Music and Semiotics: The Nattiez PhaseAuthor(s): Jonathan DunsbySource: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Winter, 1983), pp. 27-43Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/741799Accessed: 05/06/2010 07:12

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Music and Semiotics: The Nattiez Phase

JONATHAN DUNSBY

W ITH the publication of Fondements d'une semiologie de la musique,' Jean-Jacques Nattiez provided a focus for a grow-

ing area of musical debate.2 It has seemed to many scholars over the last few decades that an intellectual climate concerned with the per- ception of meaning ought to be able to offer new and much-needed ideas about musical meaning. This climate has involved a strong structuralist impulse. Its emphasis on the structure of linguistic mean- ing has naturally aroused the interest of musicians, since music theory and aesthetics have always been open to the possibility of interpreting language and music in the same way. In the seventeenth and eight- eenth centuries, that possibility flowered into an elaborate, compara- tive musico-linguistics; indeed it may be ironic that the present inter- est in semiotics is pursued with little reference to the theory and aesthetics of rhetoric that were so familiar to Baroque musicians. The new flowering has taken its lead not so much from general structural- ist theory as from its empirical offshoots. Semiotics, a discipline which seeks to explain meaning as a relational phenomenon where- ever there appear to be significant kinds of activity, might be thought to be as appropriate in principle for the study of music as it is for the study of any other form of communication.3

The genuine sense of relationality that emerges from Nattiez's theories has been generally admired, but it must also be recognized

1 (Paris, 1975). 2 This essay is based on a paper delivered to the May, 1980, joint meeting of the British

Society of Aesthetics and the Royal Musical Association. I am grateful to John Stopford for advice on many aspects of semiotics.

3 There is a historical distinction to be made between semiotics and semiology, the former deriving principally from American pragmatic philosophy and the latter from European linguistics. In music the terms have come to be synonymous, and "semiotic" is the customary usage.

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that it challenges the traditional musical disciplines. The categories which conventionally justify the distinctions between historical mu- sicology, theory, aesthetics, and analysis (to the extent that it may be considered apart from these areas) are not absolute. For semiotics, music is a cultural or social phenomenon, definable only in terms of its value held in a culture according to a quantitative, qualitative, and analytical interplay. Because of this, "music semiology would lose all chance of gaining a scientific status if it took upon itself to make a normative choice about which of the three were suitable for defining a work."4 This issue was raised by Jean Piaget: ... if one tries to deal with structures within an artificially circumscribed domain- and any given science is just that -one very soon hits on the problem of being unable to locate the entities one is studying, since structure is so defined that it cannot coincide with any system of observable relations, the only ones that are clearly made out in any of the existing sciences.5

A proper reluctance to locate musical wholeness, its identity, purely in terms of cultural norms, must lead to more and more comprehensive descriptions, as Ferdinand de Saussure predicted with his notion of "a science that studies the life of signs within society."6 And the drive toward more and more comprehensive descriptions in music has exposed such a strong disciplinary convention of musical thought that the boundaries of any musical object are a priori in relation to the methods used in its examination.

It is a defining proposal of semiotics that, on the contrary, what is given is a sign of the meaning we ascribe to it according to the methods by which we have come to regard it as "given." This is clearly the case in the more practical realms of musical activity. For example, most professional musicians have a working idea about the circular-and in this context they can be called relational-arguments concerning authentic performance practice: some normative attitude has to be struck, some decision about historical authenticity has to be made. This process will have occurred whether we recognize it consciously or not and whether or not we claim an aprioristic quality for some decision. In more speculative areas, the semiotic proposal is harder to substantiate. Music criticism and analysis rarely make their assump- tions explicit. We are never sure whether we learned Beethoven from

4 Fondenents, p. 124. All translations from Fondements are my own. 5 Structuralism, trans. Chaninah Maschler (London and New York, 1971), pp. 137-38. 6 Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade

Baskin (New York, 1966), p. 16.

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Music and Semiotics

our harmony lessons or harmony from Beethoven, even whether there is any purpose in asking such a question. It has fallen to Nattiez to reveal forcefully to us any complacent conclusions we may have reached about such issues.

It is not surprising that Nattiez's work has had a mixed, almost confused reception. There is a quite extensive article literature, par- ticularly in ethnomusicology, but also embracing analysis and main- stream historical musicology, which refers to the same methodologi- cal and conceptual climate as Fondements. Yet that literature, usually on specialized topics and drawing what it needs only selectively from the wide potential field of music semiotics, hardly prepared the way for Nattiez's extensive inquiry. The critical response to his work reflected both the selectivity and the feeling of challenge mentioned above, resulting in three types of misunderstanding. The first was to discuss various issues in Nattiez's work through a largely irrelevant aesthetic perspective-thus the war over musical semantics waged on Fonde- ments by Roger Scruton7 and Patricia Tunstall.8 The second was a matter of critical hindsight. It is not strictly necessary to go into methodological issues which Nattiez did not wish to address at that stage, even if those issues would finally take on their real significance. David Lidov could be accused of this in a fine assessment of music semiotics that nevertheless took a more elaborate view of Nattiez's analytical methods than he ever implied.9 Finally, it is erroneous to approach this form of semiotics in terms of principle rather than practice, as Otto Laske did in claiming that the book has a global significance for musicology.'0 If the conclusions here about the rather unsystematic and esoteric character of the Fondements-stage in music semiotics are well grounded, the perils of welcoming wholesale what appear to be new ideas in new terminology will be clear.

If these cases show the kinds of misunderstanding that have arisen, an attempt must be made to express what there is of central impor- tance to be understood. Pride of place belongs to the theory of musical meaning. Meaning is typically a most informal concept in musical

7 "The Semiology of Music," The Cambridge Review, June 2, 1978. 8 "Structuralism and Musicology: An Overview," Current Musicology, XXVII (1979),

51-64. 9 "Nattiez's Semiotics of Music," The Canadian Journal of Research in Semiotics, in V/2

(1977), 13-54. Some of the criticisms in my own review of Fondements in Perspectives of New Music, XV/2 (1977) may also reveal this tendency.

10 "Towards a Musicology for the Twentieth Century," Perspectives of New Music XV/2 (1977).

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speculation, sufficiently loosely defined as a shared category of thought able to embrace any new terms and methods. During the last few decades this process has been at work with Schenker's style of analysis, most recently in Eugene Narmour's attempt to refute the voice- leading account of tonal meaning." Alan Keiler's examinations of a diluted Chomskian approach to music have equally centered on the possibility of semantic pertinence, in that case for generative models of musical structure.12 But if there is any future in the assimilation of music semiotics into general ideas about musical meaning, it is surely a future where we shall address the problem of musical meaning at the level of semiotic methodology. Critics like Scruton and Tunstall appear to feel that this new discipline should finally satisfy the desire for a definitive semantics, when it is of the essence of semiotic research to distinguish first of all between the many varieties of accounts of meaning offered in different disciplines. In the second part of Fonde- ments, Nattiez undertakes a long "Comparative Semiology of Music and Language," beginning with an attempt to deal with "musical signification, with the study of various methods that have been pro- posed to take account of it."'3 The intention, then, is well directed.

The practice, however, is paradoxical. In Nattiez's tripartitional model of musical activity, the status of the level between the poietic, which entails factors of creation in music, and the esthesic, which entails factors of its reception, needs to be explicit. It should be clear whether this neutral level is some kind of virtual component of semantic structure or whether it can actually be seen as a sufficient metaphor for what is otherwise loosely termed semantic structure. An early statement makes this explicit: Certain configurations of the neutral level will be poietic, others will be esthesic, or both: one can know only by means of external information, which is not given by the text itself. Others will be neither poietic nor esthesic, which well proves that the musical message possesses an autonomous level of organization.14

Yet a subsequent comment on the tripartition cruelly opens up the conceptual discontinuity which semantics can so easily bring to ana- lytical theory:

"l Beyond Schenkerism: The Need for Alternatives in Musical Analysis (Chicago, 1977). 12 "Bernstein's The Unanswered Question and the Problem of Musical Competence," The

Musical Quarterly, LXIV/2 (April, 1978), 195-222. 13 Fondements, p. 129. 14 Ibid., p. 55.

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The neutral level is dirty: its only purpose is to present, on the basis of an explicit and reproducible procedure, a collection of possible schemes of which the poietic and/or esthesic pertinence will be given later.'5

From this we have to accept early in Fondements that any case of analysis at the neutral level is provisional. It is difficult to conceive, then, how it can also be autonomous. Toward the end of his study, Nattiez synthesizes this conflict in a manner which recalls, awkwardly in view of his antistructuralist position, Proppian [referring to V. Propp] or Levi-Straussian functionalism. We segment music into units, writes Nattiez, according to an "explicit methodology" that is defined in an abstract way. But these units have a "functional potential of which the nature is only partly determined and not guaranteed by the segmentation technique which has identified the unit."'6 It seems, then, that the neutral level is not a virtual component of semantic structure so much as musical semantics itself having a virtual quality; musical meaning is delineated in part by neutral, semiotic analysis, which is in this relational scheme only provisional. This deeply obscure aspect of Nattiez's semiotics can hardly be explained. One can only acknowledge the tension inherent in the mode of thought and consider whether it is a useful tension. But it is important to recognize the consequences of Nattiez's account of meaning, and these can be sensed through comparison with attitudes toward artistic meaning which represent a different perspective. The methodological conse- quence in Nattiez is a mechanistic one:

What makes this descriptive level neutral is that the tools used for the segmentation of phenomena . . . are systematically exploited to their furthest consequences, and are replaced only when new hypotheses or new difficulties lead to the proposal of new ones. "Neutral" signifies here that one pursues a given procedure to its end, independ- ently from the results obtained.17

Nattiez regards such a proposal as fundamentally semiotic and anti- structuralist, and it is so to the extent that it disregards the cultural values ascribed to the structure it scans. Its "tools" do not derive their nature from the structure or indeed the results, whereas in structuralist thinking "systematic analysis of non-literary works of art must opt for a set of terms or categories reflecting the important features in the art in question and then pursue the description of individual works, part by

5 Ibid., p. 56. 16 Ibid., p. 407. 17 Ibid., p. 55.

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part."'18 Mediating between these positions, and implying a certain pessimism, is the attitude that both logical, or semio-logical, descrip- tions and intuitively sound accounts of meaning are conceivable, but not a secure integration of the two. Thus Jonathan Culler, writing about structuralist analysis of poetic meaning, says: Even where linguistics provides definite and well-established procedures for classing and describing elements of a text it does not solve the problem of what constitutes a pattern and hence does not provide a method for the discovery of patterns. A fortiori, it does not provide a procedure for the discovery of poetic patterns.19

It is clear, then, that Nattiez has put forward a somewhat rigid idea about how we can best study music and that its conceptual back- ground is both complex and, to some degree, a barrier against sympa- thetic approaches to his concrete proposals. This can lead to interpret- ing valuable analytical attitudes as wrongheaded theories. Writing about Nattiez and the understanding of musical experience, Scruton asks:

Why ... assume that there are rules of this game, and why assume, what surely stands to be proved, that the rules are those of a "syntax"? The fact is that we have nothing here but an immense unscientific metaphor.... 20

The question of how music semiotics is scientific has occupied Nattiez too deeply, and is examined in Fondements in such an extensive and sometimes complicated manner, for this sweeping condemnation to be altogether fair. It should be just as important if Nattiez's contact with the idea of a musical science turns out to be a practical virtue as it is if there is some theoretical vice. Some theoretical, or conceptual confusion may be inevitable. The tripartition, Nattiez's epistemologi- cal model for musicology, predicts that there must be such a procedure as scientific analysis of music. That which is neither poietic nor esthesic concerns the music in itself. The term "neutral" for this autonomous level is well chosen, and clearly the methods we use to study music will have much in common with those of scientific inquiry. The music will have to be examined purely in terms of its inherent qualities and quantities. In the practical investigation of music semiotics, Nattiez does not even attempt to sustain this logic

18 Philip Pettit, The Concept of Structuralism: A Critical Analysis (Dublin, 1975), p. 58. 19 Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (Ithaca,

1975), p. 65. 20 P. 176.

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and has to side with the position indicated above through Pettit. Here there is a strong suspicion that Nattiez reverts to the kind of paradoxi- cal theorizing that semiotics should, at best, avoid:

It is absolutely wrong to claim that the step of classifying... does not have recourse to intuitions or hypotheses.... Behind all taxonomy there are... intellectual categories, bequeathed by culture, and accepted as guides for the task.21

The easy option, in face of such discontinuity between theory and practice, is to abandon all pretense of scientific or rigorous analysis. This leads into familiar traps. Attacking Nattiez's discussion of the Pelleas prelude, Scruton writes: "Debussy never flattened a fifth, as a Jazz musician might; he simply used the interval of a tritone."22 Thus the worst analytical fantasy, which in its fear of a retreat from the "scientific," will invent for us what composers do or do not think when composing, and which will suppose that such intentions pass from being creative phenomena into perceptible ones. If that kind of analysis is the way to study music, so is the study of the acoustic record of a piece. Nattiez tries to avoid either easy option. He does so, not so much on the grounds that analysis which is more scientific is therefore more descriptively adequate, but rather on the grounds that music is a symbolic activity. It is articulated by means of reference, so we should study its forms of reference. These forms have the widest musicologi- cal scope, embracing all that we customarily consider as the business of music history and much more besides. Theoretically, they may even turn out to be what we recognize in other disciplines as "rules"; the rules of Baroque counterpoint, for instance, are remarkably efficient hypotheses about the way a large variety of music will behave. How- ever that may be, it is certain for music semiotics that the forms of reference are constitutive objects of analysis. Nattiez uses this difficult but creditable option to account for some classic analytical issues. In dealing with the opening of a Brahms Intermezzo, for example, he acknowledges that there may be no definitive tonal center: that is to say, all interpretants, in the perception of any number of listeners, will register a sign of equivocal reference. But from his viewpoint this is not a special issue at all:

What, in fact, is a harmonic analysis? It is the operation of a certain choice from among a possible collection of variables, according to criteria of different orders. . 2:

21 Fondements, pp. 256-57. 22 P. 176. 23 Fondements, p). 325.

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Neutral analysis, then, should enable us to see that choices have been made and, if the methods are reasonably consistent, should enable us to make explicit comparisons between various possible analyses. We should by no means take analysis to mean here the pure, often insular specialism that is a growing element of historical musicology. For Nattiez, any kind of musical study is controlled by the same mechanism.

The methodological potential of such study is revealed most con- cisely in Nattiez's work on Debussy's Syrinx. He begins by adopting more or less directly the method devised by N. Ruwet. This establishes paradigms of musical segments arranged, not according to their se- quence in a piece, nor according to loosely conceived descriptions like "phrase" or "variation," but according to similarity of the real-time longest units, and then repetitions between subunits. Ruwet's Geiss- lerlied wasi ideal for this method, and it is quite effective on Syrinx. But the "operation of a certain choice," taking the longest repeated units first, is too restrictive in Nattiez's view, too dependent on an abstract norm. The next logical step is to analyze instead on the basis of the shortest repeated time units. Nattiez does not say so, but it could be supposed that an empirical level is substituted here for Ruwet's normative level--assuming that identity between musical segments is more of an empirical quality than is the specific identity between segments that are of equal real-time length. The short units displayed in this so-called "bottom to top" analysis obviously do not constitute the longest units conceivable, but they may be thought to constitute the longest units which can be described in neutral terms, that is, strictly on the basis of binary contrast, either as repetitions or as unique material. The paradigms revealed in Syrinx are now quite different. As Nattiez insists, "A given level of characterization will never exclude other possible ones,"24 but he is quite sure that with any such semiotic analysis something will be gained by thematizing the relations that are observed in each paradigm. It is, then, a logical conclusion to thematize the relations themselves, that is, to establish paradigms of structural disposition and to tabulate their use in a piece of music. The third analysis of Syrinx thus sets out the short kinds of structuration that occur-pitch relations, rhythmic figures, and so on-and records, in a segmentation of the piece into minimal units of a few notes each, which relations obtain in each case.

24 Ibid., p. 263.

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It should be helpful here to make a point that does not appear to have been clarified, perhaps even considered, in the semiotic literature. With his thematizing, not of binary contrasts in the material of a piece, but of the structural disposition of its minimal units, Nattiez has taken semiotics an important stage toward what we might think of as a more customary form of music theory. We know from many traditions, for example the tradition of harmonic analysis from Rameau through Riemann, Schenker, and Schoenberg, that descriptive systems become adequate, not so much in terms of how musical material is symbol- ized, but in terms of how all possible symbolizations register against each other. Is it not the case, asks Rameau, that , 6 and 6 chords may actually represent the same harmony under certain relational condi- tions, or that what appear to be four quite different figures may all represent the chord of a diminished seventh? Following this line of analogy, we might ask, too, whether Nattiez's makeshift paradigm of pitch-class organization in Syrinx is not naive in retrospect, in view of the elegant system Allen Forte has devised for laying out a paradigm of all possible pitch-class sets.25 Only rather controversial ideas of inver- sional equivalence have allowed Forte to do this; and it is equally true that awkward assumptions about musical structure, its division into categorical types like harmony and melody, underlie traditional har- monic theory to a degree that only Schenker began to expose some two centuries after the event. Nevertheless, the close analogy between Nattiez's theory of symbolic analysis (which can be found both in the Syrinx analysis and the Density 21.5 study26) and theories like those of tonal harmony or modulo 12 set structure, suggests that semioticians should perhaps begin to sift through music theory to find which traditions are not semiotic. It is clear by extension that all musical disciplines are open to the same suggestion as soon as they adopt the outward tokens of a semiotic point of view. This is not to say that semiotics is only a new terminology for all old practices. But one can well imagine that it represents one aspect of a well-established tradi- tion. If for a moment we assume that there is a confluence of structural- ist and semiotic ideologies, confirmation can be found in Umberto Eco:

25 The Structure of Atonal Music (New Haven, 1973). 26 " 'Density 21.5 by Varese: A Study in Semiological Analysis," Music Analysis, 13,

(Nov., 1982).

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There is surely a lesson here for our sense of intradisciplinary order in musical studies. The experience of set-structural theory has brought with it a notion of precompositional activity, the manipulation of musical material into a state of readiness for some creative use. In the same way, music criticism is underpinned by a wide range of activities from paleography to performance, and the pragmatic sense in which such activities could be called precritical is quite obvious. But less obviously, because there are few pragmatic guidelines for such a classification, we may want to think of theories like Forte's as preana- lytical and, on the argument given so far, regard semiotic procedures in the same way. By elevating the concept of neutral, quasi-scientific procedure to a methodological principle, whether it concerns tran- scription, analysis, or any other musicological activity, Nattiez is trying to rule out the interpretative role of a musician so that its purpose and precise conduct will become systematically evident.

The preanalytical character of semiotic procedures applied to music is most clear, perhaps, in the form of distributional method: a distributional approach of one kind or another seems to inhere in all procedures taken by Nattiez to be of positive value. He cites Ruwet's distinction between the analytic and the synthetic.28 In Nattiez's judgment, most musicology works synthetically, with generative models which pass from code to message. Semiotic analysis stresses instead the movement from message to code, and it uses distributional models to do so. If that is the case, it must be remembered that Nattiez is striking at aesthetic issues here as well as analytical ones, and in this context this justifies his critique of Leonard Meyer. As Lidov has suggested, Meyer's influential views about music have amounted to a distributional semiotics of musical communication. Nattiez ob- jected to the Meyer account on various grounds: a stimulus such as timbre, texture, or sonority is not apparently subject to restriction or blockage of the kind that supposedly creates information flux in the domains of pitch and rhythm, so that there is a sense of profound empirical discontinuity; poietic and esthesic conditions do not actu- ally correspond in many cases, something which the information

27 A Theory of Semiotics (London, 1977), p. 10. 28 Fondements, p. 105.

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model can explain only through a peripheral aesthetics; and style in the information model is a constant pattern for different listeners, whereas it is generally held that stylistic continuity of that type is no more than a modest hypothesis, a heuristic device. Such, at least, is one interpretation of Nattiez's various comments on Meyer's writings.

Central though these aspects may be for a confrontation of Nattiez and Meyer from an aesthetic, and partly a technically esthesic point of view, a more straightforward analytical critique of Meyer is almost a formal requirement for Nattiez's investigation and is present in Fon- dements, if at all, only by implication. The information model, ex- posed with such expertise by Meyer in Emotion and Meaning in Music,29 suggests a kind of moving contact between stimulus and receiver in relation to the overall structure of a work of art; however well or badly it may describe this point of contact, it is surrounded, in effect, by noise. Meyer's and Narmour's recent work on melodic analy- sis is beginning to solve this, but in so doing it retreats from a distributional to a prescriptive analysis of continuity. The proposi- tion that gaps in melodies need to be filled assumes something about tonal music far more reactionary or radical (depending on how one regards prescriptive, explanatory music theory) than do any assertions of Schenker. In a paradigmatic analysis there is no noise. On the contrary, the effectiveness of semiotic method is measured by the degree to which it can embrace a complete musical structure in a model of relational continuity. It is important to be clear about this confrontation, if only because it demonstrates once again the chal- lenge Nattiez has put forward to the traditional form of debate about how music gains its effect. Meyer and Narmour both seek to express a notion about the musically dynamic, but when Meyer implies that the dynamic in music has its source simply in temporal change he is, from the Nattiez point of view, oversimplifying beyond reason. Meyer's type of dynamism presents the temporal location of music as being in essence simple; it is an event that begins and ends in real time, inducing in the course of its existence an affective change in the listener which manipulates cognitive and emotional states as a func- tion of real psychological time. But the question of what unifies such a sequence of states of perception is hardly addressed from an analytical point of view. The lesson of Nattiez is that analysis can identify only the multiplicity of forms of organization in a piece; it cannot in itself

29 (Chicago, 1956). See also Meyer, Explaining Music (Chicago, 1973).

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The Musical Quarterly reveal that a system, a unity, is at work. The agent which does reveal such a phenomenon, according to Meyer's thinking, is a controlling system of expectations which fuses with the implications and realiza- tions inherent in musical structure. But it has not been said what makes this into a system of expectations rather than a random collec- tion of attitudes and beliefs. These attitudes and beliefs may corre- spond with Nattiez's poietic and esthesic levels, but nowhere does Nattiez fall into the temptation to claim that such levels have aprioris- tic, systematic qualities.

At least it is beyond question that Meyer and Nattiez seriously face the fact that musical articulation is, as an object of verbal speculation, of great complexity. Nattiez's recognition of this meant that his dis- cussion of double articulation theories was to play a justifiably prom- inent role in the argument. It is important, for instance, to lay the ghost of Levi-Strauss, whose professional insights have generated many vital characteristics of musical semiotic practice, but whose incursions into musical thinking can be misleading because of their disciplinary confusion. For example, Nattiez quite properly scorns Levi-Strauss's linguistic analogy between the synchronic/diachronic opposition and the vertical/horizontal axis in which we read music scores. And in general Nattiez found that double articulation theories never quite fit the needs of musical thought. Technically, even the syntagm/paradigm contrast in its Saussurean purity is of little value, Nattiez observed, if we adapt it to any structure more complex than simple monody. Semantically, even Jakobson's duality between ex- troversive and introversive semiosis finds no firmer basis in musical practice. Who knows, Nattiez asks, but that those who find exo- semantics more important than endo-semantics may not be correct? It is after all most likely that the adherents of a dominant introversive semiotic function in music will be partisans of the West European analytical tradition. Nattiez had to leave these questions open, argu- ing that it was simply too early to envisage how the relationality of musical thought and perception is organized.30 This is the semiotician supposed by Scruton and many others to insist that musical meaning has a "syntax." Nattiez is far from this. When he speaks of the "cunning play of interpretants across the poietic, esthesic and neutral levels"31 it is evident that uniform models of musical articulation are neither presupposed nor to be expected.

30 Fondements, pp. 210-14. 31 Ibid., p. 61.

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The articulation of music in terms of continuity and diversity may not be a systematic phenomenon, but this is an inescapable dichotomy in any account of style. From the point of view of continuity, of style amounting to the observation of recurrent characteristics, semiotic analysis should be at an advantage. If we can analyze a Geisslerlied and Syrinx in precisely the same way, then at last a universal stylistics is conceivable. Such is the theory of the mise en serie, or seriation. In Fondements, some emphasis is given to the methodological scope introduced by seriation, and from a semiotic perspective it is indeed desirable that there should be no a priori distinction between the smallest unit of a piece of music and the largest body of pieces of music. Nattiez's example of seriation, which draws together various works by Debussy as an extension of the Syrinx discoveries, is rather offhand: it surely misrepresents the method by comparing figures that have been identified consistently and in depth from Syrinx with figures plucked at random from works like Jeux. But at least there is a suggestive idea here, and one that again indicates the comprehensive and existing field of musical semiotics. Any agreed form of analysis which does not change in method from one application to another holds out the promise of a definitive stylistics. Seriation in fact makes an analytical as much as a stylistic claim. This is a significant interpre- tation in view of the general opinion that stylistic continuity is not the essence of style in music. As Lidov has noted, style may be an essen- tially fuzzy concept in any case.32 This would also rule out the Meyer- Narmour model with its necessarily strict dichotomy of norm and deviation. Nattiez does not say anything different. "Semio-stylistics," he writes, "builds a complex, irregular, multiform edifice."33 So per- haps we should forgive his enthusiasm for a formal stylistic model and underline the value of an informal practice. It is hard to underestimate the importance of a systematic inventory of structural variables for the kind of distributional stylistics that has made a healthy contribution to modern musicology. Nattiez could be accused of having failed to see that seriation does not explain the origins of our intuitions about musical immanence, and that a multitude of levels of pertinence does not in itself address the problem of what constitutes a specifically musical pertinence. But it is to his credit that sufficient weight is placed on the need to keep a model of musical structure within the realm of epistemology. He incorporates within his model a poten-

32 P. 47. 33 Fondements, p. 10.

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tially infinite number of different levels of pertinence, each constitut- ing a different interpretant in the Peircean [referring to Charles Sand- ers Peirce] sense, while at the same time allowing the criteria of pertinence to be drawn from empirically accessible areas. This is possible, according to Nattiez, by including the whole cultural back- ground within the range of possible interpretants through the means of seriation. In this way, the model is really a methodological one, paving the way for the use of analytical techniques which, if used individually, would be unacceptable.

This indication of a deeper kind of consistency in Nattiez's work was taken up most explicitly by Laske, who seemed to be struck above all by the broad methodological strength of Fondements.34 If we ask once again what there really is to be understood in this respect, it is inevitable that some assessment of the semiotic bases of the work be sought, not only in terms of their intact characteristics, but also as they appear to work against the background of semiotics in general.

Nattiez's tripartitional musicology takes the lion's share of his conceptual framework, and here he has to articulate the semiotic background in various ways to convey some sense of the scope and depth of the idea. The tripartition is located by analogy with a long list of ideas from other disciplines, for instance with the articulatory, acoustic, and auditive levels of phonetics; but also in a genuinely interdisciplinary sense with Prague linguistics, Levi-Straussian an- thropology, and Chomskian linguistics (which correspond to neutral, esthesic, and mixed poietic and esthesic levels respectively). None of this can disguise the suspicion that, as with Barthes's codes of rhetoric, we are dealing with a normative hermeneutics. The clearest expres- sion of this appears in an article where Nattiez argues back from analytical method to the tripartition: As soon as an analysis explicates its own criteria, it cannot fail to encounter [the] three dimensions, because the reasons for considering particular units of a musical work to be paradignatically equivalent are based on a phenomenon of perceptive association, on a knowledge of the equivalences allowed by the composer, or on both at the same time.35

The semiotic component of this hermeneutics is our ability to break the music into its constitutive segments, ideally perhaps into Roman

34 Op. (it. 35

"TIhe Contribution of Musical Semiotics to the Semiotic Discussion in General," in A Perfusion of Signs, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Bloomington, 1977), p. 134.

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Music and Semiotics

Jakobson's "ultimate, discrete, strictly patterned components."36 But it may be a random step to go from the necessarily autonomous type of musical structure implied by neutral level operations to the binary aesthetic world of the poietic and the esthesic. Transmission and reception make a convenient hypothesis for a theory of communica- tion, which can embrace linguistic signs and auditory or visual signs imparting information either of the same kind or in the same way. It has never been shown that music is a system of communication that is essentially similar to these other, legitimate areas of semiotic study. Nor can it be certain that the transmission-reception hypothesis will work, or could be expected to work for music. It is no accident that the bulk of original thought in Fondements concerns the neutral level, not the programmatic polarization of the musicological tripartition.

Nattiez may now be prepared to consider a more empirical ap- proach to the communication model which should, doubtless, be there to support the neutral level. This tendency might be discerned in another semiotic basis, that of sign typology. From the outset Nattiez recognized that existing typologies are not adequate for a music semiotics.37 They can of course be used to some benefit as hypotheses, in the manner that Wilson Coker has investigated the musical rele- vance of Peirce's typology.38 And this leads to a further basis, for, if music semiotics has to construct its own typology of signs, it must also construct its own theory of sign function. In Fondements, the Peircean triangle of sign, object, and interpretant is supposed to underpin the whole enterprise. How this is so remains unclear from most points of view, except that a process of unending semiosis, of a limitless chain of interpretants for any sign and sign object, provides a convenient model for music's structural multiplicity, for the multiplicity of aes- thetic response, and finally for its semantic indeterminacy.

Naturally, therefore, the disciplinary basis of Nattiez's semiotics, the relation between linguistics and musical speculation, is princi- pally a methodological investigation. Nattiez makes four broad con- clusions: that functional models in linguistics may be helpful insofar as music also seems to reveal an autonomous level of organization; that the phonological model relying on a specific theory of double articulation may correspond with the specific musical model which

36 Selected Writings, II (The Hague, 1972), 337. 37 Fondements, p. 27. 38 Music and Meaning: A Theoretical Introduction to Musical Aesthetics (London, 1972).

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The Musical Quarterly

distinguishes between structure and esthesically pertinent structure; that a comparative semiotics should consider every kind of linguistic model; and that the recourse to linguistics at least provides analogies where some kind of validation is possible-basically in terms of a dichotomy between structure and meaning. It is striking that none of this seems to derive from the tripartition, from a preferred sign typol- ogy, from the Peircean triangle, or indeed from the intentions of any linguist apart from Jakobson-whose comparisons of structuralist poetics and musicology have been only a minor diversion.

In the interests of a systematic approach, an attempt has been made here to separate the three matters which seem central in Fondements- bearing in mind that cultural determination is bound to create a different response for each reader. But at least this reveals that Fonde- ments did not expose a uniform discipline. First, its movement to- ward a theory of meaning can be understood only after the event. "If the interpretants constitute a universal fact," asks Nattiez, "what differ- ence is there between musical semantics and semiology?"39 Semiotics studies the total of symbolic associations, and it is on this information base that specific semantic studies may be possible. This does make a theory of meaning in the sense that we are supposed to distinguish between virtual structure and perceived structure, but Nattiez does not go so far as to say that virtual structure is strictly meaningless. All we can guess, then, is that the theory of meaning will become more refined to the extent that the art of studying symbolic associations becomes refined. This second position of Fondements surely is its great strength, since we have seen that it is just possible to believe that the art of studying symbolic associations has gained in refinement, thanks to Nattiez: of the growing analytical literature, few examples in any decade can claim as much. The third position, the semiotic status of all this varied type of inquiry, deserves a closing judgment.

Lidov asks at the end of his fine account of Fondements whether it is semiotics at all. Part of the answer is intriguing and suggestive: I should think that semioticians would not be content to accept the narrow technical concerns of music theory, traditional and taxonomic together, as adequately outlin- ing the problematics of the musical sign.40

This is certainly true in the sense that the narrow technical concerns of the particular fields of music theory and analysis raised by Nattiez

39 Fondements, p. 189. 40 P. 49.

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Music and Semiotics

barely touch on semiotic issues. But did Nattiez identify the central concerns of our tradition? The outstanding selective models of musi- cal structure have already been mentioned, voice-leading and pitch- class set analysis. Even though it is Meyer, and Meyer's aesthetics rather than his analytical program, that have received most attention from semioticians-although the case for viewing Schenker in this way is in its infancy,41 and although Forte seems to have been ignored so far-one might predict that we shall come to regard these elements of the so-called "narrow technical" tradition as more semiotic than the music semiotics of the seventies. It may be fair, then, to suggest that Nattiez's semiotics may come to be seen as partly exotic. That it offered a measure of analytical novelty and an exciting form of theoretical debate was welcome. That it was not clearly placed in the overwhelm- ing context assumed by its general audience was, perhaps, no more than a quirk of the first steps in a new and vital discipline.

41 Jonathan Dunsby and John Stopford, "The Case for a Schenkerian Semiotic," Music Theory Spectrum, III (1981).

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Article Contentsp. 27p. 28p. 29p. 30p. 31p. 32p. 33p. 34p. 35p. 36p. 37p. 38p. 39p. 40p. 41p. 42p. 43

Issue Table of ContentsThe Musical Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Winter, 1983), pp. 1-158Front MatterSchumann, Popularity, and the "Ouverture, Scherzo, und Finale," Opus 52 [pp. 1-26]Music and Semiotics: The Nattiez Phase [pp. 27-43]Ordering Problems in J. S. Bach's "Art of Fugue" Resolved [pp. 44-61]Applications of the History of Ideas to Music (II) [pp. 62-84]The "Dramatic Symphonies" of Berlioz as an Outgrowth of the French Operatic Tradition [pp. 85-103]Erik Satie and the Concept of the Avant-Garde [pp. 104-119]Reviews of BooksReview: untitled [pp. 120-125]Review: untitled [pp. 125-130]Review: untitled [pp. 130-134]Review: untitled [pp. 134-138]Review: untitled [pp. 138-144]Review: untitled [pp. 144-148]

Reviews of RecordsReview: untitled [pp. 149-152]

Quarterly Book List [pp. 153-156]Back Matter [pp. 157-158]