Point of Discussion: The Semiotics of Music - Music

RockyRaccoon
Is it solipsistic in here or is it just me?

Gender: Male
Age: 33
Location: Maryland

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POINT OF DISCUSSION

This is Point of Discussion, a thread for people to discuss issues and topics related to music in a thoughtful and productive way. The goal of this is to make you think, to make you take a look at what you believe, why you believe it, and what others believe. Good discussion is the key to any society, and this is a place where, hopefully, that can be fostered. If you would like a certain topic to be discussed or question to be posed, PM me or post here and I'll toss it in when I can.

All of that being said, there are a few guidelines.

The Guidelines:

Don't be a dick

All opinions are welcome

There are no wrong opinions

The conversation can go anywhere

The Topic:
So this is kind of a re-hashing of an old topic with new people and new angles.

There was a thread that I had posted a while back talking about what I called the semiotics of music. Here's what the prompt said:

RockyRaccoon wrote:

Semiotics, if you're unfamiliar with it, is the study of meaning-making, how we add meaning to things (typically language, but other things too). One of the examples I was given when learning semiotics was this: there is nothing inherently dog-like about a dog. A dog is merely some kind of animal, but all of the adjectives we give to dogs are just that, given to those dogs. We as the English language have given that animal the identity of "dog" and all of the things that go along with it.

Also, it deals a lot with connotation and denotation, many academics of semiotics would say that there is no true denotation, that everything we say has some kind of meaning attached to it. We attach meaning and feelings to everything.

So my question is, how do we do this to music? We often tie emotion to music, in fact it can be an incredibly emotional experience, but what makes music, just a collection of organized sounds (that definition subject to opinion), mean something? What makes a "sad" song, or a "happy" song? An "angry" song? What makes you as a listener relate emotionally to a song? Like, for example, many people say "I Am A Bird Now" is incredibly sad because of his voice (among other reasons), but why is that sad? What makes that voice sad, what makes that music sad?

I'm not necessarily speaking about lyrics, though I realize those play a major part in emotional relation, as the answer seems too obvious. Someone singing about an emotional topic (e.g. death or loss) that you as a listener have experienced is emotional for you, I get that. But I'm more talking about the music itself, the notes, the composition.

In addition, Mecca mentioned an article he wrote about an experience he had with a band, and wondering what goes into our enjoyment of music and what outside factors affect that.

He also asked:

meccalecca wrote:

And a slight offshoot from that discussion, How does our own personality relate to the art which we enjoy? For example, I'm a very mellow person, so I've often struggled to relate to more aggressive forms of music.

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Applerill
Autistic Princess <3

Gender: Female
Age: 30
Location: Chicago

OHeyGuise

I feel like this topic is important for me as a music listener, as I've come to see art very much from a non-formalist, semiotic perspective. I'll surely answer the question more later, but I thought I'd repeat what I said in the topics thread about this first.

I just finished reading AO Scott's new book Better Living Through Criticism (which may now be one of my favorite books ever), and at one point he argued the following:

Quote:

It might seem promising— it has, at various points in history, seemed advisable— to plot the arts along a spectrum from most to least formal, which is almost to say from abstract to representational. At one end, closest to pure form, is instrumental music, which is thought to unfold in a space of abstraction, free of the encumbrances of meaning. A piece of music makes no obvious argument, tells no literal story, soars above politics and history in an ether where logic and feeling coexist interchangeably. When Walter Pater wrote that “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music,” he was making a claim not only about all art but also about all criticism, whose job is to isolate those attributes of other specimens of art that bring them closest to music and are least burdened with representational duties. A piece of music is the limit case of nonmimetic art. It is not about or of anything. It says or espouses nothing. It advances no moral and presses no cause other than its own integrity. Music is to art what its cousin, mathematics, is to science.

To contrast, I'm currently reading another 2016 book on a similar topic called Every Song Ever (it was discussed this week on Pitchfork), and it embraces almost a mix between formalist and semiotic listening.

Quote:

Reasons for engagement could be articulated in a language that isn’t specifically musical, or identified with composers and players, as Copland would have wanted, but rather a language that refers to generalized human activity. Therefore, perhaps not “melody,” “harmony,” “rhythm,” “sonata form,” “oratorio.” Perhaps, instead, repetition, or speed, or slowness, or density, or discrepancy, or stubbornness, or sadness. Intentionally, these are not musical terms per se. You know what repetition is even if you’ve never had the first thought about how a song is written. You know because you experience it in your average day or week. Why is it all right to categorize music this way? Because it has to be all right. Music and life are inseparable. Music is part of our physical and intellectual formation. Music moves: it can’t do anything else. The same goes for us. Everything has a tone and a pitch, and rhythms—or pulses, at least—surround us. We build an autobiography and a self-image with music, and we know, even as we’re building them, that they’re going to change. Most human beings impose their wills on the world partly with and through music, even if they are not musicians. The way they hear—you can call it taste, if you want—is in how they move and work and dress and love.

Actually, as I've gone deeper, it does a great job of explaining this debate between formalists (hey Tyler) and expressionists (hey Meaghan Garvey).

Quote:

There exists an old debate, especially in the classical-music world, between so-called formalists and expressionists (or autonomists and heteronomists). Formalists believe that music, in and of itself, means nothing, or has nothing to do with the world of emotions; it is the result of a composer bringing his tools and craft to neutral material (tones, chords, rhythms, textures) and creating something formally pleasing to the ear. Eduard Hanslick, the Prague-born music critic who moved to Vienna in 1846 and became possibly the world’s first significant music-appreciation writer— the precursor of Krehbiel and Copland and possibly this book, too— is understood as the king formalist. His long essay “On the Musically Beautiful,” originally published in 1854, set out his terms. Any strong theory demands a countertheory, and Richard Wagner took a kind of counterposition, arguing for “the sublime” as an animating force in great music— originating in feelings, in spirits, in people and history.

Hanslick characterized the problem that he saw around the idea that whatever transports the listener in a beautiful harmony or melody “would be not these [i.e., the harmony or melody] in themselves but what they signify: the whisperings of amorousness, the violence of conflict.” He allowed that all the duped listeners around him were partially right. “Whispering? Yes, but not the yearning of love. Violence? Of course, but certainly not the conflict. Music can, in fact, whisper, rage, and rustle. But love and anger occur only within our hearts."

.....Hanslick’s essay appeals to the skeptical mind. He rephrased his assertion, turning it around, drawing it over and over again from different angles. “It goes without saying,” he supposed, “that instrumental music cannot represent the ideas of love, anger, fear, because between those ideas and beautiful combinations of musical tones there exists no necessary connection.” But a great work of criticism— and “On the Musically Beautiful” is a great work of criticism— is very often a kind of memoir, consciously or not. It seems clear that Hanslick had the critic’s problem of prescriptively worrying for the greater good, and the future good. He didn’t want music to live or die by the extent to which it represented emotion. He didn’t want it to be judged according to how well it represented, say, remorse, or ambition, or piety. He saw the fascination around Wagner, and around Liszt’s tone poems, and worried that heteronomism might poison music or bring the whole enterprise down. He couldn’t let go. But by adding that extra clause— about how music may mimic the motion of a feeling— he almost contradicted himself, or showed what he really felt.

Hope this works as a decent primer to the discussion.

Satie

Dear Everyone on the Forums,

stop fucking calling me a formalist and setting up false dichotomies where you import pop music criticism (that usually focuses on sociological categorization and meaning-making for the self) to other forms of music wholesale.

Sincerely,
Not a Formalist

Applerill
Autistic Princess <3

Gender: Female
Age: 30
Location: Chicago

Satie wrote:

Dear Everyone on the Forums,

stop fucking calling me a formalist and setting up false dichotomies where you import pop music criticism (that usually focuses on sociological categorization and meaning-making for the self) to other forms of music wholesale.

Sincerely,
Not a Formalist

Thanks, Tyler. I didn't mean to single you out. I just know that we at least disagreed a little bit on this.

But one thing that makes this complicated is that there are so many different types of music. There could've once been a really set technical grammar when most of the west thought of music in the context of Bach and Beethoven, but now we have so many different languages of music to think of, both compositionally and in regards to recording.

I think there are definitely some of them, though. Just as a close-up has different semiotic implications from a wide shot in cinema, the use of something like a compressor mic on Dummy is very intentional for the claustrophobic environment. I know this seems like a cop-out, but I think we just need to take it on a case-by-case basis.

Satie

i have never advocated for anything vaguely regarding formalism. the dualistic minds of you and other people on the forums just made it so when i was trying to add nuance to a previous discussion because you want to import pop music philosophy or film criticism or some other ridiculous thing into the discussion and when we disagree on definitions of the word formalism, you don't seek to look at the substance of my argument at all but just sort me into a silo. i made comments in one thread that people should actually discuss music when they discuss music instead of the personalities and perceived politics of musicians, and suddenly i'm some Oxbridge pompous twat dictating to the plebes that they should listen to Bach and nothing but for his fucking mathematical properties or something. save me the fucking groaning and stop misrepresenting my opinions (opinions i haven't even given yet) for the purpose of spitting out vacuous turns of phrase. instead of anticipating my arguments, make your own, in other words. Christ.

meccalecca
Voice of Reason

Gender: Male
Location: The Land of Enchantment

Well this is off to a great start
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Deckiller

all these big words make me realize how mentally lazy I am

cestuneblague
Edgy to the Choir

Location: MA/FL

It's completely understandable that people with different backgrounds, different ways of thinking and different ways of approaching particular works of art, can percieve a different "meaning" to the work than the artist intended or other listeners may have found. It's also not false to suggest some may try to re-arrange the furniture so to speak to make the work of art try to resemble a particular meaning or message you want it to say or be about, rather than what it's actually trying to do. It's a subjective double-edged sword.

Applerill
Autistic Princess <3

Gender: Female
Age: 30
Location: Chicago

Sorry Tyler. I promise I didn't mean it that way at all (in fact, 9/10 times I'm internally defending your statements, since they really are logical and nuanced)

Also

Deckiller wrote:

all these big words make me realize how mentally lazy I am

RoundTheBend
I miss the comfort in being sad

Location: Ground Control

I hate to bring this up, especially with the Formalism discussion we had a while back and then the current troubles that's caused in this thread... but the other side of that was Reader Response... I think this theory really helps explain the OP. Music doesn't even exist until we experience it and comprehend it and put a meaning/association/cognitive whatever to it. The text is dead until you bring it alive is the idea of Reader Response Theory.

Have you ever listened to an album for the first time and then your like... WTF... I thought this was supposed to be a masterpiece and you didn't get it the first listen? For me that happened because of a couple reasons:

1) I didn't really honestly give it the attention it probably deserved... I was driving, on this website, cleaning house, etc.

2) The music has a lyrical value and not a musical value. I'm a musician and typically let lyrics soak in last. So if it is Bob Dylan, Jeffery Lewis, or Frank Zappa... it takes a little longer for that music to be appreciated by me. Again, I didn't respond to it properly.

3) Mood/frame of mind (It's not you it's me, hahaha). Even if I absolutely love an album, sometimes I 'm just not in the mood for it. Luckily if you already know the music you know that already. If you are discovering, this makes it much more difficult to ascertain was it the music or was it me.

4) Another thing is positive reinforcement. Sometimes if we have a good experience with a song (whether that has to do with the song itself or outside experience and the song happened to be there). One example of this is my honeymoon... we took PCH up the CA coast and listened to music. My wife likes the dirty dancing movies, and Havana Nights soundtrack will be forever tied to that trip. I would have no interest in that album if I hadn't have had that experience.

On a completely other note there are studies on how everything effects our thoughts. Even the color the wall was painted. The Leavey Library at USC has each section painted a color that is associated with excelling in that topic based on a study they did. If students took tests about history and the color of the room was yellow they didn't do as well if the color of the room was blue (I totally made that up, but that's roughly what the study found).

This of course also plays a role with Music. Pending on the chords/melody/noises used our mind interprets them as pretty, sad, angry, etc. I'm not a musicologist, but that's what I was told when I did a little study of music. There's even Music therapy.

Lastly Music for me means something sometimes because of the political or philosophical value it has. From Frank Zappa to U2 to Rage Against the Machine.

Not sure if I even kinda answered the question... but there's a start for more discussion I suppose?