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In Language & History Vol.52, Issue 1 (01 May 2009), pp. 119-129.
Research paper which discusses the problem of musical meaning from the perspective of some 20th century approaches to linguistic semantics. The text briefly covers the issue as it was viewed in the first half of the previous century, and then reviews some studies of musical meaning within the structural, generative, and cognitive frameworks. The author's opinion is that conceptual metaphor theory, in its search of the conceptualization of music, provides the most solid grounds for the foundation of a true "musico-semantics".
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Towards the Semantics of Music: the 20th Century1 Mihailo Antovic Faculty of Philosophy, University of Nis, Serbia Abstract This paper discusses the problem of musical meaning from the perspective of some 20th century approaches to linguistic semantics. The text briefly covers the issue as it was viewed in the first half of the previous century, and then reviews some studies of musical meaning within the structural, generative, and cognitive frameworks. The author's opinion is that conceptual metaphor theory, in its search of the conceptualization of music, provides the most solid grounds for the foundation of a true „musico-semantics‟. Key words: language, music, meaning, semantics, cognition.
T
he relationship between language and music has been of interest for centuries. Although structural („grammatical‟) comparisons have occurred throughout the history of language study, and have been topical in the last twenty odd years, it is the problem of musical meaning that has been central to many theoretical discussions, most notably in the aesthetics of music. In this paper, I will try to outline the principal currents in the modern study of music and meaning, analyzing the issue in the framework of linguistic semantics. To define the problem, I will first elaborate on Bernstein‟s term „musico-linguistics‟ (Bernstein, 1976: 9) and introduce the central question related to „musico-semantics‟: does music have any meaning, and if it does, what is its nature and possible relationship to the same term as used in linguistics? The problem of musical signification emerges from the nature of musical phenomena. While music has no clear reference to extramusical reality, it does provoke psychological reactions in listeners comparable to few other arts. The former apparently denies musical semantics, while the latter craves for an extramusical interpretation as the psychological impact that music causes urges listeners to articulate their reactions, be they emotions, associations, or explicit linguistic descriptions. This cognitive paradox brought about two opposing approaches in the interpretation of music: „formalist‟ and „referentialist‟. Indeed, the entire twentieth century in music theory may be viewed as a pendulum, where the two have been replacing one another depending on the author‟s preferences or more general Weltanschauung. The formalists, perhaps influenced by German classical idealism, have claimed that the phenomenon to study is music on its own, that it has no meaning „but itself‟, that musical tones carry no content, that the only legitimate discussion of music should exclusively deal with formal relations, elements of higher and lower order, harmonic progressions or incoming cadences. The referentialists, commonly influenced by Anglo-American psychologism, would 1
Antovic, M. (2009). Towards a Semantics of Music – the 20th Century, Language and History,
52(1): 119-129.
claim that „things by themselves‟, including music, are non-entities, and that what counts should be only how humans react to music. Naturally, this leaves a huge uncharted territory of possible signification, be it music referring to disenchanted lovers, mystical rivers, clowns in the orchestr