Eric F. Clarke
Questions about whether music is meaningful, or has meaning, what kinds of meaning it has, and how it has those meanings, have preoccupied writers on music for two and a half millennia. Plato and Aristotle wondered and worried about the effects of music on people— and in some sense were therefore concerned with what music meant to people. Since then a huge volume and diversity of thinking and writing has grappled with this most fundamental and still elusive question about music, from perspectives that range from neuroscience through psychology, linguistics, semiotics, sociology and anthropology, to the very large volume of philosophical writing. Given this very diverse literature, and in the context of the overall focus of this Companion, the aim of this chapter is to consider those approaches that are broadly psychological, or which in one way or another are connected with psychological methods or considerations. Since even this narrowing of the terrain leaves a potentially huge array of fascinating ideas, what follows will be selectively thematic rather than in any sense encyclopedic.
Anticipating the discussions of specific approaches that follow, four underlying distinctions thread their way through this chapter. First, there is the distinction between music considered as substance (or thing), and as process. In the roughly sixty-year period with which this chapter is concerned, there has been a significant shift from substance-based towards process-based conceptions of music, signaling an increasing recognition that music’s meanings are dynamic and time-based, and are experienced in the course of musical action (playing, listening, dancing, improvising, composing). Second, there is a recurrent tension between what might be termed introversive and extroversive accounts of music’s meanings— meanings that are associated with the dynamics of musical materials themselves (the unfolding of musical structures in time); and those that point beyond musical materials to a wider world. The distinction is itself questionable, with many musicologists quick to point out that music is “worldly, through and through”; but either by loose analogy with syntax and semantics in language, or sometimes by virtue of claims of direct parallelism, it persists. Third, there is a distinction between those approaches that have advocated tackling meaning in “music alone” (music devoid of lyrics/texts and drama, free of still or moving images and uncontaminated, to put it tendentiously, by interpretive discourse); as against those that have claimed that music is never “alone”—that it is always encountered in variously multimedia and socially embedded circumstances, and that this is central to how its meanings must be understood. And finally, there is the distinction between those approaches that understand music’s meanings as fundamentally symbolic and representational; and those that view them as primarily perceptuo-motor— presentational, as opposed to representational.
Three books that appeared within three years of each other in the middle of the last century stand as representative and influential treatments of the topic: Leonard Meyer’s Emotion and Meaning in Music from 1956, Robert Francès’ La perception de la musique from 1958, and Deryck Cooke’s The Language of Music from 1959. Music is almost universally recognized as not having the denotational and propositional capacities of natural language, and is widely proposed as a “language of the emotions” that functions as a complement to the instructional and propositional capacities of natural language. This is essentially the perspective that Cooke adopted, stating that “[W]hatever else the mysterious art known as music may eventually be found to express, it is primarily and basically a language of the emotions, through which we directly experience the fundamental urges that move mankind, without the need of falsifying ideas and images–words or pictures” (Cooke, 1959, p. 272). He attributed this emotionally communicative capacity to two closely related and intertwined general principles: intrinsic properties of musical materials (primarily, but not solely, the harmonic series); and culturally contingent conventions of use. The intrinsic component is based on the principle that intervals lower in the harmonic series (the octave, fifth, major third) are perceptually more stable and anchored, and are associated with positive emotions; while intervals higher in the harmonic series (minor third, major and minor second) are more unstable and therefore associated with negative emotions. Melodic and harmonic processes are therefore imbued with emotional trajectories that directly reflect those stability gradients.
The culturally convened component of Cooke’s theory focused on the association of particular musical materials with dramatic, narrative and verbal contexts that explicitly define the emotional message with which the music is associated. So when, for example, the text of a song is concerned with loss and grief, Cooke pointed to the associated music as demonstrating properties (based primarily on intervallic and rhythmic attributes) that convey that emotional message. He cited the consistency with which composers have used the same musical devices as evidence for the stability of the cultural conventions, implying considerable trans-historical and cross-cultural commonality.
Only a small amount of work (Gabriel, 1978; Kaminska & Woolf, 2000) has tried to test Cooke’s theory empirically—with mixed outcomes. But the approach has also been critiqued on a range of theoretical grounds (see e.g. Cook & Dibben, 2010): the claim that music constitutes some kind of unmediated language that is “free of ideas” seems untenable, and furthermore, in Cooke’s account, music is a “language” that seems to consist of little more than a lexicon; it is based on a historically and culturally narrow concept of emotion that is uncritically applied across a range of historical and cultural contexts; and in associating specific musical materials with particular textual and narrative/dramatic contexts, it seems to assume a mirroring relationship between words or drama and music, when a whole range of ironic or deliberately contradictory relationships are also evident. Nonetheless, despite these problems, Cooke’s theory is one of the earlier examples of an approach that has taken a more sophisticated and historically nuanced form in the work of so-called topic theorists (Agawu, 1991, 2009; Monelle, 2000; Tagg, 2013), whose work is based on semiotic principles. Topic theory dispenses both with the focus on emotion as the sole domain of musical meaning, and with the principle that properties of the harmonic series endow musical materials with intrinsic meanings; and in a much more culturally and historically specific way develops the idea that musical meanings arise from the association of musical materials with social functions: galloping rhythms with equestrianism of a particular kind, and all that might be in turn associated with that (Monelle, 2006); horn calls with the “call to arms” and thus masculine heroism more generally (Tagg, 2013); or ostentatious contrapuntalism with compositional sophistication or “learnedness.” As discussed elsewhere (Clarke, 2005) there are questions about whose listening topic theory is intended to represent (historical or contemporary, actual or idealized), but there is some empirical evidence (Krumhansl, 1998) that supports the perceptual reality of topics in the experience of ordinary listeners.
While Cooke is unabashedly theoretical and historical in his approach, Francès—the only psychologist among these three authors—adopts a broadly empirical approach complemented by an astute historical and cultural awareness. Rather than setting out a grand theory, he undertook a number of empirical studies to investigate the generality and specificity of listeners’ broadly semantic and embodied responses to a range of musical materials, using methods ranging from verbal and graphical responses to physiological measures. The result is a sophisticated and sensitive account of listeners’ perceptions of music’s meanings, in which three aspects of more contemporary approaches are prefigured. First, Francès recognized the importance of a physical and embodied component, drawing attention to spatiality, muscular tension and vocality in how listeners perceive musical materials. Second, he observed the multi-modal and analogical character of listeners’ perceptions, and in many cases the difficulty or impossibility of expressing these in language—a primary motivation for his use of graphical methods as one type of response. And third, he discussed at some length the complex intertwining of different degrees of acculturation (or perceptual tuning) and explicit knowledge of musical conventions (including sensitivity to musical “topics”) in determining listeners’ experiences of musical meaning. These are issues that remain central to current thinking.
Francès recognized the dynamic and evolving nature of musical materials, but made no systematic attempt to integrate this element into his account. By contrast, Meyer’s (1956) central insight was that a range of musical phenomena, including meaning, can be understood as arising from processes that elicit, confirm or thwart expectations—an idea that continues to play a central role in music research. Distinguishing between what he identified as absolute (introversive) and referentialist (extroversive) meaning in music, and focusing his efforts on the former, Meyer drew important distinctions between a number of temporal phases (predicted, actual and retrospective) in the experience of musical meaning, and in both the 1956 book and its successors (Meyer, 1967, 1973) made significant progress in identifying some of the detailed musical processes that generate and shape expectations. The publication of David Huron’s (2006) Sweet Anticipation, fifty years after Meyer’s first book, arguably represents the “coming of age” of expectation theory in music. Huron identifies a more refined sequence of expectational phases (summarized with the abbreviation ITPRA, standing for Imagination, Tension, Prediction, Reaction, and Appraisal responses) that are used to account for a much richer repertoire of meaningful experiences, ranging from intimations of the future to the relatively settled sense of hindsight, and providing novel explanations for musically significant phenomena such as humor, shock, surprise and irony. There is also considerable empirical evidence for expectation as a central thread in music perception and cognition, formulated in various ways including priming (e.g., Bharucha, 1987) and predictive coding (Vuust & Witek, 2014), although it is not always clear that the level at which these phenomena take place is consistent with the experience of meaning. If the predictive coding process, for example, is a fundamental aspect of neuronal function (as argued by e.g. Clark, 2013), it seems unlikely that we could have any conscious access to it. By contrast, attending to the famous repeated harmonic sequence that saturates the Prelude to Tristan and Isolde gives rise to a powerful sense of incomplete harmonic and rhythmic processes, whose meaning demands to be understood through completion—in the same way that traversing a twisting, rising path promises arrival at a vantage point that will “make sense” of the whole journey.
Expectation theory places musical meaning in a predominantly introversive domain even if it does not exclude the possibility of extroversive reference: Musical materials set up expectations for future musical events which are met, manipulated, thwarted, or diverted in all the variety of ways that Meyer and Huron explore. The introversive/extroversive distinction is analogous to that to which the philosopher Frege (1980 [1892]) first drew attention in language with the terms sense (Sinn) and reference (Bedeutung): A proposition in language has a sense that stems from its linguistic structure, which can be distinguished from what it might refer to (its reference). This specific parallel is one aspect of a more general resemblance between music and language: Both occur in sounded and written forms; and in their sounded forms, both involve manipulations of pitch, timing, timbre, dynamics and articulation, organized into units at a number of hierarchical levels. While attempts to develop a theory of music’s meanings that directly parallels language (e.g. Bernstein, 1976) have not met with success, the similarities between language and music (e.g. Rebuschat et al., 2010) have led to investigations of other more specific parallelisms that arguably contribute to an understanding of music’s meanings. Prominent among these is Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s (1983) Generative Theory of Tonal Music which, while distancing itself from engaging with musical meaning, nonetheless constitutes a significant attempt to formalize the principles according to which suitably enculturated and experienced listeners make sense of tonal music. Seen in this way, the book is a theory of musical “sense,” and one that has had a significant and long-lasting influence on research in music cognition.
A rather different approach to music’s meanings, strongly connected with language but moving much closer to directly perceptual experience, is the approach based on the conceptual metaphor theory of Lakoff and Johnson (e.g. Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Very influential in cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor theory broadly argues that much of our everyday understanding of ourselves and our world is based on mapping primary sensory-motor experiences onto more abstract domains. As in a literary metaphor, in which the attributes of a “source” domain are mapped onto a “target” domain (“All the world’s a stage . . .,” in which the attributes of the source domain “stage” serve to interpret the target domain “world”), our primary sensory-motor experiences act as the source domain for a whole range of target domains. Some of the more common mappings to which Lakoff and Johnson drew attention are those of CONTAINER as applied to our emotions (“bursting with joy,” “holding back grief”) and PATH in relation to life (“approaching puberty,” “looking back on childhood,” etc.), pointing out that in these and other such examples it is the body and its engagement with its immediate environment that forms the primary source domain.
Brower (2000) makes extensive use of this approach in her cognitive theory of musical meaning, as does Larson (2012), drawing on earlier work with Mark Johnson (Johnson, & Larson, 2003). Musical meaning is thus conceived as having a strongly embodied quality, and is experienced in terms of spatial and force-dynamic attributes in the domains of pitch, rhythm, loudness, texture and timbre, involving both local (within the piece) and more general (musical conventions, and cross-domain mappings) relationships. A musical motif, for example, that reappears in more or less literal or transformed ways elsewhere in the piece may be heard to articulate meaningful relationships of recurrence and development, but will also map onto a sense of tension and release, of moving away from a center of gravity or falling back to it; of pushing forward with more or less energy, smoothness or control. In this way, musical materials (e.g. motivic elements) and musical meanings (recurrence/ development, and embodied tension/release/motion etc.) become closely coordinated and intertwined, allowing quite detailed accounts of musical “actions”—moving by step or by leap, from thick texture to thin, or in rhythmically even or uneven ways—to be rather directly mapped onto corresponding embodied experiences.
In a number of publications, Zbikowski (e.g. Zbikowski, 2002, 2015; see also this volume) has also used conceptual metaphor theory, the related theory of conceptual integration networks (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002), and Peircian semiotic principles to offer a persuasive account of the ways in which listeners understand musical materials. Cross-domain mappings, and analogies between the dynamics of musical materials and dynamic processes in other fields of human experience (such as bodily movement, imagined narratives, the flux of emotions), constitute the basis on which “music within human cultures [can] provide sonic analogs for dynamic processes” (Zbikowski, 2015, p. 148). So the opening octave leap in the melody of “Somewhere over the rainbow” opens up a metaphorical space, and in doing so conveys (by analogy) a strong and assertive character or attitude on the part of the singer/ protagonist. Through a process of conceptual blending these attributes both engage with and are engaged by the words that the character Dorothy (in The Wizard of Oz) sings to this melody, creating a more complex meaning that is a blend of the assertive musical materials and the rather naïve and childish lyrics. The process can be understood as a specific example of music’s tendency to attach itself to other media, or to have other media attach themselves to it—a perspective that Cook (2002) has explored in an approach that recognizes music’s meanings “as at the same time irreducibly cultural and intimately related to its structural properties” (pp. 173–4). It is the affinities between music and its domain-crossing surroundings that constitute the lifeblood of musical meaning, since as he points out, music is almost never encountered in anything but a multimedia context: accompanied by speech, program notes, blogposts, cover art, videos, analytical commentaries, in films and advertisements, on YouTube and in videogames. Music both participates in the meanings of those other media, conferring cultural status (in an advertisement), anxious fear (in a movie soundtrack), or emergence into a new reality (in a videogame) on the words or images with which it blends; and it in turn takes on and transforms the meanings with which it comes into contact by structuring their dynamic and bodily trajectories.
Those approaches to music’s meanings that stem from conceptual metaphor theory, conceptual blending and multimedia theory all recognize the mediating role of language—a position that is emphatically adopted by Lawrence Kramer (e.g., Kramer, 2001). But as Kramer acknowledges, this engagement with language and image is Janus-faced: Music is always both “interrelationship, something readily intermixed with other media and with social occasions both public and private,” and is “organized sound independent of textual and circumstantial involvements” (Kramer, 2003, p. 8). The intertwining of music with other media is central to an understanding of music’s meanings, but is certainly not the whole story: there is a domain of musical meaning that arguably sits prior to or outside the domain of language, and which is continuous with the more general field of auditory perception and ecological understanding, and it is to this that I now turn.
As observed above, Robert Francès was in many ways prescient in bringing together semiotic and more directly perceptual-motor perspectives to questions of expression and meaning in music. Over half a century later, that more directly perceptual-motor approach is flourishing, based on embodied and situated psychological principles. One such strand takes its lead from the work of the psychologist James Gibson (1966; 1979) and the ecological approach more generally. Clarke (2005), Dibben (2001), Krueger (2014), and Windsor (2000; Windsor & de Bézenac, 2012) have all made use of ecological principles to frame discussions of how listeners make sense of music. Central to this approach is a more inclusive notion of meaning than might be encountered in either the semiotic or the expectation-based literature—one that lies at the heart of ecological theory. For any sentient organism the most pressing concern in an environment full of opportunities and threats is to grasp what’s going on and what to do about it (Clarke, 2012). Gibson (1966) coined the term “affordance” for this relationship between an organism’s needs and capacities and the available environmental opportunities, and regarded it as capturing a sense of value (for the organism), and thus an important kind of meaning. For simple organisms, these affordances may in turn be relatively simple (e.g. good to eat, or important to avoid). For human societies, with all the complexity of their cultural elaboration, affordances can become hugely ramified and elaborated, even if the more basic affordances are never left behind. A Stradivarius violin, for example, is a complex and multivalent object in its social embedding, and affords (among other things) high monetary value to an auctioneer, expressive performance possibilities to a violinist, and pride in national excellence to an Italian cultural ambassador, even as it also affords starting a fire for a desperate person with a box of matches. Social affordances do not displace “practical” affordances: they co-exist.
What music means, then, according to this view, is what music affords, or—to put it another way—what people perceive they can do with, or make of, the music that they encounter, whether as performers or listeners. Because affordances capture the reciprocal relationships between object properties and perceiver capacities, this is a powerful and economical way to explain the extremely varied but not entirely unconstrained meanings/ affordances of music. To a suitably stylistically attuned and able-bodied listener in an appropriate social context, the 2013 dance hit “Get Lucky” by Daftpunk affords pleasurable dancing, in part due to properties of tempo and moderate syncopation that have been shown to optimize the inclination to dance and the experience of pleasure (Witek et al., 2014). Those perception–action attributes are, however, embedded within a musical style (specified by instrumental, textural and tonal/rhythmic properties) that already specifies “dance music” to a suitably enculturated listener. A person who is unsympathetic to this music may hear the music’s potential “danceability” but be entirely unmoved by it, and a person enculturated in a radically different musical tradition the music may hear the music as dull or bewildering rather than “danceable.”
This approach to theorizing musical meaning sees music not as an autonomous domain separated from the practical and social realities of the everyday world, but as continuous with it. As I sit working on this chapter, I hear from the particular sound of a floorboard on the stairs that someone is about to enter the room, and I get ready to turn around and greet them. My apparently immediate grasp of what those sounds mean, and how to act in relation to them (to turn to greet the visitor) is a function of an attuned sensitivity to those specific sounds in that environment, and of appropriate social behavior, born of many years of inhabiting that particular niche. Likewise, the soloist sitting quietly at the piano in the first movement of Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, who hears the orchestra approach the emphatic cadence that affords her initial entry, prepares to play the parallel octave c minor scales with which she begins, her attention finely tuned to the “risks and opportunities” of that moment. And so too the person on the phone waiting to get through to customer services, who perhaps unconsciously readies himself for a particular manner of conversation on the basis of the company’s telephone hold music (Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto, rather than a cheap jingle). Sounds—“everyday” and musical—specify a limitless variety of objects, events and circumstances, from the practical and tangible (Is someone approaching? What instrument is making that sound?), to the structural (cadence—get ready to play), and the ideological (classical music—class assumptions).
The sounds of music afford a huge range and variety of phenomena, from young children’s rhythmic synchronization (Kirschner & Tomasello, 2009), and the mediation of emotions (DeNora, 2000); to enhancing the capacity to endure physical pain and distress (Edwards, 1995), or as an instrument of torture (Cusick, 2008). People become highly attuned to the musics in which they are enculturated, and pick up their meanings with astonishing immediacy and speed. A number of studies have demonstrated that listeners are able to pick up important and so-called abstract attributes of musical excerpts from extremely brief “slices” of sound: Gjerdingen and Perrott (2008) found that as little as 250 msec is enough for a listener to identify a musical genre (rock, classical, dance, latin, etc.; see also Krumhansl, 2009; Plazak & Huron, 2011). Contrary to the more conventional view that musical meaning is a high-level and abstract property of music that might therefore appear rather late in the whole perceptual process, these studies suggest that listeners identify what kind of music they’re hearing—to what “cultural world” it belongs, and what it affords—extremely early. In most circumstance it is much more important to know that this is “funeral music,” “clas-sical concert music,” or “dance music” than to hear that it is in compound triple meter or uses octatonic scales.
This leads directly to the final theme in this chapter—the idea that music’s meanings are to be understood in terms of the social functions that music performs. It is important first to dispel the idea that this is a category of meaning that is relevant only to some musics (usually the music of another and distant culture)—and that there are musics that are somehow free of social function. All music is culturally embedded, and performs a social function however abstract and rarefied (or normalized) that may sometimes be. An excerpt of Schoenberg’s piano music, used by a musicologist at a conference as an illustrative example, performs a number of social functions (contributing to academic discourse, supporting a claim in music theory, conferring music-historical gravitas on the speaker) no less than the ceremonial Nepali music (marking a seasonal festival, orchestrating/choreographing a procession around the town of Bhaktapur, expressing satire and burlesque) that Richard Widdess (2012) describes. It is ethnomusicologists and sociologists of music who have, understandably, been prominent in articulating music’s social meanings, but as has already been evident, there is considerable overlap and engagement with psychological concerns.
Tia DeNora has made particularly significant contributions in this respect, Music in Everyday Life (DeNora, 2000) kick-starting a now burgeoning interest in the detailed examination of the function and meaning of music in people’s lives from a combination of sociological and psychological perspectives. As DeNora has demonstrated with acutely observed case studies, people use music in complex socially embedded ways as a “technology of the self” that articulates or constructs a whole range of meanings in more or less familiar everyday circumstances. A woman uses a recording of a Schubert Impromptu that is strongly associated with the memory of her deceased father and childhood home to bring order and meaning to a stressful house move; an aerobics instructor compiles a playlist of music to provide the right sequence of warm-up, drive, sustain, and cool-down for the members of an exercise class; and a shopper attends to the music issuing from different clothes shops on a high street to “guide” him towards an outlet where he might find suitable clothes. In each of these cases what the music means (or affords—a term also used by DeNora) is the consequence of a complex conjunction of musical-material attributes (most obviously tempo and dynamics in the case of the aerobics music), social context and function, and the motivations and needs of the users (see Dibben, this volume).
Arguably the most significant domain in which music’s meanings are seen in accounts such as DeNora’s is in the construction, articulation, and maintenance of the sense of self (see Vuoskoski, this volume). Contemporary theories emphasize subjectivity and identity as life-long dynamic and constructive processes, rather than timeless or transcendent states; and for many people music is a powerful and persistent technology by means of which such self-making and maintaining is accomplished. The long association of music with affective states and people’s inner lives (as well as with public displays of identity) has the consequence that music’s meanings are often powerfully experienced as transformations or narratives of the self. In texted music, and particularly music in a singer-songwriter tradition, listeners may often hear themselves as being directly addressed by the music/musician, hearing the music’s meanings as being paradoxically publicly enunciated—often on a massive scale—and at the same time intimately and personally targeted (Moore, 2012; Dibben, 2013).
As Martin Clayton (2001) observes, understanding music’s meanings has been hampered by regarding music as a thing—a structure to which meanings somehow become attached, rather than a process within and out of which meanings emerge. But hampered or not, the literature on music’s meanings is an extremely rich and diverse body of work, drawing attention to the extraordinary way in which music’s affordances are encountered across experiential domains. In the most direct and palpable manner, we hear musical sounds as specifying people, objects and actions (blowing and hitting and strumming and scraping) in spaces and places both real and virtual. And at the same time, we hear in those sounds structural processes and wordless narratives that engage with the dynamic attentional mechanisms that have been explored by expectation theorists. But music is less passive and contemplative than this might suggest, even in the peculiar circumstances of the Western concert hall, and a third domain of music’s meanings engages the powerful corporeality that for a time seemed to be forgotten by both musicology and music cognition. In our throats, faces, limbs, torsos and viscera, we engage with and make music’s meanings with our bodies, in overt and manifestly participatory fashion (dancing, gesturing, singing and playing along), as well as in ways that are discreet to the point of invisibility (the “internal choreography” of recumbent headphone listening). We perceive and enact music’s meanings, even if we also have the capacity to contemplate and reflect upon the infinitely ramified connections and engagements of which musical processes are capable.
Overwhelmingly, the approaches discussed in this chapter have been concerned with how music means rather than with what music means—as is appropriate for a contribution to a volume concerned with music cognition, rather than hermeneutics. The multiplicity of music’s meanings, the dependency of those meanings on the perceptual capacities and specific orientations of individual listeners, their momentary and accumulated “state of readiness” and how they are poised to respond, and the circumstances of listening mean that it is impossible to predict exactly what any specific musical process might mean to a listener. But this is not a recipe for total relativism. In all the ways that have been explored here, there is now a powerful and varied toolkit for investigating the constraints and opportunities that musical processes afford, and thus a principled basis on which to understand music’s meanings. It may also provide the grounds on which to propose the specific meanings of specific musical circumstances, and appreciate or contest those that others may propose—but that is a different enterprise.
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