Musical Meaning in a Broader Perspective

Musical meaning has been an ongoing concern of philosophers, musicologists, and semiologists. Expressiveness and representation have been much discussed during the past two decades. Despite this, the debate concerning musical meaning has been limited to considering what music conveys, how it does so, and what it means for it to do so. These questions ask what music refers to (denotes, signifies, stands for), or what it represents (depicts, describes), or what is expressed through it. Without playing down their differences, one can see that these notions all imply a conception of meaning according to which a meaning-bearer communicates a content that exists independently of itself. In principle, the same content could be communicated just as well by numerous other meaning-bearers. The meaning-bearer is merely a vehicle for the meaning it communicates. This picture of meaning has only limited application to music. Music does not always convey "extramusical" contents. Many compositions do not refer beyond themselves. Music's capacities for representation are limited. Although music's expressive power is considerable, expressiveness is absent from many musical works of great value. One might conclude that, at root, music has no meaning. Peter Kivy argues this way: Because music has no semantic content-despite its quasi-syntactic structures-musical meaning does not exist "as a reality of listening."2 His conclusion is inescapable only if one restricts the notion of meaning to the linguistic model. Ordinary language allows for a more generous use of "meaning," however. Most people agree that (good) music makes sense and can be said to have meaning. In this paper, we explore several notions of musical meaning that do not accord with linguistic or semiological frameworks. Part I focuses on formal meaning. Accounts trying to reduce this to linguistic or semiological meaning are flawed, we argue. Instead, progress and structure within musical works can be explained in terms of reasons such as those that justify human actions. Next, we describe an even more fundamental, nondiscursive kind of meaning in music, experiential formal meaning. In Part II we turn to the subjective significance music has in human life. With meaning-for-the-subject, we concentrate on the idiosyncrasies of musical experience. The meaning music has more widely for all human beings, rather than solely for individuals, is then discussed as meaning-for-us.