“If you understood everything I said, you’d be me”.
Perhaps he assumed that he is the only one who could know or determine the meaning of what he said or played? But being Miles is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding what he said or played.
Granted that he could have meant something that he failed to express? But what he said is arguably what he expressed, and expressions are public and possible for others to understand.
Davis’s whispering speech, however, is often barely comprehensible (because of damaged vocal cords). A listener must pay attention to tone, breath, rhythm, or gestures. Like music. His playing, however, is often highly articulate, clear, and charitable in its melodic phrasing.
This inversion raises the aesthetic question: What constitutes “understanding” of sonic events in non-verbal art forms such as music?
None verbal art forms, such as music will depend on each individual who hears it based on the colmination of understaning, reference and qualia in their mind.
Even people listing to the same type of music or even the same song will feel and understand it differently.
The meaning and understanding of none verbal music or anything else may lie in the art, but will be understood differently by different people, especially in how they relate to the music through, as one example, life experiences and memories.
Just because people like the same art, doesn’t mean they understand and relate to it exactly the same.
The way we experience none verbal art, may also, even, be based on our genetics or genetic memory, or our unique and personal prefrance for frequencies or visual exposure preferences, which in turn may be based on our biology.
Big topic, thanks. Simple answer: interpretation, hermeneutics. With music, I’m especially interested in whether such interpretation produces meaning in any literal sense.
Perhaps the converse? From a sound’s property (e.g. a minor chord) which it literally has, we can reliably produce, and reproduce, metaphorical interpretations (e g. sadness).
I believe sounds literally possess properties which can be identified syntactically without appealing to particular interpretations.
I’d say that as a rule, meaning lies in the interaction between the work and the audience. In that sense, the creator’s thoughts and intents are a sort of second order consideration.
I once saw someone ask online if Inigo Montoya eventually became The Dread Pirate Roberts in reference to the film adaptation of The Princess Bride. For context, this might be the film I’ve seen most in my nearly 60 year life. I can recite much of it, word for word, off the top of my head (and annoyingly do when the opportunity arises). When I read the question, my immediate reaction was “Well of course he does!”. Then I rewatched the appropriate scene, and when the offer was made, he simply gave a thoughtful sort of shrug. Now I still hold a strong belief that in the fictional world, the fictional swordsman did adopt the role of the fictional pirate. I think that was the intent of the author, or at least of the film-maker, and can conjure very smart sounding (if I do say so myself) justifications for that belief. I think it’s an interesting question to ponder to what degree we might say I’m right or wrong in the belief I hold.
I think we can fairly say something like “Kryptonite doesn’t affect Superman” is plainly false, even though it is entirely fictional. I don’t even think this is limited to explicitly narrative art. I think we might even be able to say something like “the third movement in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 14, Op. 27, No. 2 is laid back and relaxed” is false.
Then you might like Nelson Goodman on metaphorical truths?
According to Goodman, a metaphor is literally false, but statements can be metaphorically true or false depending on how a predicate is applied (across different domains).
Yes. We can describe that minor chord using a very precise syntax. And it (pretty much) literally has the properties we name. So would you want to say that the modern Western interpretation of the minor mode as very broadly “evoking” or “referring to” sadness or imperfection is any way what the syntactical item means? I’m not asking, must it mean sadness – perhaps that’s conventional – but whether in so interpreting the chord or mode, we can refer to the result as a meaning.
Well, to say that a sound is “sad” would be literally false, but the meaning of a sound is not like the meaning of a word.
What there is for us to hear is the syntactic item, not an interpretation. We hear it under conditions of satisfaction, a specific use-context, where a minor chord sounds sad because its property (e.g. falling) is shared in our ideas (or experiences) of sadness in the same use-context.
But a minor chord can also sound “sad” across many contexts in which it has a history of fulfilling that function. Ruth Millikan’s teleosemantic view might be relevant here.
But to say that the word “sad” is literally sad would also be false. Both the word and the chord seem to refer to sadness rather than enact or embody it. Also see Peter Kivy’s philosophy of music, where he talks about music as depicting.
So I think the question remains: We can say that the word “sad” means sad, but does a minor chord also mean “sad”?
Everything else you say concerns the topic, also an interesting one, of how the “sad” association arises in the first place. But my question precedes that; I’m asking whether any of this apparatus should be considered a matter of meaning. If we decided for some reason that an augmented 6th chord evoked or depicted “ice cream,” would that be claiming that the chord meant “ice cream” in the same way that the words “ice cream” do?
Yes, but in different ways. The word denotes what it means (the relation goes in one direction, from the word to what it means). The chord, however, refers by exemplification (the relation goes in both directions). The sound of the chord possesses some recognizable property it shares with appearances of sadness (e.g. falling, moving sluggishly, speaking heavily, like in grief).
No, it neither evokes nor depicts ice cream. Perhaps we could be conditioned so that the sound evokes thoughts or a desire for ice cream. The sound is then used more like a word.
But the syntactic sound-event doesn’t seem to possess a recognizable property shared in appearances of ice cream (e.g. a “frozen” or “dripping” property different from plain ice, cream, water, oil etc).
Any word could have been made to denote what ‘sadness’ denotes, but a “sad” sound must possess the relevant property to mean sad.
The property is used across domains, not unlike how a predicate is used across domains in a metaphor.
Sadly I’ve nothing to add but a favourite passage from scripture
Nevertheless, I think expression has an importance, even for a formalist, that Boretz overlooks. Admittedly, saying that a musical work is sad - like saying that it is long or rather loud - is pretty vacuous; but this is because sadness, like length or loudness, is a commonplace, obvious, and general property, so that its ascription to a work provides little interesting information. And while sadness - like length and loudness - is indeed a consequence of the detailed make-up of the work, the converse does not hold. Works differing widely in detail may all have the same property of sadness; and the common structural property, the literal correlate of sadness, is not easily specified. To describe a work or passage as muscular, electric, spatial, curvilinear, brittle or floating may be to describe metaphorically some recondite and highly important structural features. The notion of the structure of a work is as specious as the notion of the structure of the world. A work, like the world, has as many different structures as there are ways of organizing it, of subsuming it under categorical schemata, dependent on some or other structural affinities with and differences from other works. What seems a definitive structural description may ignore some of the most significant patterns. We may overlook trees for woods, or woods for trees, or groves for either; we may overlook themes for notes; and we may examine every part of a picture without grasping subtle, or even gross, features of composition or design. Understanding a work involves the discovery, the recognition, of unobvious patterns. The requisite breaching of barriers established by habit and literal language often occurs through the importation of schemata from a foreign realm. New likenesses and differences, new relationships and patterns, are thus revealed, and are described by the metaphorical application of these alien terms. Theoretically, these metaphors can be supplanted by complex literal descriptions, but even as metaphors, they are in effect descriptions of structural features. Briefly, the feelings a work expresses are properties it has, not because the work literally has feelings, but because the feeling terms applied are metaphorical descriptions of structural (or other) properties the work has and exemplifies. Only at the risk of overlooking important structural features of a work can a formalist ignore what the work expresses.
(Reply to Benjamin Boretz, Problems and Projects, p 126.)
Some items symbolize by referring to certain properties of their own. Such items are said to exemplify the properties they both possess and refer to.
… To identify the properties it exemplifies, we need to know the system it belongs to.
… To understand a work we need to know not just what properties it has, but which of them it exemplifies.
(Goodman, Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy, p 19.)
The meaning of a harmonic property can simply be the property, or what emerges when it’s heard in the context of previous or following properties.
I imagine that’s how a symbol system is established? From syntactic items and their properties, we compose music and systems in which the works make sense and are understood.
What the relevant property and meaning of a work of art is, might often seem arbitrary or epistemically subjective. Less so if there’s a system it belongs to.
Many or most animals seem to be born with abilities to identify the relevant properties of a sound or appearance (in their specific systems).
A side note, regarding the previously mentioned teleosemantic view, as an undergraduate I briefly saw Millikan at a lecture, and I happened to mention Goodman, but she dismissed him outright as being “very wrong”.
Interesting OP. I listen, or at least used to listen, to a great deal of classical music and jazz, but no pop. I’ve never assumed that I understand the music in any literal sense. Or have any experience that resembles the composer’s intention. It is intelligible to me in some way, owing in part to my exposure to Western musical traditions, but what it primarily does is create emotional impressions that resonate with my aesthetic preferences.
When I hear Mahler or Shostakovich, I hear music that sounds like the world as I understand and experience it. But there is no narrative, and whatever the composer may have intended is of little consequence to my experience. When I listen to Miles Davis (depending on the period), I’m simply listening to jazz that I enjoy. A Silent Way pleases me more than Bitches Brew mainly because the former is what I look for in Jazz, the latter, while modernist apotheosis, does nto satisfy me as often.
Say some more about music as a language of shared understanding.
Exposure to a tradition can help you identify the relevant property in a work, which in turn can help you understand its function in the work or in the tradition.
For example, it’s easy to identify a jazz tune because of its syncopated rythm. Without previous exposure to the tradition, you’d hear the rythm, but have no clue of its relevance or function.
When Miles got tired of the “8 bars and here comes the break shit”, he invented modal jazz. Knowing it helps us understand the music, which in turn influences our responses and preferences.
Also our emotional responses help us understand what it is that we’re hearing. The music may resonate, please, surprise, impress, provoke, or make us happy or sad etc depending partly on the physical properties of the sounds,and partly on our knowledge of what they mean (e.g. sadness).
One explanation of how such knowledge is possible is that the sound possesses a property shared in appearances of sadness (e.g. falling, slow, heavy as in grief).
This presupposes a Kivy-like framework in which there is an objective reason why a syntactic property evokes a semantic one. As it happens, I agree with Kivy and you about this, but my question is different: Granted all of that, does the minor mode mean sadness, or does it only evoke or depict it?
That’s an interesting way of putting it. Do you mean that you’re unable to discern the composer’s intentions, if any, and so they’re of no consequence to your own experience, or, more radically, that you’re able to discern something of those intentions in the music, but they don’t matter to your experience?
A chord without its sound would be meaningless, and the sound is not detached from its possible meanings. A meaningless sound wouldn’t be a sound even.
The sound of a minor mode possesses several properties, including a property referred to by the word ‘sadness’.
It is in this sense that it means sadness, not in every use-context, but in contexts where sadness makes sense, e.g. funerals, heartbreak etc.
That sounds about right to me. It preserves a distinction I believe is important, between the semantic uses of words versus other signifiers. We don’t talk about the word or term “sadness” possessing any properties.
The sound of the word, however, does seem to possess a property by which it can be recognized and distinguished from the sounds of other words.
Speakers recognise the word regardless of whether it’s said with a foreign accent, a regional dialect, a speech impairment etc. These differences are unimportant for identifying the word and understand what is said.
In music, however, each different performance of one and the same minor chord can give it more or less different variations of sadness.
That doesn’t mean we are unaffected by how a word is said. There is no such thing as speech devoid of affect, because speech is a kind of articulated music. Hearers recognize a song regardless of how it is played, but it is always played in a new context.
