Saturday, March 8, 2008

Text/Sound/Music.2

Want to keep expanding the scope of this before I nail down a direction. As I hinted at the end, we can talk about the "tonal" perspective on harmony, or the 12-tone perspective on harmony. Broadly (perhaps too much so), the former says the rules are written in the heavens, the latter says the rules are written by the composer (anew, each time they compose). Which of these do we think spoken language is like? It's likely that very few people think words or their respective significance obtain independently of our use of them (that words float around in space and we discover them and their meaning, as opposed to making them up when we need them), which is the strong claim of some traditional and contemporary tonal theorists. Maybe fewer think we can remake the rules of language anew each time we use them, which is one way to interpret the 12-tone system.

With these variables in play, the variables of conventional meaning opposed to absolute meaning, the functioning of the parts of either "language", tonal system or symbol system, get increasingly complex. Lots of ink has been spilled in the philosophy of language and ethics over the notion of conventional meaning (I'll drop into some specifics at a later date). Music theorists, not particularly concerned with a semantics of music, have focused more on whether a piece must have a tonal center. Suppose we refine our analogy to talk not about note names (C, D, E, etc) but about note functions (tonic, supertonic, median, etc). Then we might have a world wherein notes could stand in for morphemes, relative to whatever key we are in.

North Indian sargam, the syllables meant for the training of raga singers, have features something like this. What we call the fourth scale degree is called "Ma" in sargam in part because practicioners of that music agree that the fourth is feminine in some important respect. The fifth is called "Pa" for parallel reasons relating to its masculinity. I'm not sure it's accurate to say that there is semantic content attached to every syllable, but we might, as a thought experiment, imagine a melody sung in these syllables as at once a denotation of musical values and a significant, symbolic bit of language. How rich would this language be? Not very, if we detach the value of the note from our transcription. But if we take the actual sounding of the note to be part of the meaning, if the sound itself is significant, than the language is exactly as rich as the music (I'm almost tempted to say "as our experience of the music", but that feels dangerous).

What does this expansion do to our notion of meaning?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

so i read this once, let it stew, then read again, and this is what i got:

first off, I know that I have, for ever since I can remember playing trumpet (piano not as much), have associated masculinity and femininity with particular notes: C, C#, F (a red note) and F# (also red) are female, G, G#, Ab, Gb, Bb, D, Db are male, A and B are androgynous. whats more is that I have associated other, nearly-non-describable characteristics with the other notes: C is very basic, foundational, but almost shy about it; B is tentative, eccentric maybe, but able to be strong in its own tonality, and also seems purple to me; E seems to be especially temperamental (maybe this is its connection to so many half-steps, more so than others, or maybe its due to its need to change tuning in C major chords). I suspect that these things have evolved over time, but I do remember some of them coming up very early. also, the descriptions are related to fingerings, and descriptions of the same notes in different octaves are different. chew on that.

second, if you are proposing a modular (morphemic?) language to be assembled from the incredibly simple and basic tonality functions (there are only 12), I would argue that your "alphabet" is too limited. In western music, although there are accepted devices (antecedent and consequent phrasing, song forms, cadencing, etc) there is incredible range for meaning in that tonality only has meaning in aggregate, and then only very subjectively. like I said before, the "madrigalisms" (not my expression!) of the late renaissance are the closest I can think of there being specific melodic or harmonic tendancies for specific textual chunks (i.e. falling voice on the word "death"). since then, though, I think there has been little codification of meaning of the type that I think you are describing, and largely for the reason that such an attempt would (as ppl eventually realized in the renaissance) limit your creative options without commensurate gains in listener understanding.

this is not to say it can't be done; there must just be a little deeper methodology to be found.

Dillon Westbrook said...

You're ahead of me on two counts. The note names in sargam are key relative, i.e. any note could be "ma" in the same way that any note could be the fourth. The characters have to do with their resonance against a drone which is always present in that music (it is a harmonic character). The notion of absolute pitches and their respective characters is often expressed by those who have, or who have developed, perfect pitch.

The analogy in that case to words or morphemes might be, on the surface, even stronger, but of course one runs quickly into the difficulty you outline here: there are at least 100 morphemes in any natural language (for English it's hundreds of thousands) and only a dozen or so absolute pitches in most musical languages (more in West African music, or North Indian music than in European music).

I still need to research the madrigal example, but there have been other attempts at 1:1 relationships. If you code letters in the English alphabet to note functions, as opposed to absolute pitches, you can (and people have) come up with stand-ins for all 26 letters. Thus the use of F# in a passage in the key of C Maj. would be distinct from F# in a section of the same piece that had modulated to D Maj, providing code for two distinct letters. Of course, the best you can do with this is slowly spell out words to an extremely specialized audience (other composers who know the trick).

Other examples are the coded musical language invented around the French revolution (I don't know a ton about it, but I know there's literature out there), and the "talking drum" practices from Africa that also show up in slave rebellions in the Americas (most famously Haiti) as a long-distance way to get information across (for the purpose of overthrowing slave masters!).

Eventually, though, all of this coding becomes cumbersome to both composition and language use, and almost always gets abandoned when not necessary.