Musical meaning

Musical virtuosity is often studied with an emphasis on the outstanding skills of the performer and their sensory and emotional effects on the listener. However, Franz Liszt, one of the main virtuosos in music history, was convinced that what matters in virtuosity is its specific function within the semantic and communicative processing of music. This article proposes a theoretical framework to further investigate Liszt’s intuitions in light of contemporary research on musical meaning and communication. First, we analyze philological data concerning Liszt’s creative process in the Mazeppa works, a set of works including both his virtuoso and program music. Second, we compare our results with recent research on music semantics based on inferential processes about the composer/performer’s intentions (Antović, Stamenković, & Figar, 2016; Schlenker, 2017). We criticize the associationist hypothesis (the idea that the composer’s intention is that the listener infers an association between the music and a real or fictional state of the world) and we defend a causalist hypothesis (the idea that the composer’s intention is that the listener recognizes the music as being an intentional “rewriting” of the states of the world, mental or physical, that are the causes of the music itself). Third, we suggest that what distinguishes Liszt’s virtuoso and program music rewritings are the visual and gestural components of two listening experiences: the virtuoso music “rewrites” its episodic causes (memories, personal experiences) whereas the program music “rewrites” its genetic causes (the work’s creative path and intertextual relations).

In this article I propose a theory of musical meaning and experience which takes into consideration the dialectical relationship between musical text and context, and which is flexible enough to apply to a range of musical styles. Through this theory I examine the roles played by the school music classroom which, despite the multiplicity of musical styles now incorporated into schooling, continues to contribute to the reproduction of existing social relations in the wider society. I consider how music itself can be understood to construct and communicate apparent 'truths' about ourselves and society and what role the classroom plays in perpetuating those 'truths'. Finally I argue for a partial but necessary reinstatement of the much-maligned notion of musical autonomy as a critical moment in any attempt to change things.

In the course of his painstaking study of ancient verse, Ferdinand de Saussure came up with an intriguing theory about the phonetics of the poetry he scanned. He postulated that the “jeux phoniques” he detected in the texts he analysed was proof that their authors were attempting to “parasite” the surface level meaning of their verse with a “hypotexte”. This hypotexte consisted of “anagrams” of “mots thèmes” whose phonetic properties were “isosyllabically diffracted” throughout the rest of the host text.
Today it is generally accepted that Saussure was wrong about this. Few however maintain that what he discerned in the phonetic depths of the verse he auscultated was no more than the figment of a fertile imagination. But if this be so, what exactly had he detected?
This paper maintains that what Saussure stumbled upon was the trace of a contribution made to ancient verse by melodically and metrically organised sounds. This was inevitable. Virtually all the texts he probed were “carmina sacra” that were composed to be sung and accompanied by music. This musical accompaniment had a decisive impact on the phonetics of the “lexemic” words in the Poetry that has survived. This is so because sung verse cannot “euphoniously” accommodate a musical accompaniment unless its phonetics constituents are selected, concatenated and intoned in such a way as to follow the melodic contours and rhythm patterns that modulate their articulation. In addition, the point of making verse consist both of melodically organised arrangements of sound and of organisations of sound in which one can recognise ordinary words was not simply ornamental. The real point was to bi nature what one was hearing. In other words, the goal was to “over-signify” the usual meanings of the “logocentric” words in the verse with a separate but complementary meaning and narrative encoded in melodised tones and metered rhythms. Why qualify the accompanying music as “acousmatic voices”? Because the music in question was added to song to give a voice to whichever tutelary divinity the song was performed to honour.
That’s what makes “acousmatic voices” an especially apt epithet for characterising the melodically and rhythmically structured bodies of sound Saussure so presciently discerned in the phonetic depths of the poésie phonissante he probed. The point of their being in poetry was to give a voice to the agencies to whom the object or occasion of verse is beholden for its Being-in-the-world.

This paper discusses how the construction and representation of identity can be observed within improvisational practice. Based on qualitative idiographic case studies, it is an analysis that explores the psychological characteristics of improvisation and their significance. It describes a type of musical meaning associated with the ongoing and cyclical process of self-construction and representation: where identity is negotiated within the dialectical phenomena of this particular musical activity. To these ends, the analytic method used is one appropriate for the exploration of music as an experienced phenomenon.

Since Joseph Kerman’s book, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology, in 1985, analytic musicology has undergone a thorough critique of the philosophical and epistemological assumptions that provide its basis for constructing knowledge and understanding. Additionally, the analytic influence of disciplines such as anthropology, sociology and psychology has led to a significant review and improvement of the aims and methods of empirical musicology. A great deal of contemporary musicology and ethnomusicology contextualises such analysis within more post-structuralist informed approaches. As Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist state, “after being absorbed with issues of method and technique [. . .] analysis is moving outwards to embrace the issues of value, meaning, and difference” (xii). As such, the question of meaning has come to emphasise the texts of musical practice rather than just musical texts. At the heart of this shift is a redefinition of ideas about individual consciousness through a questioning of the relation between the self and the social brought about by post-structuralism. This change is also integral to the rationale behind the analytic orientation of this paper. Additionally, it is important to note that further steps are taken not only towards the texts of musical practice, but also into the associated psychological and experiential dynamics of practice, thus legitimizing an idiographic approach with its focus upon the experiences of individuals. As will be clear from the methodology, the analytic emphasis here is the “psychological text” rather than the “musical text.”

It will become evident that the notion of dialectical interplay, where apparently oppositional forces, concepts and qualities co-exist and dynamically interact, is of particular significance to this paper. Bearing this in mind, it is useful to note that the interacting forces and various continua described fall within a paradigm of both/and relationships rather than binary and oppositional either/or relationships. The exploration of dialectical phenomena associated with the musical encounter calls for an analytic method adapted to and respectful of the constructive nature of the interactions between improvising musicians. To facilitate this, a hermeneutic and idiographic analytic approach is adopted so that individual and distinct instances of perception and states of awareness can be explored. Following, and in deference to, Kristeva’s notion of semanalysis, the aim is a study of the productivity in musical communication, and looks to the interactions (their type and function) belonging to experiences of music.

This essay develops an interpretation of the title and technical facets of Milton Babbitt’s 1983 composition Canonical Form. This leads to insights about the value of canonicity generally. Among the musical facets explored are: Tonality (portmantonality), including a tonal voice-leading graph, and the long-range pattern of pitch registers, modeled three ways: through (a) curve fitting, (b) binary-state operators, and (c) boolean functions. (The latter modeling reveals an intriguing parallelism between middleground registral patterning and local patterns of pitch.) Conceptual Integration Networks (CINs) organize all of these musical facets into a blended reading of the composition’s title, suggesting a poetics of double entendre. This thread culminates in yet another reading of the entire two-word title, which analogizes a well-known process of solving of equations (that is enabled by a canonical form) to the process of humanity incrementally building up knowledge.

A comprehensive theory of how bodily experience, auditory perception and musical structure relate to one another has yet to be formulated. The concept of the body has been sometimes linked to a value discourse where much of post-1945 music, especially serial music, appears highly disembodied and thus least valuable, while tonal music – pop as well as classical-romantic music – is admitted a considerably higher degree of embodiment. Such criticism of serial music’s complex structures evading the listener is based on a surprisingly enduring misunderstanding, since direct correlations between serial structures and listening experience have never been intended by serial composers. Rather there is sufficient evidence that serial aesthetics incorporated aspects of listening expectation, auditory perception and bodily sensation from the beginning, a tendency highlighted and developed in the aesthetics of post-structuralist composers such as Helmut Lachenmann, Brian Ferneyhough or Gérard Grisey. The essay argues that serial and post-serial music might in fact be considered especially embodied as they aim to liberate musical processes from a conventional gestural repertoire and tonal centricity and thus tend to throw listeners back to elementary auditory reflexes such as contour and streaming detection rather than activating the memory-loaded associations of tonal music listening. Consequently, it appears that there is no firm connection between the degree of a music’s referentiality (especially its referentiality to tonal music) and its degree of embodiment.
Isabel Mundry’s music intends to relate to experiences of daily life and to produce referentiality with-out resorting to conventional musical gestures, figures or topics. In her work Ich und Du (2008) solo piano and orchestra go through several stages of an ambiguous identity discourse informed by the 1932-essay Watashi to nanji (I and You) of Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida. The personification and semantization of musical structures implied by this reference has gained significant prominence in new music discourse since the 1970s, predated by Olivier Messiaen’s personnages rhythmiques-metaphor and Theodor W. Adorno’s process-oriented interpretation of Mahler’s musical ‘characters’. This tendency reflects an increasing awareness  of the necessity to reach beyond the non-referential and techno-essentialist paradigm of serialism.
A detailed morpho-syntactical analysis of Mundry’s work reveals the destabilization of sonic identities as a principal compositional means subverting the perception of complex sequences or juxtapositions of individual, distinguishable, ‘bodily’ Gestalten (emerging from three basic topics: attack, proliferation and resonance) to a ‘global’ perception. Piano and orchestra are mediated by diverse ‘chimeric assignments’ (Albert Bregman) and tilting movements between structure sound and texture sound (Helmut Lachenmann) resulting in a music-specific mode of narrativity. This compositional design together with the identity discourse suggested by the Nishida-reference of Mundry’s title are successfully evoking a polyvalent situation while avoiding a denotative coherence of musical meaning. By reflecting the instability and connectivity of identity concepts in today’s multiply stratified and fragmented societies, 'Ich und Du' exemplifies an utopia of art music’s social interaction and worldly experience.

The adoption of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis from psychology to consider musical meaning arises from the view of music as a participatory aspect of a lived-in world. Philip Bohlman describes this as the ‘ontology of world music’ and contrasts it with the Western ontology of music where music is treated as if it were an object, an autonomous entity possessing meaning in-and-of-itself. He has suggested that the complex aesthetic embeddedness of world music is radically different from Western music. As an example he describes how the aesthetic power and meaning of sacred music resides in its ability to do something, to effect change, to transform text, narrative and ritual into meaning. (2002: 13).

Rather than being satisfied to say that it is a matter of discourse that defines the differences of music’s ‘epistemological status’ and that there are other cultures for which music as an object is foreign, this paper argues for an aspect of musical meaning fundamental to its nature as an experienced phenomenon (the ontology of musical experience if you like). It is the position of this paper that music’s transformational qualities form a significant part of the meaningfulness of all musical experience. And that with appropriate analytic tools and an informed epistemological outlook this kind of meaning might be considered more universally. Perhaps ethnomusicology (or at least Philip Bohlman) deserves some criticism for perceiving itself as something dealing with music as more embedded, as much as musicology does for insufficiently emphasising music as an experienced phenomenon.

This article discusses the function and position of the conductor in the long chain of communication from composer to audience. It is exemplified, how the conductor’s use of language and word-signs to express musical meaning can cause serious trouble, and a list of alternative – non-verbal – tools is provided and discussed.

A central part of the article examines, whether conducting is a universal language or an individually improvised choreography, and whether the gestures of a conductor can be taken at their face value – and in which respect. Dependent on design and timing, conducting gestures either represent a unambiguous sign system with a syntactic structure, or they will have to be interpreted by the executants before they transform the contained information into sound. In case of the latter it is discussed how and to which degree is the interpretation and transformation carried out.

An attempt is made not only to describe the unique features and aims of the conductor’s gestuality but also to list a hierarchy of musical parameters, which a conductor might desire to – and under certain circumstances indeed can – decisively influence.

In the course of this the nature and structure of the so-called ‘beat patterns’ found in educational material are analyzed in detail with the aim to determine, whether beat patterns provide the means needed for the control of musical parameters in real-time, and several traditional gestural “macros” and designs are put under critical scrutiny.

Conclusively the article shortly mentions on-going conducting research and points out, how apparently minor differences in gestural design can radically affect scientific results and twist crucial conclusions within this still ‘virginal’ field of research.

Musical Sense-Making: Enaction, Experience, and Computation broadens the scope of musical sense-making from a disembodied cognitivist approach to an experiential approach. Revolving around the definition of music as a temporal and sounding art, it argues for an interactional and experiential approach that brings together the richness of sensory experience and principles of cognitive economy. Starting from the major distinction between in-time and outside-of-time processing of the sounds, this volume provides a conceptual and operational framework for dealing with sounds in a real-time listening situation , relying heavily on the theoretical groundings of ecology, cybernetics, and systems theory, and stressing the role of epistemic interactions with the sounds. These interactions are considered from different perspectives, bringing together insights from previous theoretical groundings and more recent empirical research. The author's findings are framed within the context of the broader field of enactive and embodied cognition, recent action and perception studies, and the emerging field of neurophenomenology and dynamical systems theory. This volume will particularly appeal to scholars and researchers interested in the intersection between music, philosophy, and/or psychology.

In this paper I counter the formalistic rejection of musical meaning and the consequent dismissal of the analogy between music and language. Although musical formalists may concede that music can express emotions and offer sonic analogues of dynamic relations, they claim that, contrary to a linguistic meaning, which would imply the inter-subjectively sharable reference to contents, purported musical meaning is vague, private, and arbitrary. Hence, they argue, music has no semantics, and, consequently, is not like language. However, the formalist account of linguistic meaning overlooks the pragmatic view of linguistic meaning. According to such an approach, language is a kind of action and linguistic meaning is determined by the use of language in specific contexts. Drawing on pragmatics, I will suggest that musical meaning is structurally and interestingly analogous to linguistic meaning, understood in such a way. A pragmatic understanding of music as communication, which is also supported by philosophical and empirical research on musical power to embody personal traits, is all what we need for answering positively the question of musical meaning. Musical works and musical performances are, like speech acts, communicational actions that activate and determine the vague and undetermined meaning of music, originated by music power of representing dynamic and emotional relations. Music's determined meaning is actualized in virtue of its " context of use " (accordingly to the cultural-social conventions of practices), while, conversely, musical actions contribute meaning to its context(s). Generally speaking, musical meaning emerges through contextual relations and interpretational acts. In this regard, focusing on the reciprocal connection between group improvisation and conversation, I will finally provide an emergentist and non-intentionalist account of the pragmatic generation of musical meaning, which may be heuristically adopted also as paradigm of a conversational view of the interpretation of artworks.

Meaning is encoded in the production and decoded by the audience during the consumption, which is why it is a process of constant feedback. Each person experiences meaningful connotations in relation to their favourite music, hence music occupies a particular position in each one's life and within the cultural life of particular individuals and groups. Music meaning and emotion has been studied by David Carr (2004), who wonders if emotion is intrinsic in music, or if it is a symbolic representation – or rather if emotions are projected from the listener onto the music. Like Akio Morita (the co-founder of Sony, and the person behind Sony Walkman), Jean Baudrillard argues that meaning does not reside in an object but in how that object is used (Du Gay et al. 1997, 90). Is there a relation between what music means to an individual and his/her preference for a particular genre? The methodological approach is mainly qualitative. I have analysed 215 responses to an online questionnaire, and followed this with an analysis of 8 semi-structured in-depth interviews. I seek to comprehend the space that music occupies in the net of relationships that constitute culture, and to discover the mechanisms of taste configuration in relation to music-meaning within a holistic approach, encompassing the circuit of culture as a theoretical framework.

This study concerns the widespread phenomenon that music is perceived as meaningful to the listener in some sense. The study adopts a style of conceptual clarification and investigation that is current in the analytic philosophy of language, and is further informed by recent research into the fundamental biology of human musicality, which suggests that musicality and language are neurologically related.

Cognitive psychology, with its focus on mind and its processes, is one of the approaches to study film music. Although music alone is said to be already meaningful, it gains and transfers specific meanings in the film context. This article aims to contribute to understanding of what film music means and how these meanings are processed in the cross-modal perception of a film. A review of the selected empirical research on film music with regard to meaning is followed by a short overview of the Annabel J. Cohen's Congruence-Association Model (CAM) of media cognition. The model provides a framework for the experiments' results and encourages future interdisciplinary studies in this area.

Communication is omnipresent and semiotic in nature. Within communication, a message is typically sent through a channel by means of a system of symbols, which is verbal and/or nonverbal in nature. Music is a communication channel, which can, unlike spoken language, communicate across language barriers. During the communicating of the message, the musical symbols within the music score function as a unit. For various reasons, publishers make modifications to music scores. This study aimed to investigate the impact that modifications have on the communicated message. Additionally, a more holistic understanding of communication phenomena within the context of music was obtained and the importance of selecting the appropriate edition demonstrated. This is achieved by analysing four nocturnes by the Romantic composer Frédéric Chopin to investigate meaning modifications within different editions of the same piano compositions. To achieve this, quantitative analyses were conducted to identify any modifications within the sample. This was followed by a qualitative semiotic analysis of each composition.
There is shown in this study that the most frequent modifications are made to phrase markings, dynamic symbols, articulation symbols, and pedal markings. In addition, it was found that changes were made to some of the notes and/or rests used within certain compositions. These changes have an impact on the communicated message of each composition in the sense of changing the emotion and atmosphere, and hence the communicated message. The findings of this study highlight the importance of considering the implications of making changes to an original score and choosing the most appropriate edition for a performance.

In the context of improvised music, and more specifically in jazz-a situation in which at least part of the musical "work" is created at the moment it is perceived-the performers find themselves in an ambivalent condition: like their listeners at the same time they perform the music they experience it for the first time. Improvisers experience the musical content they produce in the act of improvisation as an improvised part of a "work"-an update of it. The "work", in this case, reveals itself at the moment of performance. In this work I discuss the understanding of musical coherence in order to support the investigation of cognitive processes involved in the act of jazz improvisation.

English version of a paper published in French translation concerning the figure of Frederic Chopin in poems by Emma Lazarus, Arthur Symons, Amy Lowell, T. S. Eliot, Boris Pasternak, Gottfried Benn, and Weldon Kees.  The poems are linked by a tropes connecting the sound of Chopin's piano music to the sound of the human voice, and the expressiveness of Chopin's music to the intake and outflow of fluids.

Historically informed analysis reveals a very different conception of hero in the Eroica than the one sustained in the popular imagination and perpetuated by the majority of its reception history: a militaristic or Napoleonic Heldenleben. By combining analytic perspectives from schema theory and topic theory with key passages from Beethoven’s epistolary life and Tagebuch, this chapter illustrates that the Eroica’s narrative is akin to religious drama, conveying the same theme of abnegation found in the contemporary oratorio Christus am Ölberge and the Heiligenstadt Testament, the Eroica’s ‘literary prototype’. Unlike some middle-period works which communicate a ‘tragic-to-triumphant’ expressive genre, the Eroica is cast in the ‘tragic-to-transcendent’ type, which became characteristic of Beethoven’s late style. A central component of this spiritual genre is the strategic positioning of structural and semantic oppositions in an unresolved state of suspension. The Eroica manifests this most overtly through a governing opposition between death (‘ombra’) and pastoral (‘Ländler, contredanse’) music, and the association of this stylistic opposition with the tonalities of G minor and E flat major, respectively. Rather than a programmatic narrative about a hero who overcomes, the Eroica is a conceptually ‘late’ work that meditates on suffering as a spiritual necessity and its implications for transcendence.

The Allgemeines Handbuch der Film-Musik was published by Hans Erdmann, Ludwig Brav, and Giuseppe Becce in 1927 by the Berlin-based publisher Schlesinger. It represents the most comprehensive and undoubtedly most significant document pertaining to the practice of "silent"-film accompaniment during the 1920s in Germany. The four hundred-page work is divided into two volumes: The first one delivers an elaborate aesthetic and theoretical debate about the prevalent and ideal methods of film accompaniment, and the second volume contains a cinema music catalog, the so-called Thematisches Skalenregister (Thematic Music Index), with over three thousand musical incipits. While the Handbuch was firmly grounded in the musical practice of cinema musicians, the two parts were not solely intended as a manual to facilitate the fast-paced working routine of practitioners, like the numerous cinema music catalogs that were published in Germany in the wake of Becce's Kinotheken (1919-1929). In these catalogs, music pieces of various origins were organized according to certain parameters in order to satisfy the musi-co-dramatic demands of day-today "silent"-film accompaniment. The pieces were interpreted for their extramusical associations and labeled under specific semantic categories in order to be used for specific and recurrent types of film scenes. This labeling of music was based on the tradition of "musical hermeneutics," and it inspired the conception of the Handbuch's second volume, the Thematic Music Index, which is a complex and multilayered classification system for cinema music. Thus, in addition to providing a precise method for film accompaniment, the Handbuch contains a theory and an aesthetics that applies the music-hermeneutical ideas of German musicologist Hermann Kretzschmar to the practice of film accompaniment. Kretzschmar (1848-1924) located the core problem of musical hermeneutics-a discipline of music analysis that essentially studies musical meaning and interpretation-in the nomenclature of musical expression, which formed the basis of the musical accompaniment method in "silent" cinema. This essay focuses on the influence of Kretzschmar's theory of musical hermeneutics on the indexing system of the Handbuch as well as on the author's intentions to ground their work in academic theory.

The relationship between musical structure, perception and musical meaning can be understood as a key to the development of a theory of post-tonal music. Preliminaries of this theory are developed in three »variations«. First, a review of the difficult relationship between music theory and new music in the 20th century is explained by (1) an increasingly diverse compositional practice that has lead to a composer-centred »theory«, often amounting to nothing more than a scantily contextualized documentation of a composer's intentions and techniques, and (2) the universalist and dogmatic tendency of music-theoretical discourse around 1900 which, however, has since developed into an »epistemological pluralism« (Nicholas Cook). The Graz research project »organisation of sound«, initiated and headed by the author, pursues just such a pluralistic methodology by integrating author-and listener-perspectives on post-tonal music based on a morpho-syntactical conceptual framework with references to gestalt theory. This approach emerged not least from the observation that new music, especially after 1945, has increasingly been conceived of »morphologically« with a strong focus on music perception, as argued in the second variation. The idea that musical structure, perception and »worldliness« [Welthaltigkeit] are inseparable allowed composers to retain the idea of musical auto-referentiality while at the same time claiming the social-political impact of contemporary music. This is illustrated by a short discussion of the relationship between structural coherence and (political) meaning in works by Brian Ferneyhough, Helmut Lachenmann and Salvatore Sciarrino. The third variation discusses these questions in more detail through an examination of two recent works by Chaya Czernowin and Isabel Mundry. In Czernowin's Excavated Dialogues – Fragments Western and Chinese instruments are organized in a culturally hybrid space saturated with conflict emerging from a highly gestural material; in Mundry's Ich und Du solo piano and orchestra go through several stages of an ambiguous identity discourse informed by an essay of Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida. Antinomies between the composers' self-interpretations and the morpho-syntactical analysis can be understood as results of a music-specific polyvalence that should inform any theory of post-tonal music. In einem Gespräch, das im zweiten Band der Schriftenreihe musik.theorien der gegenwart dokumentiert ist, hat Helmut Lachenmann den von György Ligeti kritisierten * Mein beim Grazer GMTH-Kongress 2008 vorgestellter Beitrag Konzeptionelle Narrativität und kulturelle Identitäten. Methodiken der Analyse von Werken für westlich-asiatische Instrumentalensembles wurde in der Folge mehrfach überarbei-tet und erweitert und schließlich 2010 im Archiv für Musikwissenschaft publiziert (Utz, Kunstmusik und reflexive Globalisierung). Der vorliegende Beitrag greift im Grazer Vortrag eher kursorisch angestellte Überle-gungen zum Verhältnis von Musiktheorie und neuer Musik im 20. Jahrhundert auf und versucht sie mit Material zu verknüpfen, das im Kontext des Forschungsprojektes Klangorganisation post-tonaler Musik an der Kunstuniversität Graz entstanden ist (siehe unten). Es handelt sich dabei, wie der Untertitel andeutet, um »Variationen« ohne Anspruch auf ein durchweg kohärentes Gesamtbild.

The idea of ‘music alone’ as an independent auditory medium expressed in the institutions of today’s academia does not resonate with how we listen to and perceive music in everyday life; music is always accompanied with paratexts such as programme notes, LP sleeve images or other types of media. This idea forms the basis for this essay and is used to present a number of issues concerning meaning production: How, where and when is musical meaning produced? To be more specific, this essay deals with how an intermedial music culture can be described and analysed through one specific case study. Intermediality arises in the crossings between constructed media borders, which means that different aspects of a specific medium can be transgressed in various ways. Based on the American composer and jazz musician Brad Mehldau’s (1970–) most complex instrumental work, the concept album Highway Rider (2010), this essay explores how such an album can be understood within an intermedial music culture. It merges formal and structural analysis with cultural, historical, technological and psychoanalytic aspects of music emphasising the role of subjectivity in the production of meaning. By offering a varied and broad theoretical and methodological framework, the author demonstrates ways to approach the work using concepts like transmediality, intermedial reference, meta-reference, iconicity, semiotics, paratext, psychoanalysis and ecological psychology.

This work presents the description and analysis of a musical appreciation activity done with university students of the Pedagogy course. The activity consisted in the listening of a piece of instrumental music followed by the elaboration of an audio music score (graphical representation of music). The registers were grouped in categories (symbolic representational, pseudo-scores and abstract schemes) and discussed having in mind the theoretical referential. Based mainly on Vigotski, Bruner and Bakhtin, the analysis underlines questions that include the necessity of considering, in musical education, the many forms of meaning and active responsivity attributed to musical pieces. The estesia (the reception) as a knowledge form and the importance of the aesthetic-discursive approach (that goes beyond the analysis of the sonorous material and grammar elements) in the field of musical appreciation are also discussed. This investigation about musical listening is part of a research project that has the purpose of developing methodological principles that allow access to the musical language by non-musicians.

We must guard against throwing out the baby with the bath-water. In the wake of postmodernist disdain for 'monolithic' theory-building, and rising awareness of the complexity, fluidity and multifariousness of social groups and the relations cutting across them, the concept of ideology became unfashionable at the end of the twentieth century. It was somewhat dismissed as a crude and inflexible way of explaining only a one-dimensional powerrelation between social classes, incapable of accounting for the variety of relationships, perspectives and social groupings that mark the contemporary world. In this article I examine the concept of ideology with specific reference to music, and attempt to show some ways in which the concept continues to be relevant to our understanding of the construction of musical value. I suggest how ideologies of musical value are perpetuated through the education system, and how this perpetuation is also tied up with the reproduction of social groups, not merely despite but partly as a result of the recent incorporation of a variety of musical styles into the curriculum. 1

PREMISE: How can music allow a man to see the face of God? How can music direct the spirituality of those creating, practicing, and listening to it? Music and sound have played a significant role in religious practice throughout and across human history and culture, but this sonic aspect of religious and spirituality has been significantly ignored. This thesis attempts to explore spiritual manifestations of people, both generally and specifically, through musical and sonic experiences, redirecting the focus of study in religion and spirituality from the visual to the aural, creating a concept of Spirosonance as compared to Theosonance. METHODS: Part One of this dialogue begins by deconstructing and reconstructing notions of religions, religion, and spirituality along with music, sound, and noise to first lay a foundation of definitions for the study, while also questioning common notions of these human constructs. This section hopes to begins creating better tools to define, discuss, and understand these constructed notions, employing subjectivity as a priority to objectivity in forming definitions. This sections ends by outlining the general concept of Spirosonance and how it can be used to better understand people's spiritual experience of sound. In Part Two of this discourse, a particular case study is used to demonstrate concepts discussed in Part One, outlining Christian monastic practices and experiences of music as related to their spirituality. Further in this section, outsider's experience of this same monastic music is examined to understand how people outside this tradition are also gaining spiritually from this same music. CONCLUSION: Many possible reasons can be given as to why monastic chant is so popular among such wide varieties of people as a spiritual enhancer. The reasons given here are just a few, focusing on the most cited characteristics of chant that people find attractive or exceptional. Ultimately, why someone is moved or attracted to the chant is personal and could be for any reason. What was attempted here was to show how, in a few ways, people are perhaps experiencing something personal, something spiritual, within this chant that does not necessarily tie itself to religious practice. There is clearly something about this music that speaks to people beyond the terms of religion, moving into more "spiritual" realms. Most importantly, what was attempted here is the creation of better tools of understanding music as both a tool of religion and a catalyst for spirituality, forming spirituality as a character of those experiencing the music, not a character of the music itself.

How does music have meaning?  Accounts describe musical meaning as autonomous (relating to music’s internal structures and properties) or as heteronomous (situating meaning as an interrelationship between the musical object and the world). 
Chapter 1 reviews the literature relating to these accounts and argues that there are no purely autonomous musical meanings and that all descriptions of musical meaning rely on heteronomous explanations. 
Chapter 2 discusses five types of explanation: Grice’s natural meaning, ‘Kantian’ transcendence, emotional accounts of meaning, semiotic explanations and, ecological descriptions which are given a place on a ‘spectrum’ of increasing heteronomy. 
Chapter 3 contends that the descriptions of musical meaning outlined in Chapter 2 are given within the Anglo-American tradition of analytical philosophy whose aesthetics rely heavily on ontological classification (descriptions of what things are).  The Continental philosophical tradition builds on the philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger, through Foucault and Derrida, in developing an epistemological account (the way things work and act).  These two traditions are a contrast between, respectively, what things are and how things are.  Deleuze’s ‘rhizome’ is introduced as the metaphysical space which is a bridging position between the two traditions, allowing for the necessity of ontological entities, but describing how they may interact epistemologically.  It is argued that such a metaphysics is required to describe how musical objects interact in construction of heteronomous meanings.  Toynbee and Latour are introduced as writers who describe Deleuzean rhizomatic spaces.  Toynbee’s notion of the ‘Social Author’ and Latour’s Actor Network Theory are given diagrammatic explanations which prove useful in depicting how musical meaning can emerge in the metaphorical rhizomatic space. 
Chapter 4 proposes the fungal mycelium, with its network of hyphae and fruiting bodies as a metaphor for the metaphysical space inhabited by musical meaning.  The mycelium has multi-valent connections through branchings and nodal connections allowing for material to pass around it in all directions – which is required for heteronomous accounts of musical meaning. 
Chapter 5 considers two musical exemplars; the first movement of Beethoven’s string quartet in A minor, Op. 132 and a piece composed on the iPad application GarageBand called Network.  The results of some empirical research into listeners’ responses to these two pieces are considered from a ‘mycelial’ perspective. 
It is concluded that the mycelium provides a good metaphorical description of the type of metaphysical space required to give an account of how music comes to have meaning in the world.

The term yanık, a desired quality of music, is one of the most important aspects of Turkish response to music in terms of the perception of meaning. As a discourse of sentiment, yanık is an image of the bittersweet emotions in music. What is considered as yanık is generally a vocal quality, representing feelings of grief, sadness, sorrow, and passion. The term is mainly considered to highlight two features of musical quality. First, it denotes sorrow or sadness. Second, it defines the vocal style or voice quality that it is believed to be good, right, and nice. In fact, both qualities are thought to be connected to each other. What is important is to be yanık. What is wanted is a sorrowful sound which can express sad feelings. Being sorrowful, when singing, is nice, and this feature is a part of the musical taste. Consequently, yanık is the fact which expresses pleasing and sorrowful emotions together. In this article, first I will give a brief introduction to the theoretical framework of my paper. In terms of the discourse of sentiment, I propose the theory of associative structure for understanding the cultural dynamics of yanık in the Turkish musical tradition. Secondly, following from this approach/theory, which treats the substance of musical sound as a 'material' rather than 'raw' parameters, I would like to carry out an analysis that investigates the range of meanings that sound material perceived as yanık has for Turkish listeners.

"We define ‘electroacoustic’ a sound or set of sounds resulting from processes of electronic synthesis and/or manipulation. At the turn of 20th century such technological processes matched with certain ‘tropes’ of western culture such as vibration, inscription and transmission that were subsequently developed in sonic
arts. These tropes find a privileged field of application in the domain of audiovisual media, to the extent that some scholars place them at the origin of the theoretical and technical debate concerning the birth of American talkies. It is indeed the fictional
cinema that since its beginnings contributed, through the means of electroacoustic sound, to the development of those tropes towards narrative configurations such as automation and perceptual alteration and eventually to the profound characterization of genres like science fiction and horror-thriller. In an ideal itinerary leading from Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931) to Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound and Fred Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet (1956), the topical connotation of
electroacoustic sound become well established in the American cinema. I argue that Italian auteur cinema of the 1960s rearticulated such topoi under new perspectives and through an approach to electroacoustic sound strongly mediated by the reception of contemporary avant-garde music. Drawing on two case studies––The Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964) and The Seed of Man (Marco Ferreri, 1969)––this paper analyzes how Italian auteur films used electroacoustic sound and music (in
these cases pre-existent compositions) to give expression to the alienated condition of a generation facing dramatic disillusion after the post-war ‘economic miracle’. In such contexts, electronics are used not merely to produce uncanny effects but as
processes of musical construction that challenge artistic creativity and expression, eventually representing tools of hermeneutical interpretations of the films themselves."

At this point in my theoretical developments it seems necessary to better explain the reasons for a model such as a ‘natural’ narratology for music. From my point of view musicology needs to investigate musical narrativity, rather than the narrativity of music. Fludernik’s framework offers a deeper concept of narrativity that cannot be overlooked: narrativity consists in experientiality (and consciousness) of an anthropomorphic nature.
In literature, as long as the reader understands the language used, s/he will be able to distinguish between character(s), author(s), narrator(s), etc. But music, unlike spoken language, relies on the present experience of the listener without the need for referential meaning. The study of musical narrativity may thus begin with breaking the usual continuum between producer, work and receptor, and replacing it with a solely esthesic view.
Although Fludernik starts at an abstract level, she quickly applies her thinking to ‘natural’ (i.e. oral, person-to-person) narrative, straying from direct experience in order to study how this experience is recounted, transmitted. Adapting her model to an esthesic musicological view therefore means defining which concepts can be applied to music and which cannot. This, along with an overview of the potential uses of the model, is the aim of this presentation.

The capacity for music to function as a therapeutic force for bio-cognitive organization is considered in clinical and everyday contexts. Given the deeply embodied nature of such responses, it is argued that cognitivist approaches may be insufficient to fully explain music’s affective power. Following this, an embodied approach is considered––where the emotional-affective response to music is discussed in terms of primary bodily systems and the innate cross-modal perceptive capacities of the embodied human mind. It is suggested that such an approach may extend the largely cognitivist view taken by much of contemporary music psychology and philosophy of music by pointing the way towards a conception of musical meaning that begins with our most primordial interactions with the world.