Contextualist theories

Contextualist theories

In moving from symbolic to contextualist explanations of music, it is well to note that a source of great confusion, in the former, is the fact that tone painting (with explicit signals that yield, when the code is understood, designative meanings) is widely regarded as musical symbolism. An example of such tone painting is Bach's introduction of musical notes, corresponding to the letters of his own name, as a theme in the unfinished final fugue of the Art of the Fugue. And surely it may be argued that this qualifies on one level. But the contention that there is an intrinsic symbolism in the musical meaning itself is a claim that referentialists are generally unwilling to honour. Yet many theorists, whose concern is with the sociological or psychological effects of music, are not so much opposed to the idea of inner or profound meaning as indifferent to such meaning per se. Even an absolutist, however, is unable to examine music in isolation from its human environment. Meyer deliberately eschews logical and philosophical problems of music and makes “no attempt to decide whether music is a language or whether musical stimuli are signs or symbols.” (He does not defend the inference that such concerns are irrelevant to meaning.) Musical meaning and communication, he maintains, cannot exist in the absence of the cultural context. The statement is hardly open to dispute; a theorist is classified according to his proximity to the referential or nonreferential pole. If a referentialist emphasizes explicit aims and associations of a particular work (as in varieties of Gebrauchsmusik, or “utility” music, written for specific social or educational purposes), the formalist can maintain that there is also an intrinsic, or embodied, meaning to which he attaches the greater aesthetic value.