3: Musical Semiology

Semiology/Semiotics

Semiology (or Semiotics) is often described, not entirely helpfully, as ‘The Science of Signs’. Our work will build on basic theories of semiology as introduced by the Swiss linguist for which David Chandler’s Semiotics for Beginners, or Jonathan Culler’s Saussure, provide good introductions. Saussure wrote, in his Course in General Linguistics (1916), that:

Ferdinand de Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure

‘It is… possible to conceive of a science which studies the role of signs as part of social life. It would form part of social psychology, and hence of general psychology. We shall call it semiology (from the Greek semeîon, ‘sign’). It would investigate the nature of signs and the laws governing them. Since it does not yet exist, one cannot say for certain that it will exist. But it has a right to exist, a place ready for it in advance. Linguistics is only one branch of this general science. The laws which semiology will discover will be laws applicable in linguistics, and linguistics will thus be assigned to a clearly defined place in the field of human knowledge.’ (quoted in Chandler, 2012)

At the heart of Saussure’s theories is the dyadic model of the sign, comprised of a signifier (Fr. signifiant) and signified (Fr. signifié). The signifier and signified must exist together, but their relationship is arbitrary, with the signified referring to a concept, rather than (necessarily) to a materialisation. Furthermore, the relationship between signs is structural; signs only gain meaning by their difference to each other. Saussure also introduced the notion of langue – the ‘social, impersonal phenomenon of language as a system of signs’, and parole – the ‘individual, personal phenomenon of language as a series of speech acts made by a linguistic subject’ (de Saussure, 1986), which recognises the contextual nature of communication.

Charles Sanders Peirce

Charles Sanders Peirce

The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, working independently from Saussure, described a sign as ‘something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign’, noting that ‘nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign.’ Peirce’s triadic system, comprising the representamen, the object, and the interpretant, is arguably more systematic and more complex than Saussure’s, but critically recognises both the role of the observer (or receiver), and the material form of the object, in the process of communication. For Peirce, semiosis is a process rather than a structure, occurring within the activity of dialogic thinking. Peirce also developed a number of typologies of semiotics, including the notions of symbolic, iconic and indexical relationships of the sign.

  • The Representamen: the form which the sign takes (not necessarily material)
  • An Interpretant: not an interpreter but rather the sense made of the sign
  • An Object: to which the sign refers

Note that, whilst semiology developed from linguistic and philosophical studies, there are now many branches of semiology, and many – often contradictory – approaches, each with their own set of specialist terminology. Musical semiology is a developed area of study, with a range of associated theories and analytic frameworks available for the musicologist, but one that presents particular difficulties, given the essential ‘meaningless’ of music.

Musical Semiology

The appropriation of techniques of semiological analysis for purposes of musical analysis presents the musicologist with useful critical and typological frameworks, but also poses some difficult questions. As semiological study is based on the notion of ‘meaning’ (whatever ‘meaning’ means!) or, at least, signification, its application to a field of human endeavour – music – that some theorists and composers would argue is meaningless (in that it does not, or cannot, carry meaning) might seem inherently flawed. Different views about meaning in music (or the lack of it) are held, of course, so the analyst will inevitably have to weigh up several approaches and select those which seem most applicable to the music being studied. Some comfort may be taken in the realisation that there is, as yet, no single theory of musical semiology.

Many musicologists and musical semiologists have accepted that there is a formal resemblance between linguistic systems and musical systems, and this particular approach has been the subject of much enquiry. The analogies between musical and linguistic ‘phrases’, for example, seem strong, especially if the music in question involves text setting. The rhythmic nature of poetic language, deriving from ancient Greek practices, also provides a bridge between the analysis of language and music, aided by the use of common terminology (meter, rhythm, etc.). However, it must be remembered that words are intended to convey meaning, whilst music (and what is the musical equivalent of a word?) is concerned with abstractions in sound. Care must therefore be taken when using a linguistic approach for musical analysis.

The Reading List gives some key texts in the field of musical semiology, and attention is particularly drawn to the work of Philip Tagg (especially relevant to popular music studies), who develops the concept of the museme (a minimal unit of musical meaning), first proposed by the American composer Charles Seeger in 1960. Victor Kofi Agawu (for romantic music studies) and Jean-Jacques Nattiez (whose theories are well particularly useful for the analysis of electronic and electroacoustic music) provide further frameworks for the understanding and analysis of the meaning of music and the relationships between the  composer, the performer, the listener and wider society.

Musical semiology is clearly related to the field of Musical Borrowing, and to the notion of influence…

Influence

The literary theorist Harold Bloom discusses an Anxiety of Influence that has plagued poets – simply put, their relationship with their precursors have hindered their creativity. In an article entitled The ‘Anxiety of Influence’ in Twentieth-Century Music Joseph Straus writes that, ‘For Bloom, the history of poetry is the story of a struggle by newer poems against older ones, an anxious struggle to clear creative space’ (Straus, 1991, p.436).

But with some musical repertoire, others talk about a Joy of Influence. It is argued that, particularly in African American-based art forms, one celebrates the music of the past, transforming the pre-existing material in the process. This has been written about in literary theory by Henry Louis Gates Jr. as ‘Signifyin(g)’, after the tale of The Signifying Monkey. Samuel Floyd, in The Power of Black Music, has discussed Signifyin(g) in a musical context, and notes that ragtime, the blues, dixieland, swing, bebop, etc., were forms that ‘Signified’ on what came before them (and artists copied each other without lawsuits). Such Significations could be quotations of previous songs (or quoting songs in solos), or using older tunes as formal and harmonic models for new ones (such as the numerous songs based on Gershwin’s ‘I Got Rhythm’). As David Metzer writes, in Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music:

Flourishing in both oral and written traditions, signifying takes many different forms and pursues a range of strategies. Henry Louis Gates Jr. describes signifying as “the trope of tropes,” meaning that it hosts a group of other tropes, from the classical oratorical modes of metaphor and irony to the black practices of testifying and rapping. In its myriad forms, signifying outlines the basic strategy of “repetition and revision.” Practitioners draw upon existing formal structures and concepts and continually re-work them to create new version that break away, often ironically, from the originals. [p. 49]

Associated Reading

General

Nineteenth-Century Music

Jazz and Blues

Twentieth-Century Popular Music

Twentieth-Century Music

Electro-Acoustic Music

Associated Listening

  • Duke Ellington (and Bubber Miley) – Black and Tan Fantasy (1927) (also 1929 movie footage of the tune from the film Black and Tan)
  • George Gershwin (lyrics by Ira Gershwin) – ‘I Got Rhythm’ (1930). Plenty of versions can be found, but see Gershwin play a version of his own tune (c. 1934)

Internet Resources

 

 

From the Encyclopædia Britannica: (born Nov. 26, 1857, Geneva, Switz.—died Feb. 22, 1913, Vufflens-le-Château), Swiss linguist whose ideas on structure in language laid the foundation for much of the approach to and progress of the linguistic sciences in the 20th century. While still a student, Saussure established his reputation with a brilliant contribution to comparative linguistics, Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes (1878; “Memoir on the Original System of Vowels in the Indo-European Languages”). In it he explained how the knottiest of vowel alternations in Indo-European, those of a, take place. Though he wrote no other book, he was enormously influential as a teacher, serving as instructor at the École des Hautes Études (“School of Advanced Studies”) in Paris from 1881 to 1891 and as professor of Indo-European linguistics and Sanskrit (1901–11) and of general linguistics (1907–11) at the University of Geneva. His name is affixed, however, to the Cours de linguistique générale (1916; Course in General Linguistics), a reconstruction of his lectures on the basis of notes by students carefully prepared by his junior colleagues Charles Bally and Albert Séchehaye. The publication of his work is considered the starting point of 20th-century structural linguistics.

Saussure contended that language must be considered as a social phenomenon, a structured system that can be viewed synchronically (as it exists at any particular time) and diachronically (as it changes in the course of time). He thus formalized the basic approaches to language study and asserted that the principles and methodology of each approach are distinct and mutually exclusive. He also introduced two terms that have become common currency in linguistics—“parole,” or the speech of the individual person, and “langue,” the system underlying speech activity. His distinctions proved to be mainsprings to productive linguistic research and can be regarded as starting points on the avenue of linguistics known as structuralism.