How does music mean things?
A conversation with Twin A
A night at the symphony
Twin A took up the cello when she went to middle school, and sometime in March she asked if I would take her to an orchestra concert. So in early April, she and I had a date to see the Minnesota Orchestra play (among other things) Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony.
We had a delightful evening. Twin A was alight the whole time, enjoying every aspect of the outing: the drive downtown, Orchestra Hall, the refreshments we indulged in when we got there, and of course, the music. As the orchestra played, she occasionally looked at me and grinned. I grinned back at her. It means a lot to me to have a child who enjoys classical music.
Unlike the vast majority of his music, Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony is programmatic: it’s meant to convey something outside the music. Titled “Pastoral,” it “tells” a story about a day in the countryside. Its five movements have the following titles: “Awakening of happy feelings on getting out into the country,” “By the brookside,” “Merry gathering of the country folk,” “Thunderstorm,” and “Shepherds’ Song; Happy and thankful feelings after the storm.” There are bird calls: a flute plays a nightingale, an oboe plays a quail, and a clarinet plays a cuckoo. There is also, of course, a thunderstorm, with low strings and tympani rumbling. Twin A recognized all of this as it happened.
Questions arise
Twin A is also my most philosophical child, and on the way home she processed out loud what she’d heard. I swear I didn’t start it—I don’t remember her exact words, but the spirit of her thoughts went something like this: “It’s crazy that music can tell a story like that without words! I mean, the bird calls sounded like birds, and the storm sounded like a storm, but the rest of it? How does music sound like a day in the country? I mean, I know from Vivaldi that music can sound like a season, but how does it do that—sound like something that it doesn’t actually resemble? So like, could you write a piece about purple?”
I asked her what purple sounded like, and she said it was majestic but also mysterious and probably magical. I asked how that was different from yellow or orange, and how those colors would sound. She came up with ideas for many colors, noticing that it’s going to depend on what shades of them we’re talking about. She was thinking about what each color meant, and how that meaning would sound in music. At one point I mentioned that the music we’d just heard sounded like green, the green of grass and trees. And then I asked our music service to play Peer Gynt, which starts out with a movement called “Morning,” and we talked about what it was in that music that sounds like morning and what exactly we were picturing as we heard it.
It was a conversation with remarkable depth for a girl who is only 11 years old and a morning person up more than an hour past her bedtime. It had me dusting off the conversations I used to have with students the handful of times I taught a philosophy of music course. We talk about music as expressive, but what exactly is it expressing? And how? Moreover, is it expressing, representing, depicting, evoking, or describing? Outside of the small number of things music can directly imitate (bird calls, storms, brooks, trains—sounds and motions), how can it do any of these verbs to things outside itself: mornings, the country, a trout?
Of course, these questions are too broad: some music does some things, other music does others.1 There’s probably not a single unified theory available here. Still, the questions are fascinating and also very slippery.
A few basic ideas
One relatively clear and simple theory that covers a lot of ground is that music means things through association. There can be individual associations, such as a piece bringing to mind a place where you were when you heard it. There can be cultural associations, like the connections between bugle or trumpet calls and fanfare2 or the structural similarity between Javanese gamelan music and Javanese calendrical cycles, or the way certain instruments, rhythms, or styles are associated with different ethnic backgrounds. Associative meaning isn’t really “in” the music; we bring our external associations to it.
Sometimes musical motives refer to or represent or symbolize—and simultaneously describe or characterize—objects or characters, as in Prokoviev’s Peter and the Wolf. That’s a deliberate act on the part of the composer, and requires something beyond the music itself to make the connection between the music and what it’s representing.
But sometimes we think the meaning actually is “in” the music. It would be difficult to defend the claim that Barber’s Adagio for Strings is exciting and joyful, for example, or that Beethoven’s Sixth is about a spooky night, like Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain or parts of Berlioz’ Symphony Fantastique.
But if meaning is “in” the music, how does it get there?
First, there’s a sense of meaning internal to a piece of music: how the elements connect to one another to form patterns that have structure and flow. “Pure” music that doesn’t really mean anything outside itself—think of a Bach Invention, for instance—still has a kind of internal meaning as the different voices in the counterpoint “talk” to one another.
But it also seems like there’s meaning “in” the music that isn’t about the music as such. For instance, sometimes music resembles what it means: the “shape” of an emotion, the sound of the bird, the motion of an action or scene (Ride of the Valkyries or the William Tell Overture).
Sometimes we say that music expresses emotions. Within this idea we can distinguish between music itself expressing the emotion, and music evoking emotions in the listener. The latter depends on a whole bunch of contingencies about the listener, so let’s set it aside and concentrate on the former. When we talk about music expressing an emotion, I want to say that it seems to have “shapes” similar to the “shapes” of emotions and their physiological manifestations. Sadness is slow and quiet, probably in a minor key; anger is loud and forceful; joy is full of movement and probably in a major key. There are all kinds of expressive subtleties that music can capture, just as there are all kinds of emotional subtleties.
Now, I’m not sure how all of this works, really. There’s a place for some cognitive science in here; it could probably tell us more about the connections between emotions and music, for example. Semiotics also no doubt has things to say.
A lot of people have made much more detailed analyses of musical meaning than I’m doing here, and even when I’ve taught this I feel like it’s the tip of the iceberg and also just out of reach. But I find that the interest in this topic lies at least as much in the questions as it does in the answers. Philosophy is a thing that it’s easy to get started on, when we notice the questions, and music is full of them if you take a look. Twin A’s thinking warms my geeky philosophical heart.
And that’s just in Western “classical” or “art” music, which is what prompted this discussion. Popular music and music from other cultures opens up even more scope for meanings and questions.
There’s a cool discussion of this by J. Peter Burkholder, “A simple model for associative musical meaning.” In Byron Almén & Edward Pearsall, Approaches to meaning in music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press (2006).
Erica, I am fascinated by the question you asks at the end of your essay: "But I find that the interest in this topic lies at least as much in the questions as it does in the answers." How true and how revealing! At least in philosophy, it seems we can never get any final answers to our questions; and yet we cannot stop asking them. Why? I am now reading Plato's REPUBLIC as a part of a Substack read-along and I keep asking myself this question: Has philosophy made any progress in the last 2,500 years? Have we actually answered any of the questions that Socrates asked? If not, then what are we doing?
Here's another take on how music means. For me, music is the most "meaningful" and thus moving when it succeeds in expressing what we cannot express in words. For that reason, the less programmatic and more abstract it is, the more universal it becomes. Then music is no longer restrained by words or concrete images but, rather, is allowed to soar in infinite freedom. My favorite piece of Beethoven is the second movement of his last piano sonata (#32). Near the middle of it, all of a sudden, the music takes off, leaps beyond our human world, and enters a transcendent universe of complete beauty and freedom! What a miracle! This is the piece of music I turn to whenever I need uplifting or inspiration.
Music is fascinating in so many ways. Even though I played the guitar when I was young and I do enjoy music, I have to admit that it does not have as dramatic of an effect on me as it does on many other people (unless I have a little alcohol or cannabis).
I became fascinated by music while observing my daughter receiving music therapy and the significant effect it has on her, despite her intellectual disability. It is a speculation, but music seems to strike and take over a more primitive part of the brain, perhaps the limbic system, and can not only directly stoke emotions but also induce movement (also known as dancing). The prefrontal cortex exerts control over the limbic system (the emotional center of the brain) and motor function. Physiologically, it makes sense that substances like alcohol and cannabis, which interfere with normal prefrontal cortical function, would disinhibit emotions and lead to excessive movement (dancing). Some people with “thinner” prefrontal cortexes don’t need to be intoxicated to respond dramatically to music emotionally and with dancing, while others, similar to myself, might need a little help to achieve the same response. Perhaps this is why emotional lability is probably more common in musicians; unfortunately, there are tradeoffs for being able to enjoy music so much (if you could call this a tradeoff, perhaps not!).