Modes of Communication in Stravinsky's Works

Sign and Expression

Per Dahl

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000504507
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Thema: Teoría y apreciación musicales

Igor Stravinsky left behind a complex heritage of music and ideas. There are many examples of discrepancies between his literate statements about music and musicians and his musical compositions and activity. Per Dahl presents a model of communication that unveils a clear and logical understanding of Stravinsky's heritage, based on the extant material available. From this, Dahl argues the case for Stravinsky's music and his ideas as separate entities, representing different modes of communication. As well as describing a triangular model of communication, based on a tilted and extended version of Ogden's triangle, Dahl presents an empirical investigation of Stravinsky's vocabulary of signs and expressions in his published scores - his communicative mode towards musicians. In addition to simple statistics, Dahl compares the notation practice in the composer's different stylistic epochs as well as his writing for different sizes of ensembles. Dahl also considers Stravinsky's performances and recordings as modes of communication to investigate whether the multi-layered model can soften the discrepancies between Stravinsky the literary and Stravinsky the musician.

Part I Sign and expression in communication

1 Prelude

DOI: 10.4324/9781003218463-3

1.1 The point of departure

A person (A1) approaches another person (A2), and A1 lifts his right hand to greet the person he approaches. When the approaching person has identified this act as part of a greeting ritual, the person in question will (likely) lift her right hand to return the greeting.

I will describe this situation with terminology across three levels.

Level 1: A1 has an intention to greet A2 and acts by raising his right hand (element B). (If A1 was walking in a diagonal stride waving his hands, at one point, he decides to leave the right hand in the front position.) A2 identifies the act (B) as a product in the context of greeting rituals (element C) and lifts her right hand. Two preconceptions illustrate this situation: (1) To identify a sign is to categorise a segment of reality (the act) as a single element (product) classifiable in a pre-existing category (context). (2) As far as both perceive the act of greeting alike, that is, relate it to the same familiar context of greeting rituals, a meaning transference of A1’s intention to A2 is possible. They greet one another in joint action, given that they have a shared understanding indicating that it is relevant to shake hands in this situation. Even if they lack this shared understanding, the sign or gesture can still be identified, but the consequence depends on the interpretation that A2 attributes to the sign. Interpretation is thus more than the identification of signs.¹ Interpretation also involves situating sign identification within the interpreter’s mode of expectation (A2’s intention), where A2’s appraisal of consequences, that is to say, possible contexts and the sign’s potential come into play in addition to the identification of the sign and its contexts. It illustrates that transfer of meaning/message is not a linear phenomenon from Sender via Message to Receiver, but a process involving both parts and their modes of communication.

Figure 1.1 Communication in everyday life.

Level 2: The elementary situation can be described as follows: A person has a belief (the personal meaning) (A) that is shown through the signs used (B) to express the intended action (C). It is essential not to be locked in the linearity of this description. Therefore, I am searching for a communicative model and must continue the analysis from level 1: Person A1 (Arne) is responsible for the belief and the sign used. His intention includes the whish for the sign to be seen as expression following his meaning. However, it is up to A2 (Anne) to interpret the sign and connect it to an expression. The link between the sign and the expression is arbitrary and depends on Anne’s mode of expectations. We can use different methods of explanation (discourses) for the different relations in this model. The beliefs of the Person can be articulated as intentional explanations. Identification of the sign is given through an operational explanation (operationalisation of the sign). Understanding what it expresses can be explained through causal explanation (which is to say, a discovery of the causal connections obtaining between expression and the perceivers of the expression). Of great importance in developing a model of human communication is that while the Person, Action, and Product (all at level 1) are observable to others, only the Sign is directly observable on level 2. Therefore, the human production of symbols that can be treated in this model is equivalent to the human production of signs. They both need the receiver to understand the context to grip the meaning of the Sign/Symbol.²

Level 3: The elementary situation can also be described as follows: A person has a horizon of understanding (representational world) (A) evident in the choice of ideological statements (B) in given contexts (C). In our case, the Person has a conception of the elements in greeting rituals and situations where they are typically used. Implicitly, the context of these elements is culturally conditioned: what counts as belonging to a greeting ritual varies from culture to culture. These differences might be described as different ideological superstructures that set up the framework for developing the cognitive structures in greeting rituals. Within each cultural circle, an intersubjective agreement (understanding) exists about which expressions (ways of understanding sign elements) are presupposed for understanding the signs as a greeting. In our culture, the right rather than the left hand is the one for a greeting. This kind of understanding presupposes an imaginary organisation of the elements or signs to the ideological frames constituting the cultural circle. This organisation can be called a pre-judgment in Gadamer’s sense, as far as it is not the conscious act of an individual but belongs to her way of being.

Figure 1.2 Basic elements of a triadic communicative model.

The crucial elements in this model are the arbitrary connection B–C and the plural of Person in position A. The model illustrates how communication has two significant challenges: (1) the sender and the receiver have different horizons of understanding, (2) the arbitrariness of the Sign/Symbols of the message makes the communicative meaning of the message dependent on the receiver. A consequence of this model is that I can elaborate on the insight: Interpretation is more than the identification of signs. Person(s), Action, and Product (level 1) are all observable, but on level 2, only the Sign/Symbol is observable while Meaning and Expression depend on the Person’s communicative platform. Therefore, the identification of a Sign/Symbol will be part of a social construction of reality that makes communication possible. In my model, identification could be illustrated as a full line between Action and Product, as when you start learning the piano by identifying the connection between the middle c in the music sheet and on the piano. However, the Sign/Symbol interpretation will depend on the receiver’s Horizon of understanding, and then the dotted line between B and C is mandatory. (Asking young piano pupils about the primary identification will unveil a manifold of knowledge acquisitions.) Then we may ask: can there be more than one correct interpretation of a single work of art, or will interpretation always be multiple?³ To answer these questions in music is even more complicated due to the following two reasons. Music has a double ontological status: objective soundness and subjective experience. Music has no objective unity, which makes possible an endless regression in argumentation. A solution is to accept music’s social construction as a point of departure for developing discourses on music. Many existing discourses use a traditional S-M-R communication-model, making the composer the sender and the message owner. Then there will be no room for interpretation; identification will rule the music. However, in music life, the situation is entirely different. Interpretation dominates the musical scene, and I think, therefore, that my model of communication is better suited to use on an analysis of the composer Igor Stravinsky.

1.2 Discourses of a musical work

Stravinsky’s oeuvre encompasses musical and literary works. His utterances take the perspective of composer, performer, or listener, sometimes without a clear identification of his position’s role (communicative mode). Talking about music, this might bring forward self-contradictions and blurriness of his meanings. The double ontological status of a musical work as a physical event (the sounding music) and an impression of a phenomenon have blurred many discourses about the musical work and its essence. Stephen Davies points out that even the most detailed score is (ontologically) “thinner” than any performance of it.⁴ The musician will read the score as a collection of imperative symbols⁵ and thereby add more properties to the music. As a result, the “musical work” becomes a social construct encompassing more properties than those written in the score. The listeners will refer to his/her concept of music when appreciating the musical work, activating a social construction of reality,⁶ relying on their musical knowledge and affinities to combine impressions of the sounding music with its social setting.

Communication is bound up in human activity. The traditional way of thinking about musical communication involves three (human) figures arranged in a sequence from the composer via the performer to the listener. This model has been paradigmatic to nearly all discourses in music history and music theory, often without the benefit of any distinction among the ideas of music that might accompany or even characterise these three figures. Communication as an exchange of ideas has dominated the discourse about the musical experience. However, music’s double ontological status demands that we include essential non-human elements (or objects) in musical life. In classical music, these would be the notation, the sound of a performance, and the discourse about the music. The model, then, will look like this “Figure 1.3”⁷:

Figure 1.3 The communicative chain of a musical work.

Based on this model, I might link Davies’ distinction between thick and thin works to ideas and objects, respectively; transforming an idea to object involves reducing from thick to from thin entity. The composer’s concept of a musical work develops during composing the work, and what ends up in the work’s score is limited by the actual notation practice. (The second part of this book will analyse the development of notation practice in Stravinsky’s scores.) The notated musical work is the thin element and needs to be interpreted—that is, given (musical) meaning through the addition of properties that consequently open up for meanings other than those intended by the composer. The pe...