Edgar Jaramillo
N14881160
Music Education
Summer 2006
E85.1505
Performing Arts in Western Civilization
Summary of Ferrara Chapter 1


Answers to the question, “What does music mean?” has been thought to be found
Within two broad approaches. Music understanding being limited to musical syntax or that musical understanding should engage referential meaning in music. A question of the adequacy of analytical methods to describe music syntax and referential musical meaning is tied directly to the question, “What CAN music mean?” Nicolas Cook is noted to having an excellent compilation and commentary of music analysis. Yet this book will contain a critical review of literature that engages referential meaning in music due to the possibility that many musicians (including music analysts) may not have read the predominant philosophical approaches to musical understanding. Leonard B. Meyer’s theory of emotion and meaning in music is a starting point for such middle ground. While Meyer’s theory encompasses “emotion which may be considered a fact of referential meaning, he tries to stay within the broad formalist tradition.
Edward Hanslick and Edmund Gurney advanced formalist approach in music. They were concerned with music that had no program (absolute music) such as the sonata or other abstract form. According to them, absolute music is devoid of referential and emotive meanings. While such a viewpoint is unpopular with music listeners, formalists acknowledge that music can be the cause of emotional responses and can evoke extra musical ideas. However, since emotions cannot be systematically or objectively analyzed, explanation into this type of subjective musical meaning would be fruitless and irrelevant.
Meyer delineates two types of musical meaning. One is absolute meaning (intrinsic) and the other is referential meaning (extrinsic). He has tried to ground musical emotion in formal musical meaning. Meyer says that there are at least two broad approaches to the analysis of absolute musical meanings: formalism and absolute expressionism. Formalists maintain that musical meaning is purely intellectual. Absolute expressionists contend that emotions can be aroused by music but as a result of intrinsic processes. Meyer helps to produce a system that would build a bridge from musical syntax to human emotion.
Dewey’s theory specifies that emotion is aroused when tendency to respond is arrested or inhibited. Meyer takes Dewey and operationalizes his theory. If one supposes that out of habit and repeated listening (open listening, hmmm) that a Mozart piece sounds like a Mozart piece and not a Stravinsky, then expectations are created as part of normative complex system of probabilities, expectation becomes active only when norms are disturbed. A deviation from neutral music with musical meaning arises when there is tonal delay or disturbance. An example is the Wagner Operas. When uncertainty increases, musical meaning increases. Without norms, expectation is not possible. Without expectation, in Meyers view, music is without syntactical meaning.
Meyer’s brand of absolute expressionism is to demonstrate that listeners can experience emotional responses amidst the formal syntax. This would be stimulus evoked from music syntax and not that of extra musical stimuli. Meyer states that meaning in music occurs when one musical fragment refers to another fragment. This would undoubtedly lead to expectation. Meyer further brings his point home by explaining that the listener (trained musician) consciously expects congruence to musical phrases. If listened unconsciously, an emotion is simply experience. Yet, with intellectual insight, a more clarified level of analysis may result.
In the Meaning of Meaning by Ogden and Richards, meaning is referential in the sense that a symbol is placed in a context when we associate it with something else. Words mean nothing by themselves. Syntax is grammar. Referential meaning of a word refers to the thing or idea of the word to which it points. We don’t have to have a car present to know that the letters “c”, “a”, and “r” mean car but presents the concept of car.
Langer had many works that focused on referential meaning in music. She was deeply impressed by man’s genius of symbolic meaning. Thus, creating language as a symbol system. While those before and after (Kant, Cassirer, Descartes, and Darwin) all have integral parts in “philosophy” associated with Langer’s own.. Philosophical study of the arts also contains a non-rational realm. Simply put, these are two modes (genuine and non-discursive) in rationality. According to Langer, music is a metaphorical image of actual life. This music analogically represents principles of living form in a new “virtual” form. One is not actually sad when sadness is a concept presented in music. This is a symbolic transformation of actual to virtual.
The chapter in overview gives an ancillary overview of the search for further discourse in meanings of musical significance. After reading the ideas formulated and great struggle in appealing to the intellectual institutions, new thoughts or relevance were regarded as radical and maybe even dissonant. Imagine in class if someone has an idea that most of us find strange or “way out there”, how do we react to it? Granted we are students and have an aim at completing our tasks. In the real world, if that idea did not facilitate our own work or maybe even went against it, then I think we all would react as all the establishments did to the great pioneers that have contributed to our present eclectic method.