The T.O.M. uses the term SIGNIFICATION in two different but closely connected meanings.
- Either as specific significations considered in sector 4 of the Four Listening Modes: a) “abstract significations” with reference to the concrete sound material, when listening is guided by “a particular form of cognition”. (114)
[85] b) “ordinary” significations considered in ordinary hearing, which originate in sector 3.
c) specialised “specific significations”, the goal of different specialists in their skilled listening (123): the state of the patient’s lungs when he is told to say “99”, the accuracy of the notes for the musician, the phonetic make-up of the word for the phonetician (etc.)
- or in contrast to meaning, in the thorny debate about the problem of significations in music.
Signification here takes on the meaning of a particular connection between a signifier and a signified when each is relatively precise (a connection which in language is arbitrary in Saussure’s sense); whereas meaning is a more general notion.
In these two senses the term signification is applied to something particular, whereas meaning is applied to something general. So, the author puts forward the idea that music has a meaning rather than, like language, significations.
2) Meaning
The problem of MEANING is discussed in the T.O.M. in two different contexts, depending on whether it refers to:
- meaning which is commonly the goal in “natural” listening to the object, where the sound object is taken as a “sign” referring to a message which is perceived according to a code, a system of references (this is in contrast to the other mode of “natural” listening, which takes sound as an indicator referring to a cause, an agent, an event etc.);
- the meaning of music in general, a thorny problem.
P.S. puts forward this formula: music has a general meaning rather than, like language, particular significations. Moreover, unlike language, musical meaning rests on a relationship with the signifier which is not arbitrary, which does not, therefore, entirely depend on differential structures completely independent of the acoustic medium, but which
is linked to general properties of the perceptual structures of the human ear and its three perceptual fields. This is true even for the borderline case of “pure musics” (see above).
a) Meaning and signification.
When P.S. postulates that music “in a different way from language, has a meaning, rather than significations” (281), he seems to be concentrating on particular significations, the connections, associations between concepts, that language mediates, and contrasting them with the idea of something more general: THE meaning. The comparative table of language and music materials, organized along the lines of the four listening sectors, has for language, in sector 4, “signification?” with a question mark and, for music “meaning”. (314)
So, signification, in the sense of a one-off connection between particular signifiers and significations, is the opposite of the general “meaning” of music. (310)
[86] “We have avoided using the term “signification” for music, as it too obviously suggests a code, or the purely arbitrary signifier-signified link, which refers to the concept through sound. Conversely, we can hardly deny that music has a meaning, that it is a communication between an author and a listener, despite its essential difference from language.” (377)
b) If we postulate
- that the problem of music is approached from its two extremities: one “lower”, of “materials”, the other “higher”, of works and their organization;
- that these two stages (again unlike language) are not completely heterogeneous, that not any sound material is suitable for any music (principle of SUITABLE OBJECTS), that musical organization cannot be something that comes entirely from the dictates of the mind, but that it must rely on the properties of the natural perceptual field of the ear;
- that between these two extremes, traditional musics have an intermediate stage of structures of reference (melodico-harmonic rules, for example), understood by a community, a stage which contemporary musical experience lacks…
…Then the problem of making an experimental music which still has a “meaning” can be stated in new terms.
This music, rather then being the interplay of “differential structures” within a melodic-harmonic code of reference (which allows us to go beyond the stage of sound to build up a “musical language”), would be an architecture constructed on the logic of the material itself, with its meaning in its “internal proportions”. (629)
c) This architecture-music would perhaps be more universal, more “natural”, being built directly on the logic of the material itself, and by-passing the intermediate stage of a
Such a music would more than ever have to rely on a thorough understanding of the sound material as it is heard, and of the properties of the perceptual field of the ear.
We might, however, retain the hope that it would rediscover “common meaning”. “Sound objects, musical structures, when they are authentic, (…) move away from the descriptive world, to speak all the better to the senses, the spirit, the heart, the whole being, ultimately about itself. Finally, symmetry is established between languages. Man described to man, in the language of things”. (662)
d) Common meaning.
This new meaning may be the “common meaning” produced by the symmetry between nature and man “with their contradictory and reciprocal order”. The model is given by the example of Francis Ponge in poetry, demanding that language be cleared of its ideological adhesions, “in an attitude (he wrote) of phenomenological reduction” (return to the Husserlian époché). This gave “not the work of an author who has something to say, but work on words which end up saying more than the author knew, by taking him towards meanings that he himself only perceived after the event” (658). Without hoping to transpose
[87] this experiment wholesale to music, the T.O.M. proposes to rediscover the path of mankind and common meaning: in the sense that “What things have to say to us has been buried within them for generations, since the invention of language” (659).
MEANING/SIGNIFICATION: 114, 115, 116, 123, 124, 127, 154 (BIFINTEC), 281- 282, 284, 294, 310, 311, 314, 377, 612, 615, 626, 627, 628, 629, 641, 642, 658; 659- 660.