Among those who seek and propound theories of musical meaning, the most persistent disagreement is between the referentialists (or heteronomists), who hold that music can and does refer to meanings outside itself, and the nonreferentialists (who are sometimes called formalists or absolutists), who maintain that the art is autonomous and “means itself.” The Austrian critic Eduard Hanslick, in his The Beautiful in Music (originally in German, 1854), was a strong proponent of music as an art of intrinsic principles and ideas, yet even Hanslick, ardent formalist though he was, struggled with the problem of emotion in music. Hanslick’s views have been classified as a modified heteronomous theory.
Hanslick, EduardEduard Hanslick, 1865.
One looks in vain for an extremist of either persuasion, referentialist or nonreferentialist. Igor Stravinsky first achieved fame as a composer of ballet music, and his works throughout his career were rich in extramusical associations. It would be a comfortable simplification to ally referentialism with program music and nonreferentialism with absolute music. But the problem cannot be resolved by such a choice, if only, first of all, because extramusical referents can vary in complexity from a mere descriptive title to the convolutions of the Wagnerian leitmotif, in which a particular musical phrase is consistently associated with a particular person, place, or thing. Referentialists do not require an explicit program, and nonreferentialists do not necessarily denigrate program music, though they make a point of distinguishing between the extramusical program and the musical meaning. The American musicologist and theorist Leonard Meyer, in his Emotion and Meaning in Music (1956), spoke of “designative” and “embodied” meanings; he recognized both kinds in music but appeared to give equal weight to the extrinsic and intrinsic.
Igor Stravinsky, c. 1920.G. L. Manuel Freres—Hulton Archive/Getty Images
If there is intrinsic, or embodied, meaning, one may well ask what meaning is embodied and how it is to be apprehended. An extreme formalist would say that the acoustic pattern itself and nothing more is the sense of music; Hanslick, indeed, said this, though he did not hold consistently to the view. But most nonreferentialists regard music as, in one way or another, emotionally meaningful or expressive. Referentialists, too, find expressive content in music, though this emotional content may be extramusical (even if not explicit) in origin, according to the American theorists John Hospers in Meaning and Truth in the Arts (1946) and Donald Ferguson in Music as Metaphor (1960). Meyer made the observation that while most referentialists are expressionists, not all expressionists are referentialists. He made the useful distinction between absolute expressionists and referential expressionists and identified his own position as “formalist–absolute expressionist.” In acknowledging that music can and does express referential (designative) meanings as well as nonreferential ones, Meyer exhibited an eclectic and certainly permissive view. But he has been criticized for failing to make clear the modus operandi of this referential meaning in music. Intuition and intellect
Most theorists agree that music is an auditory phenomenon and that hearing is the beginning of understanding. Beyond this there is little agreement. There is contention especially between proponents of intuition, such as Benedetto Croce (1866–1952), and champions of intellectual cognition, such as Hospers. Gurney was constrained to postulate a special musical faculty that need not reside exclusively either in the mind or the heart. The main problem for theorists arises from the inveterate tendency to dichotomize thought and feeling. Henri Bergson (1859–1941) broke with this tradition when he spoke for “an intellectual act of intuition.” In the first half of the 20th century, a reawakened philosophical and artistic concern for the concept of organic unity revealed strong affinities among such disparate works as Gurney’s The Power of Sound (1880), the American philosopher Susanne K. Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key (1942) and her later works, John Dewey’s classic Art as Experience (1934), and the American composer Roger Sessions’s The Musical Experience (1950).
It is apparent that music is connected in some way with human emotional life, but the “how” continues to be elusive. Sessions (echoing Aristotle) stated the problem fairly:
No one denies that music arouses emotions, nor do most people deny that the values of music are both qualitatively and quantitatively connected with the emotions it arouses. Yet it is not easy to say just what this connection is.
It was long fashionable to speak of the “language” of music, or of music as the “language of the emotions,” but, since a precise semantics is wanting in music, the analogy breaks down. Two or more listeners may derive very different “meanings” from the same piece of music, and, since written and spoken language cannot render these musical “meanings,” whatever they may be, in consistent and commonly recognizable terms, verbal explication often seems to raise more questions than it settles. Philosophical analysts who hold that all meaning is capable of rendition in language therefore pronounce music—unless it can be saved by the referentialists—without meaning, confronting thoughtful listeners, thereby, with a proposition that seems clearly to contradict (and trivialize) their own experiences. The difficulty, of course, is a semantic one and explains why some theorists have substituted such terms as import, significance, pattern, or gestalt for meaning. Recognizing an incompatibility between the modalities of nonverbal arts and their treatment by discursive thought, it is hardly surprising that music aestheticians have been few. Symbolist contributions
Significant contributions to music theory were made in the mid-20th century by several investigators who may be classified as symbolists, though most of them exhibited formalist, expressionist, and psychological elements as well. Some of the most influential (and controversial) work was done by Langer. Her most adamant critics (such as John Hospers) objected to her use of the term symbol, which, in their lexica, must stand for something definite; she took pains to ascribe this more limited usage to the term signal. The more general use of the term symbol that she endorsed already had a long history, notably in such 19th-century figures as Goethe, Thomas Carlyle, and the French Symbolist poets. Langer was accused of having somewhat weakened her argument through a vacillating terminology, and she described the musical symbol as “unconsummated” because of its ambiguity. But the validity of her theory did not depend upon the term symbol; her thought, indeed, had much in common with that of Edmund Gurney, who did not employ the term and whose ideal motion, if substituted for symbol, would remove most of her critics’ objections. Her use of symbol was nevertheless defensible; she construed art as a “symbolic analogue of emotive life,” rendering the “forms of sentient being” into intelligible configurations. She was a naturalist; she saw art as organic in origin, and she echoed the view, long held among symbolists, that artistic form and content compose an indissoluble unity that each art manifests according to its peculiar conditions. The symbolism of music, she contended, is therefore tonal (or, at its broadest, auditory) in character and can be realized only in time; in psychological experience, time assumes an ideal guise. (Painting and sculpture, in their distinctive modalities, embody ideal space.) Langer embraced all the arts in her purview. The American music theorist Gordon Epperson applied her concepts, with modifications, intensively to music in The Musical Symbol (1967). Contextualist theories