Musicology and Semiotics: A Non-Traditional Approach to Studying Popular Music
In actuality, all three of these reasons form a coherent whole to explain the insistence upon formal musicology’s need to exclude popular music. Yet here in the 21st century a new methodology for analysing music is firmly in place, one that undoes to a great extent the importance of those analytical foundations upon which classical musicology has been based. Just as the focus of critical theories surrounding literature underwent a tremendous change in the previous century, moving away from a more traditional, structuralist, author-centered approach, so has musical analysis followed suit.
What it still unsure, however, is whether the move away from traditional musicology has been made because it is completely deficient for the purpose, or whether the semiotic approach has taken root because it represents a more accurate reflection of music’s meaning. Musicology is, of course, simply the study of music and all that music entails and semiotics is the study of signs and meanings and how they are understood.
Semiotics, therefore, is really less a study of the music itself than a study of how that music is interpreted by the listener. In this way, semiotics provides an answer for the question of why traditional musicology has failed in its attempt to embrace and understand popular music because it is less concerned with formality and tradition and open to more experimentation and interpretation based on extraneous components such as costume, gesture and performance, as well as because popular music by definition appeals to a wider audience and so is therefore a richer resource for understanding contemporary cultures and subcultures.
The deficiencies of classical musicology as regard its ability to fully analyse and explain popular musical texts is a topic that has received great attention by such writers as Richard Middleton and Philip Tagg, among others, and the general consensus by most critics is that classical musicology suffers from an overreliance on notational content as well as on language and a discursive technique that is ideologically unsound.
The basic terminology of musicology has remain unchanged for centuries and suffers from an elitism that bases the study of music upon a certain academic playing field that remains closed to new players. Middleton asserts that because of this longstanding reliance on certain academic terms, traditional musicology comes equipped with a rich vocabulary with which to analyse certain elements of classical music: harmony, chord types and functions, tonality, counterpoint, etc, but on the other hand, the vocabulary is impoverished in other areas such as rhythm, pitch nuance and timbre.
Since, as an overview of semiotics will shortly show, a combination of a signifier and a signified create signs that are all we have to communicate concrete ideas, the ability to choose from among a large amount of signs-in this case musical terms-to describe something is essential to full communication. If only certain words are capable of adequately describing music as a text then those words, like any other descriptors, will eventually become restricted to only a select few. Today we recognize these restricted words as jargon and feel discomfort when two people are using jargon we don’t understand.
The use of jargon or elitist terminology serves as a distancing device as well as an elevating device. When using certain words whose meaning is restricted to a select few, those words become connotatively charged. In other words, the meaning of the words are not only created by their actual use, but by the fact that they have attained a certain higher level of meaning; a meaning that is privileged and static, but also respected.
Middleton gives the simple example of “melody” and “tune,” suggesting that somehow through its ideological use to describe music of a higher quality, a melody should be a term used only to describe serious music such as that produced by Mozart, while a tune is basically just anything that can be whistled while walking down the sidewalk. In fact, most dictionaries employ the term melody in the very definition of tune so Middleton’s point is that the only difference between them is ideology. But what exactly does that mean? What is ideological connotation?
Connotation is a bridge that is always constructed over a cultural divide; a separation of viewpoint expressed in the often unconsciously ideologically inculcated differences of language and vocabulary. Dick Hebdige famously writes about ideology that it can’t help but “saturate everyday discourse” to the point where all relations and processes are both validated and mystified at the same time.
The ideological connotation that is associated with the terminology of traditional musicology is an example of this simultaneous validation and mystification. By using terms that do not easily apply, or apply only partly, to other forms of music, musicologists succeeded in validating their view that only a certain kind of music is worthy of intelligent academic analysis. At the same time they also ensured that their methodology remained mystifying to those on the outside.
This combination of validated mystification serves the ultimate purpose of naturalizing their viewpoint; of making it seem as if the traditional method of musicology arose fully intact as though created by God. Part of the naturalization process also involves engaging in jargon that is purposely beyond the ken of the layman. The selective vocabulary used in traditional musical analysis not only engages in elitism but also rises to the level of definition.
Musicology as it was practiced before the rise of popular music defined for future generations not only the how of why music should be analysed, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the why: because classical music is music and any form that followed would be by definition-and most importantly by the definition agreed upon by the original musicologists-not just inferior music, but, indeed, not really even music at all.
The terminology which applies most readily to classical music and only uneasily to most popular music is the yardstick used to divide what music is and what it is not and it is this insistence on formal structural-and predominantly European-notation that has been the element most argued over between classical musicology and the new semioticians of music. Semiotics and the new analytical methodology is more concerned with meaning as it applies to listeners, a move away from the composer-centered, documentary approach clung to by the old school.
As Middleton points out, “notation inevitably imposes pressures and channels practice”. Musicologists work from the text of the composition and focus almost exclusively upon those elements of the work which are most easily analysed from these limited parameters such as chords, counterpoints, thematic relationships and orchestration.
Because classical music has built a historical basis upon these elements and because that music was originally designed for a limited audience, the music came to be very schematic, following expected formulas that eventually could even come to be predicted. In a discussion with philosopher Michel Foucault, composer Pierre Boulez comments upon this difference between classical and modern music.
“The movements of a symphony are defined in their form and in their character, even in their rhythmic lifeâÂ?¦The vocabulary itself is based on ‘classified’ chords, well-named; you don’t have to analyse them to know what they are and what function they have. They have the efficacy and the security of signals, they recur from one piece to another, always assuming the same appearance and the same functions.
Progressively, these reassuring elements have disappeared from ‘serious’ music,”. Even while affecting the ideologically connotative term “serious music,” Boulez succeeds in boiling down the issue facing traditional musicology, namely the reliance on a methodology stuck in a closed, secure system of analysis that is increasingly incapable of responding to music devoid of formulaic schema. It is at this point that semiotics enters the picture to fill the void.
Semiotics is a linguistic device that can effectively be applied to musical analysis that can be traced back to the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce and is based upon the concept of the definition of a sign, arrived at through a complex cognitive process involving a signifier and a signified. The premier semiotic analyst of the 20th century was Roland Barthes who applied the principles of semiotics to a variety of subjects.
According to Barthes the aim of semiology is “to take in any system of signs, whatever their substance and limits; images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all these, which form the content of ritual, convention or public entertainment: these constitute, if not languages, at least systems of signification”. It is these systems of signification that separate traditional musicology from semiotics. Musicology is based on a fixed or static notation of text that is often analysed divorced from performance, allowing no real system for signification.
As Boulez hinted, form and function are rigidly defined with no allowance for complexity of readings. In a semiotic analysis, complexity of reading is paramount. As Philip Tagg writes, a semiotic musicology concerns itself with “discovering which sounds mean what to whom in which context”. In traditional musicology with its dependence on score and historicity, individual meanings become difficult if not impossible.
Middleton gives an example of this deficiency when he writes that when one listens to classical music, one is “strongly guided by what has been really-predominantly-heard in the past.” He then goes on to relate a story about himself in which he was incapable of listening to a piece of music by Bach with concentrating on the “functional-harmonic properties of the bass.” He concludes the anecdote by admitting that “It needs a considerable act of sociological sympathy to grasp that other listeners may actually hear different things, or hear them in different relationship”.
And that in a nutshell is the problem with traditional musicology as it applies to popular music. It would almost be unheard-of for someone to say the same thing about any popular song, that they would have trouble with the idea that someone else hearing the same tune might be experiencing it differently. Approaching the meaning of music semiotically entails a study not just of the music itself, but indeed the environment in which the music is heard and experienced.
Semiotics differs from traditional musicology in great part because of its use of environmental approximation in regarding the meaning of a musical text; semiotics does away with Boulez’s “security of signals”. Indeed, in a semiotic approach, nothing is secure and everything is up for grabs. Tagg gives a wonderful example of how this works when he asks the reader to imagine three different movie scenes with the exact same visual content and with two of the scenes containing the same musical content but with more preceding information provided the viewer in the second scene.
Three completely different interpretations are expected from an average viewer based on the small differences in the scenes and Tagg’s explanation for these different interpretations is that “music can relate to moods and gestures directly, through a sort of synaesthetic homology, and indirectly, through the intermediary of similar music used for similar purposes in similar situations”. The interpretations differ not just because of mood or narrative context; sociological context is necessary to achieve true meaning.
Sociological context cannot be found in a dusty text written by an old master; it must be observed and experienced and it is for this reason that traditional musicology reaches a dead end when it is applied to performance of popular music. Performance of classical music, with the possible exception of opera, is stuck in the same schema as notation; there is little opportunity for context to be exhibited through gesture or costume or movement. Even ballet is too formal to allow for much sociological context and suffers from the same ideological elitism; hence the rise of interpretive dance in all its robust forms.
Because sociological context is so central to semiotic analysis of popular music is why the same song heard on a CD can bring about emotions and a new depth of meaning when heard performed live or heard for the first time in an accompanying video. The rise of MTV and the video revolution impacted semiotic analysis of music in many ways. Before MTV, most music was heard minus any preconceived visual image; what you saw was what you created in your mind. And yet this is not to say that video has stolen the imagination away from the music listener and forced a visual impulse that never existed before.
Many people of a certain age cannot help but form a visual image of Elvis on a cheap B-movie set when hearing one of his songs; others see black and white images of The Beatles; others their favorite artists badly lip-synching on TV dance shows. The sociological context for these images is different only in terms of sophistication of the image compared to music videos. The signifier and the signified which fuse to form the sign is no more secure simply because of the sophistication of the music video over the image of a band standing nearly motionless on a studio floor moving their lips silently to the sounds of their latest hit.
Consider the outrage that flared in the US over the premiere of the video for the Madonna song “Like A Prayer” because of her fusion of religious iconography and sexually costuming and movement. Then consider this reading by Susan McClary of the exact same video: “Madonna is tapping into a tradition of Catholicism that has long been suppressed: that of the female mystics such as St. Teresa who claimed to have experienced mystical union with Christ”.
Were one to approach this song merely notationally, it is highly doubtful one could reach that conclusion; were one to approach it semiotically without the video, it is highly doubtful one could reach that conclusion; were one to approach the video without any background in Catholic studies, it is highly doubtful that one could reach that conclusion. And therein lies the beauty and the usefulness of the semiotic approach.
Traditional musicological approaches have fallen on hard times with marginalization of classical music, the rise of popular music and the constituent inability of musicology to adapt its formal and rigid structure in a way allowing it to be used to go beyond notation and composer-oriented analysis toward analysis of differentiation of meaning among a wide variety of cultures and genre.
By compartmentalizing music, by marking a solid line between what music is and what it isn’t, traditional musicologists boxed themselves in forever, setting in motion a path that can only lead to obsolescence. Musicology fails in its attempt to successfully analyse popular music based on its formal methodology, but has also failed by segregating popular music, by distancing its import from classical. Semiotics, on the other hand, contains no inherent failings. By centering analysis on meaning and not on text, semiotics can successfully interpret all music types, classical, jazz, world, rock, etc.
The greatest attribute of using a semiotic approach may very well be its limitless methodology; unlike musicology, semiotics does not face the negative effects of Boulez’s reassuring forms, rhythms and vocabulary. Semiotics can take into effect all manner of extraneous aspects of musical performance and how meaning can be sociologically interpreted in many different ways as a result of these factors; musicological analysis is incapable of including these in deciding upon meaning, reliant as it is upon the authorial authority and the historicity of notation.
Semiotics provides an open-ended system of identifying signs and linking them to sociological connotations that musicology cannot offer and thus provides a framework for understanding popular music texts, genres and subcultures that is a significant improvement over traditional musicological approaches.
