micamahler wrote:Would you give some examples or elaborate on your thought? I find what you said in this post very interesting (not just the excerpt, the whole thing)
As I have already said, it seems to me that sometimes there is a risk of analyzing the musical object (and here alone one could babble words for entire volumes) with tools that are not entirely appropriate. The tools of narratology, for example (and they are certainly not the only ones used), are tools historically developed having as a reference not music, but another form of expression. In itself, this would not be problematic once the appropriate calibrations have been made, until at least some knots are encountered. One of these, in my opinion, is the role of meaning in music. I say this not to take a position, but because all literary analysis can never and cannot do without meaning; it is centered upon it. This is because literature is not based on calculation. To speak of narrative characteristics without speaking of meanings is nonsense. Now, for many centuries, calculation itself has in a certain way been seen as that which can and must do without meaning, due to the fact that meaning has a characteristic that calculation absolutely wants to avoid, namely the necessity of being interpreted. Calculation does not; it works if its steps are consequential, formally correct, regardless of the interpretation one wishes to attribute to it.
Having said this, I wonder: according to which categories can I understand a musical object? If such categories are able to describe and distinguish it satisfactorily from other objects, then they are probably valid categories; otherwise, perhaps not.
Certainly, I will have to use a more specific concept of meaning, a more specific concept of consequence, a more specific concept of narrativity, and so on, without forgetting, however, that these categories must coexist in the description and not clash with one another.
For example, when I say "red" in Italian, its meaning can be (interpretation) the color red as a chromatic property of all things that appear to us in a certain way. These things are countless.
If I say "red" "flower", its meaning will be the set of flowers of that color, which will also be many, but fewer than the red things from before. If I then say "spiny" "red" "flower", I might think of red roses. Obviously, I have simplified a lot, but what I wanted to show is how meaning becomes more specific the more I use propositions that close the circle on possible interpretations. Now, how can I decline such a procedure in music? Let's try: when I say "A", its meaning can be every overtone played by any instrument. If I say "A" "of the tuning fork", its meaning can be the pure overtone at 440 Hz, and so on. But beware! In this procedure, there is something that is absolutely wrong! In this way, I am performing an operation identical to the one performed previously for red; that is, I am performing a linguistic operation. To perform a musical operation, one must play this note and perhaps verify the meaning at a psychoacoustic level, for example. It is also evident that if we then want to codify the procedure, we will have to write it down anyway, with the awareness, however, that we will be using a language of a different order than the one we are analyzing.
The example, in its simplification, can tell us a few things. For example, that meanings might not only be those whose sense is a linguistic sign. Furthermore, it reminds us that a way to produce meanings is also linked to calculation. The way it reminds us of this is something rather complicated to explain; however, it is perhaps intuitive to understand that if we manage in some way to translate the propositions "flower", "red", and "spiny" into a language suitable for being calculated, then its propositions will be susceptible to interpretation, i.e., to the attribution of meaning. A discovery that will never cease to arouse my admiration is the possibility of admitting, under appropriate conditions, the equivalence between a calculation and the process of inferential deduction of human thought. What I wish to emphasize is that the inferential, consequential process is a process of attributing meaning, i.e., a semantic process, whereas calculation is a purely syntactic process. If at this point we must return to our categories for analyzing a musical object, we must ask ourselves how and if these concepts can be specified in music. When someone speaks of coherence or incoherence, of consequentiality, of formal correctness or otherwise, regarding a musical piece, in one way or another they are either"
using a semantic category or a syntactic category or both, i.e., either assigning a meaning or performing a calculation. The goal is to discover what type of semantics and syntax it is. Regarding syntax, it is easy to run a risk: assuming that such rules are those of harmony and counterpoint or perhaps those of narrativity.
By the way, I would like to point out another difference that I believe is substantial between the interpretation of a literary work and that of a musical work. I am speaking of literature in general, regardless of whether it is fiction, drama, or something else. Essentially, the syntactic principles upon which a literary work is received are the same as, or homologous to, those on the basis of which it is produced, apart from any differences in degree or expertise. The syntactic principles upon which a musical work is received are, in general, fundamentally different from those on the basis of which it is produced. A composer from the Romantic era, for example, generally did not write thinking that their audience must necessarily have composition skills. This perhaps happens more easily today, where it sometimes occurs that there is a significant gap between the responses that can be elicited from a general audience or from a circle of colleagues (I made an intervention on this in another topic, but it was not picked up). A mathematician, on the other hand, when writing a theory, does so based on the same rules as the person reading it; they cannot help it.
I would therefore like to make a second example, or rather, a thought experiment. The notes on a piano keyboard are almost a hundred. Suppose you want to calculate in how many ways they can be combined, also taking into account that their duration can vary a limited number of times. Someone has already attempted this calculation and, even for a reduced number of octaves, the value results in being immense. It is, however, suggestive to think that in between there are also all the combinations that correspond to the music actually written so far. Suppose, however, you construct a set of rules such that among all combinations only some result as valid and not all. The number will certainly still be extraordinarily large, but by a few orders of magnitude lower than before. Imagine again adding other rules, somewhat like we did for red, in order to restrict the field at will. At this point, you will have a set of rules, which we can call a theory, of which harmony and counterpoint will probably be only a small part, or perhaps they will not even be contemplated, which will depend heavily on what you want to achieve, on the world you want to describe. If this theory works, then you can apply it, but in what way? You could think of automatically generating all the music that derives from it, or you could think of generating only some of it, or you could take an already written piece of music and verify if it respects all those rules, or something else. In the first case, unless you have built a useless theory, with every probability it will still be practically unfeasible; in the second case, instead, you will need to have an external, non-syntactic criterion to choose what to generate. In all three cases, however, you can speak of consequentiality. Finally, note that, despite the encoding of this theory, no one will forbid you from violating it; simply, the result will not be correct with respect to the theory itself. Ultimately, no one asks, as happens in geometry, that the theory must always be applied rigorously. Or perhaps they do? Does there perhaps exist a property or a characteristic not of the theory, but of the intellect that somehow forces the hand even in music? On the other hand, no one believes that musical works have all succeeded in the same way, and that some are more valid than others; if this is true, then there must be a criterion that is not mere randomness. Aside from its difficulties and its extreme application, this experiment once again draws attention to the inseparable link that exists between calculation and meaning, whatever the fields to which they are applied, since they are ways of reading reality inherent to the human brain. In the end, this experiment is not even that detached from reality. Nowadays, almost every composer has their own theory, their own code, and the music they write almost always descends from it in a consequential manner, even if to the listener's ear they may not appear so. The problem then perhaps lies in the choice and identification of the best theory, while remaining mindful that, nevertheless, many codes can be not only ineffective but also incorrect? A little while ago I wrote that the equivalence between what can be inferred and what can be calculated is given under particular
conditions, conditions that the calculus must respect. And indeed, in the experiment just performed, I spoke of theories, omitting to speak of calculus, the function of which in this context should be precisely that of establishing the way in which a theory unfolds, how one state (in our case any one of the innumerable combinations) is linked to another. It is indeed a subtle distinction and one that is rarely emphasized, but it is good not to set aside.
Finally, note that in all this discourse I have never spoken of aesthetics. I did so deliberately, not because I do not attribute importance to this category, but because I wanted to concentrate attention on something else.
At this point, I certainly cannot say that the concepts of "musical calculus," "musical meaning," "musical narrativity," "musical consequence," or "musical theory" are well-specified and succeed in characterizing any given "musical object," nor that they are the only useful or sufficient categories. I simply assert that a different perspective from the more traditional one is legitimate, and that if one cannot define a specific sense for each of them, it makes no sense for them to be used either.
