Cambios en la calidad de prendas de vestir por pa´is y respuesta

(in part through its association with unequivocal knowledge o f names) is presented as more valuable, and by mapping successive phases of complexity and knowledge to Peirce’s categories they appear as natural universal states whose legitimacy is self- evident.

The tendency towards reification is most apparent in those applications o f Peirce that deploy the categories to theorize form as a point o f origin for musical meaning. Some argue that this point o f origin lies in the relationships between notes, i.e. directly in the form o f a work (and/or works associated with it, primarily through formal but also historical considerations), whilst others argue that a necessary causal relationship between work and listener constitutes an origin for musical meaning. Because the connection is necessary, however, such arguments also tend to lead back (by a causal route) to form as a point o f origin. Such arguments reinforce notions of a reified autonomous artwork that appears to be properly studied in relative (or even complete) isolation from social context. The universality o f Peirce’s categories is again invoked here to legitimate such ideas: Peirce’s categories set out the fundamental relationships of the universe. If their relationship is hierarchical and form is at the centre or the base of that hierarchy then the notion o f an autonomous artwork needs no defence; it again appears as a self-evident truth.

The writing o f Peirce does not directly discuss ideology. But neither does his thought serve to justify the patterns o f argument framed above as ideological. Peirce’s approach to questions o f meaning and knowledge is rigorously logical and, I would suggest, specifically rejects, the kinds o f reasoning these arguments exhibit. Peirce identifies four methods o f developing established beliefs in ‘The Fixation o f B elief

(1877, in EP 1.109ff): the methods o f tenacity, the method o f authority, the a priori method and the method o f science. The arguments deployed in music semiotics, I would suggest, fall most clearly within the a priori method, which ‘secures opinion through an appeal to propositions that are held to be necessary and universal’ (Corrington 1993, 32). Corrington’s account o f Peirce on this matter is worth quoting at length:

There is a sense in which the a priori method is merely an elitist version of the method o f tenacity insofar as it does not allow for social external critique. Peirce advances an argument that today would go by the name ‘hermeneutics of

suspicion,’ which asserts that all fundamental knowledge claims are actually structures o f personal preference or moves toward control and power that belie the surface and seemingly innocent claims o f so-called ‘pure’ reason.

All three methods [tenacity , authority and a priori] have their own role to play in personal and collective history, but they fail to point to anything truly external to the self or the community. In this sense, these methods are

intrapsychic and do not reveal anything about the structures o f nature. Peirce argues that a fourth method must be developed that is open to external structures and powers. He calls this final method the method of science.

(Corrington 1993, 32)

I suggest that musicology, in its tendency to uphold a particular body of musical practices and ‘works’, can be usefully understood as upholding just such ‘personal preferences’ and even a tendency to move ‘toward control and power’. It follows from

this that if Peirce’s view o f methods is consistent with the details o f his system7 then applications o f Peirce that reaffirm musicology’s ideological habits (those that tend to reify and legitimize) will distort the details o f Peirce’s system. The subsequent stages of this chapter take a detailed look at how Peirce has been applied to musicology,

identifying possible inconsistencies and returning continually to those aspects of musicology that can be linked to an ideological tendency such as formalism, autonomy and a focus upon notated music.

The remainder o f this chapter is structured around the sign types icon, index and symbol, which have a loose correspondence to the chronology of the musicological projects discussed. This structure allows a certain clarity in attempting to understand how Peirce’s thought might be seen to have guided different approaches to his semiotics in music, but it also highlights the tendency to return to formalist habits despite more sophisticated and careful applications o f his ideas. This is partly because there is a tendency in the writings o f musicologists to conceive the trichotomies as interchangeable. This is, I think, not altogether inconsistent with Peirce’s thought. One way to approach this is to consider that Peirce clearly articulates his theory of the categories for the first time in ‘On a New List o f Categories’. In this paper the categories are termed quality, relation and representation, but they are clearly bound up with the sign-types icon (denoted here as likenesses), index and symbol, which Peirce defines thus:

1st. Those whose relation to their objects is a mere community in some quality, and these representations may be termed Likenesses.

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This thesis conceives Peirce as consistent on this point and more takes Peirce’s wider project, following Hookway, as generally consistent despite certain important developments in his thought.

2d. Those whose relation to their objects consists in a correspondence in fact, Q

and these may be termed Indices or Signs.

3d. Those the ground o f whose relation to their objects is an imputed character, which are the same as general signs, and these may be termed Symbols.

(EP 1.7)

Although Peirce also introduces the trichotomy rheme, dicent, argument in this paper it is that o f icon, index, symbol which remained the most readily employed in Peirce’s

subsequent work on semiotics, and for this reason the tendency to equate the icon with firstness, the index with secondness and symbol with thirdness is generally adopted here. The terms iconism, indexicality and symbolism make clear this connection between the more general categories and more specific sign-types, and they are adopted in

subheadings.

2 Music and Iconism

The first attempts to apply the initial typology appear in the early 1970s and concentrate upon the notion of the icon. This seems unsurprising, since attempts to assign ‘extra- musical’ meaning to musical utterance in terms of resemblance, likeness or isomorphism have circulated musicological discourse for many years. Monelle traces such theorizing back to Batteux in the eighteenth century and notes points of contact between iconism

and Hanslick’s theory o f dynamic properties. The latter point is o f particular interest when we consider that Hanslick is often assumed to typify a formalist perspective where music is, first and foremost, an autonomous art form. Monelle’s point is not ill-founded, however, as Hanslick clearly did point to the potential correspondence between musical and emotional experience:

Which o f the elements inherent in these ideas [of love, wrath and fear] ... does music turn to account so effectually? Only the element of motion - in the wider sense, o f course, according to which the increasing and decreasing force o f a single note or chord is ‘motion’ also. This is the element which has in common with our emotions, and which, with creative power, it contrives to exhibit an endless variety o f forms and contrasts.

(in Cook 1998, 88)

Wilson Coker’s early application o f iconism to music (Coker 1972) bears a remarkable resemblance to Hanslickian aesthetics. In his chapter on extrageneric (as opposed to congeneric9) meaning, for example, Coker at first shows some sympathy for ‘autonomistically oriented theorists’10 (Coker 1972, 146) but clearly asserts that in his study ‘music is regarded as extragenrically significant and meaningful’. Coker goes on to explore his notion o f the musical metaphor, which, for him, involves the analogy

9 These terms are comparable to the more common notions o f extra-musical and musical or purely musical. They concern music referring outside itself and establishing its own internal relations.

10 At this point we assume that Hanslick is regarded as one such theorist since Coker quotes one o f his clearest dismissals o f music’s relation to emotion.

between congeneric (i.e. entirely musical) relationships and extrageneric (i.e. non­ musical) relationships:

[C]ongeneric sign complexes may be regarded as metaphors for

extrageneric meaning, the prim ary dimension o f reference necessarily being congeneric and the secondary dimension being extrageneric. In this way of thinking, we would say that music is a metaphor for life values and

extrageneric meanings.

(Ibid., 152)

The italicized demarcation o f congeneric meaning as primary and extrageneric meaning as secondary begins to indicate the formalist leanings o f Coker’s analysis. Furthermore, Coker’s extrageneric meanings begin to seem less and less clearly detached from music itself. That is to say, although ‘a fundamental objective o f a musical work is, in general, its extrageneric reference to the attitudes and responsive behaviour o f listeners and performers’ (Ibid., 153), these attitudes and responsive behaviours seem somehow intimately bound to m usic’s congeneric relations. The relation to Hanslick is then made clear when Coker employs him to underline his point that the ‘means that music has for expressing metaphors are the inherent [my emphasis] properties o f sound, rhythm and sonorous motion especially’ (Ibid., 154). This point is made more emphatically later when he asserts that ‘the properties we find expressive and iconically significant are in the music itself (Ibid., 158, Coker’s emphasis).

The iconicism in Coker’s theory o f extrageneric meaning, then, is not quite a simple case o f one set o f musical relations having ‘a mere community in some quality’, to use Peirce’s phrase in the ‘New List’, with a set of non-musical objects or concepts.11 The icon for Coker in this instance involves a far more intimate connection between music and extrageneric meaning in which the ‘musical organism directly presents us with expressive behaviour through the properties o f its sonorous motion’ (Ibid., 167). It is in this way that Coker’s theory o f the icon may be allied to the formalist tradition of Hanslick and, arguably, M eyer.12

Peirce’s understanding o f the icon and the iconic is a complex matter. One of the first problems encountered concerns the way in which Peirce’s description of the iconic or firstness in the ‘New List’ is different from those descriptions given after about 1885. One of the principal points o f the ‘New List’ is to demonstrate how a conception of quality (e.g. blackness) that can be ascribed to a substance (e.g. a stove) is a more mediate conception which is not simply a conceptual given but the product of a process. This process involves comparison (or relation) and transformation (or representation). Although Peirce reworked this paper around 1893, and in 1905 described it as ‘my one contribution to philosophy’ (CP 8.213), his definition of the categories differs in later work in that firstness is no longer the more mediate category but the most immediate. In Chapter 1 we noted Peirce’s conception o f firstness as ‘present immediate, fresh, new, initiative, original, spontaneous, free, vivid, conscious, and evanescent’ in ‘A Guess at the Riddle’ (1887-8). In the first part o f ‘On the Algebra o f Logic’ published in 1885,