Music and Semiotics: The Nattiez Phase

Author(s): Jonathan Dunsby

Source: The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 69, No. 1 (Winter, 1983), pp. 27-43
Published by: Oxford University Press
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 Music and Semiotics: The Nattiez Phase

JONATHAN DUNSBY

W ITH the publication of Fondements d'une semiologie de la

musique,' Jean-Jacques Nattiez provided a focus for a grow-

ing area of musical'debate.2 It has seemed to many scholars over the

last few decades that an intellectual climate concerned with the per-

ception of meaning ought to be able to offer new and much-needed

ideas about musical meaning. This climate has involved a strong

structuralist impulse. Its emphasis on the structure of linguistic mean-

ing has naturally aroused the interest of musicians, since music theory

and aesthetics have always been open to the possibility of interpreting

language and music in the same way. In the seventeenth and eight-

eenth centuries, that possibility flowered into an elaborate, compara-

tive musico-linguistics; indeed it may be ironic that the present inter-

est in semiotics is pursued with little reference to the theory and

aesthetics of rhetoric that were so familiar to Baroque musicians. The

new flowering has taken its lead not so much from general structural-

ist theory as from its empirical offshoots. Semiotics, a discipline which

seeks to explain meaning as a relational phenomenon where-

ever there appear to be significant kinds of activity, might be thought

to be as appropriate in principle for the study of music as it is for the

study of any other form of communication.3

The genuine sense of relationality that emerges from Nattiez's

theories has been generally admired, but it must also be recognized

I (Paris, 1975).

2 This essay is based on a paper delivered to the May, 1980, joint meeting of the British

Society of Aesthetics and the Royal Musical Association. I am grateful to John Stopford for

advice on many aspects of semiotics.

3 There is a historical distinction to be made between semiotics and semiology, the former

deriving principally from American pragmatic philosophy and the latter from European

linguistics. In music the terms have come to be synonymous, and "semiotic" is the customary

usage.

27

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28 The Musical Quarterly

that it challenges the traditional musical disciplines. The categories

which conventionally justify the distinctions between historical mu-

sicology, theory, aesthetics, and analysis (to the extent that it may be

considered apart from these areas) are not absolute. For semiotics,

music is a cultural or social phenomenon, definable only in terms of

its value held in a culture according to a quantitative, qualitative, and

analytical interplay. Because of this, "music semiology would lose all

chance of gaining a scientific status if it took upon itself to make a

normative choice about which of the three were suitable for defining a

work."4 This issue was raised by Jean Piaget:

... if one tries to deal with structures within an artificially circumscribed domain-

and any given science is just that--one very soon hits on the problem of being unable

to locate the entities one is studying, since structure is so defined that it cannot coincide

with any system of observable relations, the only ones that are clearly made out in any

of the existing sciences.5

A proper reluctance to locate musical wholeness, its identity, purely in

terms of cultural norms, must lead to more and more comprehensive

descriptions, as Ferdinand de Saussure predicted with his notion of "a

science that studies the life of signs within society."'6 And the drive

toward more and more comprehensive descriptions in music has

exposed such a strong disciplinary convention of musical thought

that the boundaries of any musical object are a priori in relation to the

methods used in its examination.

It is a defining proposal of semiotics that, on the contrary, what is

given is a sign of the meaning we ascribe to it according to the methods

by which we have come to regard it as "given." This is clearly the case

in the more practical realms of musical activity. For example, most

professional musicians have a working idea about the circular-and

in this context they can be called relational-arguments concerning

authentic performance practice: some normative attitude has to be

struck, some decision about historical authenticity has to be made.

This process will have occurred whether we recognize it consciously or

not and whether or not we claim an aprioristic quality for some

decision. In more speculative areas, the semiotic proposal is harder to

substantiate. Music criticism and analysis rarely make their assump-

tions explicit. We are never sure whether we learned Beethoven from

4 Fondemrents, p. 124. All translations from Fondements are my own.

5 Structuralism, trans. Chaninah Maschler (London and New York, 1971), pp. 137-38.

6 Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade

Baskin (New York, 1966), p. 16.

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 Music and Semiotics 29

our harmony lessons or harmony from Beethoven, even whether there

is any purpose in asking such a question. It has fallen to Nattiez to

reveal forcefully to us any complacent conclusions we may have

reached about such issues.

It is not surprising that Nattiez's work has had a mixed, almost

confused reception. There is a quite extensive article literature, par-

ticularly in ethnomusicology, but also embracing analysis and main-

stream historical musicology, which refers to the same methodologi-

cal and conceptual climate as Fondements. Yet that literature, usually

on specialized topics and drawing what it needs only selectively from

the wide potential field of music semiotics, hardly prepared the way for

Nattiez's extensive inquiry. The critical response to his work reflected

both the selectivity and the feeling of challenge mentioned above,

resulting in three types of misunderstanding. The first was to discuss

various issues in Nattiez's work through a largely irrelevant aesthetic

perspective-thus the war over musical semantics waged on Fonde-

ments by Roger Scruton7 and Patricia Tunstall.s The second was a

matter of critical hindsight. It is not strictly necessary to go into

methodological issues which Nattiez did not wish to address at that

stage, even if those issues would finally take on their real significance.

David Lidov could be accused of this in a fine assessment of music

semiotics that nevertheless took a more elaborate view of Nattiez's

analytical methods than he ever implied.9 Finally, it is erroneous to

approach this form of semiotics in terms of principle rather than

practice, as Otto Laske did in claiming that the book has a global

significance for musicology.'0 If the conclusions here about the rather

unsystematic and esoteric character of the Fondements-stage in music

semiotics are well grounded, the perils of welcoming wholesale what

appear to be new ideas in new terminology will be clear.

If these cases show the kinds of misunderstanding that have arisen,

an attempt must be made to express what there is of central impor-

tance to be understood. Pride of place belongs to the theory of musical

meaning. Meaning is typically a most informal concept in musical

7 "The Semiology of Music," The Cambridge Review, June 2, 1978.

8 "Structuralism and Musicology: An Overview," Current Musicology, XXVII (1979),

51-64.

9 "Nattiez's Semiotics of Music," The Canadian Journal of Research in Semiotics, in V/2

(1977), 13-54. Some of the criticisms in my own review of Fondements in Perspectives of New

Music, XV/2 (1977) may also reveal this tendency.

10 "Towards a Musicology for the Twentieth Century," Perspectives of New Music XV/2

(1977).

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 30 The Musical Quarterly

speculation, sufficiently loosely defined as a shared category of thought

able to embrace any new terms and methods. During the last few

decades this process has been at work with Schenker's style of analysis,

most recently in Eugene Narmour's attempt to refute the voice-

leading account of tonal meaning." Alan Keiler's examinations of a

diluted Chomskian approach to music have equally centered on the

possibility of semantic pertinence, in that case for generative models of

musical structure.12 But if there is any future in the assimilation of

music semiotics into general ideas about musical meaning, it is surely

a future where we shall address the problem of musical meaning at the

level of semiotic methodology. Critics like Scruton and Tunstall

appear to feel that this new discipline should finally satisfy the desire

for a definitive semantics, when it is of the essence of semiotic research

to distinguish first of all between the many varieties of accounts of

meaning offered in different disciplines. In the second part of Fonde-

ments, Nattiez undertakes a long "Comparative Semiology of Music

and Language," beginning with an attempt to deal with "musical

signification, with the study of various methods that have been pro-

posed to take account of it."' 'The intention, then, is well directed.

The practice, however, is paradoxical. In Nattiez's tripartitional

model of musical activity, the status of the level between the poietic,

which entails factors of creation in music, and the esthesic, which

entails factors of its reception, needs to be explicit. It should be clear

whether this neutral level is some kind of virtual component of

semantic structure or whether it can actually be seen as a sufficient

metaphor for what is otherwise loosely termed semantic structure. An

early statement makes this explicit:

Certain configurations of the neutral level will be poietic, others will be esthesic, or

both: one can know only by means of external information, which is not given by the

text itself. Others will be neither poietic nor esthesic, which well proves that the

musical message possesses an autonomous level of organization."4

Yet a subsequent comment on the tripartition cruelly opens up the

conceptual discontinuity which semantics can so easily bring to ana-

lytical theory:

11 Beyond Schenkerism: The Need for Alternatives in Musical Analysis (Chicago, 1977).

12 "Bernstein's The Unanswered Question and the Problem of Musical Competence," The

Musical Quarterly, LXIV/2 (April, 1978), 195-222.

13 Fondements, p. 129.

14 Ibid., p. 55.

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 Music and Semiotics 31

The neutral level is dirty: its only purpose is to present, on the basis of an explicit and

reproducible procedure, a collection of possible schemes of which the poietic and/or

esthesic pertinence will be given later.'5

From this we have to accept early in Fondements that any case of

analysis at the neutral level is provisional. It is difficult to conceive,

then, how it can also be autonomous. Toward the end of his study,

Nattiez synthesizes this conflict in a manner which recalls, awkwardly

in view of his antistructuralist position, Proppian [referring to

V. Propp] or Levi-Straussian functionalism. We segment music into

units, writes Nattiez, according to an "explicit methodology" that is

defined in an abstract way. But these units have a "functional potential

of which the nature is only partly determined and not guaranteed by

the segmentation technique which has identified the unit."'16 It seems,

then, that the neutral level is not a virtual component of semantic

structure so much as musical semantics itself having a virtual quality;

musical meaning is delineated in part by neutral, semiotic analysis,

which is in this relational scheme only provisional. This deeply

obscure aspect of Nattiez's semiotics can hardly be explained. One can

only acknowledge the tension inherent in the mode of thought and

consider whether it is a useful tension. But it is important to recognize

the consequences of Nattiez's account of meaning, and these can be

sensed through comparison with attitudes toward artistic meaning

which represent a different perspective. The methodological conse-

quence in Nattiez is a mechanistic one:

What makes this descriptive level neutral is that the tools used for the segmentation of

phenomena . . are systematically exploited to their furthest consequences, and are

replaced only when new hypotheses or new difficulties lead to the proposal of new

ones. "Neutral" signifies here that one pursues a given procedure to its end, independ-

ently from the results obtained."7

Nattiez regards such a proposal as fundamentally semiotic and anti-

structuralist, and it is so to the extent that it disregards the cultural

values ascribed to the structure it scans. Its "tools" do not derive their

nature from the structure or indeed the results, whereas in structuralist

thinking "systematic analysis of non-literary works of art must opt for

a set of terms or categories reflecting the important features in the art in

question and then pursue the description of individual works, part by

15 Ibid., p. 56.

16 Ibid., p. 407.

17 Ibid., p. 55.

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 32 The Musical Quarterly

part."'8 Mediating between these positions, and implying a certain

pessimism, is the attitude that both logical, or semio-logical, descrip-

tions and intuitively sound accounts of meaning are conceivable, but

not a secure integration of the two. Thus Jonathan Culler, writing

about structuralist analysis of poetic meaning, says:

Even where linguistics provides definite and well-established procedures for classing

and describing elements of a text it does not solve the problem of what constitutes a

pattern and hence does not provide a method for the discovery of patterns. A fortiori, it

does not provide a procedure for the discovery of poetic patterns."

It is clear, then, that Nattiez has put forward a somewhat rigid idea

about how we can best study music and that its conceptual back-

ground is both complex and, to some degree, a barrier against sympa-

thetic approaches to his concrete proposals. This can lead to interpret-

ing valuable analytical attitudes as wrongheaded theories. Writing

about Nattiez and the understanding of musical experience, Scruton

asks:

Why ... assume that there are rules of this game, and why assume, what surely stands

to be proved, that the rules are those of a "syntax"? The fact is that we have nothing

here but an immense unscientific metaphor .... 20

The question of how music semiotics is scientific has occupied Nattiez

too deeply, and is examined in Fondements in such an extensive and

sometimes complicated manner, for this sweeping condemnation to

be altogether fair. It should be just as important if Nattiez's contact

with the idea of a musical science turns out to be a practical virtue as it

is if there is some theoretical vice. Some theoretical, or conceptual

confusion may be inevitable. The tripartition, Nattiez's epistemologi-

cal model for musicology, predicts that there must be such a procedure

as scientific analysis of music. That which is neither poietic nor

esthesic concerns the music in itself. The term "neutral" for this

autonomous level is well chosen, and clearly the methods we use to

study music will have much in common with those of scientific

inquiry. The music will have to be examined purely in terms of its

inherent qualities and quantities. In the practical investigation of

music semiotics, Nattiez does not even attempt to sustain this logic

18 Philip Pettit, The Concept of Structuralism: A Critical Analysis (Dublin, 1975), p. 58.

19 Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (Ithaca,

1975), p. 65.

20 P. 176.

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 Music and Semiotics 33

and has to side with the position indicated above through Pettit. Here

there is a strong suspicion that Nattiez reverts to the kind of paradoxi-

cal theorizing that semiotics should, at best, avoid:

It is absolutely wrong to claim that the step of classifying ... does not have recourse to

intuitions or hypotheses.... Behind all taxonomy there are ... intellectual categories,

bequeathed by culture, and accepted as guides for the task.2'

The easy option, in face of such discontinuity between theory and

practice, is to abandon all pretense of scientific or rigorous analysis.

This leads into familiar traps. Attacking Nattiez's discussion of the

Pelleas prelude, Scruton writes: "Debussy never flattened a fifth, as a

Jazz musician might; he simply used the interval of a tritone."22 Thus

the worst analytical fantasy, which in its fear of a retreat trom the

"scientific," will invent for us what composers do or do not think

when composing, and which will suppose that such intentions pass

from being creative phenomena into perceptible ones. If that kind of

analysis is the way to study music, so is the study of the acoustic record

of a piece. Nattiez tries to avoid either easy option. He does so, not so

much on the grounds that analysis which is more scientific is therefore

more descriptively adequate, but rather on the grounds that music is a

symbolic activity. It is articulated by means of reference, so we should

study its forms of reference. These forms have the widest musicologi-

cal scope, embracing all that we customarily consider as the business

of music history and much more besides. Theoretically, they may even

turn out to be what we recognize in other disciplines as "rules"; the

rules of Baroque counterpoint, for instance, are remarkably efficient

hypotheses about the way a large variety of music will behave. How-

ever that may be, it is certain for music semiotics that the forms of

reference are constitutive objects of analysis. Nattiez uses this difficult

but creditable option to account for some classic analytical issues. In

dealing with the opening of a Brahms Intermezzo, for example, he

acknowledges that there may be no definitive tonal center: that is to

say, all interpretants, in the perception of any number of listeners, will

register a sign of equivocal reference. But from his viewpoint this is

not a special issue at all:

What, in fact, is a harmonic analysis? It is the operation of a certain choice from

among a possible collection of variables, according to criteria of different orders. .2. 2

21 Fondements, pp. 256-57.

22 p. 176.

23 Fondements, )p. 325.

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34 The Musical Quarterly

Neutral analysis, then, should enable us to see that choices have been

made and, if the methods are reasonably consistent, should enable us

to make explicit comparisons between various possible analyses. We

should by no means take analysis to mean here the pure, often insular

specialism that is a growing element of historical musicology. For

Nattiez, any kind of musical study is controlled by the same

mechanism.

The methodological potential of such study is revealed most con-

cisely in Nattiez's work on Debussy's Syrinx. He begins by adopting

more or less directly the method devised by N. Ruwet. This establishes

paradigms of musical segments arranged, not according to their se-

quence in a piece, nor according to loosely conceived descriptions like

"phrase" or "variation," but according to similarity of the real-time

longest units, and then repetitions between subunits. Ruwet's Geiss-

lerlied wasi ideal for this method, and it is quite effective on Syrinx.

But the "operation of a certain choice," taking the longest repeated

units first, is too restrictive in Nattiez's view, too dependent on an

abstract norm. The next logical step is to analyze instead on the basis

of the shortest repeated time units. Nattiez does not say so, but it could

be supposed that an empirical level is substituted here for Ruwet's

normative level-assuming that identity between musical segments is

more of an empirical quality than is the specific identity between

segments that are of equal real-time length. The short units displayed

in this so-called "bottom to top" analysis obviously do not constitute

the longest units conceivable, but they may be thought to constitute

the longest units which can be described in neutral terms, that is,

strictly on the basis of binary contrast, either as repetitions or as

unique material. The paradigms revealed in Syrinx are now quite

different. As Nattiez insists, "A given level of characterization will

never exclude other possible ones,'"24 but he is quite sure that with any

such semiotic analysis something will be gained by thematizing the

relations that are observed in each paradigm. It is, then, a logical

conclusion to thematize the relations themselves, that is, to establish

paradigms of structural disposition and to tabulate their use in a piece

of music. The third analysis of Syrinx thus sets out the short kinds of

structuration that occur-pitch relations, rhythmic figures, and so

on-and records, in a segmentation of the piece into minimal units of

a few notes each, which relations obtain in each case.

24 Ibid., p. 263.

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 Music and Semiotics 35

It should be helpful here to make a point that does not appear to

have been clarified, perhaps even considered, in the semiotic literature.

With his thematizing, not of binary contrasts in the material of a piece,

but of the structural disposition of its minimal units, Nattiez has taken

semiotics an important stage toward what we might think of as a more

customary form of music theory. We know from many traditions, for

example the tradition of harmonic analysis from Rameau through

Riemann, Schenker, and Schoenberg, that descriptive systems become

adequate, not so much in terms of how musical material is symbol-

ized, but in terms of how all possible symbolizations register against

each other. Is it not the case, asks Rameau, that 5, 6 and 6 chords may

actually represent the same harmony under certain relational condi-

tions, or that what appear to be four quite different figures may all

represent the chord of a diminished seventh? Following this line of

analogy, we might ask, too, whether Nattiez's makeshift paradigm of

pitch-class organization in Syrinx is not naive in retrospect, in view of

the elegant system Allen Forte has devised for laying out a paradigm of

all possible pitch-class sets.25 Only rather controversial ideas of inver-

sional equivalence have allowed Forte to do this; and it is equally true

that awkward assumptions about musical structure, its division into

categorical types like harmony and melody, underlie traditional har-

monic theory to a degree that only Schenker began to expose some two

centuries after the event. Nevertheless, the close analogy between

Nattiez's theory of symbolic analysis (which can be found both in the

Syrinx analysis and the Density 21.5 study26) and theories like those of

tonal harmony or modulo 12 set structure, suggests that semioticians

should perhaps begin to sift through music theory to find which

traditions are not semiotic. It is clear by extension that all musical

disciplines are open to the same suggestion as soon as they adopt the

outward tokens of a semiotic point of view. This is not to say that

semiotics is only a new terminology for all old practices. But one can

well imagine that it represents one aspect of a well-established tradi-

tion. If for a moment we assume that there is a confluence of structural-

ist and semiotic ideologies, confirmation can be found in Umberto

Eco:

25 The Structure of Atonal Music (New Haven, 1973).

26 " 'Density 21.5 by Varese: A Study in Semiological Analysis," Music Analysis, I/3,

(Nov., 1982).

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36 The Musical Quarterly

We note that until a few years ago contemporary musicology had scarcely been

influenced by the current structuralist studies, which are concerned with methods and

themes that it had absorbed centuries ago.27

There is surely a lesson here for our sense of intradisciplinary order in

musical studies. The experience of set-structural theory has brought

with it a notion of precompositional activity, the manipulation of

musical material into a state of readiness for some creative use. In the

same way, music criticism is underpinned by a wide range of activities

from paleography to performance, and the pragmatic sense in which

such activities could be called precritical is quite obvious. But less

obviously, because there are few pragmatic guidelines for such a

classification, we may want to think of theories like Forte's as preana-

lytical and, on the argument given so far, regard semiotic procedures

in the same way. By elevating the concept of neutral, quasi-scientific

procedure to a methodological principle, whether it concerns tran-

scription, analysis, or any other musicological activity, Nattiez is

trying to rule out the interpretative role of a musician so that its

purpose and precise conduct will become systematically evident.

The preanalytical character of semiotic procedures applied to

music is most clear, perhaps, in the form of distributional method: a

distributional approach of one kind or another seems to inhere in all

procedures taken by Nattiez to be of positive value. He cites Ruwet's

distinction between the analytic and the synthetic.2" In Nattiez's

judgment, most musicology works synthetically, with generative

models which pass from code to message. Semiotic analysis stresses

instead the movement from message to code, and it uses distributional

models to do so. If that is the case, it must be remembered that Nattiez

is striking at aesthetic issues here as well as analytical ones, and in this

context this justifies his critique of Leonard Meyer. As Lidov has

suggested, Meyer's influential views about music have amounted to

a distributional semiotics of musical communication. Nattiez ob-

jected to the Meyer account on various grounds: a stimulus such as

timbre, texture, or sonority is not apparently subject to restriction or

blockage of the kind that supposedly creates information flux in the

domains of pitch and rhythm, so that there is a sense of profound

empirical discontinuity; poietic and esthesic conditions do not actu-

ally correspond in many cases, something which the information

27 A Theory of Semiotics (London, 1977), p. 10.

28 Fondements, p. 105.

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 Music and Semiotics 37

model can explain only through a peripheral aesthetics; and style in

the information model is a constant pattern for different listeners,

whereas it is generally held that stylistic continuity of that type is no

more than a modest hypothesis, a heuristic device. Such, at least, is one

interpretation of Nattiez's various comments on Meyer's writings.

Central though these aspects may be for a confrontation of Nattiez

and Meyer from an aesthetic, and partly a technically esthesic point of

view, a more straightforward analytical critique of Meyer is almost a

formal requirement for Nattiez's investigation and is present in Fon-

dements, if at all, only by implication. The information model, ex-

posed with such expertise by Meyer in Emotion and Meaning in

Music,29 suggests a kind of moving contact between stimulus and

receiver in relation to the overall structure of a work of art; however

well or badly it may describe this point of contact, it is surrounded, in

effect, by noise. Meyer's and Narmour's recent work on melodic analy-

sis is beginning to solve this, but in so doing it retreats from a

distributional to a prescriptive analysis of continuity. The proposi-

tion that gaps in melodies need to be filled assumes something about

tonal music far more reactionary or radical (depending on how one

regards prescriptive, explanatory music theory) than do any assertions

of Schenker. In a paradigmatic analysis there is no noise. On the

contrary, the effectiveness of semiotic method is measured by the

degree to which it can embrace a complete musical structure in a

model of relational continuity. It is important to be clear about this

confrontation, if only because it demonstrates once again the chal-

lenge Nattiez has put forward to the traditional form of debate about

how music gains its effect. Meyer and Narmour both seek to express a

notion about the musically dynamic, but when Meyer implies that the

dynamic in music has its source simply in temporal change he is, from

the Nattiez point of view, oversimplifying beyond reason. Meyer's

type of dynamism presents the temporal location of music as being in

essence simple; it is an event that begins and ends in real time,

inducing in the course of its existence an affective change in the

listener which manipulates cognitive and emotional states as a func-

tion of real psychological time. But the question of what unifies such a

sequence of states of perception is hardly addressed from an analytical

point of view. The lesson of Nattiez is that analysis can identify only

the multiplicity of forms of organization in a piece; it cannot in itself

29 (Chicago, 1956). See also Meyer, Explaining Music (Chicago, 1973).

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38 The Musical Quarterly

reveal that a system, a unity, is at work. The agent which does reveal

such a phenomenon, according to Meyer's thinking, is a controlling

system of expectations which fuses with the implications and realiza-

tions inherent in musical structure. But it has not been said what

makes this into a system of expectations rather than a random collec-

tion of attitudes and beliefs. These attitudes and beliefs may corre-

spond with Nattiez's poietic and esthesic levels, but nowhere does

Nattiez fall into the temptation to claim that such levels have aprioris-

tic, systematic qualities.

At least it is beyond question that Meyer and Nattiez seriously face

the fact that musical articulation is, as an object of verbal speculation,

of great complexity. Nattiez's recognition of this meant that his dis-

cussion of double articulation theories was to play a justifiably prom-

inent role in the argument. It is important, for instance, to lay the

ghost of Levi-Strauss, whose professional insights have generated

many vital characteristics of musical semiotic practice, but whose

incursions into musical thinking can be misleading because of their

disciplinary confusion. For example, Nattiez quite properly scorns

Levi-Strauss's linguistic analogy between the synchronic/diachronic

opposition and the vertical/horizontal axis in which we read music

scores. And in general Nattiez found that double articulation theories

never quite fit the needs of musical thought. Technically, even the

syntagm/paradigm contrast in its Saussurean purity is of little value,

Nattiez observed, if we adapt it to any structure more complex than

simple monody. Semantically, even Jakobson's duality between ex-

troversive and introversive semiosis finds no firmer basis in musical

practice. Who knows, Nattiez asks, but that those who find exo-

semantics more important than endo-semantics may not be correct? It

is after all most likely that the adherents of a dominant introversive

semiotic function in music will be partisans of the West European

analytical tradition. Nattiez had to leave these questions open, argu-

ing that it was simply too early to envisage how the relationality of

musical thought and perception is organized.30 This is the semiotician

supposed by Scruton and many others to insist that musical meaning

has a "syntax." Nattiez is far from this. When he speaks of the

"cunning play of interpretants across the poietic, esthesic and neutral

levels"31 it is evident that uniform models of musical articulation are

neither presupposed nor to be expected.

30 Fondements, pp. 210-14.

31 Ibid., p. 61.

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 Music and Semiotics 39

The articulation of music in terms of continuity and diversity may

not be a systematic phenomenon, but this is an inescapable dichotomy

in any account of style. From the point of view of continuity, of style

amounting to the observation of recurrent characteristics, semiotic

analysis should be at an advantage. If we can analyze a Geisslerlied

and Syrinx in precisely the same way, then at last a universal stylistics

is conceivable. Such is the theory of the mise en serie, or seriation. In

Fondements, some emphasis is given to the methodological scope

introduced by seriation, and from a semiotic perspective it is indeed

desirable that there should be no a priori distinction between the

smallest unit of a piece of music and the largest body of pieces of

music. Nattiez's example of seriation, which draws together various

works by Debussy as an extension of the Syrinx discoveries, is rather

offhand: it surely misrepresents the method by comparing figures that

have been identified consistently and in depth from Syrinx with figures

plucked at random from works like Jeux. But at least there is a

suggestive idea here, and one that again indicates the comprehensive

and existing field of musical semiotics. Any agreed form of analysis

which does not change in method from one application to another

holds out the promise of a definitive stylistics. Seriation in fact makes

an analytical as much as a stylistic claim. This is a significant interpre-

tation in view of the general opinion that stylistic continuity is not the

essence of style in music. As Lidov has noted, style may be an essen-

tially fuzzy concept in any case.32 This would also rule out the Meyer-

Narmour model with its necessarily strict dichotomy of norm and

deviation. Nattiez does not say anything different. "Semio-stylistics,"

he writes, "builds a complex, irregular, multiform edifice.""33 So per-

haps we should forgive his enthusiasm for a formal stylistic model and

underline the value of an informal practice. It is hard to underestimate

the importance of a systematic inventory of structural variables for the

kind of distributional stylistics that has made a healthy contribution

to modern musicology. Nattiez could be accused of having failed to see

that seriation does not explain the origins of our intuitions about

musical immanence, and that a multitude of levels of pertinence does

not in itself address the problem of what constitutes a specifically

musical pertinence. But it is to his credit that sufficient weight is

placed on the need to keep a model of musical structure within the

realm of epistemology. He incorporates within his model a poten-

32 P. 47.

33 Fondements, p. 10.

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 40 The Musical Quarterly

tially infinite number of different levels of pertinence, each constitut-

ing a different interpretant in the Peircean [referring to Charles Sand-

ers Peirce] sense, while at the same time allowing the criteria of

pertinence to be drawn from empirically accessible areas. This is

possible, according to Nattiez, by including the whole cultural back-

ground within the range of possible interpretants through the means

of seriation. In this way, the model is really a methodological one,

paving the way for the use of analytical techniques which, if used

individually, would be unacceptable.

This indication of a deeper kind of consistency in Nattiez's work

was taken up most explicitly by Laske, who seemed to be struck above

all by the broad methodological strength of Fondements.34 If we ask

once again what there really is to be understood in this respect, it is

inevitable that some assessment of the semiotic bases of the work be

sought, not only in terms of their intact characteristics, but also as they

appear to work against the background of semiotics in general.

Nattiez's tripartitional musicology takes the lion's share of his

conceptual framework, and here he has to articulate the semiotic

background in various ways to convey some sense of the scope and

depth of the idea. The tripartition is located by analogy with a long

list of ideas from other disciplines, for instance with the articulatory,

acoustic, and auditive levels of phonetics; but also in a genuinely

interdisciplinary sense with Prague linguistics, Levi-Straussian an-

thropology, and Chomskian linguistics (which correspond to neutral,

esthesic, and mixed poietic and esthesic levels respectively). None of

this can disguise the suspicion that, as with Barthes's codes of rhetoric,

we are dealing with a normative hermeneutics. The clearest expres-

sion of this appears in an article where Nattiez argues back from

analytical method to the tripartition:

As soon as an analysis explicates its own criteria, it cannot fail to encounter [the] three

dimensions, because the reasons for considering particular units of a musical work to

be paradigmatically equivalent are based on a phenomenon of perceptive association,

on a knowledge of the equivalences allowed by the composer, or on both at the same

time.,-

The semiotic component of this hermeneutics is our ability to break

the music into its constitutive segments, ideally perhaps into Roman

34 op. (it.

35 "The Contribution of Musical Semiotics to the Semiotic Discussion in General," in A

Perfusion of Signs, ed. Thomas Sebeok (Bloomington, 1977), p. 134.

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 Music and Semiotics 41

Jakobson's "ultimate, discrete, strictly patterned components."36 But

it may be a random step to go from the necessarily autonomous type of

musical structure implied by neutral level operations to the binary

aesthetic world of the poietic and the esthesic. Transmission and

reception make a convenient hypothesis for a theory of communica-

tion, which can embrace linguistic signs and auditory or visual signs

imparting information either of the same kind or in the same way. It

has never been shown that music is a system of communication that is

essentially similar to these other, legitimate areas of semiotic study.

Nor can it be certain that the transmission-reception hypothesis will

work, or could be expected to work for music. It is no accident that the

bulk of original thought in Fondements concerns the neutral level,

not the programmatic polarization of the musicological tripartition.

Nattiez may now be prepared to consider a more empirical ap-

proach to the communication model which should, doubtless, be

there to support the neutral level. This tendency might be discerned in

another semiotic basis, that of sign typology. From the outset Nattiez

recognized that existing typologies are not adequate for a music

semiotics.37 They can of course be used to some benefit as hypotheses,

in the manner that Wilson Coker has investigated the musical rele-

vance of Peirce's typology.38 And this leads to a further basis, for, if

music semiotics has to construct its own typology of signs, it must also

construct its own theory of sign function. In Fondements, the Peircean

triangle of sign, object, and interpretant is supposed to underpin the

whole enterprise. How this is so remains unclear from most points of

view, except that a process of unending semiosis, of a limitless chain of

interpretants for any sign and sign object, provides a convenient

model for music's structural multiplicity, for the multiplicity of aes-

thetic response, and finally for its semantic indeterminacy.

Naturally, therefore, the disciplinary basis of Nattiez's semiotics,

the relation between linguistics and musical speculation, is princi-

pally a methodological investigation. Nattiez makes four broad con-

clusions: that functional models in linguistics may be helpful insofar

as music also seems to reveal an autonomous level of organization;

that the phonological model relying on a specific theory of double

articulation may correspond with the specific musical model which

36 Selected Writings, II (The Hague, 1972), 337.

37 Fondements, p. 27.

38 Music and Meaning: A Theoretical Introduction to Musical Aesthetics (London, 1972).

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 42 The Musical Quarterly

distinguishes between structure and esthesically pertinent structure;

that a comparative semiotics should consider every kind of linguistic

model; and that the recourse to linguistics at least provides analogies

where some kind of validation is possible--basically in terms of a

dichotomy between structure and meaning. It is striking that none of

this seems to derive from the tripartition, from a preferred sign typol-

ogy, from the Peircean triangle, or indeed from the intentions of any

linguist apart from Jakobson-whose comparisons of structuralist

poetics and musicology have been only a minor diversion.

In the interests of a systematic approach, an attempt has been made

here to separate the three matters which seem central in Fondements-

bearing in mind that cultural determination is bound to create a

different response for each reader. But at least this reveals that Fonde-

ments did not expose a uniform discipline. First, its movement to-

ward a theory of meaning can be understood only after the event. "If

the interpretants constitute a universal fact," asks Nattiez, "what differ-

ence is there between musical semantics and semiology?"39 Semiotics

studies the total of symbolic associations, and it is on this information

base that specific semantic studies may be possible. This does make a

theory of meaning in the sense that we are supposed to distinguish

between virtual structure and perceived structure, but Nattiez does not

go so far as to say that virtual structure is strictly meaningless. All we

can guess, then, is that the theory of meaning will become more refined

to the extent that the art of studying symbolic associations becomes

refined. This second position of Fondements surely is its great

strength, since we have seen that it is just possible to believe that the art

of studying symbolic associations has gained in refinement, thanks to

Nattiez: of the growing analytical literature, few examples in any

decade can claim as much. The third position, the semiotic status of

all this varied type of inquiry, deserves a closing judgment.

Lidov asks at the end of his fine account of Fondements whether it

is semiotics at all. Part of the answer is intriguing and suggestive:

I should think that semioticians would not be content to accept the narrow technical

concerns of music theory, traditional and taxonomic together, as adequately outlin-

ing the problematics of the musical sign."0

This is certainly true in the sense that the narrow technical concerns of

the particular fields of music theory and analysis raised by Nattiez

39 Fondements, p. 189.

40 p. 49.

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 Music and Semiotics 43

barely touch on semiotic issues. But did Nattiez identify the central

concerns of our tradition? The outstanding selective models of musi-

cal structure have already been mentioned, voice-leading and pitch-

class set analysis. Even though it is Meyer, and Meyer's aesthetics

rather than his analytical program, that have received most attention

from semioticians-although the case for viewing Schenker in this

way is in its infancy,"4 and although Forte seems to have been ignored

so far-one might predict that we shall come to regard these elements

of the so-called "narrow technical" tradition as more semiotic than the

music semiotics of the seventies. It may be fair, then, to suggest that

Nattiez's semiotics may come to be seen as partly exotic. That it offered

a measure of analytical novelty and an exciting form of theoretical

debate was welcome. That it was not clearly placed in the overwhelm-

ing context assumed by its general audience was, perhaps, no more

than a quirk of the first steps in a new and vital discipline.

41 Jonathan Dunsby and John Stopford, "The Case for a Schenkerian Semiotic," Music

Theory Spectrum, III (1981).

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