COOK - Theorizing Musical Meaning

Society for Music Theory
Theorizing Musical Meaning

Author(s): Nicholas Cook
Source: Music Theory Spectrum, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Fall 2001), pp. 170-195
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Theorizing Musical Meaning
Nicholas Cook
“I hold that there can be no truth which is not the effect of an interpretation, and hence of a social contract . . . But when we come across those lines of
resistance which prevent us from making certain statements, that is the closest we can get to truth. There is something in reality that says, ‘No, you can-
not say this’.” (Umberto Eco)1
No academic discipline has a charter endowing it with perma- the demonstration of unity had come to be seen as the purpose of
nent existence. Patrick McCreless raised the specter of music the- music theory, at least insofar as it was applied to the analysis of
ory’s demise when, in 1996, he recalled how music theory carved speci c pieces of music rather than pursued as a purely specula-
out its own space in the 1950s from the then dominant disciplines tive project (and it was in the former role that it had become
of the musical academy and wondered whether the development rmly embedded in universities and conservatories throughout the
of a more culturally oriented musicology in the 1990s might not English-speaking world). In effect, the basic assumptions from
perhaps be “doing to music theory what theory itself did to com- which the discipline drew its identity were being reduced to little
position and musicology.” 2 But, in retrospect, the writing had been more than a wrinkle, to borrow Michel Foucault’s word,4 in the
on the wall at least since 1980, when Ruth Solie published her passage of musical and aesthetic history.
seminal article “The living work,” the message of which (heavily There is an element of un nished business in all this, for the
ampli ed ve years later by Joseph Kerman’s Contemplating urgency of McCreless’s response represented the exception rather
Music) was that organic unity represented not a universal criterion than the rule. After all, there were still classes to teach and pieces
of value but rather a historical construction of strictly limited ap- to analyze, and so for many theorists, it remained business as
plicability.3 The challenge, of course, lay in the extent to which usual. Such responses as there were mainly took the form of di-
rect counter-attack. The rather scatter-gun approach which Pieter
My thanks to Olle Edström for inviting me to the symposium “Musicology van den Toorn adopted in Music, Politics, and the Academy5 was
beyond 1999” at Gothenburg (12–15 August 1999) at which an early version of predictably less effective than Ko Agawu’s persistent probing of
this paper was rst presented; to other panellists and particularly to Richard
Leppert, Peter Martin, and Richard Middleton for their comments; to audiences
the weak points in the musicologists’ challenge. 6 In particular,
at Belfast, Birmingham, Harvard, Southampton, and Stellenbosch for their Agawu pointed out that analysis was certainly to be found in, say,
sometimes awkward questions; and to Eric Clarke, Nicola Dibben, Matthew McClary’s interpretations of Beethoven, based as they are on tra-
Head, and Mark Everist for reading drafts of this paper. ditional conceptions of harmonic motion, cadential direction, and
1Eco 1998, 19.
2McCreless 1997, 295. (First published in the March 1996 issue of Music 4Foucault 1970, xxiii.
Theory Online.) 5van den Toorn 1995.
3Solie 1980; Kerman 1985, Chapter 3. 6Agawu 1997.

Theorizing Musical Meaning 171
so forth, but instead of being thematized, analysis is disguised as is perfectly evident that she is equally open to the multiplicity of
common sense: “Rather than develop new methods for analysis, interpretive opportunities offered by musical texts, and to the pro-
methods that are free of conventional biases,” he complained, visional quality of any given interpretation. 11 Yet the impression
“new musicologists often fall back on conventional methods. The described by DeNora and Miles persists. Undoubtedly one reason
props of insight-formation are considered self-evident.”7 Or to put for this is the kind of common-sense, unre ective, in a word, un-
it another way, the emphasis is always on the interpretation and theorized approach to analysis that Agawu criticized.12 But I think
not the analysis that underlies it, which accordingly comes across there is another reason as well, and it is with this that I am con-
as just how the music is. Hence Agawu’s observation, with just a cerned in the present article: the lack of an adequately theorized
hint of sarcasm, that “It is hard to square this particular manifesta- conception of how music might support, or not support, the mean-
tion of reticence among some new musicologists with the search- ings ascribed to it.
ing no-nonsense spirit of post-modern inquiry.” That, thirteen years after its original publication, McClary’s in-
And this links to a more general criticism, voiced, for instance, terpretation of the rst-movement recapitulation from Beethoven’s
by Tia DeNora, according to whom McClary “treats musical com- Ninth Symphony retains its power to provoke will be doubted by
positions as if they are simply ‘waiting to be read’ ”—that is, as if nobody who has been following the SMT or AMS email lists
their meanings are located outside of situated contexts of recep- during the past few years.13 But where does its compelling quality
tion.” Similarly, Stephen Miles complains that for McClary, come from? Not, as James Johnson and others have pointed out,
“meaning is clear and there for the taking: we have only to crack from evidence of period perceptions along such lines, for there is
the codes.” 8 There is something paradoxical about such com- none. 14 If the association of Beethoven’s music and sexually moti-
plaints. One of the basic principles of the culturally oriented musi- vated murder strikes us as in any way plausible—and if it were
cology of the 1990s was that there is no such thing as “purely mu- simply implausible it would hardly have stimulated the controversy
sical” meaning: Lawrence Kramer claimed that “neither music nor
11 A representative example from her book Conventional Wisdom is a char-
anything else can be other than worldly through and through,” 9
acteristically authoritative account of tonal drama in Vivaldi’s Concerto op. 3,
while the aim of McClary’s latest book is to demonstrate that all
no. 8, followed by a discussion of the reasons why she adopted this particular
social and cultural knowledge, even that granted the status of the critical strategy in this particular case (2000, 93).
“purely musical,” consists of conventions, none of which “counts 12 Agawu has also intimated that McClary’s analyses are not always as se-
as anything more than arti cial constructs human beings have in- cure or as complete as they might be (Agawu 1993, 96; see also Treitler 1999,
vented and agreed to maintain.”10 This in turn undermines tradi- 368). But that is not really the point in the present context; Timothy Jackson
(1995) has demonstrated how it is possible to create gender-based interpreta-
tional positions of interpretive authority, replacing them with the
tions based on the same principles as McClary’s but with all the conveniences
interpretive mobility that Kramer also called for. And when of what he terms modern Schenkerian theory, and exactly the same criticisms
McClary’s writings are read with some modicum of sympathy, it might be made of his work.
13 McClary 1991, 128–9; rst published as “Getting Down off the Beanstalk:
7 Agawu 1997, 302. The Presence of a Woman’s Voice in Janika Vandervelde’s Genesis II,” Minne-
8 DeNora 1995, 127; Miles 1995, 31. Peter Martin (1995) not only makes sota Composers’ Forum Newsletter, February 1987. In Conventional Wisdom,
the same criticism of McClary (156) but also extends it to Adorno and Shepherd McClary reveals that it has been quoted “in places as unlikely as Entertainment
(160–1). Weekly and Reader’s Digest” (McClary 2000, 189 [n. 17]).
9Kramer 1992 (reprinted as Chapter 1 of Kramer 1995), 9. 14 Johnson 1995, 287–8 (n. 4). Treitler (1999, 369) has made similar obser-
10 McClary 2000, 6. vations about McClary’s interpretation of Mozart’s K. 453.

172 Music Theory Spectrum
it did—then this is in part because of the in uence of another un- spirit of post-modern enquiry: Max Paddison complains that
historical way of thought: Freudian psychoanalysis, with its pur- Adorno “does not really subject the traditional terms of his
suit of latent sexual meaning. Put that on one side and any number inherited analytical approach to the same kind of rigorous, self-
of other metaphors come to mind which might t the music just as re ective critique that he brings to his philosophical and sociolog-
well: war, for instance, with its battles, skirmishes, strategic re- ical methodology.”19 And there is a further criticism of the 1990s
treats, and Pyrrhic victories (and, after all, we are talking about musicologists that, perhaps surprisingly, might equally be made of
the composer of Wellingtons Sieg). But what underwrites the Adorno: Miles’s complaint that they “posit a relation between
plausibility of any such metaphor, what assures its “ t” with the music and society yet develop only the former in detail.”20 It is not
music, is the notion of homology. At the most obvious level, just that, as Richard Middleton says of Dick Hebdige’s work on
McClary’s interpretations involve equating the frustration and the mods (which is based on homologies between the music of
achievement of musical goals with sexual ones; at a more subtle bands like The Who and aspects of mod lifestyle or self-image),
level, they depend on an equation between conformance to or sub- the t between the two terms of the relationship is slack.21 (I meant
version of normative patterns in music on the one hand and in so- to imply as much, of course, in suggesting that the metaphor of
ciety or ideology on the other. Take away the homology and the war might t the Ninth Symphony as well as that of sexual mur-
interpretation loses its plausibility as an interpretation of the music der.) Nor is it just that such homologies depend on understanding
rather than one imposed on it; it becomes, in a word, arbitrary. both music and society at a level of abstraction which leaves any
In claiming that Beethoven’s music reveals something about possibility of empirical demonstration far behind.22 It is that, as
early nineteenth-century gender constructions, and more generally many of Adorno’s readers and critics have found, it is hard to put
that “tonality . . . constructed musical analogs to such emergent your nger on exactly how the linkage between musical and social
ideals as rationality, individualism, progress, and centred subjec- structure is meant to work. Even Subotnik describes it as “indi-
tivity,”15 McClary is of course drawing on the interpretive tradition rect, complex, unconscious, undocumented, and mysterious.”23
associated with Adorno (“and explicated so compellingly by Rose
19 Paddison 1993, 171.
Subotnik,” she adds).16 At the heart of this approach lies the claim 20 Miles 1997, 728; by “the problem of mediation” referred to in his title, he
that, in Adorno’s words, music “presents social problems through means “the concrete links between music and society on the levels of produc-
its own material and according to its own formal laws—problems tion and reception” (723).
which music contains within itself in the innermost cells of its 21 Middleton 1990, 163. Middleton’s general discussion of the concept of
technique.”17 In this way the tensions and contradictions of society homology (159–66) emphasizes its links with the British cultural-studies tradi-
tion; for further perspectives see Martin 1995, Chapters 3 and 4; Moore 1993,
are “de ned as technical problems,”18 from which it follows that
165–7, and Shepherd & Wicke 1997, 31– 41.
social meaning can be decoded by appropriate analysis of musical 22 This criticism might in particular be levelled at John Shepherd’s early
texts. This, however, is where the trouble starts. One criticism of work (e.g., Shepherd 1977), which itself is more reminiscent of Ernst Bloch
Adorno matches Agawu’s barb about the searching, no-nonsense than of Adorno. To provide a representative example, Bloch writes of the Vien-
nese classical style that “the dominance of the melody-carrying upper part and
15 McClary 2000, 65. mobility of the other parts correspond to the rise of the entrepreneur, just as the
16 McClary 2000, 119. central cantus rmus and terraced polyphony [of earlier music] corresponded to
17 Quoted in Martin 1995, 100 (from Adorno’s “On the social situation of the hierarchical society” (Bloch 1985, 201, quoted in Paddison 1993, 77). For
music,” Telos 35 [1978]). the relationship between Adorno and Bloch, see Paddison 1993, 74–8.
18 Quoted in Martin 1995, 114. 23 Subotnik 1976, 271.

Peter Martin, who quotes Subotnik’s description, concurs with But of course, if the relationship between music and meaning
Miles in locating the problem at the social, or rather sociological, is simply an arbitrary one, wholly conditioned by historical con-
end of the relationship; he characterizes the failings of not only tingency, then there is nothing in the music that can constrain
Adorno but also Shepherd and McClary as “rei cation of concepts interpretation. Just as in the case of the loosely tting, overinter-
such as society and social structure, and a potentially determinis- preted homologies I have described, there is inadequate eviden-
tic view of behaviour,” adding that these “are among the failings of tiary basis for reasoned interpretive debate; as Agawu comments,
a ‘structural’ sociology in general” (he particularly has Durkheim “One’s insights need not meet the test of intersubjective corrobo-
in mind).24 This critique cuts to the heart of the problem. In effect, ration.”26 That is why email list discussions of McClary’s work de-
Martin is saying, Adorno and his 1990s followers assume that so- generate so quickly into ames. It is also why Leo Treitler made
cial structure has some kind of objective existence, which is repre- the acid observation that McClary’s readings “seem precariously
sented through homology within the patterns of music; this is close to interpretations that are driven by little more than the need
what gives rise to the impression that social meaning is inherent in to make them,” adding that such interpretations “are not different
the music (as well as to the authoritative stance, the certainty, in form or verisimilitude from the sort of nineteenth-century
which characterizes Adorno’s pronouncements). And that brings hermeneutic that interpreted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in im-
us back to the same paradox I have already mentioned, only more ages drawn from Goethe’s Faust.” 27 And indeed there is a striking
forcibly. As Martin explains, the basic disciplinary premise of so- parallel between the conditions attending musical discourse today
ciology is that all such structures and meanings are socially con- and those of a hundred and fty years ago. Borrowing Middle-
structed; as a result, the concept of the “natural,” of structures and ton’s useful phrase,28 one might speak of a mid-nineteenth-century
meanings that are materially rather than socially grounded, be- “rush to interpretation” in which extravagant claims about musical
comes the object of critique—in the same way, and for the same meaning were made in the absence of serious engagement with
reasons, that the idea of the “purely musical” became an object of musical texts.29 Under such circumstances it would be plausible to
critique in musicological circles. And it is this premise of social see the development later in the century of more formalized ap-
constructionism, as de nitive of the (then) “New” musicology as proaches to analysis as an attempt to regulate debate through prin-
of sociology, that has caused critical attention consistently to veer cipled reference to the relevant empirical data, in other words, the
away from the question of just how particular pieces of music score.
might support particular meanings, and indeed whether there are That attempt, as I shall shortly argue, went well and truly off the
constraints on the meaning that any particular piece can support. rails. But the aim might still be thought a valid one. My purpose in
Kramer writes on the rst page of Music as Cultural Practice that this article, then, is to outline a way in which we can understand at
meaning is “inextricably bound up with the formal processes and least some of the meanings ascribed to music as at the same time
stylistic articulations of musical works,”25 but the speci c manner
of the binding remains unexplained. And in the absence of such 26 Agawu 1997, 301.
explanation, the only safe model of the relationship between music 27 Treitler 1999, 369, 370; the remark about McClary relates speci cally to
her analysis of Mozart’s Piano Concerto K. 453.
and meaning would appear to be a Saussurian one—in other 28 Middleton 1990, 220.
words, that it is arbitrary. 29 A vivid (although of course caricatured) impression of the interpretive
24 Martin 1995, 162. babble that surrounded the Ninth Symphony is conveyed by Schumann 1947,
25 Kramer 1990, 1. 100–1.

irreducibly cultural and intimately related to its structural proper- matters in this context is not so much what Hanslick meant,
ties. And I shall suggest that engaging in this way with issues of however, but what he was generally understood to mean. And
meaning forms the basis of a theoretical project that does not re- by the early twentieth century, the generally accepted reading of
ject or ignore the “New” musicological challenge to its discipli- Hanslick was that music was to be understood in exclusively
nary identity, but instead builds upon it. structural terms while issues of meaning were ruled out of court.
That became the orthodoxy on which, after the second world war,
both music theory and (within the British empiricist tradition) the
hanslick’s legacy philosophy of music were based. In this way, the concept of struc-
ture acquired the narrowness by comparison with early- to mid-
It is convenient to borrow Lydia Goehr’s terminology and see nineteenth-century formalism that Joseph Dubiel has complained
the development of nineteenth-century criticism as the conjunc- about—a narrowness that, he says, has caused him to stop using
tion of a “transcendent move from the worldly and the particular the term altogether. 32
to the spiritual and the universal” and a “formalist move which This problematic Hanslickian inheritance is most evident in the
brought meaning from the music’s outside to its inside.”30 That work of those philosophers and, more recently, music theorists
way we can understand what happened towards the end of the who have readmitted issues of meaning within academic debate,
century as a repudiation of the transcendent move, leaving the for- but on terms which maintain the underlying values of formalism: I
malist one in place as the sole criterion of musical signi cance shall refer mainly to Peter Kivy, Stephen Davies, and Robert
and value. Hatten, but could just as well have referred to Jerrold Levinson,
The most visible symbol of this is the way in which Hanslick’s Jenefer Robinson, Edward T. Cone, Leo Treitler, or Eero Tarasti.
Vom Musikalisch-Schönen came to be read as a denial of music’s The basic premise of these writers is that, in Hatten’s words, “mu-
capacity to support expressive meaning. Looking back on it, it sical meaning is inherently musical,” so that in speaking of the ex-
is hard to see how even so richly polysemic a text as Vom pressive qualities of music, of its qualities of acquiescence, resig-
Musikalisch-Schönen might have been thought to say that. A more nation, or abnegation, we are as much talking about the music as
careful reading might have seen it as asserting the continuity of when we speak of themes, harmonic progressions, or formal pro-
structure and meaning, and arguing that any understanding of totypes. 33 It follows that, as Kivy argues, expressive concepts
music’s meaning has to be predicated on an understanding of its should be integrated within the analytical process. But this turns
structure.31 It would also have seen Hanslick’s book as an exercise out to be rather problematic in practice.34 Kivy attempts to demon-
in aesthetic categorization, not denying music’s expressive power
but drawing a clear line between expression and beauty. What
32 Dubiel 1997, 313; for similar comments see Maus 1988, 73.
30 Goehr 1992, 153. 33 Hatten 1994, 276. The same is claimed by Cone: “formal and expressive
31 Wilson Coker expresses the claim more explicitly: “For musical works to concepts are not separable but represent two ways of understanding the same
be effective bearers of metaphoric meanings, they are expected to be adequate problem” (Cone 1974, 112) and echoed by Newcomb: “Formal and expressive
sign vehicles, coherently organized in themselves so as to sustain pragmatic, interpretations are in fact two complementary ways of understanding the same
semantic, and syntactic dimensions” (Coker 1972, 153). Scott Burnham effec- phenomena” (Newcomb 1984, 636); Treitler has written an entire article on the
tively reiterates this when he says that “precisely because music is musical it topic (Treitler 1997).
34 Kivy 1993a, 316–17. For a more extended exposition of the following ar-
can speak to us of things that are not strictly musical” (Burnham 1997, 326; this
passage also appears in Burnham 1999, 215). gument, see Cook & Dibben (forthcoming).

strate what he means through a comparative discussion of It would be convenient if not entirely accurate to describe this
Haydn’s symphonies “La Passione” and “La Poule,” but all that approach to musical meaning as neo-Hanslickian; 39 at any rate, it
really happens is that he substitutes expressive labels for technical is a position much closer to Hanslick’s own views than those
ones: he speaks of “the passage from light to dark emotions” ascribed to him in the century after the publication of Vom
where the rest of us might speak of the passage from A major to F Musikalisch-Schönen, one that does not reject music’s meaning-
minor,35 but otherwise little changes. And while Hatten’s analyses fulness but rather inscribes meaning within the musical text. And,
are much more sophisticated, not least because of his concern to whether implicitly or explicitly, this intimate alignment of music
locate structural features within the context of historically grounded and meaning is generally underwritten by an idea that Hanslick
expressive codes, there is a prevailing impression that what is himself put forward,40 and that has since then been taken up by
being put forward is a structural interpretation that is either being philosophers and music theorists from Langer to Coker and from
expressed in emotional vocabulary, like Kivy’s, or else having ex- Meyer to Shepherd: the tensional or energetic patterns of music
pressive meaning grafted onto it at the last moment (his discussion correspond in some manner to what Langer called the “logical
of the rst movement of Beethoven’s op. 130 is a particular case expression” or “general forms of feeling,”41 so evoking (in
in point). 36 It is telling that Hatten often begins with a stylistically Shepherd’s and Wicke’s more convoluted formulation) “an order
informed expressive characterization and then re nes it through of human relationships mediated somatically and experienced as
structural analysis, but he never reassesses a formal analysis on powerful and encompassing internal affective states.”42 Two points
the basis of his expressive interpretation; only sporadically, as in
his discussion of the Cavatina from op. 130, do we get a sense of
the expressive analysis genuinely counterpointing the structural consider this dichotomy ill-conceived” (176), on the next, that “the formal func-
one—for example, by demonstrating expressive coherence just tion of particular passages can often be accurately described only in expressive
where the music is structurally incoherent. Although Hatten refers terms.” (The second statement reinscribes the very dichotomy that the rst
to “the interaction of expressive and structural features” in this denied.) For further discussion of the extent to which writers like Karl &
Robinson, Hatten, Maus, Fisk, and Guck address the “interaction” between
movement,37 he does not really theorize the kind of oppositional
structure and expression to which several of them refer, see Cook & Dibben
relationship between them on which such an interaction might (forthcoming).
be based, and indeed it is dif cult to see how he very well could, 39 The inaccuracy is most evident in the areas in which Kivy and Hatten, in
given the premise that musical meaning is inherently musical.38 I particular, disassociate themselves from Hanslickian formalism, although how
shall return to this issue at the end of this article. far they are disassociating themselves from the real or the received Hanslick is a
moot point.
40 Hanslick 1986, 11; such thinking has an eighteenth-century prehistory, for
35 Kivy 1993a, 322. instance, in the works of Johann Mattheson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
41 Langer 1942, 218, 238.
36 Consider, for instance, his description of mm. 5–6 of the op. 130 Cava-
42 Shepherd & Wicke 1997, 113; for a closely related formulation see
tina: “The ‘willed’ (basically stepwise) ascent takes on a hopeful character sup-
ported by the stepwise bass. (Note that the wedge-like expansion ‘opens up’ Sloboda 1998, 28. For general bibliographic references concerning this ap-
emotional as well as registral space, and overrides the potential ‘lament’ conno- proach see Cook 1998, 79 (n. 62) and Davies 1994, 230. Shepherd & Wicke’s
tation of a stepwise descent in the bass.)” (Hatten 1994, 213–14). mention of the “somatic” suggests the possibility of developing this model
37 Hatten 1994, 320 (n. 8). through linking it to the role of the body as the grounding metaphor of human
38 A similar ambivalence may be found in Karl & Robinson 1997: on one conceptualization (Johnson 1992); see also the discussion of metaphor in
page they say of the relationship between structure and expression that “we Hatten 1994, 162–72.

need to be made about this idea, which I shall call, borrowing senting itself as a general philosophy of music, is in reality predi-
Kivy’s term, the “contour” theory of musical expression. 43 cated on nineteenth-century constructions of bourgeois subjectiv-
The rst is that the relationship it posits between music and ity (not unreasonably, considering its origins in Hanslick), and
meaning is inherently mysterious. It is mysterious because of the therefore of limited historical, geographical, and perhaps even
impossibility of de ning the “logical form” of human feelings ex- social application.
cept in terms of such behavioral expressions of them as music Part of Hanslick’s legacy, then, has been a fragmentation of
or dance, from which it follows, as Roger Scruton has pointed out, thinking about musical meaning. Nowhere in Davies’s apparently
that the invocation of the concept is redundant: 44 one cannot co- exhaustive book Musical Meaning and Expression is there serious
herently argue for a relationship between A and B if the only way consideration of music having social meaning (Adorno, for in-
to de ne B is A. (The mystery is as deep as that presented by stance, appears only once in the main text, forecasting that one
Adorno’s homologies between musical and social structure, and day children will whistle dodecaphonic tunes as they deliver pa-
closely related: when Shepherd and Wicke write that “there may pers!).47 Conversely, Shepherd and Wicke’s more culturally ori-
well exist a structural relationship between the internal character- ented book, which the authors describe, in the very rst sentence,
istics of drum sounds and the logics and structures of ‘militari- as being “about processes of affect and meaning in music,”48 man-
ness’,”45 it is hard to say whether music is being linked to affective ages to omit any reference whatsoever to Kivy, Davies, or Hatten
or social structure, but in neither case is it remotely clear how you (or for that matter Levinson, Robinson, Cone, Treitler, or Tarasti).
might set about de ning the “logics and structures of ‘militari- In saying this, I do not mean to imply that there should, or
ness’.”) The second point is that, through being understood in could, be a grand, unifying theory of musical meaning: as Francis
terms of such internal affective states, meaning is being implicitly Sparshott observes, “Perhaps we need to consider a lot of diverse
imputed to an experiencing subject; much of the literature con- phenomena, only vaguely connected.” 49 But it does seem that
cerning musical meaning revolves around the issue of whether there are important varieties of musical meaning (and, from the
that experiencing subject is to be identi ed with the composer, the music theorist’s perspective, possibly the most interesting) that
listener, or in some more or less obscure sense, the music itself.46 fall into the gap between an approach that sees meaning as inher-
One might accordingly object that the entire approach, while pre- ent in the music, as in the case of the neo-Hanslickians, and one
that claims it to be a purely social construction (as in the case of
43 As distinct from the “convention” theory (i.e., arbitrary signi cation): see
the neo-Adornians). To take just one example, to which I shall re-
Kivy 1980, Chapter 8. turn, it is everyday experience that the music of television com-
44 Scruton 1997, 147 (n. 7); for a further critique of Langer see Davies 1994,
mercials shapes and nuances the advertisers’ messages; in such
132–3. Davies’s concept of “emotion characteristics in appearances” (221–8),
according to which the gestural properties of music are aligned with such ob- cases the semiotic process depends on the difference between
servables as the “jauntiness” of a particular gait, overcomes some of these prob-
lems since it substitutes observable properties for hidden mental states. 47 Davies 1994, 359–60.
45 Shepherd & Wicke 1997, 156. 48 Shepherd & Wicke 1997, 7.
46 The starting point for this debate is Cone 1974 but contributors include, 49 Sparshott 1998, 24; for a typology of musical meanings see Davies 1994,
among others, Newcomb, Kivy, Robinson, and Maus; for a recent formulation 29–36. Sparshott also comments that it is “hard to see what a theory in this area
in the context of experimental psychology see Watt & Ash 1998, especially 49– could be a theory of, or what purpose it might serve” (33– 4), but Scruton, as
50, while for a sophisticated analytical study centered on the construction of usual, has the answer: “a theory of musical meaning is a theory of what we un-
subjectivity, see Cumming 1997. derstand when we hear with understanding” (Scruton 1997, 169).

music and meaning (it clearly invokes worldly and not just “inher- which I referred has militated against the development of more
ently musical” meaning), but at the same time there is an intimate principled approaches. For this reason the most telling formula-
binding between the unfolding of the music and the emergence of tion is Richard Middleton’s: “it seems likely,” he says, “that in
that meaning. practice there are . . . limits to the transmutation of meaning.”54
That we might often wish to see musical meaning in such a The phrase “it seems likely” simultaneously conveys the urge to
way is plain enough. Edward T. Cone asserts that “a piece of believe this and the absence of any principled basis for doing so.
music allows a wide but not unrestricted range of possible expres- The challenge for the theorist, then, is to nd a third way, and so
sion”;50 more concretely (and again with reference to Haydn’s pass between the Scylla of inherent and the Charybdis of social
“La Poule”), James Johnson argues that you might hear the oboe’s constructed meaning.
dotted-note patterns as a hen, or equally as an expression of merri-
ment, or even as “an essential thread in a web of indescribable between scylla and charybdis
content”—but what you cannot credibly do, he says, is argue “that
it is a funeral dirge, or paints the storming of the Bastille, or pro- There is a general tendency for critical discussions of musical
motes slavery.”51 Such formulations re ect a view of music and meaning to assimilate it to verbal signi cation. Miles argues that
meaning as interacting with one another: as different, but linked. McClary “treats music as if it were almost linguistic in nature:
Again, Shepherd and Wicke speak of “the construction of mean- witness the liberal use of verbs such as ‘articulates’ . . . McClary’s
ings through music’s sounds [that] can be understood as being metaphors effectively convey her insights into the social meanings
socially negotiated but not arbitrary.”52 And, of course, there is in of music but at times they obscure the distinction between music
principle no reason why musical meaning cannot be at the same and language.”55 Particularly revealing in this context is a prevail-
time both culturally constructed and conditioned by formal struc- ing suspicion, particularly evident in Kramer’s writings, of the
ture (as Martin says, social constructionism need not imply that associated ideas of immediacy and ineffability. The grounds for
“musical meanings . . . must be random, or that any pattern of suspicion are plain enough: meaning that lies beyond the range of
sound is likely to represent any object or idea”).53 Indeed, critical critical discourse will by de nition present itself as immanent and
commentaries on music frequently make this an implicit, common- indeed natural, thereby contravening the social-constructionist
sense assumption. But common-sense assumptions are insuf cient principles to which I have referred. And since Kramer’s back-
to regulate critical discourse, and the ideologically inspired veer- ground is in literary studies, it is hardly surprising if he identi es
ing away from issues of the material grounding of meaning to meaning with language and thinks in terms of the mutual perme-
ability of text and commentary.56 But music is not language, at
50 Cone 1974, 166.
51 Johnson 1995, 2. 54 Middleton 1990, 154.
52 Shepherd & Wicke 1997, 116. 55 Miles 1995, 26.
53 Martin 1995, 72 (see also 144–5). For Martin, this is entirely compatible 56 Kramer asserts that the work “resists fully disclosing itself, that in certain
with meanings being “ ‘arbitrary’, in the technical sense,” so it is necessary to important respects it is mute, and that we ourselves understand it at rst in
view this particular word with caution; cf. Davies’s comment that “there is an terms we must work to articulate” (Kramer 1990, 5). This looks at rst sight
unfortunate tendency to treat ‘conventional’ as equivalent to ‘arbitrary’ and to like a defence of ineffability but in reality is not, for the premise of Kramer’s
regard all conventions as structuring symbol systems dedicated to generating criticism is that music “must be made to yield to understanding” (6, my italics),
semantic content” (Davies 1994, 39). in other words that it can be made to talk.

least in more than a partial and analogical sense, and if we are to circumstances but by allowing it the opacity of its own voice” 60).
draw on other cultural practices for models of musical meaning, It follows that the interpretation of material culture might provide
then it would make equally good sense to turn to the study of ma- a useful model for musical meaning to complement the wide-
terial culture, where issues of ineffability cannot be airily waved spread, though often tacit, appropriation of models derived from
away.57 language or from literary texts.
In his book Material Culture and Mass Consumption, Daniel How, then, do objects signify? Through the social construction
Miller writes of of meaning, to be sure. Like a literary or musical text, a pot or a
picture does not simply have meaning built into it, just waiting to
the inadequacies and crudity of language when faced with objects in
be discovered. Accordingly, Miller rejects “the idea of physicality
everyday interaction . . . Imagine for a moment attempting to describe in
as some ‘ultimate constraint’ or nal determining factor,” instead
detail the difference in shape between a milk bottle and a sherry bottle, or
the taste of cod as against haddock, or the design of some wallpaper. emphasizing that
Clearly, compared with our ability to make ne discriminations of percep- even a cursory examination of artefacts as actually employed within dif-
tual qualities and immediately to recognize and discriminate amidst a ferent societies reveals the extreme diversity of uses and connotations
profusion of ordinary objects, linguistic description may appear slow and among physically similar forms . . . Societies have an extraordinary ca-
clumsy.58 pacity either to consider objects as having attributes which may not ap-
pear as evident to outsiders, or else to ignore attributes which would have
And in a similar vein, in his essay on some Eisenstein stills, appeared to those same outsiders as being inextricably part of that ob-
Barthes spoke of the “obtuse” meaning of visual images, a mean- ject.61
ing that is “evident, erratic, obstinate,” and that de es explicit for-
mulation or representation: as he says, it is “theoretically locatable But in saying that the meaning of the object is socially con-
but not describable.”59 Such views run parallel with the wide- structed, he is not saying that it is simply or exclusively arbitrary.
spread intuition that music, too, resists comprehensive verbal And it is the idea of the attribute that enables him to nd a way
formulation—views hard to shrug off as just lingering Romantic between these two positions. The argument is in essence a simple
ideology (in the case of Scott Burnham, for instance, for whom one: any pot or picture has an inde nite, though not in nite, num-
“we hear music speak . . . not by reducing it to some other set of ber of physical attributes, and each society makes its own selec-
tion from and interpretation of those attributes. (It is perhaps easi-
est to see what this might mean in terms of the different ways
57 It is a curious fact that so many musicologists and theorists have embraced
certain paintings have been seen at different times: Hans van
Goehr’s image of the “imaginary museum of musical works” without really Meegeren’s Vermeer forgeries, for example, originally fooled the
considering the implied parallel between musical works and what real museums
experts but look quite different from the originals now. The shift
contain, that is to say material artefacts. To pursue this observation would take
me beyond the bounds of this article, but I have in mind the possibility that the in the way they are seen re ects a different selection of attributes,
most appropriate models of narrativity in music might be drawn not from litera- and their price has changed accordingly.) The meaning that the
ture but from the manner in which turn-of-the-century museology conveyed object acquires within a particular culture is thus supported by—
social-evolutionary and diffusionist paradigms through the collocation of mate-
rial artefacts (Miller 1987, 110–11).
58 Miller 1987, 98. 60 Burnham 1997, 326.
59 Barthes 1977, 53, 65. 61 Miller 1987, 105, 109.

and at the same time helps to stabilize—the speci c selection of getic input of group members faced with the demands for immedi-
attributes which that culture has made; it helps to make the object ate concrete work” and “ceaselessly negotiated” between them,
what it is for that culture. In this way, while meaning is socially resulting in “a cluster of different contributions which produce,
constructed, it is both enabled and constrained by the available at- even ‘in the moment’ of what looks like ‘a single action,’ a tension
tributes of the object. and a certain semiotic heterogeneity.”64 As constructed in perfor-
Before we can con dently apply a model drawn from material mance, then, meaning is emergent: it is not reproduced in but
culture to the analysis of musical meaning, however, we need to created through the act of performance. And it is this emergent
address a very obvious distinction between the two forms of cul- quality, together with the idea of a bundle or cluster of semiotic
tural practice. Material objects are, in Goodman’s terminology,62 potential, that I want to invoke in the analysis of musical meaning.
autographic; they may be replicated, but each object has its own For, like physical objects, the material traces of music support a
independent existence. Musical objects, by contrast, are allographic, range of possible meanings, and like Melrose’s image of perfor-
instanced equally by scores, performances, or sound recordings. In mance interaction, they can be thought of as bundles comprised of
this way the notational trace represented by the score—or, fre- an inde nite number of attributes from which different selections
quently, by a number of more or less diverging scores—is supple- will be made within different cultural traditions, or on different
mented or substituted by the multiple acoustic traces of perfor- occasions of interpretation. We might speak of differential seman-
mances and recordings, each of which manifests its own forms of tic parsing, and this is one source for the cultural variability of
empirical resistance in both the semiotic process and its analysis; musical meaning, one way in which there is an articulation—a de-
what we think of as “a piece” of music should really be conceived gree of play—in the relationship between music and its meanings.
as an inde nitely extended series of traces (and when I speak of But there is also another source, which will take longer to ex-
the musical trace in this article, it is a shorthand for the entire se- plain. As I have suggested, one of the problems with the “contour”
ries).63 But this is only part of a larger issue: the extent to which theory of musical expression is that it binds meaning so closely to
one can usefully draw analogies between the autographic and the music as to become, to all intents and purposes, immanent; it
performing arts. And for this reason it is helpful to complement doesn’t, in other words, recognize the articulation to which I have
the material culture analogy I have put forward with a further one just referred. And because of this, and in order to accommodate
drawn from theatre studies. empirical evidence that listeners do not exactly agree on what
In her book A Semiotics of the Dramatic Text, Susan Melrose is emotions a given piece of music expresses, neo-Hanslickian
concerned with the way in which dramatic meaning is negotiated philosophers like Kivy and Davies have argued that music can ex-
between theatrical performers, rather than inhering in the text and press only gross emotional qualities, such as happiness or sadness,
being reproduced in performance. (This approach is equally rele- but not more nuanced emotions such as joy, elation, delight, and
vant to musical performance, but I shall explore that on another high spirits on the one hand, or grief, despondency, dejection,
occasion.) Where a modernist critic might have looked for coher- depression, gloom, moping, and broken-heartedness on the other
ence and unity, Melrose invokes the decentered concept of a “bun- (regrettably, there are more words for “sad” than “happy”).65 This
dle of . . . semiotic potential, held together by the differing ener- argument is based on the premise that these more nuanced or
62 Goodman 1969. 64 Melrose 1994, 221–2.

63 For further discussion, see Cook 1999. 65 See Davies 1994, 226, where this argument is set out in detail.

“higher” emotions require a formal (intentional) object, in the nuance.70 Or even more succinctly: music conveys not unnuanced
sense that one cannot just be proud or envious, one has to be emotion but emotionless nuance.
proud or envious of someone or something; music cannot supply And that, I suggest, provides the key to a model of musical
formal objects, or so the argument goes, and hence it is restricted meaning that understands it as neither immanent nor arbitrary, but
to simple, objectless emotions or moods, like happiness and sad- rather negotiated and emergent, just as Melrose sees dramatic
ness.66 In short, music can only express unnuanced emotion. meaning. I can make the point very simply by referring to a televi-
I have observed in another context that this conclusion is sion commercial, about which I have written elsewhere, in which
hardly calculated to satisfy musicologists (hence the prolonged shots of a Citroën ZX 16v powering its way up twisting country
but inconclusive exchange of essays between Kivy and Anthony lanes are aligned with extracts from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro
Newcomb) and that, perhaps unexpectedly, it is Hanslick who overture. 71 Heard in this context, the energetic and expressive at-
suggests the way forward.67 In an early formulation of what has tributes of Mozart’s music—in other words, its nuances—cluster
since become known as the cognitive theory of the emotions, 68 themselves around the car, transferring to it the qualities of power
Hanslick argued that emotions like longing, hope, or love depend and verve and grace associated with them, and at the same time
on a formal object, in the absence of which, as he puts it, “all that endowing it with connotations of prestige and high culture. (I
remains is an unspeci c stirring, perhaps the awareness of a gen- shall go into this process in a bit more detail below.) The music,
eral state of well-being or distress.”69 (This is not so different from so to speak, seeks out the qualities of the car, and conversely the
what Kivy and Davies claim that music is capable of expressing.) image of the speeding Citroën might be said to interpret the
But Hanslick pursues his thought in a different direction: music. And so a composite meaning emerges, one which was im-
manent in neither the overture nor the car. That, of course, is an
Love cannot be thought without the representation of a beloved person, example of multimedia, not of “music alone,” to borrow Kivy’s
without desire and striving after felicity, glori cation and possession of a
phrase (which he in turn seems to have borrowed from Hanslick).72
particular object. Not some kind of mere mental agitation, but its concep-
But it is central to my argument that music never is “alone,” that it
tual core, its real, historical content, speci es this feeling of love. Accord-
ingly, its dynamic can appear as readily gentle as stormy, as readily joyful is always received in a discursive context, and that it is through
as sorrowful, and yet still be love . . . Music can only express the various the interaction of music and interpreter, text and context, that
accompanying adjectives and never the substantive, e.g., love itself. meaning is constructed, as a result of which the meaning attrib-
uted to any given material trace will vary according to the circum-
In short, then, Hanslick is arguing that music is highly ineffec- stances of its reception. In this way it is wrong to speak of music
tive as a means of conveying emotion, but what it does convey is having particular meanings; rather it has the potential for speci c
meanings to emerge under speci c circumstances. Or to borrow a
70 In Cook 1998, 94, I suggested that precisely this is implied by Hanslick’s
66 This argument is widely but not universally accepted: for exceptions see admittedly undeveloped analogy with silhouettes (see Hanslick 1986, 18). I
the contrasting accounts of the complex emotion of hope offered by Levinson have previously advanced the same general argument in Cook 1996, 121–2.
1990 and Karl & Robinson 1997. 71 Cook 1998, 4 –8.
67 See Cook 1998, 86–97. 72 Kivy 1990; Hanslick 1986, 2 (but Kivy would probably have referred to
68 Kivy 1993b, 284.

Gustav Cohen’s translation, where the phrase appears more prominently:
69 Hanslick 1986, 9.
Hanslick 1974, 17).

term from J. J. Gibson, 73 music does not have speci c meanings, come to be heard that way by her readers in just the same, self-
but it affords sentiments of love, grace, prestige, desire, whatever. evident manner that a generation of British critics and listeners
And that is a second way in which there is an articulation in the heard it as a representation of cosmic catastrophe. Where Tovey,
relationship between music and meaning, and hence another writing in the 1930s, said that “we see the heavens on re,” Robert
source of the cultural variability of musical meaning. Simpson, writing after the war, spoke of “the sky . . . blazing from
horizon to horizon,” and Basil Lam of a “ ame of incandescent
terror.” Each writer gives the impression of not being engaged in a
constructing meaning: a case study hermeneutic exercise but simply saying how the music is.76 In this
way, the plurality of music’s meanings is not a phenomenological
In speaking of the “material trace” of music I am borrowing given but has to be deduced from the study of its reception.
from Jean-Jacques Nattiez, who in his Music and Discourse sub- At this point, it is helpful to develop in greater detail the paral-
stitutes this term for what (following Molino) he had previously lel I have already invoked between the experiencing of music and
called the “neutral level.”74 Although it still looks uncomfortably that of such mixed genres as the television commercial, lm, or
like the score in drag, the later term at least avoids some of the music video, where words, pictures, and music are typically expe-
patent dif culties of the earlier one: there is after all something rienced not as separate or even separable components, but as com-
paradoxical about the idea of the neutral level, in that it is hard to bined with one another and replete with meaning. In my book on
see how it can be conceived in terms that do not invoke either the analyzing musical multimedia, I developed a model for the analy-
poietic or the esthesic, if not both. In other words (those of a fa- sis of such combinations based on George Lakoff’s and Mark
mous Oxford limerick about Berkeley’s philosophy), the neutral Johnson’s concept of metaphor, more recently developed by Mark
level is the opposite of the tree in the quad: it is only there when Turner and Gilles Fauconnier under the title “conceptual blend-
you are not thinking about it. ing.”77 The model has two basic elements. First, there is what I
But that there is a need for some such conception can again be call an “enabling similarity”:78 there must be common attributes
illustrated through the comparison with material culture. Objects presented by the various media in question (music and moving
do not present themselves as separable from the meanings they image, say), in the absence of which there would be no perceptual
support. Instead, they appear to us as meaningful through and interaction between them. Second, there is what Turner and Fau-
through, as if meaning was immanent within them. In just the connier term the “blended space,” in which the attributes unique
same way, the double articulation between music and meaning to to each medium are combined, resulting in the emergence of
which I have referred is imperceptible. And so, when McClary de- new meaning. The Citroën commercial to which I have referred
scribes the point of recapitulation in the rst movement of the
Ninth Symphony as an expression of “murderous rage and yet a 76 Tovey 1935–9, vol 2, 100; Simpson 1970, 60; Lam 1966, 161. See Cook
kind of pleasure in its ful llment of formal demands,”75 it may 1993, 66–7.
77 Cook 1998, Chapters 2–3; Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Turner 1996; Turner &
73 Moore has also applied Gibson’s concept of affordance, originally devel- Fauconnier 1995. A major element of the original theory, not incorporated
oped in the context of visual perception, to musical meaning (Moore 1993, 6; within my adaptation of it, is the hypothesis that all metaphors are ultimately
see also Cook 1998, 96). grounded in body schemata, creating a potential link with “contour” theory (see
74 Nattiez 1990, 15. n. 42 above).
75 McClary 1991, 128. 78 Cook 1998, 70.

provides a convenient illustration. The alignment of music and inversion voicing. There is also the very fact of the major mode,
moving image works, obviously, around the representation of the wholly unanticipated in the preceding measures, of which Tovey
car that is being promoted (see the top square of Example 1).79 In remarks that “there is something very terrible about this tri-
the left- and right-hand squares ( lm and music spaces), we have umphant major tonic, and it is almost a relief when it turns into
some of the corresponding attributes of the two media (no doubt the minor as the orchestra crashes into the main theme.” 80 These
there are others, but it is the framework rather than the detail of particular attributes, then, are foregrounded by the image of the
the analysis that I want to convey). And at the bottom, we have the sky on re, so illustrating what I mean by the selection of attrib-
blended space in which the meaning of the commercial emerges: utes from the musical trace.
the qualities of agility, precision, style, and prestige associated By contrast, McClary’s interpretation involves a quite different
with Mozart’s music are drawn from it, so to speak, and trans- selection of attributes. At this point it is worth recalling what
ferred to or predicated of the ZX 16v. In that predication lies the McClary actually says.81 It all turns on a kind of sustained double
advertiser’s message. entendre around the word “subject,” which she uses simultane-
My point is that we can model an interpretation of the recapitu- ously in a traditional analytical sense (interchangeable with
lation in the rst movement of the Ninth Symphony in just the “theme”) and in the sense of the putative subject whose experi-
same way. Example 2 is a representation of the Tovey/Simpson/ ences the music expresses. The rst part of the movement, she
Lam interpretation, which is based mainly on the quality of sus- says, has seen the arduous individuation of the subject from
tained, glaring brilliance shared by Beethoven’s music and the the “womblike void” of the opening, the construction of an iden-
image of the sky on re. The result is to transfer to the music the tity maintained “only by virtue of the subject’s constant violent
qualities encoded within the image: on the one hand a sense of self-assertion”—a self-assertion that takes the form of resisting
the remote and the inhuman, and on the other connotations of the desire for cadential closure built into the generic narrative of
catastrophe and terror. (Though the Tovey passage predates the the symphony. This means that the point of recapitulation carries
Second World War, I cannot imagine Simpson writing of the sky with it a double threat: loss of identity through regression to the
“blazing from horizon to horizon” or Lam of a “ ame of incan- undifferentiated state of the opening, and the irresistible demand
descent terror” without evoking the memory of the devastating for cadence into the tonic towards which, as she puts it, “the
bombing raids on British cities from 1940 on—and so we have whole background structure of the movement has inexorably dri-
come back to a war-like interpretation of the Ninth after all). We ven.” The image of the sexual killer emerges quite logically from
might even think of this as a discovery within the music of these these premises: in McClary’s words, “the desire for cadential ar-
qualities, in the sense that the interpretation builds upon the rival that has built up over the course of the development nally
music’s semantic potential. And it does so by virtue of a number erupts, as the subject necessarily (because of the narrative tradi-
of speci c attributes of the musical trace, as shown by the “music tion) nds itself in the throes of the initial void while refusing to
space” box in Example 2. There is the sheer, sustained stasis of relent: the entire rst key area in the recapitulation is pockmarked
the D-major chord; the fortissimo brass tones heighten its percep- with explosions. It is the consequent juxtaposition of desire and
tual brightness, and the effect is underlined by the emphatic rst- unspeakable violence in this moment that creates its unparalleled
79 The graphic representation is adapted from Zbikowski 1999; in Turner & 80 Tovey 1935–9, vol. 2, 100.
Fauconnier’s (1995) terminology it is a conceptual integration network (CIN). 81 McClary 1991, 128, where the following quotations will all be found.

Example 1. Conceptual integration network for a car commercial
generic space
representation
of Citroen ZX
16v
lm space music space

rapid motion tempo
dynamic energy strong downbeats
tight editing rhythmic precision
blended space
agility
precision
style
prestige
fusion of murderous rage and yet a kind of pleasure in its ful ll- rhythmic, eruptive sixteenth-note upbeats; and the transgressive,
ment of formal demands” (and there, of course, are the words I almost twisted progression through which the music lurches from
previously quoted). the rst-inversion D-major triad to a root-position B -major one
Here, then, the blending of music and image results in a quite (particularly striking is the incoherence, in terms of contemporary
different set of semantic properties from the Tovey/Lam/Simpson norms, of the F –F –B bass line in m. 312). In this way, and de-
interpretation; instead of a remote, inhuman terror, we have an all- spite its historical implausibility, McClary’s sexual interpretation
too-human menace, a mixture of repression and oppression, the does the same as Tovey’s war-like one: it builds on the objective
imminent invasion of personal space or worse. As Example 3 properties of the musical trace in such a way as to construct and
shows, this interpretation is articulated around not the sustained communicate a quite distinctive way of experiencing the passage.
glare of the music, but rather its inner tension, its eruptive quali- (This means that, pace Treitler, it can justi ably be seen as driven
ties. And that in turn is based on, and hence foregrounds, a quite by the music and not just the need to interpret it.) And again as in
different selection of attributes from the musical trace: the obliter- Taylor’s interpretation, the blend of music and image results in a
ation of thematic identity (instead of stasis); the effectively ar- new, which is to say emergent, meaning; there could hardly be a

Example 2. Conceptual integration network for Tovey’s interpretation of Beethoven, op. 125, I, mm. 301 ff.
generic space
representation of
scene
(sky on re)
text space music space

brightness timbre/inversion/mode
glare fortissimo
icker basses, timpani
relentlessness sustained texture
blended space
remoteness
inhumanity
catastrophe
terror
clearer illustration of the way in which the critical and analytical rehabilitating the ineffable
discourse that surrounds music is engaged in the very act of creat-
ing meaning.82 We shall never be able to shake our experience free I have outlined a way in which we can understand musical
from this powerful interpretation—that is, until the next one meanings as afforded (and hence constrained) by the properties of
comes along. the musical trace while at the same time recognizing their cultural
constructedness, and suggested that this provides a way of passing
82 This is discussed at length in Rabinowitz 1992; see also, for instance, between Scylla and Charybdis. As I shall now argue, it also gives
Kingsbury 1988, 201 (“musicological discourse is not simply talking and writ-
ing ‘about music,’ but is also constitutive of music”) and Bohlman 1993. In a
sense this entire section has been an illustration of Burnham’s (1995, 31) suc- referential sense but acts as a disembodied yet compelling force that attracts
cinct claim that Beethoven’s music “is not so much about anything in a directly whatever is at hand as long as it is remotely commensurable.”

Example 3. Conceptual integration network for McClary’s interpretation of Beethoven, op. 125, I, mm. 301 ff.
generic space
expression of
mental state
(murderous rage)
text space music space

violence arrhythmic accents
mindlessness thematic absence
maintenance of identity avoidance of cadence
desire formal demands
blended space
pent-up emotion
repression
menace
personal danger
rise to a distinction between what I shall call “potential” and “ac- When I spoke earlier of “semantic potential,” I was referring to
tualized” meaning, and the fact that we apply the same word— something more than a merely theoretical potential for meaning.
meaning—to two quite distinct things is responsible for a good The tensional or energetic qualities on which the “contour” theory
deal of the confusion that surrounds issues of musical meaning.83 is based are given in perception, and I would maintain that they
are experienced as a potential for meaning as yet unde ned;84
83 The distinction I am drawing is related to Coker’s (1972, 151–2) contrast
it was just this experience I had in mind when I spoke of music
between “pre-linguistic” and “linguistic” meaning, though it is not clear to me
conveying emotionless nuance. (Perhaps the best analogy is hear-
that Coker’s “instinctual, affective response” (152) is the same as what I refer to
as the experience of meaningfulness. Compare also Coker’s further distinction ing conversation in a language you do not know: you do not grasp
between “acquaintance” and “discursive” meaning (171–81), and that which the meaning, but you do sense its meaningfulness.) But there is a
Lucy Green (1998) makes between “inherent” and “delineated” meaning, itself
echoing Meyer’s (1956) “embodied” and “designative” meaning. A parallel dis- 84 For Green, by contrast, “we can only ever experience music when its in-
tinction is sometimes drawn between “meaning” and “interpretation,” generally herent materials temporally reach consciousness as meanings in terms of their
with the aim of setting limits on the latter (see below, n. 93). status as a historically de ned, delineated musical unity” (Green 1998, 33).

further component of this experience, and that is an urge to create terpreting music directly, in and for itself, without reference to the
the kind of explicit meaning that depends on words for its formu- mediating role of social and cultural knowledge). But not all the
lation and communication; I have elsewhere likened this interpre- writers associated with the “New” musicology would have signed
tive desire to the compulsion to tell a secret.85 And interpretation on to this creed—not Philip Brett, for example, who has called
means transforming potential meaning into actualized meaning in music “an enclave in our society—a sisterhood or brotherhood of
the manner I described in the previous section. This is what hap- lovers, music lovers, united by an unmediated form of communi-
pens every time a writer in the neo-Hanslickian tradition identi es cation that is only by imperfect analogy called a language, ‘the’
an expressive characteristic in the music. (In fact, it would be pos- language of feeling.”86 What is at issue here is not just Brett’s ex-
sible to reformulate the “contour” theory in terms of a conceptual plicit description of music as “unmediated” communication: it is
integration network de ned by tensional or energetic attributes.) It his optimistic invocation of music as a means of bridging cultural
is for this reason that there is a kind of sleight of hand in the im- difference and creating a sense of shared identity. This position
pression these writers give of simply describing how the music is, contrasts starkly with Gary Tomlinson’s strictures concerning the
when in reality they are in the business of proposing interpreta- colonizing qualities of aesthetic appreciation and the necessity of
tions and so constructing actualized meaning. maintaining cultural distance, strictures that themselves developed
And that brings me back to some of the issues I raised at the out of a protracted controversy between Tomlinson and Kramer,
beginning of this article. We can see that the disturbing impression during the course of which Kramer accused Tomlinson of wanting
McClary gives of discovering meanings just “waiting to be read,” a “musicology without music.”87
as DeNora put it, derives not from the interpretations themselves This tangled pattern of dissent even between those more or
but rather from the way that McClary appears to draw them di- less within the “New” musicological orbit re ects, I think, not so
rectly from the music: the double articulation between musical much a healthy variety of opinion as a confusion between the
trace and actualized meaning (in the selection of attributes, and in different senses in which music may be described as meaningful.
their incorporation within a critical interpretation) is disguised be- As I have suggested, musical meanings are actualized through
hind an account that gives every indication of simply telling it processes of critical interpretation that are culturally and histori-
how it is. But there is a more general issue here. The social con- cally contingent; in this sense meaning is indeed a cultural con-
structionism which underwrote the culturally oriented musicology struction, and it is this that justi es Tomlinson’s warnings against
of the 1990s entailed a denial that there could be such a thing as the danger of too easy an understanding of the music of other times
unmediated access to musical meaning (along with a thorough- and places, along with the illusory sense of communality which it
going suspicion of theory as a discipline allegedly dedicated to in- creates. But the same does not apply to the more pre-re ective
level at which music is experienced as potential meaning, as
“pure” nuance, so to speak. Of course, “pre-re ective” is not the
85 Cook 1998, 267. It might be objected that the desire to interpret music is
same as “pre-cultural,” and even the musical attributes on which
not restricted to verbal expression but also encompasses, for instance, dance,
lm, and even musical performance. While this is true, none of these involve
the kind of complementation, based on the opposed values of connotation and 86 Brett 1994, 18. Treitler similarly speaks of the “unmediated” experience
denotation, that is created by the alignment of music with words; one might of foreboding in music (Treitler 1997, 44).
speak in such cases of a process of triangulation, a progressive re nement of 87 See Tomlinson 1993a, Kramer 1993 (the reference to “musicology without
connotation resulting from the blend, but that is not the same thing. music” is on p. 27), and Tomlinson 1993b.

the “contour” theory is based may involve culture-speci c pat- case of emotionless nuance.91 In Vom Musikalisch-Schönen,
terns of implication and realization.88 But there are also attributes Hanslick makes the famous observation that Gluck’s music in the
for which this may not be the case; there is empirical evidence of aria “Che farò senza Euridice” from Orfeo ed Euridice, long ad-
consistent cross-cultural associations between sonic and visual mired for “the feeling of intense grief which it expresses in con-
brightness, for instance,89 and the same might be predicated of junction with those words,” would be at least equally effective if
associations of dynamics, tempo, and perceived energy. And if we the aria instead expressed Orfeo’s joy at recovering Euridice.92
think of music as a succession of such attributes presented through Hanslick’s immediate purpose is to argue that music is emotion-
time, then there is at least a theoretical possibility of the sharing of ally unspeci c, but, as in the case of his discussion of love, the
musical experiences across cultural boundaries.90 However limited implication is that the music’s speci city lies in its nuancing of
such an experience might be as compared to that of fully encultur- expression. However, one cannot even begin to describe these nu-
ated or informed listeners, and whether or not it could possibly ances by means of a vocabulary of the emotions until one has de-
justify calling music “ ‘the’ language of feeling,” it would provide cided whether the music expresses sadness or happiness. It fol-
suf cient basis for the communality that Brett is invoking— and of lows that the experience of music as emotionless nuance is one
course that in itself constitutes a form of musical meaning, con- that cannot be translated, even approximately, into words, because
structed performatively through the very acts of playing and lis- the necessary interpretive decisions are not contained within it.
tening together. In this way, it turns out that there is no contradic- One can use words to exemplify possible actualized meanings
tion in agreeing with both Tomlinson and Brett, just so long as we emerging out of such an experience, but then one is no longer de-
realize that they are talking about different things. scribing the original experience.93 And so we are driven to what
A rather similar argument might be pursued concerning the looks like a paradoxical conclusion: music depends for its mean-
issue of music’s ineffability. I have already cited Kramer’s suspi- ing on critical interpretation but is at the same time ineffable. But
cion of claims that musical meaning lies beyond words, which he again there is in reality no contradiction between these claims, be-
sees as masking a belief in its unmediated nature. And I have been cause they refer to different kinds of musical meaning.
at pains to emphasize the role of verbal interpretation in actualiz- What I have been referring to as the experience of music as po-
ing musical meaning. But the situation is quite different when it tential meaning corresponds to what Melrose calls “an energetic
comes to the experience of music as potential meaning, as in the
91 Raffmann 1993 outlines a partially similar concept of “nuance ineffabil-
ity” (focussed around issues of pitch).

88 For a discussion of the relationship between “contour” theory and conven- 92 Hanslick 1986, 17–18, citing a certain “Boyé, a contemporary of Rous-
tion see Davies 1994, 241–3; more generally compare Umberto Eco’s critique seau”; for further discussion see Kivy 1980, 73–7 and 1993c, Davies 1994,
of the concept of iconicity (Eco 1979, 191). 208–9, and Hatten 1994, 216.
89 Marks 1978, 89–91. 93 Cf. Green’s (1988, 33) observation that “no inherent meanings are under-
90 I mention from the relative sanctuary of a footnote the idea that such a
standable without delineations.” In the same way, the distinction between
cross-cultural “core” might be located at the concatenationist level of experi- “meaning” and “interpretation” to which I have already referred (see n. 83
ence which Levinson (1997) refers to as “basic musical understanding,” under- above) makes “meaning” incorrigibly mysterious (as soon as you articulate it, it
lying the level at which culture-speci c (non-concatenationist) listening strate- is no longer “meaning”), which is why this is an effective rhetorical device for
gies are individuated. To be sure, Levinson’s model, which is frankly oriented constraining interpretive debate. It is for this reason that, in Cook 1998, 96 (n.
towards Western “art” music, would need considerable re nement if it were to 125), I argued that the term “meaning” is better reserved for what I am here
be used this way. calling actualized meaning.

potential not already semanticized . . . but made available for dif- works emerge as relatively stable, hierarchically structured, cul-
ferent semiotising,” and she emphasizes the extent to which this turally privileged—in a word, authorized wholes. And I suggest
energetic potential is viscerally engaged, somatic, grounded in that this disjunction between the instability of music as an agent
what she terms “the feel of the words in the mouth.” 94 This locates of meaning and the xed manner of its cultural representation lies
a source of ineffability in the theatrical experience (words surely behind the strangely garrulous inarticulacy that so easily seizes us
cannot articulate the feel of themselves in the mouth), and Mel- when we talk about music.
rose develops this into a critique of theoretical marginalization of I can clarify this issue through a nal reference to material cul-
the somatic at the expense of the categorical, the written, the seen. ture. Miller speaks of the “extreme visibility” of the material ob-
As she puts it, “through acquiescence to literature’s dictates . . . ject, and also of its “extreme invisibility.”96 By this he means the
we have learnt to neglect habitually the bite and taste of the words divergence to which I previously referred between the physical
in the mouth in theatre. . . . We have learnt compulsorily to see presence of the object on the one hand—its immediate disclosure
what we in fact experience elsewhere.”95 This argument transfers of itself as a totality—and on the other, the hidden and fragmented
readily to music (we might speak of the feel of the sounds in the manner of its signi cation. One sees the object, but one does not
ngers or the gut), and once again it contains a hint of what it see its operation as an agent of meaning, resulting in, as Miller
might mean to theorize music as performance. says, its quality of ineffability, its resistance to verbal articulation
What I want to emphasize here, however, is the disjunction be- —a resistance so strong that he is driven to conclude that objects
tween the somatically engaged experience of music’s meaningful- speak directly to the unconscious mind. As he puts it, “the massive
ness on the one hand, and the terms in which as musicologists— gulf between perceptual ability and linguistic competence of con-
that is to say, as musical word-smiths—we engage with it on scious articulation . . . provides evidence in day to day experience
the other. I have suggested that, in terms of the semiotic process, of the power of an unconscious oriented towards objects rather
musical works are to be understood as bundles or collocations than language.”97 Translate this to music and we might speak of
of attributes that may be variously selected, combined, and incor- the inaudibility of its operation as an agent of meaning, and the
porated within any given actualization of the music’s meaning. In resonance between this and the title of Claudia Gorbman’s well-
other words, regarded as agents of meaning, musical works are known book on lm music, Unheard Melodies, is entirely appo-
unstable aggregates of potential signi cation. But this is an under- site.98 The basic message of Gorbman’s book is that, by “masking
standing of “musical works” very different from that constructed its own insistence and sawing away in the background of con-
through musicology and represented in scores, recordings, stem- sciousness,”99 music disguises its participation in the diegetic
mata, and middleground sketches: in those interpretive contexts,
96 Miller 1987, 108. Shepherd & Wicke make a similar point: “The sound-
94 Melrose 1994, 207, 202 (emphases Melrose’s). A comparison might be image experienced as a musical sound cannot easily be distinguished from the
made with the “tears, shivers down the spine and goose esh” which Sloboda affective experience that has to occur if the sound-image is, indeed, recognized
has shown to be signi cantly correlated with structural features of Western as musical” (Shepherd & Wicke 1997, 139).
music from classical to jazz and pop, and of which he writes that “these sensa- 97 Miller 1987, 100.
tions or feelings are not speci c emotions, although they may easily give rise to 98 Gorbman 1987; her psychoanalytically in uenced theory of the uncon-
speci c emotions if appropriate contexts or associations are to hand” (Sloboda scious working of lm music is highly consistent with Miller’s interpretation of
1998, 27). material culture.
95 Melrose 1994, 218 (emphases Melrose’s). 99 Gorbman 1987, 1.

illusion of the cinema; the aim of a critical theory of lm music is sical trace and meaning, and how variable is it as between compo-
therefore to uncover its disguise, to reveal its participation, to ren- sitions, repertories, or cultures? At what level of detail does it
der the music, in a word, audible. In the same way, a critical the- make sense to interpret music in terms of fully actualized mean-
ory of musical meaning would entail the attempt to hear works of ing? 101 How far do the attributes that support meaning coincide
music not (or not only) as authorized wholes stabilized by domi- with existing analytical categories, or might the interrogation of
nant interpretations such as Tovey’s or McClary’s, but also as music as meaning lead to new ones? (Implicit in these questions
fugitive amalgams of the potentially meaningful attributes that un- are the beginnings of what might be called a “meaning-to-music”
derlie such interpretations. Or to put it another way, it would mean approach to analysis.)
recognizing the music’s otherness and so allowing it the opacity Given what I have said about ineffability, however, it is hardly
of its own voice, as Burnham put it, and then (as he continues) surprising that some authors have proclaimed the entire domain of
“engaging that voice in ways that re ect both its presence and our a somatically engaged experience of music as potential meaning
own, much as we allow others a voice when we converse with to lie beyond the grasp of theory and analysis as conventionally
them.”100 And that gives me the cue to make good on my earlier conceived. For Shepherd and Wicke,
promise and sketch a possible role for a theoretical project that
the problem, ultimately, is that music theory and music analysis are based
builds upon the “New” musicological challenge. on the description of sounds as physical events occurring in time and
space and are constructed as linguistic discourses. As linguistic dis-
courses, music theory and music analysis are quite different and distinct
conclusion: theory, analysis, and meaning
in the character of their thinking from the character of musical experience.
They cannot “reach out” to musical experience in any convincing or use-
As far as fully actualized meanings articulated through critical ful manner. 102
interpretation are concerned, I have at least provided some clues
about how theory might be invested in such approaches through One problem with this formulation is the overgeneralized or
my comparative analysis of Tovey and McClary: a variety of ana- simply uninformed claim (which the authors repeat more explic-
lytical tools might contribute to an understanding of how a partic- itly elsewhere103 ) that theorists and analysts do not care how music
ular interpretation not only emerges from the properties of the is experienced. Behind it, however, there seems to be a more basic
musical trace, but also moulds the manner in which they are expe-
rienced. In this way, theory might be understood as taking on 101 For instance, it seems to me that, in ascribing actualized meanings to the
something of the regulative function that I suggested with refer- details of moment-to-moment unfolding, Hatten is describing an analytically
ence to nineteenth-century hermeneutics and formalism, thereby constructed mode of listening rather than the everyday experience of music as
meaningful (i.e., describing a form of “musicological” rather than “musical”
opening up questions such as, Just how tight is the t between mu-
listening, as I put it in Cook 1990).
102 Shepherd & Wicke 1997, 143. They also offer a further argument against
100 Burnham 1997, 326–7; Miles (1995, 28–9) offers a similar argument con- analysis: musical meaning is to be understood in terms of traditions of signify-
cerning music’s ability to resist interpretation and the consequent need for di- ing practice, not individual instances or artefacts of music (4).
alectical engagement with it. Stephen Blum makes a related claim: “What we 103 “Music theory and music analysis have taken as their starting point not
can gain from acts of close reading and close listening is, above all, the possi- musical experience, but the production of music. They have in other words been
bility of rereading and rehearing, increasing our recognition of the limitations more concerned with how the notes are ‘placed’ than with their effect once
of paradigms, ‘ideal types,’ and other constructs” (Blum 1993, 50). placed” (Shepherd & Wicke 1997, 139).

failure to understand what Charles Seeger called the musicologi- But at this point I come back to my earlier complaint that
cal juncture: the manner in which as musicologists or theorists we Hatten’s interpretations look too much like structural analyses
use words to grasp and worry at what lies beyond words, rather onto which a semantic dimension has been grafted, in effect ab-
than restricting our disciplinary purview to what can be translated sorbing meaning back into structure and so reinscribing traditional
into words without leaving any residue. And what this implies for theoretical assumptions regarding the autonomy of music. If, as I
the analysis of musical meaning is that the aim should not be to have been suggesting in this article, analysis of musical meaning
translate meaning into words, but rather to attend to the conditions might be pro tably modeled after that of musical multimedia,
of its emergence.104 As a form of interpretive criticism, then, dis- then there is a particular approach to meaning—or more accu-
cussing as Levinson does whether or not Mendelssohn’s Hebrides rately, perhaps, an approach to a particular kind of meaning—that
Overture expresses hope might be thought a distinctly thin exer- I would like to mention in closing. Classical lm theory insists
cise,105 and even Hatten’s readings of Beethoven could be criti- that the various contributing elements of the moving image (such
cized along similar lines (if only because the emotion expressed as diegetic action, camera motion, or editing rhythm) should co-
so frequently turns out to be abnegation or some other variant of here within a single hierarchy, with none of the components ob-
Romain Rolland’s slogan “Joy through suffering”). But of course truding in its own right, and with relationships between media—
this would be a bit like complaining that Schenker reduced every- moving images, music, and the rest—being restricted to the global
thing to “Three Blind Mice”: the focus of Hatten’s analyses is not level. But in reality, it is common to nd subordinate elements
on the emotional identi cation as such,106 but on the manner in within each hierarchy interacting with elements of other hierar-
which expressive qualities are constructed, supported, undercut, or chies (for instance, coincidences of cutting rhythms and musical
negated by the music. In other words, what matters is not so much rhythms, which are taboo according to traditional lm theory but
the expressive vocabulary as the structural analysis that regulates commonplace in music videos). And the effect of this interaction
its application—analysis, that is, of the material trace and of the is to subvert, disrupt, or shatter the hierarchy of the individual
expressive codes that inform it. It is in this sense that Hatten might media107 —an effect that may be purely perceptual (as when exist-
claim that, if meaning is inherently musical, then in analyzing ing concert music is used for a lm soundtrack) or composed into
music one is always already engaged in analyzing meaning. the medium in question, as in, for example, the case of traditional
Hollywood underscore music.
In his discussion of the musicological juncture, Seeger sug-
104 Martin offers a similar rationale for what he sees as a more genuinely so-
gested that “gaps found in our speech thinking about music may
ciological and ethnographic account of musical meaning than homology-based
be suspected of being areas of music thinking.”108 The same prin-
approaches: “attention shifts from a concern with the production of an authori-
tative reading of a text to the process by which readings are produced and sus- ciple can also be applied the other way around: in Analysing
tained—and to the grounds on which ‘authority’ is claimed” (Martin 1995, 157). Musical Multimedia, I put forward a number of analyses, some of
105 Levinson 1990; it is only fair to note that this is not so much a free-
them using Schenkerian graphing, the aim of which was to locate
standing exercise in criticism as an approach to the issue of whether music can points of musical incoherence, breakdowns of hierarchical organi-
express complex emotions (see n. 66 above).
106 At one point Hatten refers to his preference for labelling musical mean-
zation, which I saw as re ecting or performing the intrusion upon
ings “more naturally in terms of correlations with cultural units” rather than in
terms of speci c emotions (Hatten 1994, 242), but in practice, emotional identi- 107 For a fuller account, see Cook 1998, 144–5.
cations play a major role in his vocabulary. 108 Seeger 1997, 49.

music of words, images, or other media.109 What I am suggesting of the miniaturized art of the commercial, then the far more
here is that, in the absence of words, images, or other media, such complexly articulated unfoldings of extended compositions carry
discontinuities might be seen as re ecting or performing the intru- correspondingly enlarged possibilities for the shaping and trans-
sion of meaning, now seen as a kind of ghost in the machine (one formation of meaning, and it is precisely this kind of complex ar-
might call this a “music-to-meaning” approach). 110 The principle ticulation that analytical tools are designed to locate and explicate.
is not unlike the one I have elsewhere described, with reference to In this way, tools conceived under the formalist regime as
the reception of the Ninth Symphony, as “creating meaning out of means of demonstrating music’s unity and autonomy may just as
incoherence”: apparent contradictions in Beethoven’s music—its well be pressed into service as means of measuring degrees of
generic heterogeneity, its disjointed orchestration, even its de - unity, charting the limits of music’s autonomy, and locating apo-
ciencies in text setting—were seized upon by sympathetic com- rias and points of slippage; they then become the instruments of
mentators as interpretive opportunities, with meaning being, as it what I referred to as a critical theory of musical meaning. And
were, squeezed into the gaps left by the composer. 111 Through the autonomy of music becomes not the presupposition or dogma
the application of established (and other) analytical methods, it as the “New” musicologists saw it, underwriting the disciplinary
becomes possible to extend this principle to the details of the identity of music theory and so consigning it to cultural irrele-
music’s unfolding through time. Advertisers insert their messages vance, but instead a hypothesis, a fragile and provisional construc-
into the interstices of the music in television commercials, relying tion negotiated within speci c contexts of musical production and
on its directed motion to create the logic, consequentiality, or reception. No longer seen as just a dimension of autonomously
causality that the messages would otherwise lack.112 If this is true musical structure (as “inherently musical,” to borrow Hatten’s
words once again), meaning emerges as an autonomous agent, an
independent principle in the construction and interpretation of
109 See the analyses of extracts from Lully’s opera “Armide,” as used in
music. I take this to be consistent with the kind of dialogical rela-
Godard’s contribution to the collaborative lm “Aria,” in Cook 1998, Chapter 6. tionship which Burnham enjoined when he wrote, in the passage
These analyses might be compared with Example 8.3 in Hatten 1994, 213, a
which I quoted earlier,113 of engaging the voice of music “in ways
modi ed Schenkerian graph which Hatten describes as representing the interac-
tion of expressive and structural features through its unorthodox mixing of ele- that re ect both its presence and our own, much as we allow oth-
ments from different voice-leading levels (319–20 [n. 8]). But the result is es- ers a voice when we converse with them.”
sentially an orthodox expression of linear-harmonic coherence with an overlay But I also take it to be consistent with something else, and here
of expressive characterization (and with the voice-leading level being adjusted I am initiating some un nished business of my own. Wrapped up
to t the latter), and in this way might be seen as representing the fusion of—
with music theory’s traditional identi cation with issues of unity
rather than an interaction between—structure and expression.
110 As explained in Cook & Dibben (forthcoming), there are sporadic sug- is the search for fundamental structures. By this I do not mean the
gestions of a similar conception in the work of, for instance, Hatten, Karl & Schenkerian Ursatz as such, though it is certainly a prime exam-
Robinson, Maus, and Guck; my aim in the remainder of this article is to suggest ple; I mean the idea that unity subsists in uniquely privileged
the kind of theoretical framework that more sustained development of this idea structural elements, from which all other aspects of musical orga-
might entail. There is also a link with the tradition of criticism that understands
nization are to be derived (and there we have the traditional work
(mainly) nineteenth-century music as an interaction of opposed narrative and
“purely musical” impulses; for a recent overview, see Micznik, forthcoming.
111 Cook 1993, 67–71.
112 Cook 1998, 16. 113 See n. 100 above.

of analysis). It is these other aspects of organization that are em- not be theorizing musical meaning after all, but rather looking for
braced within the Schenkerian concept of “design,” a catch-all ways of understanding music that are fully attuned to its emergent
term de ned as that which expresses or projects the fundamental properties, of which meaning is just one.
structure (in other words, given the predicate of unity, as every-
thing except the fundamental structure itself ). This is the back-
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Theorizing Musical Meaning

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10 McClary 2000, 6. vations about McClary’s interpretation of Mozart’s K. 453.

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62 Goodman 1969. 64 Melrose 1994, 221–2.

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70 In Cook 1998, 94, I suggested that precisely this is implied by Hanslick’s

68 Kivy 1993b, 284.

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Example 1. Conceptual integration network for a car commercial

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text space music space

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ity” (focussed around issues of pitch).

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112 Cook 1998, 16. 113 See n. 100 above.

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