TV music does not apparently allow us to qualify the majority of our population as musical. Indeed, artistic usually seems to qualify solely poetic skills in the visual arts sphere and musicality seems to apply only to those who perform as vocalists, or who play an instrument, or can decipher musical notation. It is as though the musical competence of the non-muso majority of the population did not count. The fifth and final anomaly, in fact a set of two times two dichotomies, offers some clues as to a possible remedy.

Table 4-2 divides musical knowledge into two main categories: music as knowledge and knowledge about music. By the former is meant knowledge that relates directly to musical discourse and that is both intrinsically musical and culturally specific. This type of musical knowledge can be divided into two subcategories: poetic competence, i.e. the ability to compose, arrange or perform music, and aesthesic competence, i.e. the ability to recall, recognise and distinguish between musical sounds, as well as between their culturally specific connotations and social functions. Neither poetic nor aesthesic musical competence relies on any verbal denotation and are both more usually referred to as skills or competences rather than as knowledge.

competence creating, originating, producing, composing, arranging, performing, etc. conservatories,

competence recalling, recognising, distinguishing musical sounds, as well as their culturally specific connotations and social functions

metadiscourse music theory, music analysis, identification and naming elements and patterns of musical structure departments of music(ology), academies of music

metadiscourse explaining how musical practices relate to culture and society, including approaches from semiotics, acoustics, business studies, psychology, sociology, anthropology, Cultural Studies. social science departments, literature and media studies, popular music studies

The institutional underpinning of division between these four types of musical knowledge is strong in the West. In tertiary education, poetic competence (1a) is usually taught in special colleges or conservatories, musical metadiscourse in departments of music or musicology as well as in conservatories or colleges, and contextual metadiscourse (2b) in practically any humanities or social science department, less so in music colleges and conventional music(ology) departments.

Aesthesic competence (1b) is virtually impossible to place institutionally because the ability to distinguish, without resorting to words, between musical sounds, as well as between their culturally specific connotations and social functions is, with the exception of isolated occurrences in aural training and in some forms of musical appreciation, generally absent from institutions of learning. Aesthesic competence remains a largely vernacular and extracurricular affair. Indeed, there are no courses in when and when not to bring out your lighter at a rock concert, nor in when and when not to stage dive, not even in when and when not to applaud during a jazz performance or at a classical concert. And what about the ability to distinguish musically between degrees of threat, between traits of personality, between social or historical settings, between states of mind, behavioural attitudes, types of love or of happiness, sadness, wonder, anger, pleasure, displeasure, etc.; or between types of movement, of space, of location, of scenario, of ethnicity and so on? Those sorts of musical competence are rarely acquired in the classroom: they are usually learnt in front of the TV or computer screen, or through interaction with peers and with other social groups. In fact, the epistemic problem with music, as it has in general been academically categorised in the West, can be summarised in two main points.

Firstly, knowledge relevant to musics production and structural denotation has been largely separated from that relating to its perception, uses and meanings. Established institutions of musical education and research have therefore tended to favour etic rather than emic and poetic rather than aesthesic perspectives. Such imbalance, in symbiosis with a long history of class-specifically powerful and metaphysical notions of good musics absolute and transcendent qualities (pp. 70-87), has led to frequent misconceptions about music as a symbolic system (e.g. pp. 44-47, 75-77). This imbalance has also exacerbated ontological problems of musics alogogenicity and made the incorporation of musical knowledge(s) into a verbally and scribally dominated tradition of learning an even more difficult task.

Secondly, the virtual absence of aesthesic learning (knowledge type 1b) in official education has meant that, compared to analytical metalanguage used with visual or verbal arts, relatively few viable aesthesic denotors of structure exist in musical scholarship. This paucity of user-oriented terminology has restricted musicologys ability to address the semantic and pragmatic aspects essential to musical semantics. If that were not the case, this book would be superfluous. In addition to these two overriding problems relevant to the development of a simple semiotic approach to music analysis (the real subject of this book), one final major issue of institutional legacy needs to be addressed: Western musical notation.

Notational literacy is useful, even in the age of digital sound. Lets say you need to add extra backing vocals to a recording, that neither you nor the other musicians in your band are able to produce the sound youre looking for and that you contact some professional vocalists to resolve the problem. You could give those singers an audio file of the mix so far and indicate where in the track you want each of them to come in to sing roughly what at which sort of pitch using which kind of voice. This would be a time-consuming task involving your recording, for demonstration purposes only, something none of your band can sing anyhow; it would also involve either extra rehearsal with the vocalists or the risk of them arriving in the studio and failing to sing what you actually had in mind. Its clearly much more efficient to send the vocalists their parts written out in advance. Its quicker for them and its both quicker and much less expensive for you because you wont waste studio time and money on unnecessary retakes.

This utilitarian aspect of notation is important for two reasons: [1] it highlights the absurdity of excluding notational skills from the training of professional musicians and it contradicts widely held notions about notations irrelevance to the study of popular music; [2] it illustrates that the prime function of musical notation is to act as a set of particular instructions about musical performance rather than as a storage medium for musical sound. This last reason is of particular relevance to the discussion of musical meanings.

Many well-trained musicians can read a score and convert whats on the page into sounds inside their heads. This ability is no more magical than being able to imagine scenery when perusing a decent physical map. However, although no sign system is totally irreversible, the ability to make sense of any such system presupposes great familiarity with its limitations, more specifically an intimate knowledge, usually non-verbalised, of what the system does not encode and of what needs to be supplied to interpret it usefully. For example, if the vocalists hired for your recording session are professionals and if the notation you sent them is adequate, they should be able to deduce from experience whatever else you want them to come up with in addition to the mere notes on the page. Just by looking at that notation, an experienced musician will understand what musical style it belongs to and, in the case of professional vocalists, will produce classical vibrato, gospel ornamentation, smooth crooning, rock yelling or whatever else you had taken for granted. In short, they will know to apply a whole range of expressive devices relevant to their craft and to the style in question, making decisions about timbre, diction, dialect, pronunciation, breathing, phrasing, vocal register and so on that are nowhere to be seen on the paper or in the email attachment you sent them.

Western musical notation is in other words a useful performance shorthand for certain types of music. It graphically encodes aspects of musical structure that are hard to memorise, especially sequences of pitch in terms of melodic line, chordal spacing and harmonic progression. It can also encode these tonal aspects in temporal terms of rhythmic profile and periodic placement, but it does not convert the detailed articulation of these elements. Moreover, elements of timbre and aural staging hardly ever appear in notation and parameters of dynamics (volume), phrasing, and sound treatment are, if they appear at all on the page, limited to terse or imprecise written instructions like f, cresc., leg., con sord., sotto voce, laisser vibrer, medium rock feel, brisk, etc.

Another important limitation of Western notation is that it was developed to visualise some of the tonal and temporal parameters particular to a specific musical tradition. Just as the Roman alphabet was not conceived to deal with foreign phonemes like /T/, /D/ (th), /S/ or /Z/(sh, zh), Western music notation was not designed to accommodate African, Arab, Indian, Indonesian or even some European tonal practices. Moreover, since the establishment, in the early eighteenth century, of the ubiquitous bar line in Western music notation, it has been virtually impossible to graphically encode polymetric aspects of music from West Africa or parts of Latin America where the notion of a downbeat often makes little sense. Even the frequent downbeat anticipations in basically monometric jazz, blues, gospel, funk and rock styles, so familiar to almost anyone living in the urbanised West, can only be clumsily represented on paper. In terse technical terms, the efficiency of our notation system is restricted to the graphic encoding of monometric music containing fixed pitches which conform to a division of the octave into twelve equal intervals.

Once aware of the restrictions just explained, it is of course possible to make good use of written music, not only as performance shorthand, as with the backing vocalists mentioned on page 107, but also, if you have that kind of training, as a viable way of putting details of tonal and rhythmic parameters on to paper, provided of course that the music in question lends itself to such transcription. Indeed, the analysis of music and its meanings would be easier if scholars held such a pragmatic view. The problem is that these simple truths still have to be explained to some students and colleagues who hold the scopocentric belief that the score is in some way the musical text or the music itself.

Now, given the hegemony of the written word in institutions of European knowledge, it would in one sense be odd if, before the advent of sound recording, music on the page, rather than just fleetingly in the air or as the momentary firing of neurons in the brain cells of members of a musical community, had not acquired a privileged status. After all, notation, despite its obvious shortcomings, was for centuries musics only tangible medium of storage and distribution. The weight of this legacy should not be underestimated because it ties in with important historical developments in law, economy, technology and ideology. There is no room here to disentangle that nexus but it is essential to grasp something of notations radical influence on music and on ideas about music in Western culture.

Well before the advent of music printing around 1500, notation was already linked to the sort of subjectivity that later became central to bourgeois ideology. Of particular interest in this context is a passage in the entry on notation (Notschrift) from the 1956 edition of Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. The article draws attention to the musical doodlings of an anonymous monk who should have been copying plainchant but whose own musical imagination seems to have spilled out on to the parchment. He was supposed to be using the technology of notation to perpetuate the immutable musica humana of Mother Church, not for recording ideas like what if I arrange the notes like this instead? or what if I combine these two tunes? or what if I change their rhythm to this? Of course, the abbot overseeing the duplication of liturgical music has crossed out the offending monks notes. Not only had this insubordinate brother made a unholy mess in a holy book; he had also, by committing his own musical thoughts to paper, challenged ecclesiastical authority and the supposed transcendence of Gods music in its worldly form (musica humana). Preserving Mother Churchs music for perpetuity was good; allowing the musical thoughts of a mere mortal to be stored for posterity was not. A millennium or so later, the democratic potential of music technologies like digital sequencing, recording and editing, not to mention internet file sharing, is sometimes ignored or demonised by other authorities, elitist or commercial, whose interests, like those of the medieval abbot, lie in preserving hierarchical legacies of social, economic and cultural privilege.

At least two lessons can be learnt from this story of the wayward monk. One is that there is nothing conservative about musical notation as such, even though its long-standing symbiosis with conservatory training and its conceptual opposition to graphically uncodified aspects of musical production (improvisation, etc.) can lead those who rarely make compositional use of the medium to believe that notes on the page constitute an intrinsically restrictive type of musical practice. The anonymous monks doodlings and our studio vocalists notational literacy (p. 107) both suggest the opposite. It is also worth remembering that, unlike European classical music, other traditions of learned music rely rarely, if at all, on any form of notation to ensure their doctrinally correct reproduction over time.

The second lesson is that the connection between notation and subjectivity has a long history whose development runs parallel with the emergence of notions of the individual discussed earlier (pp. 80-81, 85-87). Of particular importance is the process by which, in the wake of legislation about authorial ownership in literary works, creative musicians, no longer subjected to the anonymity of feudal patronage, were able to put their printed compositions on the open market. In late eighteenth-century London, for example, the market was a growing throng of bourgeois consumers wanting to cultivate musical habits befitting the status to which they aspired. As Barron (2006: 123) remarks:

The capacity to earn a living by selling ones works in the market freed the artist of the burden of pleasing the patron; the only requirement now was to please the buying public.

Notation was a key factor in this development. As the judge, Lord Mansfield, stated during a 1774 court action brought by Johann Christian Bach against a London music publishing house:

Music is a science: it can be written; and the mode of conveying the idea is by signs and marks [on the page].

Thanks to these marketable signs and marks, composers became the legal owners of the ideas the sheet music was seen to convey. Composers became authors of not only a tangible commodity (sheet music) but also of financially quantifiable values derived from use of that commodity: they became central figures and principal public actors in the production and exchange of musical goods and services.

As the buying public diversified its tastes, many [composers] cultivated greater self-expression and individuality (it was a way of being noticed). Under the sway of patronage, [the composer] was expected to be self-effacing Craft counted more than uniqueness The rise of a wider, more varied and anonymous [public] encouraged [composers] to carve out distinctive niches for themselves. They were freer to experiment, because less commonly working to peer expectation or commission instead producing in anticipation of demand, even to satisfy their own sense of Creative Truth and personal authority.

Rameaus nephew (p. 80) would have been delighted at this turn of events, perhaps even more pleased by the magic attributed to the Artist by representatives of German Romanticism, at least if the following characterisation of their notion of the text is anything to go by.

The text, which results from an organic process comparable to Natures creations and is invested with an aesthetic or originality, transcends the circumstantial materiality of the [score] [I]t acquires an identity immediately referable to the subjectivity of its [composer].

Here we are back in the metaphysical musical world of Tieck, Wackenroder and Hegel, except that this time were armed with notation as legally valid proof of the composers subjectivity and of the authenticity of his Text/Work/Oeuvre. In short, musical notation in Europe around 1800 stands in the middle of a complex intersection between:

the emergence of composers from the anonymity of feudal patronage and their appearance as public figures and principal actors in the exchange of musical goods and services;

Add to these four points the problem of music is music (absolute music) and its institutionalisation (pp. 70-81), plus the fact that notation was the only viable form of musical storage and distribution for centuries in the West, and it should come as no surprise that many people in musical academe still adhere to the scopocentric belief that notation is The Music it encodes so incompletely. Indeed, this belief is so entrenched in some muso circles that the word music still often denotes no more than signs and marks on paper, as in statements like I left my music in the car. The institutional magic of this equation should not be underestimated. For example, one research student told me his symphonic transcription of a Pink Floyd track was intended to give the music the status it deserves; and I was once accused of trying to legitimise trash because I had included transcriptions in my analyses of the Kojak theme and Abbas Fernando (Tagg 2000a, b).

Another important reason for the longevity of the equation music = sheet music is of course that notation was, for about a century and a half (roughly 1800-1950), the most lucrative mass medium for the musical home entertainment industry. In most bourgeois parlours, the piano was as focal a piece of furniture as the TV in latter-day living rooms. Before the mass production of electro-magnetic recordings in the late 1920s, or even as late as the 1950s and the advent of vinyl records, sheet music was, like an audio file, encoded content in need of software and hardware to decode and reproduce. The parlour piano was only part of that hardware; the rest of the hardware and all the necessary software resided in the varying ability of sheet music consumers to decode notes on the page into appropriate motoric activity on the piano keys (or on other instruments, or by using the voice). The sheet music medium on which consumers relied in order to realise an aesthetic use value, hopefully commensurate with the commoditys exchange value (its monetary price), demanded that they contribute actively to the production of the sounds from which any aesthetic use value might be derived. In this way, consumer preoccupation with poetic aspects of musical communication was much greater than it was to become in the era of sound recording. Poetic consumer involvement in musical home entertainment was also greater than that required for deriving use value, aesthetic or otherwise, from a newspaper or novel, especially after the introduction of compulsory education and its insistence on verbal literacy for all citizens: notational literacy was never considered such a necessity, even in the heyday of sheet music publishing.

The fact that those who regularly use Western notation today are almost exclusively musicians, not the general listening public, reinforces the dichotomy between knowledges of music, especially that between vernacular aesthesic competence (e.g. aural recognition of a particular chord in terms of crime and its detection) and the professional ability to denote musical structures in poetic terms (e.g. minor major nine). What composers, arrangers or transcribers put on to the page is, as weve repeatedly stated, usually intended as something to be performed by trained musicians who, in order to make sense of the signs and marks, have to supply from their own experience at least as much of what is not as of what is on the page. It goes without saying that it would today be economic suicide to produce sheet music en masse in the hope that Joe Public would derive any value from it. Despite this patent shift in principal commodity form during the twentieth century from sheet music to sound recording, musical scopocentrism is still going strong, not only in the musical academy but also in legal practice. As late as November 2003, a California judge declined to award compensation to a jazz musician whose improvisation had been sampled on a Beastie Boys track. Judgement was passed on the grounds that the improvisation was part of a work whose score the plaintiff had previously deposited for copyright purposes in written form but that the improvisation in question was not included in that copyrighted score.

One final aspect of the dynamic between notation, subjectivity and the institutionalisation of musical knowledges deserves attention if any strategy for developing more democratically accessible types of discourse about music is to be at all viable. This dynamic has to do with the composers star status in the Western classical tradition after 1800.

Back-tracking to the nineteenth-century bourgeois music market for the last time, composers became, as we have seen, the legal owners and recognised authors of ideas conveyed through the tangible commodity of sheet music. In this way they also became the most easily identifiable individuals involved in the production of music. For example, the biggest names on popular sheet music covers were, in the heyday of notation, those of the composer and lyricist, while the optional as performed by data, which only starts to appear in the inter-war years after the commercial breakthrough of electro-magnetic recording, was assigned a much smaller font. Of course, in the classical field, piano reductions and pocket scores virtually never include details of notable recordings of the work in question. Indeed, although nineteenth-century artists like Jenny Lind or Niccol Paganini were unquestionably treated like pop stars in their day, they never acquired the lasting high-art status of composers enshrined as Great Masters in Western musical academes hall of fame. Romantic notions of the individual, of music as a refuge of the higher arts and of virtually watertight boundaries between subjective and objective contributed to this canonisation process. Among the continuing symptoms of this romanticised auteurcentrism we could mention conventional musicologys considerable zeal for discovering musical Urtexts or for re-interpreting Beethovens notebooks compared to its relative lack of interest in how such music was used and in what it meant to audiences, either then or more recently. In short, the vast majority of musicological textbooks still deal with composers, their subjectivity, their intentions and their works, the latter overwhelmingly equated with the poetically focused medium of notation, much more rarely with the effects, uses and meanings of that music from the viewpoint of the infinitely greater number of individuals who make up the musics audiences.

The consequences of notations long-standing central position in music education are, in the perspectives just presented, quite daunting. Thankfully, several major twentieth-century developments have highlighted many aspects of the anomalies brought together in the discussion so far. These developments, discussed in the next chapter, have not only enabled a critique of conventional musicology: they also prefigure the sort of analytical approaches presented in Chapters 7-12.

[1] Musics relatively low status in the academic pecking order is due not only to its inherently alogogenic nature but also to its institutional isolation from the epistemological mainstream of European thought.

[2] The relative isolation of music from other aspects of knowledge in our tradition of learning is not only due to the latters logocentric and scopocentric bias but also to a powerful nexus of historical, social, economic, technological and ideological factors.

[3] Socio-musical power agendas are a severe obstacle to the understanding of music as a meaningful sign system. Musics relative isolation in our tradition of knowledge is partly due to a long history of institutional mystification: notions of suprasocial transcendence have for thousands of years been a recurrent trait in learned writings about learned musics. The doctrinal ghost of one such notion of suprasociality absolute music (music is music) still haunts the corridors of musical academe in the West.

[4] The strong link between absolute music and Romanticist (bourgeois) notions of subjectivity reinforces a more general dissociation or alienation of individuals from social, economic and political processes. In so doing, the link between absolute music and bourgeois notions of individuality also obscures the objective character of shared subjectivity among audiences, placing disproportionate emphasis on the individual composer or artist in the musical communication process.

[5] Postmodernist absolutism is a latter-day variant on its art music counterpart. It exhibits similar traits of: [i] change from radical alternative to established intellectual canon; [ii] repertoire ossification; [iii] adoption and propagation by privileged classes; [iv] metaphysical and illogical discourse, often authoritarian, promoting the superiority of certain musical practices over others.

[6] Postmodernist absolutism came out of literary-style rock journalism and Cultural Studies, not out of institutionalised music studies. While classical absolutism focused on musical texts at the expense of their context, postmodernist absolutism tended to deny the existence of a musical text altogether. In either case semiotic approaches to music are out of the question.

[7] Overriding emphasis on the production of music, rather than on its uses and meanings, is so firmly entrenched in (classical) Western institutions of musical learning that terms denoting elements of musical structure are almost always poetic, rarely aesthesic. Consequently, those without formal musical training are largely unable to refer in a doctrinally correct fashion to such structural elements (signs). This lack of officially recognised aesthesic structural denotors makes the discussion of musical meaning by those without formal training a very difficult task.

[8] The longevity of notation as the only medium of musical storage and distribution before the advent of recorded sound, combined with its subsequent status as the most lucrative medium during the early part of the twentieth century, has compounded many of the difficulties mentioned above. Unlike the written word, notation, conceived and used almost exclusively for the production of musical sound rather than for its perception, exacerbates the poetic imbalance of musical learning in West. At the same time, notations long-standing status as commodity form, combined with its historical association with European notions of subjectivity, especially during the Romantic era and in the wake of legislation rubber-stamping the composer as an authentic originator and owner of marketable property, has further contributed to the poetic lopsidedness of thought about music in Western institutions. It has in the process also reinforced the metaphysical views of music and subjectivity mentioned in points 3 and 4.

The long and short of these eight points and of the discussion they summarise is that it should come as no surprise if intelligent people perfectly capable of embracing a socially informed semiotics of language or cinema are generally unable to do the same with music: the historical legacy of musical learning in the West has simply made that task extremely difficult. At the same time, although it is vital to understand the causes of this problem, it should also be obvious that it must be solved. Musical realities after a century of mass-diffused sound clearly demand that the mental machinery of the historical legacy be overhauled.

Therefore, returning to the analogy that started this chapter, we are perhaps now slightly better placed to determine what cargo to salvage and what to discard along with the ballast of the oil tanker representing the historical legacy we have just reviewed. Although we may be able to neither manoeuvre the massive vessel satisfactorily nor bring it to a complete standstill, we can at least decrease its inertia and more easily predict its behaviour. If all else fails, we can always abandon ship and row our lifeboats towards another point on the shoreline. Hopefully the tanker can be safely moored before it causes more damage so that we can use as much fuel as possible salvaged from its hold to run less cumbersome vessels providing a more efficient and ecologically friendly shipping service in the public interest. Several epistemological lifeboats have already put out. They are the subject of the next chapter.

This chapter tries to answer one question: if conventional views of musical learning in the West are still going strong, what changes in thinking about music occurred during the twentieth century that paved the way for developing alternatives? These changes or challenges the lifeboats in the final paragraph of Chapter 3 form part of the epistemological foundations on which the analysis section of this book rests. Challenges of particular relevance in this context have been what, for reasons of brevity in this chapter, are labelled ethno (as in ethnomusicology), socio (as in the sociology of music) and semio (as in the semiotics or semiology of music). These three qualifiers imply that studying music should, unlike conventional music studies in the West which have no such qualifying prefixes, entail considering music as an integral part of human activity rather than as just music as sound (absolute music). Put simply, ethno relates music, as we defined it (p. 41, ff.), to peoples and their culture, socio to the society producing and using the music in question, semio to the meanings and functions, expressed in both musical and other terms, of the humanly organised sounds being studied.

The earliest major challenge to institutionalised wisdom about music in the nineteenth-century West came from what is generally called either ethnomusicology or the anthropology of music.

There are several plausible explanations for the rise, in Europe and North America around 1900, of these ethno approaches. One reason may be that alienated European and North American intellectuals sought alternative cultural values to those of the brutal monetary economy they lived in. Another reason may have been concern for the fate of pre-industrial cultures threatened by urbanisation, a third the search for national musical identity. Whatever factors may have sparked interest in folk and other musics at the turn of the previous century, one thing is clear: ethnomusicology would not have flourished without the invention of recorded sound.

Now, although notation, not sound recording, was, during the first half of the twentieth century, the main musical storage medium in the West, acoustic recording, commercially available since around 1890, allowed collectors of non-notated music to store what they sought to document as it sounded rather than as scholars heard it or were able to transcribe it. Thanks to the new recording technology, standards of reliability in musical documentation improved: collectors could no longer return from field trips with mere transcriptions of the music they wanted to study. Through repeated listening to a recording of an identical sequence of musical events, they could more easily grasp unfamiliar ways of structuring pitch, timbre and rhythm, taking note of all relevant parameters of expression, not just those suited to storage in the European system of notation.

This early development in ethnomusicology is of importance to anyone studying music stored and/or distributed in aural rather than graphic form because focus on musical texts shifts from notation to sound recording. With the early ethnomusicologists, audio recording became the primary medium for musical storage and acted as the basis for transcription. Put another way, the roles of notation and recording were reversed. In European art music, composers and arrangers produced notation that served as the primary medium on which live performance and any subsequent recording were based, whereas the notation of music in other traditions relied on sound recording of a primary live performance for its existence as a text used for purposes of study rather than for (re)performance. Later, after the advent of moving coil microphones and electrical amplification in the 1920s, field recordings by collectors like Peer, Hammond and Lomax were to have an even greater impact: previously non-notated music traditions like hillbilly and the blues could now be stored, reproduced and distributed in quantities that would soon outstrip those of sheet music publishing. By the time of the Beatles Sergeant Pepper (1967), of course, media primacy is in the recording, live performance becoming at best an attempt to re-enact the recording on stage, often an outright impossibility, while notation has little or no relevance. Given this historical background, there are at least three reasons for stressing the importance of ethnomusicologys challenge to Western institutions of conventional musical learning.

First: by using audio recording in their studies, early twentieth-century scholars, researchers, collectors and musicians made other musics available for interested Westerners to hear, study and appreciate. Through subsequent work by scholars and collectors, more music from more cultures became available on phonogram, this development increasing the Western listeners chances of finding aesthetic values in a greater variety of musics and substantially reducing the viability of maintaining a single dominant aesthetic canon for music.

Second: due to obvious differences in structure between Central Europes musical lingua franca and the other musics studied by ethnomusicologists, we Westerners could never take the meanings and functions of their music for granted in the same way as we thought we could with our own. We needed explanations as to why their music sounded so different from ours. Their music remained incomprehensible to us unless it was related to paramusical phenomena, that is, unless it could be conceptually linked to social or cultural activity and organisation other than what we would call musical to religion, work, the economy, patterns of behaviour and subjectivity etc. If applying notions of the absolute to familiar music in familiar surroundings is, as we already argued (p. 77, ff.), a contradiction in terms, applying such notions to unfamiliar music in unfamiliar contexts would be even sillier. So, forced to put the sounds of unfamiliar music into the specific social context of foreign culture in order to make any sense of them at all, we had to compare the sounds of our own music with those of people living in other cultures, and the context of their music with our own cultural tradition. Perhaps we would need to ask how our music worked in their context if their music was incomprehensible to us without understanding it in their context; and if we had to ask those sorts of question, maybe we would need to start thinking more seriously about how our music worked in our own context. Whatever the case, understanding anything of the unfamiliar music that ethnomusicologists recorded meant thinking comparatively. It meant reflecting on the givens of our own music, culture and society in order to understand theirs; it entailed thinking in terms of cultural relativity. Under such circumstances, musical absolutism was out of the question.

Third: as already suggested, attempts at transcribing other musics actualised the limitations of our own system of notation and thereby the limitations of music encodable within that system. This process provided insights into the relative importance of different parameters of musical expression in different music cultures and paved the way for a musicology of non-notated musics. Diversity of aesthetic norms for music became reality and musical ethnocentricity, including Eurocentric notions of musical superiority, absolute music and eternal or universal values could be challenged. This sense of the relativity of aesthetic norms for music was of central importance in the latter formulation of aesthetic values for all forms of music outside the European classical canon.

In short, ethnomusicology refuted the viability of maintaining just one aesthetic canon. It also drew attention to the importance of non-notatable parameters of expression and, of particular relevance to this book, it obliged any serious scholar of music to deal with questions of function and meaning in a socio-cultural framework.

The earliest text devoted explicitly to the sociology of music appeared in 1921. That date coincides roughly with the invention of the moving coil microphone and with the first broadcasting boom. A few years later, patents were taken out on electro-magnetic recording and on optical sound. These new sound-carrying technologies were essential to the development of radio, records and talking film. Mass diffusion of music via these new media highlighted differences in musical habits between social classes within the same nation state because people were now much more frequently exposed to what everyone else those others again! listened to. It is also essential to note that the same inter-war years saw momentous social and political upheavals, including the emergence of the Soviet Union, the increasing strength of working-class organisations, general strikes and such disastrous effects of capitalism as the Wall Street Crash, economic depression, rampant inflation and the rise of fascism.

Realisation of this socio-economic-cultural conjuncture and concern about the future of individuals within this new and unstable type of mass society seem to be the main reasons behind the development, not least during the socio-political turmoil of the Weimar republic, of a sociology of music dealing with the everyday musical practices of the popular majority (those others again!). Hence, for example, the establishment in 1930 of the Berlin journal Musik und Gesellschaft, subtitled Working Papers for the Social Care and Politics of Music. Before disappearing after the Nazi Machtbername in 1933, Musik und Geselleschaft had contained articles about, for example, music and youth, amateur musicians, urban music consumers and about music in the workplace. There were, in short, good ethical and political reasons for intellectuals to take a serious look at interactions between music, culture, class, society and values. Out of these political, social and aesthetic concerns about pre-war popular culture emerge two general trends which exert considerable indirect influence on the understanding of music in the West. One of these socio trends was more empirical, the other more theoretical.

The empirical trend in the sociology of music concentrated largely on documenting the musical tastes and habits of different population groups. It can in very general terms be understood as serving both exploitative and democratic purposes. It is exploitative, for example, when the demographic data it produces is used by privately owned commercial media to sell socio-musically defined target groups to advertisers, while its democratic potential lies in the fact that similar demographic data can be used as arguments for the democratisation of public policy in the arts and education. Put simply, the democratic potential of empirical sociology not only contributed to a general broadening of the notion of culture, a conceptual cornerstone in what became Cultural Studies; it also fuelled the opinion that publicly funded music institutions were undemocratic. Such critique helped pave the way for the serious study of musics of the popular majority, musics whose producers, mediators and users are so tangibly involved in the complex construction and negotiation of sounds, meanings, values and attitudes in our own society. Under such circumstances it would be absurd to study music as just music, illogical to determine any aspect of musical structuration without considering its function or meanings.

Several proponents of the more theoretical socio trend held very different views about the music of the popular majority. The most well-known representative of this trend was Adorno, a figure so frequently referred to by other writers on popular culture that anyone seriously studying music in the mass media is almost ritualistically obliged to mention him. One reason for Adornos academic notoriety is that, despite the Musik und Gesellschaft connection just mentioned, he is treated as if he were the first music scholar to deal with popular music. The chapter On Popular Music from his Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1962) is Adornos claim to academic fame in this respect.

Adornos On Popular Music can best be described as uninformed and elitist. The author seems to have very vague notions about the music, musicians and audience on whom he passes judgement. He also presents a hierarchy of listening modes, according to which concentrated listening as you follow events in the score is right and having music on in the background as you wash the dishes is wrong. Moreover, Adornos equation of a strong, regular beat and an easily singable tune with the manipulation of the masses expresses disdain for musics somatic properties, as well as for the working class which, according to the socialism he professed to embrace, would rid society of the capitalism he himself criticised. How can such a learned man be so contradictory? According to Paul Beaud (1980), Adornos deaf ear for popular music can be explained as follows:

His texts [on popular music] date from his American period when he was on the lookout for fascism everywhere. Anything resembling rhythm he equated with military music. This was the visceral reaction of the exiled, aristocratic Jew during the Hitler period.

This plausible explanation raises two other problems. One is that popular music in the Third Reich was not dominated by military marches but by sentimental ballads (Wicke 1985), a fact substantiating the view that Adorno was out of touch with the musical habits of the populace. The other problem is that Adornos aversion to musics somatic power is contradictory to the point of anti-intellectualism because it precludes the development of rational models capable of explaining musics relation to the body and emotions. Since, as we shall see next, Adorno exerted considerable indirect influence on alternative studies of music in the second half of the twentieth century, and since no mean amounts of music in our contemporary media have such clear emotional or somatic functions, awareness of Adornos shortcomings is essential. Ignorance of popular music, disdain for the musical habits of the popular classes, visceral aversion to musics corporeal aspects and celebration of its cerebral aspects are hardly the ideal premises on which to base an understanding of Abba, Bob Marley, Cline Dion, death metal, James Brown, the Dixie Chicks, games music audio, line dancing, Radiohead, salsa festivals, techno rave, TV themes and so on and so forth.

So, why bother about Adorno at all? Because he has been so influential is the easy answer I just gave, but its an answer that begs other questions. If Adorno was himself light years away from forming a viable approach to understanding music in the mass media, why is he so often referred to by scholars with that particular field of interest? That question raises serious epistemological issues which anyone trying to develop a musicology of mass-mediated music would be wise to consider. One explanation is that Adornos influence on two areas of thought about music has been indirect and paradoxical.

First, Adorno, a musicologist with some high-art composition credentials, introduced music academics to a vocabulary of social philosophy which, despite its obvious shortcomings, made it just that little bit harder for those academics to bury their heads in wonted formalist sand. Second, and more importantly, Adorno was Herbert Marcuses mentor and it was Marcuse who popularised the social-critical philosophy of the Frankfurt School among radical U. S. students in the sixties, not least among those who, wittingly or not, contributed to the formulation of the rock canon. It is in this second way that Adorno indirectly contributed to the establishment of influential types of postwar English-language discourse on music. In journalistic or academic guise, this discourse, which was also influenced by traditions of literary criticism and political theory, seems typically to concern itself with a certain set of social and cultural issues youth, subculture, fashion, the business and the media, etc. and with alternative aesthetic canons of authenticity in popular music. This aspect of Adornos indirect influence is paradoxical because the rock canon of authenticity, for example the spirited underdog and the body music that provokes, contrasts starkly with Adornos cerebral anti-somatic stance.

Two other explanations will serve to complete the bizarre picture that is Adornos position in the pantheon of authorities to which scholars of contemporary culture so often seem obliged to refer. One reason is simple: that Adorno is much more widely translated into English than other comparable authorities. This prosaic reply begs the question why Adorno and not others?

The general gist of the second explanation is that many aspects of Adornos writing align neatly with pre-existing value systems and conventional categories of thought in the humanities. More precisely, Adorno is empiriphobic and undialectic on two fronts, for not only are the voices of musics creators and users conspicuous by their absence in his writings; his work also involves little or no discussion of music as sound. Adorno is on this second count at an advantage in institutions where conceptual boundaries between musical and other types of knowledge are kept tight because no discussion of musical structure means that scholars without musical training can be spared the embarrassment of not knowing what minor-major-nine and other items of muso jargon actually mean (see p. 75). For scholars in other arts or in social science, theorising around music (metacontextual discourse) is simply more accessible than discourse involving reference to the sounds of music in the terms of those who produce them (metatextual discourse with its poetic descriptors). At the same time, Adornos lack of ethnographic and socio-empirical concretion, combined with his evident unfamiliarity with the realities of popular culture, are symptomatic of the sort of art criticism or literary theory in which little or no substantiation of value judgements seems to be required. As long as the language is abstruse enough and as long as shared aesthetic values are largely confirmed, disciplinary boundaries can be maintained and there need be no disconcerting paradigm shifts. Add to all this the left-wing credibility inherent in Adornos status as a critical intellectual Jew having fled from the Nazis to the English-speaking West and his popularity as reference point for anglophone academics who see themselves politically left of centre should come as no surprise.

In short, Adornos value-laden theorising has thrown two major obstacles in the path of those who want to understand how music can carry meaning in contemporary industrial society.

[1] By omitting musical texts from his discussions of music, Adorno reinforces disciplinary boundaries between studies of musical structuration and other important aspects of understanding music.

[2] By excluding empirical concretion, by privileging unsubstantiated value judgements and by his apparent unawareness of his own ignorance about the music of the popular majority, Adorno has reinforced scholastic tendencies in arts academe to confuse the elegant expression of aesthetic opinion with scholarship.

To summarise: Adornos value lies in what his status as much quoted authority tells us about the tradition of knowledge that has kept him in that position. It is in spite of him that the socio challenge to the old absolutist aesthetics of music met with any success. That challenge came mainly from empirical studies of musical life in the industrial West, studies enabling scholars to argue for the democratisation of institutions of musical learning, as well as for the validity of studying musics of the popular majority. Socio was also, it should be added, a convenient general-purpose label which for a very long time could be stuck on to studies that discussed music as an integral part of sociocultural activity or which examined musics outside both the European classical canon and the conventional hunting grounds of ethnomusicology.

One final symptom of problems with both socio trends in music studies links back to the absence of musical texts in most work about music in the mass media. Such studies are still overwhelmingly conducted by scholars with a background in the social sciences or cultural studies. It would be unreasonable to demand of those colleagues the expertise associated with the description of musical structures, more reasonable to expect musicologists to have devoted more effort to studying the vast repertoire of musics circulating on an everyday basis via the mass media. With the exception of ethnomusicologists, who until quite recently in general avoided that vast repertoire, very few music scholars examined relationships between that music and the social, economic and cultural configurations in which it plays a central part. As a result of this epistemological gap and thanks to the relative accessibility of the unsubstantiated theorising produced by Adorno, the denial of context associated with Romantic theories of absolute music could be replaced, just as idealistically, with explicit denial of the existence of musical texts. From the musicians perspective, such text denial is of course absurd. How this problem affects the main point of this book may be easier to understand with the help of Table 4-1 (p. 132).

Table 4-1 shows that socio approaches deal mainly with social aspects of Western music outside the classical tradition and virtually never with music in non-Western societies. Ethno studies, on the other hand, have traditionally dealt with the musics of non-Western cultures and, as the thick double-ended arrow indicates, with the interaction between music as sound and the sociocultural field of which it is part. The table also suggests that conventional European music studies are mainly concerned with the production and description of Western art music texts, less with its social aspects or with interaction between the musical and social. An ethnomusicology of other musics in Western society (the middle two columns on the ethno line in Table 4-1) would therefore be extremely useful if we want to understand the meanings and functions of music in the contemporary mass media. Since such studies are still relatively rare, we may have to look elsewhere.

The semiotics of music, in the broadest sense of the term, deals with relations between the sounds we call musical and what those sounds signify to those producing and hearing the sounds in specific sociocultural contexts. Defined in this way, semio approaches to music ought logically to throw some light on the interaction between any music as text, anywhere or at any time, and the socio-cultural field in which the text exists. In fact, semio studies should ideally produce the following profile in Table 4-1.

Should and ought are operative words here because the majority of music studies carrying the semio label deal only with certain types of music and/or only with certain aspects of meaning. This very broad generalisation needs some explanation since there is no single semiotic theory of music but rather, as Nattiez (1975: 19) has suggested, a range of possible semiotic projects.

Semio approaches to studying music first appear with that label around 1960 and initially draw quite heavily on linguistic theory of the time. These early studies were later criticised by semio-musicologists who drew attention to problems caused by transferring concepts associated chiefly with the denotative aspects of language to the explanation of musical signification. Such laudable caution about grafting linguistic concepts of meaning on to music seems nevertheless to have encouraged a reversion to a largely congeneric view of music. Indeed, the majority of articles in volumes of semio-musical scholarship published in the 1980s and 1990s show an overwhelming concern with theories of musics internal structuration (syntax). The same literature shows much less interest in musics interrelation with other modes of expression and pays scant attention to musics paratextual connections (semantics). Evidence linking musical structure to musician intentions or listener responses and discussion of these aspects of semiosis to the technology, economy, society and ideology in which that semiosis takes place (pragmatics) is conspicuous by its absence. This observation is based on the perusal of 88 articles published in three learned semio-musical volumes. 59 of those 88 articles (67%) discuss either overriding theoretical systems rather than direct evidence for the validity of those systems, or else they deal with syntax rather than with semantics or pragmatics. In the remaining 33% (29 articles) a few semantic issues are addressed but only three articles (3.4%) discuss pragmatics, each of those three focusing on musicians, none on musics final arbiters of signification its users. Clearly, syntax fixation and a lack of attention to semantics and pragmatics will not be very useful if we want to understand how music communicates what to whom on an everyday basis in the modern world. Indeed, Eco (1990: 256 ff.), emphasising the necessity of integrating syntax, semantics and pragmatics in any study of meaning, provides a very critical opinion of the semiotic tendencies just mentioned.

To say that pragmatics is one dimension of semiotic study does not mean depriving it [the semiotic study] of an object. Rather, it means that the pragmatic approach concerns the totality of the semiosis Syntax and semantics, when found in splendid isolation become perverse disciplines. (Eco 1990: 259)

One possible reason for the lack of semantics and pragmatics in so many music-semiotic texts may be the fact that the type of linguistics from which theoretical models were initially derived accorded semiotic primacy to the written word, to denotation and to the arbitrary or conventional sign. Such notions of denotative primacy were understandably considered incompatible with the general nature of musical discourse. However, denotative primacy has been radically challenged by many linguists. Some of them argue that prosody and the social rules of speech (including also timbre, diction, volume, facial expression and gesture) are as intrinsic to language as words, and that they should not be regarded as mere paralinguistic add-ons. Other linguists refute denotations primacy over connotation, and all underline the importance of studying language as social practice (pragmatics). Music semiotics has, it seems, either been slow to assimilate such developments in linguistics or chosen to disregard them. How can such reluctance be explained if incompatibility with linguistic theory is so much less of an issue in 2010 than it was in the 1960s and 1970s?

The syntax fixation of many musicologists rallying under the semio banner is regrettably difficult to understand in any other terms than those discussed in Chapter 3 the hegemony of musical absolutism in Western seats of musical learning. While ethnomusicologists had to relate musical structure to social practice if they wanted to make any sense of foreign sounds, and while the sociology of music dealt mostly with society and hardly ever with the (socially immanent) phenomenon of music as sound, most music semioticians were attached to institutions of musical learning in which the absolutist view still ruled the roost. Their tendency to draw almost exclusively on European art music for their supply of study objects provides circumstantial evidence for this explanation, not because music in that repertoire relates to nothing outside itself (on the contrary, see p. 75-77), but because the notion of absolute music has been applied with particular vigour to music in that tradition. Without exaggerating too grossly, it could be said that the tradition of music semiotics we are referring to is not only perverse in the sense put forward by Eco, but also based on a flawed (absolutist) notion of a limited musical repertoire developed during a limited period of one continents history by a minority of the population in a limited number of communication situations.

The main problems with the majority of semio-musical writing in the late twentieth century West can be summarised in five simple points.

1. It is hampered by its institutional affiliation with the absolute aesthetics of music.

2. Its objects of study are usually drawn from the limited repertoire of the European art music canon.

3. It exhibits an overwhelming predilection for either syntax or general theorising, much less interest for semantics and virtually none for pragmatics.

4. It concentrates almost exclusively on works whose compositional techniques must be considered as marginal, i.e. as the exception to rather than as the rule of current musical practices, codes and uses.

5. It resorts to notation as the main form of storage on which to base analysis.

The general neglect, by musicologists and semioticians, of Western musics outside the classical canon as a field of serious study is of course a matter of cultural politics, but it is also a matter of importance to the development of both musicology and semiotics. The reason is that music circulating in contemporary media cannot be analysed using only the traditional tools of musicology developed in relation to European art music because the former, unlike the latter, is:

1. conceived for mass distribution to large and sometimes heterogeneous groups of listeners;

3. subject, under capitalism, to the laws of free enterprise according to which it should help sell as much as possible of the commodity (e.g. film, TV programme, game, sound recording) to as many as possible.

According to the third point, the majority of music heard via the mass media should elicit some attraction at first listening if the music is to stand a chance of making a sell or, in the case of music and the moving image, of catching audience attention and involvement more efficiently than competing product. It also means that music produced under such conditions will tend to require the use of readily recognisable codes as a basis for the production of (new or old) combinations of musical message. Failure to study this vast corpus of familiar and globally available music means failing to study what the music around us usually mediates as a rule. It surely makes more sense to start by trying to understand what is mediated in our cultures mainstream media before positing general theories of signification based on discussion of subcultural, counter-cultural or other alternative musical codes like avant-garde techno, speed metal, bebop, Boulez, Beethovens late period or any other repertoire contradicting or complementing rather than belonging to the dominant mainstream of musical practices in our society. Using exceptions to establish rules may be considered standard practice for scholars projecting an image of high-art or high-cred cool but it is not a viable intellectual strategy for constructing a semiotics of music in the everyday life of citizens in the Western world.

The neglect of popular music as an area for semiotic analysis causes other basic problems of method. We have already touched on tendencies of graphocentricism which treat the score as reification of the work or text when in fact the notes represent little more than an incomplete shorthand of musical intentions. Such confusion is less likely in the study of popular music because notation has for some time been superseded as the primary mode of storage and dissemination to the extent that popular music texts are usually either commodified in the form of sound recording carried on film, tape or disc, or stored digitally for access over the internet. Due to the importance of non-notatable parameters in popular music and to the nature of its storage and distribution as recorded sound, notation cannot function as a reliable representation of the musical texts circulating in the mass media.

Moreover, it is probable that the professional habitat of music semioticians in institutions of conventional music studies which still focus on the European art-music canon tends to encourage a return to the old absolutist aesthetics as the line of least intellectual resistance. Conventional musicologys pre-occupation with long-term thematic and harmonic narrative seems often to preclude discussion of the meaningful elements of sound from which the various themes and sections are constructed and without which no narrative form can logically exist. The spectre of absolute music can even cast its shadow over empirically substantiated studies in which listener responses are restricted to adjectives of general affect and from which connotations of concrete phenomena are excluded, even though combinations of such connotations often constitute musogenic semantic fields.

This account of the semio phase is rather discouraging: we seem to have ended up where we started (p. 121), still dogged by notions of musical absolutism. We have to some extent been describing a music semiotics which is semiotic by name rather than by nature. Put bluntly, if the semiotics of music, as it seems largely to have been applied, were a commercial venture, it might well qualify for indictment under the Trades Description Act.

There are, however, exceptions to the general trends of grand theory and syntax fixation just discussed. A few of these exceptions are explicitly semio, while most of them are semiotic by nature if not by name. They have all informed, to varying degrees and in different ways, the type of approach presented later in this book and have all challenged, sometimes in the face of considerable opposition, the institutionalised conventions of absolute music. One work deserves special mention in this context: it is Francs doctoral dissertation La perception de la musique (1958), a thoroughly researched and pioneering semio-musical work that has influenced the ideas presented in this book but which is seldom mentioned by those who defer to Adorno or who rally under the semio-musical banner. For reasons of space we can do no more than merely list, in the next footnote, some of the other semio exceptions relevant to the main part of this study. Readers wanting to know more are instead referred to Marconis Musica, espressione, emozione (2001) for a useful and extensive historical coverage of semiotic approaches to music.

This chapter has dealt with twentieth-century challenges to the graphocentrism and to the absolutist aesthetics of music in official institutions of education and research in the West. Although some of the tendencies described seem to have done little more than reformulate conventional conceptual differences between musical and other forms of knowledge (the socio avoidance of music as sound, the semio syntax fixation, etc.), the three challenges ethno in particular have made it much easier to address questions of musical meaning in the everyday life of citizens in the Western world. At the same time, although an absolutist aesthetics of music may still be on the agenda of many learned institutions, it can also be viewed as a mere historical parenthesis: it has after all only been official policy in Western institutions for a century and a half. More importantly, everyday musical reality outside the academy has been consistently unabsolute. Musicians have continued to incite dancers to take to the floor and to gesticulate energetically or smooch amorously, while lonely listeners have regularly been moved to tears by sad songs and derived joy or confidence from others. More recently, movie-goers and TV viewers have been scared out of their seats, or they have distinguished between the good and bad guys, or reacted to urgency cues preceding news broadcasts, or registered a new scene as peaceful or threatening, or understood that they are in Spain rather than in Japan or Jamaica, etc., etc., all thanks to a second or two of music carrying the relevant message on each occasion

Even inside the academy, the notion of music as a symbolic system never really died. There were always champions of musical meaning, people like Herman Kretzschmar, who declared autonomous instrumental music to be a general danger to the public, or Deryck Cooke (1959), or, as already mentioned (p. 139), Robert Francs. But there were also organists. Organists? Yes, church organists have always had to do things like extemporise between the end of their initial voluntary and the arrival of the bride at a wedding service or the coffin at a funeral. On such occasions, organists have to create moods encouraging the congregation to adopt appropriate postures and attitudes. My own organ teacher even encouraged me to word-paint hymns, as the following zoom-in on one microcosm of actual music-making demonstrates.

Number 165 in the old Methodist Hymn Book is Forty Days and Forty Nights, a popular hymn for Lent, referring to Jesus fasting in the wilderness and usually sung to the tune Heinlein by M Herbst (1654-1681). The words of verse two are:

Thanks to my organ teacher, I learnt to apply variations of timbre to each of the four lines just cited. For line one I would, on the Great manual, push down all mixture tabs, fifteenths, etc., flick up all 16-foot and loud 8-foot tabs, and remove my feet from the pedals. These poetically described actions translate into aesthesic terms as follows: I removed the dark, booming low notes and produced a sparkling, sharp, bright, high-pitched, edgy timbre for sunbeams scorching all the day.X 400

For line twos chilly dewdrops I moved from Great to Choir organ, making sure that 4- and 2-foot claribel flutes were in evidence. I would still desist from using the pedal board. This operation produced a smaller, much less sharp, more rounded, cooler, slightly airy but precise and delicate kind of timbre, still without the darkness of bass notes.

For the prowling beasts of line three I lifted my hands up to the full Swell organ with all its reed stops connected, ensuring at the same time that my feet were playing all possible passing notes in the bass line assigned to the 16-foot Posaune. Full reeds on the Swell is as close as a church organ gets to guitar distortion: it gives a rich, gravelly, dangerous kind of sound. Together with the low-pitched, rough sounding Posaune not unlike the fat bass timbre of an Oberheim synth and the insertion of extra notes to produce a walking bass line, the prowling beasts were appropriately musicked, I thought.

In line four I returned to the Great, this time with only 8-foot Diapasons selected, while disabling the 16-foot Posaune pedal tab and suppressing the tendency to go on playing passing notes with my feet. The idea here was to create a medium-volume sound, quite large but devoid of brilliance, delicacy or rough edges a loudish sort of flat, medium, grey, matter-of-fact sound for stones thy pillow, earth thy bed.X 400

This personal anecdote documents a musical reality that flies in the face of ideas propounded by musical absolutists, partly because the sounds I produced actually communicated something to someone other than myself, making me aware of relationships between timbre and various aspects of touch, movement and space. As a musician I also learnt which harmonies made the old ladies in the local Methodist church more sentimental, which bass licks worked better with members of my universitys Scottish Country Dance Society, which placement of which mike connected to which amp with which settings made me sound more like Jerry Lee Lewis, which patterns on a Hammond organ made people think our band resembled Deep Purple, which type of arpeggiation made the accordion sound more French, etc. It is this kind of experience, which I share with countless other musicians, arrangers and composers, that motivated my attempts to critique the dry theme-spotting exercises of syntax-fixated music analysis the story so far in this book and to develop ways of examining music as if it had uses beyond its mere self as just sound, i.e. as if it actually meant something. The rest of this book takes that sort of empirically proven poetic conviction for granted.

[1] Ethnomusicology has been particularly important in developing ways of relating music as sonic text to its meanings, uses and functions. It has also demonstrated the absurdity of propagating one single aesthetic canon for all music and, through its pioneering use of sound recording, drawn attention to the importance of non-notable parameters of musical expression.

[2] Two types of sociology, neither of which concerned itself with musical structuration, have made an indirect contribution to the development of analysis methods presented in this book. Through Adorno a tradition of critical theory became popular among students of literature, communication studies and Cultural Studies, while, more importantly, empirical, demographic sociology helped motivate the inclusion of popular music in academe, i.e. music evidently incompatible with notions of the absolute and clearly demanding a different mind-set.

[3] Despite its theoretically promising potential, the semiotics of music, with its disciplinary habitat in seats of conventional musical learning whose corridors were still haunted by the ghost of absolute music at the turn of the millennium, focused largely on syntactical aspects of musical semiosis at the expense of semantics and pragmatics. Alternative views of music as meaningful sign system (e.g. Kretzschmar, church organists) nevertheless persisted throughout the reign of musical absolutism and have influenced the development of analytical method used in this book.

Sorting out notions of music is what this book has mainly been about so far and the last chapter ended with a promise to treat music as if it actually meant something. Indeed we shall, but the promise cannot be fulfilled without first bringing some order into the concepts of meaning and communication.

Meaning, in the sense of one thing conveying, indicating or referring to something else, is a recurrent concept in this book. Signification, treated here as a virtual synonym to meaning, contains the morpheme sign. Sign, in its turn, simply means a thing indicating or representing something other than itself. It is in this sense that Charles Peirce, US philosopher and father of modern semiotics, ended up by using the word. Sign also turns up in expressions like sign system and sign type.

Sign system denotes a set of conventions of meaning, like this kind of written English, or like impressionist painting, or like music for silent films in North America and Western Europe. Sign type designates the way in which a sign relates to what it signifies, for example, if it physically resembles what it means (icon, p. 151) or if the relation is arbitrary or conventional (p. 153). Sign is also a translation of the Ancient Greek words s?ma (sma) and s?meon (shmeon) found at the root of words like semiotics, semiology, semiosis, semaphore and semantics.

Semiotics, deriving from Peirces semeiotic, means the systematic study of sign systems. Semiology, a term coined by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, is generally used to mean the same thing as semiotics. There are some important differences, a few of which will be discussed shortly, between Peircean and Saussurean terminology. Saussures most widely used concepts are probably the signifier, a translation of the French word signifiant ( sign) and the signified (signifi = what the sign stands for or represents).

Unlike silicosis, semiosis is not a condition but, like osmosis, a process. Semiosis is simply the process by which meaning is produced and understood. It includes the totality of, and the connections between, three elements that Peirce called sign, object and interpretant and which Ill explain next. As already suggested, its simplest to think of the sign as a thing, with an identifiable physical existence, that represents or stands for something other than itself.

Lets say that the sign is a photo you once took of your aunts dog. The photo clearly isnt your aunts dog its a photo of it, even though you might point to the photo and say thats my aunts dog: the photo represents your aunts dog. What you saw the moment you took the photo, that momentary visual perception, constitutes what Peirce calls the object, while the photo representing that object is its sign. However, when you look at the photo long after you took it and see my aunts dog, your visual perception can never totally correspond with what you saw when you took the photo (its object). This later perception and interpretation of the sign, rather than your perception of the dog when you took the photo, is called its interpretant. Now this distinction between object and interpretant might seem like academic nit-picking because its obvious that the photo looks like your aunts dog. Still, that very obviousness can be a problem because differences between object and interpretant, as well as between interpretants, inevitably occur in relation to the same sign. Those differences cause meanings to be renegotiated, to change and to adapt to new needs, functions and situations. To understand that dynamic more easily, lets go back to your aunts dog and put some more meat on the poor animals conceptual bone.

Many years after taking the snapshot, you open your family album and look at that same old photo of your aunts dog. Note first that it has now become that same old photo. Time has passed, you are different and circumstances have changed but the photo (the sign) remains the same. Maybe your beloved aunt has died in the meantime, or maybe you subsequently learnt things about her that put her in a bad light. Or perhaps you yourself now have a devoted dog, or perhaps you were badly bitten recently by one that looked like the dog in your photo. Any of these factors could easily affect the interpretant[s] you form when looking at the same photo at that later date. True, the prosaic my aunts dog aspect of the interpretant will still work after all those years, but it will likely give rise to an array of different final interpretants, ranging from wistful longing for bygone days, when you were a child and you played with your kind aunts dog, to what a mangy mongrel! or what a mean old woman! And just wait until you start showing your my aunts dog photo to friends and family. When you do, they will, in their turn, form other final interpretants of the photo. The content of those interpretants will depend on things like how well your family or friends knew your aunt and her dog, on whether or not they like dogs, whether or not they like you, and on a whole host of other factors. Whatever the case may be, this my aunts dog story illustrates the necessity of distinguishing between object and interpretant, as well as between interpretants, in relation to the sign. These distinctions are essential when it comes to understanding how musical signs work, how the same sounds can mean different things to different people in different contexts at different times.

A complementary way of understanding semiosis is, as I just inferred, to look at it in terms of a message and its communication. There are three main aspects to this process, too: [1] the thing or idea to be encoded (similar to Peirces object), [2] the concrete form of that code the sign and [3] the decoded version or interpretation of that code (similar to Peirces interpretant). Seen in this light of intention and interpretation, the ideal semiosis would theoretically produce total unity between the sign as semiotically intended and as interpreted. The word chair would, for example, represent a fully identical notion of chair in the minds of both speaker/writer (as an object) and listener/reader (as an interpretant), while the photo of your aunts dog would be perceived, by anyone at any time, in exactly the same way as you saw the dog when you took the photo. Since exact correspondence between intended and interpreted message is impossible (and we shall shortly see how, even in the case of chair), semiosis is also sometimes used to refer to processes by which meanings of existing signs are modified and renegotiated, as with your interpretants that changed over time in relation to the same my aunts dog photo.

To put a musical slant on these observations about shifts in meaning over time, just think of the distinctive wining sound of the pedal steel guitar in Country & Western music (C&W). This sound may have derived something from dobro and slide guitar techniques in the US south, but its most obvious sonic forerunner is the Hawaiian guitar, popular in the USA in the late 1920s and early 1930s, before electrically amplified musical instruments were commonplace. To cut a long story short, from originally connoting things like Hawaii and sunshine, those steel guitar glissandi (swooping, sliding sounds) were gradually incorporated into the C&W mainstream and ended up as mere style indicators of Country music without the Hawaiian connotations. The advantage of looking at semiosis in such ways is that, by including intention as well as interpretation, the semiotic process is more open to understanding in terms of social and cultural interaction.

Semantics, a term coined by French linguist Michel Bral, is defined by my dictionary as the study of the relationships between signs and what they represent. Semantics is just one aspect of semiotics (or semiology) and the word is often used in contradistinction to both [a] syntax (the formal relationships of one sign to another without necessarily considering their meaning) and [b] pragmatics (the use of a sign system in concrete situations, especially in terms of cultural, ideological, economic and social activity). Now, as we noted earlier, to prevent semantics, the main focus of this book, from becoming a perverse discipline (Eco, 1990: 259), it must be related to pragmatics. This imperative has at least two important implications.

Ecos imperative firstly implies that a synchronic semantics (examining signs at one given point in time in one given culture) is not enough on its own: it needs a diachronic perspective that involves studying meaning as part of a dynamic sign system subject to change. The from Hawaii to Country mainstream process, described above, illustrates a diachronic line of semantic reasoning that can also be called etymophonic. Etymophony is a useful concept and quite easy to understand as follows. If etymology studies the historically verifiable sources of the formation of a word and the development of its meanings, etymophony simply means studying the origins of a non-verbal sonic structure and the development of its meanings and functions over time. Etymophony is, in short, an important part of diachronic semantics in music.

The second implication of Ecos imperative is both synchronic and diachronic. It entails relating semantics (relationships between signs and what they represent) to factors in the socio-cultural field in which the musical meanings under examination are generated and used. These meanings obviously both inform and are informed by value systems, identities, economic interests, ideologies and a whole host of other factors that constitute the socio-cultural biosphere without which music and its meanings, as just one semiotic sub-system among many others, cannot logically exist. We shall soon return to one aspect of this essential part of musical semantics (see Codal interference, p. 172, ff.).

When denoting the study of sign systems, speakers of French and Spanish seem to prefer smiologie/semiologia, while anglophones, Italians and others tend to use semiotics/semiotica. This confusion may eventually be resolved like the VHS versus Betamax battle over videocassette formats in the 1980s but it is impossible to predict which concept, if indeed either, will oust the other. In the meantime, semiotics rather than semiology will be used here for two reasons. [1] A book written in English ought logically to use English-language terms. [2] Two of Peirces numerous trichotomies (sign - object - interpretant and icon - index - symbol) substantially inform the conceptual basis of what follows. Even so, in order to save space, Saussures binary notion of signifier and signified, where signifier is roughly equivalent to Peirces sign and signified means what the sign stands for (in terms of both object and interpretant), will sometimes be used as shorthand, not as a replacement, for Peirces trichotomy object - sign - interpretant. Another terminological problem is that Peirce uses symbol to denote what Saussure calls sign and vice versa. To avoid this confusion when discussing semiosis, I shall try to avoid symbol altogether and stick to sign in the Peircean sense. That means Peirces symbol / Saussures sign needs another label. Arbitrary sign is what I use to cover the concept (p. 153).

Peirce closely examined and classified all types of signification. Radically simplifying his overall system, we can say that the relationship between an audible sound and the human perception of that sound as that sound alone without mediation would constitute his notion of firstness: it is phenomenologically just one thing, so to speak, even though the sound and its perception are physically separate entities. Its just like the oneness of your aunts dog as such and your perception of it when you took the famous photo.

Secondness is easier to grasp semiotically because (surprise!) it has two poles. The musical sound as sign (one pole) includes, relates to and represents its firstness (the other pole), just as the celebrated dog shot relates to your perception of the dog when you took the photo. For example, soft, slow, smoothly swaying music, as in a lullaby, is not the same thing as soft, slow, smooth, swaying as such: it represents that movement in sound. There is a sign (the sound) and an object (the idea of movement and touch perceived as representable in sound).

The three elements of thirdness are: [1] sign (the sound of the lullaby); [2] object (explained under secondness) and [3] interpretant[s] (interpretations of the lullaby, including recognising it as a lullaby rather than a war song). Final interpretants might be: nostalgic feelings of comfort, images of an adoring parent singing a much loved infant to sleep, the smell of baby powder, evening light shining through a chink in the bedroom curtains, etc.

Peirces next three trichotomies are like a ninefold Kyrie in that firstness, secondness and thirdness each give rise to their own three categories of sign. Since I shall concentrate on musical semantics, oneness will be largely taken as read. Secondness and thirdness, however, are of direct relevance to the topic. Nevertheless, to avoid death by conceptual drowning in Peirces trinities of 9, 27 and 81 categories, each with its own abstruse label, and so as to open up our musical semantics to sociocultural considerations through pragmatics, thirdness will be discussed in more accessible terms and use of Peirces sign types will be restricted to those of secondness because they seem best suited to musical semantics. Peirces trichotomy of secondness distinguishes between icon, index (plural: indices) and arbitrary sign (what Peirce called symbol and Saussure called sign).

Icons are signs bearing physical resemblance to what they stand for. Iconic resemblance can be striking, as in photographs or figurative painting, but maps and certain types of diagram are also iconic because there is at least some structural resemblance, though less patent, between the signs and what those signs stand for. Even the representation of rising and falling pitch, of legato slurs (smooth) and staccato dots (choppy) in musical notation can to some extent be qualified as iconic. However, the visual representation of sonic events can only be considered a resemblance if conventions of synaesthetic homology are in operation allowing us to equate certain signs encoded in one mode of perception (e.g. visually, as staccato dots on the page) with certain objects/interpretants existing in another (e.g. sonically, as intermittent, choppy, pointillistic, aurally pixelated, etc.). Since, as explained earlier (pp. 60-66), synaesthesis is intrinsic to music, we will have to refine the notion of icons in music to cater for conventions of synaesthetic homology (see Anaphones, p. 000, ff.). Here, though, we need to get to the most obvious aspect of musical iconicity, i.e. to sounds as signs physically resembling the sounds they stand for.

If a photo like my aunts dog is an icon of the whatever it is supposed to represent, then a musical recording ought logically to be considered an icon of the music as it sounded when recorded. However reasonable that assumption may be for live recordings, there are good reasons for considering icons differently as a musical sign type. One reason is that the sound of a recording does not even reach semiotic oneness until the sounds are actually perceived by someone hearing it, even less reach the semantic stages of secondness and thirdness where sonic signs can relate to objects and interpretants. It is at these stages that musical icons (sonic anaphones, see p. 321, ff.) come into play, such as a low-pitched drum roll sounding like the rumble of distant thunder, or an overdriven electric guitar sounding like a Harley Davidson, or two notes a third apart on the piano imitating the call of a cuckoo, etc. None of these sounds like examples function solely as icons because distant thunder can mean danger, while a Harley might connote a pack of Hells Angels and cuckoo notes on the piano might make you think of a spring morning or of your junior school music teacher.

Distant thunder meaning danger, smoke meaning fire, dark clouds meaning rain these are all examples of semiosis using a causal index as sign. Indices are signs connected either by causality, or by spatial, temporal or cultural proximity, to what they stand for. This sign type is so important in music that virtually all musical sign types can be considered as at least partially indexical. Some types of indexical sign are more common than others in musical semiosis, for example a type of metonymy called synecdoche [sI!nEkd9kI]. In language, synecdoches are part-for-whole expressions like the crown meaning the monarch and royal power in toto, not just a bejewelled piece of metal headgear; or like fifty head of cattle meaning not just the animals heads but fifty complete bovine beings. Synecdoches work similarly in music, for example, the overdriven guitar connoting, via the sounds like a Harley icon, an entire pack of Hells Angels and not just the bike, or the cuckoo notes on the piano connoting the entirety of a spring morning rather than just the cuckoo that happened to be part of the soundscape at the time. Another example would be seeing old Paris in your minds eye on hearing specific figurations in waltz time played on a French accordion (accordon musette). That semiosis is typically synecdochal because only one tiny set of all the musical sounds circulating in Paris before World War II have come to connote the totality of that time, that place, its culture, its popular classes, their habits and activities, all more likely in black and white, too, rather than in colour.

An arbitrary sign (Peirces symbol) is connected only by convention to what it represents. Examples of arbitrary signs in the English language are table, because, grass, semiotics, but, think, grateful, pullover and most other words and phrases. This sign type is called conventional or arbitrary because it is supposed that nothing but convention prevents a word like theology from denoting a can-opener, whereas it is highly unlikely that an indexical sign like Champagne (the wine) will ever mean Polish vodka or lawn-mower, and impossible that smoke from a fire will mean the fire has gone out or that you have run out of sugar. In other words, a sign can be called arbitrary when its semiosis exhibits no readily discernible elements of structural similarity (icons), or of proximity or causality (indices), between sign and object/interpretant.

Arbitrary signs are rare in music, except for things like instrumental versions of national anthems or instrumental passages from Eurovision Song Contest tunes. In these cases there is rarely any musical signifier, iconic or indexical, of a particular national identity, the main point of the music often being generic, apparently: to sound like a national anthem or like a Eurovision Song Contest entry. It is only paramusical evidence the language in which the melodies are sung, or, in the case of a national anthem, which flags are flown behind the Olympic medallists podium that give uninitiated listeners a clue as to which nation the anthem or the Eurovision song represents. In other instances where musical signs are apparently stylised to the point of convention, some vestige of non-arbitrary semiosis, iconic or indexical, always remains. For instance, four French horns, in unison, playing broad, strong, consonant melodies in the upper middle register of the instrument, still sound heroic, even in space (as in Star Wars), despite the fact that the etymophony of that horn sound is shrouded in the historical mists of rural Europe, when horns were used in hunting or to clear the road for stagecoaches. That specific indexical link in history with quick, strong, energetic male activity may be lost on modern listeners but it has passed into stylised convention. Other aspects of the original semiosis remain, because those heroic horn melodies move swiftly in broad, strong, sweeping and energetic gestures and because fast, broad, and strong are still supposed to be heroic characteristics.

Denotation and connotation designate two different types of semiosis. By denotation is meant the lexical type of meaning associated with dictionary definitions and with arbitrary signs. The word table, for instance, denotes a flat horizontal slab or board supported by one or more legs; it doesnt connote it. Similarly, theology doesnt connote the idea of studying religious beliefs: it denotes that idea. However, in the statement smoke means fire, neither the phenomenon smoke nor the word smoke denotes fire: it is the perception of smoke that connotes the presence of fire through causal indexicality. Despite the fact that smoke means fire exemplifies a more tangible type of semiosis than does theologys link with the idea of studying religions, denotation is still often considered to be a less vague type of semiosis than connotation. Eco (1990: 6) challenges this assumption, branding the imagined solidity of denotative signification through arbitrary signs rigid designation, adding that language always says something more than its inaccessible literal meaning. If Ecos observation is true for language, it is even more relevant to music which, as just suggested, rarely uses arbitrary signs. Since music is highly connotative, it is worth examining the concept of indexical connotation in more detail. Ill apply Ecos ideas to the semiosis involved in the statement smoke means fire.

Ive shortened where theres smoke theres fire to smoke means fire. In so doing, I substituted an indexical observation of simultaneity (smoke at the same time as fire) with one of causality. I can do that because, unless were talking about stage smoke (liquid CO2), fire causes smoke. Now fit your smoke alarm as instructed (good) and go to sleep with a burning cigarette (bad). Your smoke alarm wakes you up. Its piercing sound is triggered by smoke caused by fire. You hear that loud, sharp sound (the sign) and you know it means fire (interpretant) and other alarming things, like wake up, get out of the house and dont die (final interpretants). The alarm sound doesnt denote fire like the word fire, nor does it directly mean fire indexically like the smoke you may or may not see that is caused by fire you are even less likely to see. The connection between the smoke alarm sound and fire is one of connotation: the alarm connotes a particular sort of fire and everything you know goes with it, because the relationship between the alarm sound as signifier and the fire as signified, with all its connotations, presupposes previously established levels of signification. These distinctions are essential in understanding how connotation, a central aspect of musical semantics, actually works.

The previous levels just mentioned are all indexical and causal, namely the relationships [1] between the alarm sound and smoke (smoke triggers the alarm), [2] between smoke and fire (fire causes smoke), [3] between fire and danger (babies have to learn that fire hurts). With these three previous levels of signification you are able to connote the specific threats of multiple burns, asphyxiation and possible death with the sound of a smoke alarm. In Ecos terms (1976: 55), connotation arises when a signification is conveyed by a previous signification, which gives rise to a superelevation of codes. The form of this connotative semiotics is shown in Table 5-1.

According to Eco (1976: 55), there is a connotative semiotics when there is a semiotics whose expression plane is another semiotics. So, in the smoke alarm example, the interpretant (signified) of the three former significations combined [1] the alarm sound is caused by smoke, [2] smoke is caused by fire and [3] the great pain of skin burns is caused by fire becomes the signifier of a fourth signified: dont die! get out! Thus the smoke signifies fire indexically, but the sound of the smoke alarm also connotes both danger and evacuation associated with fire thanks to the previous semiotic relationships. Eco continues his critique of denotative hegemony in conventional linguistics as follows.

The difference between denotation and connotation is not... the difference between univocal and vague signification, or between referential and emotional communication, and so on. What constitutes a connotation as such is the connotative code which establishes it; the characteristic of a connotative code is the fact that the further signification conventionally relies on a primary one.

This critique of received wisdom about denotation and connotation segues into the next and equally problematic point the widely held assumption that music is intrinsically polysemic.

Polysemic from Greek poly (pol = many) and s?ma (sma = sign) means signifying many things at the same time, i.e. that the same sign is linked to many different objects and/or interpretants. Now, there is no doubt that music is polysemic from a logocentric viewpoint and I often produce the lexically incongruent concepts Austria and shampoo to illustrate the point. Austria is a middle-sized Central European nation famous for its capital city, Vienna, for mountains, Strauss waltzes, downhill skiing, Mozart and a host of other things that have nothing to do with viscose liquid that comes in small plastic bottles and that you apply to your scalp when washing your hair in the privacy of your own bathroom. Despite these patent differences, I claim that Austria and shampoo belong to the same, well-defined semantic field. That sounds ridiculous, so Id better explain. [X]

A one-minute extract from a romantic film theme (The Dream of Olwen by Charles Williams) was played without visual accompaniment to 607 listeners. Respondents were asked to jot down notes for a suitable film scenario or anything else that came into their mind when hearing the piece. The most common responses were love, romance and either a couple or a single woman seen strolling through the grass of a summer meadow. Other common responses were waving corn, rolling hills, the long flowing hair and dress of the woman they saw, the swell of the sea in a summer breeze, billowing sails, a flowing river, olden times, etc. Several respondents imagined scenarios in either England, France or Austria. Now, the Austria envisaged by respondents was not the Dolomites in bad weather, nor skiing at Kitzbhel, nor eating Sachertorte in a Konditorei, nor the airport or oil refinery at Schwechat. No, it was the Austria of The Sound of Music, in particular a woman in a long dress strolling through green meadows. This cluster of responses describes the scene, shown as Figure 5-1 (p. 158), in which Julie Andrews bursts into the films title song (The hills are alive with the sound of music). Now, that scene features a fine open-landscape panorama quite different to the confines of a shower cabin where shampoo is applied to the scalp. The question is obvious: how can shampoo be like strolling through the green grass of an open meadow?

Well, the shampoo respondents mentioned was no more shampoo as such than the Austria they saw was lexically Austria. Respondents were in fact alluding to a Timotei shampoo advert featuring a young woman, with long, flowing hair and a long, flowing, old-style white cotton dress, moving in slow-motion through the long grass of a summer meadow and watched longingly by a young man in the background (Fig. 5-2a). This scenario may well derive from the famous meadow love scene in Elvira Madigan (Fig. 5-2b).

Obvious similarities between these pictures suggest that respondents, some of whom said Austria and others shampoo, were not the least bit confused about what sort of scenario, movements, gestures, activities, emotions or moods they got from hearing the music, even though there is no connection between dictionary definitions of Austria and shampoo. It is therefore only from a logocentric viewpoint, that Austria and shampoo, not to mention hills, hair, cornfields, sailing ships, dresses and manor houses, all common responses to the same music, can be considered contradictory, incongruous or polysemic. [X]

Observations similar to those just made about Austria and shampoo apply just as well to very different sets of musical sounds, for instance to those associated with city streets at night, with concrete, rain, crime, delinquency, flickering lights, urban loneliness, etc. This latter set of sounds and those of the Austria and shampoo piece cover mutually distinguishable fields of connotation, but the fact that each of the two sets of associations contains lexically disparate concepts does not mean that either of the two fields of connotation is in itself musically contradictory. On the contrary, play the music connoting either of those moods to anyone belonging to the culture in and for which the music was produced, and listeners will be in no doubt about which is which. Misconceptions of music as polysemic arise partly because academe demands that we present ideas about music, not in music, not even in terms of moving picture or of dance, but in words like these. These notions of musics supposed polysemy can be questioned in at least two other ways: [1] by considering different symbolic representations of the same physical reality; [2] by turning the tables on denotative language and by absurdly branding it as polysemic instead.

Fig. 5-3. Castletown (Isle of Man): same geography, different visual representations

These three images of the same location focus attention on differences in the nature and function of the visual sign system operative in each case. Images A and B cant be polysemic just because the areas geological details arent included, any more than image C can be called vague because it doesnt represent buildings, roads or surface terrain. The point is that a physical location can be visually represented in an almost infinite number of ways, each symbolising different aspects of the same reality from different perspectives, using different rules of stylisation and abstraction, as well as different techniques for encoding different types of information for different purposes. If it is accepted that the same location can be visually symbolised in different ways for different purposes, how come music, whose basic nature and functions differ so radically from those of language or from graphic forms of representation, is expected to live up to linguistic or visual rather than musical criteria of semiotic precision?

Since different individuals within the same culture tend repeatedly to respond to the same music in quite similar ways, music cannot reasonably be considered polysemic. To underline the problem with logocentric thinking about musical meaning, you only need to apply musocentric arguments to language and ask, for example, what the sound of the spoken word table [!tEib(l] really means. True, like mas?, mesa, pyt, cnjk, st?, st?l, bord, Tisch, tavola, trapzi and other words denoting a flat horizontal slab or board supported by one or more legs, table is pretty monosemic, but it is, as [!tEib(l], musically indistinguishable from rhyming words like able, Babel, bagel, cable, cradle, Davell [do it], fable, gable, label, ladle, Mabel, naval, navel or stable, each spoken with the same voice, intonation, timbre, inflexion, accentuation and speed of delivery. However, whereas no sane musicologist would dream of calling language polysemic just because all but the most onomatopoeic of words are musically ambiguous, many otherwise intelligent people still think of music as polysemic, just because musical categories of signification do not coincide with verbal ones. This logocentric fallacy, part of the epistemic inertia discussed in Chapter 3, can also be refuted with the help of two final examples relating to a very simple, tangible, concrete and ostensibly denotative noun: chair.

[1] What does chair mean? You can sit on one type in the kitchen, in another in front of the TV; you can take the chair at a meeting, occupy another sort at a university and be fried on a final one in a Texas prison. Chair has to do for the lot of them and only the nouns context or the addition of qualifiers like kitchen, easy, research or electric will clarify which chair is relevant. Words, in other words, even nouns denoting concrete objects, can be context sensitive and polysemic.

[2] The spoken word chair [!tSE:)] is as musically polysemic as singing the Twilight Zone jingle is verbally polysemic. Neither utterance carries clear meaning if judged according to the norms of semiosis applicable to the other sign system. A verbal statement is made less polysemic (not more so!) by prosody, i.e. by the musical elements of speech intonation, timbre, rhythm, etc. just as musical discourse can be enriched when heard along with words, actions or pictures.

In short, precision of musical meaning can never be the same as precision of verbal meaning. Music and language are not interchangeable sign systems: if they were, they would not exist separately. It is for this tautologous reason that connotations given in response to the Austria and shampoo and urban alienation pieces of music mentioned earlier must be understood as belonging to musogenic, not logogenic, categories of meaning. Connotations elicited by music are verbally accurate in relation not to verbal but to musical discourse. Music is an alogogenic sign system whose semantic precision relies largely on connotation and on indexical signs. Mendelssohn put it this way:

The thoughts which are expressed to me by a piece of music which I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary too definite.

So far this chapter has presented some background concepts essential to an understanding of musical meaning. Now, no semiosis can take place without communication, be it intimate and small-scale or broadcast by satellite from a stadium venue. Even singing alone in the shower is impossible without having first learnt patterns of melodic construction that pass for song in the culture[s] you are familiar with because all communication relies on some aspect of social organisation. Indeed, as we saw in the section about music as a universal language (p. 45, ff.), musical competence, poetic or aesthesic, is to an overriding extent culturally specific. Even the simple word-painting tricks described at the end of Chapter 4 (sunbeams scorching, chilly dewdrops, etc.) had to be learnt, as did the Austria and shampoo connotations provided by respondents hearing separate musical extracts without verbal or visual accompaniment.

Returning briefly to the word-painting tricks described at the end of Chapter 4 (p. 140, ff.), I assumed, as an organist trained in a particular tradition, that my timbral variations would communicate to the congregation the basics of the kinetic, tactile, emotional and culturally connotative effects I had in mind: sunbeams scorching as sonically sparkling, sharp, bright, high-pitched and edgy; chilly dewdrops as more rounded, cooler, slightly airy but precise and delicate, and so on. As co-author of the music I was playing in church, I was simply acting in accordance with the assumption posited by Eco (1979b: 7):

[T]o make his text communicative, the author has to assume that the ensemble of codes he relies upon is the same as that shared by his possible reader. The author has thus to foresee a model of the possible reader supposedly able to deal interpretatively with the expressions in the same way as the author deals generatively with them.

That said, it would have been rash to assume that every member of the congregation registered exactly the same effects in exactly the same way, because social, physiological, neurological and psychological factors, including the momentary state of mind of each individual, would inevitably produce variations of response between members of the same basic musical community. More importantly, it would not be so much rash as absurd to expect members of a very different musical culture, with very different conventions of structuring and understanding timbre, to register my timbral effects in the same way as the congregation of the school chapel where I played organ in the early 1960s.

Here we enter the tricky territory of communication theory and (semiotic) pragmatics in which musical semantics (the relation between musical signs and what they stand for) needs viewing within the framework of the relevant socio-cultural field. A short, explanatory disclaimer is called for here because this section of the chapter will not necessarily conform to the course content of B.A. programmes in communication studies. That said, what comes next is influenced partly by the Peircean tripartite semiotic models already presented, partly by Ecos (1976: 32-47) reasoning about signification and communication and by a more music-specific model presented by Bengtsson (1972). Even so, I should, in the interests of transparency, make three admissions: [1] that the main source of ideas presented in this section consists of observations and reflections made over sixty years of experience using, as transmitter or receiver, different kinds of music for different purposes, under different economic, social, physical and cultural circumstances; [2] that such experience has more often determined the theoretical models I adopt (perceptual learning) than vice versa (conceptual learning); [3] that 38 years of running courses in the analysis of music as if it meant something forced me to abandon some intriguing but educationally less practicable conceptual universes (e.g. 18 of Peirces 27 sign types, not to mention all the specialised poetic descriptors of musical structure). Instead I have prioritised concepts that gel more easily with students perceptions of music and its meanings, even though those perceptions are sometimes, as I suggest elsewhere, in need of problematisation. With that academic proviso out in the open I feel less inhibited about presenting a basic communication model.

Figure 5-4 (p. 165) visualises basic elements of musical communication within a socio-cultural framework. The twisted arrows at the top and bottom of the diagram indicate that the model should be read as vertically circular (cylindrical), so that the store of signs and the sociocultural norms are seen as part of the same constellation of culturally specific values and activities, i.e. as part of the same socio-cultural field. More precisely, the store of signs is really just one of the socio-cultural norms shown at the bottom of the model because it contains all the social conventions of what constitutes music in the relevant culture, as well as all the socially negotiated norms about which elements of music have which connotations and are suited to which purposes, etc. I apologise for this problem of graphic representation but we need to distinguish between two types of non-communication (incompetence and interference) and I was unable to graphically encode, all in one single diagram, that important distinction while at the same time visualising the store of signs as a subset of sociocultural norms.

In fact, the diagram should really be spherical and (at least) three-dimensional, because it is also horizontally circular, as suggested by the various arrows at the left and right edges. These arrows show that the uses to which we put the music we hear and the meanings we attribute to it, whether or not those uses and meanings are intended by those who made the music, influence the symbolic and behavioural conventions (the store of signs and the socio-cultural norms) which, in their turn, form the cultural starting point without which musics transmitters cannot meaningfully produce work as composers, arrangers, musicians, singers, recording engineers, producers, DJs, etc.

Since Figure 5-4 should really be spherical, you could theoretically trace any musical communication process starting at any point in the diagram. Indeed, many scholars have, without considering musical semantics, instructively examined interactions relating to music in the socio-cultural field, such as those between commercial and aesthetic value, between patterns of ethnic, religious, sexual or social identity and their representation in the media, etc. In such cases, the communication model would almost certainly, like the geographical representations in Figure 5-3 (p. 159), look very different. Be that as it may, since the main focus of this book is semantic, it is logical to put the musical message process at the centre of the model. That process runs as follows: the intended message, informed by specifics of transmitter subjectivity in objective relation to the socio-cultural field, passes from idea or intention, via its concretion in sonic form (channel) to receivers who respond to what they hear. Lets first zoom in on that central semantic line in the communication process.

By transmitter is meant any individual or group of individuals producing music composer, arranger, musician, vocalist (including you singing in the shower), recording engineer, DJ, etc. By channel or coded message is meant the music as it sounds (an array of signs), while receivers are those hearing or using the music, be they simultaneously the musics transmitters or not. The intended message, similar but not identical to Piercess object, is what transmitters hope to express the right sounds at the right time in the right order creating the right feel, so to speak. Since transmitters rarely use words to conceptualise intended messages they do that in music, I have provided a few verbal approximations hinting at a range of feels that a musician working in the Western media might have to consider producing (see Table 5-2).

Even though musicians within the European and North American cultural sphere might never use any of the words in Table 5-2 to describe any musical idea, professionals among them would still be able to come up with sounds corresponding to most of the feels in the list. Similarly, codally competent listeners from the same cultural background would be able to distinguish that music according to categories similar to those in Table 5-2, a list that could go on for ever or include a totally different selection of mood categories. The point here is just to give some examples, in the form of pallid verbal approximations in the very verbal medium that is this book, of what an intended musical message might be, whether such intentions are verbalised or, as is more usual, just musically conceived. Of course, an intended musical message (or object), however inspired, doesnt drop magically out of the blue. As the arrows on the left edge of Figure 5-4 indicate, they are informed by conventions existing in the sociocultural field, including its store of symbols, which in their turn are informed by previous acts of semiosis involving transmitters, receivers and the sociocultural field.

Thanks to Table 5-2, there is now a little meat on the bone of intention, which well follow from transmitter to receiver. Does the music actually sound as intended? If so, does it physically reach receivers? If it does, what happens when they hear it? Is the message interpreted or used as intended or in a different way? Well start with the latter, taking as examples the first feel in Table 5-2.

A typically adequate response would probably come into play if, in the case of intended kick-ass, rock concert-goers reacted by gesticulating enthusiastically, perhaps also joining in by yelling out the hook line of the chorus. Stage diving would be good at a speed metal gig and brandishing a cigarette lighter appropriate for a rock ballad. Such activity would, however, not constitute adequate response at a string quartet recital: listening in silence and without visible expression, not clapping between movements but giving the musicians a round of applause after the performance would be more appropriate. If people sit in expressionless silence during the intended kick-ass rock or if they bop around loudly to the existential Angst or ethereal sublimity of a late Beethoven quartet, or if they hear something intended as delicate and tender in terms of sentimental tack, or something intended as interesting in terms of horror, then there has been a breakdown in musical communication. In these cases, musicians have to ask themselves what went wrong. Its not much use for composers to moan they just dont understand my work, because that implies, arrogantly and erroneously, that a breakdown in musical communication is solely due to malfunction at the reception end of the process.

Of course, with live performance there can be difficulties at the actual venue. Is there disturbing background noise? Cant careful miking, mixing, equalising or speaker placement help? Did the violins have to work too hard to make their notes last in a dead acoustic space? If such problems arent solved, some of the intended message wont even make it into the channel: it wont materialise as the signs, the sounds that you, the transmitter, want to put across so that your audience (the receivers) can form their interpretants. However, and more likely maybe your performance or recording sounds fine to you but the message still doesnt seem to get across. Is it the wrong audience for your music or did you make the wrong music for them? Perhaps they laugh when they should cry, or gape apathetically instead of shouting and jumping? These problems of musical communication are attributable to what I call codal incompetence and codal interference.

Now, incompetence and interference both sound quite negative but neither term is intended in any pejorative sense. The two words are just shorthand for two types of breakdown in musical communication. Neither the incompetence nor the interference imply any stupidity or malice on the part of transmitter or receiver. Each concept simply highlights a particular set of mechanisms causing the varying degrees of difference that inevitably arise, in semiotic terms, between object and interpretant or, in terms of intentional communication, between intended and interpreted message. Codal incompetence and codal interference are in fact essential to the renegotiation of musics possible meanings and to its survival as a sign system capable of adapting to different functions for different individuals in different populations at different times and in different places.

For musical communication to work, transmitter and receiver need access to the same basic store of signs, by which I mean a common vocabulary of musical sounds and norms (see p. 162). If the two parties dont share a common store of signs, codal incompetence will arise, at either the transmitting or receiving end of the message, or at both ends.

Imagine, as a Westerner, hearing a field recording of traditional music from a village community in East Africa and thinking this sounds festive. Then you read the CD inlay and discover the song isnt festive at all, at least if the notes written by a reputed ethnomusicologist are to be trusted. She describes the singing as strident, explaining that the track youre hearing consists largely of stylised hyena calls and that packs of hyenas regularly ravage the villagers cattle. Whoops! Codal incompetence is at work here on several fronts. Firstly, you heard no hyenas in the music whereas, reportedly, those making or dancing to the music did so at the time of the recording. Secondly, you may not even know what a hyena sounds like,[X] let alone what cultural conventions determine which aspects of hyena calls are stylised in which way into which types of song. Furthermore, you are unlikely to know how hyenas are regarded in the musics original cultural context. Did you hear the threat to your livelihood that the calls of those hyenas connote or did the imitations of those animals laughing make you want to laugh, too? Clearly, strident, rather than festive, would be an appropriate attitude for the villagers to adopt if, as you learn from the introduction to the CD inlay notes, courage, energy, organisation and determination are needed to effectively combat ravaging packs of hyenas. Mistaking strident for festive may be less inaccurate than hearing the music as mournful or gentle but codal incompetence on your part as listener is in clear evidence because you didnt hear the music in the same way as would a member of the community producing and using those sounds. None of this means that your festive and no hyenas response is wrong. Codal incompetence at the receiving end just means an inadequate response in terms of the musics original cultural setting, functions and intentions. Besides, codal incompetence is in no way a trait exclusive to musical reception, as the next example suggests.

In the early 1990s someone in Liverpool informally asked me to come up with theme tune ideas for a series of local TV programmes. I understood the series was to include a fair amount of populist nostalgia for the good old days when ordinary people were supposed to have enjoyed themselves in simple honest ways. Having just returned to the UK after living in Sweden for many years, I had learnt to associate that kind of nostalgia with Swedish gammaldans, a cheery type of old-time, proletarian fun-and-games dance music featuring the accordion. Now, if, on that basis, Id mixed some gammaldans into a signature tune to promote some that populist nostalgia for the good old days, I would have exhibited gross codal incompetence because Liverpool listeners would not have known what to make of those sounds and of their specifically Swedish connotations. So, perhaps my local theme tune would be less codally incompetent if I tried to emulate the sound of the older popular artists from Merseyside, maybe a Searchers pastiche to take viewers back to the city in the 1960s. The problem with that idea was that it too was likely to fall on deaf ears because younger Liverpudlians might not even recognise a Searchers sound, let alone be familiar with its connotations. In this latter case, however, there would also have been some codal incompetence from the receiving end, since the young audience would be unable to interpret musical signs that would be quite meaningful to older Liverpudlians. Thankfully, none these ideas saw the light of day, not so much because of my codal incompetence as because the TV project never passed the stage of loose chat in a pub.

Codal incompetence can also occur at more basic levels of musical structuration. For example, if you listen to recordings of Bulgarian women singing traditional harvest songs [X], youll hear a lot of semitone clashes similar to those often used to help create tension in Western film music. The womens penchant for producing simultaneous semitones may perhaps sound harsh and discordant to us Westerners the first time we hear that sound: at best it will probably come across exciting or exotic. But to the Bulgarian harvest singers themselves, pictured in Figure 5-5, there is of course nothing bizarre or exotic about their own music and, judging from their facial expressions, nothing very horrific about their semitones either. In short, it would be codally incompetent, from the receiving end, to apply the semiotic conventions of semitones in Hollywood film music to the sound of Bulgarian women singing traditional harvest songs.

It would also be codally incompetent, from the transmitting end, to use the semitone dissonances of traditional Bulgarian harvest songs to celebrate the Christmas break at an office party in Milan or Milwaukee, that is unless a disproportionate number of world music fans are among the party-goers. In that case Bulgarian semitones might work as group identity marker of sociocultural difference. With these ethno fans and their radical recontextualisation of the Bulgarian womens vocal techniques, we would be dealing not so much with codal incompetence as with codal interference.

Codal incompetence arises, as we just saw, when transmitter and receiver do not share the same store of musical signs, when the same musical sound, as sign, stands for different things at the transmitting and receiving ends of the communication process. Codal interference, on the other hand, arises when transmitter and receiver do share the same basic vocabulary of musical signs but differ in terms of sociocultural norms. Codal interference means that the intended sounds get across and are basically understood but that adequate response is obstructed by other factors, such as receivers general like or dislike of the music and of what they think it represents. It can also result from visual, verbal, social or ideological recontextualisation of the music.

For purposes of illustration lets go back to kick-ass rock from the 1980s. Those that hated the sounds of heavy metal and decried the musics lyrics and lifestyle did not necessarily fail to understand the musics message as you or I did with the East African hyenas (p. 169). No, metal haters were codally competent enough to register that the music was loud and powerful, that its lead singers tended to yell, that it made its listeners head bang, extend their arms in huge V-signs and so on. Indeed, heavy metal protagonists (soloists) had to be loudmouthed and loud-gestured because the backing they set themselves to be heard above, just like the society they and their audience inhabited, would otherwise have drowned them. They would, so to speak, have otherwise disappeared inaudibly and invisibly into an amorphous mass of sound and society.

Metal haters, just like its fans, knew that nice guys and good girls, with a well-mannered, reserved and demure behavioural strategy for social success, were incompatible with an aesthetic demanding a studied type of vulgarity, lavish amounts of ego projection and high volume to make the music work. Codal interference would obviously arise if you had invested time and energy into cultivating a nice-guy or good-girl identity and little or none into nourishing the self-celebratory and exhibitionist parts of your being. Metal aesthetics would be intolerable to you, not so much because the music seemed to spit on the nice guys and good girls as because youd worked hard at repressing that anarchistic loudmouth and garish slob inside you which, if let loose, might ruin your efforts to please those in authority and to acquire social power and approval. You will have understood the music only too well but your sociocultural norms and motivations would have been antagonistically opposed to the expression of cathartic disgust, desperation or self-celebration that the music could have given you if youd wanted.

Codal interference can work in the opposite direction if you think of metal, hardcore, techno, gangsta or industrial fans incapable of deriving any enjoyment from a classical string quartet. The subtle means of expression associated with classical chamber music can easily become a taboo area of affective and gestural activity for those who experience alienation at school, those whose peer group enthusiasm and social restlessness gets them thrown out of class, those who hate having to buckle under, learn the recorder or sing in the school choir, or who just resent all the goody-goody pupils and teachers who seem to love classical music so much. It is no wonder if individuals feeling such alienation do not embrace music involving, among other expressive features, qualities like delicacy, control and containment. Still, just like the good guys and girls who repress the heavy-metal exhibitionist parts of themselves, alienated metal, techno and rap fans who hate classical string quartets also miss out on essential aspects of musics semiotic richness.

If psycho-social fear or resentment of certain music, and of what it is heard to represent, interfere with the communication of intended musical messages, deep identification with a certain music can do the same in reverse. In 1972, for example, the Strawbs, a politically conservative English band, recorded a tune called Union Man in which they parodied a trade union member in the lyrics and a proletarian pub or music-hall singalong feel in the music: they intended to ridicule political views, people and music they did not like. Unfortunately for the Strawbs, but fortunately for socialists in the UK, the British left loved Union Man and adopted it as their own anthem on picket lines.X 504 Codal interference arose in this instance because of diametrically opposed political views and divergence of cultural identity between transmitter and receiver. It is also clear that codal interference is in this instance related to codal incompetence because The Strawbs had radically misunderstood the British record-buying publics store of signs.

Sometimes the words of a song can interfere with your perception of it as music. For example, if you had sung the well-known Welsh hymn tune Cwm Rhondda with its original words Guide me, O thou great Jehovah! for twenty years in the local Methodist chapel and then, for the first time, heard lager louts sing it with lewd lyrics as you walked past the pub one night, it is doubtful whether you would ever sing or feel the tune in the same way ever again. Similarly, visual narrative can also interfere with musical message, as so often happens with the use in TV ads of music you know from before. You only need think of the start of Richard Strausss Also sprach Zarathustra in ads for fabric softeners, office machinery and mobile phones, or of Dvo?ks New World Symphony for sliced bread, or of Muddy Waters Mannish Boy for jeans worn by young white US males. []

Codal interference can work in two ways with the TV ads just mentioned. First, if you knew the music before seeing the ad, the connotations and context of those previous hearing[s] will be challenged, interfered with, just as the lewd lager-lout words interfered with your previously established understanding of the Methodist hymn tune. Of course, the advertising idea is that positive values attached by target-group listeners like yourself to the borrowed music will somehow migrate to the product being advertised. However, if you know the music well, or if it means a lot to you, it is more likely that the its commercial use will seem like abuse and put you off the product advertised. In cases like this, advertising zeal to sell by associating product with assumed musical values can have the opposite effect, while, conversely, your prior knowledge of the music interferes with an adequate response to the advertisers intended sales pitch. Secondly, if, on the other hand, you didnt know the music before seeing the advert and then heard the music at a concert or on the radio, you would probably think of the advert you saw earlier. In this case, the musics paramusical accompaniment (visual, verbal) in the ad wont necessarily interfere with your perception of the music because you never heard it before without visuals or voiceover. It will, however, certainly conflict with types of semiosis relevant to hearing the same music without such accompaniment, or in a different paramusical context, because you just cant get the previously established paramusical connotations of the ad out of your head. Codal interference is certainly intentional in the advertising examples just given, the whole idea being that consumers associate the music, previously intended for, and used under, other circumstances, with the product being marketed. Its a form of connotative hijacking.

Sometimes these intentional codal interferences, including connotative hijacking, serve their purpose, as do the adverts just mentioned, or Joe Hills parodies of Salvation Army hymns to union lyrics, or the Sousa march which became the Monty Python theme tune. Still, sometimes intended interference doesnt work, as we just saw with the Strawbs Part Of The Union (p. 173), and sometimes it only half works, as in the next and final example, drawn once again from personal experience.

In 1981, Swedish Radio asked me to provide theme music for a programme series for and about immigrants. The programmes title, Jag vill leva, jag vill d i Norden (=I want to live and die in the North, i.e. in a Nordic country), is the last line of the Swedish national anthem and provided a useful starting point. Since Sweden was the host nation into whose established majority culture immigrants had to assimilate, I decided to start with a full-blown, grandiose, official-sounding version of the national anthems last line. My budget couldnt pay for a symphony orchestra or a decent brass band, so I settled for recording the line myself on full organ in a local church. In fact, that may have been a better solution because end-of-year school ceremonies in Sweden are often held in churches and are quite a nationalistic affair. OK, the official national ceremony organ sound took care of the powerful host-nation side of the story but the series was not supposed to be a nationalist PR stunt, so I also needed to reflect something of the conflicts and problems of immigrant life.

(Incidentally, when describing my intentions here, I am retrospectively verbalising mainly musical concepts and feels that constituted the object of the recording which became the sign. It was really only when codal interference affected the relationship between my object and the producers final interpretants that I had to start rationalising, in verbal terms, what I had done musically.)

I put the first aspect of immigrant problems into music by replacing the grand final chord of the national anthem with a slightly disturbing sonority. I quickly faded that worry chord to a much lower volume that could be held throughout the rest of the signature to allow solo immigrant instruments to play the same melodic phrase (the last line of the Swedish national anthem) at different points in different keys and at different pitches. The first out-of-key individual immigrant to play the national anthem was a dirty-sounding electric guitar which I included for two reasons: [1] I was not the only rock-playing anglophone immigrant in the country; [2] rock music was in 1981 itself fast becoming an integral part of the host nations mainstream culture. After the rock guitar I added accordion (Swedish and immigrant again) in another different key and then mandolin as a generic ethnic folk lute to suggest Swedens numerous Greek (bouzouki), Turkish (saz), Eastern European (balalaika/cimbalon etc.) and Andean (charango) immigrants (instruments). The last out-of-key ethnic instrument representation was soprano recorder as generic folk flute perhaps an Andean quena or a West Asian ney/ni/gagri. The final flute note was left loud, high, piercing, alone and long enough, with extra reverb, so it could be easily cross-faded into the programme speakers introductory words.

Those twenty-odd seconds of theme music were not without humour but I also wanted them to sound a bit disconcerting. Why? Well, as an immigrant in a majority host culture, you try to fit in and to sing from the same hymn sheet as the majority, but you often get the feeling that youll always be somehow out of step, out of tune and out of place because, like it or not, you think, feel, act, look or sound different to the host-nation majority. Since it was part of that experience that needed to be in those twenty seconds of music, I thought it would be good to juxtapose musical soundbytes that didnt normally belong together in the same piece: I was in other words intentionally using codal interference. Hence the official-sounding festive pomp of the organ plus the worry chord, plus each timbrally distinct instrument representing a different culture. All those elements were supposed to interfere, like immigrants, with the first and most powerful statement on the organ.X 506

The recording engineer and I made numerous mixes of the multitrack recording. Apart from the full mix, there was one without the organ, another without the distorted guitar, a third with neither organ nor guitar, and so on. The only mix the producer liked was the one with just dubbed mandolin. She even made us dump the flute because it was too shrill. Surprised at her reaction, I tried to explain why I had gone to the trouble of recording a separate organ track outside the studio but the organ and guitar were not acceptable, I understood, because they didnt sound like immigrants. But Im an immigrant, too, and Sweden is the country we come to, I objected so Sweden has to be in there because you cant be an immigrant or feel like one if theres no host culture. To cut a long story short, the only concession granted by the producer was that, after much insistence from my side, the worry chord could be held under the dubbed mandolin parts. It is that version which was finally used as programme signature. I had to content myself with the fact that there was at least a slight musical hint that being an immigrant and/or hosting immigrants might not be entirely unproblematic. X 507

My interpretation of the producers selection of just one element and her rejection of all the others is not that it was simply a matter of personal taste. She seemed to me to be saying that flutes can be cute or exotic, not strident, in the same way that host nations appreciate grateful and deferential immigrants who are never angry, alienated or frustrated. She also seemed to be saying that immigrants could not be English-speaking and not electric (so much for yours truly and hundreds of Vietnam draft dodgers in Sweden at the time). It was as if, in her mind, we should all conform to the host-nation immigrant stereotype that assumes we all come from far-off and backward rural areas where we all play pleasantly unfamiliar music on pleasantly unfamiliar acoustic instruments. The strangest thing was, however, that the signature theme should not allude to the overriding power of the host nation as a central issue affecting the lives of immigrants.

This little signature theme story illustrates codal interference on a grand scale. The producer knew as well as I did the values, attitudes and feelings encoded in the channel. However, although we probably both had access to a very similar store of signs, our sociocultural norms and expectations were in definite conflict. She did not think my musical view of being an immigrant was suitable and, as an immigrant, I thought hers was both unrealistic and unsympathetic.

Of course, the producer had the final word and, who knows, she may have been right. Maybe she saw me as a codally incompetent transmitter, as an unreliable or unprofessional young composer who didnt come up with the goods. Perhaps I was supposed to produce something happier and more catchy, something that would just acoustically identify the programme and put potential listeners in a no problems frame of mind. However, since the only information I was given about the programme dealt with its content, I assumed that I was to focus on that. If, on the other hand, my job was to provide an innocuous musical identifier and to prevent listeners from switching channels, I should have been told so, or was I expected to read that between the lines?

Whatever the case may be, it is very possible that another communication problem caused the codal interference just described. That problem relates to the task of formulating an adequate brief, i.e. the instructions given to a musician or composer by someone who is usually not. Those difficulties are, in their turn, one reason for writing this book. The fact that muso and non-muso discourse about music differ so radically, for all the reasons given in Chapters 2-4, calls for the development of models and of a terminology allowing musos and non-musos to better understand each other.

Throughout this book, connotative verbal expressions are used to designate interpretants linked to musical sounds. Those expressions turn up repeatedly in Chapter 6 as respondent VVAs (=verbal-visual associations), but there have been plenty in this chapter, too. Apart from all the moods listed in Table 5-2 (p. 166), we had to explain the Austria/shampoo idea as part of a semantic field that also includes pleasant aspects of femininity, romance, open countryside, rounded shapes, and soft materials, as well as movements qualifiable as smooth, flowing and wavy but containing elements of rustling or tingling. On several occasions I warned that these connotative verbal expressions are but pallid verbal approximations of musical meaning. Ive also suggested that they can sometimes act as convenient, culturally specific, metonymic labels or verbal tropes. For example, an adequate aesthesic label like spy chord (p. 102) does not mean that the chord signifies spy: it simply functions as a cognitive reference point allowing us to name a particular set of musical interpretants in relation to a particular set of musical signs. So whats the problem?

The problem is that, despite the repeated caveats just mentioned, many people still object to any use of verbal connotation in the discussion of musical meaning because, they argue, such connotations falsify the intrinsically alogogenic character of music. Sometimes they argue their point by using the adjectives primary and secondary to qualify levels of signification, such ordinal categorisation leading to the assumption that being on top of the pile (hierarchically primary) or first in line (sequentially primary) implies greater importance or superior value. Now, Middleton, who introduced the terms primary and secondary signification (1990: 220-227), in no way views the difference between the two categories in that way. While his valid distinction is that between how meaning might be produced at the introversive or primary level of signification and how the associative sphere of musical meaning, the level of connotation and extramusical reference (secondary), he strongly warns against the temptation to reduce the former to the sort of bodyist essentialism criticised in Chapter 3. Moreover, in later work he states that the two levels are in fact correlates:

the fields of gesture and connotation (primary and secondary meaning as I have called them elsewhere) are actually correlated, through the action of what some semiologists have termed a semantic gesture: a unifying, generating principle traversing semiotic levels (somatic; referential) and tied to deep cultural functions. (Middleton 2000: 116)

The common denominators of gesturality contained in the Austria/shampoo trope (rounded, soft, smooth, flowing, wavy, etc.) and discussed under Gestural interconversion (pp. 335-343) demonstrate such unifying, generating principles which very clearly traverse somatic and referential levels of mediation (summer meadows as well as undulation, so to speak) and are tied to deep cultural functions (e.g. romantic and parental love). The point is that if we abstain, for whatever reason, from using connotative verbal expression to designate musical interpretants, we shall never understand the social, cultural and corporeal nature of the unifying semantic gesture because we will have failed to verbally identify its constituent parts. It will moreover be impossible to democratise the denotation of musical signs because aesthesic designation of musical structure relies by definition on their perception and interpretation. If, as Middleton (loc. cit.) suggests and as argued here, the somatic and connotative aspects of musical meaning are, despite differences, neither contradictory nor mutually exclusive then there is no problem with using connotative verbal expressions to designate musical signs and their interpretants. This does not mean that connotative aspects of musical mediation are more important than somatic perception any more than the reverse is true: it simply means that if humans are more than mere animal automata, then their use of music will make little sense if somatic response is considered primary, just as it would be absurd to privilege the patently obvious power of music to move souls as well as bodies.

Chapters 1-4 were supposed to demystify notions of music and to explain why the epistemic divisions between music and other forms of knowledge are so entrenched in the West. In this chapter the focus was on basic concepts of meaning and communication. The main arguments can be summarised in the following seven points.

[1] Peirces distinction between object and interpretant in relation to the sign allows for a dynamic view of musical semiosis. Even though it saves time in semantics if you use Saussures signifier - signified, Peirces triad object - sign - interpretant is more compatible with thinking about music in terms of symbolic interaction between humans. It is from this perspective that the object can be understood as conception or intended message at the transmitting end of a simple transmitter - channel - receiver communication model, and the interpretant as (surprise!) its interpretation at the receiving end.

[2] Since music works to such an overwhelming extent as a culturally specific sign system, its ability to carry meaning relies on the existence of a shared store of signs common to transmitters and receivers in the relevant cultural context. Although object (intended message) and interpretant (listener response) can never be identical, musical communication usually works, otherwise there would be no call for music on ceremonial occasions, nor in TV ads, computer games or anywhere else for that matter. However, there will be communication failure if the music includes signs unfamiliar to its audience, or if interpretation of signs from the common store varies radically between transmitter (composer, musician, etc.) and receiver (audience).

[3] Musical communication failure can occur for logistic reasons of acoustics, technology, etc., but their most common causes are codal incompetence or codal interference. Codal incompetence arises if transmitter and receiver do not share the same store of signs (including their meanings); it can occur at both the transmitting and receiving ends of the communication process. Codal interference arises when transmitter and receiver do share the same store of signs and their meanings but do not translate those same meanings into the same final interpretants. Differences in sociocultural values often cause codal interference.

[4] Codal incompetence and codal interference (intentional or not) are prerequisites for shifts in musical meaning. Signs from one culturally specific store (or vocabulary) can be appropriated into another where they acquire a different meaning or function.

[5] Among Peirces numerous trinities of sign types, one is of particular use to musical semantics: icon - index - arbitrary sign. Arbitrary signs (what Peirce called symbols) are rare in music, whereas icons are not uncommon and indices are virtually omnipresent.

[6] Connotation is not less concrete or less efficient than denotation and music is definitely not more polysemic than language. Music is a connotative, alogogenic sign system. Verbal descriptions of musical meaning must therefore be treated as very approximate verbal connotations of musically precise messages.

[7] Since connotation relies on the existence of previously established meaning[s], and since indices are signs connected either by causality, or by spatial, temporal or cultural proximity, to what they stand for, musical semiosis tends to be both connotative and indexical. In the next two chapters I'll try to explain how that type of semiosis can be substantiated, systematised and understood, i.e. how musical signs relate to their interpretants.

Alogogenic has been used several times in this book to qualify the noun music. Applying that adjective simply means that music is unverbalisable because its semiotic precision, linked to gestural, tactile, corporeal, emotional and prosodic forms of communication, relies mainly on iconic, indexical and connotative types of semiosis, rarely, if ever, on the denotative kind of linguistic signs used in this sentence. Talking and writing about music as if it meant something other than itself is in other words difficult in our tradition of learning. The next two chapters confront that difficulty, suggesting ways of resolving some problems of the muso-/logogenic split. The basic rationale behind Chapters 6 and 7 is as follows.

Given musics obvious traits of social organisation and cultural specificity, it ought to be possible, using words and other sign types, to form some idea of the links between the sounds of music and something other than themselves, even if trying to put those sounds directly into words is a pointless undertaking. If that rationale makes any sense at all, we ought logically to be able to suggest how anyone capable of reading these words can investigate musical meaning and discuss such meaning in viable terms. That is at least the aim of Chapters 6 and 7.

As suggested in Chapter 5 (p. 165, ff.), musical communication works best when those at the emitting and receiving ends of the process share similar sociocultural norms and the same basic store of signs. Since those norms and that store of signs are both part of the sociocultural field in which musical semiosis takes place, it makes obvious sense to look at that semiosis in socially verifiable terms. Thats where intersubjectivity (see next paragraph) comes in. This chapter deals with shared subjectivity at the receiving end of the communication process, while Chapter 7 considers the question of interobjective references or hypertexts. Both these fields of investigation can provide valuable information about musical meaning.

Intersubjectivity arises when at least two individuals experience the same thing in a similar way. The same (or a similar) experience is in other words shared between (inter) two or more human subjects. Now, musical experiences may understandably be regarded as highly personal and subjective but it is just as easy to understand the fact that without intersubjectivity there would be no communities of musical taste, no format radio, no music industry and no other objective social phenomena demonstrably related to different musical configurations. Indeed, music for film, TV, games, advertising, dancing, weddings, funerals, sports events and so on would all be pretty pointless if all individuals in a given audience understood and reacted to the same musical sounds in radically different ways. This simple truth implies that anyone looking for evidence of musical meaning might do well to look for patterns of intersubjectivity relevant to the music under analysis. That means turning in the first instance to the final arbiters of musical meaning, i.e. to those who hear the music in question, who use it and react to it, in order to verify the existence or non-existence of shared interpretants.

Its tempting to start looking for the essence of musical meaning at the transmitting end of the musical communication process, i.e. by studying poesis rather than aesthesis. Issues of authorial intent can indeed be important in terms of insights about processes of musical production why musicians choose to make sound x rather than sound y in relation to phenomenon z so to speak but that it is not the focus of attention in this book for the following six reasons.

[1] Its often very hard to contact the artist, composer or musician behind the music youre analysing. Some are inaccessible, surrounded by media industry guard dogs while others may quite simply be dead.

[2] If you do manage to contact your transmitters they will not necessarily want to talk about what they meant to mediate through their music. Many will say they intended nothing in particular or claim that the music speaks for itself. Others will talk about their music in poetic terms and leave you none the wiser about what they meant by it all.

[3] When transmitters verbalise comprehensibly about their music in interviews or in writing, they have to consider their image and credibility in particular sociocultural circumstances because what they say or write can determine what, if any, their next gig might be. You need to know more about what they really mean by their music than how they currently see it in relation to their public persona.

[4] Information from just one individual (composer, arranger, producer, artist, etc.) can by definition never be intersubjective. Greater reliability of intersubjective information is gained by consulting a greater number of individuals. Therefore, unless youre studying esoteric musical situations where transmitters outnumber receivers, it makes more sense to investigate patterns of intersubjectivity about musics meanings among its listeners (aesthesis), less so to focus on the production pole (poesis) of the communication process.

[5] Focusing on the poetic pole can certainly be useful in providing technical tips to budding composers and musicians; but the risk with that focus is, as we saw in Chapter 3, that it privileges poetic at the expense of aesthesic competence. This neglect of aesthesis does little to promote the democratic sort of musicology alluded to in the non-muso part of this books title, a musicology which, as we shall see, seeks to use aesthesic competence to help construct a vocabulary of descriptors for aspects of musical structuration (e.g. vocal timbre) that conventional poetic terminology does not cover satisfactorily.

[6] Although transmitters and receivers both obviously consist of individuals, the former are much more likely to be identified as such (the named composer or artist, the star) than the latter who usually remain nameless, viewed en masse in terms of the audience, the record-buying public and so on. It may be understandable if, from this perspective, conventional studies of music favour focus on readily identifiable musical individuals at the expense of the faceless masses; but one consequence of such institutionalised auteurcentrism is that, by privileging authorial intent and skill, it marginalises and disqualifies the demonstrable musical competence of the individuals comprising the musics audience. Authorship is conflated with authority, so to speak: more importance is attributed to intended meaning than to its perception, the signs object (in Peirces sense) taking pride of place over its interpretants. However, as we saw with the Strawbs song Union Man (p. 173, ff.) and with the title theme I recorded for Swedish radio (p. 175, ff.), assigning semiotic privilege to the poetic pole can be fatal because, whatever authorial intention may have been, listeners are the final arbiters of musical meaning. It is they, not me, nor any other transmitter, who form its final interpretants, they who use the music in particular sociocultural contexts, they who negotiate and adapt the musics meanings after it has left authorial hands. Besides, there are more of them than of me or of The Strawbs. Put tersely, the final proof of the semiomusical pudding is in its eating.

None of this means to say that discussion of authorial intention is irrelevant to the discussion of musical semiosis. However, the six reasons just presented suggest that it would be inadvisable to prioritise poesis in the investigation of musical meaning in everyday life, more prudent and productive to turn primarily to its final arbiters so that the existence or non-existence of shared interpretants can be studied on the basis of some sort of empirical evidence. Shared interpretants, if they exist, can be observed at two general levels, one more ethnographic, the other more connotative, more explicitly semiotic.

Behavioural and demographic intersubjectivity can be observed ethnographically and involves such factors as:

listening mode, e.g. whether the music under analysis is played in the background or if its more the focus of audience attention;

listening venue, e.g. if the music is heard in a car, at home, in public spaces, in clubs or bars, or at a place of worship, through speakers or headphones, live or prerecorded;

listener activity, e.g. whether the music incites the audience to sing or dance, stroll or march, to rise up or sit down, to break into tears or out laughing, to wake up or go to sleep, etc.

cultural location (scene), including demographic, historical, geographical, ethnic, linguistic and sartorial information; e.g. if the music is/was made and/or heard/used by middle-class Swedes in their thirties around 1975, by young male gang members in South L.A. in the 1980s, by elderly Kosovo Albanians in the 1990s, by exile Tamils in Toronto, by Parisian labourers in the 1920s, by goths, punks, lager louts or bank executives wearing baggy jeans, national costume, pin-striped suits, flip-flops, denim or clubwear, etc.

Observations of the sort just listed can provide useful information about certain aspects of musical meaning. If we think of musical structure in terms of signs and of responses observed on hearing that music in terms of interpretants, it follows that a particular piece or extract of music giving rise to observable similarities of reasonably consistent audience response in the form of particular types of activity, emotion or connotation implies that the music in question in some sense signifies the complex of physical, social, cultural and emotional response with which it is associated or which it appears to elicit. The only problem is that some of the points listed above, especially those included under listening mode and demographic location, will vary considerably in terms of semiosis depending on cultural context, especially in relation to which audience is identified at the receiving end of the musical communication process. Different audiences in different cultural circumstances give rise to different patterns of shared subjectivity in relation to the same music. Since one single set of intersubjectively shared responses can never be applied to all audiences at all times in all situations, it is vital, when using patterns of intersubjectivity observed at the receiving end of the communication process as a basis for discussing questions of musical meaning, to be clear about which audience you are referring to in which historical and cultural circumstances. Such demographic precision is also essential when it comes to the main source of user information discussed in this chapter: connotative intersubjectivity.

Connotative intersubjectivity involves indirect observations about shared responses to music. Such observations are often made through the mediation of words describing what listeners see, feel, imagine or otherwise associate to when hearing a particular piece or extract of music. In the interests of brevity Ill call a particular piece or extract of music the musical analysis object AO for short and Ill refer to the verbal expression of what listeners see, feel, imagine or otherwise associate to as verbal-visual associations VVAs for short.

VVAs in response to a particular AO can of course be gathered by studying writings about the AO in reviews, album inlay notes, blogs and so on; but it can often be more productive to ask listeners directly for their response to music, either in conversation or by means of a reception test. The immediacy and informality of one-to-one conversations more closely resemble everyday listening situations but their transcription and semiotic collocation, in addition to the task of actually conducting those conversations, can be very time consuming. Reception tests also demand, as we shall see, their fair share of semiotic collocation work but they have the distinct advantage of needing no transcription and can be run on many respondents at the same time. Such tests, it should be added, arent tests in the usual sense of the word: they in no way test the skill of listeners to provide right answers in the form of previously determined VVAs in response to the AO. The only thing they do test are your hypotheses about what the AO might mean and listener responses to that test are supposed to help verify or falsify those hypotheses.

Reception tests can be conducted live in a classroom situation or posted on the internet. One advantage with live reception tests is that you have a captive audience whose responses you can collect on the spot. A distinct disadvantage is that classrooms are supposed to be sites of rational discourse rather than of the holistic, lateral and synaesthetic types of cognition associated with music and discussed in Chapter 2. There are at least two ways of minimising that cognitive contradiction. You can: [1] present very short music examples that give little or no time for rational reflexion or intellectual reasoning and, if youre testing more than one example, leave little or no time for deductive thinking between each example; [2] more importantly, you can give respondents clear instructions underlining that youre looking for immediate responses to music, not for verbally well-reasoned argumentation or high standards of writing.

Internet reception tests also have pros and cons. One obvious drawback is that some individuals may listen more times or more attentively through better sound equipment and spend longer formulating their response than others. Such variation of listening attitude and situation can generate data that may be irrelevant to what you want to test. They can produce extraneous variations in response that are less likely to arise in the uniform classroom situation and that may introduce variables that arent part of the exercise.14 This risk can be reduced if respondents are given clear instructions about how they are supposed to listen to the music example[s] in question.

The advantages of internet testing are: [1] you avoid problems of illegible handwriting because subjects have to type their responses; [2] you can cut and paste responses into whatever document you need to produce when writing up the results; [3] the test environment will probably resemble that of everyday listening more closely than does the classroom situation.

At least four main issues need to be addressed before you actually test any music on any respondents under any circumstances.

Those four questions give rise to several other important considerations of which theres room here to mention just a few. Firstly, youll need to decide if you want to test responses for several pieces or just one, or if you want to concentrate on one or two short extracts highlighting particular points of musical structure and meaning inside one and the same piece. Here its worth remembering that the more pieces or extracts you include in a battery of test examples, the more listener responses are likely to be influenced by what they just heard: for example, a suspense-chord stab preceded by a thrash metal riff may not sound as threatening as after a wistful ballad. Similarly, the longer the example or extract you play to your listeners, the more likely it is to involve some sort of narrative, i.e. to go elsewhere or to move through more than just one relatively coherent musogenic semantic field. That can cause problems if youre testing hypotheses of signification relating to one such single set of musical structures or to just one musogenic semantic field; but if youre interested in VVAs elicited by musical syntax a longer test example will be necessary to discover how much your respondents hear processes roughly verbalisable in concepts like about to, then, suddenly, gradually, changes to, all the time, once again, just before, after which, etc.

Secondly, if you want to test hypotheses of musical signification without respondents being influenced by verbal or visual message, you need to consider, in the case of a song, concentrating on instrumental passages or choosing a song with lyrics in a language that respondents dont understand. In the case of music and the moving image its often worth selecting relevant instrumental extracts from the soundtrack album or, failing that, playing extracts from the full soundtrack that contain as little dialogue and as few sound effects as possible. On the other hand, you might actually want to focus on vocal production or on the effects of music in conjunction with images. In those cases youll probably have to construct your own test examples, juxtaposing two or more different vocalisations of the same lyrics, or, in the case of pictures, either two or more different musics to the same images or different visual sequences to the same music. Of course, if you wanted to test the effects of lyrics on musical message you would have to construct examples with different lyrics to the same music or different music to the same lyrics. Such cross-testing can be very useful but it poses one problem of method. The difficulty is that if respondents hear in succession identical music with different verbal or visual accompaniment, or different musics accompanying the same words or visuals, or the same vocal statement treated in different ways at the mixing desk, listener attention will automatically be focused on those differences. Since that kind of focus rarely occurs under the sort of everyday listening conditions which you might ideally want to replicate in a test situation, you could try playing some of the examples to one group of listeners and the others to different but demographically similar respondents. Of course, that procedure involves more work and raises other problems, for example the task of verifying to what extent the different respondent groups are in fact culturally and demographically similar.

Thirdly, the second of the four main questions posed at the start of this subsection (p. 192) asked what sort of audience you have in mind for your reception test. You might, for example, want to concentrate on fans, devotees or experts of a particular type of music; or maybe youd prefer to use as wide and heterogeneous a population as possible. In the first instance it is a good idea to also test your AO[s] on a control group of non-experts to find out what VVAs are specific to fans and which are shared by a wider community. In either case, it is essential to gather standard demographic and other culturally relevant data from each respondent.

The fourth question in what form do you want the responses? is basically an issue of multiple choice versus unguided association. Multiple choice answers are much easier to deal with because they present no problems of legibility and because they convert conveniently into statistics. However, multiple choice tests will automatically be methodologically flawed if you cant convincingly explain which processes led you to exclude every thinkable response possibility and to include only the very few alternatives you allow respondents to select from.

There are several important advantages in using unguided association. The first point is that although the relatively immediacy of response involved in noting a few words on a blank screen or sheet of paper does not satisfactorily simulate everyday music listening situations, it does so much less inadequately than having to read a prepared text, put figures into boxes or tick alternatives on a neatly prepared test form. Moreover, the multiple in multiple choice is really a misnomer in that such tests restrict listener response options much more severely than does a blank sheet or computer screen answer box preceded by a few basic instructions. In fact it is reasonable to interpret each freely induced response as culturally more significant than multiple choice answers because each response is actively created by the listener with music as main stimulus without the restrictions of a limited number of ready-made alternatives. In addition to these advantages, it should be remembered that one main aim of the sort of musical reception test discussed here is to find out how people relate music to other phenomena than just music. Like it or not, using multiple choice testing implies a large degree of certainty as to what alternatives ought and ought not to be included in connection with each AO. Since very few scholars, if any, can lay claim to such certainty when it comes to musical meanings, multiple choice testing cannot be considered the wisest option.

Another problem with multiple-choice methods of gathering musical reception data is that they have tended to favour adjectives describing general moods or emotions and to avoid reporting other types of listener response. This kind of affective adjectival bias has meant that extremely common types of VVA like people (e.g. villain, princess, teenagers, lovers, James Bond), objects (e.g. car, crinoline, cigarettes, shampoo, neon lights), settings (e.g. sea, fields, church, street, suburb, paris, distant galaxy; medieval, 1950s, distant future; aristocratic, working class) are usually absent from such studies. Of course, affective adjectives like sad, happy, pleasant, unpleasant, romantic, calm, threatening are all perfectly viable co-descriptors of musical experience and must also be taken into account but they should never be the exclusive, nor necessarily the primary, focus of reception tests. If they are, response data can become skewed and misleadingly vague, for not only will physical, historical and social connotation be absent: so will musics obvious capacity to communicate notions of space, gesture and movement.

To concretise the issue just raised, imagine two sets of response to a sound recording of a Hammer horror film pastiche of J S Bachs popular Toccata and Fugue in D minor. One listener responds with majestic, ecclesiastical and ominous while the other writes Count Dracula drooling over the organ in his damp and degenerate castle before hitting the night air again in search of young blood. The first response certainly contains appropriate adjectives but the second is more musogenic, for not only does it imply all three adjectives in the first response (Count and castle are quite majestic, the organ in question is ecclesiastical and the remaining concepts are ominous enough); it also connotes gestural, tactile and kinetic detail missing in the first response: drooling, damp, degenerate, hitting, night air, searching, young blood. In short, the general affectivity expressed by adjectives selected from multiple choice alternatives, themselves by definition a very restricted selection of all available affective adjectives, may seem fine from a verbal semantic viewpoint, but they are musogenically inadequate. Therefore, if you want to avoid the pitfall of affective adjectival restriction, why not tell your respondents, before they hear anything, something along the following lines?

During the next m minutes youll hear n short musical extracts. Ill say the number of each one just before you hear it. Please note that number in the left margin of the page and then write down whatever you think could be happening on an imaginary film or TV screen along with each extract you hear. There wont be much time to think, nor to write, so you dont need to formulate complete sentences or bother about spelling or grammar; just jot down the impressions that come into your head for each piece of music. It might be a mood, or people you see in your minds eye, what theyre doing, whats happening (if anything), where and when its happening, what it feels like and so on.

These were the basic reception test instructions given to the 607 respondents whose VVAs provided the empirical intersubjective data used in the project Ten Little Title Tunes (TLTT). The aim of that test was to discover what kind of connotations well-known musical structures in relatively unknown pieces of film and TV music would elicit from a wide range of listeners.

Obviously, reception test instructions will diverge from those just cited depending on which music is being tested on which respondents for which purposes, but one thing is clear: unguided association responses will probably need to be written up and that means putting them into some sort of classificatory system. Indeed, although the kinds of reception test discussed in this chapter all involve some sort of methodological problem, they will be neither unreliable nor pointless as long as their aims, parameters and limitations are made clear. In fact, treated carefully and transparently, reception tests, even on just a single extract of music heard by a mere handful of people, can provide useful empirical information about degrees of intersubjectivity in response to a musical AO. Of course, the viability of a reception test using unguided association depends on the way in which the responses it produces are interpreted, collated and presented.

Ive already described how, when trying to make semiotic sense of our respondents associations to the music we made them hear, Bob Clarida and I came to the conclusion that the two linguistically disparate VVAs Austria and shampoo had to be understood as musogenically similar when taken as responses to one and the same short extract of music. Of course, in order to argue that point we had to know how much Austria rather than, say, Brazil or Japan and how much shampoo rather than, say, guns or cigarettes our respondents imagined on hearing the reception test piece in question. That in turn meant devising ways of thinking about responses in categories like general moods and emotions, possible protagonists and background figures, animals, objects, scenarios (geographical, ethnic, social, architectural, historical, etc.), action, movement, speed, stasis, spatiality, singularity, multiplicity, narrative, causality, and so on, while at the same time considering responses mentioning other pieces of music or other types of symbolic representation like drama, film or TV, including names of musicians, composers, actors, artists and directors. We eventually came up with a response grid, which we constructed on an ongoing basis to house the responses we received, so that we could report, for example, how much of which sort of humans, animals or insects (if any) were imagined doing what (if anything) in which way with what effect in which sort of setting and atmosphere at which time of day or night and at what time in history, in which type of weather, at what speed and with which type of movement, calmly or with agitation, or with humour, gently or threateningly, happily or sadly, robotically or gracefully, quietly and peacefully or noisily and frenetically, etc., etc. A short version of that response grid, with the overriding single-digit categories (1, 2, etc.) divided into double-digit subcategories (11, 12, etc.) and again into three-digit subtypes (111, 112, etc.), but without the original four-digit sub-subtypes (1111, 1112, etc.), occupies the next few pages. It is included here as an illustration of how unguided associations to music can be grouped into semantic categories. It is followed by explanations of its most important issues of theory and method.

031. Future: about to, will soon; imminent, is expected, [s.g.] will happen [now]; leading to, [will have] consequences; [will] eventually

032. Present: at this moment, has just started, after a while, turns into, changes mood, we switch to, we follow, now [x happens], during, meanwhile

033. Past: goal reached, journey over, finally, has [done x], after a long time (in past), once again, used to [do x], what we did

115. Lightness, openness, freshness: clear, fair, frank, fresh, young, pure, clean, free, luminous, transparent

122. Enmity, aggression, implacability: hate, rage, hostile, cruel, violent, destructive, vengeful, merciless

122. Disturbance, danger: unrest, adversity, setbacks, worried, troubled, threat, ominous, fateful, tense, scary, nerve-wracking

123. Sadness, boredom: disappointed, depressed, tragic, sorrow, melancholy, abandoned (alone), deserted, bored, alienated, monotonous, listless

125. Darkness, encumbrance, clandestinity, miasma: gloomy, hidden, stealth, heavy, confined, ill, decadent, dirty, rotting, dead, drugged, drunk

211. Single male: boy, man, [old] man, cowboy, cop, spy, soldier, hero, gangster, villain; + named males (e.g. Hitler, Bing Crosby, Bond, Dr Who)

212. Single female: girl, woman, heroine, princess, witch; Julie Andrews, Marilyn Monroe, Mother Theresa, Lisbeth Salander, Queen Elizabeth I

264. Comestibles, props: food, drink, eggs, chewing gum, sugar, beer, cigarettes, drugs, balloons (ludic), smoke (cigs.), briefcase, plastic bag

371-379. Northern Europe, Southern Europe, North Africa and Middle East, Subsaharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Australasia, Oceania, North America, Central America, South America etc.

533. Transitional: pass, past [the window], [move] across [the field], [move] over [the meadow], forwards, along, between (mvt.), through

542. Tremulous: tremble, wobble, quiver, glitter, flicker, flutter, rustle, babble

591. Appreciative, affectionate, respectful: I love you, marry, embrace, kiss, caress, smile, laugh, celebrate, salute, console

592. Conflictive, coercive, contusive: beat, hit, break, pierce, crash, shatter, smash, fight, struggle, bully, force, wound, shoot, kill, conquer

593. Cogitative, intentional: think, ponder, plan, try to, dream, decide, discuss, experience, feel, recognise, remember, understand, misunderstand

594. Transferential: push, pull, bring, take, drag, drive, carry, fetch, chase, accompany, follow, fill, empty, disseminate, spread, collect, retrieve

596. Symbolic communication: show, gesticulate, look, see, hear, listen, talk, whisper, shout, groan, sigh, cry, sing, read

812. Instruments: strings, brass band, orchestra, covers band, flute, trumpet, Fender Stratocaster, kick drum, piano, Hammond organ, church organ

814. Musical structure: singable tune, [nice] rhythms, dissonant, verse, chorus, bridge [section], minor key, diminished seventh

815. Musical works: Apache (Shadows), Bolro (Ravel), Liberty Bell (Sousa), Moonlight Sonata (Beethoven), God Save The Queen (Sex Pistols)

821. Cinema: feature film, movies, black and white film, cinemascope, silent film, Hitchcock, Disney, MGM; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Godfather, The Sound of Music, Taxi Driver, The World of Apu.

822. Television: TV series, [TV] documentary, news programme, soap opera, nature programme; Bonanza, Emmerdale Farm, Maigret, Wallander.

825. Verbal media: books, poems, novels, newspapers, plays; Henning Mankell, Val McDermid, William Shakespeare

826. Other media: sculpture, painting; The Garden of Earthly Delights (Bosch), Kandinskys Composition X

871-879: as category 37; examples; Czech [TV series], Hollywood [blockbuster], Bollywood [musical], Hong Kong [martial arts movie], Japanimation, Manga [movie], spaghetti [Western]

921-929: bloody awful, brainless, third rate, contrived, trash, kitsch, slushy, cloying, syrupy, schmaltz, speculative, badly produced

The obvious advantage of a taxonomy like the one just shown is that you can group, say, the VVA love under kindness and romance (category 111) rather than with its alphabetical neighbours lousy (category 92), lout (129) and Lwenbru (264). The taxonomy is, however, not without problems.

[1] Demographic inadequacy and cultural specificity. The taxonomy presented above, based on 8,552 VVAs collected in the early 1980s from over 600 individuals (mainly Swedes and Latin Americans) responding to ten different film and TV title tunes, cannot represent in any semantically exhaustive way the totality of those respondents imagination on hearing those pieces. Thats because what we present in such a list is the result of no more (nor less) than our interpretation and classification in their turn based on criteria described below of verbal-visual responses that in themselves inadequately express what the music means to each respondent. Of course, that is the nature of the beast because, as we reiterated most recently on page 185, trying to put music directly into words is a pointless undertaking. Still, that is mercifully not the object of this kind of reception test whose VVAs need to be considered metaphorically and musogenically, not just in terms of literal verbal denotation. However, the most substantial problem with our taxonomy is its cultural specificity: 8,552 VVAs from 561 Scandinavians and 46 Latin Americans hearing ten short pieces of stereotypical title music in the 1980s represents an absolutely infinitesimal part of all the VVAs imaginable in response to any music heard by any population at any time in any place. For this reason our taxonomy should be understood as just one example of VVA classification among a virtually infinite number of possible variants. It is in no way intended as a universally applicable and exhaustive or scientifically watertight taxonomy.

[2] The cultural specificity, just mentioned, of the music, respondents and time at the basis of the taxonomy causes evident problems. For example, [i] Historical location categories 387 and 388 (recent history and today/modern), altered here from the 1980s to fit the year 2011, will be in constant need of adjustment. Thats because the 1970s were, at the time of the actual reception tests, recent and the 1980s up-to-date, today and modern, and because todays 2011 will soon be part of history. [ii] The national cultures of our respondents and the mainly English-language origins of the music they were subjected to are reflected in what may seem like ethnocentric categories of geographical location. These responses necessitated a fine-tuning of Europe (categories 371-374, 871-874) while little or no distinctions needed to be made under Asia (375, 875) or Africa (376, 876) because we received virtually no responses including reference to any Asian or African locations. Clearly, this aspect of the taxonomy has to change according to demographic, musical, cultural and historical factors relevant to each reception test situation.

[3] Taxonomic fine-tuning. The original taxonomy has four, not just three, levels of categorisation and most VVAs from the reception tests on which it is based are arranged accordingly. Romance, for example, sorts under category 1112 together with romantic love but not with just love on its own (1111), i.e. neither with love that might just as well be brotherly, parental or patriotic, nor with tender and gentle (1117). Thats simply because romance is not always tender and because confusing parental with romantic love would be incestuous: you just dont feel the same sort of love towards your lover, your child and your nation and that means different music for all three types of love. Still, despite such important types and subtypes of love, of music and of human behaviour, those related concepts belong to the same main three-digit category 111 (Love and kindness) which is distinct from other positive three-digit categories like Joy and festivity or Lightness and openness (115 and 115 respectively, also positive but not necessarily love) and, much more radically at the opposite end of the affective spectrum, from 121 (Enmity and aggression) or 125 (Darkness, encumbrance, clandestinity and miasma). The four-digit categories are excluded from the taxonomy shown above not because they are unimportant but for reasons of space and clarity. In other words, the particular type of taxonomic fine-tuning just illustrated down to the four-digit level in our classificatory grid may well be irrelevant to reception tests whose aim and scope differ from those of the list occupying pages 199-205. Even so, the 1-,2- and 3-digit levels may still be of some use for many reception test situations.

[4] Polysemic VVAs. As already explained, responses in the form of unguided associations need to be discretised into individual concepts so that, for example, love in an original response like The femme fatale whispers I love you while sipping her cocktail and romance in Film noir romance from 1950s can both be considered indicative of similar love and romance connotations in response to the same music. That sort of classification is relatively unproblematic but some concepts, not least proper names, are not so simple thanks to the wealth of further connotations they carry. James Bond is a classic example of that problem.

The VVA James Bond can be correctly classified as a single named male person, real or fictional (category 211X), and, indeed, the presence or absence of a male individual is an appropriate item of musogenic information to register. However, that single male name also connotes or implies spy (category 2116), thriller (841T), tough (1091), hard (1412), adventure/action (1015), excessive bravery (1092), sex (1055, not romantic love), women (232), most of whom are probably ooh-la-la (1145), not to mention villains (2319), murder (5928), crime (1290), etc., etc. Depending on the number of respondents youre dealing with, there are two ways of dealing with this issue of verbally connotative polysemy. If you have many respondents, youll almost certainly find that the music eliciting the Bond VVA from one person gives rise to VVAs from other respondents in the other Bond-related categories just listed or that the single Bond respondent has him/herself included VVAs in one or more of those categories. Otherwise, if you only have a few respondents you can consider including cross-references to Bond as a single named male (cat. 211X) from whichever of the other categories you consider relevant.

[5] Verbal context. Unguided associations demand that VVA classification take verbal context into consideration. For example, abandon means both leave in the lurch (e.g. an abandoned child, cat. 1236) and letting yourself go in the sense of no holds barred (cat. 105). Those two emotional states suggest very different music, as do over (as in Over the Rainbow), over (riding over the prairie), over (the party's over) and over (a dark cloud over the city). In such cases its not just a matter of interpreting VVAs according to the verbal context of the response in question: its also necessary to think, as in the case of all those overs, musogenically in terms of kinetic, spatial, gestural and tactile difference. After all, the response words were elicited by music and not vice versa. Put simply, the musogenic difference between a dark cloud over the prairie and riding over the prairie is highly significant.

[6] Distanced VVAs. At least two types of distanced response demand special consideration: [i] those in quotes, for example, nice, heroic, love, freedom and [ii] negative or diminutive VVAs, for example not military, or not too much violence, or slightly scary. Those who offer these sorts of response clearly think that the music in question is supposed to connote something specific (a nice, happy or scary feeling, notions of freedom, heroic deeds or of misery and so on); but the same respondents just as clearly question the credibility of that supposed connotation. If these types of response, however distanced or critical, identify specific connotative categories (nice, happy, scary, etc.) it is appropriate to register that recognition because the respondents in question did so. At the same time, respondent distancing from that recognition needs also to be registered. Thats why it can be useful to include a special distanced VVA subtype under the relevant main category, for example 110~ for nice under 110 (Positive in general), 121~ for not too much violence under 121 (Emnity, etc.). That classification device lets you account for both recognition and critical distance when discussing the effects of the music youre analysing.

[7] Visual bias. The VVAs at the base of the taxonomy on pages 199-205 are exactly that verbal-visual associations and the visual character of many responses to our reception test pieces is exactly what we had encouraged our respondents to come up with. Now, it would be perfectly reasonable to object that our interest in the visual misrepresents musical perception which under normal circumstances seems to cause few, if indeed any, images to appear in listeners minds. From this valid standpoint it is logical to argue that tactile, gestural, sonic, spatial and kinetic, not visual, connotations should have been the focus of our study. I wish that had been possible. The trouble with this laudable line of reasoning is that it is impracticable: it assumes non-visual modes of cognition to have an equal status to that of vision in our scopocentric tradition of knowledge. The problem is that words descriptive of touch, of gesture, of sound, of para- or extramusical space and movement are so much less common than those denoting what we see. As Johnson (2003 5) notes:

English is very strong in visual modes. Read a page of English and try to delete all visual metaphors. Even harder: replace them with aural ones. It becomes instructively frustrating to discover how many terms we take for granted in discussing ways of knowing, for which we have only visually oriented vocabulary.

Space and movement are more often than not popularly verbalised, concretised and, yes, visualised in terms of beings, objects and places that are, however tautological it may sound, visible, either in reality or in the minds eye rather than in the minds ear or at the minds fingertips. The sad conclusion here is that if we want to understand musics meanings through the ears and minds of its final arbiters of signification (the whole point of the reception tests discussed here) we must, at least in our scopocentric tradition of knowledge, rely to a large extent on verbalisation of the visual as an unavoidable symbolic intermediary. Of course, those verbalisations can in themselves never be much more than metaphorical hints of whatever the music really seems to be expressing. Or, to use two visual metaphors, we shall at best see through a glass darkly or be the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. But that doesnt mean the responses discretised and classified in our VVA taxonomy let us see nothing at all. The common denominator of the Austria of Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music and of the shampoo in the Timotei commercial (pp. 157-159) certainly suggests otherwise, as does the fact that our respondents unequivocally agreed in considerable detail about what the different test pieces connoted. For example: [i] no children (category 2301) were imagined in connection with the test batterys only romantic love (cat. 1112) tune; [ii] armed forces (275) and a total absence of reflective thought (103) were exclusive as combined characteristics for the only march; [iii] nervous tension (1223), sweat (2619) and no rural scenario (31-32) constituted a combination of VVAs exclusive to another of the ten tunes.

[8] Visual annexing. One problem imposed by the necessity of visual imaging as an intermediary mode of perception is that respondents sometimes come up with VVAs whose semiotic link to the music theyre hearing can seem quite obscure. For example, the second of the Ten Little Title Tunes (TLTT) was a Western theme that gave rise to several Clint Eastwood and Italian Western responses even though the test piece contained very little resembling Morricones iconic sounds for the dollar movies. In such instances the connotative process works something like this: [i] this is obviously a Western theme; [ii] the most recent Westerns Ive seen were Italian and starred Clint Eastwood. Those VVAs were in other words based much less on interobjective similarity bewteen the test piece and Morricones music for the Sergio Leones Westerns, much more on the visual annexing of Western narrative tropes familiar to the respondent at the time of the reception test. The same goes for the few respondents who mentioned Indians: nothing in the test piece resembled all those familiar Hollywood cues of Injun savagery in productions like Stagecoach (Steiner & Hageman 1939), Valley of the Sun (Sawtell 1942) or How the West Was Won (Broughton 1976). Those listeners simply annexed Indians as an automatic ingredient of visual narrative in relation to music that clearly spelt Western as a narrative genre but which gave no sonic hint of any Indians.

As long as youre aware that the visual, non-musogenic extension of an overall narrative genre suggested by the music can occur in reception test situations there need be no major problem. Thats mainly because visual annexing is the exception rather than the rule in responses to test pieces and because it is usually more than adequately counterbalanced by a majority of patently musogenic VVAs.

[9] Taxonomic criteria. A quick glance through pages 199-205 might give the impression that the taxonomy was based on subjective intuition. That objection is partly valid because Bob Clarida and I did from time to time ask each other what sort of music a previously unclassified VVA demanded so that we could compare the music we imagined suitable for that VVA with what we knew to be typical for a particular subcategory or subtype already included in our taxonomy. If such a category already existed we could classify the new VVA accordingly or, if unclassifiable in the grid as it existed at that point in time, we could create a new subtype for it and often, as it turned out, welcome others into its company. That procedure was, however, secondary and normally used only if our overriding classification criteria proved inadequate. Those overriding criteria derived from two sources: Polish musicologist Zofia Lissas list of film musics functions and the descriptive tags and titles given to pieces in library music collections. Both are worth considering here because they represent widespread everyday practices in the verbal characterisation of musical meaning.

Authors treating the subject of music and the moving image in any depth usually propose some kind of system organising the different ways in which music relates to the images, sounds, dialogue and narrative it accompanies. Such classifications of film musics functions are clearly relevant to anyone writing about music as if it meant something other than itself and have influenced the construction of our VVA taxonomy. We found Lissas ideas useful because she constructs, discusses and exemplifies her classification through musicological argumentation that allows for verbalisation of a musical understanding of musical functions. For example, her function number 1 (underlining movement) is closely related to category 5 in our classification grid, her function 3 (location) to our categories 30-37 and her function 4 (representing time) to our categories 02, 03, 38 and 39. However, although influential at this general level in the development of our VVA taxonomy, film music function classifications, including Lissas, were of less use when it came to the finer distinctions of musically constructed semantic fields at the three- and four-digit levels. Here we had to turn to our own musical experience and, more importantly, to library music characterisations of musical message .

Library music is also known as production music and, as those names suggest, denotes a large collection of recordings of almost exclusively instrumental music, each of which can be taken out of that collection (the library) for use as jingles, title themes, underscore etc., typically in TV and radio programming, in adverts and in low-budget films. Library music differs from music specifically commissioned for particular audiovisual productions the usual procedure with film music in that it is created and recorded in advance, in isolation from and without prior knowledge of any particular production in which it might later be used. For example, in 2006 my PRS statement declared that one of my library music tracks had been used by Lithuanian TV but gave me no clue as to which part of the recording had been used for which purpose. For the weather forecast? To underscore a short sequence in a nature programme? I doubt I shall ever know.

Since library music is rarely conceived for use in a particular media production it cannot guarantee the uniquely customised feel or exact synchronisation which a good working relationship between the composer and the film director or TV producer can create. Library music is in this sense a contradictory phenomenon: it has to be specific by providing particular moods, scenarios and dramatic functions, but it is at the same time generic because those particular moods and functions must have the potential to be used at any suitable point in any media production. Since the specific musical demands of specific situations in specific media productions can be most satisfactorily met through direct contact beween director/producer and composer, library music companies have to compensate for their disadvantage in this respect by being as specific as possible about the character of each track in its repertoire. These verbal specifications appear on vinyl sleeves, in CD inlays or in the catalogues and indexes issued by the larger library music companies. Table 6-2 (p. 215) presents, in alphabetical order, a wide but by no means exhaustive selection of descriptive tags culled from various library music collections.

The categories listed in Table 6-2 are, from the standpoint of verbal taxonomy, pretty disparate. They refer to musical genres, instruments or structural traits (jazz, pop, soul, classical, strings, guitar, percussion, rhythmical, etc.), to states of mind (happy, sad, sentimental, solitude, love, stress, etc.), to synoptic or episodic functions (openings, links, bridges, titles) to narrative genres (adventure, science fiction, thriller, detective, Western), to historical periods (medieval, contemporary), to generic scenarios (foreign, sea, nature, rural, water), to named locations, regions or cultures (African, Celtic, Oriental), to animals (birds), to social functions, rituals and activity (sport, funeral, science, industry), to speed and movement (fast, slow), to affective descriptions of people, locations or actions (big, clumsy, eery, glamorous, impressive, intimate, urgent) and so on.

classical closes (ends) clumsy comedy contemporary corporate dances danger dark detective

slow solitude solo instrum. soul S. American space spectacular sport storm stress

Table 6-2 and the comments preceding it deal with descriptions of music conceived to facilitate the musical production of audiovisual presentations by individuals, most of whom, like the majority of our respondents, lack formal musical training. The main difference between our respondents and the average user of library music is that the former are at the receiving end, the latter at the transmitting end of the musical communication process. In other words, our respondents had to come up with words describing music rather than with music described in words. The importance of this dialectic is that in both cases the words referring to music are not so much structurally descriptive of music (poetic) as functionally or synaesthetically grounded (aesthesic) in the established everyday practices of musical perception in an audiovisual mass-media context. This semio-musical reality makes the descriptive terms used by library music catalogue editors a logical starting point in the establishment of a taxonomy of visual-verbal associations (VVAs) to music. Of course, the taxonomically disparate nature of the sorts of concept listed in Table 6-2 needed arranging more systematically for the purposes of response classification but they do constitute the raw materials of our taxonomy.

With library music we are back to the start of this chapter and to the idea that VVAs in response to a particular AO can be gathered by studying writings about the AO in reviews, album inlay notes, blogs and so on (p. 190). That so on is important because it includes the working vocabulary of library music company staff describing individual recordings in their collections so that potential users will have at least some idea as to whether the music so described will communicate whatever it is they want their audience to experience. And yet this working tradition of everyday music semiotics in practice, which includes choosing a suitable title for each piece, this tradition of using words on a daily basis in media production to characterise musical messages, seems to be either unknown or of little interest to scholars of music semiotics, at least to the extent that Im unaware of any reception research into whether the characterisations offered by library music company staff actually tally with what respondents imagine or feel on hearing the music in question. If that is so well be unable to make use of library musics working repertoire of poetic musical descriptors when discussing the meaning of other music. But there is a way out of the epistemic impasse just described.

If we could establish verifiable links of structural similarity between our musical analysis object (AO) and certain pieces of library music, then we could test the hypothesis that some of the structurally similar library musics verbal characterisations might also apply to our AO, i.e. that similar musical signs relate to similar musical interpretants. We could also look for structural similarity between our AO and other pieces of music, perhaps a song with lyrics, or a particular type of dance, or music for particular theatre, film or TV scenes and so on. We could then test hypotheses about semiotic links between our AO and those lyrics, dances and scenes. These procedures are the main subject of the next chapter.

[1] Intersubjectivity arises when at least two individuals experience the same thing in a similar way. Intersubjectivity is important when trying to understand how music is received, used and interpreted.

[2] There are at least six good reasons why focus has to be on the aesthesic pole when applying intersubjective approaches to understanding music and what it communicates.

[3] Ethnographic observations can be useful in intersubjective studies of music but the most common and direct way of finding out what sort of intersubjectivity exists in relation to a piece of music is to carry out some kind of reception test.

[4] Many different factors determine how a reception test will be conducted. How many respondents? Using interviews, handwriting on paper or online questionnaires? These choices are influenced by factors like methodological and demographic focus in terms of audience type, social scene, style-specific issues, etc.

[5] Unguided responses are much more reliable and informative than results gathered through multiple choice tests.

[6] Full answers from each respondent have to be discretised into individual VVAs (verbal-visual associations) and sorted into categories so that it becomes clear how much of what respondents associated to when hearing each piece in the test.

[7] A four-tier taxonomy is presented as starting point for VVA categorisation work. Special care needs to be taken with polysemic VVAs, distanced VVAs, and questions of cultural specificity.

[8] Systematisations of film music functions and, in particular, library music categories and descriptions provide interesting models for grouping VVAs into useful categories. Library music is also an excellent source when tracking down IOCM (see Chapter 7).

Chapter 6 showed how, using ethnographic observation, reception tests and a taxonomy of VVAs, its possible to start unpacking the black box of musical meaning (Figure 7-1). Shared subjectivity of response was used as evidence of other things than just music demonstrating the existence of semantic fields linked to a musical analysis object (AO). Those other things are called paramusical fields of connotation, or PMFCs for short. The links are not extra- but paramusical because they arise in connection with the music, as an intrinsic part of musical semiosis, not because of their existence outside or independent of it. The VVAs in Chapter 6 all those verbalisations of movement, location, mood, feeling and people, all those library music titles and descriptions etc. are intrinsically paramusical. They are essential to the establishment of PMFCs, i.e. of particular semantic fields connected to particular sets of musical sound in particular cultural contexts. Now, the PMFCs in Chapter 6 derived mainly from intersubjective observations of response in relation to particular structural configurations in particular pieces of music. This chapter focuses on an interobjective approach to musical semiosis (Figure 7-2, p. 228).

In what follows Im assuming that interobjectivity has to do with relationships between objects, that objects consist of structural elements and, in music, that at least some of those structural elements can carry meaning. If that is so, Ill first need to explain what I mean by a musical object, a musical structure, and a musical structure that carries meaning or a museme. With those working definitions behind us well be able to focus more clearly on interobjective procedures.

In the expression analysis object, object simply means an identifiable piece of music in its sounding form. It can be a pop song, a classical symphony movement, an advertising jingle, a film or games music cue, a TV title theme etc., and it usually has a name or title of some sort. When used in this sense, a musical object, if it exists as recorded sound, will typically occupy one cd track or constitute a single audio file. Therefore, the interobjective procedures explained later in this chapter involve the establishment of sonic relationships between an analysis object and at least one other musical object (piece, song, movement, track, etc.). The recurring proposition in interobjective analysis is that something in musical object A sounds like something in musical object B.

Now, that something that sounds like could be almost anything. It might be a particular turn of melodic phrase, a riff, a sonority, a rhythmic pattern, a harmonic sequence or type of chord, a particular use of particular instruments, of vocal timbre, of acoustic space, any of which could be presented at a particular speed in a particular register at a particular level of intensity and so on. Such somethings are more usually a combination of several, for example a particular harmonic sequence played by particular instruments using a particular rhythmic pattern, or a particular melodic turn of phrase delivered with a particular vocal timbre at a particular volume towards the front or back of the mix. Most of these somethings are short enough to fit into the extended present but some are processual: they can comprise the order and manner in which different sections inside the musical object are presented, varied, extended, shortened, repeated or recapitulated.

Whatever the exact structural characteristics of the possible types of something may be, I just used poetic rather than aesthesic terms to exemplify those constituent aspects of a musical object, i.e. I used terms deriving from techniques of constructing the sounds rather from how theyre perceived as communicating anything else. The somethings of the previous paragraph are in that sense qualifiable as structural because any one them can be understood theoretically as a musical structure regardless of semiotic potential. Just like these words typed into my computer and written to disk, musical ideas also have a semiotically dormant mode of physical existence, whether stored as an audio recording, or as a score, or in the brain cells of a musical community. That said, a musical structure, as a poetically determinable entity and set of sounds in physical form, can also become a sign in Peirces trichotomy of semiosis. In that case its status as sign presupposes that the structural entity materialises an initial idea or intention, and, more importantly, that it is linked to an interpretant. If such a structure is not considered semiotically it remains just that a mere structure but if it is considered along with intended or perceived meaning it becomes also a sign, a structural item of musical signification. A structural item with semiotic properties in music will in what follows be called a museme. If only things were that simple

[It is a] unit of three components three tone beats [which] can constitute two progressions and meet the requirements for a complete, independent unit of music-logical form or mood in both direction and extension. It can be regarded as a musical morpheme or museme.

The last part of this statement is clear enough: if a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has meaning in and of itself then a museme is the smallest unit embodying meaning in music. If that is so, Seegers explanation of the term is problematic for several reasons.

Tone, as in tone beat, is the first problem with Seegers definition of museme. If tone means a note of discernible fundamental pitch, then a musical structure consisting of three notes without discernible fundamental pitch, as in a drum pattern, would have no music-logical form or mood and would carry no meaning. Since that conclusion is both false and an insult to drummers lets assume that Seeger meant three notes, using note in the midi sense of the word, i.e. a single, discrete sound of finite duration in a piece of music, whether or not the sound is tonal. At least that definition caters for the connotative distinction most Western listeners are capable of making between, say, a symphonic timpani roll and a funky drummer loop. It would also let us use the term museme to horizontally identify meaningful units of rhythmic and melodic structuration, i.e. in terms of at least three consecutive notes (note in the sense just defined) and to think about such unlayered musemes as constituent elements in single-strand units of musical meaning museme strings, as evidenced in musical phrases, ostinato patterns or riffs, drum loops, etc. So far, so good. The only trouble is that musical signification is in no way solely dependent on note sequences (the horizontal aspect). It is, as discussed below, at least as much a matter of simultaneous layering (the vertical aspect) of notes (note still in the sense explained above).

This is neither the time nor place to discuss the epistemological background to Seegers pioneering ideas about musical meaning, except to say that its problems may derive partly from the type of linguistic theory circulating in his day, partly from conventional musicologys fixation with musical syntax and its apparent reluctance to deal with semantics or pragmatics. Many linguists have since Seegers day argued that prosodic aspects of speech timbre, diction, intonation, volume, facial expression, gesture, etc. are semiotically at least as important as the words they accompany. If such layering of sonic structuration is important to the mediation of meaning in speech, it is absolutely essential and intrinsic to music because notes cannot exist without the sound carrying them, be that sound and its note[s] imagined inside your head or heard out loud. To put it in simple terms from the musicians standpoint, the sound you put with the notes how you play or sing them is semiotically at least as important as the notes you put with your sound. Neither can exist as music without the other and, when it comes to musical signs, the how (notes or sound) is inevitably an intrinsic and inseparable part of the what (sound or notes). These ideas may become clearer with a bit of concretisation.

The two statements dont worry about me said nonchalantly and dont worry about me spoken with bitter resentment quite clearly send no more the same message than do the first line of your national anthem played by a professional symphony orchestra accompanying a large chorus of trained voices and the same passage sung out of tune, with the wrong words, by someone with a foreign accent accompanied by two drunks mistreating a battered old acoustic guitar and a concertina. Of course, the difference between the first three sung notes of one national anthem and another is semiotically significant, however they are performed, because that difference allows listeners to musically distinguish one nation from the other during, say, TV coverage of the Olympics. That said, the way those notes are sounded is at least as important, for while the symphony orchestra version of your national anthem may well be heard in terms of national pride and dignity, the foreign drunks are more likely to come across as disrespectful, as enacting a sort of musical equivalent to burning the flag. That cardinal difference between pride and ridicule is just as much a matter of musical structure (volume, timbre, instrumentation, intonation, accentuation, phrasing, etc.) as the notes (pitch and rhythm profile) telling us which nations patriotism is being extolled or dragged through a dung heap.

Now, assuming, at least for the time being, that museme means a minimal unit of musical meaning, it could be argued that the first notes in the tune of the Star Spangled Banner and of the Marseillaise each constitute a museme if neither of them can, as a sequence of notes producing a particular profile of rhythm and pitch, be broken down into smaller units that carry any meaning in themselves. But it would also imply that the official symphony and raucous drunks renderings of those two national anthems mean the same thing. No, both versions of the two national anthems clearly contain other structural elements that semiotically link not to France or the USA but to interpretants which can be referred to in terms like patriotic pride and national ridicule respectively, regardless of which nation is the object of eulogy or derision. Moreover, both those types of other musical sign can be broken down into smaller meaningful units, for example what the symphony orchestras string section plays on its own, or the sound of the drunks concertina without the raspy foreign vocals. And even those smaller but musically meaningful units may in their turn be reducible to yet smaller meaningful entities until the point where only one meaningful note is left, like the single-note museme struck on tubular bell at 0:04 in the title music for Monty Pythons Flying Circus.

If a museme can consist of as little as one single note, Seegers three-note criterion for qualification as a museme doesnt work. Indeed, a one-note museme can exist because its semiotic charge relies more (though not exclusively) on how it is constructed vertically by the way it is struck on which instrument at which volume over which chord played by which other instrument[s] in which register in which tonal idiom and so on than on its immediate horizontal context (by its relation to whatever closely precedes and follows it). This clearly means that explanations of musical semiosis need to consider several individually meaningful layers that sound simultaneously but which do not necessarily occupy the same duration as each other. These composite layers of simultaneously sounding musemes are called museme stacks and, as now-sound Gestalts, are particularly useful, as we shall see next, in forming hypotheses about which structural elements in an AO may be linked to which sort of interpretants.

Returning to the initial melodic notes of your national anthem performed in two different ways, Table 7-1 (p. 226) identifies the first museme (1a) as the first part of its first melodic line (e.g. the Allons, enfants part of Allons, enfants de la patrie in the Marseillaise, or just the Oh, say bit of Oh, say, can you hear? at the start of The Star Spangled Banner) in both the symphonic (A) and drunk (B) versions. As suggested above, the most obvious interpretant (there are others) for museme 1 in both versions is the official identity of the nation in question. Museme 2, on the other hand, is actually a museme stack consisting of three constituent musemes for version A (2a-2c) and five for version B (2a-2e), some of which can in their turn also be understood as subsidiary museme stacks broken down into yet more constituent musematic entities. That sort of musematic hierarchy is illustrated by museme 2 in the B section of Table 7-1 and can be explained as follows.

orchestra in classical vein. official, organised, classical, quality, polished, dignified, impressive, etc.

2b professional chorus as 2a + large collective, synchronised individuals, common goal

[2c3] simplified chords unpolished, unofficial, careless, messy, disrespectful; popular portable sound for parties or camp fires

2e background noise: glasses, chatter, raucous laughter disrespectful, inappropriate

1+2 Total = Either The nation, its citizens, its values and institutions are being vilely ridiculed and demeaned; or The bloated pomp and arrogance of those running my country is being rightly debunked.

The single foreign vocalist (museme 2a) does not represent the same thing as his raspy voice (2b) because a raspy foreign voice, a raspy native voice, a well-trained native voice and a well-trained foreign voice all sound different and embody four different interpretants. Nor do either museme 2a or 2b mean the same thing as the out-of-tune guitar strummed irregularly with simplified chords (2c) which, in its turn does not have the same effect on its own as the concertina without the guitar (2d). The total effect of these constituent musemes would also be slightly but significantly different without the background noise of museme 2e. Moreover, museme 2c (guitar) contains three subsidiary structural elements, each of which contributes to its overall meaning: it isnt properly tuned (2c1); its strummed simply and irregularly (2c2); and the chords played on it are much more rudimentary than in a correct or official version of the same piece (2c3). Alter or remove any of those three structural elements and both the overall structure and probable interpretants of museme 2c change too. Finally, add museme 1 to the equation and you have quite a complex museme stack capable of generating, inside a mere second or so, the two radically different sets of interpretants (PMFCs) shown at the bottom of each section in Table 7-1. To quote Mendelssohn again:

The thoughts which are expressed to me by a piece of music are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary too definite.

Although this discussion of the term museme will have hopefully provided a few insights into how musical signs may be constructed, identified and deconstructed, I have given the term no conclusive definition, simply because I cant. After all, it would be foolhardy to try and distil the theoretical essence of museme without providing much more extensive evidence of how the construction (poesis) and reception (aesthesis) of individual musical structures are demonstrably and systematically linked to things other than themselves within the same broad music culture. Initial steps in the investigation of those links were suggested in Chapter 6 Intersubjectivity. Still, we are now, after discussing the terms object, structure and museme, in a better position to expand analytical method into the realm of interobjectivity as we seek to identify and interpret structural elements that carry musical meaning, be they musemes, museme stacks or museme strings.

If procedures establishing shared similarity of response to music between several human subjects are called intersubjective (vertical arrow on the left in Figure 7-2), then those establishing shared similarity of structure between two or more musical objects can be called interobjective (horizontal arrow). Interobjective method first entails finding structural elements in other music that sound like structural elements in the AO. That process of establishing musical intertextuality is called interobjective comparison. The other music containing structural resemblance to the AO is called interobjective comparison material or IOCM for short. That type of sounds-like link is represented in Figure 7-2 by the horizontal arrow (structural similarity) between the AO and the IOCM.

Now, it may seem odd to suggest that referring to other music can help us escape from the black box of music is music: its like advocating regression into musical absolutism and to the notion that music refers only to itself. Thats why its essential to understand that interobjective comparison is only the first of two steps in a procedure relating the AO to the PMFCs appearing bottom right in Figure 7-2. Interobjective comparison simply exploits the non-antagonistic contradiction between musics intra- and extrageneric characteristics, combining the potential of both realities.

Considering first the intrageneric side of the matter, its worth recalling part of the second tenet set out in Chapter 2s definition section.

[M]usical structures often seem to be objectively related to either: [a] their occurrence in similar guise in other music; or [b] their own context within the piece of music in which they (already) occur.

As shown in Figure 7-2 (p. 228), interobjective comparison exploits this intrageneric side of the contradiction as a first step (horizontal arrow AO-IOCM) in opening up a second store of paramusical information (vertical arrow between IOCM and PMFC to the right in the diagram). A fictional example may help concretise this line of thinking.

Lets say your AO is a short extract of film music containing sounds reminiscent of a piece of library music called Mysteries of the Lake. Since that library music piece sounds, in part or whole, like your AO, you can assume it shares sonic structural traits in common with your AO. If that is so, the library music piece qualifies as potential interobjective comparison material IOCM linked to the AO by the structural similarity arrow in Figure 7-2. At the same time, the library music pieces suggestive title, Mysteries of the Lake, is an obvious hint at a paramusical field of connotation (PMFC) belonging to that piece of IOCM (step 2, vertical arrow on right in Figure 7-2). Noting also that library music company staff characterise the same piece as eerie and icy (also step 2), its possible to summarise the pieces PMFCs so far as mystery, lake, eerie, icy. The point of this simple two-step process is that if, as in this fictional instance, the concepts mystery, lake, eerie and icy are linked to music sounding like something in your AO, then it is conceivable that those paramusical concepts may also apply to the AO, in short that your extract of film music may be linked to a PMFC embodying notions of mystery, lake, eerie and icy. That is at least by no means unreasonable as a hypothesis. The only trouble is that one swallow doesnt make a summer, or, less poetically, that one single piece of IOCM and its associated connotations do not prove that the relevant sounds in the original AO actually connote whatever mystery, lake, eerie and icy together create by way of a PMFC.

There are several ways of verifying or falsifying individual occurrences of paramusical connotation deduced through interobjective comparison. One way is to use the sort of reception tests discussed in Chapter 6 to check if the VVAs they produce (the vertical arrow of intersubjectivity in Figure 7-2) show any consistency with those deduced using IOCM. Put simply, do the two sets of PMFC at the bottom of the diagram match up? If, for instance, staying with the mystery lake example, reception test respondents associate to not just mystery, lake, eerie and icy but also to things like swirling mist, dark forest and medieval myth, all well and good; but if responses include significant amounts of, say, sunshine, airports, fashion shows, happiness and cowboys youll need to think again. But there are other ways of testing initial hypotheses of paramusical connotation.

The more instances of interobjective similarity you find, the better your chances will be of finding PMFCs relevant to your AO and of examining degrees of consistency between the PMFCs to all those different pieces of IOCM. For example, still using the fictional mystery lake AO, the more IOCM you find connected to PMFCs like mystery, lake, eerie, icy, swirling mist, dark forest and medieval myth, the more plausible your initial hypothesis will be. On the other hand, perhaps lake only occurs in conjunction with your initial piece of IOCM and with none of the others whose PMFC veers more towards, say, mist, myth, medieval, Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter. If so, you might have to tweak your initial hypothesis, that is unless your respondents mention, or you find IOCM linked to, particular medieval myth elements like Merlin, King Arthur or Excalibur, in which case lake (as in the lady of the lake) would still be significant. Of course, in the unlikely event of other IOCM being connected to PMFCs verbalisable in terms like sunshine, airports, fashion shows, happiness and cowboys, youd either have to abandon the initial hypothesis or to check how much those happy sunshine airport pieces of IOCM actually resemble your AO in musical-structural terms. You might also need to ask if the happy sunshine airport pieces are conceived in the same broad set of musical idioms as the film music cue whose message youre trying to explain in words.

The collection of IOCM necessary for the sort of procedure just sketched can seem like a daunting task, especially if you arent a musicologist or practising musician. There are three practical ways, explained next, of overcoming this difficulty: Ask a musician (with caveat), Digital recommenders and Reverse engineering.

One of the distinct advantages of interobjective comparison is that it treats music as music. Putting not too fine a point on it, you could say that it uses (other) music as a sort of direct metalanguage for music. The only trouble is that (verbal) language trumps all other sign systems in our tradition of knowledge and that IOCM can only be used as a first step in the semiotic analysis of music. That said, the direct structural intertextuality of interobjective comparison can, as we shall see, produce valid insights about the meaning of an AO. Musicians (instrumentalists, composers, singers, etc.) are very useful when it comes to tracking down IOCM because of their audio-muscular memory.

One way of conceptualising muscular memory (without the audio) is to imagine youre at a cash machine and to tap your pin code on the nearest flat surface. You probably have a spatial-kinetic-tactile memory of your code reinforced each time you withdraw cash and you would, if your pin includes other numbers than 4, 5, 6 and 0, be confused if numbers 1-9 were arranged as shown on the left (A) of Figure 7-3 because muscular memory of your PIN is based on layout B. You may even remember the gestural pattern of the phone numbers you most often call and I bet, if youre not French and youre confronted with a French computer keyboard, that youll curse every time you need to type A, M, Q, W or Z because your hands and fingers are used to making patterns on a qwerty, not azerty, keyboard. And what is more annoying than a new DVD player or TV whose remote control buttons are placed differently to those on your old remote so that the setup menu appears when your fingers press where the mute button used to be or the TV changes channel instead of turning up the volume? In these cases you simply recall and unconsciously repeat hand and finger movements that are reinforced by the rewards they regularly produce money from the cash machine, phone contact with your nearest and dearest, your own words on the computer monitor, TV adverts with no sound, etc.

Its very similar with musicians and their physical relation to the sounds theyve learnt to produce. To illustrate this point in teaching situations I often ask pianists and organists in the class to give me an octave on the nearest available flat surface. Regardless of hand size, they infallibly present a hand shape spanning just over 16 cm between the points at which thumb and small finger touch the flat surface. The audio aspect of muscular memory is even clearer in the case of cover band musicians who start work on a song they dont know by playing along to the original version (direct audio-gestural mimicking of the relevant parts). Another example of the phenomenon is when musicians trying to transcribe what they hear use gestural patterns peculiar to their instrument to check that theyre hearing the music correctly. Even if they produce no audible sound, they hope that their gestures will correspond to what they hear in their head.

Air guitar provides another illustration of audio-muscular memory at work in music. As the Virtual Air Guitar project website puts it, you dont really need to know anything about guitar solos, except for how rock guitarists perform on stage. The project team, like conventional air guitarists, have observed and mimicked particular gestural patterns in conjunction with particular rock guitar sounds; but they have then reversed the process so that particular gestures trigger particular sorts of sound without the performer having to play any instrument at all.

These examples of audio-muscular memory, not to mention the practice of speech shadowing and its implications for music making, serve to underline that hearing musical structures is intimately linked with gesture producing those sounds and that this connection almost never involves verbal reasoning for it to work. Exploiting this phenomenon makes the collection of IOCM more direct and more efficient.

Lets say youve identified a snippet of music in your AO whose connotations you want to investigate. All you need do is to ask musicians if theyve ever before played (or sung, or composed, etc.) anything like that snippet and, if so, in what other piece of music it occurs. The musicians you ask will usually be able to recall and create or imagine a gesture that produces something resembling the musical structure in question. If they are able to isolate and identify that structure, they may even be able to imagine it in other pieces of music, perhaps a bit higher or lower, or a bit faster or slower, with a different before or after, maybe in a different key or on a different instrument, or, if sung, with different words, etc., etc. In any case, thats how I work to find my own IOCM and if Im unable to come up with anything because Im unfamiliar with repertoire relevant to the snippet or sound in question, Ill not hesitate to contact those who know it better and to ask them instead. For example, Ive never been a brass player and I needed to test my gut feeling that the horn whoops in the theme for the 1970s TV series Kojak were heroic. Thats why I asked a friend who played French horn in the local symphony orchestra to tell me if, and if so where, hed played such whoops before. Almost immediately he came up with Richard Strausss Ein Heldenleben and the Haupttema des Mannes from Don Juan, as well as with the main Star Wars them all highly heroic!

The great advantage of interobjective comparison is that it bypasses the frustrating exercise of trying to describe music in words. It arrives at its approximate verbal hints of musical meaning (the PMFCs on the right of Figure 7-2, p. 228) interobjectively, i.e. primarily through demonstrable musical-structural connection. The second step linking the IOCM to its verbally denotable PMFCs is merely a matter of registering previously established connections between particular musical structures and particular words (e.g. titles, lyrics), or particular types of people, action, space, energy, location, mood, movement and so on (PMFCs on right in Figure 7-2). Such patterns are of course culturally specific and warrant an important caveat.

Since the notion of music as a universal language is so dubious (pp. 45-47), sounds like connections of the sort just described should as a rule be made using only IOCM that is part of the same broad music culture as that of the AO. Just as, say, the morpheme [wi] can, depending on various cultural factors, be understood as we, oui, wee, Wii or weee!, the same melodic figure or instrumental sound or textural sonority is unlikely to have the same connotative charge in, for instance, bebop jazz, rap, Italian opera and Balinese gamelan music. Therefore, if the sound, whose connotations you guess to be, say, weird, is from a recent computer game, then the eerie, icy Mysteries of the Lake library music piece could well be relevant; but if the AO is a piece of Cambodian court music it would almost certainly not.

The sort of cultural incompatibility just alluded to can occur when a musician youve asked to provide IOCM, having first managed to reproduce the musical structure whose connotative charge youre investigating, then places that structure in a musical context irrelevant to the broad music culture to which your AO and its listeners belong. For example, I remember finding something resembling the hook line of an Abba song in an orchestral work by Bartk. Although the hand shape and movement required to produce (poesis) both the Abba and the Bartk snippets are quite similar they just dont sound the same. This aesthesic impression (not sounding the same) is due partly to differences between the tonal, orchestral and rhythmic contexts of the AO (Abba) and the potential IOCM (Bartk), partly to the fact that Abba and Bartk audiences tend more often than not to inhabit different sociocultural spaces. Although this meant I had to discard the Bartk reference in my discussion of the Abba hook line, it did seem right to use IOCM from the classical and Romantic periods in European art music, as well as twentieth-century popular song from Europe, North America and Latin America because: [i] the AO itself belonged to the same broad musical culture as those repertoires; [ii] those musical idioms were not unfamiliar to Abba listeners in Sweden in the mid 1970s.

This issue of locating IOCM in relevant musical contexts is, as well see in Chapter 8, a matter of precision about parameters of musical expression the same tune played first on cathedral organ, then on kazoo will not sound the same and does not produce the same effect, so to speak. This means that the same structure with a different before and after, in a different metre, with different instrumentation, etc., etc. cannot be expected to sound the same, let alone produce the same effect. As the Abba-Bartk anecdote suggests, a poetically determined musical element in one piece, isolated and repeated with slight variations in the hopes of discovering IOCM, is by definition decontextualised: it assumes the quasi-autonomous status of poetic structure and nothing else. That is clearly unsatisfactory if the aim of semiotic music analysis is, however tautological it may sound, to explain musical semiosis because that in its turn demands the existence of a musematic link between sign (the sonically concrete encoded part of the process) and musical or paramusical interpretant (whatever is decoded from the sign). This implies that a meaningful musical structure a museme, a museme stack or museme string should ideally be denotable in aesthesic as well as poetic terms. The trouble is, as we saw in Chapter 3, that structural descriptors are, in Western institutions of musical learning, overwhelmingly poetic, aesthesic descriptors much rarer and more vernacular. It is for this reason essential, especially if using musicians to track down IOCM, to be aware of the poetic risks involved in the process, even though instances of musically or culturally incompatible references are thankfully rare. But there other solutions to the problems of identifying musical signs in your AO and of collecting pieces of IOCM that contain such signs.

Digital music recommender systems like iTunes, Last.fm and Pandora have been under development since 2000 and can be a useful starting point when hunting for IOCM, as long as their limitations are understood. These systems are currently designed to make money in various ways by using music you already listen to as a basis for suggesting similar music they might be able to sell you. iTunes, for example, takes ratings from your playlists and compares those with ratings given by other iTunes users. By identifying and cross-referencing your tastes in this way, iTunes tries to predict what else you might like to hear or buy. Last.fm works in a similar way. However, instead of using ratings, the software installed by Last.fm on your computer logs every piece of music you listen to and builds up a detailed profile of your preferences. Your song log data is sent to Last.fms central database and cross-referenced with log data from other users listening to similar sorts of music. Its on that basis that the system tells you what else you might enjoy.

Unlike iTunes and Last.fm, the Pandora system determines its recommendations on the basis of musical-structural traits in the music you listen to, as long as the music has already been analysed by a member of Pandoras team of musician-scrutineers. Since the Pandora system relies on interobjective comparison (on similarities of musical structure observed by musicians) rather than on metamusical information (ratings, playlist logs, etc.), it is hardly surprising that it currently receives so many positive online reviews as a reliable sounds like recommender system. However, whatever the relative merits of these systems, it should be remembered that their function is not to identify and compare individual items of musical structure within a piece of music but to identify the characteristics of an entire piece with a view to selling you more pieces of music exhibiting similar characteristics. That said, these systems, particularly Pandora, ought to be able to provide you with enough titles of enough music in relevant styles that you can then test for structural similarities using your own ears.

Before continuing with other possible procedures of interobjective comparison, its worth emphasising the following four points.

1. The more informants you ask to provide IOCM, the more pieces of relevant IOCM you are likely to find.

2. The more pieces of relevant IOCM you find, the greater your chances will be of finding PMFCs relevant to your AO.

3. The more your IOCM structurally resembles your AO, the more reliable your argumentation will be about connections between the AO and the PMFCs linked to the IOCM.

4. The greater consistency there is between PMFCs linked to your IOCM, the clearer will be your presentation of musical meaning.

These four points are only guidelines. You just cant expect every music analysis to involve a statistically reliable sample of informants, nor an exhaustive bank of accurate IOCM for every relevant musical structure, nor an unequivocal set of PMFCs for every piece of IOCM relating to every musical structure in your AO. But there are a few simple steps that can be taken to improve analytical reliability: one is explained in the next paragraph, two more under Reverse engineering 1 and 2 (pp. 238-242) and another in the section on Commutation (p. 243, ff.).

If a reception test is part of your analysis (Chapter 6), you can always ask your respondents to provide not only the sort of connotations alluded to in the instructions on page 196: you can also ask them to jot down the name of any other music, artist, composer, style or genre the test piece reminds them of. That extra information may increase the size of your IOCM and, consequently, the number of PMFCs associated with it. As mentioned earlier, a cross-check between the two sets of PMFC at the bottom of Figure 7-2 (p. 228) can help verify or falsify your hypotheses about the musical meaning of your test piece (AO).

You can also switch the direction of the arrows in Figure 7-2. That gives two more useful ways of testing hypotheses about the meaning of sounds in your AO. Both procedures constitute a sort of reverse engineering by which you theoretically reconstruct sounds in your AO on the basis of PMFCs you think may be related to it. The first of these two procedures even lets you collect IOCM relevant to your AO without having to ask a musician.

If youre having trouble collecting IOCM for an AO you think communicates a certain mood or gives rise to certain connotations, you can start with that mood or with those connotations as hypotheses and try finding pieces of other music with titles, lyrics, on-screen action, moods and so on, that correspond to your hypotheses. For example, if your AO is a pop song whose lyrics recurrently include the words teen and angel, you can start by entering those words in the YouTube search box. Among countless versions of the actual song Teen Angel and innumerable episodes of the homonymous TV series, youll also find recordings of songs like Teenager in Love, Angel Baby, Tell Laura I Love Her, and Devil Or Angel, some of which may well contain passages sounding like something in your AO with all its teens and angels. If that search fails to turn up anything of relevance, you can always use a search engine like Google to look for songs lyrics containing teen or angel. If you find any (you will!), you can go to iTunes or YouTube and search by name for the relevant songs you found in Google. If the songs you find either way sound musically like your AO, you can count them as IOCM.

You can of course also use the sorts of search just explained if your AO reminds you of music by another artist or composer. Listening to short extracts from their music will soon tell you how viable any sounds like hunch might be. You can then check if any of the music your searches produce is linked to particular lyrics, moods, situations or audiences. If a particular extract from the music of another artist or composer bears structural resemblance to something in your AO (remembering the cultural caveat, of course), then those particular lyrics, moods, situations or audiences become PMFCs of potential relevance to the discussion of meaning in your AO.

Hunting for IOCM does not necessarily entail online work. You can also scour your own or your friends music collections. In my own analysis work I often formulate hypotheses about musical meaning as keywords which I then shamelessly use to look for likely titles of CD and LP tracks of film music and pop songs, or, if appropriate, of classical Lieder, of Baroque arias, Romantic programme music and so on. I also search for the same keywords in the filename and title metadata of media files on my computer. If those searches produce results (they usually do) I then check, either aurally or in the score (if I have it), whether theres anything in any of the pieces I manage to locate that sounds like anything in my AO. If there is, I note the location of the relevant musical structure within each of those pieces, along with the name of the piece and, if any, the pieces publishing details. I then add the piece to my bank of IOCM.

But what if youre having difficulties finding IOCM for an AO with no obvious verbal, visual or dramatic connections of its own? Perhaps it doesnt even have a descriptive title. No problem, as long as you have a viable hypothesis about its PMFCs.

Lets say that our fictitious mystery lake AO has no title, that its just listed as a numbered cue on a limited edition CD for film music buffs. As long as I have a hypothesis about its mood (its the mysterious lake) Im not lost. In fact, having googled the search string |+"library music" +mystery lake| I was able, in a couple of minutes and going no further than the first few of the 16,500 hits supposedly answering to my search string, to hear sample demos from three library music pieces corresponding well with sonic particularities in the AO. The IOCM I was able to locate so quickly consisted of two atmospheric synthesiser tracks called Secrets and Unseen, and a symphonic piece entitled Approaching Unknown. This third piece was described by library music staff as cautious, intense, surreal moving, ominous, emotional, soaring atmospheric, haunting mysterious, suspenseful, apprehensive eerie, [giving] a sense of the unknown, approaching trouble, mystery [and containing] hypnotic flute, celeste, piano and harp ostinato. No actual lake, admittedly, but I still thought the descriptions sounded about right, as indeed did the actual demo recording answering to those descriptions.

The point of these brief sorties into cyberspace is to show how simple it can be to find and hear music whose lyrics, title or descriptions tally with your hypothesis about what particular structural traits in your AO may be expressing. If something in the music of the piece[s] you discover through this sort of reverse engineering sounds like something in your AO, all well and good: your hypothesis is substantiated, at least in part. If not, your hypothesis might be faulty, or your IOCM might be conceived in a different musical idiom to that of your AO.

Whether youve asked a musician, used digital recommender systems or applied the sort of reverse engineering just described to hunt down pieces of IOCM and their PMFCs for your analysis, your findings can be cross-checked with results from the reception test you may have conducted (see Chapter 6). They can also be cross-checked using another sort of reverse engineering.

Another control mechanism for checking the validity of the PMFCs youve collected intersubjectively or interobjectively, or that youre simply putting forward as a hypothesis, is to provide musicians with a summary of your PMFCs and ask the them to come up with ideas for music they think would fit those fields of connotation. Of course, the musicians should not know the identity of your AO. The reverse arrow in this recomposition procedure goes from either of the two PMFC boxes in Figure 7-2 (p. 228) up to the AO because youre asking musicians to reconstruct the AO on the basis of its supposed connotations. The obvious point here is that if your musicians suggest structural traits similar to those of the AO, your PMFCs will have greater validity than if their suggestions dont sound like it. There is, however, one major problem with this procedure. If your musicians cant verbalise their suggestions in terms you understand, if youre unable to decipher jargon like a saw-tooth cluster at 110 dB with maximum distortion at 3k (ouch!), and if you cant persuade them to play or record their suggestions, then this type of reverse engineering wont work. However, if you dont stumble on this sort of problem, composing back towards the AO from a set of PMFCs can be a very useful and convincing tool of semiotic analysis.

For example, during a postgraduate musicology seminar in Gteborg (Sweden) in the early 1980s, a psychologist from Lund told participants what a patient had said when listening to a particular piece of music under hypnosis. The instructions to the patient had been to say what the music made him/her see, like in a daydream. The seminar knew neither the identity of nor anything else about the piece of music that evoked the hypnotised patients associations which were recounted roughly as follows by the visiting psychologist.

Alone, out in the countryside on a gently sloping field or meadow near some trees at the top of the rise where there was a view of a lake and the forest on the other side.

Using this statement as a starting point, the seminar was asked to make a rough score of the sort of music they thought might have evoked such associations. The seminars collective sketch suggestion, which took about thirty minutes to produce, consisted of very quiet high notes sustained in the violins and a very quiet low note sustained in the cellos and basses. These two ongoing, extremely calm pitch polarities were in consonant relation to each other. A rather undecided, quiet but slightly uneasy melodic figure appeared now and again in the middle between the two pitch polarities. A solo woodwind instrument (either flute, oboe or clarinet) played smoothly, in a folk vein, a wistful but not unpleasant tune that wandered quietly, slowly and a bit aimlessly over the rest of the barely audible static sounds.

The seminars quick sketch proved to correspond on many counts with the original musical stimulus the last post section of the slow movement from Vaughan Williams Pastoral Symphony. This brief experiment suggests that people with some musical training are able to conceive generalities of musical structure linked to given paramusical spheres of association, not merely to perceive them. The recomposition exercise also suggests that the seminar participants and the patient from Lund make very similar connections, albeit in opposite directions, between specific musical structures and a specific paramusical field of connotation. The patients connotations and the seminar participants musical ideas reinforce each other.

Whichever methods of IOCM collection and PMFC verification you use, one thing is certain: the more precisely you indicate which musical-structural element[s] in the AO sound like which structural element[s] in the IOCM the more convincing your analysis will be. Besides, a musical structure cant be treated as a sign (museme) if it isnt also identified as a structure. This structural imperative is usually enough to make non-musos very nervous, unnecessarily so, as Ill explain in the final section of this chapter under Structural designation (p. 246, ff.). First, though, Ill present the last of the procedures (Commutation) allowing you to check on the validity of conclusions you may have drawn about which structural elements in your AO relate to which PMFCs.

In linguistics, commutation means substituting just one element among several in a group with something else to check if the meaning of the whole group of elements changes. For example, replacing the u sound /Y/ in Southern UK English [lYk] (luck) with the oo sound /U/ in [lUk] (look) changes the meaning of the word, but making the same change from [bYs] to [bUs] doesnt because [bs] (southern) and [bUs] (northern) are accepted regional variants of the same word meaning the same thing: bus. Commutation is useful in the analysis of musical meaning for determining which structural elements are semiotically more or less operative than others.

Returning one last time to the official and drunk versions of your national anthem, it is clear from the discussion of their musemes and feasible interpretants (Table 7-1, p. 226) that some structural elements make for more radical differences of attitude towards your nation and its flag than do others. For example, replacing the raucous foreign voice with kazoo or exchanging the concertina for a ukelele would probably not make as much difference to the drunk version as would replacing the raucous foreign singer with an equally foreign classical baritone or the concertina player with a proficient pianist on a well-tuned concert grand. Similarly, it would change the character of the official version quite noticeably if even one member of the choir or orchestra were to perform their part out of time or tune, while much less difference of attitude toward your nation and its flag would result from a complete change of personnel from professional symphony orchestra to a proficient and well-rehearsed military band.

This sort of commutation is also called hypothetical substitution and more often than not it stays at the what if? stage. But the substitution can sometimes make you think of other music that sounds similar to the new variant you just imagined or created. That new iocm may or may not be similar to that of your AO. If the new iocm is different and if the pmfcs linked to it dont align with those of your analysis object, then the structural element subjected to commutation in your ao can be considered operative in producing the pmfcs you found to be linked with your ao because changing that structural element to something else led to different music (the new iocm) and to different pmfcs. Conversely, if your commutation leads to the same sort of iocm and pmfcs as those of your ao youll know that the element you replaced with something else was not so important in producing the pmfcs in question. An episode from an analysis class clearly illustrates this principle.

At a pop music analysis session devoted to finding iocm for a 1990s electro-dance track I was sure I was hearing a chord shuttle resembling that under the hook lines of classic pop tunes like My Sweet Lord, Hes So Fine and Oh Happy Day. But when I started playing along with the track I discovered it was pitched in an unusual key and that I had to force my hands and fingers into unfamiliar shapes. Luckily my students didnt notice how much effort I had to put into making it sound like one of the most familiar chord shuttles in the pop repertoire. The point is that Id had to do something that was poetically, from my point of view as a keyboard player, quite different and difficult: it was hard to make the music sound like the same thing. The conclusion my students and I drew from that episode was that significant changes from the musicians poetic standpoint in making the music dont necessarily lead to changes of musical message because the fact that Id had to struggle at the piano made not a blind bit of semiotic difference. Further discussion ensued and, asked what structural features would have made a difference to the musical message, the students mentioned different rhythmic and accentual patterning, a distinctly slower or faster tempo, playing the chords at a noticeably different pitch, or on an detuned piano or some other instrument. We all agreed that making simple changes to rhythm, tempo, articulation and instrumentation definitely made a difference while transposing the music up or down a semitone made virtually no difference at all. By the end of the lesson we had learnt that what musicians produce usually does make a difference to the message but that the degree of semiotic difference at the receiving end doesnt necessarily correspond to the degree of structural difference perceived by musicians at the transmitting end.

The last example of commutation procedure comes from our fictitious mystery lake AO. Lets say weve identified sounds in it that we think may somehow connote water, that none of the iocm we found has anything aqueous among its pmfcs, and that the iocm contains none of the structural elements weve identified as potentially watery in the ao. We can first imagine the ao without the sounds we think may be watery (i.e. take them out and replace them with nothing). If our ao with that omission sounds more like all the iocm whose pmfcs did not include water, then our hypothesis about the watery sounds in the ao may have some mileage. But it is less likely to be a question of whether the structural element is itself included or omitted as a whole because its wateriness could depend on any number or combination of factors on volume/intensity, register, timbre, articulation, phrasing, tempo, metre, periodicity, tonal vocabulary, acoustic staging, etc. In fact its in conjunction with those parameters of musical expression (Chapter 8) that commutation is most useful because we can test, at least hypothetically, how different the music would sound if the values of any (combination of) those parameters were to be changed. In short, you have to ask what if structural element x is played faster, slower, higher, lower, smoother, choppier, using different notes, in waltz time, with a bossa nova groove, by strings or brass, with lots of reverb or dry, with the tune more up front or further back, without the bass line, etc., etc.?

The structural imperative in interobjective comparison, I wrote a few pages ago, is usually enough to make non-musos very nervous. Indeed, how, you may well ask, can someone with little or no formal musical training, someone who cant tell a diminished seventh from a hole in the wall, be expected to accurately identify musical structures, especially given the predilection in conventional music studies for poetic descriptors of structure? Well, that objection may once have had some validity but it has in my view, at least since the mid-1990s, become more of an excuse for not confronting music as sound in the study of music. In fact I think there is today very little apart from epistemic sloth and inertia that prevents non-musos from accurately identifying musical structures. I state that opinion categorically because there are at least two complementary ways of confronting the issue of structural designation, neither of which involves any muso skill or jargon: timecode placement and paramusical synchronicity.

CD tracks, films on dvd, audio files, video files, etc. are all digitally stored these days with timecode as part of the recording. That timecode is either displayed or displayable on stand-alone cd and dvd players; it is also present in media playback software for computers and smartphones. As long as the piece is digitally recorded or rerecorded, the real time elapsed since the start of the piece youre analysing is continually updated and shown as it is played. This means that you can hit the pause button when you hear any musical event of interest and note the timing at that point. Stand-alone players (cd, dvd, MiniDisc) and normal playback software on computers and smartphones let you pinpoint events to the nearest second, standard audiovisual recording and editing applications to the nearest fraction of a second. Currently (2011) the best solution is to make sure you have your ao as a sound file on the computer and to open it using audio editing software. That way you can see points of relative quiet and loudness, changes in sound wave shape, etc. that make it easier to find your way around the piece, as shown in the top part of Figure 7-4 on page 248.

The top line of Figure 7-4 is a screen capture of the whole of the original 1962 version of the James Bond Theme as displayed by the audio recording and editing software I use. Using the line tool in an image editing application, Ive marked up the starting points of the tunes sections as I hear them. I can label them with vernacular terms like twangy guitar tune and spy chord because I can designate the sound Im referring to by indicating the exact point, to the nearest second, in the tunes timecode where that sound first occurs, for example the twangy guitar at 0:07 (for the entrance of 007 himself), the danger stabs at 1:33 and the final spy chord at 1:40. Those structural designations are all accurate and unequivocal. No reader with access to the recording can be in any doubt about the sounds Im referring to.

The four smaller screen shots in Figure 7-4 (p. 248) show displays at four points in the same mp3 file of the James Bond Theme, this time using a freely and widely available media player. Please note that the total duration of the piece is 1:45 and that the screen shots have been taken at (a) 0:07, when the 007 tune is first heard; (b) 0:33, when the intro comes back, not long before the brass first enters with its angular danger tune at 0:40; (c) 1:17, a point unmarked in the top line of Figure 7-4; (d) 1:40 for the famous spy chord. The timing 1:17 (c) marks the start of the last return of the intro, except that its up-and-down pattern only occurs once before the twangy guitar kicks in for the last time.

Simple media playback software is usually enough for simple analysis tasks but it has several drawbacks. [1] The pause button can be slow to react and you may find yourself noting timings that are a second too late. [2] Time resolution is not perfect and it can be difficult to start playing the music from exact points inside the recording. [3] You cannot extract individual mini-files or construct loops of particular sounds or passages you need to listen to repeatedly, or which you need to draw to the attention of those providing you with PMFCs or IOCM without them hearing what comes just before or after. [4] You cannot display enough of your AO on screen at one time to use as visual basis for a graphic score or for discussion of overall form and narrative process.

By creating an overview of your AO with precise timings of important events and its division into sections (see top of Figure 7-4, p. 248), you can also start referring to musical structures relatively, for example the danger loops just before the final chord, or the last five notes of the twangy guitar tune just before it repeats. It is, however, best when in doubt to provide an accurate timing so as to avoid any confusion about which sound youre referring to.

Paramusical synchronicity sounds much fancier than what it actually means, but its also much shorter than its explanation which, however brief, runs as follows. If, unlike the solely audio version of the James Bond Theme, your ao features lyrics, moving images, stage action or dance, its musical structures can also be designated by referring to paramusical events occurring simultaneously with or in close proximity to those structures. Three fictitious examples will suffice to illustrate this simple technique: [1] the singers contented growl on the last oh, baby! in verse 1 (at 0:31 in a pop song); [2] the distant screeching sound just before she pours poison into his whiskey (at 1:02:15 in a feature film on dvd); [3] the drum pattern that synchronises with the quick zoom-in on to the lead vocalists lips (at 2:20 in a video). Its usually advisable to supplement this type of structural indication with timecode designation to ensure that whoever reads your analysis can find the relevant musical structure in the recording without wasting time waiting for the moment to arrive.

[1] Structural elements in music can be considered as either: [i] structures regardless of semiotic potential; [ii] structural elements that can be shown to carry some sort of meaning musematic structures.

[2] A museme is a minimal unit of musical meaning but it is often more useful to consider meaningful musical units in terms of museme stacks and museme strings.

[3] In addition to the intersubjective procedures described in Chapter 6, a musical analysis object (ao: an identifiable and usually nameable piece of music) can be subjected to interobjective investigation.

[4] Interobjective comparison material (iocm) is music other than the ao that sounds like (bears structural resemblance to) the ao.

[5] The collection of iocm is the first of two steps in the procedure of interobjective comparison. The second step involves relating the iocm to its own paramusical fields of connotation (pmfcs).

[7] iocm can be collected by exploiting the audio-muscular memory of musicians. This method is direct and reliable since it is intrinsically musical, avoiding the mediation of words and using other music as a sort of initial metalanguage for the music under analysis.

[8] iocm can also be gathered by searching for music whose title, lyrics, accompanying images, connotations, including hypotheses you may have yourself, are relevant to the ao. Online searches usually result in quick access to relevant pieces of iocm (Reverse engineering 1).

[9] Conclusions about musical meaning drawn from interobjective procedures can, if applicable, be cross-checked for viability with reception test results (see Chapter 6). They can also be verified/falsified using the techniques of recomposition (Reverse engineering 2) and commutation (hypothetical substitution).

[10] Accurate structural designation is essential in interobjective analysis. Digital timecode placement and paramusical synchronicity are two simple ways in which anyone can unequivocally denote musical structures without having to use any muso jargon.

Fig. 7-4. Screen capture of James Bond Theme (Norman, 1962) in audio editing software display

This long chapter is mostly about musical structure. Now, that may seem odd because I just argued that, since the advent of real-time counters, anybody can unequivocally designate any musical structure in any piece of digitally stored music. However, there are two good reasons for devoting so many pages to the topic, both of which have to do with musics alogogeneity: [1] understanding phenomena like tempo, timbre and tonality provides additional insights into what might be in the black box of musical semiosis; [2] its impossible to avoid every single muso term when referring to musical signs and to their interpretants. Indeed, many such terms have already been used without definition or explanation. For example:

The wateriness [of the music] could depend on any number of factors on loudness, register, timbre, articulation, phrasing, tempo, metre, periodicity, tonal vocabulary, aural staging, etc. (p. 245).

Those words in italics are categories of structuration called parameters of musical expression. They are different sets of properties constituting the vast variety of sounds we hear as musical. Imagine, for example, the following ten sorts of musical change: [1] of metre from four beats in the bar to waltz time; [2] of instrumentation from brass band to string quartet; [3] of volume from loud to soft; [4] of pitch from high to low; [5] of tempo from fast to slow; [6] of tonal vocabulary from major to minor; [7] of timbre from smooth to rough; [8] of periodicity from regular to irregular; [9] of aural staging from close-up to cavernous reverb; [10] of episodic form from A before B to A after B. Its more likely than not that any of those changes in sound will, in a given cultural context, produce different effects on the listener. The problem is that those parameters (and many others besides) are already subjects of entire books and that theres no way in which they can all be dealt with in a single chapter. Thats also why the chapter is so long even though the overviews of musics main parameters of expression have to be so short.

This chapter has two main aims. One is to complement intersubjective and interobjective procedures by providing a perspective based on categories of musical structuration. For example, was that watery effect caused by timbre or phrasing, tempo or volume, surface rate or pitch, or by a combination of some or all of those, or by none of them? The checklist of musical parameters (pp. 269-317) is there to help answer those sorts of question.

The other main aim is to provide a conceptual basis for those needing to identify the sonic properties operative in creating musical meaning. For example, students asked why they think a film music cue sounds romantic will often say something like its the strings. That answer may well be partially true but its also radically misleading because another trope of music for strings suggests the opposite the screeching, stabbing sound-motion of extraordinary viciousness in Herrmanns music for the shower scene in Hitchcocks Psycho (1960). To distinguish romantic from psychopathic strings, you have to consider parameters like attack (smooth and soft rather than sharp and hard), melodic and rhythmic profile (continuous, regular, gradually varied and overarching rather than detached, jerky, sudden and repetitive), phrase length (long rather than short), timbre (round, smooth and full rather than harsh, rough and piercing) and harmony (consonant rather than dissonant). In short, the perceived effect of romance or horror isnt down to the strings as such but to how they play what.

Another common case of mistaken connotative identity stems from popular belief in the equations major = happy and minor = sad. Even if this dualism of tonal vocabulary has some validity in the euroclassical repertoire, its clearly inapplicable to any lively minor-mode chalga, cueca, hornpipe, jenka, jig, klezmer, malaguea, polska, reel, syrtos, tarantella or verbunkos tune. If hearing such spirited forms of dance music doesnt shake your faith in the minor modes intrinsic morosity, try acting depressed as you sing along to merry minor-key tunes like Kalinka, Hava Nagila or God Rest You Merry Gentlemen. Alternatively, try joyous abandon while listening to any of the euroclassical traditions unmistakably mournful major-key pieces. No, more reliable indicators of happy or sad are found in parameters like tempo, surface rate, loudness, phrase length, melodic pitch range and contour, accompanimental register and rhythmic configuration.

As already mentioned, theres no room here to explain in any detail the sort of parameters of musical expression just listed. I will at best be able to give a rough idea of the numberless nuts and bolts involved in making and reacting to music and readers requiring more detail must regrettably look elsewhere. Another caveat is that I have to give more space to parameters that conventional music analysis treats either cursorily, if at all (surface rate, periodicity, timbre, aural staging, etc.), or confusingly (e.g. tonality, polyphony) than to those that are less problematic. Still, before addressing such explicitly musical matters, its wise to first consider paramusical factors relating to musical meaning. That in its turn necessitates clarification of the terms genre and style.

According to Franco Fabbri, musical genres evolve as named categories to define similarities and recurrences rules that members of a given community find useful in identifying a given set of musical and music-related practices. Such rules, says Fabbri, can be explicit, as in an aesthetic manifesto or a marketing campaign, but they are just as likely to be implicit or never declared Rules that define a genre can relate to any of the codes involved in a musical event including rules of behaviour, proxemic and kinesic codes, business practices, etc.

I interpret Fabbri to mean that particular types of language (lyrics, paralinguistics, metadiscourse, etc.), gesture, location, clothing, personal appearance, social attitudes and values, as well as modes of congregation, interaction, presentation and distribution, are all sets of rules that, together with musical rules, build a larger set of rules identifying a particular genre. The fact that music, as a cross-domain symbolic system, is central to genre identity should come as no surprise: after all, the business rationale of format radio assumes musical taste to be the key indicator of demographic factors (age, income, ethnicity, education, etc.) defining a target audience. Each subset of genre rules reinforces the others and music is at the centre because, as Fabbri adds, [k]nowing what kind of music youre listening to, or talking about, or actually making, will act as a compass, helping you choose the proper codes and tools for the genre as a whole.

a recurring arrangement of features in musical events which is typical for an individual (composer, performer), a group of musicians, a genre, a place, a period of time. As a codified way of making music, which may (or must) conform to specific social functions, style is related to genre, and is sometimes used as its synonym However, style implies an emphasis on the musical code, while genre covers all kinds of code relevant to a musical event.

Style can in other words be seen as a set of musical rules or norms, genre as a larger set of cultural codes that also include musical rules. This doesnt mean that styles are mere subsets of genre. For example, Morricones musical style his personal idiolect is unmistakable whichever genre hes working in: sounds typical of his concert pieces turn up in his film scores, some of his film themes closely resemble his work with popular song, and his unique style of orchestration can be heard in all three genres.

Fabbris distinction between genre and style is useful for two reasons. Firstly, it allows for differentiation between two sorts of style flag (pp. 358 ff.): [1] musical structures that establish a home style (style indicators) and [2] those using elements of another style to refer to a genre other than that pertinent to the home style of the music under analysis (genre synecdoches). The second reason is that, seeing how music and musical rules are central to the fusion of other aspects of genre into a recognisable (albeit fuzzy) sociocultural whole, its important to consider those other aspects of genre, too. Thats why the next few pages deal with paramusical matters.

Since music is not a universal language (pp. 45-47) its essential to consider cultural parameters defining the act of musical communication. Obviously, what members of different populations intend by and interpret from the music they make and hear will vary considerably; and, as we saw earlier (pp. 168-171), the same musical structure doesnt necessarily mean the same thing to all individuals included in the same basic demographic. Thats one reason why, under Ethnographic intersubjectivity (p. 188, ff.), listening mode, venue, activity and scene were put forward as important initial points in a semiotic approach to music analysis. Those general considerations refer back to the communication model (pp. 162-168) and can be summarised as follows.

1. Who, culturally and demographically, are the musics transmitter[s] and receiver[s]? Do they belong to the same population? What sort of relationship exists between transmitter[s] and receiver[s] of the music in general and at the particular occasion of musical communication youre studying?

2. What motivates receiver[s] to use the music and what motivates transmitter[s] to create and transmit the music?

3. What interference (p. 172, ff.) is the intended message subjected to in its passage in the channel? Do transmitter[s] and receiver[s] share the same store of symbols and the same sociocultural norms/motivations? What bits of the music do[es] the receiver[s] hear, use and respond to? What sort of response is observable?

4. What aspects of attitude or behaviour at the transmitting and receiving ends affect the musical message?

5. What is the intended and actual situation of musical communication for the music both as a piece and as part of a genre, e.g. dance, home, work, ritual, concert, meeting, film? Where, physically and socially, is the music produced and where is it heard and used?

These issues of genre rather than style affect what music is actually made and heard: they influence which parameters of musical expression are operative. Even if cultural context isnt the main focus of your study they must be addressed in order to avoid the perverse discipline of a semiotics without pragmatics.

As briefly illustrated by clinking glasses, lively chatter and raucous laughter in the comparison between the official and foreign drunk versions of your national anthem (pp. 226-227), musical meanings are not only affected by the overriding sociocultural and acoustic circumstances under which the music is created and heard: they are also influenced by paramusical expression. Obviously, hearing a rendition of your national anthem along with clinking glasses and raucous laughter does not have the same effect as hearing it without. Nor does the same opening to Richard Strausss Also sprach Zarathustra (1896) mean the same thing in TV commercials for Foxy Bingo or Silan fabric conditioner as it did in films like Clueless (1995), My Favourite Martian (1999) or Zoolander (2001). It certainly meant something quite different in the film that initiated this musical trope of audiovisual grandeurKubricks 2001 (1968), not to mention its origins in a philosophical fantasy novel by Nietzsche.

Paramusical forms of expression connected to a musical analysis object are summarised in the eight points listed next. The relative absence or presence and properties of the points enumerated are not only able to affect the meaning of the music with which they co-occur: they can also be used in the process of establishing paramusical fields of connotation related to your analysis object.

1. Paramusical sound, e.g. church bells, background chatter, rattling crockery, applause, engine hum, birdsong, sound effects.

2. Oral language, incl. dialect, accent, idiom, vocabulary used in dialogue, commentary, voice-over or lyrics.

3. Paralinguistics, e.g. vocal type, timbre and intonation of people talking; type and speed of conversation or dialogue.

4. Written language, e.g. programme or liner notes, advertising material, title credits, subtitles, written devices on stage or screen, expression marks and other scribal performance instructions.

6. Visuals, e.g. photos, moving picture, type of action, narrative genre, mise en scne, scenario, props, lighting, camera angle and distance, POV, editing rhythm and techniques, superimpositions, fades, zooms, pans, gestures, facial expressions, clothing.

7. Movement, e.g. dance, walk, run, drive, fall, lie, sit, stand, jump, rise, dive, swerve, sway, slide, glide, hit, stroke, kick, stumble, forwards, backwards, sideways, up, down, approach, leave, fast, slow, sudden, gradual.

8. Location and venue (when, where, and who for), e.g. 18th-century French aristocrats in a chteau, aliens on the starship Enterprise, euroclassical concert hall audience, rock fans at a stadium concert, 1970s disco clubbers, football match crowd, etc.

Parameters of musical expression can be thought of in four main interrelated and overlapping categories: [1] Time and space; [2] Timbre and loudness; [3] Tone and tonality; [4] Totality. Very few concepts denoting musical structure fit neatly into any single one of the first three. For example, nothing in categories 2 (timbre and dynamics) or 3 (tone and tonality) can exist without the parameters of time and space (category 1); nor can elements of temporal organisation like rhythm and metre exist without timbral, dynamic or tonal patterning, nor can tone or timbre be understood without considering pitch and loudness.

None of this taxonomic untidiness will surprise those familiar with musics properties of cross-domain representation and synaesthesis (pp. 60-66). After all, no sound can exist without the movement of an object or mass of some kind (incl. air and water) interacting with another (hitting, stroking, scraping, shaking, ruffling, blowing, stirring, etc.), nor can such sound-producing friction occur without energy enabling the movement which, in its turn, presupposes space in which the movement takes place. Even synthesised sound needs energy (electrical) to generate wave forms of sufficient amplitude to power movement in speaker and headphone membranes. Since all this sound-producing energy and movement in space takes time, parameters of expression primarily relating to time and space are presented first. However, its virtually impossible to discuss any aspect of musical structure without using four very common concepts whose meanings are often unclear. Thats why note, pitch, timbre and tone each needs its a working definition. A piece of music and the extended present and two other rudimentary terms requiring at least some sort of clarification.

A piece of music is usually delimited, both before and after, by something that is not heard as music (e.g. silence, talking, background sound). A piece of music can also start or end when immediately preceded or followed by other music that is clearly recognised to have a different identity. If a piece of music exists as recorded sound, it will typically occupy one cd track or constitute a single audio file.

The extended present is a key notion in the conceptualisation of structured time in music. It can be understood as lasting for about as long as breathing in and out, or as a few heartbeats, or as enunciating a phrase or short sentence, i.e. as a duration equivalent to that of a musical phrase, or to a short pattern of gestures or dance steps. Such immediate, present-time activities usually last, depending on tempo plus degree of exertion, for between around one and eight seconds.

The extended present is also a concept implied in the distinction between the intensional and extensional aesthetics of music (Chester 1970). According to this polarity, a classical sonata form movement is more likely to derive interest from the presentation of ideas over a duration of several minutes (extensional), while a pop song or film music cue is more likely to do so in batches of now sound in the extended present (intensional). The 3.6 seconds of guitar riff accompanied by steady bass and drumkit patterns in Satisfaction (Rolling Stones, 1965) provides a textbook example of rock intensionality in the extended present.

Theres no clear boundary between the extended present and the passing of time along a unidimensional axis from infinite past to infinite future through a point of zero duration called the present. Anyone who has stared transfixed as the sun sets over the sea, or who has drowned with delight in the eyes of a lover, knows that a sense of now can extend well beyond ten seconds: time seems to stand still on such occasions. On a more mundane level, its worth noting that the extended present has an objective existence inside the human brain. For example, knowing how to finish the spoken sentence you just started relies on short-term memory located in a different part of the brain to that used for medium- and long-term memory.

In musical contexts note seems to mean four different things: [1] any single, discrete sound inside a piece of music; [2] such a sound with discernible fundamental pitch (p. 266); [3] the duration, relative to the musics underlying pulse (p. 277), of any note (e.g. whole note, quarter note); [4] the scribal or graphic representation of a note, according to any of the above definitions, in musical notation. Note will be used here in its first sense, i.e. to mean any single, finite, discrete minimal sonic event in a piece of music, irrespective of that events duration, pitch, timbre or graphic representation.

Pitch is that aspect of a sound determined by the rate of vibrations producing it. Pitch is scientifically measured in units of frequency called cycles per second or Hertz (Hz). For example, 27.5 Hz is the pitch of the lowest sound on a piano (its bottom a), 3,520 Hz its highest (top a). Pitch is simply the degree of perceived highness or lowness of a sound.

High pitch is in general associated with light in both the not dark and not heavy senses of the word. Thats probably because gusts of wind scatter leaves, plastic bags and other small, light objects, blowing them up into the air towards the sky, the clouds and the sun. Heavy objects are more difficult to move, more likely to stay down on the ground, which is understandably perceived as darker and heavier than air. Not only do large, heavy objects need lots of energy (a tornado, say, or vast amounts of jet fuel) to get them off the ground; their very weight makes them appear less volatile, more likely to be understood as heavy, dark and massive rather than quick, small and light. Besides, small children have smaller bodies and vocal equipment producing higher, lighter sounds than grown-ups; and the process whereby adolescent male voices break and deepen reinforces the same sort of synaesthetic patterning, as does the fact that singers tend to use the head register to produce high notes, the chest register for low ones. Moreover, the vibrations of a loud bass instrument, or of an earthquake, are felt in the stomach, whereas dissonant high-pitched sounds are often used in film music as a sort of sonic headache to accompany scenes of madness, relentless sunlight, etc.

Along with volume, timbre and duration, pitch is a basic element of sound. It allows humans to distinguish between, for example a hi-hat and a large gong struck in the same way, or between the top notes of a piccolo flute and the lowest ones on alto flute played at the same volume with the same sort of attack for the same duration. Now, theres a problem with that previous sentence because the high or low pitch of flute notes is different from the high or low pitches of hi-hat and large gong, even though the sound of a big gong contains a lot of low frequencies and the hi-hat (quelle surprise!) sounds high. That problem has to do with the difference between note and tone.

The difference of pitch between hi-hat and large gong, on the one hand, and, on the other, between high and low flute notes is that flute notes, high or low, each have one clearly discernible fundamental pitch while hi-hat, snare drum, bass drum and gong notes do not. It is this factor of clearly discernible fundamental pitch a concept explained under timbre (p. 268, ff.) that determines whether the note in question is also a tone. In short, a tone is a note of discernible fundamental pitch.

The main reason why, technically speaking, a tone contains a fundamental pitch is because its sound wave rate is steady or periodic, whereas aperiodic sounds exhibit no such regularity (fig. 8-1). Thats why singing sounds more tonal than talking, whistling more tonal than hissing, groaning more tonal than growling. All six sounds can be used as notes in music but only three of them (singing, whistling and groaning) can be tonal. It may be worth adding the obvious point that, in our culture, tones are the only type of notes with pitch names like a, b$, b8, c, c#, and so on. That all seems quite straightforward but there are at least two major problems with the word tone.

One problem is that tone means so many different things in relation to sound. It can refer to aspects of speech that express attitude, as in I dont like your tone. It can even mean timbre, as with the tone knob on a guitar amp, where tone is probably short for tone colour. Tone is often used to mean not a note of discernible fundamental pitch but the pitch step or interval between two neighbouring tones, as in whole tone (e.g. between the notes c and d) and semitone (e.g. between e and f).

Another critical problem with tone is the use of its derivatives tonal and tonality in conventional Western music theory. Given our commonsense definition of tone, tonal should logically mean having discernible fundamental pitch and tonality should mean any system according to which tones are configured in music. Unfortunately, many music scholars in the West still use tonal and tonality to refer to just one way in which tones are configured that of the euroclassical repertoire between c. 1730 and c. 1910. This ethnically, socially and historically restrictive use of the word has bizarre consequences, one being the nonsensical dualism tonal v. modal all modes are by definition tonal!, another the anachronistic notion that twelve-tone music, despite its name, is called atonal instead of atonical. To avoid such lexical absurdity, here are some short definitions:

Timbre [!tQmbr(] and its adjective timbral [!tImbr(l] are words denoting acoustic features that allow us to distinguish between two notes, tonal or otherwise, sounded at the same pitch and volume. Timbre, sometimes also called tone quality or tone colour (Klangfarbe), is an extremely complex acoustic phenomenon whose four basic phases were simplified by analogue synthesiser manufacturers in an ADSR scheme: A for attack, D for decay, S for sustain and R for release. The properties of each of these elements, and how those properties vary as the sound is produced, continues and ends, determine the specific qualities of what we hear as timbre. That whole unit from start to finish is called the envelope (Fig. 8-2, p. 267).

The envelope of notes played on drums, piano and other percussion instruments, as well as notes on plucked acoustic instruments (e.g. guitar, pizzicato strings), consist of only attack and decay while those played by bowed strings, woodwind, brass and electrically amplified instruments contain all four phases. The first type of note relies on a single one-off action to produce a sound that can last from as little as just a few milliseconds (e.g. xylophone, claves) to several seconds (e.g. large gong, loud note on the piano, as shown in Fig. 8-2a and b), while the second type is generated by ongoing action (bowing, blowing, electric current, etc., as with the violins and synthesiser in Fig. 8-2c and d.). These and other distinctions are essential to the understanding of how timbre is produced but for the purposes of a perception-based semiotic analysis the following three phases, explained next, will probably suffice: attack, continuant and release.

Attack refers to the initial fraction of a note corresponding to the way the note is struck, hit, plucked, scraped, blown, etc. on an acoustic instrument, or attacked by the voice. For example, its easy to distinguish the same note of the same duration played at the same volume in the same position on the same guitar string on the same guitar in the same room if the instrument is plucked with the flesh of the thumb rather than with a plectrum.

Release refers to the way a note ends. For example, xylophone and unsustained piano notes end more abruptly than piano notes played with the sustain pedal pushed down, or than undamped or unclipped notes on, say, guitar, French horn or cello. Release is often audible when violinists take their bow off the string at the end of a long note (Fig. 8-2c).

Continuant is a term borrowed from phonetics where it means an extendable consonant, like /r/ as in rrreally!, /l/ as in I lllove it!' or /S/ (sh) when you want people to be quiet. Im adapting the word here to denote the ongoing body of a note, i.e. the part that is most likely to be heard as tonal, regardless of whether its the decay of struck or plucked notes or the sustain part of notes produced in other ways. Continuants are easily conceptualised using onomatopoeias like ding and pling (two small bells?) or dang, twang and blang (three electric guitar sounds?): the initial consonant represents the sounds attack, ng its release and the vowels its continuant. Unless youre playing the xylophone or quick notes on the piano or acoustic guitar, a notes continuant is usually, compared to the attack, a relatively long sound whose timbral specificity is acoustically determined by its frequency spectrum, i.e. by how much of which frequencies it contains. And that, finally, is where fundamental pitch comes in.

As we saw just saw, some musical sounds, like those of the hi-hat and a kick drum, although heard as high- and low-pitched respectively, are aperiodic: they have no audible fundamental pitch. The frequency spectrum of tonal instruments and singing voices, on the other hand, is periodic in relation to a fundamental. Now, a tone sung or played at a particular pitch doesnt just consist of waves oscillating at the rate corresponding to that single pitch (its fundamental): it also contains the sound waves of overtones or harmonics oscillating at integral multiples of the fundamentals own frequency. How strongly which harmonics are present in which parts of an envelope is an essential aspect of timbre.

The four sound waves visualised in Figure 8-3 (p. 269) are all periodic (regularly recurring wave pattern) and have a strong fundamental (first peak in each phase) but the similarities end there. Flute tones contain a strong first harmonic, oscillating at twice the frequency of the fundamental, but not much else (hence the wave forms characteristic single bulge), while tones played on the other instruments consist of a more complex array of frequencies in the harmonic series producing more complex wave forms. The almost limitless range of combinations of variable amounts of harmonics present in a tone its frequency spectrum make timbre an essential primary parameter of musical expression. Variations of vocal timbre can be particularly expressive and discussed in Chapter 10.

With these explanations of basic terms out of the way we can now confront the main topic of this chapter. The underlying premise is that change in any of the parameters, by definition involving a change of structure, can also bring about a change of meaning.

It may be helpful to think of musical durations in five fuzzy categories: [1] micro-durations, lasting typically less than 1 second; [2] meso-durations, equivalent to the time span of at least one but no more than, say, eight bouts of the extended present (= 1"-60"); [3] mega-durations, ranging from the time occupied by a long advert or title theme (c. 1 min.), through that of an up-tempo dance number (= 2 mins.) to the standard length of a pop song, rock track, Schubert Lied, or short euroclassical movement (= 3-6 mins.); [4] macro-durations, typical for extended euroclassical symphony movements, for jazz or prog rock tracks containing multiple sections and/or lengthy solo improvisations (= 6-30 mins.); [5] giga-durations (>= 30 mins.), as for a complete opera, a Mahler symphony, or a live r?ga performance. Only micro-, meso- and mega-durations need concern us here.

Micro-differences of 100 milliseconds (one tenth of a second), or even less, can produce significantly different linguistic and musical effects. Figure 8-4 shows the durations in milliseconds (ms) of four different ways of asking the question What did you say?. Version [a] sounds angry What the XB did you say?!; [b] asks what did you actually say rather than mean to say?; [c] sounds robotic; version [d] is spoken quickly, as in everyday conversation.

At least five points of micro-duration are worth noting about these what did you say variants.

1. Version [a] is longer than both [b] and [c], much longer than version [d]. Loudness, pitch, timbre and propulsive reiteration (p. 351 ff.) arent the only parameters determining sonic emphasis because, clearly, the more time you spend on one idea, the more it will be heard. This observation holds for individual syllables (notes) within the phrase (e.g. the what in [a], say in [b]) as well as for the whole phrase in relation to other phrases in its vicinity.

2. Variants [b] and [d] are both articulated as one single and uninterrupted stream of sounds, i.e. legato, Italian for joined. The same phrase is broken in variant [a] (anger) by a pregnant pause (tacet is Latin for is silent) lasting over half a second: WHAT [pause] did you say?. The 600-millisecond pause, as long as the whole of variant [d], is just as communicative as the WHAT outburst that preceded it. Duration of silence in speech and in music can be as communicative as duration of sound.

3. Instead of one unbroken enunciation, all four notes (syllables) in variant [c] (robot) are sounded for the same duration (200-250 ms each) separated by short silences of equal length (150-200 ms). The phrases notes are presented in a choppy manner (staccato): the notes or syllables are detached from the flow of the statement to which they would normally belong in human speech.

4. Each note or pause in each of the four variants occupies a micro-duration inside a longer duration the phrase What did you say?. Those different configurations of micro-durations give each variant its own identifiable rhythm.

5. Variation of micro-durations in music corresponds roughly with what classically trained musicians call phrasing because those durations are constituent elements in a musical phrase.

The patterning of micro-durations in music can have other significant effects. For example, the time difference between placing notes one half and two thirds of the way between beats is one sixth of a beat, e.g. 76 milliseconds at 132 bpm. That micro-duration makes all the difference between straight () and swung (2) articulations of the beat. Micro-durations are significant because their patterning contains important emotional and kinetic information. They are essential in mediating feels that sound choppy or smooth, straight or swung, stuttering or flowing, distinct or fuzzy, nervous or confident, bold or timid, etc., as well as in mediating certain notions of space (p. 287 ff.).

Musical phrases are the basic units of meso-durations. Depending on tempo and the degree of exertion involved, they can last for as little as one second and as much as around eight or nine the time span of the extended present (p. 261). Consecutive phrases tend to be clearly separated from each other by the sort of time it takes to breathe in. Four seconds is a typical phrase length, equivalent to the time it normally takes to in- and exhale (the human ventilation cycle, i.e. the duration of the extended present). Pertinent questions to ask about phrases are: What is their length? Are they extensive, controlled, lyrical or ecstatic? Or are they short, stressed, out of breath, just consisting of short motifs? Is phrase length consistent or does it vary? What effects do these phrase lengths create?

Motifs are either constituent parts of a phrase or extremely short phrases in themselves. They rarely last for more than a second or two and are building blocks not only in melodic construction but also in instrumental patterns like riffs. Motifs differ from phrases, not just by being shorter, but also in that they can be ongoing, as in the obvious case of repeated guitar riffs where no breathing space is required.

A musical period consists of at least one phrase. In most types of dance music and popular song periodicity is regular, i.e. the periods are of equal length, often arranged in multiples of 4 bars. A period consisting of 4 bars of r metre at 96 bpm (16 beats in 10 seconds)36 will most likely consist of two 2-bar phrases, each lasting 5 seconds. A period consisting of 8 bars of r at 120 bpm (32 beats in 16 seconds) will probably consist of four 2-bar phrases, each lasting 4 seconds.

In urban Western cultures, music relating to gross-motoric movement, especially music with an energetic groove (p. 285), is, as just mentioned, usually organised in larger symmetric durational units, typically in multiples of four the four-bar phrase, the eight-bar period and so on. This quadratic symmetry of meso-durations applies not just to the obvious rectangularity of marches but also to music for almost any type of dancing, from slow foxtrots or waltzes to energetic jives, jigs, reels or sambas. Such symmetrical periodicity serves to organise dance steps into longer patterns, as exemplified in Table 8-1.

Each of the first sixteen footsteps in a Gay Gordons coincides with each beat of the music. At 112 bpm that means one beat = one footstep every 0.54 seconds. Each step pattern lasts four beats (one r bar) or 2.1 seconds. Each of these two-second, four-beat patterns has the duration of a musical phrase and is repeated with minor variations to create a larger pattern spanning two bars of r (8 beats in 4.3"), a duration still inside the extended present. That two-bar pattern is in its turn repeated with minor variations to create a four-bar period of sixteen beats (4 r) or 8.6 seconds, a duration equivalent at 112 bpm to two bouts of the extended present. The complete 17-second or 8-bar pattern of Gay Gordons steps falls into two clearly distinguishable four-bar periods, the first (bars 1-4) containing simple steps forward and backward, the second (bars 5-8) featuring two sets of two clockwise spins. Ladies (a) spin clockwise eight times and men (e) four times (P in column 5 of Figure 8-1) as both partners proceed in a generally anticlockwise direction (Q in column 4) to complete the entire 17-second pattern consisting of 32 beats (8 bars of r). The entire sequence is then repeated starting from a new position on the circumference of the shared dance area. Finally, if the whole sequence of steps is repeated eight times at 112 bpm the dance will last for 2:17, by which time you will have held hands with your partner for 1:43 and spun around in each others arms for the remaining 0:34.

The Gay Gordons example serves two purposes. The first is to illustrate the hierarchy of musics meso-durations, ranging from smaller units within the extended present, through longer periods incorporating two or more such segments, to complete episodes like the entire 17-second cycle of dance movements. Periodicity is the operative word here. All too often overlooked in conventional music analysis, periodicity simply means the way in which musical meso-durations (phrases in particular but also the larger sections or episodes into which they are arranged) are configured within the same piece, whether they are long or short, regular or irregular, symmetrical or asymmetrical, etc. The second point of Table 8-1 is to exemplify the regular periodicity that characterises not only most types of dance and march but also work songs, in fact any music with an energetic groove (p. 285) relating to gross-motoric body movement, be it fast or slow.

Regular periodicity is common in situations where coordination of movement between individuals is essential, as in sharing space on the dance floor, marching on a parade ground, or in collaborative tasks of manual labour like hoisting the topsail, weighing anchor, cross-cutting trees, hauling barges, or track lining a railway. The greater the need for concerted simultaneity and the greater the number of people involved in the activity, the more regular and symmetrical the periodicity of music connected with that activity is likely to be: just consider the difference between delivering a political speech (one person) and chanting political slogans (many people), or between a personal rock ballad like Your Song (John 1970) and a collective rock anthem like We Will Rock You (Queen 1977), or between country blues (one performer) and urban blues (usually several musicians).

Irregular periodicity, on the other hand, is more likely to cause the listener some sort of surprise, even confusion, because it either delays (We should be in the next bit by now!) or anticipates whatever is expected to happen next (Whoops! That came a bit soon.). It is also common when the rhythm of lyrics or visual narrative overrides the expected course of musical events. An extended period of, say 4 or 5 bars instead of the usual 4 in a popular song, can communicate something like The words are important here and Im going to fit them in even if it means spending a little extra time on them, while cutting a period short can tell the listener theres no waiting for the next bit. However, irregular periodicity can also help create effects at the opposite end of the spectrum from urgency or confusion. If the music is soft, the tempo moderate or slow, the articulation relatively smooth, if there ar no sudden surprises and, most importantly, if the music features little or no energetic groove, then the symmetric arrangement of meso-durations into regular quadratic patterns can be discarded. Those characteristics help create a reflective, meditative and rhapsodic groove freed from the constrictions of movement immanent in the social organisation of time and space typical for marching, dancing, work songs or street slogans. Instead, a floating sense of relative stasis and tranquillity can be produced, with tonal and timbral parameters helping define its mood as serene or desolate, relaxing or foreboding, etc.

Appropriate questions about periodicity might be: Is it constant or varied? Regular or irregular? What effects are created by the musics periodicity? Are the lyrics or the dance groove more important? Is it a theme tune (regular periodicity more likely) or a piece of underscore (irregular periodicity more likely)? Is it a solo or ensemble piece?

One step up the hierarchy of durations from phrases and periods, but below that of a complete normal-length piece, comes the category of section or episode. In point of fact, episodes are not so much definable in terms of duration as of their distinctiveness in terms of sonic content and expressive character.

Figure 8-5, based on the jazz standard Blue Moon (Rodgers 1934), shows how four two-bar phrases constitute each of the AABA forms eight-bar periods, and how those four eight-bar periods produce three episodes: [1] the chorus (containing the hook line) that is repeated so that it spans two periods (35" at 110 bpm); [2] the middle eight, containing different material, some of it in a different key, and spanning one period (17"); [3] the chorus in recap, also spanning a single period (17"). Episode is a key concept in understanding musical form (see p. 000).

The basic unit of mega-duration is that of an entire piece, be it a title theme lasting less a minute, a pop song or Schubert Lied lasting less than three minutes, or a shortish movement from a euroclassical symphony, or a prog rock or jazz track lasting six minutes or more. Theres clearly no point thinking in terms of mega-duration if the piece is a jingle, bridge or tail lasting no more than a few seconds, but even a 60-second tv theme tune contains phrases and periods, often also episodes. If so, its identity as a piece is partly determined by the form pattern created by how the constituent episodes are managed in terms of order, relative duration, etc. inside its total duration. An obvious question to ask about a pieces mega-duration is whether its total running time is indicative of any style, genre or function and, if so, which.

Musical pulse or tempo is measured in beats per minute (bpm), a rate also known as its metronome marking. Pulsus, the Latin origin of the word pulse, means beat, as in heartbeat. Metronome markings range from 40 (largo or lento) to 212 (prestissimo). This range of bpm relates directly to human pulse: 40 bpm is that of a well-trained athlete in deep sleep and 212 bpm that of a baby in a serious state of stress. Most metronome markings are in the range 50 to 160 bpm and can also be related to footsteps: 52 bpm for a slow funeral procession, 90 bpm for a pleasant stroll, 120 a brisk march, 160 for long-distance running and 200 for an Olympic 100-metre sprint. Tempo provides the underlying pace of a piece of music and is an obviously important parameter to consider.

Tempo beats can be stated either explicitly, as in the obvious four to the floor kick drum sound of electronic dance music, or implicitly as points at regular intervals inferable from the rate at which prominent parts of the music seem to move.

Beat is often used loosely to refer to combinations of tempo, metre and rhythm (e.g. breakbeat), but it is strictly speaking no more than the occurrence, at regular intervals of between 0.67 and 3.5 per second (40-210 bpm), of points in time comparable with those defining the duration of heartbeats or breaths. The constant presence of these elemental biological functions throughout life makes them inevitable reference points for experiencing and measuring the speed and duration of other sound and movement. Thats why we can feel a beat in music even if none is audible and why the beat, in this strict sense of the word, is not only the basic unit of tempo but also of metre. Its also why notes sounded regularly at a rate outside the limits of the metronome cant be musical beats. If theyre much below 50 bpm well hear them occurring on at least every other beat; if they exceed 200 well hear two for every passing beat. Such extra-metronomic rates are often important in communicating a musical sense of speed, as we shall see next.

If tempo, with its pulse quantifiable in bpm, indicates the musics underlying pace, its surface rate can be measured in notes per minute (npm) indicating the speed at which actual notes are sounded or implied. For example, a homophonic hymn sung at 80 bpm with virtually all its notes running at the same rate (80 npm) sounds much slower than, say, a TV Western theme played also at 80 bpm but with plenty of notes running two, three, four or even six times faster than the underlying tempo. Put simply, dum diddley diddley dum sounds a bit faster than dum diddle diddle dum, definitely faster than dum did- did- dum, and radically faster than dum dum, even if the duration between each beat on dum is identical in all four cases. Therefore, when talking about a sense of speed in music, its essential to consider both the underlying pulse (the tempo, the metronome marking, the dum-dum or boom-boom factor, the bpm) and the musics surface rate (the diddle-diddle or diddley-diddley factor, the npm).

Now, although surface rate is usually quicker than tempo, it can often be the same, as in homophonic hymns, and, occasionally, slower. Consider, for example, the TV theme for NYPD Blue (Post 1993) which runs for one minute at a stable 120 bpm. At the start, loud drums establish a surface rate four times faster (480 npm) than the tempo (120 bpm), but at 0:19 the drums fade into the far distance and a pastoral theme, carried by sampled cor anglais and a string pad, occupies the foreground with a surface rate four times slower (30 npm) than the underlying tempo. The stark contrast of relationship between the constant tempo (120 bpm) and the two radically different surface rates (480 and 30 npm) creates two dramatically different moods.

Surface rate tends to vary much more than underlying tempo and is, as the name suggests audible on the surface. Nevertheless, the same surface rate can often be heard more or less permanently throughout a complete episode or entire piece of music. The hi-hat sounding repeatedly in a pop song at twice the rate of the underlying pulse is one case in point and its consistent bisection of the beat creates what can be called subbeats. Subbeat the regular subdivision of a beat is a useful concept in the understanding of metre (p. 282 ff.).

Appropriate questions to ask about tempo and surface rate might be: Does the music have a regular pulse measurable in bpm? If not, does it change suddenly or gradually? If the music has no pulse, what effect does that create? If it has pulse, whats the tempo in bpm? Is there a constant surface rate or does it vary? Or are there several simultaneous surface rates? How fast (or slow) is the surface rate in relation to the tempo? What effect is created by, say, a fast surface rate and a slow underlying tempo, or by a slow surface rate and a fast tempo?

Harmonic rhythm is not really a rhythm but a rate, more precisely the rate at which different chords (if any) are presented. A single held chord, or a very slow rate of harmonic change, is more likely to bring about an effect of stasis, quick change between several chords more likely to favour a sense of speed.

Rhythm has many meanings. Apart from its use as a blanket term to cover cyclical events (annual, seasonal, menstrual, daily, etc.) its also often used loosely to refer to one or more of several parameters like tempo, surface rate, metre and groove. Here, however, rhythm is taken to mean the temporal configuration of notes and pauses between notes (short or long, strong or weak, high or low) to produce recognisable patterns of sound in movement. Such configurations can be perceived as smooth or jerky, monotonous or invigorating, varied or repetitive, and so on. As a specific configuration of micro-durations, a rhythm can consist of just two notes, like the Scotch snap (Il.), or three notes, like the dadada daahm motif at the start of Beethovens fifth symphony (iil |l). The eight notes of the famous Satisfaction riff also form a rhythm (l l. zil;l. zil_l) constituting an entire musical phrase (3.6") but it can also be heard as two different rhythmic motifs (two rhythms).

A single note on its own does not constitute a rhythm, nor, strictly speaking, does the ticking of a clock or metronome. When we say the clock goes tick-tock we ascribe two slightly different sounds to what is in fact an identically repeated single sound. We binaurally configure that one sound into a rhythm using a timbral/tonal distinction that seems logical for the ding dong of a two-chime door bell but anachronistic for the monotone ticking of a clock. Still, even monotonous ticking can, like the unvaried four to the floor of house and techno, become a rhythm if its in a piece of music containing other temporal configurations of notes and pauses between notes (rhythms). The monotony then becomes one of several rhythms that together create a groove, however mechanical or metronomic it may seem to some. Besides, rhythm always involves the configuration of notes into specific, identifiable patterns of either pitch or emphasis.

2. agogic: the note itself, or the duration of the note plus the silence immediately following it, is/are longer than the note[s] immediately preceding it (its upbeat[s], lead-in or anacrusis);

3. tonic: the note clearly diverges in pitch (usually higher) in relation to notes immediately before it.

If emphasised notes recur at regular intervals separated by the same number of beats or subbeats they give rise to the regular grouping of beats into a metre with metric accents placed on the first note of each group. As we shall soon see, those beats can be either reinforced by coinciding with one or more of the three other types of emphasis, or contradicted by placing accents elsewhere in the metre.

The basic unit of metre is the bar or measure. A bar is a duration defined by a given number of constituent beats, all of a consistent duration definable in beats per minute. and are the commonest time signatures for music of European origin. The lower figure in the time signatures , and denotes a quarter-note () or crotchet (l), the most common scribal unit for designating a single beat of music. The numbers on top in , and indicate the number of beats in each bar. At 120 bpm, a bar lasts for 1 second, a or bar for 1 and a bar for 2 seconds. The 16 subbeats shown in Figure 8-6 (8 beats at 120 bpm in , and ; 6 beats at 80 bpm in ) occupy 4 seconds. In such standard types of metre, metric accents are on the first beat (one) of each bar. That beat is also called the downbeat because down is the direction of the euroclassical conductors baton at those points in the music. Bars are user-friendly units for denoting musical durations because they can be both felt and counted as the music actually progresses, whereas thinking about duration in seconds is virtually impossible with music in progress unless its tempo is exactly 60 or 120 bpm.

While a recurring rhythmic pattern at a particular tempo and metre may be semiotically significant (e.g. slow waltz, frenetic jig, relentless march, laid-back ballad, etc.), difference of metre is on its own no guarantee for difference of perceived kinetic effect. For example, although music in fast time will more likely sound like a polka or reel rather than a lyrical ballad, is the metre not only for swirling Viennese waltzes but also for some types of lyrical ballad, as well as for the sedate UK national anthem. Similarly, depending on tempo, rhythmic patterning and other factors, metre might just as well signal a lullaby as a cavalry march, or lively galliard or cueca, while is the most common metre for an almost limitless variety of music, ranging from up-tempo rock via son and foxtrot to funeral dirges.

The explanations just given about metre apply in general to music of Central and Western European origin. That music is mainly monometric (= using only one metre at a time) and symmetric, meaning that its patterns of strong and weak [sub-]beats are consistently grouped into simple multiples of two or three. However, in much traditional music from West Africa, metric practices are much more sophisticated. There are often polymetric configurations running in cycles of 12 or 24 subbeats simultaneously divisible into patterns of 2, 3, 4 and 6 subbeats, and with variable placement of what ears raised on monometric music hear as up- and downbeats in any one of those simultaneously sounding metres. Another tradition of metre differing from that of Western Europe is found in many types of music from the Balkans, Turkey, the Arab world and Indian subcontinent. There, asymmetric metre is quite common, featuring time signatures like five (articulated in groups of 3+2 or 2+3 beats or subbeats), seven (4+3 or 3+4) and ten (3+4+3, 3+3+4, 3+2+3+2, etc.).

In music from the urban West the most common exceptions to the symmetric articulation of beats and subbeats are those that configure the eight subbeats of a r bar as 3+3+2 instead of 4+4, or the sixteen subbeats of two r bars as 3+3+3+3+2+2 instead of 4+4+4+4. These alternative patterns involve metric accents, placed on the first note in each group of subbeats, that dont coincide with regular points of emphasis in the underlying metre. Such variation of metric accent is sometimes called cross-rhythm; or, to put it more conventionally, if a part of the [bar] that is usually unstressed is accented, as with cross-rhythm, it can be called a syncopation. Of course, syncopation can also, as noted earlier, result from dynamic, tonal or agogic accents falling on a metrically unstressed point in the bar, but syncopation can logically exist only if the music is monometric. If two or more metres are in operation, as in many types of West African traditional music, or if the location of the downbeat varies between instruments or from one bar to the next, as in the combination of Cuban Montuno with claves and other salsa patterns, there can be no syncopation because the music is, at least to eurocentric ears, in a permanent state of cross rhythm or syncopation. Anyhow, patterns of metric grouping of beats, subbeats and accents are, whatever their character, key elements in the construction of different feels or grooves.

Like the grooves on a vinyl record, musical grooves are cyclical. They consist of one or more rhythm patterns lasting, as single units, no longer than the extended present, but those patterns have to be repeated several times before they constitute grooves. They fit into an overriding tempo and metre, and are usually repeated constantly, though often with minor variations, throughout entire pieces of music, or at least for a complete episode inside one piece. Groove relates directly to the gross-motoric movement of the human body and is most obviously connected to dance, different grooves being suited to different types of body movement, step patterns, etc.

Although the musical sense of the word groove originated in discourse about one culturally specific type of rhythmic and metric patterning the swing articulation and anticipated downbeats of jazz, later also applied to rock, reggae, funk, R&B, etc. its a concept that can be usefully applied to any music whose present-time cyclic configurations of tempo, rhythm and metre relate to bodily movement. The Viennese waltz, the Chilean cueca, the bourre, the courante, the jig, the slip jig, the reel, the mazurka and the minuet each has its specific groove, as does even a march, be it swung like The Washington Post or straight like the Marseillaise. This means that while mazurka or march grooves may sound ungroovy to jazz or funk fans, they are, like it or not, metric/rhythmic configurations connected to bodily movement, configurations which, just like jazz or funk grooves, are repeated and whose duration as individual occurrences do not exceed the limits of the extended present. Of course, a march or mazurka groove sounds quite different to that of a Funky Drummer loop, but there is no reason to reserve such a useful concept as groove for certain musical traditions and deny it to others any more than there is to insist that a composition must be the written work of one individual, rather than, for example, the result of aural collaboration between band members with input from producers or recording engineers.

Repeated metric/rhythmic configurations (grooves in the sense just described) in the music youre analysing might suggest continual or repeated movements like tiptoe-ing through the tulips, or marching to war, or trudging to a place of execution, or twirling around as an elegant couple waltzing in an imperial ballroom, or chopping the air with robotic arms, or singing your baby to sleep, or gyrating like a belly dancer, or hauling a heavy load, or swimming against the tide, or grinding and thrusting your pelvis, or floating on your back in a swimming pool, or shuffling your feet fast and forwards, or spinning round with others in an eightsome reel, or galloping hell for leather, or taking a leisurely stroll, etc. ad infinitum. In fact its probably best, if you feel uncertain about the lexical niceties of metre and rhythm, to describe your kinetic impression of the groove in question in the sort of aesthesic terms just listed. And if you feel uncertain about your own kinetic impressions of that groove you can always test those impressions intersubjectively (Chapter 6).

Space is intimately correlated with time and movement. That simple assertion is borne out every moment of the day: we have to time our own movements through space correctly if we want to cross the road without being run over, to get food from the fridge, or, in fact, to take any action at all. Even when were motionless we rely on time and movement, as well as on loudness and timbre, to let us know what sort of space were in. The microseconds it takes for a sound we emit to rebound, once or several times, loudly or softly at 343 metres per second, from different surfaces of different materials placed at different angles and distances from our ears help inform us if were in, say, a bedroom, a bathroom, a cathedral, an open field, an empty street or alley, or a long (or short) corridor in a luxury hotel or large prison. Such aspects of acoustic space can be part of live performance but are used much more extensively as parameters of expression in recorded music where input signals from voices and instruments can be treated, separately or together, so that they appear to be sounding in a particular sort of acoustic space. Each acoustic space has a unique profile defined by many different parameters determining two sorts of sound reflection: echo, where return signals are heard as distinct repeats of part or whole of the input signal, and reverb, where return signals merge into one overall spatial impression. The first question to ask is therefore pretty obvious: What kind of space are we hearing in a piece of music through the use of echo or reverb?

With live acoustic performance we mostly hear just one space unless we walk around the venue to check out the sound from different angles and distances. But by the late 1920s, after the invention of the coil microphone, performance of popular song could include two simultaneous spaces: one for the band in the untreated acoustic space, the other for the vocalist who could, through amplification, sing softly in close-up to the listener without being drowned out by the band. Since the advent of multi-track recording, each strand (track, line, part, stream) of the music can be treated separately and so placed in different two-dimensional positions relative to the listeners ears in the same given space (left, right or centre; near or far). Moreover, each strand of the music can also be assigned its own acoustic space that can be combined with other strands in the music to form a spatial composite impossible out there in external reality, but which can be both suggestive and convincing inside our heads as virtual audio reality. Aural staging is what I call the use of acoustic parameters to create such virtual reality. Lacasse (2005) explains this sort of sonic mise-en-scne, illustrating its use in two recordings by Peter Gabriel (1992, 2002) in which a powerful dynamic between inner thoughts and emotional outbursts is created through the subtle treatment of vocal tracks in relation to the rest of the music. Widely used and extremely important in film soundtracks, video games and studio recordings, aural staging is still often overlooked as a vital parameter of expression to consider in the analysis of the vast majority of music produced since the mid 1960s. Awareness of aural stagings semiotic potential is essential and discussed further under Spatial anaphones in Chapter 9 (pp. 334-335).

Now theres no room here to even start trying to explain the acoustics, neurology or psychology of aural staging because it involves not just the representation of particular types of space in music, but also the placement of different sound sources in their own spaces, how those sound sources are positioned (either stationary or in motion) in relation to each other, as well as how each of these various configurations produces a specific overall effect on the listener. Without that sort of background theory and without the poetic experience of a sound engineer, the only viable analytical approach consists of: [1] being aware of aural staging and its importance; [2] the aesthesic description of its effects on the listener. As with many other parameters of musical expression, this approach involves registering and describing its effects on yourself and, if possible, on other listeners. Are you hearing a large or small space? Or several spaces? What sort of spaces? Which strands of the music (e.g. vocals, drums, bass, backing singers, individual instruments or instrument sections, sound effects, etc.) are in which space? Are they situated to the left, right or in the middle? Are they close by, far off or in the middle distance? Are they constantly in the same position? Which sounds are internal (thoughts in sound) rather than external (statements out loud)? Which sounds are more ambient, creating more of background or environment, and which ones are more like a figure (near or far) against that background, or in that environment?

Now, even if the most practical way of dealing with aural staging may be based in interpretations of perception, one theoretical issue is essential to the understanding of how a sense of musical space can be mediated. It has to do with how the three dimensions of Euclidean space (Fig. 8-7) are represented acoustically.

Fig. 8-8. Speaker placement, seen from above, for (a) two-channel stereo; (b) 5.1 surround sound

In two-channel stereo, sounds can be placed anywhere on the horizontal (lateral) x axis running from left through centre to right (Fig. 8-8). Its simple: a sound placed on the left, right or in the centre will be literally heard as coming from that position. With the vertical y axis things arent that simple because music is rarely, if ever, recorded or diffused in vertical stereo. In live performance you never see piccolo flutes, hi-hats or sopranos placed significantly higher than bass instruments or voices and its only in the most experimental studios that youll find tweeters in the ceiling or woofers under the floor: everything comes at you from the same height. The vertical placement and perception of sound relies in other words on a much less literal type of mediation, most obviously on pitch parameters.

The third dimension (z axis) has no standard adjectival label equivalent to the horizontal and vertical of the x and y axes. Often referred to as depth, the z axis might be more accurately called frontal in terms of simple stereo and frontal-retral in surround-sound situations. In fact, the z axis can, strictly speaking, only work properly in surround sound because if points on the x axis range from far left to far right, and those on the y axis from high up to low down, then those on the z axis must range from far behind to far in front of the listener. Far is the operative word here because we are dealing with distance along both axes of stereo sound: horizontal (x) and frontal (z). As shown in Figure 8-8, the stereos acoustic horizon traces a semicircle, like the top half of a compass face or analogue clock, running from far left (west or quarter to), round through a long way in front of the listener (far north or twelve oclock) to far right (east or three oclock). Sounds can be placed anywhere within that semicircle and their distance or proximity to the listener is mediated by setting different values for parameters of loudness, timbre and reverb.

This short theorisation should make at least one thing clear: the mediation of acoustic space and the positioning of sounds within that space is, with the exception of lateral placement, not so much a matter of putting those sounds literally in their respective positions in relation to the prospective listeners ears as generating, by other means, sonic data that listeners intuitively interpret as relatively to the left or right, far or near, high or low, diffuse or compact etc. in relation to an overall space that seems large or small, public or intimate, open or closed, and so on. The listener is in other words, as Figure 8-8 shows, placed centre stage with the aural staging arranged around him/her. Its as if the audience and the actors the auditorium and the stage had changed places.

Now, this section has mainly dealt with space as a parameter of musical expression, but that isnt the same thing as perception of space in music, as, indeed, was clear in the apparent contradiction between our ability to hear sounds vertically (high and low) and the absence of literal verticality in aural staging. In fact, our perception of space in music relies extensively on other parameters of expression, many of which are kinetic because, as mentioned earlier, space is intimately correlated with time and movement. To make this link quite clear, imagine the sort of movement you would make in which type of space when taking the following four actions: crossing the road, fetching milk from the fridge, surveying the surrounding countryside from the top of a hill at sunrise or sunset, and cramming yourself into an overcrowded train at rush hour. Obviously, you dont act as if youre trying to catch a rush hour train when youre at peace on top of the hill, or meander meditatively with arms outstretched and eyes slowly scanning the far distance when you have to contend with hundreds of other commuters trying to board the same busy train. Nor do you rush frenetically to fetch milk from the fridge at teatime, just as little as you would try to cross a busy road by sauntering three metres into the traffic as if you were chatting with Grandma while fetching her the milk she wants to put in her tea. Expansive musical gesture, slow and smooth or quick and sudden, will obviously suggest more space than do tight or contained types of gesture, be they nervous and claustrophobic or gentle and delicate. Such aspects of musical space are usually mediated by the sorts of kinetic anaphone discussed in Chapter 9, in particular under the heading Gestural interconversion (p. 335 ff.). <-END MKS!!!)

Timbre is explained on pages 265-269 and discussed also under the Tactile anaphones (pp. 328-332) in Chapter 8. Particular timbres are perhaps easiest to describe by using the sort of words suggested under 000 (xxxxxxxx) and in Chapter 10 (p. 376, ff.).

Vocal timbre is discussed at some length in Chapter 10. Lists of words descriptive of vocal timbre can be found on page 376, ff.

The timbre of a musical instrument is often used as a genre synecdoche (p. 358, ff.) to connote an elsewhere heard from a musical home perspective, i.e. through the ears of the culture into which it is imported. For example, to most non-Japanese listeners the koto or shakuhachi will suggest Japan, while Highland bagpipes may conjure up generic Braveheart and tartanry notions of Scotland to those unfamiliar with differences between pibroch and pipers parading at the Edinburgh Tattoo. Other well-known examples of ethnic timbre stereotypes timbre are the French accordion spelling France to the non-French, quena or zampoas and charango to signal Andean folk to non-Andean folk, and sitar with tablas to evoke a generic India in the ears of most non-Indian listeners in the West. All these and countless other examples of ethnic instrument stereotyping will only work if listeners are unaware of the range of moods and functions associated with the relevant instrumental sound inside the foreign music culture.

Inside our own familiar and broad tradition of Western musical cultures, a symphonic string section can, as we already saw (p. 254), be used to produce familiar tropes ranging from love and romance to psychopathic killing. Similarly, depending on how they play what, French horns can be associated with heroism, hunting, danger or lyricism, while the different sounds of a saxophone might lead listeners to think of wind bands, big bands, jazz, rock or, yes, sex, as suggested by the rhetorical question what is Kenny G doing in everyones bedroom?

Despite the sort of differences just mentioned, some kinds of instrumental timbre have more focused connotations because they connect, by culturally specific convention, with particular styles or functions. Its in this way that the harpsichord is often linked to olden times, typically the eighteenth century in a European upper-class setting, rather than to, say, a kitchen-sink drama from the 1960s. Its also why the symphony orchestra is linked to either euroclassical concert halls and opera houses or to big-budget Hollywood productions for the whole family rather than to pub gigs or experimental cinema. And its why the sound of a church organ suggests church rather than strip joint, why a legato oboe tune is more likely to signal nostalgic pastoral idyll than an angst-ridden post-apocalyptic dystopia.

Some instrumental sounds act anaphonically (p. 321 ff.) in that they resemble sound, touch or movement that exist outside musical discourse. Timpani rolls, for example, sound more like the rumbling of an earthquake or of distant thunder than like pattering rain or clinking glasses. Thats why a timpani roll is more likely to connote danger, as just before a daring feat of acrobatics at the circus, rather than the sparkling magic of a tinselly fantasy world la Disney. The latter would be more aptly suggested by the tinkling of a glockenspiel or celesta because such sounds resemble that of a music box, which is more likely to connote a protected olde-worlde sort of childhood than bombs exploding in a war-torn neighbourhood. The tinkling timbre of tiny metallophones also suggest shiny, small, brittle, delicate objects like the clinking glasses just mentioned, or like Tchaikovskys Sugar Plum Fairy (1892). By the same anaphonic token, the grainy sound of a seriously overdriven electric guitar resembles more closely that of a large motorbike than of a babbling brook, while sonorously smooth viscous string pads are, as tactile anaphones, more likely to be linked to sensations of voluptuousness and romantic luxury than to those of digging up the road with a jackhammer. Still, even though there may be demonstrable anaphonic resemblance between types of instrumental timbre and what they seem to connote, it should be remembered that such semiosis is largely contingent on culturally specific conventions of stylisation.

The basic principles according to which musical instruments produce different timbres in different ways have already been explained (pp. 265-269) and the rudiments of acoustic instrumental timbre semiosis have just been summarised. In addition to these basic considerations, acoustic instruments can produce a vast diversity of attack, continuant, decay, release and frequency spectrum by using different playing techniques, for example pizzicato, col legno and sul ponte on violin, or damping, laisser vibrer, picking and strumming on guitar. Acoustic devices are also used to vary the timbre of many instruments, for example the different sorts of mutes used by string and brass players, the different sorts of reed types used by woodwind players, the different kinds of mouthpiece available to players of any wind instrument, the array of sticks and brushes that drummers use, not to mention the variety of registration (stops or tabs) available to organists. The range of timbral variation has radically expanded since the 1960s, first with the spread of electro-acoustic and, later, digital devices effects units for treating audio input signals.

Timbre can be altered by using different types of echo and reverb effects, as well as by placement in the stereo space (left/right, far/near), and by using different types of microphone placed in different positions in relation to the original sound source. Other common alterations of timbre are produced by the following sorts of device.

[1] Distortion effects (a.k.a. overdrive, saturation) radically alter the character of overtones in a sounds frequency spectrum to create timbres that have been variously described as rough, gritty, harsh, rich and full-bodied. Fuzz, as heard in the famous Satisfaction riff (Rolling Stones 1965), produces a more piercing type of distortion effect.

[2] Filter effects are those that boost or weaken particular pitch ranges in an audio signal. The most widely used filtering device is the equaliser (abbr. EQ). EQ settings can be used to make a signal more or less prominent in the mix, to get rid of unwanted sounds, or to create specific effects like the disembodied, boxed-in telephone sound that has sometimes been applied to vocal tracks.

[2b] The talk box is a filter device that sends input audio through a tube into the instrumentalists mouth which, shaped to produce any vowel sound, creates output audio giving the impression that the instrument is talking.

[2c] The wah-wah pedal creates a similar effect to the talk box, except that it only covers one binary of vowel sounds from oo to ah [wa] and back [aU]. Wah-wah probably derived from acoustic muting techniques developed by jazz musicians. As an effects unit, wah-wah is usually applied to electric guitar sounds and is common in psychedelic music, as well as in certain types of funk and disco.

[2d] The vocoder manipulates frequencies in an audio signal to produce a non-human, robotic sort of sound.

[3] Modulation effects mix two or more audio signals to create a whole array of different sounds. Apart from ring modulation, which, depending on the input signal, produces bell-like or sci-fi sounds, modulation effects can be thought of in two main aesthesic categories that I call diffusive and oscillatory.

[3a] Diffusive effects are those that use various techniques to diffuse a single sound so that its position on the aural stage seems less precise, so that it seems to fluctuate or cover more acoustic space. These effects, particularly phasing and flanging, create a sweeping, swishing, swooshing sort of effect. Chorus effects are similar except that they sound fuller and often seem to shimmer rather than swish or swoosh. Dubbing (or doubling) is not strictly a modulation effect but it can, like chorus, make audio input sound bigger (not louder) and create the impression that there is more of the sound occupying more space, especially if the original and dubbed tracks are assigned different positions on the aural stage. Digital dubbing involves copying the input signal, detuning it very slightly, offsetting it by a few milliseconds and mixing that copy with the original. Applied frequently to vocal tracks, dubbing can be used to flesh out a thin voice or to make a single voice sound like two or more of the same vocal persona, or like two or more sides of the same vocal persona. Digital dubbing has not replaced real dubbing practices in which the artist physically re-records the same passage a second time on to a different track. Real dubbing is useful if a radically different overdub is required, for example if the singer needs to whisper the words he/she has previously recorded in song so that listeners can hear the message both out loud and inside their heads.

[3b] Oscillatory effects are those that add rapid to-and-fro movement to a sound. Vibrato involves microtonal oscillation between two pitches and is used by classical violin players to give more body to longer notes. The wide, wobbling, slow vibrato that was de rigueur as a device of heightened emotion among Mediterranean opera singers is rare in popular song, except for the famous gospel jaw wobble applied to the end of long notes by vocalists performing slow ballads involving the public presentation of deep personal feelings. Tremolo involves no change of pitch but rapid oscillations in the loudness (volume) of a note. Tremolo produces more of a pulsating, shuddering, or, as the name suggests, trembling rather than wobbling sort of effect.

[4] Loudness effect units in common use are compression, limiting, gating and the volume pedal. [4a] Compression basically makes loud sounds weaker and weak sounds louder, thereby compressing the audio signals dynamic range. An audio track can be compressed to make it sound fuller and tighter so that it stands out from other input sources. Compression is also often applied to the complete mix, to an entire song or album, even to the entire output of a radio station. Such compression is useful if the music is to be heard in spaces containing a lot of extramusical sound, for example when driving a vehicle.

[4b] Limiters set a ceiling for the maximum strength of a sound and are mostly used to avoid unwanted distortion. [4c] Gating does the opposite: it sets a minimum level of intensity below which nothing passes through into audio output. By excluding certain elements of a sounds attack and decay, gating alters the timbre of the input signal. A particularly common gating practice is the gated reverb that has often been applied to drum tracks in order to create a bigger, more compact type of sound. Strong compression and gated reverb on kick drum tracks are largely responsible for the voluminous, sub-bass boof sound of electronic dance musics relentless four-to-the-floor aesthetic.

[4d] The volume pedal lets instrumentalists adjust their output level without having to take their fingers off the instrument theyre playing. Church organists use the instruments swell pedal to adjust the volume of passages played on the swell manual and guitarists can use a volume pedal to increase volume during a solo. The device is also often used to change the timbre of individual notes, most commonly by weakening or muting their attack and shifting to full volume for the conitnuant. This technique, sometimes called violining, can make an overdriven electric guitar sound a bit like a bowed violin: it produces a swell effect that seems smoother, softer (not quieter), rounder, less percussive, less brash, more ethereal and more reflective than the untreated sound.

The words softer (not quieter), used in the previous sentence, raise the first of several problems about the adjective loud. The first of these is that loud is a bit like light, whose opposite can be either dark or heavy, in that it also has two opposites: soft and quiet. There is in other words a difference between the more timbral-tactile (loud/soft) and the more dynamic-kinetic (loud/quiet) aspect of loud. Dynamic-kinetic has obviously to do with energy, power and movement, and that is literally what loudness is all about, at least in poetic terms. Obviously, it takes more energy to produce a loud sound than a quiet one: violinists bow more energetically, pianists hit the keys harder, wind players blow more forcefully, and your amp uses more electricity to make stronger sound waves that have greater amplitude. That means in its turn that the sounds so produced cover more three-dimensional space or, to be more exact, that they literally occupy a greater volume. Volume and dynamics are commonly used as synonyms for loudness and are conventionally measured in decibels (dB), a unit which, in acoustics, quantifies sound pressure levels in air. These levels range from the threshold of human hearing (0 dB), through the sound of, for example, rustling leaves (10 dB), a washing machine (60 dB), a screaming child (90 dB), a helicopter (110 dB), an averagely loud rock band (120 dB), to the threshold of pain (130 dB) and a rocket launch (180 dB).

Another conceptual problem with loudness is that it isnt just a matter of simple decibels because many amplifiers used to come not only with the standard volume control that regulated the total audio output signal strength (measured in dB), but also with a knob or button labelled loudness (Fig. 8-9). The point here is that signals at the upper and lower ends of the audible frequency range need to be stronger if they are to sound as loud as those in the middle. Loudness control compensated for this idiosyncracy of human hearing by letting listeners boost (more dB) those highs and lows without simultaneously boosting mid-range frequencies. By regulating the decibel level of sounds at different frequencies, the amps loudness control also altered the timbre of the overall output. More recently, however, loudness has been used to denote the overall effect of compression in a complete audio production (see also p. 299).

Sound signal strength (measurable in dB) is only one factor determining the relative loudness or quietness of what we hear. Temporal, timbral and tonal parameters are all at least as important, especially if loudness is considered aesthesically in terms of the prominence and audibility of one strand of sound in relation to others. Musical strands with clear rhythmic, tonal and timbral profile simply stand out more than those without and can seem louder, even if their output signal strength (dB) is lower than that of other strands in the music.

Loudness is in short a parameter of musical expression in which signal strength (dB) is a central factor but which also relies on combinations of timbre, tone and timing to produce maximum effect. Taking loudness as an aesthesic category, the obvious questions to ask of an analysis piece are: How loud is the music? Is the music constantly loud or quiet? If not, which passages are louder and which ones quieter? Are changes from loud to quiet or quiet to loud sudden or gradual? Which, if any, of the strands in the music are louder than others? Do any individual notes or motifs stand out as louder or stronger than others? What effects are created by these differences between loud and quiet? Are any features of loudness indicative of a particular type of music?

Pitch and tonality, already defined (pp. 264-265), are, along with form, the general parameters of expression covered in most detail by conventional musicology. Since I have dealt extensively with tonal topics in Everyday Tonality (Tagg 2009), and since their explanation is more likely to involve poetic jargon than has been necessary so far in this chapter, this section will be stripped to its barest essentials.

Pitch is, as we already saw, measurable in cycles per second or Hertz (Hz). 440 Hz is internationally agreed concert pitch. Its equivalent to the note a near the middle of the human range of hearing. Middle c, on the other hand, the note just above the keyhole on a piano (and opposite your navel as you sit to play the instrument) has a frequency of 261.63 Hz. As mentioned under Timbre (p. 265), the first harmonic or overtone (2f) has a frequency twice that of its fundamental so that, for example, 880 Hz (a5) is 2f in relation to 440 Hz (a4) which, in its turn, is 2f in relation to 220 Hz (a3). The note name for the three pitches 220 Hz, 440 Hz and 880 Hz is identical a and the pitch difference between any given pitch and another at twice or half its frequency is one octave: thus a4 (440 Hz) is one octave higher than a3 (220 Hz) but one octave lower than a5 (880 Hz).

The octave is a central concept in music for at least two reasons. [1] All known music traditions tend to treat two pitches an octave apart as the same note in another register: men are understood to be singing the same tune as women and children if both parties follow the same pitch contour at the same time in parallel octaves. [2] Musics range of audible fundamental pitches is often divided into octaves so that register can be referred to without having to contend with scientific sounding units like cycles per second (Hz).

In everyday speech interval is understood as the horizontal distance in time between one event and another. In music theory, however, interval refers to the vertical distance in pitch between one tone and another. Pitch intervals are expressed as ordinal numbers based on the heptatonic (seven-tone) scale and on the inclusive principles of Roman counting. Thats why two sounds at the same pitch (zero difference in pitch) are said to be in unison (unum = one) while a difference of one tone between two pitches is called a second, a difference of two tones a third, and so on until you arrive at a difference of seven notes between two pitches and at an interval called not seventh but octave. Of course, a quick look at the piano keyboard reveals that there are not just seven white notes inside each octave but five black ones as well. Each of those twelve notes is at an interval of one semitone from those on either side (one fret on the guitar). This means that some of the seven standard interval names need some sort of qualification; it also explains why musicians distinguish between, for example, minor and major thirds. The difference between a minor and a major third in relation to the musics keynote, an interval of three and four semitones respectively, is at the basis of widespread notions about the affective character of minor and major modes.

Although its impossible here to do more than scratch the surface of the topic, two aspects of intervallic affect, both relating to the linguistic domain of representation, are easy to observe and useful in semiotic music analysis. The first of these has to do with the simple fact that someone expressing great interest, surprise, enthusiasm, fright, frustration or indignation will normally speak using a much wider pitch range than someone expressing boredom, depression, indifference or resignation. Thats why a melodic line, instrumental or vocal, that contains large intervallic leaps and bounds is much more likely to be heard in terms of heightened emotional energy than one that doesnt. The affective precision of that energy (interest or indignation, surprise or shock, etc.) will of course depend on matters of relative consonance or dissonance, as well as on timbre, loudness, rhythm, tempo, surface rate and other factors. The second aspect concerns register.

Pitch range means exactly what it says. Its either: [1] the range of pitches between the lowest and highest notes that can be played on a particular instrument or sung by a certain type of voice; or [2] the range of pitches between the lowest and highest notes in a certain strand of music, or in a particular passage or piece of music. For example, the pitch range of an oboe covers two octaves plus a sixth (from b$3 to g6), and the pitch range of the tune Happy Birthday is the single octave between its first note (lowest) and the note on the third occurrence of birth[day] (highest). Most people have an effective vocal range of just under two octaves, a range which no widely sung melody ever exceeds. Two octaves may seem quite puny compared to the ten-octave range of a humpback whale but there is an unmistakable difference in gestural affect between tunes that span an octave or more (expansive) and those that cover no more than a third (constrained). Although pitch range is more often applied to the sort of pitch spans just mentioned, it can also be used, as we shall see under Texture (p. 000 ff.), to describe overall impressions of vertical space in terms of orchestral or chordal density and sparsity.

Register is easiest to explain by example. Depending on how you count what, the average human voice uses between two and four registers. Apart from the chest register and head register, so called because thats where the sound of low and high notes respectively seem to resonate in the singers body, its also possible to speak of a mid register between the two. In addition, the human voice has a falsetto range that both overlaps with and extends higher than the head register. Since different vocal registers draw on different parts of the human anatomy they also produce different timbres: register is in other words a pitch range associated with particular timbral traits.

The larger the intervallic leap between two consecutively sung notes, the more likely it is that there will be a change of vocal register. For example, a deeply felt sigh of relief, delight or despair has to descend an interval of at least a sixth, usually more; but sliding down a mere third, an interval demanding no change of vocal register, will sound more like an indifferent uh-uh of negation, acknowledgement or resignation. Conversely, leaping an octave to a strong high note creates a much more expansive, proclamatory upwards-and-outwards gesture than ascending a mere second or third. Since musical instruments also vary in timbre from one register to another, patterns of vocal intonation and articulation, including sighs and go-get-em upward leaps, can be efficiently expressed without involving the human voice.

Melodic lines, including motifs, bass lines and riffs, all have a pitch contour, i.e. a pattern of ups and downs of the sort shown in Figure 8-10. Contour patterns can be typical for certain musical styles (e.g. the tumbling strain for blues) and some can be related to connotative categories like recitation (often centric) or dream (wavy). Initial and final motifs (melodic cadence figures) can also be indicative of a particular music culture or type of gesture.

Here are a few basic questions that can be asked about pitch in a piece of music. What are its highest and lowest pitches? Do the high and low pitches occur at the same time? If so, how would you describe the texture: thin, full, top heavy, bottom heavy, all in the middle, with no middle? If pitch texture varies in the piece, where, how and why does it do so? Which strands in the music are in which register[s]? Is their pitch range large and expansive or narrow and constrained? Are there any noticeable intervallic ups or downs ( disjunct motion and changes of register) or do the musics different strands move in small steps ( conjunct motion)? How would you describe the pitch contours of melodic strands in the music? Do they suggest a certain style of music? Do any of the above suggest any sort of gestural affect? If so, which?

Tonality means the way in which tones (notes with clearly distinguishable fundamental pitch), are configured. Now, since the octave is, as we just saw, globally accepted as presenting the same note in another register, differences of tonality between musical styles and cultures are to be found in how pitches and intervals are arranged within the octave and in how those tones are treated, which ones are heard as sounding good or bad together or in sequence, and so on. Those of us brought up in the urban West are, for example, likely to hear most notes played on gamelan instruments as out of tune, even though the Balinese take great care to ensure their pitches conform to the appropriate tradition and function of their music. Closer to home, some of my music students have even raised eyebrows at old recordings of African-American or white Appalachian music in which they hear the vocalist singing blue notes, or out of tune, or in the cracks between notes when nothing blue, out of tune or in-between was either intended or heard in its original context. As for norms about which tones sound good together or in succession, please listen again to the Bulgarian women singing their happy harvest song: they seem to be thoroughly enjoying the sort of harsh semitone clashes that were more used to hearing as underscore in a horror film. In short, since tonal norms vary from one style or music culture to another, we cannot assume that the conventions of our own traditions of being in or out of tune, of consonance and dissonance, of what sounds pleasant and unpleasant, etc. should apply to others.

Tonality is probably the most problematic aspect of structuration facing non-musos interested in the semiotic analysis of music. There are at least four reasons for this problem: [1] conventional musicology has developed an impressive arsenal of terms relevant to tonality in the euroclassical tradition; [2] those terms can be problematic, even ethno-centric, and need critical discussion; [3] such discussion involves other specialist terms in need of explanation; [4] tonal phenomena are virtually impossible to explain in writing without resorting to musical notation which, as we saw earlier, developed to graphically encode aspects of musical structure that are hard to memorise, especially sequences of pitch (p. 108). Thats why the next few pages provide no more than a rudimentary summary of the most important aspects of tonality.

The question is, then, what to do, as a non-muso, if your analysis piece contains something you can hear in terms of a mood, gesture or connotation but which seems to be a tonal issue more than a matter of speed, rhythm, periodicity, loudness, timbre, form, aural staging, etc.? Is it a question of mode (e.g. major, minor, pentatonic), harmonic idiom (e.g. euroclassical, romantic, avant-garde, jazz, rock, etc.) or what? I would suggest the following: [1] dont be alarmed: tonal parameters arent necessarily the most important in your analysis piece; [2] read relevant passages in Everyday Tonality (Tagg 2009) to see if you can find any answers to your problem; [3] ask a musician for help in identifying and naming the tonal features youve identified as potentially meaningful.

Most of the music we hear in the urban West conforms to the convention of equal-tone tuning which divides the octave into twelve equal and slightly doctored intervals (semitones) arranged on a piano keyboard in the familiar pattern of five black and seven white notes (Fig. 8-11). The twelve pitches in just-tone tuning, on the other hand, are based on undoctored frequency ratios. Just-tone tuning is suited to styles involving no more than seven different notes to the octave, as with many types of blues, bluegrass, blue-based rock, folk rock, not to mention the traditional musics of Africa, the Arab world, the Balkans, the British Isles, the Indian subcontinent, Scandinavia etc. Just tuning sometimes sounds more open, bright and clean than equal-tone tuning, especially if drone notes are involved (p. 000).

Tonal vocabulary (a.k.a. pitch pool) means the store of all pitches within the octave that are used to create tonal structures in a musical phrase, passage, work or style. As mentioned earlier, some traditions, like Indonesian gamelan, use tonal vocabularies unfamiliar to Western ears because the octave is divided into pitches that fall into the cracks between the notes in the Western twelve-note system (Fig. 8-11). Melodic vocabularies which conform to, or which resemble more closely that system are often called modes.

The most commonly used modes in the urban West are pentatonic, hexatonic and heptatonic. Pentatonic modes use five, hexatonic six, and heptatonic seven of the twelve available pitches inside the octave. The two most widely recognised heptatonic modes are those containing the notes of the Western major (ionian mode) and minor scales (variants of the aeolian mode). Each mode has its own keynote or tonic as reference point for other notes in the mode. The combination of these intervals in relation to the tonic creates tonal configurations that give each mode its unique sound. Modes can be just as efficient as vocal or instrumental sound in connoting particular musical styles and cultures, as popular descriptions like Gypsy mode or Arab scale suggest.

Melodies are monodic tonal sequences perceived as musical statement with distinct rhythmic profile (p. 281), pitch contour (p. 306) and tonal vocabulary (mode). Melody also has the following five important characteristics: [1] it is the monodic musical foreground to which accompaniment and harmony are generally, at least within most popular music traditions of the urban West, understood as providing the background (p. 000); [2] it is usually the easiest part of the music to recognise, appropriate and to reproduce vocally; [3] its phrases cover the duration of a long exhalation (the extended present again); [4] it is normally delivered at a rate ranging from that of medium to very slow speech; [5] it is generally articulated with rhythmic fluidity and unbroken delivery of tonal material within one sequence. These properties mean that melody, as tonal monodic movement, is often understood as a heightened form of human speech and as that aspect of music most closely connected to human utterance, both gestural and vocal.

A useful conceptual pair when considering vocal melody is syllabic melismatic. A melisma is a string of several consecutive notes sung to one syllable. On the other hand, singing one syllable per note is simply called syllabic. Syllabic singing is common in homophonic (p. 312) settings of hymns and national anthems, as well as in the verse parts of recordings by singer-songwriters. Melismas are particularly common in rock and gospel phrases like oh yeah!, as well as in liturgical settings of Kyrie eleison and Alleluia.

Apart from profiles of pitch, rhythm, tonality and melisma, together with whatever they may suggest by way of gesture, affect and connotation, it is also worth considering the overall melodicity of the music under analysis. Is melody important in the piece or there greater focus on riffs and rhythms, or on long, held sonorities? Is the melody mixed up front and in the middle or is it more like an equal part among all the other strands of the music? Are melodic lines performed by the same voice[s] or instrument[s] throughout the piece? If not, do the melodic lines occur at the same time (tonal polyphony) or in succession? What effects are created by such ways of treating melody?

Polyphony (without the tonal) simply means more than one sound at the same time. Singing without accompaniment is monophonic but as soon as you stamp your foot in time with the tune, the music becomes polyphonic. Obviously, if you get out your guitar and strum a few accompanying chords to your song, or if someone else starts singing along in parallel thirds, youre creating tonal polyphony.

One simple and very common form of tonal polyphony is the use of a drone to accompany melody. Drones are easiest to understand as the continuous notes that sound at the same pitch throughout part or whole of a piece of music. They act as tonal reference point and background for the changing pitch of the musics other strands. Drones occur in bagpipe music from many parts of the world and usually feature the keynote or tonic of whichever melodic mode they accompany. Lower strings on the guitar or fiddle are also to create drone effects that have a more rhythmic character in that note[s] of identical pitch are repeated at short intervals. Drones are also used in audiovisual productions as a suspension device to suggest either stasis (e.g. the stillness of wide open spaces) or, if booming in the bass register, as a doomsday cue of ongoing, oppressive threat.

Heterophony is polyphony resulting from simultaneous differences of pitch produced when two or more people sing or play more or less the same melodic line at the same time. Heterophony can denote everything from the unintentional polyphonic effect of unsynchronised unison singing to the intentional discrepancies between vocal line and its instrumental embellishment that are characteristic of much music from Greece, Turkey and the Arab world. Another type of heterophony can occur in the final chorus of trad jazz performances when instrumentalists improvise their individual variants of the same tune at the same time. An extreme example of multi-strand heterophony can be heard in traditional home worship singing from the Scottish Hebrides where each florid improvisation on the same hymn tune is thought to present each individuals relation to God on a personal basis.

Homophony is the type of polyphony in which different strands of the music move in the same rhythm at the same time. It is the polyphonic antithesis of counterpoint meaning polyphony whose instrumental or vocal lines clearly differ in melodic and/or rhythmic profile. Most hymns and national anthems are homophonic.

Polyphony is homophonic or contrapuntal only by degree. The less concurrent similarity of rhythmic and melodic profile between the musics strands, the more contrapuntal it becomes. For example, Bach fugues, Renaissance motets, rock recordings, funk grooves and overlapping call-and-response phrases in gospel music all exhibit varying amounts of counterpoint (with some homophony), while hymns, nursery rhyme harmonisations and Sousa marches display varying degrees of homophony (with some counterpoint).

Harmony is popularly thought of as that aspect of tonality which has to do with chords. Chord just means the simultaneous sounding of two or more tones with different note names. A chord consisting of two different notes is called a dyad, of three a triad, of four a tetrad, etc., and a chord of several neighbouring notes is called a cluster.

If counterpoint is imagined as the horizontal or diachronic aspect of tonal polyphony, harmony is often thought of as its vertical or synchronic aspect, as the chords. This distinction can be misleading, not just because tonal counterpoint produces chords in the sense just given but also because even the most homophonic types of tonal polyphony are inevitably diachronic. There are two basic reasons why harmony needs also to to be considered horizontally, one being the fact that the individual notes in one chord lead to individual notes in the next one (voice leading). The other reason is that the same set of chords, each of a particular note length presented inside a particular overall duration, dont sound the same, or have the same effect, as those same chords sounded in a different order with different durations. The point here is that chord progressions constitute a diachronic parameter of musical expression that can signal a musical style as well as a sense of musical movement, flow or direction (see p. 000). Still, lets first consider the synchronic aspects of harmony.

If I play the James Bond chord (Em^9) on a piano rather than, as it should be, on a Fender Stratocaster treated with slight tremolo and some reverb, most students I meet can identify the sound in terms of a spy chord, detective chord, etc. Such codal competence suggests that a chords tonal information can on its own, at least under certain conditions, carry culturally specific connotations. In fact, choosing the right chord type can be just as effective as instrumental timbre (p. 294 ff.) or melodic mode (p. 309 ff.) in establishing a musical idiom, as well as in suggesting moods and environments. Ive found that many students, muso and non-muso, can, if their attention is drawn to the sonority in question, recognise not only detective chords but also, for example, the bitter-sweet chord, the romantic pathos chord and Burt Bacharach chords. They can also usually distinguish between drone-based and busily over-harmonised arrangements of folk tunes, between the harmonic idioms of trad jazz and bebop, between Elizabethan and late Romantic harmonies, etc. The problem is in other words not one of aural competence but of poetic nomenclature (e.g. m^9) because aesthesic descriptors like bitter-sweet, romantic pathos, Burt Bacharach and twangy folk chords have (as yet, if ever) little or no validity in institutions of conventional musical learning.

Like the types of chord just described, chord progressions often have semiotic significance. They can indicate a home style, refer out to a foreign style and sometimes suggest a mood. They can also act kinetically and syntactically by contributing to the establishment of metre, phrase, period and overall form in a piece of music. It may be useful to think of chord progressions as existing at three levels of duration: [1] short-term shuttles or loops contained within one or two bouts of the extended present; [2] medium-term loops or matrices covering one or two periods; [3] long-term harmonic narrative (p. 000).

[1] Shuttle denotes an ongoing oscillation between two chords, loop a repeated sequence of (typically) three or four chords. Chord shuttles and loops are common in many types of popular song and dance music. For example, the aeolian shuttle, as heard in All Along The Watchtower (Dylan 1968; Hendrix 1968), Whispering Thunder (Cain 1972), Money (Pink Floyd 1973) and Chopins Marche funbre (1839), is, in slow to moderate tempo, a habitual harbinger of things dark and ominous. On the other hand, the floating dorian shuttle, as heard in Hes So Fine (Chiffons 1963), Oh! Happy Day (Hawkins 1972), My Sweet Lord (Harrison 1972) and, most notably at several brightness points on the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon (1972), is much less dark and a much more open-ended sort of affair.

Among the most familiar loop progressions must surely be the three-chord La Bamba pattern, so common in many types of Latin-American music and the chordal basis of tunes like Guantanamera, Pata Pata, Do You Love Me?, Twist And Shout, Hang On Sloopy and Wild Thing. Perhaps even more well-known is the four-chord vamp loop (also known as vamp until ready) that accompanied countless milksap numbers recorded in the USA around 1960. Im referring to teenage angel hits like Diana, Teenager In Love, Poetry In Motion, Oh! Carol, Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen, Dream Lover and Sherry Baby, as well as the A sections of evergreens like Blue Moon (pp. 276-277) and At Last. or

Harmonic change as long and short term phenomenon, incl. harmonic rhythm (see 3.8) .

Order and treatment of thematic events, e.g. starts, ends, continuations, interruptions, recurrences (reiterations, repeats, recaps), sequences, inversions, retrogrades, augmentations, diminutions.

This chapter summarises basic ways in which musical structures relate to what they can be seen to elicit by way of response. At least that is how this sign typology came into being. Its taxonomy is not exhaustive and its rationale is perhaps easiest to grasp initially by considering a concrete example.

The second of the Ten Little Title Tunes (TLTT) tested on 607 respondents was a cover version of a TV Western theme The Virginian. Common responses to that piece were across, broad expanses (incl. panorama, open plains, prairie), cowboy, hero, horse, riding, towards, TV and, of course, Western. Those VVAs fall into two main categories: [1] Adventure, TV and Western; [2] hero riding across open landscape. The first category consists of narrative genre responses, while the second a hero riding across open landscape towards some destination or other consists of VVAs that might just as well apply to a Hungarian galopping across the Puszta in 1241 as to a cowboy riding the range in 1881. A lone hero dashing across wide-open spaces on horseback is kinetically and spatially, not geoculturally, specific and music for such scenes would typically include patterns of sonic movement suggesting horse riding rather than skating or caressing, an individual rather than a gang, plains rather than streets, speed rather than calm, etc. Indeed, horses, riding and some sort of open landscape were, in addition to Western, The Virginians most common VVAs while other Western narrative tropes were absent. There were no wagon trains, no unshaven villains terrorising the townsfolk, no U.S. cavalry, no pow-wows or wigwams, no bar room brawls, no Mexican bandits, no buggy rides, no shoot-outs on main street, and no horses being serenaded by the light of a camp fire. The Virginians respondents clearly heard a particular type of Western. Some of the musical structures signalling that particularity were indicative of a particular musical style (style indicators) while others were more kinetic and spatial (kinetic anaphones). Such distinctions were useful in trying to determine which musical elements in the piece were more likely to connect with which responses.

The simple sign typology that follows has two complementary uses. [1] It facilitates, as just suggested, consideration of the ways in which certain responses to the music relate to certain sounds in the analysis object (AO). [2] It can help in the formulation of hypotheses about the connotations of the musical structures under analysis.

determinant structural elements determining the division of music into distinct sections

marker short processual structure signalling temporal position or relative importance of events

indicator aspects of musical structuration indicating the home style of the music in question

synecdoche pars pro toto reference to foreign musical style, thence to cultural context of that style

Before explaining and exemplifying each of these sign types it should be noted that only two pairs of sign types shown in the table are mutually exclusive: [1] genre synecdoches and style indicators; [2] episodic determinants and episodic markers. With those exceptions, explained later, links between musical structure and VVAs can almost always be understood as combinations of any of the sign types just listed, as composites. That observation also tallies with the qualities of music as a mode of cross-domain representation and synaesthesis (p. 60, ff.), as well as with the importance of considering musemes not so much as single entities but rather as layered stacks of meaning (p. 225, ff.). Its also worth flagging up that some sign types anaphones, episodic markers and genre synecdoches work at the level of musemes and museme stacks while the others style indicators, episodic determinants and form patterns are meaningful at the level of idiom and process. The former are the contents of the latter, so to speak.

Anaphone is etymologically analogous to analogy; but instead of meaning the imitation of existing models... in the formation of words (ana-logy), anaphone means the use of existing models in the formation of (meaningful musical) sounds. Anaphones are in that sense homologous sign types and can be thought of in three main categories sonic, kinetic and tactile depending on which mode of perception sound, movement or touch is most striking in the link between musical structure and paramusical phenomena. That said, anaphones are, as we shall see, usually composites of sonic, tactile and kinetic perception.

A sonic anaphone can be thought of as the musical stylisation of sound that exists outside the discourse of music. Such sound can be produced by the human body, by animals or by elements and objects in the natural or man-made environment. In this section sonic anaphones are divided into two principal but overlapping subcategories: those produced by the human voice (vocal anaphones) and those that arent (non-vocal). Lets start with the latter.

The babbling brook piano accompaniment in Schuberts Die schne Mllerin (1822), the thunderstorm in Beethovens Pastoral Symphony (1808), the earthquake in Bachs Matthew Passion (1729), William Byrds bells (c. 1600), Daquins cuckoo (1735), Messiaiens blackbird (1952), Hendrixs B52 bombers (1971), the first motorbike second of Sweet Hitch-Hiker (Creedence, 1971) and The Fools Psycho Chicken (1980) all contain pretty obvious sonic anaphones. However, as Rsing (1977) points out, sonograms of Schubert brooks or of Beethoven thunder share very little objectively in common with the real sounds those musical stylisations are supposed to represent. But, continues Rsing, that is hardly the point because the structural homologies between real and musical brooks or between real and musical thunder stem partly from cultural convention and social experience, partly from differences in sound technology. This dual mechanism explains why Vangeliss sampled rain in Soil Festivities (1984) sounds much more like rain than Beethovens or, for that matter, any of Eislers Fourteen Ways of Describing Rain (1941).

To put things simply, you may well have a non-vocal sonic anaphone on your hands if a musical structure under analysis resembles any onomatopoeia of the following type:

bang, beep, boing, boom, bubble, bump, buzz, chug, clang, clatter, click, clink, clank, clunk, clip-clop, crack, crackle, crash, creak, crumble, crumple, crunch, diddle, ding, dong, drip, drop, fizz, fizzle, flutter, grate, grind, jangle, jingle, kerplunk, knock, lap, plip, plop, pop, pow, rat-a-tat, rattle, ring, ripple, rumble, rustle, scrape, scratch, shatter, sizzle, slam, slosh, smack, smash, snap, splash, splatter, squelch, squish, swish, swoosh, throb, thrum, thud, thump, thunder, thwack, tick-tock, tinkle, tintinnabulate, trickle, twang, vroom, whirr, whizz.

Add to that all the sounds emanating from the animal kingdom bark, bleat, chirp, cluck, moo, purr, quack, twitter, whinny, etc., plus words that can describe both human and non-human sounds babble, belch, breathe, call, choke, chortle, cough, croak, cry, fart, groan, growl, gulp, gurgle, hiccup, hiss, howl, hum, moan, murmur, roar, scream, sigh, slobber, snarl, sneeze, snivel, splutter, squeak, whisper, whine, whistle, yell, etc. (see p. 325) and you may find it easier to identify a non-vocal sonic anaphone somewhere in your analysis object. If not, you will almost certainly stumble on some other type of anaphone.

Vocal anaphones are those in which the musics melodic and rhythmic profile resembles that of speech or other human types of vocal utterance. Vocal anaphones musically stylise either linguistic rhythm and intonation or paralinguistic utterances like sighs and interjections of disgust, delight, horror, surprise, relief, contentment and so on.

Transscansions are the most striking type of linguistic vocal anaphone. They are short wordless motifs whose melodic and rhythmic profile closely resembles that of at least two spoken syllables associated with the music in which it occurs. The talking drums of some traditional musics from West Africa demonstrate one of the most obvious and consistent uses of transscansion but transscansions also abound in contemporary Western mass media, notably in advertising and title music. The Intel Inside jingle provides one familiar example, its four notes echoing the rhythmic pattern of the four spoken syllables Intel inside.

Transscansions typically serve to highlight and reinforce key words or phrases that are sung elsewhere in the same piece of music or that appear in its title. They are common in the instrumental intros and outros to opera arias, Lieder, oratorio choruses, parlour songs and pop songs, where intros pre-empt and outros echo the prosodic profile of words in the vocal line, as in the Hallelujah chorus from Handels Messiah (1741), or Schuberts An die Musik (1816), or Claribels I Cannot Sing The Old Songs (c.1855), or The Beatles Please Please Me (1963). A similar process operates when church organists play the first and/or last line of a hymn tune to prepare the congregation for what they are about to sing: hearing the first line of, say, O God, our help in ages past without words establishes in advance both tune and words of the hymn O God, our help in ages past.

There are two other sorts of linguistic anaphone. Less striking than transscansions, the language identifier and the stock-phrase homology involve no explicit echoing of actual words and can occur in either vocal or instrumental strands of the music.

As its label suggests, the language-identifier involves melodic-rhythmic motifs characteristic for the prosody of a particular language. For example, the two-note disyllabic Scotch snap, as in coming, going, body, hit it etc., is as typical a rhythmic trait of English or Gaelic as it is uncommon in Italian or Spanish, which in their turn feature trisyllabic patterns Milano, Sevilla, ti amo, tus ojos, te quiero, la notte, mi vida, il mare, la playa, etc. that are much rarer in English or Gaelic. Although anaphonic in that they resemble speech independent of musical discourse, the vocal anaphones of language identification also function as style indicators or genre synecdoches because, by signalling specific speech patterns, they can connote the language and culture of which those patterns are but a small part.

Stock-phrase homologies also relate to prosodic aspects of speech. Like transscansions and language identifiers they are also wordless melodic-rhythmic motifs but they neither echo syllables directly associated with the piece in which they occur (transscansions), nor do they necessarily connote any culture through the specific prosody of a particular language (language identifiers). As the label suggests, stock-phrase homologies are melodic-rhythmic motifs that can be heard to resemble the prosody of common verbal statements uttered with the attitude appropriate to their message. The motif under investigation might melodically and rhythmically resemble more a short, sharp shut up! or go to hell! than a mellifluous I love you because you understand, dear. Or maybe it sounds more like a flustered get a move on! or leave me alone!, or perhaps a sincere thats so kind of you, or a provocative you aint seen nothing yet. For example, the sentence I love you because you understand, dear, as sung by Jim Reeves (1964), has exactly the same rhythm, duration and number of syllables as I hate you because you make me vomit. Unless comic effect is intended, these two isorhythmic and equidurational sentences are unlikely to be uttered using the same timbre, intonation, diction or dynamics.

Paralinguistic anaphones involve the musical stylisation of non-verbal vocal expression. Such anaphones can stylise the sounds of, for example:

babbling, booing, cackling, calling, crying, cheering, giggling, groaning, growling, grunting, gurgling, hicupping, howling, laughing, moaning, mumbling, murmuring, muttering, screaming, sighing, slobbering, snarling, snivelling, squawking, squeaking, squealing, stammering, whimpering, whining, whooping, yammering, yawning.

They can also be heard as resembling the vocal expression, with or without words, of states of mind and emotions, such as:

[1] abandon, ecstasy, extraversion or control, restraint, introversion; [2] loneliness, solitude or a sense of community and belonging; [3] contentment, hope, enthusiasm or anger, apathy, irritation, confusion, consternation, despair, despondency, disinterest, regret; [4] calm, confidence, determination or fear, worry, panic, apprehension; [5] delight, appreciation, encouragement, happiness or disgust, disdain, grief and sadness; [5] relief or tension; [6] suprise or shock; and of course [7] pleasure or pain.

Another way of understanding paralinguistic anaphones is to hear them in terms of either the prosody or social function of the type of utterance they resemble. Are any of the melodic motifs in your ao in any way similar to the prosody of any of the following types of speech?

accusing, agreeing, affirming, announcing, apologising, approving, arguing, asking, beseeching, bewailing, cajoling, challenging, chattering, chiding, complaining, condemning, confiding, confirming, cursing, declaiming, denying, disagreeing, exhorting, gossiping, negating, objecting, ordering, persuading, pleading, praising, praying, preaching, provoking, ranting, reciting, teasing, taunting, threatening, warning, whining etc.

Or perhaps some melodic utterances in your ao may be presented in a form that resembles one of these types of speech:

monologue (incl. monologue intrieure), rumination, discussion, declamation, conversation, proclamation, question and answer, call and response, opening line, punchline, comment, (theatrical) aside.

Vocal anaphones can sometimes also be roughly indicated using interjections like aah!, aee!, brrr!, eh?, gasp!, groan!, grrr!, gulp!, help!, hm!, ho-ho!, huh?, hush!, no!, oh yes!, oh-ho!, oh no! ooh!, oomph!, ouch!, phew!, phwoah!, tee-hee!, ugh! uh-uh! sh! sigh!, slurp!, uh-uh!, whoopee!, wow!, yay!, yawn!, yee-ha!, yes!, yuck! or zzzz! However, given the connotative precision of music, it is often more instructive if you can find words that coherently express the attitude or state of mind stylised in the relevant anaphone. Remembering that logogenic precision rarely resembles its musogenic counterpart, it is unlikely that the words you find to indicate the relevant state of mind will create a stock-phrase homology, let alone a transscansion. Concocting lyrics is not the point of the exercise here: its a matter of prosaic verbal precision about musical discourse, not of it. Thats why its more useful to hazard interpretative guesses like If only things were that easy!, or Im totally lost and confused, or Now Ill show you, or even Life may be hard but Ill not be put down than to hide behind the convenient truth that music cannot be put into words. The aim is not to put music into words but to use words to formulate an approximate description of what you think the music might mean. You will never be able to prove conclusively that your interpretation is right but you can at least test its plausibility using the approaches presented in Chapters 6 and 7.

The fact that vocal expression, verbal or non-verbal, is intimately related to wordless musical statements will be evident to anyone familiar with certain types of blues, rock, Country, or with any other type of music in which call-and-response patterns are divided between voice (the call) and instrument (the response). For example, instrumental fills between vocal phrases in the musical styles just mentioned are ana- phonic in that they suggest conversation: sometimes they seem to merely answer the vocal line, while at others they comment and expand on what has just been sung. Perhaps even more indicative of languages close relationship with melodic lines is the use of wah-wah and the talk box in rock music. Instrumental fills and comments, as well as the devices just mentioned, all serve in one way or another to make an instrumental statement resemble the utterance of a human voice.

Sonic anaphones, non-vocal or vocal, may be the most obvious sort of anaphone because they are unimodal (sound representing other sound) but they are neither the only nor the most common type of anaphone. Transmodal anaphones in which musical sound links with other sensory modes and domains of representation, notably those of touch and, even more importantly, of movement, are central to the semiotics of music.

One of the most familiar tactile anaphones to Western ears must surely be the sound of orchestral strings bowed smoothly to produce a slowly moving, continuous, chordal texture. On synthesisers such sounds are called string pads because they pad holes and fill gaps in the musics overall texture. Performed live on a group of stringed instruments, string pads are characterised by their lack of distinct attack and decay, and by their relatively consistent envelope, all often enhanced by considerable amounts of reverb. This sort of sound produces a homogeneous, thick, rich, viscous sonic effect and, by haptic synaesthesis, sensations of luxury, comfort and smoothness. This observation can be substantiated by noting titles and in-house descriptions of library music featuring thick (rich, lush) string scoring of pleasant harmonies, for example: [1] Lullaby Of The City: home, soft and velvety, gently flowing, quiet, intimate and restful; [2] Penthouse Affair: fashions, sweetly melodic, slightly nostalgic but sophisticated, dressed in silk and satin; [3] Amethysts for Esmeralda rich and dreamy; [4] Girl In Blue lush, smooth melody; [5] Valse Anastasie romantic, lush; [6] Sequence for Sentimentalists rich, romantic theme. Viscous string pads have of course also acted as sonic emulsifiers in many a voluptuous Hollywood love scene.

Soft, gentle, velvety, silk and satin, lush, smooth and rich all connote a particular range of tactile sensations to which I added, more prosaically, homogeneous, thick, emulsified and viscous in efforts to concretise the shared physical characteristics of the unctuous aspect of the sort of string pad anaphone under review here. Oily, sticky and glutinous would admittedly be strange descriptors of the sound, but sacharine, sugary, syrupy, sappy, slushy, gooey and mushy have all been used disparagingly to qualify music that listeners find too lush, too sweet or too rich. That said, sweet viscosity, musical or otherwise, cannot be unpleasant per se, as apposite correlatives like juicy, succulent, creamy, soft and smooth clearly suggest. Besides, the other tactile aspect of the library music descriptions the silk and satin side of the anaphone embody lithe delicacy and gently flowing smoothness as counterbalance to the deeper, thicker and more viscid aspect of smoothness in the rich string texture.

The lighter quality of smooth sheen (silk and satin) rather than of deep viscosity is largely attributable to higher pitch (higher as lighter, less heavy, less dark) in terms of fundamental or harmonics. String pads, live or synthesised, are characterised by a timbre that is normally rich in high harmonics so that notes played in the mid, or even low, register include an element of shine. Indeed, expressions like shimmering strings and silver strings are so widespread that suggesting synaesthetic links between the sheen of silk or satin and the shine of satin strings seems superfluous. The sweetly melodic co-descriptor of the silk and satin piece Penthouse Affair (p. 328) hints at another explanation of the contrast between the silky delicacy and rich viscosity types of smoothness: not only is the pieces melody set at a higher (lighter) pitch than the average of its accompanying string pad; its legato notes also change at a quicker pace than those of the underlying string pads chords so that it can become, as the library music company put it, sweetly melodic and more gently flowing like Lullaby Of The City.

Now, although soft, gentle, velvety, silk and satin, lush, smooth and rich all indicate clearly tactile qualities, several of the words just used to describe string pad sounds obviously relate to taste sweet, sugary, syrupy and creamy, for example. So why are gustatory anaphones absent from this taxonomy?

The first reason is that most of the taste words used so far have as much to do with texture or consistency (creamy, syrupy, juicy, etc.) as with taste itself and that those of unquestionably gustatory derivation (typicaly sweet and its opposite numbers sour and bitter) are just as often used in everyday speech to qualify perception that is non-gustatory, as in a sweet-natured person, a sour face, a bitter experience, etc. Although the sweet in the sweetly melodic description of Penthouse Affair (p. 328) may relate transmodally to the actual taste of sugar, honey or a ripe peach, that use of sweet is just as likely to be non-gustatory in the sense of attractive, pleasant or endearing. The second reason for excluding gustatory and olfactory anaphones from the taxonomy is that English has far fewer words descriptive of taste and even less of smell than of non-verbal sound, not to mention vision. This heavy reliance on other modes of perception (mainly tactile) to describe taste and smell explains why gustatory and olfactory anaphones are less useful in the semiotic analysis of music than those relating to sound, touch, space, mass and movement.

At the other end of the tactile spectrum from smooth, rich, lush sounds that pad holes, fill gaps and flow gently are sounds perceived as rough, coarse, grainy, uneven, choppy, harsh, bitter, sharp, piercing, etc. Excluding the more kinetic than directly tactile pair of opposites flowing-choppy, one clear example of rough, grainy sound in music is the distorted electric guitar used in some types of rock, in particular to produce the power chords of heavy metal.

In a 30-second TV ad from 1986 for the Philishave Tracer, a fully distorted power chord on electric guitar, very similar to those heard at the start of Money For Nothing (Dire Straits, 1985), accompanies footage of a man riding a red Ducati through desert scenery. It includes close-ups of spinning bike wheels cross cut with the shavers rotor blades and shots of the mans face in the bikes rear-view mirror juxtaposed with close-ups of the same guy in his shaving mirror as he attacks some serious stubble. Were obviously supposed to equate the typically male activity of shaving with the typically male excitement of riding a power bike and with a successful rock and roll lifestyle. These visual links rely partly on the well-established sonic anaphone rock power chord = motor bike, but in reality the shaver sounds much lighter (mid-range, low-volume buzz), much less powerful than the bike (full-throated roar). That obvious incongruity is counteracted in two ways: [1] a commonality of maleness between shaving and power-bike riding is taken as read; [2] the distorted guitar timbre works not only as a sonic anaphone for the bike but also as a tactile anaphone reminiscent of the not altogether unpleasant abrasive sandpaper sound and scratchy, tingling sensation of shaving. After all, both dzzzz (shaver buzz) and grrrr (bike vroom) have more in common, both in terms of touch and sound, with each other than they do with, say, babble, bang, clank, clink, ding-dong, eek, hiccup, kerrang, mmmm, oops, patter, rustle, sigh, splash, splutter, swish, tee-hee, tinkle, ugh or whisper, .22

It is worth noting that tactile anaphones, be they smooth and silky or rough and abrasive, usually relate to timbral properties of music and that the borders distinguishing them from sonic anaphones are fluid. The dividing line between tactile and kinetic anaphones is even fuzzier because touch is impossible without movement.

Since neither sound nor touch can exist without movement (energy and mass in space), both sonic and tactile anaphones should perhaps have been dealt with as subtypes of the kinetic anaphone. Indeed, all aspects of musical structuration stylising anything on a scale running from total stasis to frenetic action, are intrinsically kinetic. However, since experience has taught me that students find it easier to distinguish types of musical semiosis on the basis of different modes of sensory perception than by considering different combinations of different quantities of mass, energy and space, I have persisted in subdividing anaphones into sonic, tactile and kinetic, the latter relating strongly to elements of visual perception. Of course, this visual aspect does not mean that movement has to be seen, as any unsighted person will tell you and as any seeing person knows full well, especially if theyve experienced a storm on the high seas in total darkness. It just means that kinetic anaphones are those that are, at least for the seeing, the easiest to conceptualise in visual terms.

Kinetic anaphones relate closely to at least three of the six domains of representation that make up the embodying or combinatory (or proto-musical) level of representation discussed in Chapter 2 (pp. 60-66). Those three domains are the gross-motoric, the fine-motoric and the physical. A very brief recap may be in order here.

The gross-motoric side of kinetic anaphones is easiest to envisage in terms of humans riding, dragging, pushing, pulling, driving, flying, walking, running, marching, trudging, skipping etc. along, through, round, across, over, to and fro, up and down, in relation to a particular environment or from one environment to another. Most types of dance contain culturally stylised kinetic anaphones grooves appropriate to certain types of human body movement. Gross-motoric kinetic anaphones can also be visualised as the movement of animals en masse (birds, insects, cattle, etc.) or of objects (machinery, vehicles, trees, cornfields, bodies of water, wind, etc.).

The fine-motoric aspect of kinetic anaphones relates to smaller, lighter and more delicate types of movement, for example blinking, glittering, shimmering, rustling, fluttering, babbling, clicking, tapping, ticking, fingering, fiddling, twiddling, dripping, tickling, and so on.

The physical domain of representation gives rise to complex kinetic anaphones in which different aspects of space are key ingredients and which always also contain fine- or gross-motoric elements. These anaphones, which can be called holokinetic, are spatio-temporal and involve the interaction of one or more objects (including bodies) with another or others, or with a mass. As stated on page 61, the physical domain covers the ballistics, trajectory and kinetic relationship of a body (or bodies, including ones own) to the type of space through which it travels (or they travel), or in which it is (or they are) motionless, as well as the relationship of movement between one body (or several bodies) and others in simultaneous movement or stasis.

Spatial anaphones are a subset of holokinetic anaphones that are easy to identify. Just as the same piece of live music heard in a hotel lounge sounds radically different when performed in a cathedral, the types of acoustic space assigned to different tracks in a multi-track recording, or to the mix-down as a whole, create virtual acoustic space[s] in the listeners speakers, headphones and actual head. For example, my audio software features ready reverb templates allowing me to fake the following sorts of space: rich hall, wide open hall, concert hall, deep hall, long hall, medium hall, warm space, cavernous space, bright corridor, medium room, small room, live ambience, warm ambience, metal tank and sewer. I can also use different delay settings to create spaces like an empty urban alley, even to suggest to listeners that theyre hearing voices inside their own heads. I can apply these effects to one, more or all the tracks I record, depending on how I want them to be heard in relation to each other and on how I want the overall acoustic space of the recording to come across. I can of course also pan different tracks at various points to the left, right or centre of the recording and place them towards the back or front of the mix; and I can use pitch and EQ to make different tracks seem spatially higher or lower.

Identifying spatial anaphones in a recording lets you determine not only the positioning and relative importance of different strands in the music. It can also provide insight into the mediation of mood in the music. Do the spaces suggest, for example, something mystical or matter-of-fact, intimate or public, general or particular, open or enclosed, expansive or crowded, external and documentary or internal and psychedelic, an acoustic performance or a sci-fi scenario? And how do the spaces assigned to different strands of the music relate to each other? The following descriptions of two British recordings illustrate how important spatial anaphones and phonographic staging can be in the mediation of musical message.

[1] The lead vocals seem to be a few metres away, together with a metallic-sounding drumkit, in an acoustic space resembling that of a disused factory. Guitar fills and synthesised stabs are punched straight into your face from much closer: theyre almost inside your head.

[2] The lead vocals are yelled from what sounds like the far end of a very long corridor. Closer by, life seems to move on inexorably with smooth but rather ominous or lugubrious synth pad patterns and an insistently tinny bell sound. (Massive Attack: Unfinished Sympathy, 1991)28

Other kinetic anaphones, like those of the vocal and instrumental tracks just alluded to, move inside (or can move in and out of) such varied constellations of acoustic space. Such movement can be fast or slow, hectic or serene, jerky or smooth, regular or irregular, oscillatory or unidirectional, sudden or gradual, repeated or varied, wavy or jagged, circular or angular, or relatively motionless. The movement, or lack of it, can occur in a wide open or tightly closed space that objects or beings can enter or leave in various ways, or in which they can remain. Music is eminently suited to representing perception of all such aspects of movement through combinations of kinetic anaphones. The notion of gestural interconversion, explained next, should shed a little more light on this matter.

Diligent readers will recall the Austria and shampoo episode in Chapter 5 (p. 157, ff.), featuring the Timotei shampoo advert and the theme song from The Sound of Music. I insisted that Austria and shampoo were musogenically the same thing, arguing that point on the basis of two facts: [1] that the Austria mentioned by respondents was not any old Austria but that of the Julie Andrews character in a long dress as she strolls, arms outstretched, through a grassy summer meadow against the backdrop of distant hills which, she proclaims in song, are alive with the sound of music; [2] that the shampoo in question was not so much a plastic bottle containing viscose liquid applied to the scalp in the intimacy of a shower cabin as the Timotei shampoo adverts young blonde woman in a long dress sauntering through another summer meadow as she gathers wild flowers under the admiring gaze of a young man. A very similar type of gestural interconversion is at work in both the Austria and the shampoo scene: long flowing dresses, a leisurely walking pace, the potential sensation of summer grass against the legs, etc. The gestures immanent in both sets of images share a lot in common. So what is gestural interconversion?

Gestural interconversion is a two-way process that relies on anaphonic connections between music and phenomena perceived in relation to music. Since interconversion means the conversion into each other of two entities, gestural interconversion means two-way transfer via a communality of gesture between, on the one hand, particular sensations that seem to be both subjective and internal, and, on the other hand, particular external objects (animate or inanimate) in the material world. Gestural interconversion entails in other words both the projection of an internal sensation via an appropriate gesture on to an external object and the internalisation or appropriation of an external object through the medium of a gesture corresponding in some way to the perceived form, shape, movement, grain, density, viscosity, etc. of that object. Of course, different cultures and individuals are liable to exhibit different patterns of gestural interconversion, so there can be no universal agreement as to which particular objects relate via which particular gestures to which particular sensations and vice versa. How does this work? Lets start with some hills in the background.

Figure 9-1 shows the outline of Welsh hills that were visible on a clear day from where I used to live in Liverpool. Moel Famau, in the middle, is 35 kilometres away as the crow flies, and the range stretches 45 km in a northwesterly direction from left to right. Apart from the vertical axis of Figure 9-1, exaggerated for purposes of clarity, these facts are irrefutable. Equally irrefutable is the fact that if you put your hand about 50 cm in front of you with your fingertips at eye level, youll find that the range of hills measures about 30 cm. Youll also find that it takes roughly seven seconds (one slow bout of present time) for your fingertips to trace the ups and downs of that skyline from left to right. Three complementary types of movement are involved in completing this gesture: [1] your arm pans gradually from left to right; [2] your wrist rocks very slightly to outline the vertical contour of each hill and valley; [3] your elbow gently swivels a few degrees at each hilltop and valley floor to offset the vertical rocking and to ensure fluidity of movement and direction. A two-way process of gestural interconversion links the physical characteristics of these hills to the human movements just described. In one direction there is gestural internalisation from 45 km of external reality to 30 cm of hand gesture, quite a small-scale conversion in terms of map reading (1:150,000). In the other direction there is gestural externalisation (projection) from hand gesture to hills on a reciprocally large scale.

Figure 9-2 is a series of five shots taken from the other side of the same range of hills as shown in figure 9-1. A sweep of the hand over the hills stretches this time from left (north) to the knoll on the far right (south). The scale of gestural projection here is now down to 1:40,000 because a panoramic 33 cm hand sweep over the hills or under the cumulus clouds only covers about 13 km of external reality.

Much closer than the hills in the background, at about 25 metres from the camera, the tree line presents eight separate waves, all contained within one overall descending sweep spanning about 300 metres, or 33.3 cm at a hand-to-view scale of 1:900. Slightly closer still, at a scale of 1:600, the foreground terrain descends roughly 200 metres from left to right and is contoured by two rounded dips.

Fig. 9-4. (a) Sunny day on a beach in Baja California; (b) unidentified clip art

Figure 9-4a brings the external objects of gestural interconversion even closer. Ignoring the distant cordillera, a five-second hand gesture of 30 cm extending from your chest will trace over a kilometre of gently curved shoreline as small waves break towards you and ebb back every seven or eight seconds. Waves are also visible on the sea, as are changing areas of shadow and sunlight, both producing smooth patterns of movement a few tens of metres away. At least three different scales of gestural interconversion are at work in terms of undulation and of easy hand movements in this scene: 1:5,000 for the 1.5 km curve of the beach, 1:70 for the waves on the sea twenty metres away, and 1:20 for the small waves lapping at your feet from a distance of six metres.

You have to zoom in even further to trace the curves of the woman in Figure 9-4b. In order to see her in full figure, youd need to be at a distance of about three metres. From that distance, a five-second, thirty-centimetre sweep of the arm down the curves, exaggerated by the clothing of the day and indicated by arrows, would take you from head to toe in a few seconds at a scale of about 1:7. The general drift of this narrative should be obvious by now.

In Figure 9-5 gestural interconversion zooms in to a scale of between 1:3 and 1:2. The Virgins head, shoulders and breast are now only just over a metre away from the viewer, her hands and knees a little less, just out of touching range at 1:1. In addition to the little round bundles of baby and breasts, Morales has painted his subject with long hair (locks on the left, strands on the right), and emphasised the arc of her neck and shoulders while creating additional curvature through folds in the smooth and supple material of her flowing garments. The Morales Virgin is far from the only European female subject to be portrayed in such terms. Long hair, arc of the neck, body curvature accentuated through exposure of bare flesh or by choice of suitable fabric etc. are recurrent features in our cultures visual representations of desirable womanhood.

The obvious narrative here is that an undulant 30-cm hand gesture fitting the outline of hills and valleys in the distance, or gentle waves on the sea or of wind across a cornfield at 100 metres, or the summer foliage of a large elm, oak or lime tree at 30 metres, corresponds to the actual length of curves in the adult human body, male or female, for example round the back of the head to the neck, round the nape of the neck to the shoulders, round the shoulders to the elbow, from the elbow round the wrist to the hand and fingers, and so on. What, you may well ask, does all this have to do with music?

As described in the Austria and shampoo section of chapter 5, among the most common VVAs provided by 607 respondents on hearing, without visual accompaniment, the first of Ten Little Title Tunes (The Dream of Olwen), were, in descending order of frequency: romantic, love, [long, green] grass (usually a meadow), summer, countryside, sea, a couple [man and woman], walking, sun, [sailing] boats, pastoral, flowers, girl, woman, family, woods, coast, beach, wind, lakes, hills, gliding, fields, cornfield. The same tune also scored well above average on connotations like summer, wavy, beck (creek) and river, and it was the only one to elicit the responses slow motion, valleys, rolling [hills], long dress, long hair and, of course, the kinetic and tactile aspects of shampoo as displayed in the shiny body-of-hair swish captured as stills in figure 9-6.

The gestural common denominators, both kinetic and tactile, of all those waves on the sea, rolling hills and valleys, sandy beaches, trees, fields, long hair and dresses can be summarised in six points. [1] Long grass, flowers, corn in a field, trees and seas can all sway, undulate, ripple and flow. [2] Clouds can float, hills and valleys can roll. [3] Rivers, streams, long hair and long dresses can flow. [4] Flowing garments and long hair can sway. [5] Human movement filmed in slow motion floats or glides. [6] The ideal beach has smooth sand and a gently curving shoreline by the waves of the sea. Such observations illustrate the first premise of gestural interconversion: its shared characteristics do not derive from the unmediated objective qualities of the phenomena in question but from human gesturality, tactility, bodily movement and sensual perception which, within a given culture, can be observed as relating to the same objective phenomena hence the waving of corn and of the sea, the swaying of hair and of trees, the flowing of loose garments and of rivers, etc.

The second premise of gestural interconversion follows from the first and states that it is possible to project the same basic set of human gestures on to all matter and objects perceived, in the manner just described, as sharing the same general qualities. This premise also assumes that the phenomena in question are perceived from particular perspectives, i.e. placed at such a distance from the human and viewed at such an angle as to allow a particular type of gesture to coincide with the perceived form, shape, surface or movement of the phenomena in question. If, as we saw, hills and dales are viewed from a distance of ten kilometres, or a cornfield or meadow from a hundred metres, or a large tree or waves on the sea from twenty, or the full figure of a human from three metres, or his/her head and shoulders from one metre, etc., then the size, proportions and trajectory of a viewers gestures outlining the profile of those phenomena will be quite similar.

The third premise is a corollary of the second. Just as the same human gesture can be projected on to a set of gesturally compatible external objects, the same external phenomena can, if perceived from the relevant perspective, also be appropriated and internalised through the medium of gesture. It is this two-way process of projection and appropriation through gesture which gives rise to the term gestural interconversion.

To make the principles of gestural interconversion really clear, its worth knowing that The Dream of Olwen clocked up nothing at all in response categories involving speed, conflict, aggression, crime, asperity, fear, eruption or disorder, and nothing in the urban, North American, darkness, danger, modernity or future-time departments (see fig. 9-7, p. 343). Thats because its melody and accompaniment featured kinetic anaphones that were clearly perceived as wavy, undulating, smooth, curved, swaying, rolling, rippling, flowing and no elements of musical structure suggesting any sharp, square, angular, rough, sudden or choppy sort of movement. The notion of gestural interconversion is in other words useful in semiotic music analysis because by synaesthetically imagining suitable gestures in response to the music it allows us to concretise the sort of spaces, objects, textures and movements expressed in the music. Of course, neither hair, hills, waves, fields and trees, nor motherboards, skyscrapers, radiators and Nazi phalanxes, are to be heard literally anywhere in any music, but space and movement mediated through commonality of gestural interconversion appropriate to either of those two sets of external objects is most certainly something that music can express with considerable force and precision.

Fig. 9-7. Non-fluid (choppy/angular) gestural interconversion: (a) computer motherboard; (b) Chicago skyline; (c) radiator; (d) Nazi rally 1938

As mentioned earlier, the categories and subcategories of this simple typology of musical signs are rarely mutually exclusive. The following three examples galopping, stabbing and newscasting each illustrate how anaphones often combine sonic, tactile and kinetic aspects into one single museme stack.

The most common equine anaphone in European and North American music for the stage and the moving image must surely be the fast diddle-dum diddle-dum galop motif heard in such pieces as Rossinis William Tell overture (1829 also as tv theme music for The Lone Ranger), the signature tune for Bonanza (Livingston, 1959), and Morricones title music for both For a Few Dollars More (1965) and The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966). There may not be much tactility in this popular galop motif but its sonic and kinetic aspects are quite clear. Sonically this diddle-dum or giddy-up motif is only a very approximate stylisation of horse hooves hitting the ground in full galop. Thats partly because the animal has four, not just three legs: it takes off after its fourth hoof hits the ground (see fig. 9-8, on the dum of diddle-dum or diddledy-dum, or on the literal up of giddy-up) for a duration similar to that occupied by the other three hooves touching the ground ([a] and [b] propelling into [c] and [d] in figure 9-8). Those three, not two, other hooves should logically prompt a four-syllable onomatopoeia like diddledy-dum rather than the mere three syllables of the popular galop motif diddle-dum or giddy-up. The strongest kinetic element in the motif is the group of two quick notes the diddle or giddy propelling energy towards an agogic accent at the take-off point the dum or up.

Figure 9-9 (p. 345) is a reduction of Herrmanns famous score for the famous shower scene at 0:48:24 in Hitchcocks Psycho (1960). It is included here as a textbook example of composite anaphones in action. Of the eighteen bars cited in the example, the first twelve consist of 36 equidurational stabs (8 every 5 seconds at 96 bpm), each to be played forcefully and very loud (sff = sforzando fortissimo) with down-bow strokes (?). Such articulation creates strong, sharp, percussive, abrasive and piercing attacks for each note. Strident harmonic dissonances are added in a descending pattern so that the simultaneously sounded notes cover not just the high pitches heard on their own in bars 1-3 but progressively also encompass mid-register dissonances (bars 4-12).

Sonically, the sudden, sharp, repeated notes in high register resemble a combination of female screams of terror and the sound of a large knife being sharpened on a whetstone. Tactile and kinetic anaphones are richer in this paragon of musical horror: the sharp, piercing, painful dissonances are one, the replacement of kheek-kheek [Xi:k] (bars 1-12) with the bweep-bweep [bwi:p] of bars 13-14 another. The short, sliding bw (glissando) of those six bweeps is particularly disconcerting because it replaces the straight hacking of the first 36 kheeks with a momentary softness of attack (bw instead of kh) at the onset of each stab. That modified attack resmbles, in terms of both touch and movement, the initial resistance offered by the skin just before the knife point plunges into the body. Equally unsettling is the addition of progressively lower dissonances in bars 4-12, not so much because the hapless Marion slumps gradually down to her death as because pain occupies more and more of her entire body, starting with the high-pitched terror in her head register and gradually extending to the chest register and abdomen from short, sharp, excruciating pain to more generalised, throbbing and internal haemorrhaging, so to speak.

The kinetic anaphone of regularly repeated stabs is also disturbing, perhaps surprisingly so since regularity usually implies predictability and because predictability generally implies order rather than chaos. However, since Hitchcocks cutting of this scene is itself intentionally chaotic and disorientating (frequent and sudden changes of angle in jaggedly cut takes, etc.), Herrmanns metronomically repeated dissonant stabs work as a disturbing counterpoint, as an inexorable, almost mechanically unstoppable, counterpart to the horror behind the chaos and mayhem shown on screen.

Staccato signals of constant information is how Paul Simon (1986) characterised this composite anaphone. Hes referring of course to the rapid, irregular rhythms of news music that were so widely used throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as urgency cues identifying TV productions like Sportsnight and Capital Radio News in the UK, like Sportnytt, TV-nytt and Aktuellt in Sweden, like TF1 Tljournal Vingt Heures in France; and like This Week, Wall Street Week and The McLaughlin Group (world affairs programme) in the USA.

The kinetic aspect of these staccato signals of constant information is closely linked to its sonic character. The rhythm of this type of anaphone resembles: [1] the unpredictable patterns of dots and dashes heard while sending or receiving Morse code messages, a sound associated with immediacy and urgency since the early days of telegraphy; [2] the fast but irregular string of repeated consonants uttered by someone stammering, a sound associated with stress, worry and urgency because even individuals who dont normally stutter are more likely to do so if under pressure to say something important instantaneously. Moreover, the timbre of instruments articulating these rhythms often sounds mechanical or synthetic, i.e. unlike the normal sound and utterance of a human voice or of an acoustic instrument stating a melodic line.

In terms of touch, this sort of anaphone bears no trace of anything smooth, sweet, rich, soft, velvety, restful, dreamy, lush, fluid, flowing, rolling, rounded, wavy, swaying or viscose; but nor is it particularly rough, abrasive or eruptive. (Here the lines between touch and movement are obviously blurred.) Its short, quick notes clearly connect with fine-motoric rather than gross-motoric movement, with fingers tapping, or teeth chattering, rather than bodies bending, arms swirling or legs kicking. It more closely resembles rapid twitching, spluttering or flickering than babbling, rippling or rustling. It doesnt have enough mass (too high, too light) to be square, jerky or angular but it does have a certain sharpness: not that of being cut by a knife or razor but of something more like running your fingertips down a pebble-dash wall: no sensation of smoothness or fluidity there, just an incessant sequence of very small, hard and sharp irregularities. Given also the mechanical or synthetic timbre that often carries these motifs and given their sonic etymophony (telegraphy, stammering), little wonder that these fine-motoric kinetic anaphones (sharply twitching, flickering) were also conflated with the stuttering sound of ticker-tape machines, with teleprinters and, consequently, considered thoroughly appropriate as urgency cues for newscasting.

Diataxis (ditajiw) means disposition or arrangement. Here it refers to elements or aspects of musical structuration letting listeners know, through ordering and placement of events and sections, where they are in a piece of music, which events are more important than others, and so on. Diataxis is in that sense an apsect of musical syntax (sntajiw) but that word is avoided here for the following reason. If syntax means the formal relationships of one sign to another without necessarily considering their meaning (p. 148) and if, as we shall shortly see, diataxis includes signs that also act as style indicators and/or anaphones, then it would be inaccurate to qualify them as syntactic. There are three diatactic sign types: episodic markers, episodic determinants and form patterns.

Episodic determinants and markers, like most of the sign types presented in this chapter, had to be conceptualised because of differences in musical semiosis observed in conjunction with the reception test data referred to on several previous occasions. To be more precise, some pieces in the test battery gave rise to far more episodic associations than did others, for instance to responses like has just, after that, after a long time, about to happen, leading to, and then. How were those pieces structurally different from the non-episodic ones? Our rather obvious conclusion was that test pieces featuring more structural change were heard as more episodic than those that just chugged along in much the same vein from start to finish. In our test material we found five main structural factors operative in eliciting episodic responses: non-recurrent themes, harmonic blur, orchestral change, temporal change and unidirectional sweeps. Most of those structural change types are immediate: they put the music in a different place, so to speak, with little or no warning: the music changes key without preparatory modulation, or gets louder without an introductory crescendo, or changes register without a preliminary ascent or descent, or changes instrumentation, or melodic contour and rhythm, or underlying accompanimental figures, or metre, or tempo, or acoustic staging etc., or several of these all at once. These changes make one section of the music sound different to another (e.g. verse chorus, A theme B theme, instrumental vocal, etc.) but are they episodic?

If episode, applied to music, means a passage containing distinct material as part of a larger sequence of events, and if that passage lasts long enough to establish itself as an episode rather than as a mere phrase or event, then the sorts of change just listed are definitely episodic. However, such immediate changes do not so much mark episodic change as constitute in themselves the actual materials of difference that determine the existence of an episode. Such sounds determining the identity of one passage as distinct from another are therefore referred to as episodic determinants: they are the constituent ingredients of what sounds characteristic for the duration of the musical episode in question. They are in a manner of speaking the style indicators of a musical section, not of the whole piece.

One of the five episodic traits mentioned above the unidirectional sweep differs from the others. Since it does not in itself constitute episodic change but rather prepares it and draws attention to it, the unidirectional sweep does not determine the nature of a musical episode (as just defined): it is not the change itself but the structure marking its imminent occurrence. Two of the more episodic pieces in the reception test battery contained this sort of unidirectionl sweep. These sweeps were both melodic figures rising very quickly about one seconds worth of take-off, run-up, whoosh, scoop, swoop, etc. from mid to high register, at which point new melodic material was presented in that higher register. Neither figure lasted long enough to become an episodic determinant, nor did either of them occur in the material that immediately preceded or followed them. Since they were short events leading into and drawing attention to episodic change, not constituting it, they were called episodic markers.

Its important here to underline that this sort of episodic marker has to be unidirectional. If a line of music leaps and falls straight back down again (<>) its no more than one single event inside an episode; but if it goes in only one direction < or > and leads into the new register continuing from the point of the arrow tip, it marks an episodic change from one register to another. The same principle applies to a crescendo (< from soft to loud) or diminuendo (> from loud to soft). If the process is unidirectional it can become an episodic marker drawing attention to the louder or softer section it prepares; but if it goes there and straight back (< > or ><) it cannot: it merely draws attention to itself. Its like queuing at the post office. When you see a cashier open a new window for service its an episodic marker (from closed to open), as is also closing the window after its been open for some time. But if the cashier opens then immediately closes the window theres no episodic marker, just one single (annoying) event inside the episode of being closed.

Chord sequences work in similarly ways. Some are modulations (short chord progressions leading from one key into another), as just before the middle-eight (bridge) section of A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square or Once In A While and in so many other jazz standards that the device works not only a marker of episodic change (to a new key) but also as a style indicator signalling this sort of key change is typical for jazz standards. But at other times short chord progressions operate as loops, like in the vamp until ready introductions to jazz standards or as tonal background to melody and riffs in rock and pop music. In addition to its function as style indicator, vamp until ready can work as an episodic marker when repeated at the start of a song because it draws attention to whatever breaks the repetition in terms of either a different chord sequence or, more commonly, the entrance of the main melodic line. Riffs in pop and rock, on the other hand, rarely, if ever, funtion as episodic markers because they are repeated throughout most of either an entire piece (as kinetic anaphones), in which case they can also act as style indicators.

One of the most common types of episodic marker is the propulsive reiteration. It is exemplified in figure 9-10 and shows a stripped-down version of kit patterns you might hear from an extremely rudimentary rock drummer during the last two bars (= 8 beats or 4 seconds) of a four-bar period running in r metre at 120 bpm.

The diddle-diddle-diddle-diddle on toms packs eight notes into the final second (2 beats) of the period compared to the rate of just two notes per second (boom plus thwack) throughout the preceding three seconds (6 beats). Mid-to-low percussion notes are in other words articulated four times faster during that final second. Increasing the surface rate at the end of a period is a very common device for propelling the music towards whatever comes next, be it something new or simply a signal that the episode just ending is about to be repeated: it marks the end of one episode and the potential start of another. Such propulsion can also be generated by an increase in harmonic rhythm (the rate at which chords change), or by introducing a quick one-off scalar figure like the unidimensional upward sweep in the two episodic reception test tunes, or by repeating a short motif a few times.

Repeating a short motif a few times is a very common device for driving music forward into whatever comes next. This device, the propulsive reiteration exemplified in figure 9-10 (p. 351), is a kinetic anaphone also known as ready steady go!, sometimes as 1-2-3-go!, where steady is a repetition of ready, where 2 and 3 are repetitions of 1, and where go! is the point towards which the reiteration is propelled. Now, propulsive reiteration is a basic element of melodic construction in popular euroclassical pieces, in popular song from the Arab World, the British Isles, Russia, Scandinavia and elsewhere. However, even though all these sorts of reiteration propel movement towards whatever breaks the repetition, they only become episodic markers when their go! coincides with the start of an episode, old or new. Such episodic markers are clearest when the repeated motif is really short, as in the case of the diddle in our diddle diddle diddle diddle (actually a 1-2-3-4-go!) on page 351. The six repeated notes leading into the chorus of Abbas Fernando (1975) provide another prime example of propulsive reiteration as episodic marker. In that instance, the surface rate of notes in the vocal line does not increase: the propulsion is generated by repeating the same note at the same pitch at the same surface rate for the six syllables there was something in the producing a three-beat, 1-2-3-go! anacrusis: (1) there was, (2) something, (3) in the (go!) Its a bit like someone saying Let me tell you that, tell you that, tell you that before finally reaching I love you, I hate you or something else altogether.

Other clear examples of propulsive reiteration are found as repeated centrifugal melodic mini-swirls in two popular waltzes: Die Fledermaus (J Strauss, 1874) and the Minute Waltz (Chopin, 1847). Their kinetic character is more like that of a discus thrower circling on the spot before reaching the go! point of actually hurling the object, less like a pole vaulters run-up to the take-off point. Whatever their kinetic niceties, these sorts of reiteration are often called lead-ins or anacruses and their propulsive quality referred to as anacrustic. They gather momentum to arrive at the go! point. That point may be a new section or the start of a reprise, but it can also be the final chord or note in a piece (1-2-3-stop!), because that final sound event is always new, given that it can logically occur only once in any piece of music.

Episodic markers of finality are obvious: the fade-out of a pop song, the repeated chords at the end of euroclassical pieces, the virtuosic milking of the penultimate chord to end numbers in stadium rock gigs, the descending flourish on sitar in a r?ga performance, the final gong in gamelan music, etc. are all episodic markers of finality that are also archetypal style indicators. Finality markers can also exist inside the same piece of music. These end-of-phrase or end-of-section markers usually take the form of melodic, harmonic or rhythmic cadence patterns, also often formulaic enough to act as style indicators.

Breaks are also episodic markers. They are often used in pop and rock, as well as in jazz and dance music, and can in general terms be characterised as follows. A break starts when ongoing accompaniment patterns suddenly stop to give sonic space to, and thereby highlight, whatever occupies them. That whatever can be total musical silence (in which case the nothing is important), but it is more likely to draw attention to catch phrases in the lyrics, or to the tunes hook line, or to the skills of the drummer or of another musician, or to a point at which dancers can execute special moves, or freeze on the spot, or wave their arms in the air, etc. Obviously, breaks end when the suspended accompaniment patterns restart.

In music for the moving image, episodic markers are often used to bring affective clarity to visual narrative that may strike the viewer or gamer as confusing or incongruous. These markers are particularly clear in the short music cues used as bridges between two scenes of disparate character and mood. Imagine, for example, an episode of the popular TV soap Dallas (1978-1991) in which the scene changes from (a) burly bronzed men in hard hats as they struggle to plug an oil rig that has blown to (b) the pale blue satin sheets of the blonde prom queens bedroom as she attends to her tresses with leisurely legato sweeps of a bejewelled hairbrush. Staged in a theatre, there would be a scene change giving the audience enough time to adapt from oil rig to boudoir but on TV the cut from one to the other is absurdly instantaneous. A musical bridge lasting a few seconds helps solve this problem of narrative incongruity by first very briefly stating something compatible with the oil rig scene, for example a chordal stab that is held and cross-faded into musical elements compatible with the cossetted bedroom, most likely a string pad with rich harmonic texture underscoring a short sexaphone motif. A bridge like that would last no more than a few seconds, ending on a sonority without closure that would fade, leaving the acoustic space open for dialogue and sound effects. Such endings, called tails because they literally tail off into whatever follows them, are episodic markers of non-finality. They serve a sort of to be continued purpose, typically to bring TV viewers back into the narrative after attacks of consumerist propaganda (commercial breaks).

By form pattern is meant the order in which different sections or episodes of the music are arranged in sequence: how many sections the piece contains, how long each of them lasts in relation to the others, how many times they occur in succession, if they occur as recapitulations, etc. Unlike anaphones, genre synecdoches and episodic markers, form patterns do not signify at the level of musemes and museme stacks. Form patterns carry meaning in two basic ways: [1] as style indicators; [2] as processual devices determining how different episodes are presented in terms of order and relative importance. The assumption underlying the second of the two is of course that the order and relative importance of episodes influence the overall message of a piece.

In conventional music theory, the episodes constituting a piece of music are usually called sections and can be either referred to using terms specific to the style in question, or designated using capital letters. Two examples: [1] the verse (A) and chorus (B) sections of a pop song can be arranged to produce patterns like A1 A2 B1 A3 B2 B3 (or simply AABABB, i.e. verse 1, verse 2, chorus 1, verse 3, chorus 2, chorus 3); [2] the chorus (A) and bridge or middle eight (B) sections of a jazz standard are typically arranged to create the styles archetypal 32-bar AABA form. Both form patterns consist of two contrasting episodes but those ending with a return to A (an overall ABA scheme) are conventionally called ternary, those ending with B (the AB pattern) binary. These form pattern types can also be thought of in terms of centripetal (tending to return to and end with the A section) and centrifugal (tending to move away from the A section and to end with different material).

Jazz standards of the 1930s and 1940s are characterised not only by melodic and harmonic features particular to the style but also by their formal pattern AABA. Euroclassical sonata relies on a

, usually a ternary AABA structure where A represents the main tune part of the song, including its hook,

order: which episode follows which; which episodes are repeated consecutively and which are recapitulated; which episode starts or ends the piece;

importance: how much time is devoted to each of the pieces episodes (duration); how much each episode is highlighted by preparatory markers.

For instance, according episode x, with all its constituent musemes, more importance than episode y, with its different content, does not communicate the same thing as y being made more important than x, just as little as starting the piece with episode x and ending it with y means the same as starting with y and ending with x, or as starting with x, going to y and then back to x.

As its label suggests, this third and final main sign type uses particular sounds to identify a particular musical style and often, by connotative extension, the cultural genre to which that musical style belongs. There are two main categories of style flag: those that establish a home style or musical idiom style indicators and those that refer from inside a home style to a foreign style and to the genre associated with that style genre synecdoches. Style flags of both types use different combinations of different aspects of duration, rhythm, timbre, tonality, spatiality, form, etc. to determine style identity and these combinations often include structures that simultaneously work as anaphones, episodic markers or as both. They let listeners instantaneously know if theyre hearing 1970s disco rather than zouk, rococo chamber music rather than death metal, glitch dub rather than Gregorian plainchant, mbaqanga rather than Muzak, an Elizabethan madrigal rather than a low-church hymn, a r?ga performance rather than a romantic pop ballad, a national anthem rather than a tv detective theme, and so on ad infinitum.

Perhaps the most obvious sort of style flag, be it style indicator or genre synecdoche, is instrumental. For example a string quartet (two violins, viola and cello) indicates string quartet, not barbershop quartet or glitch dub, just as the standard guitar band line-up (lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass guitar and drumkit) indicates a particular type of rock, not a madrigal group or gamelan ensemble. Vocal types or mannerisms can also be clearly indicative of musical style, for example the lead vocalist and his two or three male backing vocalists for doo-wop, or the authentic and individual vocal persona cultivated by male singer-songwriters performing serious lyrics.

Of course, tonal vocabulary, rhythmic configurations, volume, form and so on are all operative in communicating one style rather than another. For example, music using only a few chords (rarely inverted) but sporting plenty of vocal and instrumental inflection (of particular types) might be regarded as indicative of blues rather than of Viennese classicism, whereas plenty of different chords (frequently inverted) and much less variation in terms of vocal or instrumental inflection might be regarded as indicating Viennese classicism rather than blues.

A style indicator that type of style flag which contributes to the establishment of a home musical style. Style indicators are in other words those aspects of musical structure that state the compositional norms and identity of a given style and that tend to be constant for the duration of an entire piece. They lay down the basis of the home style without which genre synecdoches (p. 358, ff.) cannot exist and into which the latter must be imported from outside. Apart from the sorts of style flag mentioned in the previous two paragraphs, it is worth adding that obvious style indicators occur in dance music where characteristic rhythmic configurations (waltz, tango, twist, samba, etc.) tend for obvious reasons to remain constant for the duration of the piece. Episodic markers of propulsion and finality can also act as style indicators. It is, for example, easy to distinguish between the way in which final cadences are milked in a euroclassical symphony and in a stadium rock gig. Similarly, a rapidly rising scalar figure (or a Stamitz-style crescendo, or a Mannheim rocket) is more likely to provide propulsion in a euroclassical symphony than in a rock recording whose propulsive episodic markers are much more likely to be articulated as a drum fill on toms leading to a downbeat cymbal crash.

The second category of style flag is the genre synecdoche. Synecdoche means a figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole, as in the expression all hands on deck, implying, at least from the captains viewpoint, that a sailors brawn is worth more than his brain. A musical synecdoche is therefore a set of musical structures imported into a musical home style that refer to another (different, foreign, alien) musical style by citing one or more elements supposed to be typical of that other style when heard in the context of the home style. By including part of the other style, the imported sounds allude not only to that other style in its entirety but also to the complete genre of which that other musical style is but a part.

Herrmanns murder music for the shower scene in Psycho (fig. 9-9, p. 345), played in a concert or radio context to popular music listeners who do not recognise the piece, might well be perceived as a genre synecdoche for the following reason. Since it sounds more like the work of, say, Penderecki than of Cline Dion, it might produce the style reference modern art music connoting, as genre synecdoche, avantgarde Angst rather than, as composite anaphone, murder by multiple stabbing in a popular horror film.

Genre synecdoches operate in many types of music, not least in well-known works from the euroclassical repertoire. Im thinking here of a museme stack consisting of a long held note (drone or pedal point) over which a simple melody is played. This museme stack turns up in the pastoral symphonies from both J. S. Bachs Christmas Oratorio (1734) and Handels Messiah (1741) as well as at the start of Beethovens Pastoral Symphony (1808). With its drone and harmonic stasis, this museme stack was out of place in the urbane musical idiom of euroclassical traditions which featured no droned instruments but plenty of chord changes. That meant it could be used as a device referring from inside the civilised classical idiom to other music on the outside, more specifically to the music of Central Europes agrarian proletariat. That musematic device was in other words not only a style reference from inside a home musical style to another on the outside; it also referred, by extension and connotation, to the people, culture and lifestyle on the outside. Thats why those familiar at that time with the European classical idiom, could recognise that other music as country or pastoral. Its also why Bach and Handel found it handy for passages involving sheperds keeping watch over their flocks by night, and why Beethoven could use it to suggest the awakening of cheerful feelings upon arriving in the country.

Unlike anaphones, genre synecdoches connote paramusical semantic fields another place, another time in history, another culture, other sorts of people not by synaesthetic or structural homology, but by the intermediary of another (foreign) musical style. Since the intermediate foreign style is only one part of a larger set of cultural phenomena (way of life, attitudes, perceived environment, clothing, behaviour, etc.) as viewed by the home styles audience, the foreign style acts as synecdoche for that larger set of foreign phenomena. Put simply, genre synecdoches contain two stages of semiosis in a connotative chain: [1] from certain sounds considered, rightly or wrongly, as typical for a foreign musical style to the totality of that same style; and [2] from that style to the rest of the culture of which that foreign style is, rightly or wrongly, thought to be part.

Much use is made of instrumental or vocal timbre and technique to produce genre synecdoches. Among the more stereotypical Western notions about the geo-ethnic identity of vocal or instrumental sound are the following twenty equations: [1] quena flute, panpipes (zampoas), charango and bombo drum = the Andes; [2] shakuhachi and koto = Japan; [3] accordon musette = Paris in the inter-war years; [4] tin whistle, uileann [!Il9n] pipes and keening (caoine) = Ireland; [5] Highland pipes, pibroch (piobaireachd), Scotch snaps = Scotland; [6] steel drums = Trinidad; [7] castanets and flamenco guitar = Spain; [8] mariachi trumpets = Mexico; [9] bouzouki = Greece; [10] balalaika = Russia; [11] ud, ney and darbuka = the Arab world; [12] bottleneck guitar and dobro = the deep rural south of the USA; [13] sitar, shenhai, tablas and adult women with girly voices = India; [14] erhu, pipa, qin, sheng, guan and gong = China; [15] gamelan metalophones = Indonesia; [16] digeridoo = Aboriginal Australia; [17] women singing semitone and whole-tone dyads = Bulgaria; [18] Inuit competitive song (katajjaq); [19] Mongolian throat singing; [20] Alpine yodelling, etc.

Tonal vocabulary is also often used to produce genre synecdoches. Musicians refer to blues scales, Gypsy scales, Arab scales (including Hijaz and Kurd), medieval ecclesiastical modes, pseudo-Russian guitar tuning, Celtic pentatonicism, Chinese pentatonicism, and so on. Perhaps the most familiar example of a different tonal vocabulary to connote others elsewhere, at least to Northern Europeans and North Americans, is the genre synecdoche linking the phrygian mode with all things Spanish, as in Rimsky-Korsakovs Capriccio Espagnol (1887), Bizets Carmen (1875) and Rodrigos Concierto de Aranjuez (1940), including Miles Daviss version of the piece on Sketches of Spain (1959).

In addition to the frequent use of tonal vocabulary and vocal or instrumental timbre to connote others elsewhere, anaphones of any type can in fact also double as genre synecdoches. For example, by importing Scotch snaps and pentatonicism into the home style of European art musics orchestral tradition, Dvo?k was able to produce his Symphony from the New World (1893): those imports gave his work a convincing flavour of others elsewhere without radically disrupting the symphonic home idiom.

Other genre synecdoches occur in pop music. In Abbas Fernando (1975), for example, you hear quasi-Andean instruments and instrumental techniques, irregular periodicity, an extremely sparse bass line, military figures on snares but no other part of the drumkit, and vocal delivery resembling more recited speech than the strophically regular patterns of pop song. These devices situate the tunes verses in a verbally and musically foreign there-and-then that contrasts with the here-and-now home territory of the tunes choruses, complete with their mid-1970s easy-disco backing patterns featuring full drumkit and constant bass riffs, their stropically regular vocal phrases, and their overall regular periodicity (4 4 = 16 bars). Of course, the Andean elements in Fernando can only be genre synecdoches in the here and now context of Abbas home style; but they would be style indicators in the original style and genre context from which they were borrowed: Huayno music from Peru, Bolivia or Chile. Whether the style flag is genre synecdoche or style indicator all depends on where home is, so to speak.

Sometimes a genre synecdoche can become a style indicator if it is repeatedly used over time until it no longer sounds foreign in the home style. For example, from originally connoting things like Hawaii and sunshine in early styles of Country music in the USA, whining steel guitar glissandi gradually became style indicators of mainstream Country music and ceased to operate as genre synecdoches connoting Hawaii or sunshine. Such incorporation of foreign elements into a home style is of course part and parcel of musical acculturation and of semiotic processes in which musics meanings and social functions are renegotiated over time from one audience to another under different social, cultural and technological conditions. The distinction between genre synecdoche and style indicator is in other words useful because it allows us to discuss musical meaning from a historical (diachronic) perspective.

Indeed, the reservation expressed in the last sentence of the previous paragraph applies to all the sign types mentioned so far. However, this obvious point of cultural relativity and dialectics in understanding the construction of meaning in music is beyond the scope of this paper. The main aim here has been simply to suggest the different ways in which musical structures can be related to their perceived meanings, i.e. to their connotations, uses and paramusical contexts. I feel that not only traditional (Schenkerian or otherwise) studies but also analysis posing as semiotic might be well advised to discuss the elements they feel constitute the works they hold under the microscope as if those elements had some symbolic value. I have merely sketched here how such types of connotative signification might be systematised.

I remember my mother telling me as a child dont worry about me Im fine, all in a very sad voice [X00]. I also remember the confusion that statement caused me: did she mean the words dont worry about me I feel fine or should I listen to the music in her statement: Please worry about me I feel miserable?

The second interpretation was probably nearer the truth than the first, not least because of the narrative context of her statement: she was not always a happy person and shed just been involved in a domestic argument. Another reason for prioritising the music of her statement was that her facial expression, body posture and gestures (in this case, lack of gesture), all aligned with her vocal timbre, volume, intonation, diction and speech rhythm but contradicted the meaning of her words. That said, I remember opting, as a child with the notion that words were the domain of educated adults, to take my mothers dont worry about me at denotative face value. That decision prompted my father to chide me for being insensitive even if I objected but she told me not to worry. So I reverted to the more instinctive (childish?) mode of interpretation, paying much more attention to peoples music and less to their words. But reading people on the basis of their music (timbre, volume, inflexion, posture, facial expression, etc.) and ignoring their words was also wrong, apparently, because if I responded to mothers plaintive tone rather than to her words, by asking her sympathetically whats the matter?, I risked insulting her pride and hearing her retort: I said I was fine. Why dont you ever listen to what I say? It was, as they say, a lose-lose situation!

It took me many years to realise how I could interpret my mother saying [plaintive ] dont worry about me [normal ] as an integral statement, despite its contradictions. It actually meant something like Im very sad and I find it hard to put on the brave face of self-control I know that grown-ups should. So, please show me some kindness but respect the fact that I at least know Im supposed to put on a brave face, even if I expect you to see through it. I was slow to learn that you could consider the narrative context, the scenario, the body language, the words and the music of my mothers complex statements as a whole to be grasped instantaneously. It was a musogenic statement in the same way as the clear musical moods, mentioned in Chapter 2, where they were expressed as pallid verbal approximations like desperately troubled in the midst of calm and beauty, or sick of the world and feeling alive because of that disgust.

The dont worry about me anecdote illustrates at least three important issues of musical meaning, the first two of which have been discussed in earlier chapters. This chapter concentrates on the third point.

1. Musical meaning is never created by the sounds on their own. They always exist in a syntactic, semantic and socioculturally pragmatic context upon which their semiosis depends.

2. Precision of musical meaning does not equal precision of verbal meaning or that of any other symbolic system. Hence, its logocentrically apparent contradictions of meaning (see pp. 64-66; 157, ff.) are irrelevant and should be treated as musically coherent.

3. Vocal timbre, pitch, intonation, inflexion, accentuation, diction and volume, plus the speed, metre, rhythm and periodicity of vocal delivery are indicators of the affective disposition communicated by an individual speaker or singer using those means of expression.

The third point, just mentioned, is illustrated in clip 00 which uses a twelve-second extract from the film Taxi Driver (1976, see Fig. 9-1 and Table 9-1, p. 369) to highlight central aspects of links between voice and personality. In that extract, Travis, the films main taxi driver character, played by Robert De Niro, practises his famous question are you talking to me? in the mirror, with the camera as that mirror. The De Niro character is appalled by the cruelty and decadence he meets in his job but he is also a rather nondescript loser who has exercised his second-amendment right and acquired a gun to bolster his confidence. Now he feels able to face the hoodlums he meets but his low self-esteem still demands that he prepare for eventual confrontations by practising his Are you talking to me? line in the mirror. He utters three variants of that question. Please note that the timings in brackets, below, refer to clip 00 (see Table 9-1, p. 369), not to their position in the actual film.

It takes De Niro less than two seconds to say the line and he pauses over two seconds between each time he does so (0:30, 0:34, 0:38). Leaving aside gesture, posture and facial expression for the moment and concentrating solely on the sound of De Niros voice, minor differences of inflection, intonation, volume and accentuation can be discerned. The first time he asks the question (0:30) his voice is low-key but quite rapid with the quick but substantial rise of pitch normally used in English to questions expecting the answer yes or no, but it does sound a little bit sudden, as if he had been taken off guard. The second utterance (0:34) is slightly slower, a little more deliberate and has clearer diction, suggesting that the imaginary low-life interlocutor may not have heard him the first time. The third utterance (0:38) is once again quite low-key but includes slightly more emphasis on me and a little less on talking, this shift in accentuation underlining his personal involvement in the imagined encounter. Apart from these minor variants, it should be noted that De Niro does not raise (the volume of) his voice in anger or frustration, and that his is the normal voice of a young, probably white, North American, English-speaking male. In fact, without the narrative context and without De Niros body language, there is nothing remarkable about his vocal persona in this scene any more than Travis himself is supposed to be a remarkable personality, even though his distinct lack of charisma may be what makes him narratively interesting.

Given that this relatively normal, neutral and uncharismatic personality has a correspondingly normal, neutral and uncharismatic vocal persona, it ought to be possible to replace his voice with others in order to understand how certain vocal elements are compatible or incompatible with other simultaneous aspects of non-verbal communication. Well deal first with the latter in the Taxi Driver mirror scene, referring to clip 00 The Vocal Persona Commutations (see Table 9-1, p. 369).

The fact that were in quite a noisy and untidy kitchen and that the young man is white, unshaven and wearing what appears to be an grey flannel or denim air-force jacket tells us quite a lot. It rules out vocal personae who are children (6:20, 6:25, 7:15), women, old men, African-American-sounding or from the higher echelons of society (4:05), unless theyre slumming it, of course. It also rules out robots (3:03), death-metal monsters (3:40), chipmunks (6:25) or anything else that doesnt look or sound like a Caucasian male, between 25 and 50 years of age and a member of the popular classes. But there is more in the visuals (0:30-0:45) that narrows down the vocal commutation possibilities.

Since De Niro is about one metre away from the camera, alternative voiceovers cannot sound too close (3:17, 3:57) or too far away (6:40). For example, the repugnant intimacy of the lecherous voice (3:17) only works if De Niros face is in extreme close-up (3:30, 6:50). Obviously, then, one element of vocal persona is its perceived proximity. Another element is acoustic space: the monster, big guy and evil god voices, for instance (3:40, 6:16, 6:59), have all been given generous amounts of reverb incompatible with Traviss kitchen.

The first time (0:30, 0:52) Travis asks the question he is at the far right edge of the screen with his body facing screen left. He turns his head towards us, as if just having heard something coming from the direction of the camera. He looks surprised, his eyebrows are slightly raised and his head tossed back a bit. It is the look of someone literally taken aback. However, there is nothing except the immediate narrative context that rules out the possibility of pleasant surprise, which is why the first baby talk voiceover (1:35) works well if viewers imagine the camera being the babys point of view and that the De Niro character is a proud father, suprised and delighted by his infants happy and communicative gurgling as he walks past.

For the second version of the question (0:34, 1:03) De Niro has half turned toward the mirror/camera, tossed his head back a bit more and raised his eyebrows higher. Once again, it is mainly the narrative context that rules out a possibly positive interpretation of Traviss body language and which lead us to believe that this more clearly taken aback posture is more likely to express affront and irritation than surprised delight. Even his teeth, visible for a short moment in an unsmiling mouth, may suggest an attitude of confrontation. Moreover, he seems to be looking down his nose at his imagined interlocutor, and since his diction and accentuation are slightly more forceful than before, the baby talk voiceover of the delighted dad is less convincing here. Furthermore, the despondent, depressed and weak voiceovers (3:57, 6:46) align badly with De Niros posture, facial expression, accentuation and diction during these three seconds.

The third version (0:38, 1:25) is gesturally the clearest. His body is turned a little more towards us (the camera/mirror/imagined interlocutor), as he points to his own chest in sync with to me. Yet again, prior knowledge of Traviss character and story will most likely lead viewers to interpret his grin as insolent, and his hand gesture as expressing personal affront. However, without such prior knowledge and with the addition of a few sonic correctives to the narrative (baby gurgling, mother going aaah!, as in how cute!), are you talking to me?, spoken by a personally delighted and surprised father, aligns quite convincingly with this third version of the famous question (c. 1:50, 2:20).

Several vocal persona commutations do not work because of problems with lip sync (synchronisation). For example, stereotypical robot voices (3:03) tend to apply equal durations for each syllable a non-human speaking trait if ever there was, while depressed and despondent statements (3:57) are much slower than the rate at which De Niro delivers Traviss famous question in a normal speaking voice. Similarly, whispering and other types of vocal close-up are incompatible not only with the lack of visual close-up in the Taxi Driver sequence but also with its speed of delivery: whispering has to be slower than talking because it has to compensate for its lack of voiced consonants and clear vowel sounds, while many types of intimate statement are unsuitable if delivered in a rapid tempo (e.g. I love you at breakneck speed).

None of the observations just made about the Vocal Persona Commutations clip should come as a surprise. As Hughes et al. (2004: 296) remark:

[L]isteners who hear voice samples can infer the speakers socio-economic status, personality traits, and emotional and mental state Listeners exposed to voice samples are also capable of estimating the age, height, and weight of speakers with the same degree of accuracy achieved by examining photographs Independent raters are also capable of matching a speakers voice with the persons photograph over 75% of the time.

Indeed, the relationship between an individual voice and its unique personal identity has given rise to the voice print branch of the security industry, complete with its biometric claims about defeating credit card fraud or ensuring that prisoners incarcerated in their homes or out on temporary passes [are] where they were supposed to be. Whether or not the scientific sales spiel of voice print marketeers has any validity is not the point here, although incredulity may be warranted, bearing in mind the technical crudity and soico-linguistic incompetence of most corporate voice recognition phone systems. The point is that insights about congruence between individual voice and personal identity are nothing new. Indeed, the very word person contains the morpheme son, meaning sound, and Latins personare literally means to sound through (per), hence to sound forth, to proclaim, etc. Moreover, the original meaning of the Latin word persona is a mask as warn by actors in Greek and Roman drama. Its transferred meanings of enacted role, personality, etc. derive from the fact that revealing the true nature of a dramatic character involved projecting the voice of that individual through the mask worn by the actor playing that role. His or her voice had literally to sound through the mask vox personans out into the auditorium, through the audiences ears and into their brains.

Links between voice and personality are also clear from numerous Google sessions featuring search strings including voice, vocal, persona and personality. Although descriptive adjectives of voices were, as we shall see, far from uncommon, another frequently recurring type of voice characterisation related, tautologically enough, voice to personality. Among the more striking examples of persona descriptors of Anglo-US singing voices collected so far are (artists in brackets) hard-edged sexual exuberance (Chaka Khan), impish chirp (Katryna in The Nields), [they looked and sang like] Barbie dolls (Wilson Philips), cuddly vocal personality (Beverly Sill), a nervous teenager, fearful of being rejected (Buddy Holly), an angry smurf (Eminem) and, finally, [she is the] Western mythical girl/woman, heartbroken yet resilient and entirely feminine [a throbbing edge to her voice], the edge between vulnerability and willfulness (Linda Ronstadt).

None of these voice descriptions will sound very scientific to the sceptical reader: they are more likely to come across as highly subjective, at best as amusing or imaginative. However, the fact that [i]ndependent raters are capable of matching a speakers voice with the persons photograph over 75% of the time, the existence of voice print companies, and the patterns of congruence and incongruence in the Taxi Driver commutation clip, not to mention the etymology of the word person[a] itself, all suggest that well-established patterns of linking voice with personality do exist and that such links can be verified interubjectively in given cultural contexts. We shall shortly return to these links and to their usefulness in discussing the meaning of singing voices, the central point of this chapter, but it is essential to be aware of other approaches to the issue of describing vocal sound.

The musical properties of vocal sound, spoken or sung, can in general be understood and verbalised using one or more of three main perspectives: [1] the physical techniques of its production (poetic perspective); [2] its measurable physical attributes as sound (acoustic); [3] its perception, interpretation and effects (aesthesic).

The poetic perspective focuses by definition on how particular parts of the human body are used to produce particular vocal sounds, e.g. larynx, throat, mouth, jaw, tongue, nose, lungs, diaphragm, shoulders, chest, head. Recurrent concepts are breathing, control, projection and register (chest, mixed, head, falsetto). Now, as we shall see later in this chapter, the ability to reproduce, at least roughly, a vocal sound can help us understand its meaning. Thats why some familiarity with the physical implications of the terms just mentioned can be useful in identifying the body posture (shoulders, chest, head, etc.) and facial expression (mouth, jaw, nose, etc.) most conducive to the production of a particular vocal sound. That knowledge in its turn contributes to insights about the emotional state of the person[a] producing the vocal sound in question.

The acoustic perspective focuses on the physical properties of vocal sound, i.e. on volume (dynamics, intensity), attack, envelope, decay, fundamental pitch, overtones (partials, transients, harmonics, sound spectrum), etc. The number of possible variations in these quantifiable parameters is virtually infinite; their combination forms the physical basis of the enormous variation of sounds that human voices can produce and of how those sounds are perceived. Differing values in different parameters produce the complex phenomenon we simply refer to as timbre and which Riemann, one of musicologys most notable father figures, in a moment of similar simplicity defined as the quality which differentiates sounds of the same pitch.

Now, there is no room here to explain even the rudiments of acoustic physics in relation to the human voice and its perception. Readers are instead referred to a wealth of literature, some of it online, some of it dealing with correlations between the measurable physical properties of particular sounds and their perception. That said, basic awareness of parameters like fundamental pitch, overtones, intensity, attack and envelope can, by drawing attention to the physical properties of a particular sound, refine procedures of commutation (e.g. changing the tone spectrum to check on possible changes of perceived effect) and lead to greater precision of semiotic analysis.

The third perspective is aesthesic, i.e. characterised by how sounds are perceived, interpreted, reacted to and used by those who hear them. As weve repeatedly stated, since this book is aimed primarily at musics users, I focus mainly on the aesthesic perspective and this chapter is no exception. So, Ill try, in what follows next, to sort out the various ways in which we seem to verbalise our perception of different vocal sounds. Then, after an excursion discussing basic differences between speaking and singing, the chapter will end with suggestions about how categories of vocal persona can be used in the semiotic analysis of music.

Since 2006, I have, off and on, been trawling through websites looking for various combinations of voice, vocal or voiceover with words like quality, timbre, persona, personality and character. In addition to having annoyed students, friends and colleagues by asking them to describe voices to me, I have also taken an interest in vocal casting, a specialist profession in which verbal descriptions of voice play an essential part. For example:

Seeking voiceover talent who can recreate a female witch voice for an animated feature. The project involves an English dub of a Russian animated feature The witch is also very old, around 70.

Also seeking a counsellor voice. High pitched and whiny This character is middle-aged.

Heres a character description circulated by a Hollywood agency looking for computer game voiceover artists.

X is the comically annoying, shape-shifting spirit of an ancient Druid Priest who serves as a kind of guide to [the hero] throughout the ages, as well as being a bothersome pest. He pops up unexpectedly to give advice, frequently at less than opportune moments, although he basically means well. He has a sarcastic, dry wit and is an irritating, amusing, occasionally caring and sincere presence that [the hero] has little choice but to tolerate throughout time. Since he can become anyone or anything, he exhibits a wide variety of voices and personalities. [This character is] a sophisticated elder voice in the range of Sean Connery or Ian McKellan, as Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, with comedic undertones. Vocal Quality: should be older and wise-sounding, but also with a Celtic-type accent

That neither of these two adverts describe voice from the poetic or acoustic perspective is hardly surprising since the jobs arent for musicologists, singing teachers or acousticians. On the other hand, the paucity of aesthesic sound-descriptive words, given their denotative clarity and simplicity, does seem a little strange just high-pitched and whiny for the counsellor and nothing else. Is this type of descriptor less relevant than others when advertising for a voice relating to a specific dramatic personality? To answer that question we need to explain our aesthesic voice-descriptive categories. These categories are based on observations made from: [1] student comments in popular music analysis seminars since 1992; [2] online descriptions of speaking and voices; [3] comments from a voice casting agent in direct response to specific questions (see p. 000). Table 9-2 (p. 378) includes examples of descriptors from these three sources, arranging them in the following three principal categories

[1] Sound descriptors directly denote perceived qualities of sound. Apart from the sample of adjectives listed in Table 9-2, a large number of vocal verbs could be added to the list, including babble, bark, bawl, belch, bellow, bleat, blubber, boom, buzz, caterwaul, chant, chatter, chuckle, chirp, cluck, complain, cough, croon, cry, declaim, denounce, drone, exclaim, gargle, gasp, giggle, growl, grumble, gurgle, hiccup, hoot, howl, hum, lament, laugh, lilt, moan, mumble, mutter, proclaim, pronounce, quack, rasp, recite, roar, scream, screech, shout, shriek, sigh, snap [at], snarl, snigger, snore, snort, sob, spit, splutter, squawk, squeak, stammer, stutter, twitter, ululate, wail, warble, weep, wheeze, whimper, whinge, whisper, whistle, whoop, yammer, yap, yawn, yell, yelp and yowl. The human voice, lungs, mouth and nose can between them produce all those sounds.

[2] Transmodal metaphors like rough, smooth, velvety and gravelly connote sound on the basis of homologies from the other senses. These descriptors are like anaphones in reverse in that they denote mainly kinetic and tactile sensations that are transferred to the perception of sound. A longer list of transmodal metaphors, most of them applicable to vocal sound, is included under Instrumental timbre on page 293.

[3] Persona descriptors seem, perhaps unsurprisingly after our account of links between voice and personality, to be the most common type of vocal characterisation. They can be divided into four subcategories.

e.g. high-pitched,* whiny*; squeaky, booming, low-pitched, deep, full-throated, gravelly, gruff, breathy, husky, guttural, distinct, harsh, indistinct, muffled, plaintive, rasping, roaring, shrill, stammering, loud, soft, quiet, monotone, lispy, foghorn, hoarse, throaty

e.g. sweet, smooth, rough, rounded, sharp, angular, velvety, scratchy, piercing, textured, clean, clear, shaky, wobbly, brassy, strained, grainy, gravelly

distinctive voices e.g. Sean Connery or Ian McKellan;* Clint Eastwood, the Clint Eastwood IS Dirty Harry guy, The Smurfs, Donald Duck, Richard Attenborough, Orson Welles, Morgan Freedman, Billy Holiday; Elvis Presley, Kate Bush, Bjrk, Maria Callas, Elba Ramalho

3b. Demographic e.g.| female, male; | very old, around 70, middle-aged, older; young, child | Celtic accent; African American, French, Asian, Southern [US], British, upper class, working class, from the country

traits means well*, caring*, sincere*, kind, friendly| cute, cuddly, sweet, nice | wise, intelligent, controlled, well spoken, confident, regal | arrogant, dramatic, over-the-top, extravert | willful, determined, courageous | energetic, flamboyant, bubbly, cheeky, cheery, comical*, coquette, jaunty, playful, keen, eager, sassy | interesting, complicated, quirky, annoying,* bothersome,* eccentric, cartoony | hip, cool, sophisticated,* sensual, seductive, sexy | vulnerable, embarrassed, scared, edgy, nervous, angry, frustrated, irritated, exasperated, bitter | dark, mysterious, introvert | sad, depressed, heartbroken, miserable, anguished | melancholy, bored, bland, nondescript, neutral |intimate, subdued, laid-back, relaxed, soft spoken, humble, simple, innocent, childlike | angelic, ethereal | raw, rude, tough, rugged, gritty, macho, aggressive | devious, slimy, sleazy, nasty, evil, petty | sardonic, sarcastic,* dry wit,* ironic, acerbic |

archetypes witch, counsellor, Druid Priest, guide, elder; bitch, little boy, little girl, heroine, hero, leading woman, leading man, mother, father, evil queen, loving mother, princess, vamp, villain, monster, alien, soldier, old wise man, big boss, fat cat, gangster, robot, sissy, miser, nervous teenager, Barbie doll, imp, suicidal student, lager lout, football hooligan, wiseguy, nerd, geek, evil child, dirty old man, etc.

Subcategory 3a, Named persons with distinctive voices, is often found in reviews, presumably to give readers an idea of what sort of vocal sound to expect from a record they have yet to hear. My unjustifiably disparaging remark that Portisheads Beth Gibbons, in Western Eyes (1997), sounds like an under-age Billie Holiday belongs to this descriptive subcategory.

Subcategory 3b, Demographic descriptors, covers the gender and age, as well as the ethnic, cultural, social and economic background, of the vocal persona in question. These descriptors are very common in characterisations of both singing and speaking voices.

Psychological and emotional descriptors (subcategory 3c) are the most common of all. They are mainly adjectives qualifying the feelings, state of mind, attitude or morality of the vocal persona in question.

Subcategory 3d, Archetypal descriptors, combines traits from all the other categories into archetypal or stereotypical units of personality, sometimes in the guise of professions (priests, teachers, etc.), more often as narrative roles (heroes, villains, victims, lovers, parents, sages, witches, wizards, fools, tricksters, etc.). This subcategory has obvious advantages and drawbacks. Consider, for example, the following extract from a review of Audio Bullys 2005 album Generation.

[T]he intro welcomes back Simon Franks pot-smoking, pill-popping, wife-beating, bottle-lobbing, yes I do live on a council estate thank you very much, vocal persona

Even though pot-smoking, pill-popping, wife-beating and bottle-lobbing may derive from the duos lyrics, those epithets also connote the sort of voice most urban UK residents would associate with (male) slob behaviour (uneducated, careless, thoughtless, self-centred), not least because the activities of wife beating and bottle lobbing imply a specific (and severely impaired) emotional state as well as specific body postures, breathing patterns, etc. Restricting ourselves to words listed in Table 9-2 (p. 378), it is much more likely that the vocal persona in question is loud and booming rather than soft or muffled, brassy rather than wobbly, working-class rather than upper-class, arrogant rather than humble, over-the-top rather than subdued, etc, etc., in fact the sort of voice associated with football (soccer) hooligans (typically loud, male and working-class) and lager louts (vocally similar to soccer hooligans but with bottle lobbing as a likely additional trait).

The advantage of epithets like bottle-lobbing and lager lout is that they each encapsulate in a single concept a wide range of behavioural, psycho-social and vocal characteristics. The disadvantage is that epithets like lager lout are culturally restrictive: only those familiar with relatively recent phenomena in UK popular culture are likely to grasp the social and vocal implications of lager lout. As for the final epithet the yes I do live on a council estate thank you very much vocal persona, it would take another chapter to convincingly explain council estate and all its relevant connotations, yet another to provide a viable socio-linguistic analysis of Yes I do live and the final thank you very much. In short, while the semantic efficiency of such epithets is undeniable within a restricted socio-cultural sphere, their connotations may well be meaningless to the rest of humanity, unless adequate equivalents can be identified in other cultural contexts.

Despite problems of cultural specificity, there is little doubt that aesthesic descriptors are in much wider general use than their poetic or acoustic counterparts and that persona descriptors, especially the demographic, psychological and archetypal subcategories, are particularly popular. This observation is substantiated by a Hollywood professional specialising in vocal casting for video games and animated productions for film and TV. Here are two abbreviated extracts from email correspondence I had with her on the subject.

The biggest problem they have when they first contact me is that they describe body type, hair color, [etc.] I often need to ask more questions, such as age, accent, vocal quality, personality traits, quirks, and temperament

Almost always. Most frequently requested are little boy, little girl, 20s heroine, 20s hero, leading man, evil queen, villain, monster, alien, soldier, wise old man, big boss, fat cat, gangster.

Of course, none of the aesthesic vocal description categories discussed so far are mutually exclusive. For example, a particular kind of witch voice (descriptor category 3d) might also be described as high-pitched and cackling (category 1), scratchy and piercing (2), as sounding like an angry and evil (3c) eighty-year-old (3b) version of the Annette Benning character in American Beauty (3a). Moreover, many descriptors bridge two or more categories: rasping, for example, may be most commonly used to qualify sound (category 1), but the act of rasping (using a rasp as a coarse file in the original sense of the word) has as much to do with touch and movement (category 2) as with sound. Similar observations apply to words like scratchy, piercing, clean, shaky, strained and gravelly. Indeed the whole point of introducing the categories just mentioned is not to create some sort of watertight taxonomy a fruitless task in view of musics synaesthetic properties (p. 60, ff.) but to provide insights into the various ways that vocal sound is popularly perceived and described on an everyday basis. The aim of that exercise is in its turn to develop richer and more nuanced descriptions of what a vocal sound can communicate.

[C]lothing for a particular activity or an actors clothes for a part are, according to The Oxford Concise English Dictionary (1995), two common meanings of the word costume. With expressions like national costume, notions of group identity are added to the concept. In simple terms of perception, someone wearing a swimming costume is probably dressed for swimming (although it may be just a photo shoot), someone wearing the garb of a sixteenth-century Italian nobleman might be acting in Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet (or just going to a fancy dress party), and a man in a tartan kilt and tweed jacket might have some intimate ties with the Scottish Highlands (or might be a complete fake). Costume is etymologically related to custom (a particular established way of behaving) and semantically to the noun uniform, meaning distinctive clothing worn by members of the same body, i.e. another type of costume signalling group identity.

Vocal costume is a metaphorical expression meaning those aspects of phonation serving the three same sorts of function as literal costumes do: [1] to more easily carry out a particular activity; [2] to assume a role or to act a part; [3] to signal a particular group identity and/or to conform to a given set of cultural norms. Vocal costumes are something people put on like clothes for any or all of the reasons just mentioned: they are used on an everyday basis in both speaking and singing, as the following discussion will hopefully illustrate.

Phone voices provide a rich resource for studying vocal costumes, most probably because talking on the phone involves a particular type of sensory dislocation. Its one-to-one audio close-up (if the line is good) but without the visual, kinetic and potentially tactile aspects of one-to-one close encounters. A phone call takes place in the intimate acoustic space determined by the minimal distances between earpiece and eardrum, between lips and mouthpiece. Like it or not, we are almost at sonic kissing distance from our telephonic interlocutor down the road or on another continent. Such sensory dislocation may be less problematic when phoning friends and family but it requires some corrective measures if were on the phone to someone we dont know, perhaps talking to a representatives for a large corporation or a public institution. Its mainly in these types of telephone encounter that vocal costumes come in handy.

When phones were a novelty in UK homes after World War II, many people of my parents generation put on a special vocal costume when answering the phone. It was a more posh, more official-sounding voice whose diction, vowel sounds and intonation resembled that of BBC radio announcers or newsreaders of the day. These closely miked but widely broadcast official voices, by occupying the public space of the contemporary media, seem to have been taken to represent a sort of common ground for close-up speaking with which everyone was familiar. Of course, since this vocal costume was also that of the old British establishment, it was not the most comfortable clothing to wear and was usually dropped if it became clear that the person at the other end of the line was more friends and family than authority. Moreover, as with the increasing incongruity of using military marches for news and sports broadcasts in the UK (see Chapter 00), the old-establishment BBC voice later became an anomaly in the wake of socio-economic change leading to the use of other vocal costumes. Technological development played a central role in this process.

As the number of radio channels increased, and as TV and hi-fi recordings became part of both individual and domestic acoustic space, the repertoire of closely miked but widely disseminated voice types available for use as vocal costumes expanded radically. Consumerist propaganda, infamous for its just for you messages disseminated to millions of others belonging to the same target group, started to choose particular voice types corresponding to the intersubjectively verifiable values and desires of a particular demographic. Those voice types are often used today in automatic phone dialogue and voice recognition systems. Or, as one EU-funded eCommerce document puts it:

Advertisers adopt different strategies depending on the product they are selling and the intended audience. The same is true for creating automated telephone service dialogues. Two of the [phone answering] personalities [John and Kate] were created with the intention that they would portray younger, more streetwise [bank] agents and therefore would appeal to younger users.

This sort of vocal costume marketing has led to such cybernetic disasters as Simon (Virgin Mobile USA), Claire (Sprint), Julie (Amtrak) and Emily (Bell Canada). While each pre-programmed vocal persona sounds like an attractive, engaging, educated, helpful young woman, she turns out, in the reality of dialogue, to have the brains of a pea and the socio-linguistic skills of a drainpipe. However, so blind is the faith of corporations in the hocus-pocus of vocal pseudo-personalisation that they spend vast amounts of consumer money replacing fallible but relatively efficient humans with crude, incompetent, expensive and time-wasting machinery. That said, although John, Kate, Simone, Claire, Julie and Emily are no more than attractive vocal drapes covering lifeless dummies in a shop window, vocal costumes can serve some purpose, even inside the field of telephony, as long as no false claims about interactive dialogue systems are made. If, for example, you call Radio Taxi 8585 in Milan, the message telling you to hold so as not to lose your place in the phone queue has been recorded to sound like an attractive female secretary with a hint of coquettish fun in her voice. Theres a hidden laugh of flirtatious complicity in her tone, or, as my friend Alessandra puts it:

Its as if shes saying to male customers who knows what you and I could get up to while you wait? Its not the voice of a mother that would sound too old or of a wife because that would be no fun. Its closer to the voice of an attractive and well-spoken lover They assume of course that most customers are men in need of flattery.

Outside the weird world of brand-conscious, market-driven automated telephony, vocal costumes are simply a very real part of everyday life. For example, if you have to address a crowd of people and there is no microphone, or if you have to keep order in a primary school class, or if you have to make your bid heard in a capitalist casino like the New York Stock Exchange, you will have to put on a vocal costume to do your job and to avoid causing long-term damage to your larynx. Hopefully, you will change into a much softer, happier, more sing-song costume (motherese) when you talk to your baby child, into something less lilting when you have to answer important job interview questions, into something more sincerely contrite yet competent when you have to explain why you are late delivering work to your boss, and so on. Or perhaps you are a psychoanalyst dealing with a highly strung patient, in which case you may want to put on your professional vocal valium costume and suggest tell me how you felt about that in a nice, relaxed manner. That way, your patient is less likely to throw a fit and, even if he/she does start screaming, at least you can keep your calm.

Attentive readers will already have noted that Public speaking voice, primary school teacher voice, a lilting parent voice (motherese), psychologist voice and the nervous interviewee voice are all aesthesic vocal descriptors, more precisely persona descriptors designating professions, roles or archetypes. Those labels act as shorthand not just for a type of person (teacher, trader, psychologist, parent, etc.) but also for the type of voice associated with that type of person in particular circumstances. One final example of spoken vocal costume should clarify the issue once and for all.

Before I went googling for vocal persona-related concepts in 2006, I had never heard of the girlfriend voice. The online Urban Dictionary defines the phenomenon as [t]he change in pitch or tone of a man's voice when talking to their significant other. The dictionary continues:

The girlfriend voice is characterized by a higher pitch and a more effeminate tone with speech patterns scattered with pet names and childish words. This type of speech is usually frowned upon when used in the presence of other men. When another man uses this voice they will usually receive a fair amount of ridicule

When he answers his phone and it's a guy, he uses his normal voice, but when he sees that it's his girlfriend calling, his voice instantly climbs several octaves and acquires a whiny, please-don't-be-mad-at-me tone. He's also the kind of guy who, when he gets on the phone with his girl, immediately walks away from the group, leaves the room, or tells everybody to shut up so he can talk.

Even if several octaves is an obvious exaggeration, this explanation of the girlfriend voice provides a clear example of all three functions of vocal costume. The girlfriend voice involves traits of phonation that firstly enable the man adopting it to more easily carry out a particular activity, in this case that of talking to his significant other in the way he imagines will please her. Secondly, the same man assumes the role and acts the part of boyfriend rather than that of one of the guys. Thirdly, he signals that he belongs to the social sphere of the couple by conforming to the cultural norms of conversation he considers appropriate for that sphere of interaction, even to the extent of walking away from the group, leaving the room and telling his male peers to shut up.

Many vocal costumes used in singing relate to the first definition of costume in the sense of what you wear to more easily carry out a particular activity (the swimming costume function). Singing classical opera, for example, demands techniques of breathing, diction and phonation allowing the unmiked voice to cross the orchestra pit and stalls to reach listeners high up and far away in the opera house balcony. It can take years of conservatory training to master these natural amplification techniques.

almost all people who have rough voices are probably badasses (game character Auron in Final Fantasy X)

About half the music we Westerners hear on average every day accompanies moving images. The vast majority of that music is invisible in the sense that we dont see anybody actually making the sounds we hear. If you also consider music for religious and other ritual functions, for the stage, for dancing, on the radio, on personal stereos, through speakers in bars, cars, cafs, trains, planes, shopping centres etc., it becomes obvious that most music, not just most music heard in conjunction with moving images, is invisible.

If music in everyday life is overwhelmingly invisible for the majority of those who hear and use it, its not unreasonable to ask why music studies have been so dominated by visible music making, mostly in terms of performance, less commonly (and less visibly) as composition, arrangement or recording. That anomaly is partly explained in Chapter 3s deconstruction of the absolute music aesthetic, but it also relates to issues, discussed in Chapter 6, about music educations lopsided concern for poesis at the expense of aesthesis. While its obvious that music making cannot exist without being able to see and/or feel where the notes are, the actual music-making process (poesis) is as a rule visibly absent at the moment of musical perception (aesthesis). True, the effects of the music may well be tactile and/or visual dancing, goose pimples, tears, synaesthetic connotations, etc. but these aesthesic aspects of touch and sight cannot be equated with those involved in music making. Its from this perspective that analysing music used in connection with moving images becomes an important field of study, not just because music on TV or in films and games reaches our ears and brains more than does music from any other source but also because the musics meanings cannot be fully understood without considering the audiovisual events with which the music co-occurs.

Another important reason for studying music and the moving image is that its a subject of equal interest to those with and those without formal training in music. For example, although my job was to teach in university schools of music, a significant number of students on my Music and Moving Image courses came from subjects like cinema and communication studies. This mixture of musos and non-musos on the same course has three distinct advantages.

[1] It rhymes better with the reality of audiovisual production where musical experts (composer, music editor, etc.) and others (director, scenographer, etc.) have to collaborate.

[2] Musos have to learn how to talk about their ideas in ways that non-musos can understand and to try and decipher what non-muso collaborators want by way of music.

[3] Non-musos who want to work in the audiovisual sphere, have to rely on their own aesthesic competence in music and learn how to give composers and music editors a coherent and comprehensible brief.

[4] Musos have to learn the rudiments of cinematographic terms and practices, while non-musos have to plunge into the weird world of musical thought.

[5] Musos have to learn that music serves other purposes than those extolled by their music-making peers, that their art communicates more than just itself, and that visual narrative rarely aligns squarely with musical patterns of change, continuation and finality.

[6] Non-musos need to stop claiming they are unmusical and to learn to trust their own ears as well as eyes. They also need to understand something of how musicians tend to think and act and to grasp the potential of musics main parameters of expression (Chapter 8).

[7] As shown in Chapter 7 (pp. 246-250), anyone, muso or non-muso, can, since the advent of real-time counters, unequivocally designate, to the nearest second, any musical structure by referring to the timecode at which it starts in a digital recording. Non-muso unfamiliarity with the poetic denotors of conventional music theory is in other words no longer an excuse for avoiding structural denotation in music.

[8] Both musos and non-musos involved in audiovisual production need to have realistic notions of what music can and cannot do, and of how it can communicate things other than itself.

[9] Both musos and non-musos need to be aware that their own musical experience, however intense and powerful, is not necessarily that of their prospective audience.

Since these nine points derive substantially from teaching experience, the rest of this chapter is devoted to explaining key elements in the course Music and the Moving Image. Particular attention will be paid to the hands-on analysis all students, muso and non-muso alike, have to do by way of coursework.

Music and the Moving Image is the name of a single-semester undergraduate course I taught between 2003 and 2009. It most recently involved thirteen effective teaching weeks of three-hour sessions and an average class size of forty-four students (Table 11-1, p. 392).

Legend: G logistical and administrative; content delivery in mainly lecture format with frequent musical and audiovisual examples; [3] content delivery mainly by students (average no. participants in Montral: 44 students); [4] discussion with at least as much input from students as from teaching staff.

N.B. This course cannot be delivered to more than 30 students without help from a Teaching Assistant (thanks to Simon Bertrand, Montral).

Music and the Moving Image contains two interrelated elements: [1] theory and history; [2] analysis. With the exception of the two guest lectures (weeks 12-13 in Table 11-1), theory and history are mainly dealt with in weeks 1, 2, 4, 7 and 8 while analysis elements occur throughout the course, occupying the entirety of sessions 3, 5, 6 and 9-11. The courses main theoretical elements are: [1] the functions of film music (week 1; p. 406, ff.); [2] basic semiotic method for film music analysis (week 1, based on Chapters 4-9 in this book); [3] cinematographic and film-musical terminology (reading, weeks 1-4; p. 412, ff.). These elements are introduced in direct connection with audio or audiovisual examples presented in class. The historical elements are: [1] origins of film music (week 2; p. 395, ff.); [2] music for silent film, including the comparative analysis carried out in groups (weeks 2-6; see p. 403, ff.); [3] classic Hollywood film scores (week 7); [4] postwar film scores (week 8). This aspect of the course includes mandatory historical reading, plus obligatory viewing and listening repertoires.

The course focuses mainly on feature film music rather than on music for TV or games for the following four practical reasons.

[1] The feature film has the longest history of any extant type of recorded audiovisual production in which music plays an important part. It is also the type of recorded production with which most people are most familiar and which is still viewed more often than any other.

[1] There is more literature of a serious nature about film music than about, for example, music for television or computer games.

[2] Recordings of feature films are in general easier to acquire for analysis purposes than recordings of tv programming, adverts, short films, corporate in-house productions, etc.

[3] Since computer game narrative unfolds according to the individual habits and skills of its players, its music has to adapt to each players position in the game and to his/her relative speed in confronting each situation where musical change is considered appropriate. Given that the adaptive music conceived for such varying conditions cannot be mapped as fixed sync points on the immutable time line of a film or TV production, the composition and analysis of games music demand skills and practices that cannot be effectively included as part of a single-semester course containing hands-on elements.

[1] Technological developments (cue sheets, click tracks, smpte, timecode, etc.) highlight: [i] the centrality of synchronisation in the provision of music for the moving image; [ii] radical changes in the treatment of relationships between dialogue, sound effects and music (from one-channel mono and through-composed scores to multi-channel audio mixes, so to speak).

[2] Studying stylistic change provides insights into how film musics range of idioms expands to include sounds appropriate to new sorts of popular narrative (Westerns, detectives, modern social drama, science fiction, stories set in non-Western locations, etc.). Style history also gives recurrent evidence of the need to use words to refer to music in ways that directors and producers, not just musicians, understand (silent film music compilations, library music categories, etc.).

[3] By hearing/viewing and discussing examples from the historical repertoire in class, students learn and practise approaches to discussing music and the moving image that are directly applicable to their analysis work (p. 422, ff.).

Although I cannot, for reasons of space and clarity, discuss the historical part of the course in any detail, one period is of particular importance to the analysis work that is the main focus of this chapter and to the topic of this book in general: the origins of film music.

Two basic questions arise at the start of any history of film music. [1] Why did silent films need music? [2] Why, at least in North America and Europe, did music for silent film draw so much on one musical tradition and so little on others?

The usual answer to question 1 is that music was used to mask unwanted noise from the projector, from the audience and, in the non-soundproofed venues where films were often shown in the early years of cinema, from the street outside. This is certainly one feasible explanation for music being played at films shown in penny arcades, nickelodeons, fairgrounds and, in general, for cinema as working-class entertainment before 1910 or so; but it doesnt explain why the practice continued after projectors were boxed off from the auditorium in picture houses with a foyer separating the audience from the street outside. While its possible that the practice may to some extent have continued into the 1910s and 1920s out of force of habit, a more likely explanation is that seeing just movement without any accompanying sound at all is simply unreal and can be quite upsetting. Just imagine one of those bad dreams in which no sound comes out of your mouth even though youre yelling at the top of your voice, or in which youre trying to run away from a tsunami, an avalanche, a pyroclastic flow or some other loud threat you see but cannot hear bearing down on you. Little wonder, then, that the Lumire Brothers silent short Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895) scared some of the audience, not so much because a large locomotive came towards them in 2D black-and-white as because it came at them without its sound. At the same time, the passengers and station staff bustling about on the platform were all silent too, unreal, ghostlike and sonically disembodied.

If you think Im overstating the case for sound as intrinsic to energy and movement. If you do, please consider the following pieces of circumstantial evidence: [1] what a noise! translates into Swedish as vilket liv! which literally means what a life! in the sense of what a noise and/or commotion!, implying that sound, motion and energy are intrinsic to life; [2] motion occupies most of the words commotion and emotion, the latter linked to being moved by, for example, the sounds of music; [3] clamour, uproar, racket and hubbub (sound), as well as agitation, bustle, tumult and turbulence (motion), are all synonyms for commotion. These points might help explain why sound was necessary in the early days of cinema but not why the sound should be music. The simple answer is that music was much cheaper and, more importantly, the only practical alternative at the time.

Before the general spread of electrically amplified sound technology in the late 1920s, dialogue, sound effects and ambience would either have had to be recorded and played back without amplification or produced live at every showing of every film in every cinema. The latter can be ruled out straight away because the amount of staff and equipment required to dub dialogue and to convincingly produce an infinite number of different sounds was never a financial or logistical option; nor were the newfangled 78 rpm audio discs because they had no bass register and because playback was unamplified. If the Lumire brothers large steam locomotive had been shown accompanied by an acoustic recording of the actual sound it had made when shot to celluloid, the cinema audience might have heard some faint hissing and distant clinking but the massive engines rumbling and clanking would have already been filtered out with all the other bass frequencies at the recording stage. The visual effect of the approaching locomotives power, size and volume and its presence close to the audiences eyes would in other words have been contradicted by their ears. Moreover, since multi-channel mixing on to audio tape was not in widespread use until much later and stereo uncommon before the 1960s, it was impossible to acoustically stage any scene convincingly so that, for example, the smaller sounds audible on the La Ciotat station platform when the visuals were shot (general bustle, passengers talking, station staff shouting, etc.) could be heard in the right place of the audio picture, if they were audible at all on the recording. Add to that the fact that selective audio focus recreating the cocktail party effect, making an actors inner thoughts audible, even a simple voiceover was out of the question and its clear that the cameras and projectors ability to produce a convincing simulacrum of visual reality had no sonic counterpart until decades later. And even if none of the technological and expressive restrictions just mentioned had applied, film distribution companies would have had to include twenty brittle and scratchable 78 rpm discs with the two or three reels of celluloid they circulated to cinemas for each hour-long film. Such hypothetical solutions would in their turn assume that projectors and record turntables ran at a fixed rate in every cinema to ensure that sound and image were in sync, a technology unavailable before 1926 and which was replaced soon after by the more reliable and less cumbersome system of optical sound. Meanwhile it was music that offered the easiest solution to the silent films dilemma of silence.

Music could at least temporarily solve the synchronisation problem because it has its own logic of temporal and kinetic narrative independent of the way in which visual events unfold. Musics sonic logic can in other words override the need to hear the audible counterpart to every potentially audible visual event or situation: neither lip-sync-ed speech, nor Foleys, nor even the ambient soundscape has to be present if music is played. As long as suitable music started on cue in the silent film era, it could be played for the duration of an entire scene until the general mood, atmosphere or location changed and different music was required. Moreover, since the music was played live, it was by definition heard in hi-fi, variable enough in volume and adaptable enough in all its other parameters of expression to accompany large locomotives, bustling crowds, pastoral idylls and intimate love scenes. What sort of repertoire could silent film musicians draw on to provide such a wide range variety of suitable musics?

A quick glance through any extant cue sheet from the 1910s or any collection of silent film music from the early 1920s shows that nineteenth-century European art music dominates the repertoire. For example, Ern Rapes Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists (1924) contains 19 pieces by Grieg, 12 by Mendelssohn, 5 each by Beethoven and Bizet, 4 by Schubert, another dozen or two by the likes of Brahms, Dvo?k, Schumann, J. Strauss, Tchaikovsky and Wagner, plus a significant number of pieces in the same vein by less well-known figures. There are at least three reasons for the dominance of nineteenth-century European art music in the silent film era.

1. It was, at least in both Europe and North America, the most widespread and interculturally viable of any musical tradition available at the time.

2. It was a musical tradition with well-established practices for use together with a wide variety of paramusical forms of expression.

3. Its use of notation enabled silent film musicians to synchronise their performance with what was shown on screen.

The most obvious classical forerunners to film music are found in opera, ballet and music for the theatre. Here was a living tradition of invisible instrumental music accompanying stage action. It was music that could be easily adapted for use with silent film. Tone poems and other types of programme music provided another source, as did the piano parts of parlour song whose musical ideas had to fit the lyrics. The European classical traditions popular character pieces were also useful since they were explicitly linked to extramusical phenomena and were already written for the piano. Moreover, no other repertoire was as at that time as interculturally viable as music in the European classical tradition, and no other repertoire had the European traditions system of physically storing essential aspects of its sound staff notation so that musicians could retrieve and perform a much wider range of music than they could possibly memorise.

Reason number three notation as a prerequisite for satisfactory synchronisation is even more prosaic. Lets say we need music to cover visual footage lasting forty seconds and that we have a suitable musical extract occupying 16 bars of 4/4 time (64 beats in all) that sounds good played at 92 bpm. Using a metronome and simple arithmetic we can calculate the duration of those 16 bars by first converting the tempo of 92 beats per minute into beats per second [6092= 0.652174], then by multiplying that figure by the number of beats (64) in our musical extract [0.65217464 = 41.74]. Since 41.74 is almost two seconds too long for the 40-second footage we want our music to fit well either have to play the piece a little quicker or use simple arithmetic again to calculate the right metronome tempo for our 16 bars of music. Dividing the 64 beats of our piece by the duration (0:40) of the visual extract it has to fit (6440) means well need to perform the piece at 1.6 beats per second, i.e. at 96 beats per minute (1.664) to make our music fit the footage.

This way of aligning musical cues to fit exactly with visual events became even more important with the advent of the talkies because no longer was a single film subjected to as many variations of music plus image as there were cinemas; instead one single product was distributed to every cinema and it was obviously desirable that the centrally produced combination of music and moving image be as convincingly synchronised as possible. It was to this end that the system of click tracks, expressed as beats per minute and film frames per click, was developed. It was a synchronisation system that remained in use until the 1980s. With the exception of music scenes, title sequences and certain types of animated film, the fact that music had as a rule to adapt to visual events rather than vice versa demanded that its synchronisation be planned in the minutest detail. With musical notation as the only viable editing and storage technology allowing for such planning it is hardly surprising that, between roughly 1930 and 1990, film composers were almost exclusively classically trained, with advanced skills in orchestration, arrangement, composition and conducting. And that is of course why, in the early days of the talking film, Hollywood hired Europeans like Korngold (praised by Mahler), Steiner (pupil of Brahms and Mahler) and Tiomkin (pupil of Glazunov) to score films like Robin Hood (Korngold 1938), King Kong (Steiner 1933) and Lost Horizon (Tiomkin 1937).

The main lessons to be learnt from this short excursion into the origins of film music are:

1. Sound is experientially intrinsic to movement. Visible movement without sound can come across as unrealistic and disembodied.

2. During the silent film era music was the only viable solution to the problem of soundless visible movement, not just for technical and logistical reasons but also because musics own narrative logic can for short periods of time override that of the visuals.

3. Synchronisation of musics entry, exit or radical alteration with key points in the visual narrative, especially with the starts and ends of scenes, is essential to the overall narrative credibility of any film.

4. The nineteenth-century European art music tradition was the most viable and widely used source for music capable, thanks to staff notation, of providing reliable synchronisation with the visuals. It also provided the only interculturally viable repertoire of invisible instrumental music with well-established links to visual action.

5. The fact that film has relied so heavily on the European art music tradition squarely contradicts the notions of absolute music deconstructed in Chapter 3.

Despite the need to explain basic theory and method in the first few weeks of the course (the functions of film music and the semiotic analysis method in week 1, the origins of film music in week 2, etc.), it is essential to confront students from the outset with concrete examples of musics ability to tell us what the pictures on their own cannot, and to start identifying the sort of thing music actually can communicate to audiences. It is with this goal in mind that I resort to two well-tried cheap tricks at the start of the course.

As soon as initial administrative tasks are out of the way, I play two short clips to the class. The first one consists of the same 30-second visual sequence played four times in succession: [i] without any sound to allow for a musically unbiased view of the visuals; [ii] with the original music, in this case the pastoral signature tune to an interminable UK soap;24 [iii] a loop from a library music track that sync-ed well with the visuals and was characterised by record label staff as ominous and agitated; [iv] the looped instrumental intro to an up-tempo Deep Purple track which sync-ed abominably with the visuals. Students are often surprised by the radical difference of narrative between versions [ii] and [iii]. What was calm and peaceful in version [ii] comes across as eerie, desolated and threatening in version [iii]; what was an idyll without stress turns into the aftermath of a killer virus; what was in version [ii] a small car driven by a little old lady at a leisurely pace past the village green to the pretty stone farmhouse on the green hillside becomes in version [iii] a serial killer who, driving with an evil grin of determination, is transporting human body parts back to his necrophiliac stash in the insanitary cellar of his dark, dank isolated hideout. Version [iv], the up-tempo rock loop, usually provokes merriment because its so obviously inappropriate, not just in terms of the frontal cultural collision between its own connotations and those of the visual subject matter it accompanies but also in terms of its tempo, its surface rate, its short, square periodicity and boisterous bounce, none of which matches the long, slow, gliding helicopter sweeps and the smooth, soft cross-fades of the visual idiom. The point is that by viewing this clip and by registering the differences of narrative caused by differences of music and nothing else, attention is drawn to the central importance of synchronicity and of understanding the potential of musics parameters of expression (Chapter 8) in mediating the differences observed. The discussion also provokes the need for a systematic understanding of musics various functions in connection with moving images.

The second week-one example I used during the last few years of teaching the course is a six-minute clip (0:06:14 to 0:12:21) from American Beauty (1999). It exemplifies virtually every film music function in the book (see p. 406, ff.), including source music that is so much more than merely diegetic (0:06:47, at the dinner table), psychological underscore of considerable poignancy (0:09:13, in the kitchen) and plenty of representing place and underlining movement (0:10:44) as the Annette Bening character cleans the house she hopes to sell. Unfortunately, if I start writing about the wealth of meaning mediated in any of those three cues, for example about the sunny, carefree, corporate marimba sounds in relation to the misery of desirable properties in the soulless suburbs of the American Dream, I will never finish this book.

The second trick is to involve students as early as possible in actual coursework. This element of the course, described below, involves access to Rapes Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists (1924, see Figure 11-1, p. 404) in a library with photocopying facilities, dividing the class into groups of four, and the participation of at least one notationally literate keyboard-playing student in each group. This group work, called Musical mood comparison between silent film and recent feature film, runs roughly as follows.

Fig. 11-1. Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists (Rape, 1924: 10), showing mood categories in left margin.

Each group chooses at least one of the musical mood categories listed in Rape (e.g. children, comedy, love, neutral, pastoral, Western, etc., as enumerated on the left of Fig. 11-1) and photocopies the pages of notation covering that mood (e.g. pp. 10-20 for battle, including Agitato no. 3). A group member with some piano skills then either plays representative extracts of the silent film mood live for the other group members or records them to an editable midi file using a piano preset and appropriate audio software. Group members then list their impressions, paying particular attention to musical structures they consider typical for their chosen silent film music mood, and noting anything they find surprising, for example (typically) that horror music from 1924 doesnt sound very horrific in our ears.

The second phase of the project entails scouring group members dvd collections in search of music from recent films containing scenes that can be characterised using whichever of Rapes musical mood categories was chosen for the project (action, children, comedy, love, neutral, pastoral, Western, etc.). The final stage of preparation involves describing the music heard in connection with the relevant scenes in the recent films and comparing that with music for scenes labelled in a similar way back in 1924.

This entire group project is presented in class. Group members are expected to have managed their own internal division of labour so that the following tasks are distributed equitably: [1] playing and recording the pages from Rape; [2] structural description of music in Rape; [3] structural description of music in the recent films; [3] description of other audiovisual aspects in the recent films; [4] formulation of comments and conclusions; [5] organising the presentation in class. Standards of presentation usually range from acceptable to excellent, some ambitious in their mode of presentation (e.g. commutation of music for the same visual footage or vice versa), others more in terms of structural detail and conclusions drawn.

Apart from inevitable comments like they only had piano or organ back then, this project can produce interesting insights. For example, several groups described how recent film-musical notions of children and love differ from those in circulation in 1924. Another group concluded that neutral music is never neutral because it has to be dynamic enough to avoid sounding static, and that music neutral in one context will inevitably sound culturally specific in another. The group work sketched above focuses in other words on musical difference over time and on how changes of attitude towards paramusical phenomena are expressed in music. It provides essential basic insights to which we can refer later in the course when discussing the mediation of ideology through film music in relation to, say, Africa, the American dream, crime and its detection, death, the English, the jungle, Native Americans, nature itself, peace, war, the Wild West and women.

The two cheap tricks just described dont just kick-start involvement in the course by exploiting real issues of musical meaning; nor is the sole function of the group work to create a better social environment for everyone involved in the course. Both tricks also create a need for getting to grips with the functions of music in connection with the moving image.

In The Aesthetics of Film Music, Polish musicologist Zofia Lissa (1965: 115-256) discusses the basic functions of film music. I have freely translated and adapted her function labels as shown in Table11-2 (p. 407).

[1] Emphasising movement mainly involves the use of kinetic and tactile anaphones (pp. 332, ff.), i.e. music relatable to verbs like run, rush, stress, bustle, galop, stroll, drag, push, pull, jump, ascend, climb, descend, fall, approach, leave, pass [by], relax, wave, sway, swell, shrink, spin, fly, hover, caress, hit, stab, cut, stretch, open, close, flicker, stay [motionless], and to adverbs like towards, away from, over/across, to-and-fro, quickly, slowly, calmly, roughly, smoothly, jerkily and so on. The relevant movement may or may not be visible on screen.

[2] Stylisation of real sounds involves the use of sonic anaphones (p. 321), i.e. the stylised musical expression of sounds, actual or potential, in the reality of the concurrent visual narrative. Sonic anaphones, very common in the era of the silent film, in early talkies and in some types of animated film, have largely been replaced by sound effects (Foleys, atmoses, etc.) but it is still possible to hear feature film scores using sonic anaphones of machines, screams, sighs, laughter, etc.

[3] Representing place has two main aspects: [3a] mediating a particular sense of space irrespective of cultural considerations; [3b] representing a culturally defined location. Function 3a is closely linked to function 1 in that a culturally non-specific space open, closed, large, small, high, low, crowded, empty, indoors, outdoors, etc. inevitably implies movement large, wide and sweeping gestures as opposed to small, cramped and restrained ones, for example (see Ch 8. p. 316). Function 3b usually involves the use of some sort of style indicator or genre synecdoche to connote a culturally generic or specific location. Examples of culturally generic locations might range from Western notions of the tundra via pastoral rurality and small market towns to the hubbub of modern metropoles, while culturally specific locations are often connoted using geo- or ethno-musical stereotypes, for example koto or shakuhachi playing in traditional modes for rural Japan in bygone days, or accordon musette playing a cheery waltz for proletarian Paris in the inter-war years.

[4] Representing time has also, like function 3, two aspects: [4a] connoting a historical period; [4b] suggesting a time of day. Function 4a is very similar to 3b, as the phrases rural Japan in bygone days and Paris in the inter-war years suggest. It also involves the use of some sort of archetypal style indicator or genre synecdoche to establish the period, for example Gregorian plainchant or a Carmina burana pastiche for medieval Europe, non-organic electro-acoustic sounds for some types of science fiction. Function 4b, on the other hand, could be easily subsumed under function 1 since times of the day tend to link musically with types of activity or states of mind seen as typical for the hour in question. For example, Respighis The Trevi Fountain at Midday (loud, bustling and bright) is quite different to his The Villa Medici Fountain at Sunset (calm, darker) not least in terms of tempo, surface rate, register and volume, i.e. in terms of movement, energy and space.

[5] Lissas Comment function, a.k.a. counterpoint, entails the use of music to comment upon the images so as to create a distancing effect which, in the theatre and according to Brecht, prevents the audience from losing itself passively and completely in the character created by the actor, and which consequently leads the audience to be a consciously critical observer. In the cinema the risk is more likely that viewers/listeners become so engrossed in the complete media package with all its well-established congruences of sound and vision that they never get the chance to back off and reflect on the values of what they hear and see. Film-musical comment or counterpoint can be used to create a distancing effect by contradicting the connotative sphere of the visuals, as Stanley Kubrick did at the end of Dr Strangelove (1964), setting Vera Lynns mellifluous rendering of Well Meet Again (1939) to the dropping of doomsday bombs and a nuclear holocaust. Conversely, the agitated and ominous music used in Cheap trick 1 (p. 402) to underscore idyllic images of rural bliss always provokes basic questions of the type whats wrong with this picture?. In both cases the musical comment or counterpoint obliges the audience to step back from what theyre seeing and to reflect consciously on whats actually happening.

[6] Lissas category Real music situations is usually referred to as source music or diegetic music. Source music could be the best term to use for three reasons: [i] the real in real music situations is problematic; [ii] source is three syllables shorter than diegetic; [iii] source music is what the phenomenon is called in Hollywood production circles. However, diegetic is also a good word because: [i] its the standard term used by academics; [ii] unlike source music it has a useful antonym: non-diegetic; [iii] speakers of UK English can avoid silly jokes about music as ketchup, barnaise, tabasco or salsa.

Diegesis (????????) is Greek for narrative (noun) and diegetic qualifies anything that belongs, literally or by inference, to the films narrated story, i.e. to the reality supposed or proposed in the film. The term can be exemplified as follows:

Two adjoining studio sets can represent locations supposedly hundreds of metres or thousands of kilometres apart in diegetic space.

Two or more actors (e.g. a child and an adult, or a star and a stuntman or double) can successively depict the same diegetic character.

Diegetic music simply means music whose source is justified by the films visual narrative (hence the term source music). Non-diegetic music is film music whose source is not motivated within the films visual narrative. Most underscore and title music is non-diegetic.

Source music or diegetic music can be thought of as music audible to (hearing) characters (if any) in the scene where it occurs. The sounding source of the diegetic music may be visible on screen a marching band, a karaoke bar, a parent singing a lullaby, a concert, a church organ and congregation, etc. but it might just as well be invisible a car radio, Muzak in an airport or shopping mall, an inconsiderate or half-deaf neighbours sound system on full blast, etc.

[7] Expressing psychological experiences entails the use of music to communicate the emotional state of an on-screen character. Imagine, for example, a neutral shot of the heroine reading a letter with an expressionless face, normal body posture and without any gestures but with horror music as underscore. Only the music tells the audience the state of shock or terror she experiences on receiving such bad news.

[8] Providing empathy involves the use of music to communicate a certain set of emotions that may or may not be the same as that supposed to be experienced by the character(s) on screen. For example, imagine exactly the same scene and same music as in function 7, except that this time its the psychopathic serial killer, not the heroine, we see reading the letter. Once again the horror music underscore tells us (the audience) that something awful is going to happen but in this case the letter brings good news to its reader, perhaps the opportunity for temporary psychological release through the fulfilment of some indescribably perverse act of violence. Thats not good news for the killers victims, nor for the other people with whom we, the audience, hopefully identify. The horror music helps us to empathise with their horror rather than with the psychopaths feelings of excitement or relief.

[9] Anticipation of subsequent action is virtually self-explanatory. Just as a pleasurable experience can be enhanced by preparing for it, a really nasty event can be made even worse if you have premonitions of the imminent horror. Thats why presenting a mood of threat while the visuals are still quite pleasant or neutral just before they cut to the foul deed itself can increase the effect of horror when it arrives on screen.

[10] Enhancement and demarcation of the films formal structure can be divided into two parts: [10a] themes and motifs; [10b] episodic markers.

Themes and motifs are usually quite melodic and mainly serve to identify characters, moods and environments recurring, not necessarily on screen, throughout a film, thereby helping to make the film more comprehensible. For example, if we hear the films love theme as the wounded hero is shown dying alone in a World War I trench we may be experiencing a bit of function 5 (comment or counterpoint), but by hearing a theme previously linked to characters, moods and environments not currently presented on screen, its easier for us to make emotional sense of an important part of the films overall narrative.

Themes are more substantial and melodically more extensive than motifs which can be very short and may even consist of no more than just a rhythm or a sonority. A leitmotif may often be associated with a person, place or idea but since it can be subjected to harmonic, rhythmic and orchestral modification, it is not necessarily linked to a particular mood or emotion. Adapting the same basic leitmotif to different moods is one way of bringing structural cohesion to film scores that have to cover a wide range of atmospheres, locations and situations.

Episodic markers consist of openings, links and bridges, tails and endings. Openings (something new starts now) and endings (thats the end of that) need no explanation. Links and bridges are short music cues that bridge two scenes. They are particularly useful when the two scenes are of a disparate character since music can quickly but seamlessly join one mood to another. Tails are snippets of music, often after a change of scene or at the end of a bridge, that set the mood of the new scene and tail off, often on an unresolved sonority signalling that the narrative will continue and leaving the acoustic space open for dialogue and sound effects.

Please note that the functions just listed are not mutually exclusive. For example, imagine some fictional footage from the 1970s of a female fashion model slinking around her sumptuous penthouse apartment in a silk nightgown to the accompaniment of a smooth sounding bossa nova album she has just slipped into the CD player We could be hearing film music functioning in any or all of the following ways.

Its diegetic music (source music, function 6) because we saw her put the disc in the CD player.

It could be underscoring how we, the audience, are supposed to feel about her (function 8): luxurious, desirable, etc.

As we see her do her make-up in the mirror, the music tells us a bit about how she may be feeling herself (function 7): laid-back, cosseted, smooth, sexy, sophisticated, etc.

Since the music emphasises lazy slithering, sliding or caressing rather than, say, angular or energetic battering, clodhopping or headbanging, there is also an element of function 1.

The music tells us that we are far more likely to be in a luxurious North American urban penthouse, or possibly drinking cocktails under Martini parasols with the Ipanema lite rather than in the neighbouring favela of Rocinha; nor are we in a Scunthorpe scrap yard, nor the Gobi desert, nor halfway to Mars. Function 3 is therefore also in operation.

Depending on what sort of bossa nova is being played, the music might also be a comment (function 5) communicating that what we see is really a bit old-hat: she might be feeling fine swanning round her apartment but theres something in her choice of music possibly suggesting that she could be a bit older than she tries to look.

Apart from insights into the origins and functions of film music, students also need, before embarking on their analysis work, to be familiar with the most common terms used in cinematography and in film music production. Theres no room here to list, let alone explain, the cinematographical terms that students need to know and readers are referred to any of the numerous glossaries available on line to check the meaning of concepts like dolly, crane, boom, pan, tilt, tracking, jump cut, wipe-in/out, dissolve, pov, ls, ms, cu, detail shot, montage, post-sync, etc., etc. Since there is also a wealth of useful literature about film sound other than music, I will restrict this part of the chapter to brief explanations, in alphabetical order, of the most essential terms relevant to the analysis of film music.

Breakdown notes, a.k.a. timing notes, are prepared by the music editor. They comprise a detailed list of significant events inside a scene, including cuts and camera moves, as well as key points in the action and dialogue, each with its relevant timecode location. This listing allows the composer to synchronise, where appropriate, specific points in his/her score with specific visual events in the scene (hit points). Breakdown notes should not to be confused with cue list or cue sheet.

Click denotes the metronome sound that conductors and/or musicians hear in headphones when recording music to picture. This procedure means that the music for each cue can be recorded so as to align exactly as intended with the visuals.

Cue originally meant an event signalling that another event should take place, for example cutting to a low-level shot of Dannys tricycle in the corridor was the cue to bring in Bartk. Over the years cue has come to denote not so much the point at which the music starts (the cue point) as the complete musical continuum starting at that cue point. The duration of a cue can vary from just a few seconds to several minutes.

Cue list: a list of cue points for part or whole of an audiovisual production, i.e. the chronological enumeration of timecode locations corresponding to the start and end of each music cue (not to be confused with cue sheet or breakdown notes).

Cue point: point, expressible in terms of timecode location, at which a musical cue starts; not to be confused with hit point.

Cue sheet: [1] a list of all cues in an audiovisual production, specifying details of duration, composer, publishing rights, type of usage (e.g. visual vocal music, instrumental underscore), and prepared by the music editor for copyright purposes (cf. cue list); [2] a list of scenes in a silent film (c. 1910-1920) together with titles and sheet music publishing details of pieces suggested as suitable for each scene in the film.

Hit point: point, expressible in terms of timecode and frame location, at which a particular musical event synchronises with a particular visual event inside a cue; not to be confused with cue point.

Music Editors time, organise and manage music cues for an audiovisual production. They are present at spotting, recording and post-production sessions. They also produce the breakdown notes and the cue sheet, sometimes also the clicks.

Music-led montage is a home-grown term denoting footage in which visuals are edited to fit music rather than vice versa. Music-led montage is typical for music videos and is also common in title sequences.

Set pieces (another home-grown term) constitute that subset of diegetic music in which musical performance is visible on screen as part of the narrative. If the performance of the piece is the main focus of the narrative, as in most musicals, the visuals will be cut to music and whatever other action may be present can also be choreographed in time with the music. However, if the set piece is more of a backdrop to other activity, cutting points are less likely to be in sync with musical episodicity. Such diegetic music may change from visual foreground to background in the narrative, even to the extent that the source music is faded out and replaced by underscore. For example, in an episode of The Return of the Saint entitled The Brave Goose, source music (function 6) is provided as a set piece by a disc-jockey and dancers in a Saint Tropez disco. In the middle of an up-tempo number a murder is committed. The camera zooms in on the heroine (who alone realises what has happened) and back to the dancers who are still bopping away on camera despite the fact that the source music has been replaced by non-diegetic music. This music underlines the emotions of horror the heroine is supposed to be feeling (function 7) and provides a basis for the audiences emotions (function 8). Since the dancers are still shown to be having a good time, the set piece interrupted by underscore also counterpoints horror (non-diegetic music only) against gaiety (silenced source music and continued dancing), making the horror more poignant (function 5).

SMPTE = Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, more precisely the Societys standard timecode system used in audiovisual production and according to which passing time is given in hours, minutes, seconds and frames so that, for example, 01:09:50;12 refers exactly to a point one hour, nine minutes, fifty seconds and twelve frames after the start of the production at 00:00:00;00.

The Spotting Session is held after work on the visual footage has finished. The director and composer discuss what sort of music should be used at which points in the production (cue spotting). Those points are noted as timecode locations by the Music Editor and sent to both composer and director.

Temp Track, a.k.a. temp music, temp score, scratch score, is existing music added to an audiovisual production during the editing phase. It is used: [1] to test a film on audience focus groups and on production executives; [2] to give the soundtrack composer an idea of the sort of music the director envisages at various points in the production.

Title music is a generic term denoting music conceived for an audiovisual productions title sequences (or credits), usually at the start (the main or opening titles) and/or end of the film or programme (end titles). Music for opening titles has three main functions:

2. Preparatory function: something of a particular type, set in a particular environment, including particular types of character and particular types of action and mood is about to start.

3. Mnemonic function: a particular, identifiable and recurrent (type of) production is about to start, e.g. another news broadcast, another James Bond movie, another episode of Dr Who, Seinfelt or Coronation Street.

The most common function of theme tunes on radio or TV is of course mnemonic, but no title music could work properly without the preparatory function. Feature films rely mainly on the preparatory function to mediate the musical message of their title sequences.

Title sequences present the composer with the rare opportunity of writing music on musics own conditions. While underscore demands strict adherence of music to visual narrative, title music often determines the pace and type of visual flow, at least within the obvious limits of duration assigned to the sequences and the general character of the complete visual production. In fact, visual titles are more likely to be cut to the music (music-led montage), whereas underscore is generally recorded to picture.

Underscore is invisible non-diegetic music, usually background or incidental music, written to fit an existing visual sequence. Unlike title music and set pieces, underscore is recorded to picture.

Having sketched the outlines of the course Music and the Moving Image and dealt with some of its central historical, theoretical and terminological issues, we can now finally focus on the actual title of this chapter: Analysing film music.

Six of the courses thirteen sessions, as well as the entirety of what students are expected to do between sessions from week six to thirteen, is devoted to one mandatory piece of individual coursework: Cue list and analysis of music in a feature film. To complete the project successfully students need to read the following text (ends on page 436).

This project consists of the following stages: [1] choosing a film; [2] creating a cue list of the film; [3] choosing one scene to analyse in detail; [4] presenting your analysis scene in class; [5] writing up the project.

After choosing, in consultation with the course leader, a full-length feature film recorded on dvd, you produce a cue list for the film and choose one of its scenes to analyse in detail. You also write up a discussion of the musics uses and functions throughout the film as a whole.

The main aim of this project is to let you discover, through hands-on work with existing audiovisual productions, how music interacts with moving images. This work entails observing, documenting and analysing details of sound and picture with a view to understanding which means of musical expression in conjunction with which visuals can produce which effects.

Since scores for audiovisual productions are virtually impossible to come by in the form of notation, music for the moving image has to be analysed by ear and eye without any pre-existing scribal or graphic intermediary. In-depth analysis is a central part of this project because it trains sonic and visual observation skills that are useful to composers, music editors and film directors when deciding what sort of music, if any, should occur with which images at which points in the film. However, since such analysis demands great attention to detail it cannot be applied to more than a short extract from the whole film. Thats why, in order to understand [i] the musical and filmic functions of the extract chosen in relation to the film as a whole, and [ii] issues involved in the production of a complete score for an entire film, its also important to study more generally how musical ideas are used throughout the film. Producing a complete cue list (enumerating what happens when) is therefore another key element in this project.

The in-depth analysis and cue list both involve the investigation of what happens when in the film and are essential to any discussion of what the films music may be communicating. They also let you more clearly and convincingly discuss to what extent the music, including its relative or total absence, makes the visual narrative more effective.

Given that each in-depth analysis extract comes from a different film and that the extracts are presented in class, this project also lets you come into contact with a wide range of styles and techniques used by different composers with different backgrounds for different purposes. The project also helps improve your verbal, visual and oral presentation skills.

With so much attention paid to the composers work on the film you study, your aural awareness should improve. Involvement in this project, including your participation in feedback sessions presented by other students, should also provide you with insights about what sort of musical ideas you might (or might not) want to use in which way in your own audiovisual production work.

In consultation with the teacher you should by week 4 choose a feature film with a typical running time of between 75 and 130 minutes. That feature film will be your object of study for the whole project which constitutes the only assessed coursework during the remaining weeks.

The films narrative theme should not be primarily musical, i.e. it should not be focused on the production or performance of music, nor contain many scenes of visible musical performance, dance, singing, etc. The film should contain a minimum of thirty minutes of music of which at least twenty are not primarily motivated by any on-screen musical reality. Focus should in other words be on underscore or on music accompanying title sequences. Despite these restrictions a vast quantity of films available on dvd remains to choose from.

After choosing your film (stage 1), four more stages have to be covered: [2] producing a cue list; [3] choosing and analysing an extract for in-depth analysis (p. 422); [4] presenting your analysis scene for feedback (p. 422); [5] writing up the project (p. 424-000).

Your cue list should consist of four or five columns, as shown in the in Table 11-3 on page 418.

0:00:49 i Cardinal, screen left ECU, harshly silhouetted, sweaty, uncomfortable. m1A1,

0:00:56 Cardinal dictates letter: free to be enslaved, not the right note, begin again. m1A1, 2A, m3A1 (Woodwind intermittence: (a) pan pipes; (b) low-reg. wood flutes).

0:01:47 View of mission (trees, cows); cut to jungle highlands. Voice-over ends at martyrdom (0:02:07) Fade out La folia;

0:02:46 8 2. Over Iguazu Falls. Guaran talk carrying s.g. heavy through dark jungle

(2:46) Its a priest, tied to cross and thrown into river. Floats downstream into rapids. m3A1 gradually drowned by water FX

1. Timecode location in hours, minutes and seconds (frame count not essential in this project) at which the music enters, exits, or otherwise changes significantly.

2. Thumbnail stills or storyboard-style drawings typical of on-screen events starting at the timing given in the left column and ending at the subsequent timing in the cue list.

3. Brief verbal indications of important paramusical events action, dialogue, sound effects (if not contained in a separate fifth column)47 etc. occurring between the timing given in column 1 and the subsequent timing in the cue list.

4. Brief verbal indications of music heard during the cue (see Creating a table of musical ideas, p. 425, ff.).

Columns 1-3 in the table are self-explanatory. Column 4 (Music), on the other hand, contains codes m1A1, m2A, etc. that save space and act as shorthand for musemes listed in the Table of Musical Ideas, explained shortly (p. 425, ff.).

Its much easier to find your way around a cue list if you clearly distinguish between where music is present and absent. How you do so will depend on what software you use. The double-lined bounding box in Table 11-3 is just one example of how music cues can be highlighted. Other useful devices in a cue list are: [i] indication of dvd chapter starts (e.g. the thick horizontal line and 8 in Table 11-3) to facilitate navigation to particular points in the film on dvd; [ii] noting the duration of music cues and of musics absences, for example the 02:46 in column 1 at 0:03:03 indicating that music is present until the end of the cue at 0:03:31 and has been audible since 0:00:45 (0:03:31 - 0:00:45 = 0:02:46).

You obviously dont need to provide much detail in your cue sheet for passages containing no music. For example, while musical events are up front between 0:00:45 and 0:02:07 in The Mission, from 0:02:07 to 0:03:31 they assume much more the role of background audio colouring to be eventually drowned out by other sound. This later section does not need to be covered in as much detail as the section preceding it. For the section from 0:03:31 to 0:06:23 (end of table entry at 0:04:22) there is no music at all and cue list entries can be limited to dvd chapter starts, scene changes and other important narrative events.

Before trying to finalise the complete cue list in the sort of form shown in Table 11-3 youll need to start with a rough working version containing timings for the films musical entry and exit points, as well as for the main changes of scenes, the dvds chapter starts, etc. That way youll soon have a good overview of what happens when in the film and be in a better position to choose your scene for in-depth analysis, as well as to decide what youll need to include by way of verbal description in columns three and four, and by way of thumbnails in column 2. Making this provisional rough list means youll also have a better idea of the musical ideas used throughout the film and that youll be able to sort them into categories because your provisional cue list will let you know where to find them on the dvd. At this stage you can just use numbers or temporary labels for the musical ideas and jot down, in poetic or aesthesic terms, something to help you identify each of them.

Using database or spreadsheet software its easy to insert, alter or delete cue points in your cue list since you can index column 1 (Time) so that your the list is always presented in chronological order of events in the film. Remember to include, where appropriate, leading zeros in your timings, for example 0:01:20 for one minute and twenty seconds. If you dont, 1:20 (1 minute and 20 seconds) will appear after 1:19:55 (1 hour, 19 minutes and 55 seconds)!

A cue list of the sort just described usually occupies between fifteen and twenty pages. If you think thats excessive, please remember that Hollywood breakdown notes, the nearest professional equivalent to your cue list, usually run to hundreds rather than tens of pages.

For your in-depth analysis youll need to choose an extract which contains music, which interests you and which you think could interest other course participants. The extract might be typical of the film or of the film genre in general, or it might be a key scene in the film. The length of the scene you choose will depend on the following factors.

If your graphic score (p. 427, ff.) presents a lot of visually and sonically complex detail that is thoroughly discussed in your analytical text section (p. 432, ff.) then the duration of your extract can be much shorter than if you are presenting something simpler. In general your extract will last for between about 60 seconds for a really complicated passage treated in great detail and about 8 minutes for something really simple. The extract can consist of a single music cue or of several short cues whose lengths add up to the sort of durations just given.

The primary aim of the feedback sessions is to discover what other course participants think the music in your chosen scene connotes and communicates. A secondary aim is to find out, time permitting, what other course participants think about the relation between music and other aspects of your chosen scene (sound, dialogue, mise-en-scne, visual action, camera work, etc.).

You have a time slot of 15 minutes of which at least half should be devoted to discussion and to hearing the associations and reactions of the other course participants.

Given that the main aim of this project is to find out which means of musical expression in conjunction with which visuals can produce which effects (p. 416), your in-depth analysis will need to be substantially semiotic. You can use any of the procedures explained in Chapters 6 and 7 to this end. The class presentation of your analysis extract is designed to provide you with intersubjectively generated evidence of the musics possible connotations, meanings and functions. Now, since its obviously impossible to discover anything about how music works in your chosen scene if you know nothing of what the music communicates on its own, and since most people tend to notice pictures and words without paying much conscious attention to the music, its essential to start your presentation by focusing on the music alone, without the visuals, preferably also without any dialogue or sound effects.

The best way of isolating the music from everything else in your analysis scene is to find, if you can, an original soundtrack recording of the relevant music because such recordings rarely include dialogue or sound effects that could distract listener attention from the music. Failing that you can just play your chosen scene to the others without showing them the pictures. In this case youll need to create a separate audio file of the extract[s] so that no-one sees the dvds menu images you otherwise depend on to navigate to your extract, or the first few frames of the extract before you manage to disconnect the visuals. Nor is it a good idea to let people see your dvd box with its title, colours and images. The less people know at this stage about the scene and its film the better. Besides, with an audio file of your scene you can yourself start work with the sound, musical or otherwise, in your graphic score without being distracted by the images or dialogue.

Preparing separate audio and video files of your scene has other important advantages in feedback sessions. You dont have to waste time thumbing through menus, fiddling around with next, previous, fast-forward and rewind buttons in the hope of eventually arriving at the right place. You just click on the file you need to play.

You are strongly advised to identify in advance of your feedback presentation any problems you may have with the music in your analysis scene. You might need help identifying a musical sound, or in understanding the possible connotations of a particular sound or passage. In those cases its advisable to isolate those elements and to present them outside their musical or audiovisual context.

Other participants are asked to note on a sheet of paper whatever comes to mind on hearing the music-only or audio-only version of your chosen scene. They are in other words subjected to a short musical reception test of the sort discussed in Chapter 6 and their responses can be of any type similar to those listed in the VVA taxonomy (p. 199, ff.).

You should be well prepared for your feedback presentation. You should also: [i] collect in response sheets; [ii] note or record comments arising during the discussion of your scene. This information constitutes an empirical basis for semiotic aspects of your analysis.

You are also expected to participate actively when others present their chosen scenes at feedback sessions.

Your written work should include the following sections: [1] preliminaries; [2] cue list; [3] table of musical ideas; [3] in-depth analysis including graphic score and discursive text; [4] general discussion of music in the film as a whole; [5] appendices.

Filmography and important credits should include: [1] film title and original year of production and/or release; [2] production and distribution companies; [3] film director, composer and producer, as well as principal actors and the roles they play.

Publishing details of the dvd used in this project should be included in the List of recorded references (lrr).

You should include a brief summary of the films story line in your preliminary comments. This summary would typically include descriptions of the main characters and locations, as well as any traits of mise-en-scne contributing to the overall character of the film. You should also motivate your choice of film and choice of scene.

Since one of film musics functions is to make what the viewer sees easier to interpret affectively its hardly surprising if musical ideas recur during the course of a film. You should therefore create a table of all the main musical ideas in your chosen film (Table 11-4, p. 426). There are also two practical reasons why creating this sort of table is a good idea: [i] you only once need to describe each musical idea for the whole film; [ii] you can refer back to the table of musical ideas not just from the cue list but also from your analysis, your general discussion, even from the graphic score. Creating a table of musical ideas presupposes that you have an overview of what happens when in the film youve already done that in your provisional cue list (p. 418, ff.) and that youve named and/or numbered all the musical ideas you need to refer to.

Numbering musical ideas is normally a relatively simple process. Its easiest to count the first musical idea to occur in the film as number 1 and increment the integer for each new idea that is presented. It can also be a good idea to think of the ideas in terms of what you think they communicate, grouping together those that both sound and feel similar (e.g. 1a, 1b; 1a1, 1a2). Using that kind of numbering system lets you more easily check which sort of musical idea belongs with which sort of scene, character, action or mood in your film.

Number codes may be shorter than names useful when saving space in a cue list, for example but most people find it easier to identify and recall musical ideas when referred to by name rather than just by number. There are several viable ways of naming a films musical ideas.

Original names of film music cues can sometimes be found in the track listings on soundtrack albums. If you cant find such an album, try searching for it on line: several sites let you hear short samples of each track listed. In such cases you can consider using the composers name for each relevant cue, otherwise dvd chapter names can sometimes give good ideas for appropriate names. In other cases youll have to invent your own names, either poetically (e.g. distorted guitar; minor-key strings) or aesthesically (e.g. James Bond; hounds of hell) or a mixture of the two (e.g. celestial choir; high-heeled sax). Sometimes a catch phrase from the dialogue in the relevant scene can work as a music cue name (e.g. Never again; You dont care). Of course youll need to explain any labels whose relation to the music or film is not obvious.

Every musical idea you include in your Table of Musical Ideas must be given an unequivocal timecode placement indicating where in the film it first occurs. It also helps if you provide timecode placements for other occurrences of the same idea, especially if its a variant. Once columns 1, 3 and 4 of the cue list are ready, a table of musical ideas for a feature film can be compiled, using database or spreadsheet software.

0:00:45 Quiet, slithering, string clusters mid register as cardinal reads letter Your holiness, free to be enslaved, etc. Also at 0:24:24 (Mendoza Alone) and 0:29:23 (Mendozas Remorse).

0:27:07 Rodrigo totally alone after killing Felipe; also at 1:36:20 1:36:20 (Mercenaries scale the falls); 1:40:34 (Battle preparations/Refusal); 1:51:11 (Massacre 2).

0:15:14 Mendoza confronted by Gabriel in forest; also (varied) at 0:16:34 Nervous plucked strings off-key. as slaves dragged into Ascuncin; 0:26:03 Constant quiet string wobble before fratricide; 0:26:26 Rising timp./str. dissonance before Rodrigo explodes; 0:29:40 Jaws idea: Mendoza Alone (jealousy); 0:30:15 Mendozas Remorse: loud bass (threatens Gabriel); 0:14:44 Slave Hunt: descending danger woodwind and strings

0:33:00 Mendozas Penance (main theme; break for Dies Irae at 0:32:44); also at 0:34:15 Penance: repeated in woodwind; Blessing the troops at 1:29:39.

0:15:14 String punctuations in jungle at making Christians if you have the time (Confronting Mendoza). Also at 0:24:20, ff. The jealous Mendoza Alone: strings and/or woodwind, loud; 0:30:15 Mendozas Remorse: string punctuations; 0:26:26 Rising string discord in the Duel with Felipe; 0:39:40 Knife held to Mendozas throat by Guaran (str., bass) repeated); 1:42:01 Portuguese paddle to battle; 1:51:44 Off-key trumpet fanfare as mercenaries hack through jungle.

Table 11-4 shows the first of seven main sets of musical ideas used in The Mission. This first set is called diaboli in musica because: [i] musemes labelled 1D are entirely based on the tritone, an interval which, in the history of Western music, was also called the Diabolus in musica; [ii] all the musemes in category 1 are heard in conjunction with unpleasant ideas, statements or feelings in the film. Museme 1A1 is called sick string slithers because glissando means sliding, because the ideas are played by strings, and because slow glissandi between neighbouring tones, by stating no fixed pitches, seem tonally instable and are often used in situations of mental, emotional or even gastric instability.

Criteria for selection of an analysis scene are given on page 422. Your analysis should be presented in two parts: [i] a graphic score; [ii] a discursive analysis (p. 432).

It is vital that your graphic score clearly shows in hours, minutes and seconds counting from the start of the film, not of the extract the timing at which your analysis scene starts.

Graphic scores usually consist at least of the following vertically stacked parts, each of them running horizontally left to right:

2. storyboard line, i.e. visual events represented by thumbnail photos, or by storyboard drawings or by brief verbal descriptions;

The next three pages contain a specimen five-line graphic score covering the first scene in The Mission. The time line is at the top, in the middle and at the bottom, speech on the second line, sound effects (mostly shown as icons to save space) on the third, thumbnails on the fourth, and the scenes three different strands of musical events on the fifth (strings, drum and ethnic flutes).

In this part of the project you discuss how the musical events detailed in your graphic score give rise to particular moods, effects or connotations. You should also discuss how those musical meanings combine with the visuals, sound effects, dialogue, etc. to create an overall audio-visual complex of meaning. The discussion should in other words be semiotic and take into account comments and reactions gathered during the feedback session.

In the case of the graphic score just presented I would probably start the analysis by dividing feedback responses into three categories: [1] tense, worry, headache, inner turmoil, ill, sick, confused, repressed terror; [2] unpredictable, fateful, ominous, foreboding, death, funeral, execution; [3] ethnic, South America, Indians, tropical birds, jungle. I would relate these categories to musemes 1a1 (Sick strings), 2a (Death drum) and 3a1 (Worrying woodwind ethnic), more specifically to 3a1a (Panpipe punctuations and breathy blasts), 3a1b (Wood flute hoots), 3a1c (Screaming bird flutes). Id try to substantiate this interpretation for museme 1a1 using iocm like [i] a very similar-sounding section one minute into Pendereckis Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima and [ii] various snippets of film music linked to seediness, drunkenness, motion sickness, madness, etc. Id try to argue similarly for the death drum and the ethnic woodwind musemes, pointing out the temporal unpredictability but semantic consistency with which the latter are inserted at words relating to colonisers and the colonised (enslaved, settlers, La Plata, San Miguel, Indians, plateau). Id draw attention to the co-occurrence of the death drum with [i] the films first image (a European man of authority sweating uncomfortably in tropical heat at 0:00:54), and [ii] references to Rome (Your holinessyear of Our Lord 1758 at 0:01:19 and the academies of Rome at 0:01:46), noting how it the drum is struck more regularly and repeatedly towards the end of the excerpt (from 0:01:54), accompanying the change of location (visuals and sound effects) from the enclosed European colonial mission out on to the plateau and into the jungle. It would also be worth noting how the sick strings linked to the moral turmoil inside the cardinals head give way at 0:01:35 to pleasantly melodic and harmonious quasi-diegetic music linked visually to the films good guys Father Gabriel and his indigenous pupils dressed in angelic white and verbally to the noble souls of these Indians. Other musical events worth discussing might be: [i] the ethnic flute figure after I dont think Im setting the right note (0:01:12); [ii] the transscansion after Begin again (0:01:15); [iii] the loud, spluttered pan pipe burst at martyrdom (0:02:07); [iv] the fact that the very first audiovisual event in this film, at 0:00:45 and lasting four seconds, consists of total darkness containing a single note of music sliding uneasily down to reveal (at 0:00:49) the cardinals immobile face in extreme close-up; and [v] another sick string slither plus a death drum hit before the cardinal finally moves and opens his mouth to speak (0:56:24).

This discussion should be based on observations presented in the Cue list (p. 418), the Table of musical ideas (p. 425) and the In-depth analysis (p. 427). You should summarise your findings about the association of particular musical ideas with particular characters, locations, actions, attitudes and moods throughout the film, drawing on your knowledge of film musics functions (p. 406) and other relevant concepts (p. 412) to make your arguments more convincing. You should discuss any eventual ethical or ideological dimension you think the music adds to the film, pointing out, if applicable, which individuals or groups of people, which locations, which types of action and attitude etc. are scored in positive, negative or neutral terms. This section of the project also gives you the chance to express your own opinions about how well or badly the music works in the film. In the case of The Mission I think the following sort of points would be worth discussing.

[1] Music is heard during 58% of the films total running time. Does the film really need that much music? Why is there relatively little music in the middle of the film?

[2] Morricones score contains a wide variety of musical styles, ranging from dissonant European modernism (for the cardinals inner turmoil and colonialist acts of violence) to idealised indigenous music, and from finely crafted exemplars of classical tonality (for attitudes and acts of hope and generosity) to the death drum and other threatening uses of percussion.

[3] The score contains several cues in which humanist classical ideas combine with the idealised indigenous music to accompany scenes of concord where the common interests of the lowly Jesuit brothers and the indigenous Guaran are presented visually or verbally.

[4] The unpredictable intermittent woodwind bursts on ethnic instruments heard in the first scene become successively less threatening as the story unfolds. By the end of the film they are an integral, consonant part of the combination European humanism plus indigenous rights and dignity mentioned under point 3.

[5] The films main theme is really more of a motif. Built on three notes, it appears in many different guises, for example: [i] played by full symphony orchestra with classical harmonies for the main titles in front of the falls (0:05:01-0:06:26); [ii] much more discordantly for Rodrigos anguish and outburst in prison (0:29:23-0:31:40); [iii] sung in a very high register by an indigenous treble voice (innocence) as a Miserere (= Have mercy) accompanied by almost dirge-like mid-to-low-register strings playing very simple held chords (1:59:59-2:00:50).

[6] One of the films recurring humanist themes, Gabriels Oboe, occurs only once and very briefly as diegetic music (0:10:59). It is otherwise used for longer underscore cues (at 0:14:13, 0:40:41, 1:15:58, 1:26:02, 1:27:13, 1:38:26, 1:55:22) and in the end credits. Despite being used mainly as underscore, Gabriels Oboe is one of the worlds most popular tunes, published in every conceivable type of arrangement, played at weddings, in concert halls, on bandstands, in bars and clubs, at figure skating competitions, in airline adverts, performed by amateurs and professionals, set to lyrics so it can be sung, used as soundtrack for beautiful nature montages of stills on YouTube, available as a ringtone, etc., etc. Why has this technically demanding tune that features long phrases and contains several subtleties of timing become such a popular piece to perform as well as to hear?

Your written project should correctly list all verbal and audiovisual references you have used in your work. Norms for formulating these appendices are online at |tagg.org/xpdfs/assdissv5.pdf|.

The Bibliography should contain all written verbal references (books, articles, web pages etc.) you have used in your work.

The List of Recorded References (LRR) should similarly list all recorded or broadcast materials (films, TV programmes, games, discs, etc.) you refer to in your work.

To complete this project successfully its best to do its various tasks in the following order: [1] Choice of film; [2] Preliminaries (film details, motivations, etc.); [3] Cue list; [4] Choice of scene for in-depth analysis; [5] Table of musical ideas; [6] Graphic score; [7] Discursive analysis; [8] General discussion of music throughout the film; [9] Appendices; [10] Table of contents. This order of working is not the same as that in which the projects various parts should be submitted.

Your project should be submitted with its constituent parts in the following order: [1] Table of contents; [2] Preliminaries (filmography, motivations); [3] Table of musical ideas; [4] Cue list; [5] Graphic score; [6] Discursive analysis; [7] General discussion; [8] Appendices.

audiovisual playback capable of reading dvds and standard video file formats (mpg, avi, etc.).

split your film into manageable lengths showing the right timecode in relation to the start of the movie;

Since computer software is, unlike this published book, in a state of constant change, I post updated software tips for this project online at |tagg.org/zmisc/VideoTips.htm| and |tagg.org/zmisc/softwarefavs.htm|.

Its too much. You cant expect students to do all of that, especially if theyve no formal training in music. These are some of the comments I hear from other teachers of both music and other subjects when I talk, often enthusiastically, of some of the student projects submitted by musos and non-musos alike. Ive even had to ask students to lend me their work after its been graded and its back in their hands so that I can show the doubting teachers who wont check the examples of student work Ive put on line that Im not exaggerating. True, some students regret having registered for the course when they discover the extent of what they are expected to produce during weeks 5-13, and one or two abandon the course in week 2 after hearing what sort of work is in store for them. But even those who initially swore while slaving over their cue list must have found it worth the effort because anonymous student evaluations have been consistently positive and the generally high standard of student work suggests that there must be considerable interest and motivation for the subject. Although Ive heard some students complain about the scope of the coursework, the most common irritant is expressed in terms like I cant watch a film any more without paying attention to the music. Dont worry, I reply when I get the chance: Ive learnt to switch off my analytical ear when I want, because I know I can always switch it back on again if need be.

The scepsis of some colleagues towards the work described in this chapter contrasts starkly with the enthusiasm of many students for the work they have to do on the course. This contrast may well reflect some of the differences between knowledges discussed in Chapters 3 and 6, in that skills involved in Music and the Moving Image rely largely on aesthesic competence in music (knowledge type 1b on page 105) and its conventional status as a largely vernacular, extracurricular affair. Moreover, the project just described demands interaction with an intrinsically non-scribal medium including large amounts of invisible music: there is no notation to follow, there are no canonic texts to ingest, and, to quote Simon Frith again, its literally not the sort of thing you [can] photocopy. And yet, knowing that films, tv programmes and video games are media with which every student on every Music and Moving Image course Ive run since 1993 has been familiar since birth, it strikes me not so much as absurd as wasteful not to help students understand and systematise their aesthesic competence in reacting to the messages, musical and otherwise, circulating in those media. To put it bluntly, given the issues of dual consciousness and the ubiquity of invisible music in contemporary media, both raised at the start of this book, what, I wonder, should general music education be about if not the sort of thing set out in this chapter?

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Wicke, Peter (1985). Sentimentality and high pathos: popular music in fascist Germany. Popular Music, 5: 149-158.

Williamson, Donald S (2007). Automatic Music Similarity Assessment and Recommendation. Master of Science in Electrical Engineering. Drexel University.

This appendix lists source details of music and media references made in this book.To avoid the inconvenience of being referred to several different appendices to obtain information about one item, all types of audiovisual storage are inluded in this one appendix.

Items appear in alphabetical order of author (composer/artist etc.) or, in the case of multi-authored or anonymous collections, in alphabetical order of title (film, TV show, tune, album, etc.). Items by the same author are arranged in chronological order of first known appearance of each item. For example, music for a film which appeared in 1968 and which is included on a sound recording from 1988 or on a DVD from 2002 is ordered as 1966, not as 1988 or 2002. Similarly, a work known to have been composed, published or released in 1832, which also appears in a volume of sheet music published in 1954 and which is included on a CD issued in 1998, will be chronologically listed as 1832, except in those instances where the original year of release, publication or performance is unknown. n.d. (= no date) signals that the year of the items appearance or release or publication or first performance is not known, except in cases where no date details are to be expected (traditional sources, pocket scores, etc.).

To save space and to facilitate identification of the type of source referred to, the following symbols are used in this appendix:

Please note the following terms and abbreviations: B&H Boosey and Hawkes; C20 Fox Twentieth Century Fox; Ch4 Channel 4 TV (UK); CUP Cambridge University Press; DGG Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft; ed. edited by; ITV Independent TV (UK); mvt movement; OUP Oxford University Press; rec. recording/recorded; rev revised; SRP2/SRP3 Sveriges Radio Program 2/3 (Swedish national radio channel 2 or 3); SvTV Sveriges Television (Swedish national TV); TV3 Scandinavias commercial third channel; UA United Artists; xtr extract[s]; xwos except where otherwise stated.

[1] YouTube file addresses are reduced to their unique filenames and the recurrentURL prefix http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= is omitted. For example:

To view any YouTube clip referenced in this way, just copy the unique code (e.g. msM28q6MyfY), paste it into the YouTube Search box and press Enter. Only that one single clip will appear in the YouTube display. Just click the Play button (q) to view/hear.

Addison is composer (c) of the theme (T) for this TV production (t), first broadcast by CBS in 1984 and recorded off-air (w) from Swedish TV in 1990.

2. Barry, J (1979) c The Black Hole F Gary Nelson, f Disney; 0 Pickwick SHM 3017.

Music written by John Barry (c) for the 1979 Disney-produced film (f) The Black Hole, directed by Gary Nelson (f), is available on a sound carrier (0), in this instance on an LP issued on the Pickwick label with the catalogue number SHM 3017. Since no lower-case italics occur, the album title is the same as that of the film (The Black Hole). If no date were known for the album, the entry would have ended SHM 3017 (n.d.). If the album had been issued in, say, 1980 rather than 1979, the entry would have ended SHM 3017 (1980).

3. High Noon (1952) fCriterion/Republic/UA, FFred Zinnemann; V4Front 054 1463 (1998); cT Dimitri Tiomkin; 0vo> Frankie Laine; 0vR> Tex Ritter.

The source used for the music throughout this 1952 film is a VHS cassette released in 1998. Details for the sources we have used for the title theme (T) written by (c) Dimitri Tiomkin can be found under the entries for: [1] Tiomkin himself; [2] Frankie Laine, who sang (v) a popular cover version (o) of [3] the original recording (R) by Tex Ritter.

4. Mozart, W A (1791) Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra in A major, K622 2nd mvt. FPadre Padrone > Macchi (1977); fOut of Africa > Barry (1986); t$ Enhanced Assurance wITV 1993; 0Classic Commercials, Volume 27.

Details of the sound carriers used as sources for the second movement of this Mozart concerto from 1791 are provided under two other author entries, to which the reader is referred: [1] the album containing Egisto Macchis music for the film Padre Padrone (released in 1977); [2] the album containing Barrys music for the 1986 film Out of Africa. Part of the same movement was also used (the rest of this is fictitious!) as an advert for the Enhanced Assurance company (now in liquidation after accountancy scandals). The advert was aired by ITV in 1993 and the music is included on the 27th CD in the Classic Commercials series, to which you are referred for further source details.

Ive accessed 3 sources for Verdis Ada (first performed 1871): [1] the Dover score (no publication date); [2] an Italian video from 1981 reissued on DVD in 1998; [3] the HMV LP box set from 1974.

V Warner SO 15031 (1996) D Warner 23497 (2003) w SvTV2 1990-02-24 0 Virgin V2402 (1986) Ascuncin Gabriels Oboe >E Tagg (2010c).

Sources for The Mission, a film (F) from 1986 produced/distributed by Goldcrest and Warner and directed (f) by Roland Joff are: [1] a commercial VHS (V) released by Warner in 1996; [2] Warners North American DVD release (D) from 2003; a video recording off-air (w) from Swedish TV on 24 February 1990; [4] an audio carrier (0) (in this case an LP) released by Virgin in 1986. Two tracks on the CD or cues from the film are referred to: Ascuncin and Gabriels Oboe, the second of which can also be found in a YouTube offering made by Philip Tagg in 2010.

Arlen, Howard (1938) Over The Rainbow (j E.Y. Harburg) v J Garland 0 Decca (1939).

Auld Lang Syne (Trad. Scot.) > n Rape (1924: 439); n Songs That Will Live (nd: 10).

Bach, Johann S (1727) Passion according to Saint Matthew, bwv 244 (ed. E Elgar & I Atkins) pE London: Novello (1938); 0 Matthuspassion m numerous and various C Paul Goodwin 0 Cala 99048 (1994-5).

(1730?) Orchestral Suite no. 2 in B minor, BWV 1067; 0 Six Brandenburg Concertos and Four Orchestral Suites m The English Concert C Trevor Pinnock

0 Archiv 423 494-2 (3) (1978); Badinerie m Aurle Nicolet (fl.), Mnchener Bachorchester C Karl Richter E DAw-I5TFXQM [110818].

(1734) Weinachtsoratorium (ed. H. Kretzschmar), BWV 248 pELeipzig: Edition Peters (n.d.); Bereite dich Zion (Prepare thyself, Zion) v Angelika Kirchschlager

Badalmenti, Angelo (1989) Twin Peaks Vol. 2 V Screen Entertainment SE 9142 (1991).

Ball, Kenny (and his Jazzmen) (1962). Midnight In Moscow (Soloviov-Sedoy) 0 Pye 7NJ 2049.

m Berliner Philharmoniker C Herbert von Karajan. 0 Naxos 8.550135 (1988), m CSR Symphony Orchestra Bratislava C Michael Halsz.

Big Concerto Movie Themes (1972) 0 Music For Pleasure MFP 4261. mC Geoff Love and his Orchestra m Robert Docker (piano).

Bizet, Georges (1875) Carmen nLeipzig: Edition Peters (1916) m Wiener Philharmoniker

Farewell To Erin is also at 0:00-2:30 in E Gs79hRgFVlg (pub session from Asturias, 2007); or solo fiddle by glasgokiwi at E MtzN98uzXMg (2008).

Broughton, Bruce (1976) c How the West was Won: the Macahans episode The Enemy t NBC/MGM w SvTV1 (1980). Tc Jerold Immel.

Brown, Clifford; Roach, Max (1955) Jordu (Duke Jordan) 0 Trip Jazz TLP 5540; also on Clifford Brown, Max Roach 0 Verve 314543306-2.

(1847) c Waltz in D$ major, Op. 64, No. 1, a.k.a Minute Waltz, a.k.a. Valse du petit chien pn Breitkopf & Hrtel E KESTJm1g_N0 mTzvi Erez (pf).

Claribel (Charlotte Allington Pye/Barnard) (c. 1855) c I Cannot Sing the Old Songs; n Selected Songs for Ladies Voices; London: George Newnes (n.d.)

Creedence Clearwater Revival (1971) Sweet Hitch-Hiker 0 United Artists UP 35261.

Cruz, Clia (1999, con Tito Puente) Guantanamera (j Mart 1899, c Fernndez 1949) A Night of Salsa 0 RMM 0-2828-3078-2.

Cwm Rhondda (Arglwydd, arwain trwy'r anialwch/Guide me, O Thou Great Jehovah), hymn tune by John Hughes > nMethodist Hymn Book (1933 #615);

Daquin, Louis-Claude (1735) c Le coucou. E 6bf-Cpw8oJc m Sergei Rachmaninov (pf).

Dowland, John (c. 1610) Lachrimae Amantis 0 The Elizabethan Collection. Boots Classical Collection 143 (1986/1988) m Dowland Consort C Jakob Lindberg.

Dr Strangelove (1964) f Stanley Kubrick. F Stanley Kubrick Productions/Columbia Pictures. D Columbia Tristar (1999).

Duncan, Trevor (n.d. 1). Transcenics (ominous, agitated) 0 Recorded Music for Film, Radio & TV: drama themes, links and bridges. Boosey & Hawkes SBH 2986.

Dvo?k, Antonn (1893) Symphony No. 9 in E minor From the New World, Op. 95 0Decca Weekend Classics 417 678-2 (1968); 2nd mvt. as bread advert (Hovis, 1974-79) E TOWJECdobqk [110829].

Edwards, Michael (1937) Once In A While (lyr. Bud Green) mTommy Dorsey and his Orchestra; 0 This is Tommy Dorsey & his Orchestra, vol. 1 (RCA Victor, 1991).

0 Es lebe Chile! Es lebe das Volk! v Ernst Busch, Balkanton BAK 3140 (1973); n Snger fr Socialismen; Stockholm: Arbetarkultur, p. 54 (1981).

(1941) Vierzehn Arten den Regen zu beschreiben (Fourteen Ways of Describing Rain: variations for winds, strings and piano, Op. 70); recorded to silent film Regen F CAPI f Joris Ivens (1929); E sISW8msuAxU.

Faith, Percy (1959) A Summer Place cT F Warner f Delmer Daves. 0 Theme From A Summer Place Columbia 433007 m Percy Faith & His Orchestra (1963)

(1961) The Virginian tT NBC 1962-69 0 Televisions Greatest Hits Vol 2, Silva Screen FILMCD 034 (1986), p Northern Music Co. 0o Golden Hour of Favourite TV Themes, Golden Hour GH 845 (1976) m 101 Strings.

Flash and the Pan (1979) Flash and the Pan 0 Mercury 6310 956 E 7oA-1IUIegc [110906].

Frequency X (1989) Hearing Things. This Is Urban. 0 Pop & Arts PAT CD 101 (1990).

Gibbons, Orlando (1612) The Silver Swan (from the First Set of Madrigals and Motets of 5 parts) English Madrigals from the Courts of Elizabeth and James

(1615?) This is the Record of John (verse anthem) 0 Tudor Church Music; Academy Sound & Vision DCA 514 (1982) v Choir of Kings College Cambridge m London Early Music Group C Philip Ledger.

(n.d.) Drop, Drop Slow Tears m Choir of Kings College Cambridge C David Willcocks 0 Abide with Me, 1 G katapi.org.uk E _DEHBfv5N8M [110819].

Gluck, Christoph W (1744) Che far senza Euridice from Orfeo ed Euridice (1744/1762)

n New York: Norton, 1970; v Marilyn Horne m Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden C Georg Solti E 0bUAM0ER-Dw[110814]; also as What is Life Without Thee? v Kathleen Ferrier (1946) E ypePP1ENcmw [110818].

Guantanamera (j Jos Mart, 1899) > cvFernandez (1949/1929), m Seeger (c. 1962); m Sandpipers (1966); m Jean (1997); v Cruz (1999).

Handel, Georg F (1738) Largo (aria Ombra mai fu) from Xerxes, HWV 40, n Rape (1924: 616) v Kathleen Ferrier m London Symphony Orchestra C Malcolm Sargent E Z_bL4LVbgVs [110818].

0 Belart 461 629-2 (1999 P1960) m London Philharmonic C Adrian Boult; He was despised v Kathleen Ferrier (1952) E qH3E64G0oCI [110814].

Hendrix, Jimi (1968) Electric Ladyland 0 Polydor 184-183, 184-184 (1972 pressing);

(1969) The Star Spangled Banner F Woodstock (Warner/Wadleigh) f Michael Wadleigh; also on 0 Rainbow Bridge, Reprise K 44159 (1971).

Hollywood (1988): cowboy episode of documentary series f Mike Wooler, narrated by James Mason w SvTV1 1988-09-01.

Houston, Whitney (1992) v I Will Always Love You c Dolly Parton. The Bodyguard (Original Soundtrack Album) 0 Arista 07822-18699-1.

Jarre, Maurice (1965 c) Doctor Zhivago F MGM fDavid Lean D WB/Turner DVS Z8 65571 (2001); T Lara's Theme >0 plus clbres musiques de film.

Jefferson, Blind Lemon (1927) Match Box Blues 0 Okeh 8455; also on Good Mornin', Blues The Legendary Bluesmen 0 Sanctuary CD AJA 5439 (2004).

Khachaturian, Aram (1954) Pas de deux of Phrygia and Spartacus from Spartacus Tt The Onedin Line (BBC, 1971-80) D Cinema Club (2007); 0 The World of TV Themes, m Wiener Philharmoniker, Decca spa 217 (1972).

(2004) Radioactivity (live, Sala Kongresowa, Warsaw, 2004-05-27) Minimum-Maximum 0 EMI 12EMDJ 663 (2005) E kXD6Gtinvbc or E dNUzfcNGKHo.

Lee, Peggy (1949) o Bali Hai (Pc Rodgers, R; in South Pacific). 0 Capitol ep 54 601;

Legend of Zelda, The (1989-1992) t DiC Entertainment/Viacom/Nintendo; Rocky Road To Dublin m The Young Dubliners E MPMT6_aMyn0 [110820].

Mart, Jos (1899) j Guantanamera > cvFernandez (1929/1949), m Seeger (1963); m Sandpipers (1966); m Jean (1997); v Cruz (1999).

Miller, Glenn and his Orchestra (1995) In the Mood. Sound and Music Corporation Ltd. mucd 9010 (1995). m Glenn Miller and his Orchestra

Morricone, Ennio (1964) c Per un pugno di dollari/For a Fistful of Dollars. FJolly Films

(1965) c Per qualche dollari in pi/For a Few Dollars More F REA Films f Sergio Leone D MGM 0-7928-3905-6 (1998).

(1966a) c Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo/The Good, the Bad and the Ugly F PEA Prods.

(1968) c Cera una volta il West/Once Upon a Time in the West F Paramount/Rafran/

(1971) c Gi la testa (a.k.a. Duck, You Sucker!; A Fistful of Dynamite; Once Upon A Time...The Revolution) F Rafran Films f Sergio Leone

(1994a) C La grande orchestra di Ennio Morricone 0 Music Market /Ariola/ RCA 74321

(1995) c Ennio Morricone 0 New Sound Track NST-CD 01-1 (incl. Requiem per un destino).

(1997) c The Singles Collection: 47 Themes from 25 Movies 0 drg Cinemavox 32921.

(1996) c Ennio Morricone m Orchestra Unione Musicisti di Roma 0 New Age Music and Sounds NAMS 062X (incl. Due pezzi sacri per orchestra).

(2008) Ennio Morricone: The Complete Edition 0 GDM/Edel Italia 0194392ERE (15 CDs).

Mozart, Wolfgang A (1786) Concerto for Horn in E$ major, K495 m Dennis Brain (horn), Philharmonia Orchestra C Herbert von Karajan 0 Columbia 33 CX 1140.

Musik frn Bulgarien (1965) rec. by Deben Bhattacharya 0 Expo Norr (Rikskonserter) riks lpx 4 (1971) 0 Caprice cap 1085 (1978).

Newman, Thomas (1999)c American Beauty. FDreamworks/ Jinks/Cohen fCohen Brothers DDreamworks 85382 (2000).

0The Best of Bond (Original Soundtracks), United Artists UAS 29021 (1975) |tagg.org/audio/DrNoBondVinyl.mp3| [100923].

North, Alex (1951) A Streetcar Named Desire FWarner/Charles K Feldman f Elia Kazan w Channel 4 (UK) May 1995 0> Fifty Years of Film Music.

Post, Mike (1993) ctT NYPD Blue Les meilleures sries TV du cable et du satellite

Rape, Ern? (ed. 1924). Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists. New York: Schirmer; facsimile reprint by Arno Press, New York (1974).

Ravel, Maurice (1928) Bolro. 0 Holst: The Planets. Ravel: Bolro, IOrchestre National de France CLorin Maazel. CBS Master works MDK 44781 (1981).

Recorded Music for Film, Radio & TV [#2984: romance] 0 Boosey & Hawkes SBH 2984 m The New Concert Orchestra (n.d.).

Riley, Jeannie C (1967) Harper Valley PTA 0 Polydor 56748 E 4ivUOnnstpg [110315].

Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai A (1874) Flight of the Bumblebee (also in opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1900)) 0 Sheherazade, Bumble Bee, Prince Igor, G eClassical ec1721;

Rodrigo, Joaqun (1940) Concierto de Aranjuez m Melos Ensemble, Julian Bream CColin Davis 0Guitar Music, RCA LSC 2730-B (1967) o Miles Davis (1959).

Rolling Stones, The (1964) Route 66 0 The Rolling Stones. Decca (Belgium) 23536.

Rossini, Giacchino (1829) William Tell (overture) n London: Eulenburg # EE 616 mChicago Symphony Orchestra CF Reiner 0 Rossini Overtures, RCA Gold Seal AGL 1-5210, 1959; with sound effects TThe Lone Ranger tABC (1949-56) 0Themes Like Old Times, Vol 1.

Rota, Nino (1972) c The Godfather (Part 1) FParamount fF F Coppola wDanish TV 1978.

Rouget de Lisle, Claude-Joseph (1792) c La Marseillaise n The Fellowship Song Book,

p. 2. London: Curwen (1915). 0 National Anthems. Nationalhymnen aus 29 Nationen m American Brass Band. Laserlight Digital 15 155 (1986).

Rzsa, Mikls (1944) Double Indemnity F Paramount f Billy Wilder D Universal Studios Home Entertainment (2006); cue Mrs Dietrichson on 0 Spellbound The Classic Film Scores of Mikls Rzsa, RCA GL 43443 (1981) m National Philharmonic Orchestra CCharles Gerhardt.

Saint Patricks Hymn, a.k.a Slane, a.k.a Bob tu ma bhoile, a Comdi cride (Trad. Irish)

Sarduy Dimet, Carlos (2005) Charly en La Habana. Cinquillo Colibri CD 042 (2005);

(n.d.) np London, New York, Frankfurt: Peters; Gesnge fr eine Singstimme mit Klavierbegleitung nach den ersten drucken revidiert (ed. Friedlnder): Band I - Ausgabe fr hohe Stimme.

Semmler, Alexander (n.d.) Cinderella Dreams and Lullaby Of The City >0 Background Music for Home Movies.

Sherwin, Manning (1940). A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square (lyr. Eric Maschwitz). 0We'll Meet Again: The Love Songs of World War II. Smithsonian msd2m-35384.

Simpson, Mike (2010) Gamelan Tuning Systems - Slendro & Pelog E 3Ku9iH2pU9g [110917].

Soloviov-Sedoy, V (n.d.) ???????????? ??????/Midnight In Moscow; quoted from memory after Kenny Ball and his Jazzmen (>m0 Ball, 1962); see also

Songs That Will Live For Ever (n.d. c. 1938, ed. Maurice Jacobson) ELondon: Odhams.

Stafford Smith, John (c. 1810) c The Star-Spangled Banner (US national anthem) j Francis Scott Key (1814) >0 National Anthems (1986).

Star-Spangled Banner, The >c Stafford Smith (c. 1810) >0 National Anthems (1986).

Steeleye Span (1971) The Blacksmith and The Female Drummer 0 Please To See The King. Mooncrest Crest 8 (1971); CD Shanachie 79075 (1990); Female Drummer also on The Essential Guide to Folk (3CD) E MSuuVqxEhRA [110814].

Steely Dan (1976) Haitian Divorce 0 ABC 4152 w SRP3 Dec. 1976; 0 The Very Best of Steely Dan mca mcldd 19147 (1985).

Steiner, Max (1933) King Kong. F RKO f Merien C Cooper and Ernest B Schoedsack w Super Channel, Dec. 1987.

(1942) Now Voyager F Warner f Irving Rapper D Warner (2001); Love climax and Finale 0 Now Voyager The Classic Film Scores of Max Steiner RCA Read Seal SER 5695 m National Philharmonic Orchestra CCharles Gerhardt.

Stockhausen, Karlheinz (1964) Mixtur fr Orchester, Sinusgeneratoren und Ringmodulatoren m D Johnson, H Boj, J Fritsch, R Gehlhaar, Ensemble Hudba Dneska

Strauss, Johann (Jr.) (1867) An der schnen blauen Donau a.k.a The Blue Danube Waltz. 0 Strauss Waltzes, CBS Odyssey MBK 44892 (1979) m Philadelphia Orchestra C Eugene Ormandy; see also > 2001 (1968).

(1874) Die Fledermaus (Overture) m Wiener Philharmoniker C Karajan; New Year Concert, Vienna, 1987 E sHF5LP53LZY.

(2011a) fj Buzz, Grrr, Click and Crash: an anaphonic account of links between men, shaving, power chords, guitar distortion and rock myth E 5ADH5RB6Qsg [110316];

Tallis, Thomas (1570) Spem in alium v Choir of Kings College, Cambridge C David Willcocks 0 Decca Ovation adrm 433676-2 (1992) 0R Argo zrg 5436 (1966).

Tarantella from The Godfather Part 1 om Prague Symphony Orchestra E nb-z1ZG7q3o.

Tarantella pugliese from Torchiarolo, Grecia Salentina 0 Music of Italy E 2i4xiIi3tAY.

Trukeros, Los (2007). De chilena; 0 own production (autoedicin), Santiago de Chile; live version at E v92yIsJbecY [110820].

Tsourdalakis, Yiannis (2010) ?????? ?????? (??? ??????: ??????? ???????????, ??????? ???????????? - ??????? 2010) E NFhICDWOQV0 [110814].

0 Original soundtrack MGM S 13; see also Ligeti (1961), Strauss J (1895), Strauss R (1896).

Ultramen/DJ Anderson (2003) Olel 0 Formao e prtica musical de DJs; um estudio multicaso em Porto Alegre (acquired July 2004).

V (1983) f Richard T Heffron V Warner Home Video WEV 11443 [1-5] (1987); theme c Barry De Vorzon & Joseph Conran, underscore c Dennis McCarthy.

Valens, Ritchie (1958) La bamba b/w Donna 0 Del-Fi 4110 (US), London HL 8803 (UK).

Van Van, Los [Juan Formell con los Van Van] (2002) Tim-pop con Birdland En Malecn de La Habana 0 Unicornio Producciones Abdala;

Vaughan Williams, Ralph (1914) The Lark Ascending m Academy of St. Martin in the Fields C Neville Marriner m Iona Brown 0 Argo ZRG 696 (1972).

Volga Boatmen, Song of the (??, ?????, Russian Trad.), quoted in b Ling (1997:41);

Warren, Harry (c 1940) At Last (in films Sun Valley Serenade and Orchestra Wives); The Glenn Miller Story HMV DLP 1024 (1978?); >v Etta James (1961). also rec. by Etta James, Argo LP-4003 (1961).

Waters, Muddy (1977) Mannish Boy 0 Blue Sky SKY 32357; used in Levis 501 jeans fridge commercial (1988) E 2RKp1P2S2qs [110829].

Watson, Doc (1963) The Doc Watson Family 0 Folkways fts 31021 0 Smithsonian Folkways SF 40012 (1990) The Lost Soul Darling Corey.

Watson, Doc; Ashley, Clarence (1960-62) Old Time Music at Clarence Ashleys, vols 1

and 2 0 Folkways 2355, 2359 (1963); reissue: Doc Watson and Clarence Ashley: The Original Folkways Recordings 1960-1962 0 Smithsonian Folkways SF40029/30 (1994) The Coo-Coo Bird (1962) Amazing Grace v Jean Ritchie (1962)

Webern, Anton von (1913) Fnf Stze fr Orchester, Op. 10 n Wien: Universal Edition (1926) m City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra C Simon Rattle

Weelkes, Thomas (n.d.) Hosanna to the Son of David n London: Oxford University Press (1921); also in Oxford Book of Tudor Anthems: 113 0> Weelkes (1999).

(n.d.) When David Heard n Oxford Book of Tudor Anthems: 343; 0 Thomas Weelkes and Thomas Tallis m Choir of St Johns College, Cambridge C George Guest, Argo ZRG 5237 (1961); also 0> Weelkes (1999)

(1999) Weelkes: Madrigals and Anthems m Consort of Musicke C Anthony Rooley 0AS&V Gaudeamus 195.

White, Barry (1973) Loves Theme 0 Best Of Barry White, Love Unlimited and the Love Unlimited Orchestra. 20th Century 9279576 (1974).

(1978) Superman F Salkind/Dovemead/Film Export A.G. etc. f Richard Donner; D Superman The Movie: Warner 0-7907-5243-3 (2001); V Warner SO1013 (1995). 0 Warner Brothers WB 2BSK 3257 (1978).

Whose Line is it Anyway? (1989) tT Hat Trick Productions (UK) w Dave (UK, 2011).

aesthesic [Is!TizIk] adj. (from Fr. esthsique, Molino via Nattiez); relating to the aesthesis [Is!TisIs] or perception of music rather than to its production or construction; opposite of poetic.

anacrusis [Qn9!kru:sIs] n. short musical event having the character of an upbeat or pickup, i.e. a rhythmic figure and/or short tonal process propelling the music into whatever it immediately precedes; adj. anacrustic [Qn9!kru:stIk].

anaphone n. [!QnfUn] neol. (1990); musical sign type bearing iconic resemblance to what it can be heard to represent (p. 321, ff.); adj. ana-phonic [Qn!fOnik]; see also sonic anaphone, tactile anaphone, kinetic anaphone.

anaphora [!nafor] n. rhetorical device by which successive sentences start identically but end differently, as in Martin Luther Kings I have a dream speech; transferred to music, a melodic anaphora means that successive phrases start with the same motif but end differently, while a harmonic anaphora means that successive chord sequences start with the same change[s] but end differently. Anaphora is the opposite of epistrophe.

AO [EI!U] n. ph. abbr. neol. (1979) analysis object, i.e. a piece of music subjected to the sort of analysis procedures described in this book.

atmos [!QtmOs] n. (pl. atmoses [!QtmsIz]) a.k.a. ambience, ambient sound; an atmos presents the general ongoing soundscape, the audio scenery, the sonic backcloth, etc. relevant to the visual footage with which it is heard (e.g. a busy street, by the sea in calm or stormy weather, inside a car driven on the motorway, in a forest with or without the appropriate birdsong for the location in question, in a city park in spring or winter, in an up-market restaurant or a fast food joint); etym. abbr. atmosphere.

aural staging n. ph. abbr. neol. (2011) the mise-en-scne or scenography of sound sources (voices, instruments, sound effects, etc.), in one or more acoustic spaces; particularly important in audio recordings phonographic staging (Lacasse 2005) but also in film and games sound, as well as in live performance situations (see p. 288).

bpm abbr. beats per minute standard unit of tempo measurement (cf. npm and see p. 277).

break n. mus. [1] very short section during which ongoing accompaniment patterns in a piece of music stop to give sonic space to, and thereby highlight, whatever occupies them (see p. 353); [2] musical event[s] inside a break, as just defined, e.g. a drum break. N.B. Break, breakdown and drop have different meanings in post-1990 DJ parlance, notably in the sphere of hip hop and electronica.

breakdown notes a.k.a. timing notes n. notes prepared by the music editor and comprising a detailed list of significant events inside a single scene in an audiovisual production (cf. cue list and cue sheet).

CCCS n. abbr. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, UK.

conjunct motion n. ph. mus. (of melody) movement by small, normally single, intervallic steps; opposite of disjunct motion.

contrary motion n. ph. mus. movement of two strands (parts) in opposite pitch directions; pitch movement away from each other; opposite of parallel motion.

continuant n. [1] phon. extendable consonant, e.g. /r/ as in rrreally! or a long /S/ (shshsh) when you want people to be quiet; [2] neol. (2011) the continuous body of a timbre regardless of whether its technically the decay or the sustain part of the envelope (see pp. 267-268).

counterpoint [!kaUnt9pOInt] n. [1] mus. type of polyphony whose instrumental or vocal lines (strands) clearly differ in melodic and/or rhythmic profile; polyphonic antithesis of homophony; adj. contrapuntal [kOntr9!pYnt9l]; [2] intentional contradiction in music of concurrent verbal or visual events.

cowboy half-cadence n., neol. (1987) progression from major triad on the flat seventh to major triad on the dominant ($VII-V), as in the main themes from The Magnificent Seven, Dallas, Blazing Saddles, etc.

crisis chord n. neol. (1991) chromatically embellished chord containing at least one diminished or augmented interval and occurring within the standard harmonic context of the European tertial idiom; most frequently occurring as m6 or m7$5, crisis chords can often be found about 75% of the way through a nineteenth-century parlour ballad.

cue n. musical continuum in an audiovisual production; the duration of a cue can vary from just a few seconds to several minutes.

cue list n. a list of cue points for part or whole of an audiovisual production, i.e. the chronological enumeration of timecode locations corresponding to the start and end of each music cue (not to be confused with cue sheet or breakdown notes).

cue point n. point at which a musical cue starts, typically (but not exclusively) the start of a scene; not to be confused with hit point.

cue sheet n. [1] list of all cues in an audiovisual production, specifying details of duration, composer, publishing rights, type of usage; not to be confused with cue list; [2] list of scenes in a silent film, together with titles and sheet music publishing details of pieces suggested as suitable for each scene in the film.

diataxis [daI9!tQksIs] n. neol. (2011) (from ditajiw = disposition, arrangement; adj. diatactic [daI9!tQktIk]). General sign type indicating the arrangement / disposition / order of musical events in terms of duration, chronological placement (order/form) and relative importance; see also episodic determinant and episodic marker.

disjunct motion n. ph. mus. (of melody) movement containing large intervallic steps; opposite of conjunct motion.

doo-wop. n., primarily vocal genre with origins in black US gospel of the 1940s and in barber shop quartet singing. Originally sung a cappella or with simple percussion, doo-wop became part of US-mainstream pop in the 1950s and early 1960s. The terms etymology is onomatopoeic (like fa la la la in Elizabethan madrigals), deriving from the styles use of paralinguistic syllables vocalising approximations of instrumental accompaniment patterns, e.g. The Marcels version of Blue Moon (1961), Barry Manns Who Put The Bomp (1961).

dual consciousness n. perception of the self as having two conflicting identities. Fanon (1952) referred specifically to the two different cultural identities of the colonised individual in relation to [1] colonisers and [2] colonised peers. Ive taken the liberty (2010) of using the expression to denote the widespread phenomenon of dual consciousness involving the private and public identities of an individual (p. 1, ff.).

episode n. mus.passage containing distinct material as part of a larger sequence of events in a piece of music.

episodic determinant n. neol. (2011) sign type determining the identification of a musical passage as an episode; episodic determinants are essential to the understanding of musical form, i.e the order, placement, dispsition and duration of episodes (passages, periods, sections, etc.) in a piece of music; see also diataxis and episodic marker.

episodic marker n. neol. (1992) musical sign type consisting of a short processual structure mediating temporal position or relative importance (see p. 349, ff.); see also diataxis and episodic determinant.

equidurational. adj. neol. (2000) of equal duration, lasting for the same amount of time.

extended present n. ph., a.k.a. present-time experience. In music, the extended present is a duration roughly equivalent to no more than that of a musical phrase (inhalation + exhalation), or to a few footsteps, or a short gestural pattern, or a few heartbeats; i.e. a duration experienced as a single unit (Gestalt) in present time, as now rather than as an extended sequence of musical ideas (see p. 261, ff.; see also intensional). The extended present can be imagined as the human brains equivalent to a computers ram where information is processed immediately, rather than as its hard drive (longer-term memory) where access and retrieval times are longer.

extensional adj. (Chester, 1970) relating to horizontal, syntactical aspects of musical expression extended over longer durations; opposite of intensional.

falsetto n., adj. vocal phonation distinct from that of normal singing or speaking and covering a pitch range extending from the upper end of the head register to considerably higher pitches; falsetto singing produces a characteristically high, clean and flute-like timbre.

Foley n. (c. 1930) sound effect recorded to synchronise with (usually visible) on-screen events (e.g. footsteps, door shutting, clothes rustling); etym. Jack Foley, sound effects specialist in the early days of talking film; pl. Foleys.

genre n., mus. [!ZA:nr9] set of norms, rules or habits that members of a given community find useful in identifying a given set of musical and music-related practices Genre rules can relate to any of the codes involved in a musical event including rules of behaviour, proxemic and kinesic codes, business practices, etc. (Fabbri 2005: 8-9); cf. style; see also pp. 256-257.

genre synecdoche n. [!ZAnr sIn!EkdkI] neol. (1992) part-for-whole sign type referring to a musical style other than that of its immediate surroundings and, by extension, to paramusical or extramusical aspects of the genre with which that other musical style is associated; see also genre, style, synecdoche.

graphocentric [grQfU!sEntrIk] adj. neol. (J-J Nattiez in conversations with the author, c. 2005) assuming written or other graphic signs to be more important than others (see logocentric and scopocentric).

heterophony n. mus. etym. Gk. ?????? (hteros = other) and ???? ( fon? = sound) polyphony resulting from simultaneous differences of pitch produced when two or more people sing or play roughly the same melodic line at the same time.

hit point n. point in an audiovisual producion at which a particular musical event synchronises with a particular visual event inside a cue; not to be confused with cue point.

holokinetic [hOl9UkaI!nEtIk] adj. neol. (2011) relating to or characterised by all aspects of movememt.

homophony [hO!mOf9nI] n. mus., etym. Gk. homfonos (= sounding in unison or at the same time); type of polyphony in which different strands of the music move in the same rhythm at the same time; polyphonic antithesis of counterpoint. adj. homophonic [hOm9!fOnIk].

IOCM [aIUsI!jEm] abbr., n., neol. (1979) Interobjective Comparison Material, i.e. music other than the analysis object which bears sonic resemblance to i.e. sounds like part or parts of the analysis object.

intensional adj. (Chester, 1970) relating to vertical aspects of musical expression and to the limits of the extended present; opposite of extensional.

kinetic anaphone n. neol. (1990) type of anaphone relating musical structure with perception of movement (p. 332, ff.).

library music n. a.k.a. production music; music, mostly instrumental, prerecorded and typically used in TV or radio programming, in adverts and low-budget films. Library music differs from music commissioned for particular audiovisual productions in that it is almost always created and recorded in advance without prior knowledge of any audiovisual production in which it might later be used (see p. 212, ff.).

logocentric adj. assuming, often implicitly, that the semiotic properties of (verbal) language apply to other symbolic systems.

logogenic adj. having properties that can adequately be put into words; conducive to verbal expression (etym. ?????: word; ?????: type); deriv. abstr. n. logogeneity [lOgUdZ!ni:tI]; cf. musogenic.

LRR [ElA!rA:] n. ph. neol. abbr. (2010) List of Recorded References, including phonograms, videograms, film and TV productions, computer games, audio files, media files, etc., as well as sheet music and scores.

MIDI [!mIdi] n., adj. abbr. Music Instrument Digital Interface, the music industrys universal protocol enabling the interconnection of electronic instruments and devices. Midi neither generates nor transmits audio, neither digitally nor analogically. Midi code includes the following sort of data about each note: [1] which sample, instrument, preset or other type of sound should be used to produce the note in question; [2] the pitch at which the note should sound (or, if [1] is a bank of non-tonal sounds, the individual sound assigned to that pitch); [3] the volume/intensity of the note (velocity on); [4] the points in time at which the note should start and end.

mike [maIk] v. abbr. (1939, M-W) to supply with a microphone; to position a microphone of a particular type in relation to a sound source: miking [!maIkIN], miked [maIkt]; occasionally also as n. (see mic).

morpheme n. ling. minimal unit of speech that is recurrent and meaningful; a linguistic form that is not further divisible without destruction of meaning, for example (in English) an, at, cat, sat, mat, man, van, lychee, banana. Morphemes consist of at least one, most commonly of several phonemes (q.v.).

musematic [mjuzI!mQtIk] adj. (of musical structure) carrying musical meaning; having the characteristics of a museme, museme stack or museme string.

museme [!mjuzim]n. (Seeger, 1960) minimal unit of musical meaning; see pp. 221-227.

museme stack n. neol. (1979) compound of simultaneously occurring musical sounds to produce one meaningful unit of now sound (see extended present); components of a museme stack may or may not be musematic in themselves.

museme string n. neol. (1979) compound of consecutively occurring musemes in one strand of music.

music editor n. audiovisual production worker responsible for timing, organising and managing music cues; liaises between director, producer and composer.

music-led montage n. neol. (2010) audiovisual footage in which visuals are edited to fit music rather than vice versa. Music-led montage is typical for music videos and is quite common in title sequences.

muso [!mjuzU] n. colloq. musician or musicologist, more specifically someone who devotes a lot of time and energy to making or talking about music, especially its technical, structural and poetic aspects; someone with either formal training in music, or who makes music on a professional or semi-professional basis.

musogenic [!mju:zU!dZEnIk] adj. having properties that can adequately be put into music; conducive to musical expression; cf. logogenic.

note n. mus. any single, discrete sound of finite duration in a piece of music. (cf. tone).

npm abbr. neol. (2011) notes per minute unit of measurement for surface rate and subbeats (cf. bpm and see p. 279).

octave n. mus. interval of eight tones between notes of the same name at a pitch separated by a frequency factor of two, e.g. a3 at 220 Hz, a4 at 440 Hz, a5 at 880 Hz.

NTSC n. abbr. National Television System Committee; also the video scanning and recording system used in North and Central America, and consisting of 29.97 interlaced frames per second in which each frame consists of 525 scan lines, of which 486 cover the actual picture. cf. PAL.

PAL n. abbr. Phase Alternate Line; [1] analogue television encoding system used throughout the world except in those areas where NTSC or SECAM is in operation; [2] scanning and recording standard running at a rate of 25 frames per second with 625 scan lines per frame.

parallel motion n. ph. mus. movement of two or more strands (parts/voices) at different pitches in the same pitch direction; opposite of contrary motion.

paramusical adj. neol. (1983) literally alongside the music, i.e. semiotically related to a particular musical discourse without being structurally intrinsic to that discourse; see also PMFC.

phoneme n. ling. smallest constituent unit of sound used to construct meaning in speech (cf. morpheme). Ten different phonemes are used in UK English to construct the 25 morphemes , Qn, Qt, hQt, kQt, vQt, kQn, vQn, hEn, kEn, It, hIt, kIt, On, kOn, kIt, hOt, kOt, hYn, hYt, kYt, A:, kA:, b!nA:n, nI!va:n (= a, an, at, hat, cat, vat, can, van, hen, ken, it, hit, kit, on, con, hot, cot, Hun, hut, cut, are, car, banana, Nirvana). The ten phonemes are /Q/ /k/ and /t/ as in cat, /h/ and /E/ as in hen, // as in a (indefinite article) or the unstressed a-s in banana and Nirvana, /A:/ as in car and the stressed middle a in banana or Nirvana, /I/ as in hit, /O/ as in hot, and // as in hut. Only one of the phonemes can also work as a morpheme: the phoneme //, as in [b!nA:n], becomes also a morpheme when used as the unstressed indefinite article a [], as in [ b!nA:n] (a banana), which has a completely different meaning to u: b!nA:n, A: b!nA:n, U b!nA:n and D b!nA:n, i.e. Ooh! Banana! (nice surprise), Ah! Banana! (I understand!), O banana! (vocative, addressing the fruit, as people so often do) and The banana (not just any old banana).

phonogram n. physical object on to which sound has been recorded acoustically, electro-acoustically or digitally; sound carrier usually sold as a commodity and which can be played on stand-alone audio equipment, e.g. LP, CD, MiniDisc, audiocassette but not audio files or sheet music.

piece of music n. ph. musical continuum delimited, both before and after, by something that is not heard as music (e.g. silence, talking, other sound). A piece of music can also start or end when immediately preceded or followed by other music that is clearly recognised as having a different identity. If a piece of music exists as recorded sound, it will typically occupy one cd track or constitute a single audio file.

pitch n. mus. the perceived height or lowness of a sound, measurable in terms of high or low frequency (Herz).

PMFC abbr., neol., n. (1991) Paramusical field of connotation, i.e. connotatively identifiable semantic field relating to identifiable (sets of) musical structure(s) (see paramusical).

poetic [pO!jEtIk] adj. (from Fr. potique, Molino via Nattiez) relating to the poesis [pO!jisIs], i.e. to the making of music rather than to its perception (a.k.a constructional); the opposite of aesthesic, poitic qualifies the denotation of musical structures from the standpoint of their construction rather than their perception, e.g. con sordino, minor major-seven chord, augmented fourth, pentatonicism, etc. rather than delicate, detective chord, allegro, etc.

polyphony n. [p9!lIf9nI] etym. Gk. ???? (pol = many) and ???? ( fon? = sound) music in which at least two sounds of clearly differing pitch, timbre or mode of articulation occur at the same time; adj. polyphonic [pOlI!fOnIk]. Warning: some scholars of conventional musicology use polyphony to refer solely to contrapuntal tonal polyphony of the type used by certain European composers between c.1400 and c.1650.

pomo [!pUmU] n. & adj. abbr. neol. colloq. postmodern, postmodernism, postmodernist, postmodernising.

pomorockology [pUmUrO!kOldZi] n. neol. (2002); tradition of rock criticism and journalism influenced by the discourse of literary criticism and celebrating the supposedly liberating aspects of rock music without considering matters of musical structuration or meaning.

pragmatics n. branch of semiotics focusing of the use of a sign system in concrete situations, especially in terms of cultural, ideological, economic and social activity.

riff n. short, repeated (or recurrent) pattern of notes lasting no longer than a musical phrase; similar to the euroclassical notion of ostinato, riffs are particularly common in rock music, in big band and jump music, and in many types of Latin-American music; e.g. Bolro (Ravel 1928), In The Mood (Miller 1940/1995), Choo-Choo ChBoogie (Jordan 1946), Satisfaction (Rolling Stones 1965), Iron Man (Black Sabbath 1971), Malandro (Buarque 1985), Tim Pop con Birdland (Van Van 2002), Olol (Unmen 2003), etc.

rock n. and attrib. adj. (qualifying music); a wide range of popular and mainly, though not exclusively, English-language musics produced since the mid 1950s for a primarily youth audience, more usually male than female. The label rock covers everything from prog rock (e.g. Genesis) to country rock (e.g. Byrds), from punk rock (e.g. Sex Pistols) to folk rock (e.g. Steeleye Span) and from heavy metal (e.g. Led Zeppelin) through thrash (e.g. Metallica) to death and speed metal (e.g. Slayer) and so on. Its well-nigh impossible to pinpoint stylistic common denominators for such a wide range of musics, apart from the fact that the music is usually loud and its tonal instruments electrically amplified. The heyday of rock, still alive in 2011, lasted from the mid 1960s to the 1990s and its musicians are mainly, though not exclusively, male. Fun, anger, opposition and corporeal celebration (kick-ass) are aesthetic concepts frequently linked to rock.

rockology n. derog. neol. (1994) academic study, with value-aesthetic agenda, of rock music; see also pomorockology.

rock n roll n. is a much more restrictive term than rock or rock and roll; it denotes rock music produced only in the 1950s and early 1960s by such artists as Chuck Berry, Bill Haley, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley.

scopocentric [skOpU!sEntrIk] adj. neol. (Bruce Johnson c. 1994) assuming, usually implicitly, other types of expression than visual to be of lesser importance (cf. logocentric, graphocentric, scribal).

scribal [!skraIbl] adj. [1] orig. of or relating to a scribe (1857, M-W); [2] relating to written rather than to oral/aural symbols (cf. logocentric, logogenic, graphocentric, musogenic, scopocentric).

SCAM n. abbr. = Squentiel couleur mmoire, Europes first colour TV standard; analogue TV scanning and recording system used mainly in France, the ex-USSR, and in Frances African ex-colonies. cf. NTSC, PAL.

semantics n. branch of semiotics focusing on the relationship between signs and what they represent; adj. semantic; cf. syntax, pragmatics.

semiology n. term used in some language cultures, for example smiologie (francophone) and semiologa (hispanophone), to denote basically the same thing as semiotics (see p. 149, ff.).

semiosis n. activity or process involving signs and the production of meaning (see p. 146, ff.).

semiotics n. the study of semiosis, i.e. of processes involving the production of signs, their formal characteristics, their intended and perceived meanings, etc.

set piece n. in film music contexts a type of diegetic (source) music in which the actual musical performance is prominently visible on screen as part of narrative reality.

sexaphone n., a.k.a. high-heeled sax, media trope consisting of short, jazzy, legato phrase on (usually alto) saxophone to underscore sexual potential in stage or on-screen narrative; see |tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Sexophone| (e.g. What is Kenny G doing in everyones bedroom?). See footnote 85, p. 294, for more details.

singalong n. a tune to which, when performed, it is easy for members of an audience to sing along; in general a tune easily sung by many people, or an occasion on which such tunes are performed (e.g. Friday night singalongs at the old peoples home); adj. attrib., e.g. a singalong evening with pianist Fred Bloggs or the singalong chorus part of the recording.

SMPTE colloq. pron. [!sImptI] n. abbr. the (US) Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers; often used as oral shorthand for SMPTE code, i.e. the Societys standard timecode system used in audiovisual production and according to which passing time is given in hours, minutes, seconds and frames, e.g. 01:09:50;12 for a point at which one hour, nine minutes, fifty seconds and twelve frames have elapsed since the start of the production at 00:00:00;00.

sonic anaphone n. neol. (1990) type of anaphone relating musical structure with para- or extramusical sound (p. 321, ff.).

spotting session n. preparatory stage in composing for movies: director and composer discuss what sort of music should be used at which points in the production (cue spotting).

stand-alone equipment n. electrically powered apparatus for playback and/or recording, without need of a computer connection, of audio or audiovisual material using external media carriers, e.g. record turntable, Walkman, VCR, CD player, MiniDisc player, DVD player.

strand n. individual, relatively continuous thread of sound with identifiable characteristics (typically timbre and pitch), distinguishing it from other strands or sonorities in the music; a.k.a. line (e.g. melody line, bass line), part (e.g. oboe part, four-part harmony), stream (Lacasse 2000). Each musical strand is usually assigned its own track in the processes of audio recording and mixing.

style (musical) n. recurring arrangement of features in musical events which is typical for an individual (composer, performer), a group of musicians, a genre, a place, a period of time, etc. (Fabbri 2005: 8-9).

sync [sINk] (abbr; 1945, M-W) [1] v. synchronise; sync-ing [!sINkIN] (pres. particip.), sync-ed [sINkt] (past); [2] n. synchronisation.

syntax n. [1] (general) the study of principles and rules for constructing texts, including written or spoken language, musical works, recordings, etc. [2] branch of semiotics focusing on the formal relationship of signs to each other without necessarily considering their meaning.

tactile anaphone n. neol. (1990) type of anaphone relating musical structure with the sense of touch (p. 328, ff.).

temp track (a.k.a. temp music, temp score, scratch score) n. existing music added to an audiovisual production during the editing phase; used [1] to test a film on audience focus groups and on production executives, [2] to give the soundtrack composer an idea of the sort of music the director envisages at various points in the production.

title music n. generic term denoting music conceived for an audiovisual productions title sequences (or credits), at or near the start (the main or opening titles) and/or at the end of the film or programme (end titles).

TLTT abbr. = Ten Little Title Tunes; 914-page source book so often referred to that its title is abbreviated to save space; see Tagg & Clarida (2003) in the bibliography (p. 451) and explanations in the preface (p. 16, ff.).

tonatim [tU!nEItIm] adv., neol. (1992) tone for tone or note for note (etym. tone + [verb]atim).

transscansion [trQn!skQnS(n] n. neol. (c. 1989) short wordless motif whose melodic and rhythmic profile closely resembles that of at least two spoken syllables associated with the music in which it occurs; etym. trans (across) + scan (speak or read metrically), i.e. with the metre and rhythm of the word[s] transferred from speech into music.

turnaround n. short chord sequence at the end of one section in a song or instrumental number and whose purpose is to facilitate recapitulation of the complete harmonic sequence of that section.

tunraround chord n. in chord loops, the final chord immediately preceding the repetition of the loop; i.e. the chord whose relation to the first chord works like a turnaround (q.v.). Turnaround chords are also incoming except for when the loops first and last chords are both tonic, in which case a turnaround device is needed to move from the the last back to the first.

underscore n. invisible non-diegetic music, usually background or incidental music, written to fit an existing visual sequence.

vamp n. chord loop with several variants whose chords generically run NI-vi-ii/IV-VO.

videogram n. physical object containing an audiovisual recording, usually, but not necessarily, of a single work; carrier of recorded sound and moving image usually sold as a commodity and playable on stand-alone equipment, e.g. videocassette, dvd, games disc.

vocal persona n. ph. vocal representation of an individual or type of individual in terms of personality, state of mind, age, gender, nationality, ethnicity, narrative archetype, etc. (see Chapter 10).

VVA [vi:vi:!EI] n. ph. abbr. neol. (1983): verbal-visual association, more specifically a response to music, expressed in words and/or images.

whole-tone scale n. hexatonic (six-tone) mode consisting solely of whole-tone steps: either c d e f# g#/a$ b$ or c#/d$ e$ f g a b8.

Music's Meanings