Referential Meaning in Music (Ferrara, Ch. 1)

Summary:
In this chapter, Ferrara adresses the question, "What does music mean?" He identifies two approaches to this question. The first approach is limited to musical syntax, and the second engages referential meaning. The second approach, therefore, changes the question from what does music mean to what can music mean.

The formalist approach as presented by Hanslick and Gurney defines music as temporally organized pattern and structure of sound. This applies to "absolute music," or music in abstract forms such as the sonata, not program music. They claim that this kind of music is "devoid of referential and emotive meaning." Therefore, with this view, emotional responses and extrinsic meaning can't be objectively analyzed. Extended formalists, such as Leonard Meyer, believe that emotional responses to music are grounded in syntax. In this view, absolute meaning can be discerned by analyzing the syntax, but referential meaning is grounded in the extramusical and therefore still can't be objectively analyzed. Absolute Expressionists believe that emotions produced from music are the result of intrinsic syntactical aspects of the music. John Dewey's Theory of Emotion states that emotion is aroused when the tendency to respond is arrested or inhibited. Building on this theory, Meyer contends that the tension and release or expectations of chordal or melodic progressions in music triggers emotion. He goes on to conclude that musical meaning is a product of intrinsic references which result in expectations.

The main argument supporting syntactical analysis is that it is objective and verifiable whereas referential symbolic analysis is subjective and is not verifiable because there is no method, which in theory could lead to chaos. As Ferrara states, however, the problem is that "the implicit goal of scientific methods is technical control over nature." This produces a human bias, which proves that objectivity in the sense that the researcher is detached, value-free, and neutral is a myth.

A supporter of referential analysis, Susan K. Langer states that "man's evolutionary achievement is transforming experience to language." In her book Philosophy in a New Key, Langer asserts that music is a symbol system with its own principles and inherent rules that has its rationalty that can't be fully understood or evaluated based on rules of ordinary language. According to Langer, music is a non-discursive language, or a language based on logic and intuition, as opposed to discursive languages, such as spoken languages, which move from premises to conclusion in logical steps. She states that music doesn't represent actual feeling, but rather the composer's knowledge of form and concept of feeling, and that music is a metaphorical image of life. Wilson Coker states that referential meaning emerges when the analyst responds to musical gestures and notes that music provides sign complexes that ordinary language can't signify. Put another way, Carrol C. Pratt said, "Music sounds the way emotions feel."

Peter Kivy attempts to reconcile the objectivity of formalism with the accountability of expression provided by referential approaches in The Corded Shell. He asserts that expressive qualities are genuine objective qualities of music and that there are objective criteria for applying expressive terms. First he states that there are 4 styles of critique in order of ascending respectability: biography, autobiography, emotive description, and objective scientific description of music. He then states that music cannot express but rather can be expressive of. The third criterion is that one recognizes emotions as features of music but does not necessarily feel them. He concludes that music criticism need not be inhuman to be respectable. Kivy goes further in his second book, positing that music is representational of a content that lies outside of syntax. He identifies 3 categories of musical representation: perceptual, structural, or expressive. He maintains that if music has a verbally expressive subject, it is representational.

Monroe Beardsley rebuts the argument for referential analysis of music on the grounds that no rules that govern musical reference or expressiveness had been provided. He emphasizes the fact that there is a difference between a work having qualities analogous to human qualities and stating that a work refers to those qualities and maintains that one must distinguish the idea of referring to emotion from possessing a quality that might be described metaphorically by an emotion word. Ferrara concludes, however, that "one's understanding of emotion in music is based to some extent on the concept of the nature of the emotion outside music. How else can someone experience and dexcribe this quality in music without referring to this extra-musical concept?"

Reaction:
Attempting to explain the relationship between human emotion and music is an extremely existential endeavor. At the heart of this issue are the questions what is emotion, and why and how do we feel emotions. As with anything existential, the deeper we probe into these questions, the closer we get to articulating an answer, but at what cost? As we delve deeper, the questions multiply, complicate, and confuse. The closer we get to knowing, the farther we get from understanding. For this reason, I think it is very important to keep Langer's idea that music is a non-discursive language based on intuition in mind. I believe that the most fruitful theory on this topic would be a combination of Langer's view, Meyer's position that musical reference is grounded in syntax, and Kivy's assertion that music criticism doesn't have to be inhuman to be respectable. Musical syntax is important to the language of music in the same rhetorical sense that syntax is important to discursive languages; and humans are the ones who create music as well as analyze and critique it, it should follow that there are human elements, such as reference to human emotion, in our analses and critiques. Honestly, I believe that formalists who deny that the expressive and referential qualities of music are not in fact intrinsic properties of music itself are not being honest with themselves.