Ed McDonald On Musical Meanings And Their "Re-expression"

Edward McDonald wrote to: sys-func on 20 Nov 2023, at 09:59:

As for language being able to "re-express" musical meanings, my reading of many reviews of performances, as well as screeds of scholarly expositions of musical styles and meanings, has left me deeply sceptical of any such possibility. Certainly aspects of a particular semiotic system can be "re-realised" (?) in another semiotic — as the custom of setting words to music clearly shows — but even in such cases, the musical tends to express meanings that language doesn't, or at least doesn't do so easily, and vice versa.

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, the fact that music does not express socially agreed meanings would suggest that music is not a social semiotic system, and the fact that the meanings of music cannot be identified — e.g. what are the meanings of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells and how are those meanings realised? — suggests that music is not a semiotic system at all.

Instead, if music is viewed in terms of Halliday's linear taxonomy, it is a system of social value that is not construed symbolically. Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 507, 509):

As we conceive of it, the term "semiotic" is framed within a linear taxonomy of "physical — biological — social — semiotic"; … A biological system is a physical system with the added component of "life"; it is a living physical system. In comparable terms, a social system is a biological system with the added component of "value" … . A semiotic system, then, is a social system with the added component of "meaning". Meaning can be thought of (and was thought of by Saussure) as just a kind of social value; but it is value in a significantly different sense — value that is construed symbolically. … Semiotic systems are social systems where value has been further transformed into meaning.

But music differs from the systems of value in other social species — e.g. whalesong, birdsong — in that it is made by linguate beings, who can complement music with the social semiotic that is language (lyrics), represent music socio-semiotically (notation), and evolve its value potential through the social semiotic that is language (realising music theory).

It is because music cannot be modelled as a social semiotic system that McDonald feels the need to redefine what constitutes a semiotic system.

[2] To be clear, Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 509) claim that language is the only semiotic system into which all other semiotic systems can be "translated". McDonald could not be making these meanings with any social semiotic other than language.

[3] To be clear, this is not the re-expression of the meanings of one semiotic system in another semiotic system. It is simply the complementation of language and music.

[4] To be clear, if music really did express meanings, McDonald would be able to draw a system network of musical meanings that specified how such meanings are expressed in musical sounds.