Introduction

This course attempts to provide a theoretical and practical basis for understanding music as a form of interhuman communication. Such an attempt, however modest, is, I would argue, of considerable use at a time and in a culture whose omnipresent and ubiquitous audiovisual media disseminate ‘messages’ relying mainly on symbolic systems (auditive and visual, with or without words) that have tended to escape the analytical eye of the largely logocentric legacy of learning in the West.

Any viable approach to understanding musical ‘meaning’ will need to address at least three theoretical ‘holy trinities’: [1] emitter/channel/receiver; [2] icon/index/arbitrary sign; [3] syntax/semantics/pragmatics. Now, conventional musicology in the West has, for reasons presented in lesson 1, traditionally concerned itself with the syntax of music in the European art music tradition —the ‘channel’ or idealised ‘music itself’— and paid only marginal attention to other musics, even less to the semantics and pragmatics of any music. This course seeks partialy to redress that imbalance.

Another problem with conventional Western learning about music is its tendency to effectively disqualify the popular majority of culturally competent music users as unmusical, even though they can in a matter of milliseconds distinguish musically, without verbal cues, between, say, imminent murder and a carefree country stroll, or between rap and a romantic tone poem. Since the inability to read Western music notation and unfamiliarity with the terminology of Western ‘music theory’ have never been obstacles to the practical comprehension and use of music on an everyday basis, there is no good reason why general music education should disregard such everyday musical competence. The trouble for music education and research is that while the signification of verbal and visual symbols can be discussed using metalanguage accessible to any educated person, the discussion of music as meaningful non-verbal sound does so very rarely. This course attempts to tackle those epistemic obstacles and provides pointers for those interested in creating a viable meta-musical vocabulary of structuralsemantic denotors. To this end, the course will include numerous short music examples in MP3 format. Music needs much more than words to explain its workings: music primarily needs music to explain music, to put the matter in tautological terms.

The course falls into two roughly equal parts: [1] background explanations, concepts, theory and method; [2] application of method and the identification of musicogenic categories of thought.

Main aim

Any student, with or without formal musical training, who diligently follows all eight lessons should be able to apply concepts and methods presented during the course when attempting to discuss, in an informed manner, questions of musical signification.

Lectures

1. What is music and what is musical ‘meaning’? ()

   1. Music as an anthropologically universal phenomenon but not a universal concept, even less a universal ‘language’.
   2. Pre-history: language and music; wails and whales; music as a (the?) central domain of human representation.

2. How come music affects us so concretely but is so hard to talk about in concrete terms? ()

   1. Music and the ‘great epistemic divide’ in Western knowledge: ‘absolute’ music, notational centricity and syntax fixation.
   2. Four musical competences: constructional/poïetic, receptional/esthesic, metatextual, metacontextual.
   3. Four challenges to conventional musicological wisdom: ‘ethno’, ‘socio’, ‘semio’ and popular music studies.
   4. Critical review of existing semiotic approaches to music; semiotics and the denotation of musicogenic categories (functional embodiment).

3. Parameters of musical expression (comprehensible for non-musicologists) ()

   1. Time, tempo, rhythm, metre, polyrhythm, duration, pulse rate, surface rate, periodicity.
   2. Pitch, range, ambitus, tessitura.
   3. Tonality, polyphony, harmony, counterpoint, homophony, heterophony, etc.
   4. Timbre, instrumentation, dynamics, acoustic space and positioning.
   5. Musemes and musematic compounds.

4. Musematic analysis (1) ()

   This chapter tries to answer one question: if conventional views of musical learning in the West are still going strong despite their irrational premises, what changes in thinking about music occurred during the twentieth century that cleared the path 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.

5. Musematic analysis (2) ()

   Sorting out notions of music is what this book has mainly been about so far and the last chapter ended with the promise to ‘treat music as if it actually meant something’. So, now it’s time to review concepts of meaning and communication.