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Among those who seek and propound theories of musical
meaning, the most persistent disagreement is between the referentialists (or
"heteronomists"), who hold that music can and does refer to meanings outside
itself, and the nonreferentialists (who are sometimes called formalists or
absolutists), who maintain that the art is autonomous and "means itself." The
Austrian critic Eduard
Hanslick, in his The Beautiful in Music (German edition published
1854), was a strong proponent of music as an art of intrinsic principles and
ideas; yet even Hanslick, ardent formalist though he was, struggled with the
problem of emotion in music. Hanslick's views have been classified as a modified
heteronomous theory.
One looks in vain for an extremist of either persuasion,
referentialist or nonreferentialist. Igor Stravinsky first
achieved fame as a composer of ballet music, and his works throughout his career
were rich in extramusical associations. It would be a comfortable simplification
to ally referentialism with "program" music and nonreferentialism with
"absolute" music. But the problem cannot be resolved by such a choice, if only,
first of all, because extramusical referents can vary in complexity from a mere
descriptive title to the convolutions of the Wagnerian leitmotiv, in which a
particular musical phrase is consistently associated with a particular person,
place, or thing. The referentialist does not require an explicit program (which
may, when present, be altogether too meagre by his canons), and the
nonreferentialist does not necessarily denigrate program music, though he makes
a point of distinguishing between the extramusical program and the musical
meaning. The contemporary U.S. theorist Leonard Meyer, in his Emotion and
Meaning in Music (1956), speaks of "designative" and "embodied" meanings; he
recognizes both kinds in music but appears to give equal weight to the extrinsic
and intrinsic.
If there is intrinsic, or embodied, meaning, one may well ask what meaning is embodied and how it is to be apprehended. An extreme formalist would say that the acoustic pattern itself and nothing more is the sense of music; Hanslick, indeed, said this, though he did not hold consistently to the view. But most nonreferentialists regard music as, in one way or another, emotionally meaningful or expressive. Referentialists, too, find expressive content in music, though this emotional content may be extramusical (even if not explicit) in origin, according to the American theorists John Hospers in Meaning and Truth in the Arts (1946) and Donald Ferguson in Music as Metaphor (1960). Meyer has made the observation that while most referentialists are expressionists, not all expressionists are referentialists. He makes the useful distinction between absolute expressionists and referential expressionists and identifies his own position as "formalist-absolute expressionist." In acknowledging that music can and does express referential (designative) meanings as well as nonreferential ones, Meyer exhibits an eclectic and certainly permissive view. But he has been criticized for failing to make clear the modus operandi of this referential meaning in music.
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To cite
this page:
"music" Encyclopędia Britannica Online
<http://search.eb.com/bol/topic
[Accessed June 22, 1999].
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