MEANINGS(no cover picture yet available) |
Book
title (provisional): Music's Meanings The text of this book will be finished at the end of February 2012. It should be on line in its entirety in April... Provisional version Provisional 'work-in-progress' versions of this book (variable page-numbering, variable content, no index, incomplete appendices, some incomplete chapters —please see Description) are under constant review and periodically posted on line. On completion the book will be given as a token of gratitude to anyone donating to the upkeep of this website (how this arrangement works). View/download the incomplete book as is. |
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This description refers to the final provisional version, posted 2012-02-15 This book contains very little musical notation or muso jargon. The basic idea is that anyone can talk intelligently about music as meaningful sound once mystical beliefs are abandoned and replaced with no-nonsense theory and method. The book falls roughly into two parts. Part 1 (Chapters 1-5) clears the conceptual and theoretical ground for Part 2 (Chapters 6-12) which focuses on ways of analysing music ‘as if it meant something other than itself’. Preface (c. 32 pp.) — Epistemological, theoretical, practical, historical, educational and biographical background to the book; aims of the book; Ten Little Title Tunes and this book; overview of chapters; formal explanations (appendices, typographical conventions, footnotes, etc; acknowledgements). Part 1 Chapter 1 —How much music?— (10 pp.) estimates the importance of music in terms of time and money in the everyday life of people living in the urban West. [Basically complete but subject to alteration, incl. statistics update] Chapter 2 —'The most important thing'…— (28 pp.) starts with definitions of and axioms about ‘music’, including the concept of concerted simultaneity, the non-antagonistic contradiction between intra- and extrageneric notions of music, and the tenet that music is no more universal a ‘language’ than language itself. After an intercultural comparison of words denoting what we call ‘music’ and a short history of the concept in European thinking, music’s relation to other modes of human expression is discussed. That section includes observations from the anthropology of human evolution, from child psychology and from studies of cross-domain representation and synaesthesis. [completed November 2009] Chapter 3 —The epistemic oil tanker— (52 pp.) confronts the notion of ‘absolute music’ head on, tracing its history, demystifying its articles of faith, including those of its latter-day ‘postmodernist’ counterpart, and deconstructing its ideological implications. The chapter’s second part identifies institutional splits in musical knowledge (poïetic v. aesthesic etc.) that exacerbate the polarities of dual consciousness. It also explains the central role of notation in conventional music studies. [completed March 2010] Chapter 4 —Ethno, socio, semio— (24 pp.) discusses the three main disciplinary challenges to conventional music studies in the twentieth century: ethnomusicology, the sociology of music and the semiotics of music. It highlights their contribution, real or potential, to developing the sort of music analysis covered in Part 2, underlining the importance of ethnomusicology and empirical sociology, and discusses the problems of music semiotics in dealing with semantics and pragmatics. [completed, June 2010]. Chapter 5 —Meaning and communication— (40 pp.) is the book's semiotic theory chapter. It explains key concepts like semiotics, semiology, semiosis (object - sign - interpretant), semantics, syntax, pragmatics, sign type (icon - index - arbitrary sign), denotation, connotation, connotative precision, polysemy, transmitter, receiver, codal incompetence and codal interference. All these concepts are essential to the adequate treatment of the book’s main analytical question: how does who communicate what through music to whom and with what effect? [completed September 2010] Part 2 Chapter 6 —Intersubjectivity— (34 pp.) presents the first of two main approaches to discussing the meaning of a musical analysis object. Six reasons for prioritising the aesthesic rather than poïetic pole are followed by a brief presentation of how ethnographic observations can help in the semiotic analysis of music. The bulk of this chapter deals with reception tests, the categorisation of verbal-visual associations (VVAs), the establishment of paramusical fields of connotation (PMFCs) and other important steps in the collection and collation of response data. The chapter ends with a section on the use of library music in systematising reception test responses. [completed January 2011]. Chapter 7 —Interobjectivity— (34 pp.) 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 tips about collecting interobjective comparison material (IOCM) and about the establishment of paramusical fields of connotation (PMFC). Verification procedures (recomposition, commutation) are also explained and the chapter ends with a section that should definitely allay non-muso anxiety about the designation of structural elements in a piece of music as an essential part of analysis procedure. [completed April 2011] Chapter 8 —Terms, time & space— (42 pp.) is the first of three to focus on parameters of expression, i.e. on poïetic factors determining how music sounds and what it potentially communicates. A short first part presents paramusical parameters (audience, venue, lyrics, images, etc.) and their role in the construction of musical meaning. It also includes explanations of basic terms essential to subsequent discussion— genre, style, note, pitch, tone, timbre and the extended present. Most of this chapter is devoted to simple explanations of temporal-spatial parameters of expression, including duration, phrase, motif, period, episode, speed, pulse, beat, subbeat, tempo, surface rate, rhythm, accentuation, metre and groove. It ends with a section on aural staging, i.e. the placement of different sounds in different (or similar) types of acoustic space, both in relation to each other and as a whole in relation to the listener. [completed December 2011] Chapter 9 —Timbre, loudness and tone— (32 pp.) covers the second set of parameters of musical expression. After reviewing instrumental timbre (vocal timbre is covered in Chapter 10) and how it creates meaning, an overview of acoustic devices and digital effects units explains everything from pizzicato and vibrato to distortion, filtering, phasing, limiting and gating. Then, after a short section dealing with loudness, volume and intensity, the rest of the chapter provides a rudimentary guide to all things tonal, including pitch, octave, register, interval, mode, key, tonic, melody, tonal polyphony, heterophony, homophony, counterpoint, harmony, chords and chord progressions. [completed December 2011] Chapter 10 — Vocal persona — (40 pp.) concentrates on one complex of parameters of musical expression whose meaningful details non-musos tend to identify and label more easily than do musos. 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. Practical ways of relating vocal sound to posture and attitude are explained so that its meanings can be more easily grasped and verbalised as part of semiotic analysis. [completed January 2012] Chapter 11 —Overall narrative and texture [under construction]— (c. 50 pp.) covers composite parameters of musical expression in two sections: [1] diataxis, i.e. the narrative ‘form’ of the music’s episodes (‘horizontal’, diachronic and extensional); [2] compositional texture, i.e. the overall ‘now form’ of the music in the extended present (‘vertical’, synchronic and intensional). Concepts like verse, chorus, refrain, hook, bridge, AABA form, sonata form and the way they can construct meaning are discussed in the first half. The second half convers such questions as the link between notions of musical figure and ground and patterns of subjectivity. [in progress February 2012] Chapter 12 —A simple sign typology— (c. 50 pp.) Discusses how the musical structures defined by the parameters discussed in Chapters 8-11 relate to what they appear to connote. This chapter includes explanation of anaphones (sonic, tactile, kinetic, composite), genre synecdoches, style flags , style indicators, episodic markers , episodic determinants, gestural interconversion, etc. [still in progress, February 2012] Chapter 13 —Analysing film music— (50 pp.) The aims of this chapter, based on experience of teaching Music and the Moving Image to both musos and non-musos, are: [1] to provide insights into how music influences the images, action and dialogue it accompanies; and [2] to show how the theory and method of previous chapters can be put into practice. After underlining the importance of understanding the subject in terms of history and technology, and after presenting the subject's most useful general concepts (Lissa's film music functions as well as film-industry terms), pedagogical 'tricks' (like musical commutation) and hands-on assignments are explained, the latter including group work comparing musical moods in silent film with those used in recent feature film. Most of the chapter concentrates on the assignment 'Cue list and analysis of music in a feature film', setting out how musical ideas can be labelled (cue list, list of musical ideas, etc.), how graphic scores can be constructed, how music's functions and meanings can be coherently talked about, etc. [completed July 2011] Chapter 14 —Epilogue— (c. 10 pp.) projected to include concluding remarks in dialogue form about unresolved issues (0% complete) Reference appendix (c. 12 pp.), List of verbal, musical and audiovisual references (40 pp. 8 pt. font; 90% complete) Index (c. 20 pp.) under constant reconstruction. Not available until completion. Selection of music examples referred to but not available elsewhere on line (incomplete).
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