genres, Todorov argues that discourses are made up not of sentences but of utterances. That is, they are constituted not of abstract rules or patterns but of the concrete deployment of such abstractions in real social contexts. Sentences are transformed into utterances by being articulated among themselves in a given sociocultural context. For music, this implies that any formal or syntactical patterns an analyst may recognize must be interpreted as abstractions from utterances or speech acts that can only be said to have meaning in particular, socially grounded ways.
Genres, according to Todorov, arise from metadiscursive discourse. The discussion in chapter 1 of the competing definitions and understandings of heavy metal promoted by fans, business interests, critics, and others was meant to demonstrate precisely this point. It is from the discourse about discourses that concepts of genre are formed, transformed, and defended. Genres then come to function as horizons of expectation for readers (or listeners) and as models of composition for authors (or musicians). Most important, Todorov argues that genres exist because societies collectively choose and codify the acts that correspond most closely to their ideologies. A society’s discourses depend upon its linguistic (or musical) raw materials and upon its historically circumscribed ideologies. Discourses are formed, maintained, and transformed through dialogue; speakers learn from and respond to others, and the meanings of their utterances are never permanently fixed, cannot be found in a dictionary. Thus, the details of a genre and its very presence or absence among various social groups can reveal much about the constitutive features of a society.
Like genres and discourses, musical meanings are contingent but never arbitrary. There is never any essential correspondence between particular musical signs or processes and specific social meanings, yet such signs and processes would never circulate if they did not produce such meanings. Musical meanings are always grounded socially and historically, and they operate on an ideological field of conflicting interests, institutions, and memories. If this makes them extremely difficult to analyze, it does so by forcing analysis to confront the complexity and antagonism of culture. This is a poststructural view of music in that it sees all signification as provisional, and it seeks for no essential truths inherent in structures, regarding all meanings as produced through the interaction of texts and readers. It goes further in suggesting that subjectivity is constituted not only through language, as Lacan and others have argued, but through musical discourses as well. Musical details and structures are intelligible only as traces, provocations, and enactments of power relationships. They articulate meanings in their dialogue with other discourses past and present and in their engagement with the hopes, fears, values, and memories of social groups and individuals. Musical analysis is itself the representation of one discourse in terms of another, the point being to illuminate the social contexts in which both circulate.
Many critics and historians of rock music have been dismissive of any sort of musical analysis. Peter Wicke, for example, claims: “Rock songs are not art songs, whose hidden meaning should be sought in their form and structure.”10 Wicke is right to be dubious of the sort of reductive musicological analysis that simply abstracts and labels technical features, but he is wrong to assume that the specific details of rock music are insignificant. He accepts uncritically a highly problematic dichotomy when he argues, “Rock is not received through the critical apparatus of contemplation, of consideration by visual and aural means; its reception is an active process, connected in a practical way with everyday life.”11 To argue that critical scrutiny of the details of rock music is inappropriate because people don’t hear that way is like arguing that we can’t analyze the syntax of language because people don’t know that they’re using gerunds and participles. But more important, reception of all music is “connected in a practical way with everyday life,” however hard some people may work to hide the social meanings of their music. The danger of musical analysis is always that social meanings and power struggles become the forest that is lost for the trees of notes and chords. The necessity of musical analysis is that those notes and chords represent the differences that make some songs seem highly meaningful and powerful and others boring, inept, or irrelevant.12
The split between academic contemplation and popular understanding is not a function of repertoires but rather of interpretive ideologies. As recent musicological colonizations of jazz and even rock have shown, any cultural text can be made over into a monument of neutralized order. But too many analysts of popular music are unaware of the extent to which this process has already remade what is now “classical” music. They assume that traditional musicological methods are simply appropriate for the traditional musicological repertoire and that popular musics do not warrant such analysis. Yet much recent work in musicology has been directed toward undoing the formalist depoliticization of classical music. The problem is not with musical analysis per se but with the implicit or explicit ideological context within which such analysis is conducted. Rock songs, like all discourse, do have meanings that can be discovered through analysis of their form and structure, but such analysis is useful only if it is grounded culturally and historically and if it acknowledges its interests forthrightly.
This is where I differ from most semioticians of music. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, for example, might agree with much of what I have asserted thus far, but there are two important divergences.13 First, his concern is primarily metadiscursive; he seems more interested in debating definitions and concepts than in analyzing actual music and musical activities. Second, while Nattiez recognizes the conventional basis of semiological meanings, he seems to want to retain some sort of absolute notion of truth, against which interpretations can be measured. That is, he stops short of recognizing the conventional basis of semiology itself; he is unwilling to acknowledge the ultimate grounding of analytical credibility in nothing more absolute or less complex than social contestation, institutional prestige, and power. But there can be no meaningful semiology apart from ethnographic inquiry, historical analysis, and argumentation about culture. There is no way to decide what something means without making a political statement. Underpinning all semiotic analysis is, recognized or not, a set of assumptions about cultural practice, for ultimately music doesn’t have meanings; people do. There is no essential, foundational way to ground musical meaning beyond the flux of social existence. Ultimately, musical analysis can be considered credible only if it helps explain the significance of musical activities in particular social contexts.
Some semioticians and philosophers of language, such as David Lidov and Mark Johnson, have worked to ground discursive meanings somatically, in terms of (socially constructed) bodily gestures, tensions, and postures.14 In The Body in the Mind, philosopher Mark Johnson argues that meanings of all sorts, even the ones that seem most abstract and mental, are grounded in bodily experience. While Johnson’s own analyses of artworks are rather simplistic, his epistemological challenge to the Western mind/body split is important. Human experiences of meaningfulness, Johnson argues, are grounded at the level of prelinguistic structures which organize our experience and comprehension, which he calls “image schemata.” These schemata are not concepts; they are patterns of activity, fundamental mechanisms of meaning production that inform the more abstract operations of language and conceptual thinking. Johnson argues that metaphor links these bodily image schemata to language. Metaphor, in this view, occupies a central place in the production of human meaning. It is not merely a kind of poetic expression or a literary figure of speech; rather, metaphor is a crucial process for generating meaning, whereby we come to understand one area of experience in terms of another.15 It is by means of metaphor that image-schematic structures are extended, transformed, and elaborated into domains of meaning that may seem less directly tied to the body, including language, abstract reasoning, and, I would argue, music.
Attempts to explain “music as metaphor” have appeared with some regularity, but metaphorical interpretations appear to many scholars to be arbitrary: the images you describe in response to a piece of music may be wholly unlike those I would use, and a positivistic orientation would then declare meaning, in this sense, subjective and out of bounds. In rebuttal to what he calls the Objectivist rejection of metaphor, Johnson stresses that meanings at the level of image schemata and metaphor are grounded in physical and social
