Music and Cultural Theory

P Tagg: Review of Wicke & Shepherds "Music and Cultural Theory"
Music and Cultural Theory.

By John Shepherd and Peter Wicke. Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1997. ix + 230 pp.
Essay review by Philip Tagg for Popular Music
(Unabridged version)
Introduction
Ever since popular music studies acquired an institutional face there has
been a serious gulf between what can be loosely termed as the musicological and the cultural studies approaches to our field of enquiry. This gulf
has been the subject of much discussion and it is essential that we try to
solve the problems it causes. Therefore, the publication of a book resulting
from seven years of serious theoretical rumination between two musicology
professors and explicitly aimed at bridging that epistemological gap is an important event. Indeed, its very title, as well as its aims, will no doubt attract
the attention of anyone interested in the integration of music with other
forms of knowledge and experience. These historical aspects of the publication have made the task of reviewing Music and Cultural Theory a serious
business too. It has been an arduous and daunting task because the book is
hard to read, not so much because of its rather esoteric vocabulary and
somewhat convoluted writing style, as because the very nature of its topic
presupposes coverage of a wide range of approaches and a correspondingly
wide degree of interdisciplinary familiarity on the part of the reader. As just
one of many musicians, music educators and musicologists keenly interested in semiotic, cultural and social theories relevant to music, I must admit
that I was unable on my own to provide informed criticism on every important problem in the book, and that I had to consult trusted colleagues when,
as was often the case, I experienced difficulty in understanding or in accepting the authors line of reasoning.1
In order to make distinctions between my own thoughts and those of the
books authors as clear as possible, I will first present a brief uncommented
summary of the main points in the book as I understand them. I will then
attempt a critique of the ideas put forward by Shepherd and Wicke, paying
particular attention to questions of theory and method.
Account
The books main aims are stated on page 1. They are to feed musicology
into cultural theory, to consider the implications for cultural theory of a viable theory for the social and cultural constitution of music as a particular and
irreducible form of human expression and knowledge. The authors see their
initial task to interrogate those forms of cultural theory which have been
central to its development since the late 1950s and to determine where the
1.
I would like to thank the following friends and colleagues for their patience, help, input
and encouragement while I was working on this review: Sara Cohen (Liverpool), Franco
Fabbri (Milan), Alessandra Gallone (Milan), Lucy Green (London), Dave Harker (Manchester), David Horn (Liverpool), Andrew Hugill (Leicester), Margit Kronberg (Gteborg), Dave
Laing (London), Greg Lee (Hong Kong), Richard Middleton (Newcastle), Kay Richardson
(Liverpool), Garry Tamlyn (Brisbane) and Marta Ulha (Rio de Janeiro). Although considerable input from all these people is incorporated in this review, they cannot be held responsible for the use or misuse of their ideas in this text.
application of cultural theory has had some success in grasping affect in music as socially and culturally constituted. This book should in other words
help cultural theorists to understand music and help musicians or musicologists to understand the work they do from the viewpoint of theories of culture and society.
In chapter one, the authors basically argue that the few musicologists to
have dealt with the problem of affect and meaning in music, have, in one
way or another, misrepresented the nature of musical communication. Only
one music theorist, Leonard B. Meyer, they claim, has consistently confronted the difficulty (p.11), although his analyses of classical music are
compelling only because the consequences of social mediations to this tradition are revealed intuitively and through omission (p.14). Shepherd and
Wicke then take on scholars of cultural studies who, like most musicologists,
they argue, have a concept of music as a thing. For scholars from both
disciplines, we are told, either music contains meaning in its material qualities as a phenomenon autonomous in relation to social and cultural processes, or it acts as an inscrutable black box, the role of whose internal
characteristics in the transmission or creation of social and cultural meanings is neither considered or understood (p.15). The reason for this sad
state of affairs is then attributed to the idea that Saussures concept of the
arbitrary sign is inapplicable to music. For example, Nattiez and Kristeva are
seen to be so dominated by notions of the arbitrary sign as to be incapable
of providing any satisfactory theories of meaning in music. The way forward, say the authors, is suggested by way of the more structuralist dimensions of Saussures work (p.23). However, a few pages later the authors
point to incipient tension between, on the one hand, Saussures idea that
the sounds of words can have no necessary or logical connection to their
customary meanings (p.26) and, on the other, what the authors see as the
intrinsically iconic nature of music.2 This polarisation of arbitrary and immanent modes of signification becomes one of the books recurrent themes.
The next four chapters, constituting over one third of the entire text, are devoted almost entirely to reviewing the work of a selection of cultural, literary, linguistic and psychoanalytical authorities. The gist of this section is that
although these scholars may be credited to varying degrees with insights of
varying validity about some aspect of language, society and conceivable
links between music and either of these two, none of the work discussed can
really be endorsed as substantially contributing to an overall theory of music
as a form of human communication. One idea the authors do embrace is the
structural homology, especially as found in the work of Willis and Shepherd,
its importance heralded as the first time a theoretical protocol existed
through which the social and cultural meanings of music, as articulated
through musics internal, technical characteristics, could be grasped and understood within the framework of cultural analysis (p.38). Another set of
ideas the authors clearly find relevant to their aim is Althussers inclusion of
subjectivity and relative autonomy in theories of ideology (pp.48-55).
The first part of chapter four (pp.56-62) reviews the work of selected psy2.
I always thought Saussure meant that the sounds of words need not have any such connection to those using those sounds, and that one important aspect of etymological semiotics was to explain the necessary and logical connection between the sounds of words
and their customary meanings. The problem of iconicity is discussed later on in this
review.
choanalytical and socialisation theorists, seeking explanation of the complex

relationships between subjectivity, sound, language, body and emotions.
However, since this section concludes that we are no nearer understanding
the precise order of relations between music as a socially constituted signifying system and subjects as likewise socially constituted (p.63), the authors have to move on, this time to Lacan and the linguistic production of
the subject. Once again, although laudatory about Lacans opening up of
the territory we need to enter to move forward with our project (p.69), the
authors conclude this line of thought for understanding music to be effectively dashed as a consequence of Lacans arguments (p.70), more specifically by Lacans and Althussers failure to theorize the link between ideology
and subjectivity in terms of the material dimensions of signifying practices
(p.71). The next port of call is Kristeva who, the authors argue, can help correct this failure by expanding the gendered charging of the semiological
field beyond language to include the body as one source for the acquisition
of language and the formation of identity. Kristevas notion of the chora3 is
presented with some enthusiasm as a key concept which, we are told a few
pages later, leads her to deduce that music is not a system of signs because
its constitutive elements do not have a signified (p. 91). Consequently, we
move to other authorities, in particular Middleton, and to the question of primary and secondary signification, because it is now emerges that the authors intend to concentrate on a second semiology of music related to
primary signification, a semiology in which the characteristic mode of operation of asemantic elements as they act through musics own semiological moment will lead us to an understanding of how sounds in music
act as structures (p.103).
This prioritisation of primary signification is at the centre of the books intellectual strategy. By presupposing acceptance of states of Otherness in
its various guises (p.99),4 the authors allow themselves to draw dividing
lines between culturally specific types of affective connotation in music and
music as sound in direct relationship to the body. This positioning leads them
to qualify work discussing connotative aspects of musical signification as
privileging methods derived from linguistic analysis, as reproducing the
hegemony of language, and as rendering music as music a second-class
citizen (p.108). This view clearly implies that discussion of musical connotation is by definition linguistic, that discussion of secondary signification is
equatable with a second-class notion of music, and that such discussion contributes little or nothing to an understanding of primary signification in music. Having discarded discussion of secondary signification as irrelevant to
their aims, Shepherd and Wicke bring back the structural homology and,
with reference to Middleton, Bierwisch, Knepler and others, relate it to gesture and the biogenic elements in music [which are] called forth, subsumed, embedded and articulated in the homologous and symbolic relations
taken to obtain between music as sounds and states of awareness as elements of signification. In so doing, they also confirm their agreement with
Volek about the intrinsic structural iconicity of music (p.114). This train of
thought leads them to posit the theory of music as a medium rather than
as a signifying system, the signifier being dubbed an inappropriate [concept] in approaching questions of signification in music. Sounds acting as a
3.
4.
Chora = bodily site of the first signifying processes of the fetus (p.76).
For a critique of concepts of the Other, see Tagg (1996).
medium, the authors argue, become materially involved in calling forth

from people elements of signification in a manner which sounds as signifiers
do not (p.117). This theoretical distinction leads them to opt for the examination of music as a distinctive signifying practice of which individual pieces
are evidence rather than to approach the question of its affectivity through
the analysis of individual pieces which might, in their totality, be thought to
constitute music (p.122).
It is at this point that Zuckerkandl5 is put forward as main provider of insights into the ways in which music can gather up and reveal to us the structures of the internal and external social worlds and the relations obtaining
between them (pp.122-129). Some of Zuckerkandls ideas about tonality
and metre in European classical music are given considerable space
(pp.129-136) and taken as theoretical foundation for the central position of
the passing present in music as a whole. [Non-verbal] auditory events are
auditory time and space, the authors conclude: like a gesture, which is the
structure or state of a process and does not just replace it,6 auditory time
and space (time-space) can only be articulated (as a unified field) inalienably through the articulation of auditory events in relation to one another
(p.135). Shepherd and Wicke call this cusp of coincidence or consubstantiation between structure, process and articulation in music the sonic saddle,
a central notion in their final theoretical model of musical signification.7
Before presenting their own solution to the problem, the authors briefly revisit musicology and the problems of using language to explain musical signification, adding that language cannot reach out to musical experience in
any convincing or useful manner (p.143). Walser is criticised for defining
discourse in a manner incompatible with the authors own understanding of
the term.8 He is further rebuked for using the opinions of fans and musicians
as one way (of several) to confront the issue of meaning in music (pp.144146) because, according to Shepherd and Wicke, ethetic relations, vocal
and kinetic rhythms, musics synaesthetic relatedness to the physical field
of movement can only be explained by leaving behind the analysis of musical experience as it is grounded in sound as a sonic medium (pp.143-144).
We are moreover warned that standard categories of musical production
such as timbre, volume, mode, harmony and rhythm, are of little
assistance in specifying the cultural character of those sounds in music and
cannot lead to analyses which are socially and culturally sensitive (pp.1467).
Having dismissed the need to consult musical cognition as evidenced via the
intermediary of language used by musics producers and users, having refuted the viability of musematic analysis in relation to primary signification,9 and having cursorily dealt with concepts of musical syntax, the
authors seem satisfied that enough virtual territory has been evacuated for
the expansion of their own theories. Chapter 7 starts with the workings of
5.
6.
7.
8.
Austrian musicologist, author of Sound and Symbol (1956, Princeton University Press).
Shepherd and Wicke (p.136), quoting Bierwisch (no page reference).
Consubstantiation is my terminological interpretation of one important aspect of what the
authors seem to mean by the saddle. Originally used by Christian theologians in the exegesis of the Holy Trinity, consubstantial simply means having the same substance.
The authors base this critique on their interpretation of the Foucaults use of the term.
What the authors actually have in mind is nevertheless obscure since they make no reference to any work by Foucault.
musics internal structures, those of its matter or timbre (p.153).10

Obviously, with the signifier and secondary signification jettisoned in favour of the medium and musical matter or timbre, the authors still have
to deal with what constitutes that matter (=timbre) and how it can be understood as meaningful. It is to this end that cuckoo calls, drum rolls and
sea swell (all of which are apparently taken as exemplification of such matter or timbre), together with their homologous evocations of pastorality,
militariness and oceanness respectively, are used to illustrate the iconic
relationship the authors posit as similar to those of primary signification in
music (pp.153-158). Musical sounds may, the authors admit, have been
conventionalized through constant and repeated usage, but, they hold,
must function in a structural manner if they are to function at all in being
implicated in processes of meaning construction in music.
It is with this heavy emphasis on what the authors have variously referred
to as the biogenic, iconic and immanent elements of music that their concept of the sonic saddle is presented in some detail.
Evocation can only occur in the continually unfolding present through the tactile dimensions of sound, the matter of sound as it is presented to us. It is only
this way that the sounds of music can operate through a technology of articulation. The concept of the saddle of the continually unfolding present is thus
crucial to understanding the articulation of meaning through music. Meaning
in music is articulated through the continually unfolding saddle of the medium,
which is to say, the sonic saddle of the present As sound-image, the saddle
occupies a position in processes of the articulation of meaning through music
similar to that of the signifier in processes of the articulation of meaning
through language. (pp.159-160)
Shepherd and Wicke insist on the primacy of timbre or musical matter in

relation to other elements of music (by implication less synonymous with
musical matter) and expose the syntactical qualities of difference through
attraction and repulsion that are highlighted by the apparent consubstantiation of structure, process and articulation in the saddle. They also introduce the hierarchy of first, second and third order awareness within the
saddle, levels of awareness that seem to range from the timbral and iconic
(first or second) to conventional relationships between articulation and
connotation (second or third) in order to emphasize the corporeal and somatic dimensions of meaning construction through music that they believe
to be fundamental to meaning construction through music (p.171). In short,
the authors have replaced the signifier with the sonic saddle as the continually unfolding sound-image derived from the medium and experienced
as the material ground and pathway for the investment of meaning, while
the concept of the signified has been replaced by the rather more general
notion of elements of signification (p.170). They point out that states of
awareness can exist independently of elements of signification because the
latter can be affected to different degrees by internal (individual) or external
(social, public) factors. This interplay between, on the one hand, the sub9.
A little later on, the authors become even more adamant: the complexity and versatility
of the sonic saddle demonstrate the ultimate futility of using concepts as the signifier or
the museme to explain primary signification in music and, through that, secondary signification (p.168).
10. The authors use of timbre at this stage (p.153, ff.) is very confusing because it was
thrown out with other culturally insensitive categories a few pages back (pp.146-7) and
has not been redefined.
jects internal world the material binding between saddle and elements
of signification, internal states of awareness and being and, on the other
hand, the external world with its materiality (including the sound medium)
and its sociocultural processes (including practices of signification) is unfolded in a series of flowcharts. This expos constitutes the theoretical nub of
Music and Cultural Theory (pp.169-177).
After revisiting differences between language (qualified recurrently as cerebral, cognitive, rational, denotative, etc.) and music (corporeal, affective, emotional, iconic, etc.) in the light of their theoretical expos
(pp.178-203), the authors devote a substantial part of books last eleven
pages (5%) to a backtracking exercise in which they seek to dispel impressions of reductionism and to re-integrate their own ideas with other views of
the relationships between music, the individual and the external world.
Critique
The topic Music and Cultural Theory is vast and must be radically reduced
or distilled to fit into a book of standard length. Criteria of inclusion, exclusion and focus are therefore vital to the understanding and success of the
authors project.11
The cultural theory of this book is really Cultural Theory, i.e. the university
(sub)discipline established in the United Kingdom in the 1960s. As both concept and institution in this sense, cultural theory is virtually unknown in
most nations of the world, even in France.12 To the majority of readers who
are neither British nor au fait with the mainly British institution of Cultural
Theory, the book is much more likely to be interpreted from its title as dealing with any theory, formulated anywhere in the world at any time in history,
that can shed light on music as a cultural phenomenon. Important input into
the discussion of music and culture from, for example, Africa, the Arab
world, Argentina, China, Greece, India, Indonesia, Italy, Russia and Sweden
is absent, as are European medieval, renaissance, rationalist and romantic
theories relevant to the topic.13 A similarly narrow ethnic and historical focus
raises concern about whose music the cultural theory of the book relates
to, since its rare and cursory references to identifiable musical events are
11. Since criticism of focus forms a substantial part of this review, I have in an appendix
included bibliographical reference to some of the most relevant works absent from Music
and Cultural Theory. In order not to overburden this text with such references and in order
to save space, works mentioned in this review, in particular those cited by Shepherd and
Wicke, are not referenced in my bibliography. I have also only inserted parenthesised
dates in the main text in connection with the citation of particular passages. Most authors
I mention are listed in the bibliography together with reference to work of particular relevance.
12. In France itself, the French gurus of British Cultural Theory are academically categorised
as literary theorists, linguists, semiologists, sociologists, etc.
13. See, for example, Nketia (1974), Vega (1941), the Ntyastra (India), or Jayadipura,
Jakub, Wignyarumeska, Suryaputra and Wayan Rai (Indonesia, all cited in Hood,
1997:58). For further references to non-European theories of music and culture see, for
example, the entries Arabic music, China, India in The New Grove Dictionary of Music
and Musicians (London, 1995). See also Peter Crossley-Hollands account of music in
China, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and the Arab world in The Pelican History of Music,
volume 1 (ed. A Robertson, London: Penguin, 1960). As a musicologist resident in Sweden
for twenty-four years, I have tried, without much success, to make the English-language
community of popular music scholars aware of Scandinavian work of relevance to our field
of enquiry. Of particular importance here is the work of Ling (1983, 1985, 1989, 1992).
drawn exclusively from the European classical or Anglo-American pop-rock

traditions. If the book aims to put forward a viable theory for the social and
cultural constitution of music as a particular and irreducible form of human
expression and knowledge (p.1), then readers have a right to know not only
that the majority of cultural theories about the majority of music are not included in the book but also why such exclusion has taken place. In other
words, the restricted meaning of key terms used by the authors, both in its
title and throughout the book, needs to be clearly motivated as well as stated.
Accepting, solely for reasons of space, the narrow focus and the mainly unmotivated restrictions of the titles meaning, a second problem arises within
the narrow focus on a particular type of cultural theory. There is, so to
speak, quite a lot of Saussure, Lvi-Strauss, Barthes, Althusser, Lacan and
Kristeva, but no Bourdieu, Derrida, Foucault, Habermas, Jakobson or Jameson. In addition to substantially influencing Cultural Theory since the late
1950s, these latter scholars have also discussed various aspects of subjectivity, mind, body or society that might contribute towards our understanding of music. Similarly, explanation is lacking as to why semioticians or
linguists relevant to the development of Cultural Theory since the 1950s,
such as Eco, Greimas, Hjelmslev, Lothman, Morris and Peirce, are all excluded from discussion while Saussure is not. Moreover, due to lack of original
language source references, it is impossible to tell if the authors are referring to early or to late Barthes and Kristeva, such distinction being essential
since both these scholars were to revise their views on issues relevant to
music and cultural theory quite considerably.14 I claim no expertise in this
field, but I get the impression that the cultural theory (in the authors sense
of the term) of this book is further restricted to literature either written by
or influencing those working in English-language university institutions of
cultural studies during a very short period of postwar history. No substantial
motivation for this additional restriction is offered.
Turning to my own area of study, musicology, I find the authors unproblematised exclusion of writings relevant to their task perplexing, particularly
since (i) they are both titular musicologists and (ii) one of the books explicit
purposes is to feed musicology into cultural theory. Their first musicological
exclusion zone (of ten) is history, in that nothing written before World War
II is referred to at all. It is as if St. Augustine, Tinctoris, Zarlino, Gallilei,
Kircher, Kepler, Mersenne, Mattheson, Rameau, Quantz, E.T.A. Hoffmann,
Wackenroder,15 along with a whole host of other scholars, had nothing relevant to say, be it agreeable or disagreeable, about music, its structures, its
articulation and their relation to the body, the soul, the emotions and the
external world, social or natural. Assuming therefore, in line with the previ14. Such inadequate source referencing is particularly misleading when the authors state that
English Cultural Theory was influenced by Gramsci. That authors vast output is referenced
merely as an English language selection published in 1971. Which of Gramscis ideas on
which topics remains a mystery. The distinction between early and late Kristeva is particularly relevant to the issue of essentialising femininity, a matter discussed later in this
review.
15. Relevant extracts from work by all these scholars are available in Strunk (1952), except
Kircher (1650), Kepler (1611) and Mersenne (1963/1636) both cited in Ling (1983) ,
and Mattheson (1739), also as cited in Zoltai (1970: 174, ff.). For relevant quotations
from Quantz, see Klingfors (1991), from Rousseau, E T A Hoffmann, Wackenroder etc.,
see LeHuray & Day (1988).
ous restriction of cultural theory, that by musicology the authors must

mean the academic institution of the same name, everyone just listed can
be excluded. Frankly, this delimitation of the term constitutes a considerable
loss to our understanding of music and culture, not least because, as Hood
(1997:56) remarks, many medieval theories of music show acute awareness
of relationships between music and bodily movement.16 The same implicit
definition does not, however, explain musicological exclusion zone two and
the absence of such institutionally recognisable musicologists as Francs,
Kretzschmar, Ling, Lissa, Marthy, Mellers, Rosen and Zoltai, all of whom
are in different ways relevant to the authors project.17
Rehoused in exclusion zone three we find those music sociologists whose
work contains important spin-offs for cultural theory, for example Raynor,
Silberman and Max Weber, while zone four is occupied by ethnomusicologists and music anthropologists of equal relevance, such as Chernoff, Emsheimer, Lomax, Merriam and Nettl. Musicological exclusion zone five is
populated by those discussing music and human communication from neurological, therapeutic or biological perspectives, such as Alvin, Geck and
Young, zone six by musical psychologists and educationalists like J B Davies,
Gabrielsson, Green, Small and contributors to Bruhn et al. (1981). Zone seven houses those writing about the body, kinaesthetics and dance, for example Steinman or Bartenieff and Lewis, while zone eight is inhabited by
pertinent authors whose work is mainly published in other languages than
English, French or German, for example Fabbri, Klingfors, Ling, Stefani and
Vega.18 In exclusion zone nine we find those composers and musicians who
have had plenty to say about music, its meanings, its effects, its social and
political functions, etc., for example Cutler, Fabbri, Eisler, Henze, Hindemith,
Stravinsky, Theodorakis, Wagner and Zappa.19
The tenth and final musicological exclusion zone belongs to music semiotics
and semiotic music analysis. Although Walser and myself are involved in this
area of study and mentioned on several occasions by Shepherd and Wicke,
some central figures are conspicuous by their absence. Since the authors are
concerned with semiotics and musical articulation it is puzzling that they bypass the work of Stefani on that very subject, equally perplexing that, in
dealing with semiotics and the relation between music and myth, they ignore
the work of Tarasti.20 Moreover, given the authors preoccupation with
structural homology and with what they regard as the iconic essence of the
musical medium, it is baffling that they do not see fit to mention the extensive work of Karbuicky on the indexical character of musical signification.
Nor is the work of the Prague school referenced (e.g. Jirnek), nor that of
16. Hood (loc.cit), referring to the work of Dr R Schumacher (no publication details given). For
graphic illustrations of pre-rationalist notions of relations between music, mind and body,
see the work of mystic Dr Robert Fludd (1574-1637) as quoted in Alexander Roobs
Alchemy & Mysticism (1997, Kln: Taschen).
17. See bibliography for relevant work by these musicologists.
18. For a recent review of an important (Italian) book by Fabbri and for comments on the linguistic ethnocentricity of popular music studies, see Tony Mitchells review in Popular
Music 16/3: 315-317.
19. For an account of relationships between the musical work, sociocultural theory and political activity of Theodorakis, see Holt (1980). For Wagners ideas about music, see for
example Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft as reprinted in Strunk (1952: 876-903). Examples
of writings by all other composers, except Zappa, are listed in the bibliography.
20. Tarasti, it should remembered, is highly influenced by Greimas and to some extent by the
work of Propp.
Kivy, S Davies or Rosen,21 nor that of Bjrnberg, Brackett, Lacasse or Tamlyn. The common denominator of much of the work excluded in zone ten is
of course that it features the semiotic analysis of actual pieces of music, an
activity which the authors of Music and Cultural Theory explicitly preclude
from their own project. However, although such restriction of method is understandable in a publication targeted at an English language Cultural Theory readership, it does not explain musicological exclusion zones one
through nine. These lacunae are to a considerable extent attributable to
general problems of semiotic theory and method.
Eco (1990:256, ff.), referring to Peirce and Morris, emphasises the necessity
of integrating syntax, semantics and pragmatics in the study of signification.22 He points out how rhetoricians and sophists, philosophers and anthropologists, even the most abstract and theoretical among them, have
throughout the ages concerned themselves not just with the relationship between expression and content but with the intended meaning and interpretations or effects of statements.23 Eco further holds that pragmatics in no
way implies depriving semiotics of an object of study because it incorporates
the totality of the construction of meaning.24
Music and Cultural Theory lacks the semiotic objects and pragmatic concretion that are widely held to be essential to semiotic inquiry. Indeed, the authors plainly state that they will not only steer clear of actual musical
statements but also abandon discussion of musicians intentions, musicians
verbal reference to musical structures, listeners associations and reactions,
etc. as irrelevant to their particular purpose. The absence of these central
aspects of semiotic theory and method radically undermines the epistemological credibility of the authors stated purpose. Such absence leads furthermore to a less convincing and less readable book because the rich palette of
musical experience is sadly missing from its pages. There is an almost clinical absence of the wonder of music the urge to move different parts of
our bodies in an infinite variety of ways, the sensation of goose pimples, the
21. The Davies and Rosen references are taken from Treitler (1997).
22. Put simply, syntax deals with aspects of signification bearing on the temporal relationship
of signifying elements (signs) within a given mode of communication, semantics with the
relation between such signs and what they stand for or stand as, pragmatics with all cultural and social aspects related to the production and interpretation of meaning related to
syntax and semantics. The pragmatics of musical signification can therefore be understood to cover such phenomena as, on the one hand, the sociocultural position and signifying intentions of those transmitting, making or producing music, and, on the other
hand, the sociocultural position, interpretations, reactions, functions, uses, etc. made by
those hearing the same music.
23. La retorica greca e latina, cos come lintera linguistica dei sofisti, possono essere [considerate] come forme di un pragmatica del discorso. Ma anche nelle pi astratte definizioni
classiche di significazione ci sono elementi pragmatici tutte le definizioni del segno tengono conto non solo del rapporto fra espressione e contenuto,ma anche di quello fra
lespressione e la reazione mentale dellinterprete. Eco also reminds us that such figures
as Wittegenstein, Peirce, Morris, Meade and Habermas, as well as St Augustine, Roger
Bacon, Occam, Abelard, Locke and others were all interested in the intended meaning and
interpretations of statements, not only in abstract relations of expression to content (Eco
1990:266).
24. My italics. Dire che la pragmatica una dimensione della semiotica non significa privarla
di un oggetto. Significa invece che lapprocio pragmatico ha a che vedere con la totalit
della semiosi, la quale, per essere compresa pienamente, devessere avvicinata anche da
un punto di vista pragmatico. La sintattica e la semantica, quando si trovano in splendido
isolamento diventano discipline perverse (Eco, 1990:259)
10
welling up of tears, the evocation of childhood, of special places, faces and

moods, the excitement of wondering which note the soloist is going to aim
for next, not to mention the toil, mental effort, passion and exhilaration involved in making music. Personally I found it almost impossible to recognise
myself and my own relationship to music in any tangible way while reading
the book.
In the very few instances where the authors do refer to actual music or to
its effects upon us, the relationships between musical sound and its interpretation are taken as semantically read and with reference to pragmatics
in no more than highly generalised theoretical terms.25 For example, the famous guitar riff in Satisfaction, mentioned three times, is qualified on each
occasion as sexual,26 rather than as, for example, obstinate, insistent,
driving, forthright, full-bodied, pushing and pulling, to and fro, round
and round descriptors provided by other individuals of their experience
of the same sound. The authors solely sexual reading of the sound might be
explained by reference to one line in the songs lyrics and to culturally specific social connotations of the song for certain individuals of a certain age in
certain places at certain times in history, i.e. a reading that the authors
should, according to their own terminology, place at the secondary rather
than primary level of signification, the latter being more compatible with
such descriptors as insistent or to and fro.27 However, the problem here
is not so much one of choosing an inapposite reading to illustrate structural
homologies but of equating forceful bodily movement of a repeated or oscillatory character with sex, as though human beings had spent more time in
uninspired metronomic copulation than in a combination of climbing, digging, dragging, defecating, hacking, hauling, hewing, hoovering, horse-riding, jumping, lifting, kneeling, pulling, pushing, sawing, cycling, scrubbing,
shovelling, stooping, sweeping, etc.28 The tendency, seemingly quite wide25. The following passage exemplifies this tendency. The motor rhythms of Satisfaction are
themselves taken to constitute socially and culturally the form of sexuality in question
through their very articulation. They are taken at the time of their articulation to occasion
in individual subjects as socially and culturally constituted the structure of feeling of this
form of sexuality in a manner specific to themselves (pp.95-96). The relationship
described is theorised in the book as that between sound as medium plus sonic saddle
and elements of signification plus states of awareness.
26. pp.15, 35, 95. Although the authors mention the bass guitar riff (p.35), I assume they
mean Keith Richards distorted guitar riff b b b c# d d d c#, not Wymans bass guitar quavers oscillating between the E and Asus chords.
27. Although the lyrics may refer to trying to make some girl and come back next week, the
lines most people I know remember as leading up to I cant get no satisfaction are the
radio man telling me how white my shirts could be, but he cant be a man cause he
doesnt smoke the same cigarettes as me.
28. Sitting firmly on my office chair in front of the computer, I have just thrust my buttocks
forward to roll closer to the monitor in order to read the small text of this footnote more
easily. That was not sexy at all. Now I will use my buttocks to move my chair in the opposite direction. Nothing sexual about that either. Perhaps I should move myself to and fro
several times in succession. Still no experience of anything sexual. Putting a different
slant on the problem, Alessandra Gallone, teacher of modern dance, recently told me:
confusion of lower body movement with sex is a real problem in dance teaching. Many
people have this nudge-nudge, wink-wink notion of what we do. Helping them to use
their whole body to express anything they want, not just sexuality, can be a heavy task
(Milan, 4 January 1998). Perhaps this is why some of us still ethnocentrically assume the
essential use of the lower body in many forms of African dance to be primarily sexual. For
a settling of accounts with inverted racism in relation to music of African and European
origin, see my open letter to Popular Music 8/3 (1989: 285-298).
11
spread among English-language subculturalists of rockologist persuasion, to

reduce such corporeality to its sexual constituents is understandable coming
from members of the leisured classes living with a legacy of sexual repression inside late capitalism, because we/they have been socialised into identifying forceful movement in the lower body with sport or, more commonly,
with sex, or with mass disseminated images of these activities.29 However,
if this culturally specific restriction of lower body movement in relation to
sound is, as suggested, only part of the story in the particular case of the
Satisfaction riff in a particular historical context, then it is difficult to see
how it can constructively inform quite generalised theories of musical signification in a much broader context. The problem is in other words not only
one of inadequate attention to the pragmatic aspects of semiotics: it also involves the tendency to reduce concepts to one overriding set of many possible sets of traits attributable to that concept.
Reductionist tendencies in Music and Cultural Theory often arise when Shepherd and Wicke discuss the views of other writers. Since such discussion occupies large parts of their text and since it is not always clear to what extent
the authors agree or disagree with the ideas under review, I felt ill at ease
with their conceptualisation of body, femininity, language and music, even
after reading the final chapters disclaimers.30 There is no room to discuss
these matters in any detail but having read, for example, the section Kristeva, Language and the Subject, with its discussion of the body, mother, the
uterus, the asemantic, the symbolic versus the semantic, etc., especially as
reported through secondary sources (pp.74-80), I was left with an indelibly
reductionist impression of femininity which a passage from one of Kristevas
later works (1990: 33-34), rather than the book I was reading, was thankfully able to dispel.
We live in a culture whose sanctified notion of femininity is embodied in motherhood. But motherhood becomes a phantasm nourished by grown-ups,
male and female. It does not so much concern an idealised primal mother as
an idealisation of the indefinable relationship connecting us to her an idealisation of primal narcissism. When feminism lays claim to a new understanding
of femininity, it seems to identify motherhood with this idealising error and
thereby bypass the real experience hidden by the phantasm. The result is that
motherhood is denied or rejected by certain avant-garde feminist groups, or
that it is accepted, consciously or unconsciously, in its traditional form by the
vast majority of men and women I call the ambiguous principle which links
[femininity] with the species on the one hand and on the other with the nonverbal or with the body as maternal a catastrophe of identity.
The catastrophe for women that results from such reductionism is that if
they do not live up to the socially constructed phantasm of woman=mother=nurturer, then they will be regarded as either fallen or abnormal (Kristeva 1990:48). The resultant disaster for men is that as long as the full
29. For example Chambers, as quoted by the authors (p.15), Grossberg (Is there life after
punk in On Record, ed. Frith & Goodwin, New York, 1990: 113) and Lull (Popular Music
and Communication, ed. J Lull, Newbury Park, 1992: 29-30). For critique of rockologist
reduction of forceful low-pitch beat and backbeat to sexuality, see Tagg (1994) and Tamlyn (1998).
30. I am referring to the way in which the authors, in the final pages of their book, criticise
essentialisation, by which they seem to mean the sort of reductionism under discussion
here. Exaggerating my impressions on reading the authors warnings, I felt a like a young
man leaving home and being told in a few words by my father, who had beaten me
throughout childhood, that violence is bad.
12
experience of what our society and culture, including some of its theorists,
see fit to essentialise as feminine the non-verbal, the corporeal, the kinaesthetic, etc. , then we, by biological definition unable to experience
motherhood within ourselves, will continue to be alienated from our own
bodies, emotions and their social construction. In short, although I am in no
way suggesting that the authors subscribe to the notion just criticised, even
less condone its ideological implications, I think they have given too much
space to reductionist notions of body and femininity, too little to refuting
them.
Discussion of language sometimes runs into similar difficulties. Denotation
and the arbitrary sign are put forward as the overriding traits of language
and little or no problematisation is given to such aspects of linguistic signification as intonation, accentuation, speech rhythm and melody, vocal timbre, diction, phonation, volume, facial expression, bodily gesture, social
rules, etc. (e.g. Bolinger 1989, Fonagy 1972). Nor is the issue of denotation
through pitch addressed (tonemes), nor the frequent refutation by modern
linguists of denotations semiotic primacy (e.g. Cruise 1988, Harris 1981,
Kress 1993).31 We are in other words presented with a reductionist and simplified Saussurean notion of language.
I have already suggested that the authors restricted semiotic and musicological perspectives relate to the books failure to mediate a sense of music.
Such lack of musicogenic substance is also influenced by a reductionist view
of our art. For example, what appears to be regarded as the primarily cerebral character of syntactical signification in classical music seems to take
no account of the fact that people fainted from sheer affect upon hearing a
false recapitulation,32 nor of the cardinal importance attached to timbre,
texture and to the beat during the ascendancy of the Central European classical idiom.33 The same reductionist view of music semiotics can also be discerned in a more pervasive sense, in that virtually all aspects of musical
signification theorised in the book seem to have been slimmed down to those
31. Moreover, arbitrary signs cannot originate as such since without other initial types of semiotic relationship (e.g. icons or indices) it would be impossible to develop the conventions
on which arbitrary signs rely for their subsequent denotative qualities. Eco (1990:6) qualifies the imagined solidity of denotative signification through arbitrary signs as rigid designation, pointing out that language always says something more than its inaccessible
literal meaning, something which is already lost right from the start of the textual utterance.
32. False recapitulation: restatement of the main theme of a sonata form movement in a different key to that in which it appeared at the start of the movement and in which it is
expected to reappear after the movements development section. I regret that I have
been unable to find any primary source for the observations about fainting.
33. This was also a period of ascendancy for rationalism and colonialism. For documentation
and discussion of timbre and texture in the work of J S Bach, see Klingfors (1991), especially the chapters dealing with intonation, singing, violins and ensembles. Regarding the
beat, it is worth noting that Johann Beer (1655-1700, Austrian composer, singer, instrumentalist and satirical novelist) wrote that people with no sense of regular pulse have no
sense of honour and that regular time is the soul of music (Beer 1719: 166, ff.). Similarly, Mozarts father Leopold held that accompanists who cant keep to a regular beat are
vulgar and amateurish (Mozart 1756: 266), while J S Bachs composition pupil Kirnberger
(1721-1783) stated that a good music teacher always keep his pupils on various types of
dance music so they become rooted in the automatic aspect of the beat (Kirnberger
1771). Finally, the author of J S Bachs obituary (1754) saw fit to record that the deceased
was a very accurate conductor and in matters of tempo extremely reliable (Bach-Dokumente III, 1972: 666). All citations are from Klingfors (1991: 346-350).
13
that fit the authors model, i.e. those easily perceived as evidencing a relationship either between sounds able to exist in similar physical form inside
and outside what members of the same given culture regard as music, or
that between sounds understood in the same way as music and their biogenic effect on the human body. These two types of homologous relationship form the basis of reasoning behind the models of musical signification
the authors present. I would call the former type sonic anaphone in that
there is a homologous relationship between the sound heard and what the
same listener feels or understands, in sonic terms, by that sound.34 The latter type I would call either a tactile or kinetic anaphone, depending on
whether the overriding perception was one of touch or movement, and assuming that the authors have not entered the realm of bio-acoustic universals.35 There are three main problems with this effective reduction of
musical signification.
Firstly, I am unclear as to whether the authors are in fact concerned with
bio-acoustic universals and as to where, if at all, they think a line can be
drawn between, at one end of the scale, the response of the nervus vagus
under sedation36 and, at the other end, experiencing a brook with its rural
connotations on hearing the piano accompaniment to Wohin? from Schuberts Die schne Mllerin, or identifying a B52 bomber and feeling indignation at the carpet bombing of Vietnam on hearing Jimi Hendrix play The
Stars and Stripes at Woodstock in 1968. In other words, some guidelines as
to where bio-acoustics stop and musical meaning starts, a distinction essential to any theory of primary signification, should have been provided.
Secondly, although it is clear that musical sounds can be homologous with
sensations of touch and movement (e.g. smooth and wavy, rough and
jerky), it is dubious whether such synaesthetic or, rather, transmodal homologies are necessarily iconic.37 According to (my reading of) Peircean
semiotics, where the concept originated, icons are, in simple terms, those
signs sharing physical traits in common with what they stand for or stand
as. Thus, while the sound of a recording of an Alsatian dog barking will usually be identified in terms like its a big dog, that same sound is in fact iconic
only to the extent that it is structurally and physically similar to that of a
large dog barking in a similar way, i.e. the recorded sound is an icon of a
physically similar sound. However, the relationship between the same recorded sound and large dog is indexical, not iconic, because there is no similarity of physical structure between that bark and the dog in its entirety. The
notion of dog obtained from hearing the recorded bark relies instead on (i)
previous knowledge that such barking sounds issue almost exclusively from
large dogs, (ii) acceptance of the synecdoche that the mere sound of a dog
barking, without representation of its snout, paws, tail, habits, character,
34. Anaphone, analogous with the word analogy (= another way of saying the same thing),
simply means another way of sounding the same thing. Anaphones can be sonic (musical
sounds resembling sounds outside music), tactile (musical sounds resembling sensations
of touch), or kinetic (musical sounds resembling patterns of movement). For a more
detailed account or musical sign types, see Tagg (1992).
35. For discussion of musical universals, see Hood (1990), Imberty (1990), Tagg (1993) and
Marconi (1996).
36. It is not a good idea to drop a metal tray of instruments during brain surgery because the
nervus vagus may react to the sound and make the patients body move.
37. Transmodal = transferred from one sense mode (e.g. sound) to another (e.g. touch,
vision).
14
etc., can represent dog in its entirety. Other plausible canine attributes derivable from the same bark, such as big teeth, dogs breath or danger (or
the nobility of a mans best friend), lie at other levels of indexicality thanks
to further links of causality or proximity. Applying these points of semiotic
terminology to a well-known musical example, the relationship of the sound
of the pianists semiquaver arpeggiations in Schuberts Die schne Mllerin
to brook are much less iconic than that of the recorded sound of a barking
dog to dog, because, as Rsing (1977) has shown, there is very little demonstrable physical similarity between such highly stylised musicalisations
of brooks and the sounds of appropriate brooks recorded and analysed for
purposes of comparison. Nevertheless, since a culturally definable population is able to identify physical similarities between the sound of the piano
arpeggiations and a small but significant subset of sonic properties belonging to certain types of brook small, contiguous, ceaselessly overlapping
sonic events in quick succession inside the middle pitch range of audibility
and forming repeated patterns of short duration , that part of the semiotic
equation may be qualifiable as iconic. However, empirical evidence suggests
that what sonically constitutes the kind of babbling (as of a brook) perceptible in the sounds of the Schubert piano arpeggiations is also iconically relatable to, for example, fluttering (as of sails) or rustling (as of leaves).38
The iconicity of the Schubert sounds in relation to brook is therefore as ambiguous as it is incomplete. At the same time, other essential, non-sonic,
physical and corporeally experienceable attributes of apposite brooks, such
as cold and wet, are absent, while their culturally specific connotations of
idyllic rurality are of an unequivocally indexical character. Of course, Shepherd and Wicke are at liberty to redefine whatever terms they like and to
extend widely accepted notions of iconicity to include non-arbitrary signification that exhibits no demonstrable similarity of physical structure, as in
the case of transmodal homologies (tactile and kinetic anaphones). However, such revision of conventional wisdom at such a basic level of semiotic
theory cannot be taken for granted and the authors should have explained
such idiosyncrasies of terminology.
Thirdly, even if, with the terminological sleight of hand just discussed, the
authors extend the concept of iconicity to cover all types of structural homology in music, no other musical sign type seems to enter into their field
of vision or hearing. Episodic markers, style indicators and genre synecdoches,39 in all their possible forms and functions, are far more indexically
than iconically constituted, and are all omitted from discussion. There is no
room in this review to account for these complex aspects of musical signification, but if, as I would argue, episodic markers, style indicators and genre
synecdoches are each as important as anaphones (structural homologies) in
the mediation of musical meaning, then readers must resort to trust and
good will if they are to accept the authors quite generalised theories of musical signification.
It was in this spirit of good will that I earnestly hoped to find nuggets of wisdom in the book. I was delighted to register two related areas in which I felt
that Shepherd and Wicke had managed to provide insights into music: (i)
38. The semantic field covered by such musical gesture is the topic of detailed discussion in an
analysis of The Dream of Olwen in Ten Little Title Tunes, forthcoming research report by
P Tagg and R Clarida.
39. For explanation of these terms, see Tagg (1992).
15
the relationship between language and music, (ii) the refinement of musics
semiological moment. Although the former suffers from lapses of reductionism, their argumentation, as I interpret it, about gestural consubstantiality
between the hearing of a sound in the medium of music and, put crudely in
my terms, the culturally modifiable bio-acoustic experience upon hearing it
(what the authors call sonic saddle and elements of signification) to be
both convincing and potentially useful to the development of our understanding of some important aspects of musical signification. Similarly, their
problematisation of the semiological moment within the (socialised) individual hearing music raises important questions about what it is we consider
music to be capable of communicating. This is where the final set of problems start.
In order to arrive at the presentation of their potentially productive theory
of the semiological moment, the authors resort on several occasions to an
intellectual scorched earth policy. For example, those who present ideas or
information about the nature of musical meaning by doing the anthropological dirty work of interviewing fans and musicians are discarded as irrelevant
to their project, while those who engage in the musicological and empirical
donkey work of relating musical structures (the authors medium or matter) to the connotative reception of music are branded as responsible for
making music as music a second-class citizen.
Music as music is a strange expression implying that some music is either less music or not music at all. The last time I heard it was in 1990 at
a film music symposium in Siena when Morricone, a figure of some repute
in both the popular and art music spheres, was rebuked by two professors
of musicology for being a film composer rather than a composer of music
as music.40 Clearly, these Italian musicologists had scant knowledge of Purcells, J S Bachs, Mozarts, Beethovens or Verdis ability to commute between varying types of musical signification. Through such lack of historical
perspective, the two Italian academics were unashamed to act as keepers
of the seal for an autonomous aesthetics of music (as music) in the institutions employing them to implement such an agenda. Now, I am in no way
suggesting that Shepherd and Wicke would pooh-pooh Morricone in such an
ahistorical fashion or consciously aim to propagate an autonomous aesthetics of music. It is, however, clear that their notion of music as music,
their implicit disqualification of connotative aspects of musical signification
as inferior (second-class), and their books lack of historical perspective all
bear striking resemblance to the professors grounds for disapproving of
Morricone who, as a film composer, must work with overtly connotative elements of musical signification. The two Italians and our two authors seem
to agree that this kind of making or thinking about music is suspect. It is in
this way that Shepherd and Wicke set up false states of antagonistic contradiction between types of musical signification that are integral and complementary rather than rankable as primary and secondary in a theoretical
hierarchy. The authors preoccupation with primary signification, in my
mind a nebulous concept which became even more elusive by reading their
book, may be justifiable, but answers to questions about musical meaning
are far more likely to be found in integration than in antagonistic confrontation with other types of signification. For example, reverting to the Schubert
40. I vividly recall the attack of these dumbfounded musicologists as they formulated the desperate rhetorical question C la musica di film e c la musica musica, no?
16
piano accompaniments, it does not seem to have occurred to the authors

that brooks (not people) babbling, sails (not washing) fluttering and leaves
(not pages) rustling can all be corporeally internalised by any individual as
virtually the same set of sonic, tactile and kinetic gestures, and thus contribute to an understanding of what the authors would call primary signification. At the same time, the connotative and socioculturally specific values
of a particular notion of brook, as evidenced in a certain style of music at a
certain time and place in history for a certain population, are at least as important and as intrinsic to musical communication as the gestural common
denominator just described. The question then arises as to why the book
privileges one aspect of musical signification (the primary) at the expense
of another and why it fails to grasp their symbiosis.
In confronting the obvious intellectual impasse of autonomous music aesthetics as propagated to this day in many institutions of music education and
research, we have two basic options. Option one is to present alternative
musical and intellectual canons to compete with those that still rule the roost
in many of those institutions. Option two is to use the study of music as a
means of contributing to a re-integration of mind, body and soul and to the
healing of our atomised bourgeois subjectivity by (i) defalsifying and reclaiming the music history of our own continent and people, (ii) ceasing to
assume, consciously or unconsciously, that the structural, semiotic and aesthetic workings of our own musical cultures are valid for all humanity, (iii)
giving equal status to all types of musical practice and signification, (iv) ensuring that our work as academics is constantly related to the musical and
social world outside our institutions. With the exception of the final chapter
(5%) and a few other sections in the book, the authors have tended to click
their mice on option one. The overriding impression is therefore one of replacement and reversal rather than of renewal. It is as though the old idealist notion of autonomous music, which highlights the suprasocial
narrative of the emotions through syntactical process and extensionality,
had been replaced by one in which an equally decontextualisable body, mediated as timbre and matter through present-time intensionality, were the
inverse order of the day. It therefore seems hardly fortuitous that musicological pride of place is given to such modernisers of bourgeois autonomous
music aesthetics as Zuckerkandl, Meyer and Langer, rather than to scholars
such as Francs, Karbuicky, Ling, Mellers, Stefani or Tarasti. It is on the basis of such musicological preference that the authors attempt to concoct the
essence of music in purely theoretical terms, and repudiate the very notion
of trying to distil theories of music from the multitude of its real constituent
practices. Such undialectical epistemological alchemy, the hallmark of the
metaphysical aesthetics of absolute music (as music) and the intellectual
cornerstone of its institutionalisation when capitalism was consolidating its
economic and ideological hegemony in Central Europe, inevitably involves
the mystification of musical practices. Such mystification relies on the mythical notion of music as music, be it formulated in the corporealist terms of
subculturalist rockology or in its old guise as tnend bewegte Formen.41 It
also obstructs attempts to integrate music not only with mind, emotions and
41. This famous expression literally means tonal forms in movement and is taken from
Hanslicks Vom musikalisch Schnen (first edition 1854, Swedish translation of second
edition 1858, Uppsala 1955). Put crudely, Hanslick was a fan of Brahms, a composer of
symphonic music (as music), and opposed to Wagner, a composer of stage music (not
music as music).
17
body, but also with the entire sociocultural field of which music is an inextricable part. In short, although the authors unequivocally state in the final
chapter that such integration is their intention, and although the external
world is at least featured in their theoretical model, large parts of the book
set a very different agenda, more specifically one which facilitates the institutionalisation of popular music (as music) in accordance with, rather than
in opposition to, the ideological rules of the game. This contradiction and the
problems discussed earlier, together with some linguistic and terminological
faux-pas, unnecessarily jeopardise what I believe to be the potential viability
of the authors theoretical models.42 Nevertheless, readers surviving the
books first three quarters may be able to glean some useful ideas from its
last quarter. In particular, some aspects of the distinction between language
and music, as well as the authors theories of the semiological moment,
may prove to be innovative contributions to the discussion of musical signification if they are given some empirical grounding.
Summing up this review, I am regrettably unable, for the following reasons,
to recommend the book to any substantial readership. It cannot work as an
undergraduate text on account of the esoteric language and convoluted style
of writing. I cannot recommend it to postgraduates due to shortcomings in
terms of subject restriction, definitions, terminology, reductionism and semiotic theory. I also fear that very few musicians and music educators will accept ideas from a book about music which contains no substantial reference
to music nor to the experience of music. Finally, I am not convinced that the
book provides a satisfactory account of cultural theory relevant to musicology, while I am as sure as I am troubled that the picture of musicology presented in the book for the edification of cultural theorists is not so much
incomplete as downright misleading. I am truly disheartened at having to
summarise my opinions in these terms because it is clear that the book is
the result of much hard work and because the good ideas contained within
it are so obscured by its problems.
42. Further difficulties of comprehension concern two areas: (i) what to a musicologist seems
to be a Cultural Theory propensity for constructing abstract nouns from past participles,
such as connectedness, relatedness, embeddedness, words whose meaning I can only
guess; (ii) terms and phrases whose meanings are neither defined nor comprehensible
from the context, or which are used in different ways on different occasions. For example,
I still have no idea what technology of articulation, musics internal characteristics or
the continually unfolding sound-image, all apparently important to the books main theory, actually mean. Nor do my dictionary or I agree with the authors implied definition of
cognition and cognitive. Particularly obscure is the authors multifarious use of conceptual hierarchies. Readers are apparently expected to distinguish between all the following
rankings: first and second order actions; first, second and third order awareness;
first and second semiology; primary and secondary processes (of cognition); primary
and secondary use of language, not to mention primary and secondary signification.
Less prejudicial to comprehension but important to the establishment of popular music as
an area of scholarly enquiry is the consistent misspelling of timbral (adjectival derivative
of timbre) as timbrel. If adjectives deriving from centre and genre are central or
centric (not centrel), and general or generic (not genrel), then there is no reason
why the adjectival suffix for timbre should take the -el form of nominal suffixes like personnel or colonel. Even if timbral (sometimes timbric) is a relatively new word coined
by popular music scholars, it has been in use for some time in our subject. In short, the
scholarly credibility of popular music studies is not enhanced by inability to follow satisfactory orthographic practices established by precedent in our own area as well as in written
English as a whole. One the other hand, the misspelling of immanent (inherent) as imminent (overhanging) and the enthusiastic tautology corporeal and somatic are no more
than minor blunders of the kind found in almost any text, including this review.
18
Music and Cultural Theory is difficult to understand. I had to reread many

sentences several times in attempts to fathom out what the authors were
driving at. Even when I thought I had grasped their drift, I was often struck
with disbelief, rushing to consult books, articles and colleagues for help in
sorting out the confusion. Learning by such provocation is an arduous and
circuitous route to knowledge and it is predominantly in this sense that reading Music and Culture can be a rewarding experience. I therefore recommend the book to confident, independent and interdisciplinarily experienced
scholars endowed with lots of patience, perseverance, time to spare and
critical spirit. Such readers should also be keenly interested in the topic as
restricted by the authors, have access to many alternative sources of knowledge, be able to think clearly of music in its absence, be fluent in rare academic dialects, and possess previous experience of intellectual provocation
as a positive way of kick-starting attempts to sort out their own ideas. Read
in this way, Music and Culture could offer substantial contributions to the ongoing discussion of musical meaning.
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