A Constructivist Account of Musical Semantics — Epoche C1
What the mimetic tradition claimed, and about which kind of meaning The claim under examination is that a piece of music means what it means by imitating something outside itself, and its classical statement is a single passage of Aristotle. In the eighth book of the Politics he argues that music should form part of education because rhythms and melodies contain likenesses of anger and gentleness, of courage and temperance and their opposites, so that hearing them habituates the soul to the corresponding states. The word matters: likeness , not sign. Aristotle is explicit that visible shapes and colours are at best signs of character — conventional indicators, learned as one learns a vocabulary — whereas sounding motion actually resembles the states it conveys. Plato had already drawn the practical conclusion in the third book of the Republic , admitting some scale-types into the ideal city and banning others on the ground that they imitate lamentation or softness. Mimesis theory is therefore not the naive doctrine that music paints cuckoos and thunderstorms. It is the claim that the meaning of music is fixed by a resemblance relation holding between the sounds and something extra-musical, and that the listener's task is to recognise a resemblance that is already there. Before that claim can be assessed, 'meaning' must be split, because three different things travel under the word and mimesis fares differently against each. There is representation : the music being about something particular, as the opening of Vivaldi's 'Spring' is about birdsong. There is expressiveness : the music having a sad character, as a face or a gait can be sad, without anyone necessarily being sad. And there is arousal : the music causing an emotion in the listener. These come apart in obvious ways — one can find a funeral march unmistakably sad and be exhilarated by it — and most confusion in this area consists in taking an argument that works against one and applying it to another. The constructivist thesis of this essay is that meaning in all three senses is constituted in the encounter rather than discovered in the object; establishing it requires showing separately where the mimetic account fails and where it does not. Hanslick's objection, and what it actually establishes The strongest objection to mimesis about expressiveness was made by Eduard Hanslick in Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Musically Beautiful, 1854), and it deserves stating as an argument rather than as a mood, since the earlier version of this essay asserted its conclusion under the heading 'the problem of specificity' without supplying the reasoning. Hanslick's premise is drawn from the analysis of emotion. A determinate emotion is not a bare feeling-tone; it has an intentional object and a conceptual content. Hope is not merely a pleasant agitation — it is hope that some specified state of affairs will come about, and without that thought there is no hope but only excitement. Love requires a beloved. Music, however, possesses no means of specifying an object or a proposition; it has pitches, durations and intensities and nothing that functions as a subject term. Therefore music cannot present determinate emotions. What it can present, Hanslick concedes and indeed insists, is the dynamic aspect the emotions share: swelling and subsiding, hastening and lingering, rising and falling, strength and weakness. That is why the same piece can be heard as expressing hope by one listener and defiance by another, since hope and defiance may have the same dynamic profile and differ only in the thought that music cannot supply. Hanslick's positive doctrine is that the content of music is nothing beyond its own sounding forms in motion. Two consequences follow, one of which the earlier version overstated. The first is genuine: a mimetic theory that takes music to resemble specific emotions cannot work, because the resemblance would have to reach the part of the emotion that music has no resources to touch. The second is that this leaves the listener room to supply the missing specificity from context, memory and belief — which is the first real foothold for a constructivist account, and it is a foothold Hanslick himself would not have welcomed, since he thought the supplying illegitimate rather than constitutive. Why mimesis does not die here The argument so far settles the easy case. The hard case is different, and it is the one the earlier version of this essay overlooked when it treated mimetic accounts as uniformly defeated. Twentieth-century philosophers of music reconstructed the resemblance claim so as to survive Hanslick's objection, and the reconstruction is the dominant position in the field. Peter Kivy's contour theory, set out in The Corded Shell (1980), relocates the resemblance. Music does not resemble sadness; it resembles the expression of sadness — the drooping contour of a downcast voice, the slowness of a dejected walk. Kivy's illustration is the face of a Saint Bernard, which we describe as sad without supposing the dog to be miserable, because its features have the configuration that a sad human face has. Expressiveness on this account is a perceptual property of the object, grounded in structural similarity to behavioural expression, and it requires no intentional object because behaviour has none either. Kivy adds a second, conventional component to handle cases such as the association of the minor mode with sorrow, which resemblance alone will not explain. Stephen Davies develops a close relative in Musical Meaning and Expression (1994), where expressiveness is analysed as an emotion characteristic in an appearance: a weeping willow looks sad in the way a person's bearing can look sad, and music, being temporally extended movement, presents such appearances more richly than any static object can. Here a correction to the earlier version is due, since it cited Davies's Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration