Consideraciones adicionales

12 Wayne Bowman in Philosophical Approaches to Music deals with Hanslick and Meyer under the same chapter heading: ‘formalism’. In M eyer’s work, according to Bowman, ‘[w]hat started as a defence of “absolute expressionism” ends in formalism’ (Bowman 1998, 190).

Peirce gives a description o f the icon which perhaps goes furthest in warranting the kind of theoretical work to which it is put by Coker:

I call a sign which stands for something merely because it resembles it, an icon. Icons are so completely substituted for their objects as hardly to be distinguished from them. Such are the diagrams o f geometry. A diagram, indeed, so far as it has a general signification, is not a pure icon; but in the middle part of our reasonings we forget that abstractness in great measure, and the diagram is for us the very thing. So in contemplating a painting, there is a moment when we lose the consciousness that it is not the thing, the distinction o f the real and the copy disappears, and it is for the moment a pure dream - not any particular existence, and yet not general. At that moment we are contemplating an icon.

(EP 1.226)

Peirce was, I would suggest, convinced o f the importance of firstness in the process of reasoning, and we find him in such passages at pains to show the applicability o f the icon to fundamental aspects o f the process o f understanding. But even in this passage we have a clear indication o f the difficulty o f conceiving o f the iconic. In trying to describe the icon in simple phenomenological terms he appeals to the idea of somehow dropping the process of signification, allowing us to contemplate something that does not exist and cannot be generalized. This allows Peirce to retain the notion o f a singularity where one thing does not relate to another but simply is. There is a contradiction here, however, because the painting (in this instance) still appears to represent the thing it copies. Peirce

is fully aware o f this contradiction and for this reason comes to define firstness more in terms o f possibility:

An Icon is a Representamen whose Representative Quality is a Firstness of it as a First. That is, a quality that it has qua thing renders it fit to be a representamen. Thus, anything is fit to be a Substitute for anything that it is like. (The conception o f ‘substitute’ involves that o f a purpose, and thus of genuine thirdness.) .... A Representamen by Firstness alone can only have a similar Object. Thus, a Sign by Contrast denotes its object only by virtue o f a contrast, or Secondness, between two qualities. A sign by Firstness is an image o f its object and, more strictly speaking, can only be an idea. For it must produce an Interpretant idea; and an external object excites an idea by a reaction upon the brain. But most strictly speaking, even an idea, except in the sense o f a possibility, or Firstness, cannot be an Icon. A possibility alone is an Icon purely by virtue o f its quality; and its object can only be a Firstness.

(EP 2.276)

In this passage from ‘Sundry Logical Conceptions’ of 1903 we find Peirce having to continually back track in order to qualify the point that a pure icon cannot properly function as a sign. Two points may help to clarify this complex point. The first is that Peirce derives his categories primarily by logical means. However, after around 1885 Peirce also looks to conceive and explain the categories phenomenologically, but this often gives a sense o f his trying to make himself understood and relying, as a result, upon

simplifications which can be misleading. The second point is that when the categories are derived by stricter logical means we get a clearer sense that firstness is an aspect of the reasoning process that is available to conception through the process o f precision. What needs to be underlined here is that icons are not sufficient to explain a process of signification. Therefore, although Peirce’s statement in ‘On the Algebra o f Logic’ may seem to warrant the role for the icon developed by Coker, a fuller understanding of Peirce’s conception of the icon renders it problematic. What Coker is actually discussing should properly be termed a hypoicon. The quotation above continues thus:

But a sign may be iconic, that is, may represent its object mainly by its similarity, no matter what its mode o f being. If a substantive be wanted, an iconic

representamen may be termed a hypoicon. Any material image, as a painting, is largely conventional in its mode of representation; but in itself, without legend or label it may be called a hypoicon.

Hypoicons may be roughly divided according to the mode o f Firstness of which they partake. Those which partake o f simple qualities, or First Firstnesses, are images; those which represent the relations, mainly dyadic, or so regarded, of the parts o f one thing by analogous relations in their own parts, are diagrams', those which represent the representative character of a representamen by representing a parallelism in something else, are metaphors.

(CP 2.276-7) The process by which m usic’s internal relations can be said to signify ‘life, values and extrageneric meanings’ (Coker 1972, 152), then, cannot be explained by a simple

appeal to iconism. A more thorough understanding of Peirce, I would suggest, leads us to take a far more considered approach to the icon and to note in particular the

importance o f the symbolic in any sign situation. Hookway gives a clear account of how the icon and index are ‘normally’ conceived as subclassifications o f the symbol:

[I]t is arguable that it is only because there is a general practice of using them that we are able to apply colour samples; the colour chart is a sort o f conventional symbol .... The convention instructs us how to use the patch as an icon; we do not need a specific convention to determine the meaning of each patch, but a general convention which enable us to use the patch as an icon .... Similarly, it is a familiar point that we require conventions [i.e. symbols] to be able to interpret indices such as a pointing finger - we need to know what route to take from the end o f the finger to find the object indicated .... Although Peirce is not wholly clear on the matter, there are passages that suggest that he thinks there are no pure icons or indices; and his normal usage o f the three terms [icon, index, symbol] reflects the subclassification o f symbols just alluded to.

(Hookway 1985, 126)

Coker’s use o f the icon to theorize a direct, immediate and transparent connection between music and meaning is not surprising when we consider musicology’s formalist tradition. The apparent contradiction that Peirce is at pains to explain (a contradiction resolved, I would suggest, in Hookway’s account) is uncritically adopted by Coker to suggest a situation in which musical form can both refer beyond itself and yet embody

‘meanings’ in a way that requires nothing beyond itself. And this contradictory idea allows, by the same token, a side stepping o f the role of convention. This process provides a particularly clear example o f how Peirce’s work has been used to reify musical meaning as a transcendent immutable entity. The point that it is derived from tensions in Peirce’s work is particularly interesting and points, perhaps, to the way in which notions o f unmediated, pure entities are difficult to avoid in any theoretical system. Peirce is particularly insightful, I would suggest, in this area, and his work is an outstanding contribution to its study.

Criticisms o f iconism in music have been derived not so much from a more careful reading o f Peirce but instead with reference to the work o f Eco. This is the case with Monelle’s account o f Coker’s ideas (Monelle 1992). Referring to Eco, Monelle draws a distinction between iconic signs and intrinsically encoded acts. The latter occur when a relation is founded in identity (i.e. something approaching pure iconism, it would seem). Thus the red in a drawing o f a red flag does not signify the red o f the flag: it is the same red and is thus an intrinsically coded act, not an iconic sign.

Monelle employs this distinction to point out problems with Coker’s notion of congeneric meaning - the process where one musical unit refers to another through resemblance:

It is doubtful that musical repetitions can be regarded as signs o f each other, whether iconic on no, though variants may be considered signs; for as Eco makes clear, a relation o f identity is not a sign relation.

Monelle’s critique o f Coker’s notion o f congeneric meaning is, I think, significant and is relevant also to the paradigmatic musical analysis developed by Nattiez, discussed below. It will suffice, at this point, to suggest that M onelle’s critique leads to a number of further questions about the extent to which one musical utterance can ever be said to be identical with another and the further difficulty of maintaining any notion of iconism once Eco’s idea o f intrinsically coded acts in particular, and his wider critique of iconism in general, has been assimilated.

Monelle also hints at a misguided conflation o f the extrageneric and the congeneric in Coker: ‘sensory isomorphism and signs o f “value” would have to be classed as extrageneric, though Coker presents them as though they were integral to his theory o f congeneric meaning’ (Monelle 1992, 206). At this point, Coker’s alignment with earlier theorists is again apparent. Coker’s definition of the iconic process posits the notion o f an abstract quality. This quality is so abstract that it may be shared not only by differing musical ideas but also by experiences that involve different senses - the most pertinent instances being emotional sensation and musical response. Thus musical experience, like Eco’s flag, may contain the exact same quality o f any extrageneric meaning.13 The music does not refer to this meaning: it embodies it. A music’s

extrageneric meaning, in this sense, is derived (somewhat paradoxically) from that which is entirely musical, although analogies may be drawn with emotional experience in itself.

13

Eco places considerable emphasis on the point that what might be taken to be signs that function by taking up, or mimicking, the qualities o f that which are taken to be iconically signified actually embody those qualities. Thus Eco notes that ‘the red that appears in the drawing o f a flag is not “similar” to the red o f the real flag: it is the same red’ (Eco 1976, 210).

In his article titled ‘The Iconic Process in Musical Communication’, published in the same year as Coker’s Music and Meaning, David Osmond-Smith presents a similar theory by drawing upon research into brain processes in relation to musical experience (Osmond-Smith cites McLaughlin’s Music and Communication as a summary (see Osmond-Smith 1972, 39)). Here the abstracted quality (encountered in Coker) is actually named: ‘a sort o f synthetic “Urgestalt”’ (Osmond-Smith 1972, 40) which, because shared by both music and emotional experience,14 might cause it to be related to one or more of ‘a wide variety o f conscious and unconscious experience-pattems’. This ‘abstract form’, according to Osmond-Smith, ‘may be regarded as an “unconscious icon’” (Ibid.) as opposed to a (conscious) iconic sign.

Osmond-Smith’s conclusions are more successful than Coker’s for two reasons. Firstly, he avoids the implication that these synthetic Urgestalten or unconscious icons are in some sense entirely musical - they are abstractions, which coincide with, or may be identical to, other abstractions and can thereby bring about signification whilst remaining subject to different readings (albeit within a limited field). Secondly, he avoids the assumption that iconicity (an example o f firstness) is separable from the symbolic (an example o f thirdness). This is achieved with reference to Eco’s

reformulation o f the iconic (which is not that far removed from the formulation with which Hookway credits Peirce). This reformulation is worth consideration.

14

Osmond-Smith, following Meyer suggests the term mood rather than emotion is more appropriate here because that to which the music refers is too stable and permanent to be an emotion. This distinction between immediate emotion and rationalized mediated mood, I would suggest, is indicative o f the mobile ever-changing degree o f perceived conventionality at work in any sign situation.

Eco’s semiotics, as outlined in his A Theory o f Semiotics,15 is underpinned by his theory of codes. These codes establish, by convention, correlations between an

expression and a content, and it is this that constitutes a sign-function (the term Eco favours over sign). Iconism (conceived in simple terms) is rejected by Eco:

So-called iconism in fact covers many semiotic procedures, many ways of producing signals ordered to a sign-function, and we will see that, even though there is something different between the word /dog/ and the image of a dog, this difference is not the trivial one between iconic and arbitrary (or ‘symbolic’) signs. It is rather a matter o f a complex and continuously gradated array o f different modes o f producing signs and texts, every sign- function (sign-unit or text) being in turn the result o f many of these modes o f production.

(Eco 1976, 190)

Eco, in one sense, provides a possible explanation for and means to negotiate this

ambiguity by positing a complex field o f sign production, insisting upon a more ‘flexible and prudent’ (Ibid., 192) understanding o f the (related/interchangeable) terms arbitrary and conventional (presumed characteristics o f symbols in particular and thirdness in general) - that is, a definition o f the symbolic that does not preclude the possibility of shared characteristics. Similarly convention is no longer precluded from definitions of iconism.

15 Although Osmond-Smith refers to three articles by Eco published in 1968, 1971 and 1972, it is generally