A Semiotic Approach to Music

General issues in cognitive musicology

A semiotic approach to musicNicolas Meeùs

Conservatoire Royal de Musique de Bruxelles, BelgiumContemporary Music Review,1993, Vol. 9, Parts 1 & 2, pp. 305–310 Photocopying permitted by license only

© 1993 Harwood Academic Publishers GmbH Printed in Malaysia

The purpose of this paper is to sketch a semiotic approach to music that avoids relying on linguistic models. Peirce’s triadic description of the sign is drawn into a landscape in which any sign is viewed as a node in a latent network of potential intersemic relationships. Whenever a sign is uttered, in speech or in musical performance, it activates an area of the emitter’s and the receiver’s semiotic network; the felicity of the exchange depends on the level of similitude between the networks. Basic musical techniques such as repetition, variation or development are the means of structuring the listener’s network. The musical discourse tentatively controls the listener’s meandering through the semiotic network, and the score is a notation of the discursive strategy.

KEY WORDS: Semiotics, network (semiotic), intersemic relationships, discursive strategy.

Musical semiotics as an approach to a general semiotics

The purpose of this paper is to sketch a semiotic approach to music that would avoid relying on linguistic models; it proceeds from the conviction that these models, especially that of verbal communication, are not suitable for the development of a true semiotics of music. The need to distinguish what is particular to language from what belongs to a general semiotics had been stressed already by Ferdinand de Saussure when he proposed

General issues in cognitive musicology 329

his programmatic description of the task of the linguist, “to define what makes the language a special system within the set of semiological facts” (1916/1972:33). But this programme has not been fulfilled, and a certain confusion reigns today between linguistics and semiotics.

A general semiotics by definition should account for non-linguistic semiotic facts as well as for linguistic ones. Music, by reason of its particular position with respect to language, analogous to it in several ways, essentially different in many others, may for the time being form a better model than language for a general semiotic theory. The present discussion, therefore, indirectly aims at testing the possibility of such a general semiotics.

It is a common prejudice that communication should form a primary concern of semiotics. “Semiology, writes Buyssens, can be defined as the study of the processes of communication” (1967:11). This is the position of the functionalists for whom semiotics is concerned with signs only insofar as they have communication as their function (Prieto, 1966; Mounin, 1968, 1970). Jean-Jacques Nattiez, however, show that “communication is but a particular case of the various modes of exchange, one among the possible consequences of the processes of symbolization” (1987:39). This is not to say that the matter of communication is of no importance, but merely that it would form a rather uncomfortable premise for the construction of a musical semiotics. Even if there may exist in music “a fructuous coincidence between the intention, the structure of the work and the expectations of the listeners” (D. Stockmann, quoted in Nattiez, 1987:40), it cannot be decided a priori that this coincidence necessarily amounts to an inter-personal communication in the strict sense of the term.

Most of the problems of extending a linguistic semiotics to non-linguistic signs exist at the interface between the semiotic system proper and its surroundings: problems arise when signs have to be related to their meaning, their reference, on the one hand; to things or states of the world, their referent, on the other hand. And despite Eco’s claim (Eco, 1977), the theory of codes, which is a theory of the relationship between signs and meanings, is too much oriented towards language to form the basis of a general semiotic theory. The tendency to consider signs as consisting of form and content (Saussure, 1917/1972:25ss., 98, and passim; Hjelmslev, 1943/1971:65ss.) has a linguistic basis.

At the same time, it must be realized that the preponderance of linguistic considerations in the semiotic debate is not merely the result of some excessive arrogance on the part of linguistics. The study of the meaning of non-linguistic signs often supposes a verbalization; because language is the main vehicle of thought, introspection usually requires the use of words; also, as language remains the best vehicle for interpersonal communication, sharing a semiotic experience seems to demand some form of verbalization. As Barthes said, “man is condemned to articulate language” (1967/1981:9). A general semiotics therefore must keep language among its models—but that, needless to say, is not at all the same thing as making use of linguistic models.

It is necessary to return to the hard stone of semiotics, the formal study of signs and of their relationships within a single semiotic system. Matters of intersystemic relationships (e.g. correspondences between musical and verbal signs) or of the relation of signs to extrasemiotic systems (including systems of referents) may be considered less pressing, if not less important.

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The semiotic network

Peirce’s theories, because they centre on signs as such, offer a useful departure point for the present undertaking. Peirce’s triadic description of the sign is now well known (see Eco, 1979/1985:68ss; Nattiez, 1979–1980); in a somewhat simplified presentation, it may be summarized as follows: a sign, a representamen, is something which stands for something, its object, and projects an equivalent sign, its interpretant (cf 2.228).1 What is perhaps less obvious is that, in Peirce’s conception, both the object and the interpretant are signs themselves. The interpretant, therefore, cannot be identified with the meaning (see Deledalle in Peirce, 1978:222), nor with Saussure’s signifié, nor with Ogden and Richard’s reference. The Peircean object, similarly, is not to be confused with Ogden and Richard’s referent (Ogden and Richards, 1923/1966:10s.).

“The object of a representation, writes Peirce (who means a mental representation, a representamen), can be nothing but a representation of which the first representation is the interpretant (…). The interpretant is nothing but another representation to which the torch of truth is handed along; and as representation, it has its interpretant again” (1.339; see also 1.538–542). The objects form “an endless series of representations, each representing the one behind it” (1.339), and the sign “determines (…) its interpretant to refer to an object to which itself refers (…) in the same way, the interpretant becoming in turn a sign, and so on ad infinitum” (2.303). Peirce’s description offers an unlimited chain of signs, each of which determines its down-stream neighbour, its interpretant, to refer to its up-stream neighbour, its object.

Peirce stresses that the triadic relation “cannot consist in any actual event that ever can have occurred; for in that case there would be another actual event connecting the interpretant to an interpretant of its own of which the same would be true; and thus there would be an endless series of events which could have actually occurred, which is absurd. For the same reason the interpretant cannot be a definite individual object. The relation must therefore consist in a power of the representamen to determine some interpretant to being a representamen of the same object” (1.542). The relation, in other words, remains potential until realized by a process of semiosis. But it is clear that, before an actual semiosis occurs any sign potentially relates to several signs-objects and to many signs-interpretants.

Peirce’s theory of an unlimited semiotic chain may therefore be extended to a conception in which any sign is viewed as a node in a latent network of potential intersemic relationships. The idea of this network is not entirely new: Eco spoke of “the network of interconnected properties that form the Global Semantic Field” (1979/1985:112); Nattiez defines a “symbolic form” as “a sign or a set of signs to which is attached an infinite complex of interpretants” (1987:30); and there are obvious correspondences between the idea of a semiotic network and those of cognitive frames or networks.

Whenever a representamen comes to the mind, either in a mental process or as the result of an external solicitation, it activates the surrounding network, defining an up-stream part of it as the Peircean object and a down-stream part as the Peircean interpretant. But the network must be preexistent, if only in a latent form: “The Sign can only represent the Object and tell about it. It cannot furnish acquaintance with or recognition of that Object; for that is what is meant (…) by the Object of a Sign; namely,


that with which it presupposes an acquaintance in order to convey some further information concerning it” (2.231).

Peirce did not provide a very coherent theory of meaning; we saw that the meaning cannot be equated with the interpretant.2 A sign alone has no meaning (Hjelmslev, 1943/1971:62); it acquires significance only when triadically related to one or several objects and to one or several interpretants. The latent relations of a sign to possible objects and interpretants, i.e. the area of the semiotic network surrounding it, therefore establish for the interpreter the range of its possible significations. In this conception, the signification of a sign is a manière d’ être, a syntactic quality of the semiotic network around it. It is in this sense that the signification of a piece of music may be thought to reside entirely in its syntax. The signification so defined may relate to an external meaning, to a concept; the study of this possible relationship is the field of semantics. But it might be argued that the relation to an external meaning is necessary only in the case of language.

Interpersonal semiotic exchanges

The above description expresses an essentially abstract conception in which the semiosis is described as a process within an individual’s semiotic network. The case of the interpersonal semiotic exchange must now be considered; it may be viewed as a process of socialization of the individual semiosis. Whenever a sign is brought forth in an actual utterance, as in speech or in musical performance, it not only activates an area of the semiotic network of the emitter, but may also activate a similar sign and a corresponding area in the receiver’s network: the emission of the sign that triggered the semiosis in the emitter’s network allows it to trigger a similar semiosis in the receiver’s network. This exchange does not necessarily imply the communication of a message, since, as remarked above, the triadic semiotic relation does not necessarily convey an external meaning. But it is clear that the success, the “felicity” of the exchange depends on a level of similitude between the individual semiotic networks; it is the similitude between the networks that has been described as involving a “code”.

Let us first envisage the case of a verbal exchange. The structure of the semiotic networks in this case is strongly determined and regulated by the meaning of the signs: the syntactic structure is subordinated to the semantic one; the depth of activation of the interlocutors’ networks, i.e. the number of active denotative or connotative interpretants, is also largely determined by the semantic structure. The success of the exchange therefore supposes both a syntactic and a semantic validity of the statement uttered. “Syntactically valid”, in the present context, means “belonging to the interlocutor’s semiotic networks”.

Musical exchanges may be quite similar, in some cases, to verbal ones. An often quoted example is that of the Wagnerian Leitmotive, which may convey a conventional meaning. This is, possible, of course, only if the listener is aware of the convention; that is, if the particular signifier of the Motive belongs to the latent intersemic relationships in that listener’s own semiotic network. Two points must be noted in this respect. One is that the signification considered here almost inescapably involves a verbalization: the network of the Wagnerian initiate must include a potential relation of the musical motif to


verbal interpretants, and it is this connotative relation which gives way to the motif’s particular meaning. The second point is that this relation to verbal interpretants is not necessarily activated when the motifs are heard: the listener may not notice them as such, or may not want to think of them in this particular sense. This demonstrates the absence of inner necessity in the latent relationships that make up the semiotic network.

But the semiotic function of Wagnerian Leitmotive cannot be considered representative of a musical semiotics at large. Although any musical sign may connote verbal interpretants,3 it is the syntax of musical signs themselves that must engage us here. A non-linguistic syntax, because it is largely independent from any external meaning, in general has a much higher degree of freedom than a linguistic one.

In the case of music, it appears that the work itself often provides the means for structuring the listener’s network. Basic musical techniques such as repetition, variation, development, etc., are techniques which state intersemic relationships before building upon them. Tonal music, similarly, often begins with a statement of the principal tonal functions, tonic, subdominant and dominant, in what Sadai (1980) calls a functional cycle; this initial statement establishes essential semiotic relationships before making use of them in a semiosis that triggers ever more distant interpretants. As the conventionality of the musical style increases, the need for such initial statements lessens; this is particularly obvious in late tonal music, in the second half of the 19th century, where the initial tonal statement at times completely disappears. But even in such works, the musical structure remains based on stated or implied intersemic relations. Modern techniques in music analysis aim at identifying this when they stress a musical linearity, when they illuminate musical implications and their realization, or when they evidence a paradigmatic structure of the work.

A musical style may be defined as involving a predetermined semiotic network. “A style, writes Nattiez, is the identification of recurrent figures. But these figures are not the same to everyone, because style itself is a semiologic fact: the composer wrote a work, an ensemble of works, and from these traces the listeners have formed a more or less precise image of what the style of Wagner or Debussy may be” (1975:88). This “more or less precise image” consists in an awareness of the particular syntactic validity of some intersemic relationships, i.e. in a competence inscribed in one’s individual semiotic network. But the theory of the semiotic network also explains how the awareness of a particular musical style may be a very personal competence and why, even in the absence of this competence (e.g. in intercultural exchanges), a true musical experience remains possible.

A discourse, be it musical or verbal, tentatively controls the listener’s meanderings through her own semiotic network; a certain feedback is possible in conversation or perhaps in musical improvisation. In the case of a written text or of a musical score, however, the emitter controls the uttered signs only and can but hope that the interpretants that they trigger in the receiver’s network are similar to those in his own network. Some of these non-uttered signs depend on context, on topic, on circumstances: they may be called the pragmatic objects and the pragmatic interpretants. The persuasiveness of a discourse consists either in rendering it as independent as possible from pragmatic signs, that is in uttering signs whose relation to their objects and interpretants is as unambiguous as possible, or in making correct hypotheses about


pragmatic relationships that may be triggered in the receiver’s network. It goes without saying that the co-textuality of the uttered signs is a factor in removing ambiguity.

The way in which a theory of the semiotic network may fit within the tripartition of Molino and Nattiez (see Molino, 1975) must now briefly be considered. A score, or more generally a text, is the notation of a strategy of persuasion. The poïetic work by which the strategy is elaborated usually involves tests carried by the emitter on his own semiotic network. More than once during the creative process, the artist must put himself in the position of the receiver: the composer must listen to his work, the painter must step back to embrace her canvas in one look. So doing, they leave their semiotic network as free as possible to develop pragmatic interpretants, in order to form some idea of how the semiosis may unfold in the receivers’ network. In this sense, the poïesis involves an activity in many ways comparable to an aesthesis. In the case of musical performance, the performer filters the musical text through his own pragmatic objects and pragmatic interpretants, producing an acoustic image that again is a strategy. Finally, on the side of the receiver, the aesthesis again involves an activation of pragmatic objects and interpretants, an activity which resembles poïesis.

The poïesis could be described as a semiosis that utters signs, the aesthesis as one triggered by external signs. But both poïesis and aesthesis are essentially individual processes, involving darker areas of the individual semiotic networks. The text, the score (or its acoustic image) is the material trace of the semiotic exchange and, as such, the first and the main object of study. It reveals little, however, of the semiotic processes proper, which occur in the secrecy of the individual semiotic networks.

Notes1. Following the usage, references to Peirce’s Collected Papers (1931–1960) consist in the

number of the volume followed by the number of the paragraph. 2. The most extended discussion of meaning is in 5.475ss. At first reading, it might seem that

Peirce equates meaning with interpretant. But he can only be thinking of the interpretant as it relates to the representamen, and this relation, being triadic, necessarily involves that between sign and object: Peirce’s conception, therefore, is similar to the one proposed here.

3. There are reasons to believe, however, that the verbalization of music took on a particular importance during a relatively short period in the history of occidental musical, namely from the end of the 16th century or the beginning of the 17th, when rhetoric considerations became normative in composition, until the end of romanticism. Verbalization may be less developed in pre-Baroque music, as in some non-European cultures.

References

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traduit de l’italien par M.Bouzaher. Paris: Grasset. Hjelmslev, L. (1943/1971) Prolégomènes a une théorie du langage, traduit du danois par U.Canger

avec la collaboration d’A.Wewer. Paris: Minuit. Molino, J. (1975) ‘Fait musical et sémiologie de la musique’. Musique en jeu, 17, 37–62.


Mounin, G. (1968) Clef pour la linguistique. Paris: Seghers. Mounin, G. (1970) Introduction à la sémiologie. Paris: Minuit. Nattiez, J.-J. (1979–1980) ‘Les fondements théoriques de la notion d’interprétant en sémiologie

musicale’. Journal canadien de recherche sémiotique VII /2, 1–19, reproduced with complements in Nattiez, 1988:143–171.

Nattiez, J.-J. (1987) Musicologie générale et sémiologie. Paris: Bourgois. Nattiez, J.-J. (1988) De la sémiologie à la musique, Cahiers du département d’études littéraires 10.

Montréal: Université du Quebéc. Ogden, C.K. & Richards, I.A. (1923/1966) The Meaning of Meaning. A Study of the Influence of

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Peirce, Ch.S. (1931–1960) Collected Papers. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press, 8 vols. Peirce, Ch.S. (1978) Ecrits sur le signe, rassemblés, traduits et commentés par G.Deledalle. Paris:

Seuil.Prieto, L. (1966) Messages et signaux. Paris: PUF. Sadai, Y. (1980) Harmony in its Systemic and Phenomenological Aspects. Jerusalem: Yanetz. Saussure, F. de (1916/1972) Cours de linguistique générale, Genève, 1916; éd. critique par T.de

Mauro. Paris: Payot, 1972.


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A Semiotic Approach to Music