In ‘The Subjectivities’ Cumming retains Lidov’s mapping of the initial typology onto music as shown in Figure 3.1. She also brings a new emphasis to this model, however, in her segmentation of music according to notions of voice, gesture and acts of agency or will. These correspond to index (secondness), icon (firstness) and symbol (thirdness) respectively (firstness and secondness, remember, are reversed in The Sonic Self returning them to the order Peirce always employs). Despite Cumming’s new emphasis, the
notions of voice, gesture and will coincide reasonably closely to Lidov’s nuance, gesture and ordering, which, in Figure 3 .1 ,1 have generalized as small, medium and large-scale aspects of music.
Having established the discernment of voice, gesture and agency, Cumming then focuses upon their synthesis in music. The act of drawing these signs together is a compelling move, as it allows Cumming to suggest that the ‘sense of a “subject” emerges from these things, but is not reducible to them ’ (Cumming 1997, 12). Moreover, the necessity of drawing the categories together into a kind of symbiotic whole is
undoubtedly Peircian in spirit. After all, in Peirce’s thought (particularly his earlier thought), any separation of the categories can only be accomplished by prescinding; no thought is possible without thirdness from which the other categories may be ascertained. What is problematic in Cumming’s synthesis, however, is its location within the music. This is made clearest when Cumming opposes her theory to those that seek an authorial voice, stating that ‘[b]y locating the qualities “in the music” there is no need to make any presumptions about the com poser’s subjective state’ (Ibid., 16). It is here that
Cumming’s adherence to Gadamerian notions of the reified artwork are clearest as she maintains that ‘it is possible to find an increased sensitivity to the musical content as inseparable from its presentation’ (Ibid., 16). This theory pre-empts that of The Sonic Self, in which the Peircian sign-complex in music is collapsed so as to render object and sign inseparable.7 In ‘The Subjectivities’ Cumming is clearly sensitive to the possible accusations of assuming music’s autonomy, however, and constructs quite a complex argument to sustain her position. This warrants careful attention.
The key Peircian notion of the interpretant forms a pivotal concept in Cumming’s argument for what might be termed m usic’s (quasi-)autonomous persona. In ‘The Subjectivities’ the interpretant is defined as a link between expressive content and structure. In the case of a gesture, it is ‘a link between melodic figure and a particularly shaped expressive movement’ (Cumming 1997, 9). At this point it is important to note that such a link is better understood as a ground in the sense asserted by Hookway,8 as it is that aspect of the sign which allows it to signify its object; the interpretant does, of course, draw upon the ground but it is usually understood as an idea in a person’s mind:
I define a Sign as anything which on the one hand is so determined by an Object and on the other hand so determines an idea in a person’s mind, that this latter determination, which I term the Interpretant of the sign, is thereby mediately determined by that Object.
(CP 8.343)
y
We will see that this contradicts Peirce’s assertion that the sign is determined by ‘something other than itself’ (CP 8.177). Hausman is also clear on this point (1993: 68).
g
However, as Hookway notes, the claim that the interpretant is a state of a person is, in Peirce’s words, ‘a sop to Cerberus because I despair of making my own broader conception understood’ (in Hookway 1985, 121).9
The idea that the interpretant can act as a link10 as well as the possibility of expanding its definition beyond a person’s mind is employed by Cumming as a means of locating ‘vocality, gesture and various forms of agency’ as signs (or sign complexes) complete with interpretants in the music itself. This idea forms the cornerstone of Cumming’s theory of musical semiotics and allows her to further legitimate various musicological practices and assumptions of epistemic authority because the signs of music can, to some extent, be detached from their reception. But there are problems in the use of Peirce here.
Cumming’s theory is that interpretants in the music, which may be understood in terms of vocality, gesture or will, take the role of ‘connecting things which are
represented with things that are absent’ (Cumming 1997,15). In the same way that a listener will synthesize these aspects of music to form an interpretant, these aspects themselves are already interpretants, but interpretants formed prior to their reception by a person. Figure 3.3 gives a schematization of Cumming’s conception of the relationship between signs, music and listener.
9 An authoritative discussion o f the ‘sop to Cerberus’ is given by Fisch in Peirce, Semeiotic, and
Pragmatism: Essays by Max H. Fisch (1986: 342).
10 The interpretant as a link between two entities also seems problematic from a Peircian perspective as it suggests a dyadic relation that is specifically precluded by Peirce in defining the sign (CP 2.274). It is particularly incompatible with the interpretant because the interpretant is a third that cannot be reduced to a second.
Individuated Character
Vocality (index later qualisign) Gesture (icon later sinsign) Will (symbol later legisign)
Process of identification Process o f synthesis Listener Subject Subjectivities
‘the text o f the work in itself, as it is perform ed’
Figure 3.3: A schematization o f Cumming’s semiotic model based on the text o f ‘The Subjectivities’
As we saw in the case of gesture, ‘ [t]he “gesture” is an interpretant, a link between a melodic figure and a particularly shaped expressive movement’, (Ibid., 9) but Cumming goes on to suggest that this interpretant is precognitive in stating that this link is
‘recognized during listening by an impulse toward bodily response or by the desire to entertain a kinaesthetic image in the m ind’ (Cumming 1997, 9). For Cumming vocality, for example, does not ‘simply emanate from timbral characteristics by evoking
associations with human vocality’ but instead can be understood ‘in [its] own right as [a] sig[n]’ (Cumming 1997, 12).
Much hangs here on what Cumming means by the phrase ‘in their own right’. If what is being suggested is that vocality, gesture and will in music do not have to be interpreted in order to be understood as signs then this is consistent with Peircian
semiotics to the extent that Peirce suggests, on a number of occasions, that an interpretant is not simply an interpreter and that it may relate to a potential rather than an actual mind (see Hausman 1993, 69 and Fisch 1986, 342-4). It is also clear, however, that such
uninterpreted signs are not genuine signs, for as Hausman asserts, ‘[s]uch things in themselves are not, strictly, genuine signs, because ... they are not things that represent something for an interpretant - their status is to be potentially, not actually, interpreted’ (Hausman 1993, 70). But in ‘The Subjectivities’ Cumming seems to be suggesting not that vocality, gesture and will are potential signs but signs that are no different (but for a degree of tangibility) from those interpreted by a listening subject:
As a synthetic ‘interpretant’ of other signs, those which disclose various forms of subjectivity in the music [namely vocality, gesture and will], the subject is formed through the active participation of the listener. Yet this participation is no different from that which constitutes the signs for vocality, gesture and various forms of agency. All have an ‘interpretant’. None are entirely secure in their ‘existence’. The difference in the position of the ‘subject’ is only that it relies on other, more tangible signs as its representata.
(Cumming 1997, 15)
A more sympathetic reading of this passage might point to the notion of less tangible signs as recognition that vocality, gesture and will are not genuine signs. The further difficulty still presents itself, however, that Cumming builds the theory of a synthesized, genuine (in that it is actually interpreted) subject (in the music but - necessarily it would seem - interpreted by a listener) upon a set of signs that are always somehow uninterpreted. The point here is that the non-genuine unsynthesized signs (vocality, gesture and will) would surely become genuine signs once they have formed a
component part of the more elaborate sign situation Cumming describes. The idea of signs that are not interpreted by a listening subject and yet form a key component in the process of musical meaning is highly questionable. Cumming appears to have become aware of such potential criticisms by the time of writing The Sonic Self and consequently reconfigures her application of Peircian semiotics so that all of the subjectivities outlined (vocality, gesture and will) are presented as firsts, thereby emphasizing their potentiality. This process of reconfiguration, however, does not resolve all the problems discussed thus far and suggests an approach whereby theory is employed to conform to
interpretative assumptions rather than vice versa. The notion of a hermeneutic circle, through which theory and interpretation develop symbiotically, also seems inapplicable here. Instead Cumming’s concern to retain a place for traditional musicological
epistemes, such as the artwork’s autonomy and the transcendent potential of musical expression, dominates her treatment of Peircian theory and renders his philosophy a legitimizing tool as much as a means to develop understanding. In The Sonic Self Cumming shows an awareness of certain inconsistencies in her treatment of Peirce in T h e Subjectivities’ but, in addressing these problems, does not lose sight of her wider concern to reassert the validity of older musicological traditions.