Chapter 1
Introduction
Esti Sheinberg
Viktor Franklās groundbreaking research into the Self is published in English under the title Manās Search for Meaning.1 Its original title,ā¦trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen is, nevertheless, more telling about this painfully meticulous portrayal of a persistent quest. This description of a psychological struggle with suffering, its transcendence and final transfiguration into a renewed and courageous existential stance, produced a new term: Logotherapy ā healing by meaning.
We live in a universe of meanings that we create and according to which we live. Paraphrasing Frankl, our life depends on our constantly challenging these meanings with questions, interpretations and analyses, all surrounded by infinite doubts. Certainties divide humankind; questions unite us. The constant search for signification, the very process of inquiry, makes our existence intentional ā and therefore meaningful.
The Universe of Musical Meaning
The area of meaning that the writers of this collection address is music, and the most important element that unites them all is their indebtedness, in one way or another, to the scholarship of Raymond Monelle. Were it not for the risk of being deemed banal (and lacking in keywords for search engines), this book could be titled The Posthumous Papers of the Dr Strabismus of Utrecht (whom God preserve) Club. Such title would honour Raymond Monelleās literary persona,2 his love for Charles Dickens and his rare gift of combining earnest (and razor-sharp unforgiving) analyses with a self-ironizing DoppelgƤngerās gaze at his own work. Indirectly, it would also allude to his diverse taste and overwhelming knowledge of literature, philosophy, history, art and music; in other words, of his being, first and foremost, a truly open-minded scholar.
In an academic world divided by findings, Raymond Monelle cherished search. His relentless study, scholarly integrity and unfashionable insistence on a civilized, respectful discourse inspired a generation of scholars. His courage to contemplate music as a signifying system reminded us of the true meaning of our own work, and his admirable determination to calmly stare into the abyss of musicās āabsent meaningā3 became thus a lesson in confronting Life.
Monelleās articles often started with a faint spotlight ā a teaser, maybe ā directed at some obscure corner of a musical work, a āsomethingā that no one had noticed before, mainly because it was, well, obvious. However, the narrow beam implied, this particular little detail did not quite fit in, was not quite right. Once defamiliarized, the specific element, nĆ©e Obvious, became Fascinating, a starting point for a new Thinking-Adventure. Reading his work meant engaging in an exciting game in which he was the Magister Ludi, the one who juggled the ever-moving, ever-changing spaces that weave the endless glass-beads of human thought. Never underestimating his readers, he built his story, developing a characteristically transparent narrative of the inquiry, and inviting us to a mental dialogue that offered no intellectual concession. This volume presents some phases of this dialogue.
Texts
The original subtitle of this collection was Texts on Music Semiotics. Borrowed from one of Monelleās most intricate essays, it highlighted a main keyword of his scholarship.4 To understand the nature of a musical text, he argued, one must first define what is a text. Puzzled by this ostensibly simple concept and inspired by French-thinking inquisitive minds such as Rousseau, Derrida and Tintin5 ā Monelle investigated the nature of texts in literature, poetry and music, and of music texts set to literature and poetry. His early thesis was written precisely on this relationship,6 and many of his later projects display this interest. Even his earliest paper, on BartĆ³kās purely instrumental Fourth String Quartet, focused on the meaningfulness of its musical structure.7
What is a text? āA text is a semiosis, something understoodā.8 A score can become a musical text ānot as performed, but as understood, its dialectics [between the signifier and signified ā ES] resolved into intelligibilityā.9 A text is not a thing; it is an interpretant, a part of a process. It exists only when interpreted. The book you hold is not a text; it becomes one only when it is read and understood.
Furthermore: a text is never a text. While its existence requires the meeting of two minds ā the originator of a message and its reader (or, as all of us well know, the two minds of one originator) ā any one message can become an infinite number of texts, interpretants produced by semiotic processes, tied by an infinite number of threads to an infinite number of other texts and other minds. A message is a promise for an ever-expanding web of possible significations: of perpetual, eternal semiosis, connecting between periods, places and people. Texts are communications between human minds, ad infinitum renewed and renewable.
Theory
The theory of semiotics stipulates the principles of signification. Monelle positions it at one pole of two different oppositions: in the first, it opposes all particular manifestations of readings, performances, or texts. Semiotics is a theory, and therefore it does not necessarily prescribe any particular method of communication or of sign reading. Unlike hermeneutics or any other type of interpretation, semiotics does not look at what is signified as much as it looks at how the signification process takes place.
The second opposition differentiates semiotics from any set of principles that carry value judgments. āSemiotics is innocentā: its queries and statements follow no ideology, no agenda. Therefore, āsemiotics threatens no oneā.10 As a theory, argues Monelle, semiotics is based on speculative and deductive thought rather than on inductive processes that characterize, for example, psychology, history or sociology. Examples and particular texts serve as case studies to validate and corroborate (or refute) its stipulations, which must remain clear of any a-priori values.
Being a series of principles that offer explanations for the phenomenon of signification, the semiotics of music explains how music signifies. While the phenomenon of music signification is intuitively familiar to each one of us, the theoretical basis on which its principles, ideas and postulates, as well as the criteria for their formation into sets or schemes, is still unfinalized, forming the subject of our quest for accurate definitions and lucid descriptions.
While our conviction that music signifies is indeed primarily based on intuition and observation, theoretical thought must be verified through critical processes, making sure that the principles of accuracy, impartiality and transparency are respected and followed at each step. Each point must ā and should ā be debatable. While acknowledging that no eye ā and no mind ā is innocent, the fact that no Grail of Innocence awaits us at the end of this road does not invalidate what this quest stands for. Insisting on scholarly rigour keeps us from falling into the deepest (and most cynically abused) pit of postmodern theory: the false claim that āanything goes since everything is just an interpretationā. Our research is geared precisely against entering that tempting comfort-zone; our strategy is based on the ethos of rationality.
Reading and writing semiotics is a merciless enterprise, particularly when the writers are, first and foremost, musicians. Focusing on facts and ideas, we are called to set aside our opinions, feelings, natural prejudices, and any immediate āgut reactionsā we were trained to trust in our musical encounters. Being open to discussion and to criticism is, therefore, a main postulate of this collection. The only way in which we can hone our analyses and improve our research is by exposing our thoughts and deliberations to comments and constructive criticism. In a field that is murky with overlapping and confusing terminologies, our aim is clarity of expression and thought.
Networks
Meaning is intermodal. The simplest pairing of a signifier and signified, inherent in the very idea of a sign, implies a web of inter-systemic correlations. As systems complicate, inter-systematic correlations become interdisciplinary networks. Being aural sign-systems that develop in time, musical works are by their very nature interconnected with other systems: dramatic, political and social narratives, historical contexts and rhetorical devices. Ignoring that music semiotics is based on intermodality necessarily misleads music interpretation. If a text is āsomething that is understoodā, then all the chapters in this volume are not only intermodal but also intertextual. Musicians writing about music need to be acquainted not only with literature, mythology, poetry, art and history, which so often are an inseparable part of a musical work, but also with a quite expansive array of philosophical, theological, psychological, linguistic and sociological studies. Monelle wrote on works by Bach, Barthes, BartĆ³k, Baudelaire, Debussy, Derrida, Greimas, Jakobson, Mahler, Maxwell-Davies, Metastasio, Molino, Nattiez, Peirce, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Wagner and Žižek ā to mention only a few. We write about music and poetry and learn about the connection between music and movement while wondering about the relationship between music and facial expressions. We engage in the study of opera, literature, mathematics, history, zoology, computers, film and what not, looking for ways in which these systems of signification might relate to ours. Led by the nature of music no less than by our ā slightly arrogant, letās admit ā curiosity, we tend to roam through various fields of inquiry. More often than not, we are lucky and grateful to encounter sympathetic minds, our own Virgils and Beatrices.
The interrelationship between music and literature was among the first to be explored in studies of music signification. Its centuries-old roots lie in poetic verse theories, but the evolution of these studies āfrom so simple a beginningā (as Darwin might have said), is staggering. Monelleās interest in the dramatic power of music expanded to its relation to lyrical poetry; his later writings are often related to musicās own semantic meaning, but never neglect the manifold interconnections of music with the literary arts.11 Meanwhile, GrabĆ³cz and Tarasti developed studies of musicās narrativity, based on literary theories of Greimas and Propp.12 Other studies, like those by Hatten, Spitzer and myself, focused on specific areas of the intermodal semantic universe: theories of mus...