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101
ANTHONYPRYER
II
Perhapswe should begin such a dialoguewith the
'totalsocialfact' (p. ix). We are told (p. 34, n. 33) assertionthat music is a
that Nattiezborrowedthis
phrasefromthe workof the Frenchanthropologist
MarcelMauss,whosemost
famouswork, Essaisur le don (1925), examinedthe
functionsof the exchangeof gifts within society. Theutilitarianand symbolic
'total social fact' is repeatedfrequentlythroughout notion that music is a
seemsobviousto assumethatit mustbe an initiatingNattiez's book and so it
his argument.But what,exactly,does this notion and governingconceptin
mean and how does it relate
to the detailof Nattiez'sinvestigations?
There is, of course, some difficulty with the
concept of a 'fact'.
Traditionally,this termhas been used to referto something
or empiricallydecidable.It is often contrasted directlyobservable
with conceptssuch as 'fiction'
and 'evaluation',thoughphilosophershave been
the implicationsof these distinctionsof late.2 gettingmore nervousabout
Nevertheless, the word 'fact'still
tendsto implya descriptionof how the worldis
thanhow it might be construedor evaluatedby generallyagreed to be, rather
sundryindividuals.We can
probablyall agreethat, as Nattiez says (pp. 74-5),
cycleat Bayreuthin 1976, and that this eventis a Boulez conducteda Ring
of the word. But what of Boulez's assertions 'fact',at least in some sense
(reportedon p. 138) that the
structural characteristics he describesin his analysisof TheRiteof Sprzng
there, and I don't care whether they were put 'are
there consciously or
unconsciously,or with what degree of acuteness they
composer's]understanding'? informed [the
Do these structuresform part of the total social
factthat is music?
Nattiez comes face to face with this problemwhen he
refusalto classifychordsin his Coursdecomposition. discussesd'Indy's
Nattieztells us that
nothing prevents us from ... describing
superimpositions of notes
empiricallypresent, according to a given, culturally
stock' [here he means the Western harmonic established 'taxonomic
system], and thus recognizing
within d'Indy's works the presence of ... chords
that he himself would not
have acknowledged. (pp. 21 4-15)
Interestingly
enough,however,when he describessuch features,he
callthem harmonic facts, but harmonic does not
'phenomena' (p. 214). This
description,
unlikethe notion of 'facts',suits Nattiez'sgeneral
since it focuses on what is perceivedby the mind (or purposesmuch
better
a
thanwhatis supposedto be 'out there'.3Asthe book culturalgroup)
rather
aninevitable shift away from the notion of progresses
thereis
'fact' towards that of
'phenomenon', especiallyin Chapter4 ('The Statusof the SoundObject')
in
Chapter6 ('The Objectof MusicAnalysis'). and
Again,it is not difficultto establishthe less than
completeappropriateness
D
Blackwell
Publishers Ltd. 1996
MusicAnalysis,
15/i (1996)
NATTIEZ'S MUSICAND DISCOURSE 105
III
We should now turn from anthropologyto semiology. Most attempts at
semiologybegin with the conceptof the 'sign'and Nattiezfollowsconvention
in this respect. He begins with a quotation from one of the founders of
semiology,Ferdinandde Saussure(1983):
the linguistic sign unites not a thing and a name, but a concept and a
sound image. The latter is not the material sound - a purely physical thing
- but the psychological imprint of the sound, the impression it makes on
our senses ... I call the combination of concept and sound-image a sign ...
and ... replace concept and sound-imagerespectivelyby signifiedand signifier
(PP. 34).
So,for Saussure,all of these thingsseem to be mentalevents.Whenthe word
'music'is spoken (a specific utterancelike this is given the term parole) it
makesan impressionon our minds (that is, it becomes a signifier).It then
unitesin our minds with concepts (signifieds)drawnfrom our background
cultureand our culture-specificlanguagestructure(known as lang2Xe). Thus
thesound-imageand conceptscome togetherto signalour notion of music- a
(S)(D(S *- (D *-
1 / /
diagram the 'object' seems worryingly concrete and singular considering the
range of interpretants acting upon it, presumably at different times. Also, so
far as one can tell from Peirce's statement, the sign does not 'refer' to the
interpretant, it brings the interpretant into relation with the object; in fact,
there is a sense in which the arrows in Fig. 1 between the sign and the
interpretants seem to be going the wrong way. Moreover, Peirce seems to be
suggesting that the interpretants are brought into relation with the object via
the sign, not directly and independently.
IV
All in all, this diagram, which stands as the seminal iconic representation of
Nattiez's view of the way in which the 'dynamic' sign works, presents us with a
number of problems which can hardly help us to follow Nattiez's explanation-
model in any detail. In order to get further with the argument, therefore, I
present an alternativeview of the operation of the 'dynamic' sign, one which I
hope will show more clearly the explanation problems that Nattiez has to face
(Fig. 2). For the sake of argument, I have taken the example of how the sign
for 'music' might imply different things for different observers.
The first aspect of the new diagram which differs from Nattiez's plan is that
the raw data (what we might call 'instigating object') is separated from the
object as eventually perceived, shown as connotations 1, 2 and 3. Of course
these perceptual objects are each different. In the diagram, the adjacent
connotations overlap only a little (and connotations 1 and 3 not at all), but in
any given society or culture there would presumably be a fairly large overlap
between all connotations, though this is difficult to represent diagrammatically
at this level of detail.
Secondly, the signifier, the signifieds and the sign have been preserved as
events that take place in our minds. The physical, spoken words tparoles) are
not the signifiers as such: the signifiers are what we each, individually, sense
about such utterances. This means that someone else could speak the words
'This is music', but not until they are received by our own brain do they
become signifiersfor us, and it is at that point that we put them together with
our notions, our signifieds, and produce our own sign for the term 'music'. Of
course, since we live in collective cultures, our signifiers and signifieds will
probablyhave much in common with those of others in our community.
Finally, although there is probably going to be a good deal of common
material between connotations 1, 2 and 3, this agreement cannot be
guaranteed by the system as such. Nattiez quite rightly insists that 'Semiology
is not the science of communication' (p. 15). It is not entirely clear in the
book, but presumably we are to understand 'communication' to mean
something along the lines of: a non-accidental correlation between the
ANTHONY PRYER
110
r----------------------___________n
DATA
' Vibrationsin the air/
< relatedartefacts/
, relatedbehavioursand events/
(Sense / | relatedstates of mind
\ data)
L_ / ___________________________J
Person
(Sense
data)
/ / (Sense
[Parole 11 [Languel / data)
intended message and the received message, such that the non-accidental
correlation is facilitated by the transmission system. Since, however, our own
notions (signifieds) subtly colour the incoming information, exact correlation
is unlikely even in a perfectly efficient system. Of course, communication can
happen, and this is presumably what makes Nattiez say towards the end of the
book that 'semiology is not necessarilythe science of communication' (p. 237,
my italics); this seems to mean that the things which semiology examines can
sometimes produce communications, rather than that semiology should treat
these things as if communication is their business.
Having presented the scheme in Fig. 2 we can now get down to examining
its implications. Although I have taken the example of how the sign for 'music'
might be produced, concepts of a slightly less general nature could equally be
implanted into the diagram, for example, 'Beethoven's "Pastoral"Symphony'
or 'The "Tristan" Chord'. The first thing that we want to know is: what
exactly is the relationship between the perceived objects (the things in the
connotation boxes) and the raw data (the 'instigating objects', as I called them
earlier)?There are really two parts to this question. The first is: where is the
real object? This is a question about the ontology, the mode of existence, of a
thing. For example: 'Where is the real "Beethoven's Sixth Symphony"?'.The
second part of the question is: what makes us decide that the raw data can be
collected into a single, identifiable thing here? This is a question about how we
make definitions. For example: 'How do we decide what is music?'.
It is rather diff1cult to get a clear idea of Nattiez's answer to the first
question about the mode of existence of a musical work, particularly as he
describes his construction of the tripartitionas being 'based on an ontological
prejudice' (p. 174). Certainly he seems not to agree with Ingarden, for whom
'the work is ... immutable and permanent' (p. 69), and who 'all but ignores
the music of the oral tradition' (p. 71). In fact, while Ingarden did believe the
work to be immutable, he did not assert that it was therefore permanent,
because he recognised that some artworks (for example, Leonardo's Leda and
the Szvan) have been destroyed forever, and so the opportunity for readings
('concretizations') of them is now gone: 'the work of art constitutes an
aesthetic object only when it is expressed in a concretization' (Ingarden 1973:
372). Ironically enough, Ingarden's separation of the material work from the
various and multiple aesthetic objects we might imagine in its presence has not
a little in common with Nattiez's notion of the 'dynamic' sign, in spite of the
latter's resistance to his ideas.
In his chapter on 'The Concept of the Musical Work', Nattiez does give a
direct example of his position in relation to the case of Beethoven's Sixth
Symphony. He says that 'When we recognize "PastoralSymphony", we do not
make a connection to the thing in itself, but to a certain number of relevant
constants that recur from one performance to another' (p. 86). But there are
two difficulties with this statement. Firstly the 'constants that recur' are
presumably the things that tell us that something is repeated, and that the
repeated thing is something we have labelled 'Beethoven's Sixth Symphony'
rather than another work. They do not tell us what kind of a thing it is; in
other words, they are what philosophers would call markers of its
individuation, not explanations of its mode of existence. Secondly, the
reference to 'relevant constants' simply begs the question: relevant to what? To
a shadowy notion of 'the thing in itself' to which we are supposed not to be
making a connection? In fact, Nattiez's statement simply leads us on to the
question of who or what is doing the defining, that is, towards his position on
the problem of definition ratherthan that of ontology.
Of course, half the problem of trying to define a work, or even music itself,
is not the classification of common material but rather the formal problem of
how to make a definition. This problem is never addressed directly by Nattiez
although most of the common approaches are tried. When defining narrative
behaviour in music, for example, Nattiez insists on 'two necessary and
suff1cientconditions' (p. 128) before the activity can be deemed to be taking
place. When an attempt is made to define Stockhausen's Klavierstuck XI, on
the other hand, it is 'intention' that holds sway (p. 86). Again, when the
listener has to decide whether two performances are of the same work they are
urged to seek some 'family resemblance' (p. 85) between the two events. This
term comes from Wittgenstein,9and the force of it is to urge us not to worry if
phenomena at different ends of a spectrum seem unconnected because, by a
process of 'creeping resemblance' between adjacent members, both ends can
be seen to be connected after all - that is, they do form a family- and so we
can use this as a model for definition-making.As a metaphor, however, this is
misleading, because the only reason why one might wonder at the disparate
physical attributes of an extended family is because one already knows that
they are a family, that they are genetically connected. The 'familiness' is not
guaranteed by the 'resemblance' but rather by the underlying genetic
connection which has already been proved. There are lessons in this for a
system that tries to establish communalities by invoking an infinite chain of
referencesbetween signs.
Two further features of Fig. 2 now need to be addressed. Firstly, is each of
the signs (with its different connotations) equally valid whatever it refers to?
Nattiez comes up against this problem when he imagines John Cage saying
'chess match, I baptize you concerto' (p. 53), but it is also present when we
think of the variety of things that have been considered part of music at
differenttimes and in different societies. Behind this problem is the possibility
that 'what music is' can simply be arbitrarilydecided by any group or any
society. This 'institutional aspect' (p. 43) of music is problematic in relation to
its artistic import, and an attempt has been made to address this problem via
C)
Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1996 MusicAnalysis,
15/i (1996)
NATTI EZ ' S M ussc A ND DISCOURSE 113
the so-called 'institutional' theory of art (see Dickie 1974). This theory, in one
form or another, infiltrates some of the arguments in Nattiez's book as well as
much anthropologicalthinking on the subject.
Actually, there is probably not a problem if a particular group wants to
decide that a particular activity will be called 'music'; they will simply have a
set of experiences that relate to that activity in a particular way. Eating
bananas may be 'music' to some societies, but I doubt that their experience of
that will be like our experience of the BrandenburgConcertos, though it might
still be 'artistic'.The real problem comes when a single, particularsociety (say,
Western Europe in 1990) wants to say not that something unusual should now
be the general thing that we think of as 'music', but that anythingcan come
into the fold of music. At this point the institutional theory of art ceases to tell
us anything. To the question 'can anything be artistic?' there are only two
possible answers. If the answer is 'yes' then we cannot be dealing with an
institutional theory of art, because any artefact or attitude can qualify and so
we will never learn what might be distinctive about 'art' as such. If the answer
is 'no' then there are limits on what the community alone can decide and so
we do not, in the end, have an institutionalexplanation of art.l In general the
book does not pick up on the distinction between those societies which might
want something different from us to be music, and those who might want
anything and everyiing to be music. All relativismsare not the same.
For those that want anythingto be music, then, the specificity of music, the
specificity of artistic experience, the careful and particular use of concepts
(which is the only way we have of stopping all sensations from being the same
one) - all of these are not only lost, they become meaningless. That is why, in
Fig. 2, there already has to be some cultural selection in the raw data box
itself, that is to say, some limitation on the things we are even willing to
consider as being potentially music. (Usually they involve vibrations in the air,
which are perceived as sound.) Nattiez does have a theory of the specificity of
music which he defines as being located in the unstable relationship between
intrinsic and extrinsic referencing that it displays (pp. 116, 118). However, on
the face of it, it is hard to see how this distinguishes music as such from, say,
abstract art, certain types of poetry or architecture, and so on. And it is harder
still to see how such a definition captures the artistic import of music, by
which I mean not so much its meaningful remarksas its remarkablemeanings.
Like many anthropologists before him, Nattiez betrays a subtle bias towards
the necessary conditions of art in a culture, at the expense of the sufficient
conditions: he wants to suggest what conditions are necessary to produce
music, but not what conditions are sufficient to mark out that product as being
exclusively music and nothing else.
The final feature of Fig. 2 that needs to be assessed is: what meaning should
we attach to the overlapping of the connotation boxes? It is in the chains of
these connotations (p. 120), these symbolic webs (Chapter 5), that Nattiez
locates the meaningful clumps of variables in society, the so-called symbolic
forms (a musical work, a coherent activity such as music analysis, and so on).
But does the mere fact of their overlappingcausecultures (or metalanguages),
or are they forced to overlap by cultures (or metalanguages)?What is limiting
these connotations so that they overlap?Nattiez's answer to this seems to be
that these connotations are not arbitrary, they are not just people saying
anything they want. Rather, these connotations are controlled by a
background agenda or metalanguage - what Nattiez calls a 'plot' (p. 176) -
which takes a given phenomenon and proceeds to 'integrateit within a seriesof
comparable phenomena' and thus assigns 'some plausible meaning' to it
(p. 230). A first objection to this might be that there does seem to be some
kind of circularityhere: how are we to know what phenomena are genuinely
'comparable' unless we have already decided on our criteria for meaning?
Secondly, of course, such a manoeuvre is somewhat removed from traditional
accounts of meaning within the Anglo-Austrian analytic philosophical
tradition, which would normally attempt to tease out the truth conditions of a
statement before it was considered meaningful. Thirdly, one might well seek
an explanation of why 'meaning' and 'contextual significance' could be
conflated in quite this way, although it is easy to see why something's
contextual significance could produce a kind of 'meaningfialness'(which is a
slightly different thing). Even within Nattiez's own terms, however, it is
sometimes quite difficult to see exactly where his explanation leads. If, for
example, a particular 'plot' is the background culture itself, then meaning
derives from culture. But what is culture? Culture, we are told, 'is nothing
other than a style' (p. 195). So meaning is a style accessory? However, style
cannot exist on its own, it must be a style 'of' something, and it is presumably
that further thing which needs to be tested for its equivalence to meaning,
even in Nattiez's own terllls.
That Nattiez should have brought to our attention so many fundamental
issues within the context of a single thesis is a considerable achievement.
There is no doubt that Musicand Discourseis an important and immensely
stimulating book. It draws music analysts into a general anthropology of the
society in which they work, it gives them a new methodology of examination,
and it tackles the big questions that most excuse themselves from attending to.
That it should be accused of some prevarication on the finer points of
epistemology and ontology is not the main point: the alliances of eighteenth-
century Europe die hard, after all. It is most valuable, it seems to me, as
perhaps the first cultural theory of music analysis to have been written. With
that thought, I shall leave the last word to the anthropologist Clifford Geertz:
This is the first condition for cultural theory: it is not its own master ... its
freedom to shape itself in terms of its internal logic is rather limited. What
NOTES
1. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse:Towarda Semiologyof Music, trans.
Carolyn Abbate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). xv+272pp. $45.00
(hardback)and $ 14.95 (paperback). ISBN 0-691-09136-6
2. See, for example, the article: 'Fact/value'in Dancy and Sosa (1992, pp. 137-8).
3. Another common distinction is, of course, that between facts and data. There is a
lucid discussion of this from the musician's point of view in Dahlhaus (1983),
Chapter 3. Nattiez occasionally uses the term 'data' towards the end of his book:
on pp. 222 and 229, for example.
4. See, for example, Adorno (1989).
5. For a lengthy discussion of the implications of this notion for art theory see
Gombrich (1979).
6. Compare also Jacques Derrida's use of the notion of a 'trace' as discussed in
Johnson (1993).
7. Interestingly enough, some commentators on Mauss have seen him as concerned
with social 'phenomena' rather than 'facts'. See, for example, Kuper and Kuper
(1985, pp. 504-5).
8. For a discussion of this passage see Sturrock (1986, pp. 15-16).
9. See the discussion in Baker and Hacker (1983, pp. 185-208).
10. See the interesting discussion of the 'institutional' theory of art in Wollheim
(1980, pp. 157-66). Wollheim states that 'the theory may be traced to a sug-
gestion made by the great anthropologistMarcel Mauss' (p. 269).
REFERENCES
Adorno, T., 1989: Introductionto the Sociologyof Music, trans. E. B. Ashton (New
York: Continuum).
Baker, G. andHacker, P., 1983: EssaysonthePhilosophicalInvestigations:Wittgenstein,
Meaningand Understanding(Oxford:Blackwell).
Dahlhaus, C., 1983: Foundationsof Music History,trans. J. B. Robinson (Cambridge:
CambridgeUniversity Press).
Dancy, J. and Sosa, E., 1992: A Companionto Epistemology(Oxford:Blackwell).
Dickie, G., 1974: Art and the Aesthetic:An InstitutionalAnalysis (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press).
Dunsby, J., 1983: 'Music and Semiotics: The Nattiez Phase', The Musical Quarterly,