Notes and Meanings

Paul McCartney: Once I’ve finished with my song and I release it then I don’t mind who makes what interpretation of it. At least, for me, they’re thinking about it. They’re free to think it means this, that or the other. If they ask me what it means I’ll say, “OK, well this is what I think it means but you’re free, feel free to think of it as anything you wish.”

Peter Kivy, author of several books on the philosophy of music, has identified three theories of musical expression: the arousal theory in which music arouses in the listener garden-variety emotions such as sadness, happiness, anger, depression and so on. He notes that this theory was pretty much universal since the seventeenth century until recently. The dissenters from this theory fall into two camps, the formalists like Eduard Hanslick who deny that it makes sense to talk about music in emotive terms, and the other camp of thinkers like Susanne Langer who approached music through various semantic and analytic methods trying to discover the emotions in the music itself. [cf. Peter Kivy, New Essays on Musical Understanding, "The Arousal Theory of Musical Expression: Rethinking the Unthinkable," pp 119 et. seq.]

Kivy was, among others, to critique the arousal theory successfully and instead of seeing music as disposed to inspire ordinary emotions, placed the expressive properties in the music itself. Incidentally, one of the key elements of the critique was that garden-variety emotions, such as love, hate, happiness, sadness and so on, have objects. They are not free-floating moods, but directed somewhere. One loves something or is sad about something. These emotions have objects. But instrumental music, at least, lacking concrete referentiality, does not have objects. What we perceive in music is atmosphere, mood, expression--that we can feel in varying ways.

I don't recall the source, but one of the most succinct comments on music and meaning was this one: "if music is a language what are the words and where is the dictionary we can look them up in?" Of course, while music has language-like properties, it is not a language and there are no words nor dictionaries.

In writing my set of songs I looked to the words for inspiration in the sense that I tried to find a musical "language" (by which I mean a collection of expressive devices) that would reflect and amplify the poem. In the setting of the poem by Li Po that mentions a Chinese bell, for example, I used a paper clip on the sixth string to give a cluster of bell-like tones. In an excerpt from a satirical play by Aristophanes, I imitated the gestures of a Rossini opera. Some of the choices were made instinctively and I doubt I could give a rational defense of them!

And in instrumental music, I have been turning away from this kind of referentiality and using each piece to explore the musical materials. This is a fairly common practice in contemporary composers. So the "meaning" of the piece while I am writing it relates to the materials of its construction and the way they are related in time. Later on I may discover interesting atmospheric or mood effects that I might amplify or expand. Finally, after the piece leaves the studio and comes alive in the concert hall the listeners may derive various kinds of enjoyment from it. They may describe it as "relaxing" or "energetic," "soothing" or "dynamic." They may hate it or like it. They may change their minds on further hearing.

But with a few exceptions, for the most part, I am not trying to craft or inject "meaning" into the piece in any kind of sense that can be put into words.

I know I have put this up before, but for those who have not heard it or who want to hear it again, here is my piece Dark Dream: