Semiology of the music

Tolstoï defined art as: “the human activity by which a person can, voluntarily, and by means of external signs, to communicate to others the feelings and the feelings which it tests itself” ( in: What art? ). For him, “as soon as the spectators or the listeners test the feelings which the author expresses, there is work of art”. The objet d'art is thus to evoke, to communicate. Art is consequently in a social context (in fact for him, that of the saleable output). This definition, which is not without lending the side to criticism when one experiences the development current of art, counts for a long time its holding and its detractors.

But it is starting from this postulate noting the presence of significances, of Symbole S, of direction, that multiple artistic fields (iconography, cinema, painting…) started, in the years 1970, with being approached under the angle of the communication of Signe S.

Music and language

The structures of the music and the language are in common above all auditive of the communication which they initiate, and which more is its transcriptible side . To the couple its and note would correspond the concepts Linguistique S of Phonème S (meaning) and of Monème S (meant). These concepts found the double articulation of Martinet. But does the music have really this double articulation? The language report/ratio - word can seem to corroborate the report/ratio of the musical theories to creation or that of the writing to the execution, with interpretation: in both cases the language founds an assembly of the syntactic units in Syntagme S which the word reorganizes with its liking. But if the language can speak about the language, the music does not speak about the music. The linguistic concepts evaluate waiting of information often confronted with a statistically known forecast. Pareillement, between redundancies and variety, the creative spirit (poet as musician) made the share of unacceptable and built a autorégulée organization of its work. The Audition has the privilege to have a memory in which the stimuli can be classified in the form of long sequences, and thanks to which we restore without error of the long musical topics of a few tens or hundreds of notes. To listen to is to choose! From where this estimated character of hearing, and by-effect the need for creation to destroy the references, to found a shift with the models of organization such as they appear progressively of historical integration.

Synchrony and diachrony

Beyond, the structures of the music and the language also have (and perhaps above all) jointly their temporal unfolding. The distinction made by linguistics between the synchronic and diachronic the, or between the structural history and changes, resembles that paramount in the music between the simultaneous one and the contiguous one. The music develops in time, and has at the same time a progressively built structure its unfolding, and harmonies resulting from simultaneities of sounds (sometimes, as in the Modern music, it acts more sound conglomerates, and the harmony becomes “sound mass”).

Direction and significance

On the basis of the reference to the Linguistic , science controls in the field of the Social sciences since the years 1950, the authors precisely make art a system of Signe S having a direction, and seeking to communicate a significance. The music then found quickly all its place there, it whose “sound” expression brings it closer more of the language. In the same way that Ferdinand de Saussure had opposed the language and the word, the Sémiotique developed on the same topic the oppositions and the complementarities between the code and the message. But the Art, does not deliver a message. “To mean” in music does not want to say to render comprehensible: the musical work wants simply to communicate a personal sensitivity presented to our direction but accessible good beyond. Besides this communication takes in certain type-setters the form of an increasingly complex disparate material integration.

Information and reception

The type-setters are seldom (never) in phase with their time. Who could blame some; how to refuse to see the face of a renewed esthetics there that it does not belong to us to judge. Any creation seeks what Debussy invited “the delicious pleasure of the idea to choose between all. ” On its side, the esthetic reception rests on a desire tended towards the unknown, and which meets the pleasure of the variety of unexpected moments. The type-setter must tend to give at the same time beacons, points of anchoring and with déstructurer listening. This is why the rules which enact the musical theories unlimited and are often transgressed, allowing diversity forms musical listening to build itself on complexity and the variety.

Structures and universals

Claude Lévi-Strauss for which the music represents “the language minus the direction” uses his theory of the elementary structures to discover those which traverse all the history of the music. In its theory, these structures are our pool, the conscience of a representation of the world suitable for a certain whole of humanity. Thus “by inventing the musical forms, music only redécouvert the structures which existed already at the mythical level”. Its anthropological analysis explains why many musics which appear to us “foreign” even “strange” can be listened, to be perceived like musics with whole share. It is then enough to turn to philosophies of knowledge. These rules which generate all the new creative processes should belong jointly to all the theories resulting from the Psycholinguistique which explore creation.

Syntagms and paradigms

By translating the hierarchical structure of the musical expression, gets clear a “lexicon” and a musical “syntax”. Heinrich Schenker or Milton Babbitt, both musicians, was intended to start this project. Analog with the language is then the corpus of works, this analysis where each work is seen definite by its relation with the others, where each style is born from its common structure with the precedent. The language report/ratio - word seems, in this analysis, to corroborate the report/ratio of the musical theories to creation or that of the writing to the execution, with the interpretation: in both cases the language founds an assembly of the syntactic units in Syntagme S which the word reorganizes, and where the oral language operates by combinations of phonemes: the note, the sign or musical signal functions like the Phonème; syntactic units of the music, those which provide the logic of its own scheduling are on the other hand always to seek.

the language as under consideration by the Linguist S structuralist American or by those of the French school, to which Georges Mounin was attached, is analyzed like the distribution of unit segments. This distribution takes place according to precise codes which make it possible to release one meaning of the various analogies of the activity symbolic system and conceptual of the language. The sound units, that it remains in this case to define, operate in the music as in the language by repetitions, parallelism, assembly, selection and opposition (binary, serial): the report/ratio is known as syntagmatic; or they operate by comparisons: the report/ratio is then paradigmatic. Any language, including the musical language, and it is the theory developed in the semiological vision, is a combination at the same time syntagmatic and paradigmatic (according to what follows and of what precedes) of its syntactic elements built according to a linearity. On the level of the general structure of work, signals act on the Perception of the structure. Certain functions reserved for the musical phenomena are exploited to give to understand a semiotic function immanente.

the music is organized well around patterns , i.e. of culturally acquired forms, or diagrams of acquisition, assimilation of an organized whole of preferences, practices, which release from the laws of perception (underlined by the school behaviorist and in particular by work of Georg B. Watson). This bringing together between codes (for example those of the musical notation), conventions (those of the tonal music), appears to be able to impose a communication system whose each music would be only one of the forms. The new model which the theory must propose must be based on a universality of the musical language (this function structured and structuring) to define the characteristics of each style, of each work.

Generative grammars

Since 1957 the structuralist linguist Noam Chomsky arrived, thanks to data-processing new technologies of treatment of the Artificial intelligence, to release from the formal treatment of the languages a new theory of the language based on the universality of certain structures. Noam Chomsky built a universal grammar then, purely structural description, by definition deprived of the semantic constraints. He is opposed in this theory to holding of the Béhaviorisme for which the language has above all the double articulation meaning - meant, and is thus a communication. He succeeds in the exploit to release from the language the major structures syntactic S, a relatively reduced stock of sentences “cores” (kernel) from which all the particular speeches are built. This theory marks the birth of the modern Psycholinguistique. The principal interest of this revolution chomskienne for the development of the rules of construction of all the languages, including musical language, it is that she explains how the produced brain and recognizes “meaning” statements which were never used previously. The production, even infinite, can take place by rules of finished number. These rules are known as of transformation, or transformationnelles and of association or associationnelles. They were included in the generative theory of the music by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff (1981) to explain a similar mechanism in musical creation, under the psychological terms of structures of grouping, structures metric, reductions of the space time, reductions of prolongation. Lerdahl and Jackendoff based the generative theory of the music on perception by the listener of the organization of the music (tonal then atonal) by laws borrowed from the Gestalttheorie. But especially their theory is not without consequences nor implications for the composition. If one hears, as the authors do it, by system compositionnel not an algorithm, but a whole of procedures, one is not limited any more to inhibiting rules, and, as the theory of Chomsky wished it to prove it, the generation of a new stating, can obey a finished system of rules. The semantic character is interpretative. The code of production belongs to everyone (it is general) and manages to be translatable because it is quantifiable.

Code and musical theory

In fact, the music is often built starting from a code, the musical theory: that it is tonal or atonal, spectral or serial, the theory, existing or invented ( theory a priori and theory a posteriori ) remains the base of the musical writing.

She is written (but also conceives itself) then like a system of Signe S, i.e. of recognizable objects on the basis of some characteristic suitable for the Culture. Admittedly it remains an art not meaning. Igor Stravinski in a famous remained apostrophe - but unfortunately often used with misinterpretation by its detractors - was one of the first to consider rightly that the music had of another significance only that of any art: a direction which founded its gasoline (and its direction), but which could not and was not to be confused with an analysis in term of psychological states. It joined together by there the two designs of the directions, dynamic and linguistic:

“I consider the music essentially impotent to express anything: a feeling, an attitude, a psychological state, a phenomenon of nature, etc the expression forever be the property immanente of the music. The raison d'être of this one is not in any way conditioned by that one. If, as it is almost always the case, the music appears to express something, it is only one illusion and not a reality. It is simply an additional component which, by a tacit agreement and become inveterate, we lent to him, imposed, like a label, a protocol, in short, a behavior and that, by habituation or unconsciousness, we managed to confuse with his gasoline. ”

However the rhythmic one of the Rite of Spring breaks the yokes of the measurement to reinvent an unknown form of Rythme of the Occidental culture. Pierre Boulez when he studies rhythmic Sacre tries to show that, even very elaborate, this rhythmic preserve the trace of a traditional material. But of which tradition can one speak? If there were “scandal” with creation, it is although the public could not give a direction to this music. Not only the type-setter seeks to express a certain vision immanente of his art, but the listener built by his listening the expressivity of the music: each culture has its own esthetics of the reception (cf Sociologie of the music). What makes say to the theorists musical semiology that there are at least two levels of musical Sémantique: that of the type-setter, named poietic or poiesis (“creation”), and that of the listener, named esthesic (“reception”).

All the criteria of authenticity or fidelity to the texts exploit this ambiguity. The redécouvertes of interpretations Baroque S have holding to them and their outcomes which cannot, for the interpreter as for the listener, being analyzed, with orée of the 21st century, in the same direction as that heard with XVIIIème. All the polemics of musical interpretation were born from this double aspect of the musical direction.

Tripartition

It thus should be recognized with Jean Molino then with Jean-Jacques Nattiez, founders of musical semiology, that the musical direction is on double level: that of the type-setter, that they name poiésis, and that of the receiver, or esthesic. Each type-setter, especially at our time when each one refuses to be let lock up in ghettos stylistics, seeks to define a language which is clean for him. Jean-Jacques Nattiez in his Bases of a musical semiology , anchored his study in the analysis of the correspondences symbolic systems which the music establishes since the level of its creation until that of its reception. He explains why the musical language is established at the same time at the creative level that the type-setter seeks to express, and so that the receiver made of formal perception, the direction, of the structure, which he calls the level esthesic. The music art of time, is also the art of perceived time, (that each one knows perfectly subjective). Romance Jakobson, in a famous diagram, posed the need for a code common to the receiver and the speaker, and the object about which one speaks. This restriction operates only in one discursive procedure of the communication. A process of integration of the continuity of musical time does not offer on the contrary restrictions of this kind. The recognition of a musical work is carried out by correlation of the information transmitted with the contents of an in the long run permanent memory. Nattiez locates a third level which is the intermediary between these two there: that of the partition, or “neutral level”. For musical interpretation the notation has at the same time this considerable asset to transmit the creation of the author himself. despite everything, the acuity of the differences in transcription through the edition proves if it were necessary that this transmission is always relative and leaning it creationist who defends with work to evolve/move under penalty of betraying the thought of his author make this level very important.

the musical writing, following the example mathematics represents a form of abstraction; but it subjects the forms of expression of similar inclinations to the standardization towards a standard. Lastly, and especially, the writing manages to reinstate the personal symbol by getting a certain autonomy in the interpreter who can give multiple facets to the composition. The power of the symbol entrusted to the interpreter gets for the music an important dimension, that neither the type-setter nor the receiver can really control.

Symbol and transcendence

The statements of the language, forms meaning and abstract communication, are a manifestation of the conceptual intelligence of the man, of his aptitude to be communicated. Any science which handles general concepts builds on a language, often difficult to make evolve/move. The language is underlined by all the authors as the advanced form of communication which made it possible the man to forge a knowledge and to try out the laws of the universe. This aptitude to connect the sign, the word, the concept and the thing or the idea in arbitrary and abstract meaning representations is in fact purely human and does not exist nowhere elsewhere in the animal world. The art, which, as Hegel explains it is defined as the significant demonstration of the idea, exceeds this framework of representation appreciably. The creative imagination of art, imagination Symbolic system, inverts the common direction of the Symbole: the music has certain connotations (it can represent for some of the emotions, the affects), but it is not its goal. By being based on expressive referents allotted to the modes, with phrased, with the accents, the melisms, the music does not seek to translate an image or even directly feelings. It is either about a univocal symbolization, but “to represent”, i.e. as meant it Nietzsche to present differently, in another way, which does not belong to the significant experiment. The music exerts a power of transcendence while meaning by reference to a time lived specific to each one. Its perceptions can operate differently for each spirit which receives it while preserving a unit and a universality. Musical semantics, essentially abstracted, creates in fact a quite particular world, which is at the same time immanent with its material and transcending in the world perceived by each one. The musical statements hold one “meant” which confers a potential to them to structure work according to various levels of hierarchy. The musical material results from the representation; the immanence of its expression is retained to assign the emotion of it - within the meaning of movement of the heart - to one given musical transcendent.

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