© Copyrighted Material Music seMiotics: m A Network of ... · explicit theoretical models for the attribution of meaning to music’ pointing up work by Zbikowski, Gibson and Cook

© Copyrighted Material


www.

ashg

ate.

com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

Music seMiotics: A Network of sigNificAtioNs



www.

ashg

ate.

com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

Music semiotics: A Network of SignificationsIn Honour and Memory of Raymond Monelle

Edited by

esti sheiNberg



www.

ashg

ate.

com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

www

.ash

gate

.com

Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPg books group, uk.

© Esti Sheinberg 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Esti Sheinberg has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work.

Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing CompanyWey Court East Suite 420Union Road 101 Cherry StreetFarnham BurlingtonSurrey, GU9 7PT VT 05401-4405England USA

www.ashgate.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Music semiotics : a network of significations : in honour and memory of Raymond Monelle. 1. Music--Semiotics. 2. Music--Philosoophy and aesthetics. I. Monelle, Raymond, 1937- II. Sheinberg, Esti, 1954- 780.1'4-dc23

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataMusic semiotics : a network of significations in honour and memory ofRaymond Monelle / edited by Esti Sheinberg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-1102-4 (hardcover) 1. Music--Semiotics. I.Monelle, Raymond, 1937- II. Sheinberg, Esti, 1954- ML3845M9747 2012 781’.1--dc23

2011035116ISBN 9781409411024 (hbk)


© Copyrighted Materialww

w.as

hgat

e.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m Chapter 12

Time, Subjectivity and Contested Signs: Developing Monelle’s Application of

Peirce’s 1903 Typology to MusicBen Curry

Introduction

All thought, including that bound up with listening processes, develops through time. If musical meaning is manifest in thought it follows that its study should pay close attention to time. There has been a tendency in music semiotics, however, to avoid temporal factors in the development of meaning. A point in part explained by Saussure’s influential notion of synchronic (non-temporal) linguistics and a general tendency for musicologists to search for relatively stable meanings within immutable masterworks.1

Peircean semiotics provides a means to theorize processes of meaning generation in music that affords time a central role. The universality of Peirce’s categories – firstness, secondness and thirdness – allows us to draw together sign types (particularly icon, index and symbol) and the dimensions of time (present, past and future). By exploring the implications of this integration of signification and time this chapter looks to develop ideas formerly presented by Raymond Monelle.2 The theories it posits can also be usefully allied to those studies that Cook and Dibben have identified as attempting ‘to develop explicit theoretical models for the attribution of meaning to music’ and those which recognize the ‘personal and provisional nature of musical meaning’.3 Their summary of musicological approaches to emotion highlights the achievements of Robert Hatten in particular;4

1 A notable exception is Raymond Monelle’s essay ‘The Temporal Image’, in The Sense of Music (Princeton, 2000), pp. 81–114.

2 Raymond Monelle, ‘Music and the Peircean Trichotomies’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 22/1 (1991), pp. 99–108.

3 Nicholas Cook and Nicola Dibben, ‘Musicological Approaches to Emotion’, in Patrik N. Juslin and John A. Sloboda (eds), Music and Emotion: Theory and Research (Oxford, 2001), pp. 64–66.

4 Editor’s note: Cook and Dibben discuss Hatten’s earlier book: Robert Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation and Interpretation (Bloomington, 1994), and not to his later inquiries into musical gesture, topics and metaphors (see Bibliography).



w.as

hgat

e.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m

Music Semiotics: A Network of Significations150

however, in the conclusion of their article they make clear that Hatten’s project still leaves considerable scope for further development and qualification. They identify two essays, that might be used to inflect Hatten’s work and which point to the ‘performative’ character of analysis/interpretation.5 To recognize analysis as performative is to recognize its ‘personal and provisional nature’ and to reverse the assumption that we hear meanings already within the music – we hear them, instead, into the music.6

Cook and Dibben go on to outline a number of more recent ‘attempts to develop explicit theoretical models for the attribution of meaning to music’ pointing up work by Zbikowski, Gibson and Cook. This chapter is another such attempt. Like Cook and Dibben’s article, this chapter also pays particular attention to Robert Hatten’s achievements in the field of musical meaning whilst attempting to qualify and develop his work. The theoretical model it develops is derived from C.S. Peirce’s 1903 typology, paying particular attention to Monelle’s aforementioned article.7 As with other applications of Peirce, one of the key theoretical notions explored is the trichotomy icon, index and symbol. However, unlike other applications, this chapter focuses upon the way in which these signs combine in the process of semiosis. It also looks to pay closer attention to the broad sweep of Peircean thought by considering the role of time in defining his categories which, in turn, may allow us to conceive more comprehensively the potential for semiotics to elucidate the listening process.

Peirce’s 1903 typology

To supplement his Lowell lectures in 1903 Peirce produced a large document entitled ‘A Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic’. This document comprises six sections. The fifth section – ‘Nomenclature and Divisions of Triadic Relations, as Far as They are Determined’ – contains one of Peirce’s better-known proposals for the study of semiotics: the three-fold trichotomy of the sign, which yields 10 classes of sign.8 Although Peirce did not present this classification as a simple

5 Marion Guck, ‘Rehabilitating the Incorrigible’, in Anthony Pople (ed.), Theory, Analysis and Meaning in Music (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 57–73; Charles Fisk, ‘What Schubert’s Last Sonata Might Hold’, in Jenefer Robinson (ed.), Music and Meaning (Ithaca, 1997), pp. 179–200.

6 Cook and Dibben, ‘Musicological Approaches’, p. 65.7 Monelle, ‘Music and the Peircean Trichotomies’.8 Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce (eight volumes,

Cambridge, MA, 1931, 4th printing 1978), henceforth CP, internal references marked by volume and paragraph numbers. Part of the first four sections of ‘A Syllabus of Certain Topics of Logic’ are in CP 1.180–202 and CP 3.571–608, reprinted in Nathan Houser (ed.), The Essential Peirce, Vol. II (Bloomington, 1998), pp. 258–288; The fifth, ‘Nomenclature and Divisions of Triadic Relations, as Far as They are Determined’, most of which can be



w.as

hgat

e.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m

Time, Subjectivity and Contested Signs 151

table, a version of what is presented in Table 12.1 is commonly found in the Peirce literature.9

Table 12.1 Peirce’s 1903 typology

firstness:

as the sign in itself

secondness:

as the relation of the sign to its object

thirdness:

as the sign’s interpretant represents it

first Qualisign icon Rheme/Term

second sinsign Index Dicent/Proposition

third Legisign Symbol Argument

The nine sign types in Table 12.1 are those upon which Monelle’s ‘Music and the Peircean Trichotomies’ focuses. I, however, propose to look a little more closely at the 10 classes of sign these nine signs yield. Liszka provides a useful account of how these 10 classes are derived.10 We can summarize the rules thus: (1) each sign will exhibit one of the divisions within each of the trichotomies; (2) a first can determine nothing but a first, whereas a second can determine a second and a first and a third can determine a third, second or first (this is perhaps best grasped by studying the numbering in Table 12.2 – it may be helpful to read each instance of three numbers from right to left). These rules give the 10 classes of signs, which Peirce schematizes in a triangular table as shown in Table 12.2.

If we explode the boxes in the schematization, arrows can then be used to indicate the interrelationship between the 10 sign types.11 This is done in Figure 12.1 with the arrows running from right to left indicating instantiation or replication – the sign to the right being instantiated by the sign to the left (this is the token-

found in CP 2.233–272, 274–7, 283–4 and 292–4, reprinted in Houser, ibid., pp. 289–299. The sixth section, ‘Existential Graphs: The Conventions’, is printed in CP 4.394–417.

9 See, for example, Paul Weiss and Arthur Burks, ‘Peirce’s Sixty-six Signs’, Journal of Philosophy, 42/14 (1945): p. 385; and Anne Freadman, ‘Peirce’s Second Classification of Signs’, in Vincent Michael Colapietro and Thomas M. Olshewsky (eds), Peirce’s Doctrine of Signs: Theory, Applications and Connections (Berlin, 1996), p. 144.

10 James Jakób Liszka, A General Introduction to the Semeiotic of Charles Sanders Peirce (Bloomington, 1996), pp. 44–45.

11 For clarity, I have avoided Peirce’s abbreviations of the 10 classes of sign and added hyphens in the main body of the text.



w.as

hgat

e.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m


type or sinsign-legisign relationship). The arrows from left to right, on the other hand, indicate composition, with the sign to the left being a component of the sign to the right. Thus, for example, a dicent-symbolic-legisign (2.3.3) is instantiated by a dicent-indexical-sinsign (2.2.2) but comprised of all the signs in the shaded boxes.

Table 12.2 Peirce’s triangular table of the 10 sign types of the 1903 typology12

1.1.1Rhematic

iconic Qualisign

1.1.3Rhematic

iconicLegisign

1.3.3RhematicSymbolicLegisign

3.3.3ArgumentSymbolicLegisign

1.1.2Rhematic

iconicsinsign

1.2.3RhematicIndexicalLegisign

2.3.3Dicent

SymbolicLegisign

1.2.2RhematicIndexicalsinsign

2.2.3Dicent

IndexicalLegisign

2.2.2Dicent

Indexicalsinsign

The shading indicates those three signs that are the most prominent signs of the initial typology: icon, index and symbol. In order to better understand the 10 sign types of the initial typology we will begin with these three sign classes, situating them within Peirce’s wider thought.

Around 1885 Peirce developed a conception of his categories bound up with his discovery of the logic of relations (a discovery similar to, but arrived at independently of, Frege’s formulation of the core ideas of quantificational logic). Through his work on the logic of relations Peirce comes to conceive icons as unsaturated predicate expressions that have one, two or three unsaturated bonds (also termed a valency of one, two or three). Simple examples of unsaturated

12 Peirce, CP 2.264. Numbering and shading added and bold type removed. The table appears also in Houser, The Essential Peirce, Vol. II, p. 296.



w.as

hgat

e.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m


predicate expressions are given by Hookway: ‘() is red’ has a valency of one; ‘() killed ()’ has a valency of two; and ‘() gives () to ()’ has a valency of three.13 The unsaturated bonds, indicated here by brackets, are filled by indices. In ‘On the Algebra of Logic’ of 1880 Peirce gives an indication of these points, further developed in his ‘On the Algebra of Logic: A Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation’ in 1885;14 by 1895 he articulates the relationship between icons and indices with greater clarity:

13 Christopher Hookway, Peirce (London, 1985), pp. 86 and 131.14 Charles Sanders Peirce, ‘On the Algebra of Logic’, CP 3.154–251. First published

in the American Journal of Mathematics, 3/1 (1880): pp. 15–57. Partly reprinted in Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (eds) The Essential Peirce Vol. I (Bloomington, 1992), pp. 200–210. A development of the ideas presented in that paper, marked in the original with a ‘to be continued’ note, appeared five years later as ‘On the Algebra of Logic: A Contribution to the Philosophy of Notation’, American Journal of Mathematics, 7/2 (1885): pp. 180–196.

Figure 12.1 Interrelationships between 10 sign types. Arrows from right to left indicate instantiation or replication. The arrows from left to right indicate composition (in this paper, Peirce usually describes this relationship as the sign to the right involving the sign to the left)



w.as

hgat

e.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m


It is impossible to find a proposition so simple as to not have references to two signs. Take, for instance, ‘it rains.’ Here the icon is the mental composite photograph of all the rainy days the thinker has experienced. The index is all whereby he distinguishes that day, as it is placed in his experience. The symbol is the mental act whereby he stamps that day as rainy.15

This simultaneous functioning of icon, index and symbol is key to understanding Peirce’s notion of the proposition (also called the dicisign or dicent sign), and understanding Peirce’s conception of the dicent sign is key to understanding his wider philosophical project, as it is the theory of this sign that enables him to address one of his central questions: how are humans able to make progress in understanding the world? We might also begin to recognize here the role of time in defining the categories and their manifestation in icon, index and symbol. ‘The mental composite photograph’ to which Peirce refers can be conceived as a present entity in the sense that it is a qualitative entity, reducible to a simple sensation.16 The index refers to an actuality that has a definite determined existence which can only, therefore, be a past entity – thus although that day may seem to refer to the past and future, Peirce is conceiving it here as the past entity that constitutes ‘that day’. The generalizing acts of conceiving ‘raininess’ (an icon) and ‘a day’ (an index) and furthermore the drawing of these two entities together are acts pertaining to rule. Rule (thirdness) concerns the future: the patterns determined by rule are the stuff of interpretation and prediction.

When, in 1903, Peirce theorizes the dicent sign (now labelled a Dicent-Symbolic-Legisign) in ‘Nomenclature and Divisions’ the role of icon, index and symbol signs in its composition is again observable. Peirce asserts that the Dicent Symbolic Legisign ‘is composite inasmuch as it necessarily involves a Rhematic Symbol[ic Legisign] (and thus is for its Interpretant a [Rhematic] Iconic Legisign) to express its information and a Rhematic Indexical Legisign to indicate the subject of that information’.17 These three signs are those given in the shaded boxes in Table 12.2 and their involvement in the dicent sign is discussed more extensively by Peirce in the third section of the syllabus: ‘Sundry Logical Conceptions’.18

Partly reprinted in Houser, The Essential Peirce, Vol. I, pp. 225–228. Both papers appear in Peirce, CP, the earlier in 3.154–248 and the latter in 3.359–403M. The later paper is the more relevant to the present discussion.

15 Peirce, CP, 2.438. Also in Houser, The Essential Peirce Vol. II, p. 20. 16 Firstness is a particularly difficult notion to grasp, not least because it is two stages

removed (secondness is one stage removed) from thought or thirdness. Peirce’s notion of prescinding or separation is useful here: consider raininess divorced from any generalization (thirdness) and any actual occurrence. Such an entity can only be something subsisting in the present moment as sensation. Recall also that in the dicisign ‘it rains’, the predicate that concerns raininess is a symbol (a third) functioning as an icon.

17 Peirce, CP, 2.262; also in Houser, The Essential Peirce Vol. II, pp. 295–296. 18 Houser, ibid., pp. 267–288.



w.as

hgat

e.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m


Hookway provides an excellent summary (with simplified terminology). He underlines the following claims as particularly ‘important for understanding the structure of Peirce’s thought’:

Among the symbols employed in such a language must be some whose meaning fits them to function as indices and some that work like icons. It is primarily singular terms and quantifiers that are indices, and predicates that are icons; but recall that the functioning of all of these expressions has a symbolic aspect.19

Music semiotics and Peirce’s sign types

When Hookway talks of ‘such a language’ he is referring to the language of scientific enquiry. And it is perhaps for this reason that few semioticians have pursued the application of the dicisign or dicent sign to music, a point to which Monelle gives some consideration.20 Monelle regards the rheme, not the dicent sign, as ‘the most suggestive category of sign for aesthetic theory’ but goes on to propose that the dicent sign may be fruitfully applied to music if we conceive it as a ‘seeming dicent’.

The artistic rheme has within it a seeming-phenomenon which gives it already the character of a dicent; as we perceive the level of virtuality, we observe the rheme’s conversion into a seeming-dicent. Art, then, is the condition of a rheme which permits its transformation into a seeming-dicent.21

Monelle’s point seems to be that although music, unlike the linguistic dicent, may be powerless to make statements that are genuinely true or false, the objects to which a musical sign refers (for Monelle, in this article, an indexed sequence of emotions) may have all the semblance of reality. These are virtual objects, but in their verisimilitude their sense of reality is somehow heightened.

Monelle’s concept of the seeming-dicent can be developed if we now return to the point that the dicent sign is comprised of icon, index and symbol.22 Peirce’s fundamental point in conceiving the dicent sign is that it must bring together a subject or breadth (via an index) and information regarding that subject or depth (via the icon) – both of these signs are also conventionalized and in that sense symbolic. Music, I am suggesting, is read (again due to conventions) like a language in that it is rendered meaningful in the same way. When we listen to music we conceive its depth which, in turn, is made meaningful because it is brought into relation with breadth. These points are usefully explored in relation to

19 Hookway, Peirce, p. 131.20 Monelle, ‘Music and the Peircean Trichotomies’, p. 105.21 Ibid., p. 106.22 In the language of the 1903 typology the icon, index and symbol, to which I

refer, are labelled as the rhematic-iconic-legisign, the rhematic-indexical-legisign and the rhematic-symbolic-legisign.



w.as

hgat

e.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m


the work of Robert Hatten. I would argue that what we tend to define as expressive is, by that fact, in some way, extra-musical. However, Hatten seems to blur the distinction between the musical and the extra-musical in his assertion, that ‘expressive meanings are as purely musical as the forms and structures that serve to distinguish them’.23

Music’s depth, in functioning like an icon in the dicent sign, is more obviously reliant upon convention than is its indexical counterpart. For this reason, in the 1903 typology, Peirce closely connects the symbol and the icon in his definition of the dicent sign (or dicent-symbolic-legisign).24 This aspect of music is addressed most successfully in music semiotics, I would suggest, by Robert Hatten’s notion of correlation. Hatten theorizes a connection between musical structure and expressive meaning through the correlation of respective markedness values. This affords him a means of asserting a series of compelling interpretations. He interprets the opening gestures of Beethoven’s Op. 106/iii as spiritual, solemn and monumental,25 and the movement’s overall structure as expressive of a move from the tragic to the transcendent,26 conceiving these correlations as dependent upon ‘structural iconism’ (a notion derived from Peirce’s trichotomy of the icon, or hypoicon).27 Similarly Hatten suggests that iconism (along with indexicality) can play a part in motivating the correlation of sound and meaning. The notion of correlation also allows us to conceive the importance of convention in maintaining the relationships that render music meaningful. Iconic motivations tend to ‘break away’ but cultural habits allow certain meanings to remain intact.

Hatten’s application of Peirce to music is extremely successful as has been already suggested in relation to Cook and Dibben’s survey. This achievement, however, may be limited to the extent that it primarily concerns the function of the icon (in conjunction with the symbol) in the musical dicent sign. Hatten’s theories account for music’s apparent qualitative/conventional meanings (depth) but do not explicitly address its relation to actualities (breadth). That is to say, by focusing more upon composers and texts rather than listeners and contexts the actual experiences people bring to the listening situation and the actual listeners themselves are de-emphasized. It is, perhaps, in part, for this reason that Michael Klein has noted that approaches like Hatten’s can tend to ‘hypostatize interpretation’.28 In paying limited attention to the indexical aspect of musical meaning Hatten has a tendency to conceive of a qualitative presence in the music that is impervious to the contingencies of its past and the past experiences of listener. A new emphasis upon the role of the index in the musical dicent sign

23 Hatten, Musical Meaning, p. 2.24 See note 17 above.25 Hatten, Musical Meaning, p. 14.26 Ibid., p. 26.27 Peirce, CP, 2.274.28 Michael Klein, ‘Chopin’s Fourth Ballade as Musical Narrative’, Music Theory

Spectrum, 26/1 (2004): pp. 23–55.



w.as

hgat

e.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m


might enable us to fill out Hatten’s theory and thereby address possible drawbacks. In so doing, we will, I hope, also gain a further understanding of the insight offered by Monelle’s insistence upon the virtual or ‘seeming’ aspect of the dicent in music and begin to recognize the extent to which temporal factors can acquire a vital role in theorizing a less stable and more dynamic process of meaning generation.

the Dicent sign in Music

There can surely be little doubt that the indexical function I am discussing is not present in Western music in the way that it is in language. In Western music practices we are not in the habit of connecting musical sounds with actual objects in the way that the name ‘Ben’ has been attached to my actual body. Musical sounds can, of course, point indexically to certain objects such as the sound of an instrument or voice pointing to the actual instrument or person performing (or causing) the sound.29 This, however, is a different function from the one that concerns us here; it is a dicent-indexical-legisign rather than the rhematic-indexical-legisign. The former tends to be overlooked in the consideration of meaning in Western music because the ‘work’ tends to be privileged above the performance.30 The more central role of the index in Peircean thought is that of the rhematic-indexical-legisign, particularly in its role within the dicent-indexical-legisign (or dicent). It is here that we find a key distinction between music and language. Whereas language (especially the scientific language that concerns Peirce) relies upon a process whereby ideas can be traced back via the index to the actual world, this process is not readily accepted in Western (particularly classical) listening practices. The tendency in Western listening practices is to remove (suppress even) direct reference to the actual world. Scholars associated with the new musicology have been particularly astute in examining this point and it is partly from such bodies of scholarship that I derive my key point here. It is that music’s indexicality in Western listening contexts tends to be contested.31 Thus whilst, as Hatten’s work demonstrates, we have developed a means for discussing those meanings that derive from symbols functioning as icons, symbols functioning as indices are yet to be so clearly addressed.

Whilst music’s indexicality within certain contexts may be contested, it is not possible for the dicent sign in music to operate without it. There may be a habit of contesting music’s reference to actuality but some relation to actuality (however problematic) will be necessary for musical meaning to occur. I am suggesting

29 José Luis Martínez, Semiosis in Hindustani Music (Delhi, 2001), pp. 135–136.30 This is less true in the practice and study of popular music.31 Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minneapolis,

1991), p. 8; see also Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Middletown, 1993), pp. xvii and 4.



w.as

hgat

e.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m


here that music’s depth (its symbolism/iconicity) is in search of breadth32 and without that breadth there can be no meaning. Without the rhematic-indexical-legisign, the ‘Rhematic Symbol[ic Legisign] (and … its interpretant, a [Rhematic] Iconic Legisign)’33 is like the construction ‘() killed ()’ – incomplete and in need of saturation if it is to be comprehended.

The means of ‘saturating bonds’ in music can be conceived by considering a point from Cook and Dibben’s survey. In discussing Deryck Cooke’s important but, in certain ways, flawed studies in musical meaning they note that:

Perhaps the most telling symptom of Cooke’s ethnocentricity … lies in the way in which he unquestioningly identifies meaning with the expression of personal emotion–in which he understands it, in short, in terms of bourgeois subjectivity.34

Cooke was adhering, we might assert, to a habit that dominates Western listening practices whereby music’s unsaturated bonds are filled by the listener’s subjectivity or conception of self. Returning to Monelle’s discussion of the seeming dicent we might develop another of his insights further. In one striking sentence concerning the larger-than-life character of the seeming dicent, Monelle notes that ‘the emotional trajectory of student compositions is lukewarm and incoherent; but life is often like that too’.35 In a similar vain, we might contend that listening subjects are fragmented and indistinct but through certain listening practices they can come to feel more coherent and composed.

The notion of the seeming-dicent goes a considerable way to address the peculiarity of the dicent sign in music. Because its indexical function is contested it does not acquire the sorts of connection with the world that render its linguistic counterpart either true or false. The contestation of its connection with the world leaves it somehow open so that the listening subject can saturate the listening experience, bringing their subjectivity (or conception of self) to bear upon it. Such a process may also help to explain music’s apparent immediacy.

the Dimensions of time and subjectivity

This conception of self may seem too unstable (too virtual or seeming) to be classed as an actuality. I would not want to dismiss this point outright: key to my

32 Liszka explores this point in relation to the rheme and the dicent (which Peirce asserts brings together icon and index, but which in another sense is an index): ‘One might say that the rheme is a sign whose depth is seeking breadth; it leaves “its Object, and a fortiori its Interpretant, to be what it may”’ (Peirce, CP 2.95, quoted in Liszka, A General Introduction, p. 41).

33 see houser, The Essential Peirce Vol. II, pp. 295–296.34 Cook and Dibben, ‘Musicological Approaches’, p. 57.35 Monelle, ‘Music and the Peircean Trichotomies’, p. 106.



w.as

hgat

e.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m


conception of the dicent sign in music is the point that its contestation renders it more unstable. It is this very point that leaves it open to those listening habits bound up with bourgeois subjectivity. Having said this, we may find a way to conceive the interaction of symbols functioning as icons and symbols functioning as indices within the dicent sign by turning to one of the most far-reaching aspects of Peirce’s categories: their relation to time. This, I hope, will provide a new theoretical gate, through which Peircean thought might be applied more rigorously to music.36

Peirce labels his categories firstness, secondness and thirdness. These categories are, in Apel’s words, ‘rigidly coordinated with the three dimensions of time’.37 Thus firstness, secondness and thirdness can be mapped to the present, the past and the future respectively. This mapping allows us to address two points: (1) the way in which those entities picked out by the musical index might be said to be actualities; and (2) the process by which we might begin to distinguish between musical symbols that function as icons and musical symbols that function as indices.

I will address these points simultaneously. Let us consider that the icon in the musical dicent sign38 can be conceived as the moment-by-moment experience of music – that is music in the present. To this experience a listener brings past actualities to bear. Thus memories of past music, as well as all manner of other memories, will be used to saturate the experience of music in the present. Due to the listening habits that dominate Western musical practices, there will be a tendency to bring to mind those memories that are intensely personal and significant to our identity, those memories that are, we might say, important in the construction of subjectivity. In the present moment, through music, the past is renegotiated in a process that tends towards self-affirmation. Thus it may be difficult (impossible even) to diagram through notation or any other means the unsaturated bonds of music and those ideas that come to fill them but we can begin to distinguish them by exploring that aspect of music that is arguably the most fundamental to its ontology: its temporality.

The drawing together of subjectivity, signification and time in this theory produces a particularly dynamic conception of musical meaning. Meaning is no longer simply in the music but neither is it simply imposed from the outside. A listener’s past experiences will be important in determining the meanings that develop in relation to music but those experiences and their future interpretation and development will be shot through with the rules that constitute the conceptual habits of Western listening practices. The moment-by-moment experience of

36 See Ben Curry, ‘Reading Conventions, Interpreting Habits: Peircian Semiotics in Music’, PhD Thesis, Cardiff University, 2011.

37 Karl-Otto Apel, Charles S. Peirce: From Pragmatism to Pragmaticism, trans. John Michael Krois (Amherst, 1981), p. 96.

38 I will now omit the qualification that such an icon or index is a symbol functioning as an icon or index.



w.as

hgat

e.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m


music – its qualitative dimension – also remains significant; it is an equally important factor in the (re)negotiation of identity through musical experience

Conceiving Legisigns and sinsigns

The musical meanings I have described involving symbol/icons (music in the present) and symbols/indices (subjectively significant memories) cannot easily be conceived in terms of legisigns and sinsigns. The rule required to conceive a sinsign (a single occurrence) as an instantiation of a legisign (a generalized rule) is undermined by the contesting of music’s indexicality. One possible exception is the ‘darling they’re playing our song’ phenomenon. Here a tiny community (a couple) has agreed to saturate the symbolic/iconic aspect of the music with their own actual experiences (of, say, meeting for the first time). Insofar as this allows musical moments to instantiate general ideas with some uniformity they are sinsigns (or replicas) of the signs in the shaded boxes in Table 12.2. This uniformity may also be discernable for the individual but the lack of a community (however small) clearly militates against its stability.39

Monelle suggests that there are a number of types (or legisigns) in music including the work and style. Monelle’s assertions in this area need to be treated with some caution in the light of my theory of the contested index and the uncertainty in musical meaning it posits. Take, for instance, the words ‘Mozart’s K.183’, which are a sinsign of the general type ‘Mozart’s K.183’ (when conceived as a general idea). In the previous sentence there are two sinsigns pertaining to a G minor symphony but only one legisign. The object of these words (the collection of sounds that can be classed as K.183) can also be conceived in terms of the sinsign and the legisign but they do not have the stability of reference of the words ‘Mozart’s K.183’. In this way Monelle is right to assert that the work can be conceived as a legisign (a general concept) and a sinsign (when instantiated in performance) but the stability of its meaning must not be confused with that of its title or label.40 The notion of style is more problematic. Styles are conceived less in terms of an instantiated rule than by a grouping of widely differing objects according to a variety of criteria, which are only ever loosely defined. Furthermore, as with the notion of the ‘work’ we need to be careful not to assume that because the words ‘classical style’ or ‘singing style’ are sinsigns of legisigns that any objects they bring to mind can function with the same specificity of signification.

39 In emphasizing this instability I am not advocating what Cook and Dibben refer to as a ‘critical free-for-all where anything goes’ (Cook and Dibben, ‘Musicological Approaches’, p. 67) in writing about music. There is a degree of stability in musical meaning but it is derived primarily from its symbolic/iconic aspect. The contested index does work to destabilize this, however – ‘() is red’ would not be such a stable idea if we continually contested what could be placed in the slot to make a true (or seemingly true) statement.

40 Monelle, ‘Music and the Peircean Trichotomies’, p. 103.



w.as

hgat

e.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m w

ww.a

shga

te.co

m


Much work remains to be done on sinsigns and legisigns and this chapter has not been able to discuss all 10 classes of sign in the 1903 typology in detail.41 However, by emphasizing the centrality of the icon, index and symbol to a successful engagement with Peirce; introducing the notion of the contested index and by opening up the possibility of theorizing music’s segmentation and semiosis in relation to time, I hope it has gone some way to building on those first steps into the complexities of Peirce’s sign system taken by Monelle.

41 Two signs, in particular, were not discussed: the qualisign, which is arguably one of the most problematic of Peirce’s concepts, and the argument, the application of which to music had to remain outside the scope of this chapter. See David Savan, An Introduction to Peirce’s Full System of Semeiotic (Toronto, 1988), pp. 23–24; Douglas Greenlee, Peirce’s Concept of Sign (The Hague, 1973), pp. 47–49.

Documents

© Copyrighted Material Music seMiotics: m A Network of ... · explicit theoretical models for the attribution of meaning to music’ pointing up work by Zbikowski, Gibson and Cook