mentality and it follows that nature must be perfused with mentality. There is a direct correspondence between Peirce’s pansemioticism and his panpsychism (the doctrine that matter is ‘effete m ind’). Some scholars have been vexed by the panpsychist elements in Peirce, seeing them as a late aberration that shows a flaw either in his metaphysics or in his very thought processes. These views betray more about the lack o f philosophical elasticity in Peirce’s interlocutors than about Peirce’s semiotic and metaphysical theories.
(Corrington 1993, 141)
Notable also when comparing Spitzer and Peirce is the role of the physical (in Spitzer) and the actual (in Peirce) as the underpinning o f thought. Spitzer draws on Lakoff s theory that image-schemata derived from biological aspects o f human experience - our physicality can explain our modes o f understanding.43 In Peirce the category of secondness or actuality has a similarly foundational role. Secondness is often explained with similar reference to human experience (such as the resistance encountered in putting a shoulder to a door) and is the category o f existence which gives grounding to our inquiries.
There are, of course, many differences between Peircian and cognitive-semantic models. But Spitzer’s adoption o f the latter is, I think, indicative o f a certain
dissatisfaction with distinctions drawn by musical semiotics in its simpler guise. These distinctions, however, derive more from Saussurian than Peircian models. In certain core
43
It is notable, however, that Spitzer is critical o f those musicologists who have accepted Lakoff and Johnson uncritically and suggests that the work o f other theorists has exhibited an alarming trend to presume ‘mappings from a notional bodily structure onto a musical structure with an unacceptable degree o f immediacy’ (Spitzer 2004, 62).
aspects of Spitzer’s work, there is a move to construct a system that like Peirce’s can supersede simplistic notions of the natural vs. the cultural or the world as it is vs. the world as it is known. In this sense Spitzer’s models approach those o f Peirce.
This correspondence between Spitzer’s take on cognitive semantics and Peircian models should not be overstated, however. One area, in particular, in which superficial similarity belies incompatibility concerns Spitzer’s basic categories o f musical structure (harmony/counterpoint, rhythm and melody), which Tine up with’ the cross-domain metaphors o f painting, language and life. These tripartitions might seem at first to correspond to those in Peirce, especially when we note that harmony involves attending ‘more to the qualities of its [music’s] materials than to the logic of its structure’ (Ibid., 11). These interrelated classes are in some respects exhaustive, in that ‘the number of cultural metaphors in the European common-practice period is closed: they number precisely three’ (Ibid., 66). But the foundational status o f Peirce’s categories is not matched by Spitzer’s metaphor types. Peirce’s categories are derived from a set of logical arguments whereas Spitzer’s appear to rely, at least in part, on two habits of musicology: the tripartition of the ‘common-practice’ era into Baroque, Classical and Romantic eras and the carving up o f music into elements that are subsequently classed as more and less significant (an approach made explicit in Gurney’s notion of primary and secondary elements). The parameters Spitzer favours (harmony/counterpoint, rhythm and melody) are derived, almost exclusively, from these ‘primary’ elements (pitch and
duration/rhythm). Spitzer’s tripartition, then, although extraordinarily compelling and potentially useful to an understanding o f musical practices, does not claim for itself the necessity nor the ubiquity o f Peirce’s categories. However important these discrepancies
may be, there is something Peircian in Spitzer’s search for foundational entities, and more importantly his approach, in attempting to devise a theory that brings the processes of meaning into a generalized conception o f human thought and understanding, exhibits a thorough engagement with many o f the issues and concerns that confronted Peirce.44
6 Music and P e irce’s later typologies
In 1991 Raymond Monelle published a paper titled ‘Music and the Peircian
Trichotomies’. It was one o f the first attempts by a musicologist to engage with the more complicated sign systems developed by Peirce from 1903 onwards. In this paper (and in a chapter that closely matches it (Monelle 1992)) Monelle discusses the categories in general terms before discussing each o f the three trichotomies o f the 1903 typology in turn. Some of M onelle’s key points have already been discussed, but at this point it is simply notable that Monelle discusses each o f the nine sign types in Figure 2.4
individually, considering their relevance to music. There is little consideration of the ten sign types derived from this table (see Figure 1.7) nor of the way in which sign-types
44
One area o f interest here is Spitzer’s engagement with the notion o f prototypical categories taken from cognitive semantics. Spitzer allies him self to Rosch in his rejection o f ‘the traditional view ... that categories are classified according to shared properties’ (Spitzer 2004, 20). Although this seems at odds with Peirce’s notion o f iconism it should be noted that Peirce’s first important work, ‘On a New List o f Categories’, addressed a similar problem. His findings were not altogether dissimilar in that qualities or properties are understood as derived from the processes o f comparison and transformation, not as unanalyzable givens. Spitzer notes that the notion o f ‘individual models radiating around a central
prototypical category’ (Ibid., 21) does not involve a transformational relation between model and prototype which again marks his ideas (or those o f his theoretical models) out from Peirce’s but the concern to replace the notion o f quality or property with a more complex relational principle is again comparable and in some ways brings Spitzer closer to Peirce than writers such as Hatten and Cumming who have embraced Peirce more openly but relied heavily upon simplifications o f Peirce’s conception o f quality. It should be noted also that Spitzer, perhaps like Peirce, still tends to rely on the notion o f qualities or properties, such as in his argument that ‘with cross-domain metaphors in music ... mappings are motivated and selected by properties o f musical material (Ibid., 66).
contain one another.
As the sign in itself As the relation of the sign to its object
Firstness: Secondness: Thirdness:
As the sign’s interpretant represents it
First Qualisign Icon Rheme/Term
Second Sinsign Index Dicent/Proposition
Third Legisign Symbol Argument
Figure 2.4: The three trichotomies of 1903 or ‘interim’ typology.
In A Theory o f Musical Semiotics (1994), Eero Tarasti again used the 1903
typology suggesting (albeit briefly) a process by which it might be applied to the analysis of music. Tarasti’s approach shows considerable misunderstanding o f the categories, however, and does little to build on the more careful and tentative work of Monelle.
Jose Luiz M artinez’s published PhD thesis exhibits an unprecedented rigour in the engagement o f Peircian thought in relation to music. Martinez worked closely with Tarasti to produce this work, publishing it under the title Semiosis in Hindustani Music (1997). The thesis, then, not only has a firm foot in both musicological and Peirce studies, but it is also concerned primarily with non-Westem music.
There has been a tendency for musicologists in applying Peirce to start from a traditional musicological perspective and to deploy Peirce in order to address the many ideas and issues such a perspective entails. This is true of the work o f Hatten in
particular (see Chapter 4) but also Monelle and Tarasti, I would suggest. This approach tends to be reversed in the work o f Martinez. Martinez shows an exceptional grasp of the
complexities of Peirce’s sign system within the context of Peirce’s wider philosophical project, and he tends to move from a strong grasp of Peircian ideas to their possible application to music. This approach is admirable and renders Martinez’s thesis a
worthwhile contribution to the study o f Peirce in music. However, for much of Semiosis in Hindustani Music there is a strong sense o f Martinez becoming lost amongst (or at least waylaid by) the trees that are Peirce’s sign types and losing track o f the woods that allow key insights. As a result many o f the issues that continue to dominate the study of music are scarcely opened up. To adopt a rather more elaborate metaphor, one might almost characterize Martinez as taking hold o f the tool kit of Peircian semiotics but, rather than wielding some of the sharpest knives and using them to dissect musical practices, spending his time trying to get the tools in order and ending up simply hinting at how different tools might be relevant to musical study.
As a result I read Martinez’s work as a series o f missed opportunities. Martinez understands music extremely well, and his understanding of Peirce is exceptional amongst musicologists, but these two areas are fruitfully synthesized in his work. This point is perhaps best demonstrated by M artinez’s discussion of the Peircian index - a concept that I consider key in successfully applying Peirce to music (see Chapter 5). When Martinez addresses this area he rightly allies indices and secondness in general to actuality. Rather than confront the role o f actuality within those processes traditionally conceived as indicative o f musical meaning, however, Martinez embarks on an
exploration o f a plethora o f (somewhat self-evident) examples of musicians and locations being connected to music by causal connection (e.g. the sound of a horn indicating the
musical instrument called a ‘horn’).45 The key issue as to how music might be read as a sign that relates to the actual world beyond the obvious context of its generation is not considered.
Martinez soon moves on to consider further partitions of the index. Such partitions can scarcely be ignored or dismissed as they are ubiquitous in Peirce, and Martinez is reflecting Peirce’s own habit. Unfortunately, however, these partitions are again allied to musical concepts in a way that has little bearing upon complex processes o f musical meaning. Furthermore, there appears to be no sense o f a system that is relevant to music as we have come to conceive it; whereas Hatten begins with a systematic notion of musical development informed (albeit rather loosely) by Peirce, Martinez goes to the opposite extreme and presents a more or less rigorous adherence to Peircian thought but only a loose collection o f musical applications, which I would suggest explains Hatten’s greater influence amongst music semioticians. Having divided indices into genuine and degenerate forms, then, Martinez applies the label genuine index to musical concepts such as works, styles, genres, systems, instruments and performance styles, some, if not all of which, I would suggest, are better considered thirds. And, in dealing with the degenerate index (the index which I claim is key to understanding musical signification), Martinez takes the step o f subdividing further this time into three in accordance with the categories - a step not taken, it would seem, by Peirce. By way of this tripartition we are then given (1) ideas traditionally considered iconic (e.g. the ubiquitous cuckoo) and those exhibiting obvious iconicity and indexicality (e.g. recordings), (2) functional music, as in that music that has strong connotations o f occasion or ritual (again these are surely thirds
45
In the terminology o f the 1903 typology Martinez is discussing the dicent, indexical legisign. This sign is o f limited significance, I would suggest, in comparison to the far more extensively theorized dicent, symbolic legisign, also termed a proposition or dicisign - see Chapter 6.
not seconds, unless taken as particular rather than general occurrences) and (3) part-to- whole relations (obliquely connected to sinsign-legisign relations), where certain notes in a raga can signify the raga as a whole (Martinez 1997, 137-140).
Through the process o f subdividing, cross referencing and labelling (which at times is surprisingly shaky given Martinez’s intimate knowledge of Peirce) Martinez scarcely approaches what is surely one o f the key questions concerning indexicality or secondness in relation to questions o f musical meaning: in what sense, if at all, is there a relationship between actuality and the ways in which people find music meaningful?
Despite these points Martinez’s achievements need to be underlined. His study introduced a new rigour to the engagement o f Peircian philosophy and brought home the extent of Peirce’s vast but (in accordance with the universal categories) unified theories. Martinez also highlighted the ways in which Peircian thought developed primarily from a consideration of science rather than aesthetics, and this may go some way to explaining why he did not manage to employ Peirce sufficiently flexibly to address those questions more central to the study o f musical meaning in particular and musicology in general.46
Martinez broadly follows the outlines o f the 1903 typology in structuring the second part o f his thesis, which specifically applies Peircian concepts to music (the first part is basically a literature review and the third part looks in more detail at Indian music before relating findings to Peircian thought.47 There are a number o f references to the
46
Martinez does clearly discuss the role o f aesthetics in Peirce, but my point here is that he fails to apply Peirce’s semiotics in a way that takes a full account o f the very different patterns o f semiosis that
characterize artistic rather than scientific practice.
47
This third part, as I suggest, is primarily an account o f the Rasa theoiy and its relationship to Hindustani music. The final chapter o f part three, however, does begin to bring Peirce to bear upon musical
considerations with some sophistication. This engenders some tantalizing insights, such as the point that ‘musical semiosis is suggestive (abhivyajyante, in Abhinavagupta’s [a Kashmirian theorist bom c.960] terminology), and its interpretants are developed imaginatively by the listener’ (Ibid., 357). But such insights are not systematically pursued and, although Martinez develops a useful notion o f thirdness aimed
ten-fold classification o f the sign derived from the 1903 typology, but such references occur in passing (the interrelation o f these sign types, discussed in Chapter 5, for example, is not pursued). Martinez does touch upon aspects of the final typology pointing out the trichotomy o f the interpretant (immediate, dynamic and final) and the dichotomy of the object (immediate and dynamic) but again his application of them to music is piecemeal. Martinez does look in more detail at a trichotomy that is placed rather ambiguously in Peirce’s system (along with a number of his own).48 It is generally understood as the trichotomy of the dynamic interpretant, although others suggest it is identical with the trichotomy o f the interpretant already mentioned (see, for example, Greenlee 1973,117 n.8 and Weiss and Burks 1945), and gives the classes emotional, energetic and logical. A more systematic (but undeveloped) application of both
interpretant trichotomies is proposed by William Dougherty (1997), an approach which may prove fruitful in developing the ideas o f Hatten. At the time of writing, however, Dougherty is yet to publish his monograph in this area and his articles, by his own admission, give an insufficient framework for extended critical discussion. The other semiotician to discuss Peirce’s later typologies in detail is Naomi Cumming, whose work is discussed at length in the chapter that follows.
towards firstness, they draw rather heavily upon a religio-cultural metaphysics that remain drastically undertheorized.
48
Musical interpretation is trichotomized to give perception, performance and (a ‘double third’) musical intelligence and composition. Each o f these is then trichotomized twice to give nine terms in each case. Here again we are given the sense that elaborate (pseudo-)Peircian system building is taken up at the expense o f insightful analysis.
7 Conclusion
Towards the end of their article on popular music and musicology (1990) McClary and Walser issue a challenge: ‘Most Bach scholars’ they assert ‘would profit from studying how Elvis Presley is dealt with sociologically and musically’ (Ibid., 285). This is
because, in their view, musicologists o f popular music have not been ‘struggling to catch up to the standard o f scholarship typical o f traditional musicology’; for McClary and Walser ‘the reverse is rather more the case - because their area of study has required the exploration o f a whole new set o f issues and the development of a whole new set of methods, they are far beyond their conventional colleagues in sophistication’ (Ibid.). This statement and others like it are clearly polemical and likely to sting a little if you have devoted much o f your life to ‘conventional’ musicological enquiry. Whatever one’s position here the tension it describes (between musicologists of ‘older’ and ‘newer’ persuasion) is instructive in understanding the application of Peirce to music. Peirce has been taken up enthusiastically by a good number o f musicologists because his ideas appear to plug the theoretical gap highlighted in McClary and Walser’s account of traditional musicology. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Peirce has been repeatedly employed in an attempt to engage with the problems faced by those musicologists keen to keep pace with developments in scholarship (particularly those that characterize cultural studies with the complexities o f post-structuralism, post-modernity and the many other ‘posties’ bearing down) whilst keeping hold o f the methods and approaches that rely upon conceptions o f music as a canon o f notated (quasi-)autonomous works.
point of argumentation in Semiosis in Hindustani Music he turns to the question of absolute music (a term used here interchangeably with autonomous music). The conclusion o f his thesis begins ‘ [i]n view o f the richness of musical meaning in Hindustani music ... there is no evidence for any conception of it as being absolute’ (Martinez 1997, 369). And yet throughout his thesis Martinez admits the possibility of some sort of absolute music (even, it would seem, in the experience o f Hindustani music - as long as a listener has ‘minimal acquaintance with Indian culture’ (Ibid.)), and again in his conclusion he asserts that ‘there is a mode o f musical reference that generates pure icons’ and that ‘these are likely to be interpreted as pure music’ (Ibid., 372). Martinez’s ideas are a particularly simple example o f music semiotics’ attempt to account for and espouse the formalism that still dominates much musicological discourse. We saw a similar tendency in the work of Coker, Osmond-Smith and Nattiez, and in the theories of