Eero Tarasti - The Emancipation of The Sign On The Corporeal and Gestural Meanings in Music PDF
Eero Tarasti - The Emancipation of The Sign On The Corporeal and Gestural Meanings in Music PDF
Eero Tarasti - The Emancipation of The Sign On The Corporeal and Gestural Meanings in Music PDF
Anglo-American musicology is at the moment quite obviously embracing a semiotic approach. The fact that so many scholars are now writing about the Otherness in music, differences and how they emerge, and
the construction of social reality, as well as about the implicit meanings
hidden in musical institutions, about body as a social and ideological
product, gendering etc. is, after all, a consequence not only of the assumption of post-structuralist, sociologist, post-modern and feminist premises but of one aspect without which none of these approaches would
have been possible. This phenomenon could be termed the emancipation
of the sign.
What is involved here is that scholars have recognised that music always has a content, and that this content has a conventional, arbitrary
relationship to its signifier, the aural physical embodiment of the musical
sign. Since this relationship is arbitrary, one might exclaim: Let us find
other kinds of agreement! Un nouveau contrat smio-social in the manner of
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Let us no longer accept conventional traditions.
For surely we want to make a new start which is no longer ideological,
essentialist, racist or secretly nationalistic. In other words, a new beginning which is inherently neither consciously nor unconsciously making
differences and evaluations. As extreme examples we may consider certain feminist analyses like Susan McClarys famous image of Beethoven as
a rapist in the Ninth Symphony finales recapitulation. In such analyses,
the cards of the musicological play have been dealt again, as it were, and
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(La vie sexuelle) est ce qui fait quun homme a une histoire. Si lhistoire sexuelle
dun homme donne la clef de sa vie, cest parce que dans la sexualit lhomme
projette sa manire dtre au regard du monde, cest--dire lgard du temps et
lgard des autres hommes. Il y a des symptomes sexuels lorigine de toutes
les nvroses, mais ces symptomes, si on les lit bien, symbolisent toute une attitude, soit par exemple une attitude de conqute, soit une attitude de fuite... et la
question nest pas tant de savoir si la vie humaine repose ou non sur la sexualit
que de savoir ce quon entend par sexualit... Quand on gnralise la notion de
sexualit et quon fait delle une manire dtre au monde physique et interhumain, veut-on dire quen dernire analyse toute existence a une signification
sexuelle ou bien que toute existence a une signification existentielle? Dans la
premire hypothse lexistence serait une abstraction, un autre nom pour designer la vie sexuelle... mais comme la vie sexuelle ne peut plus tre circonscrite,
comme elle nest plus une fonction separe et dfinissable par la causalit propre dun appareil organique, il ny a plus aucun sens dire que toute lexistence
se comprend par la vie sexuelle, ou plutt, cette proposition devient une tautologie. Faut-il donc dire, inversment, que le phnomne sexuel nest quune
expression de notre manire gnrale de projeter notre milieu? (p. 185).
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sounds and other signs. He even deals in passing with Mussorgsky, referring to the composers Nibelungen in the form of Goldenberg and
Schmuyle in Pictures at an Exhibition. Then what is involved are sonic
signs (p. 144) or speech patterns (p. 146). In Parsifal, though, the olfactory signs play a significant role evoking compulsion, entrapment and
sexual urgency (p. 229). In Weiners reasoning the German body does not
appear as iconico-indexical signs as such but as pure metaphor. Moreover
he notices how the foot has an iconic function in Wagners works for
the stage (p. 264). But when he seeks the signifieds of these signs he can
find only one: anti-Semitism. So all the negative and dysphoric types on
stage come to represent Wagners hatred for the Jews and concretize his
racism.
The author claims that these signs were apparent, although implicit, for
the entire nineteenth century audience. Only we, at the end of the twentieth century, have lost our ability to decode these signs, since we are
blinded by the musical genius of Wagner. However one has to put the
question: If Wagners intentions in all his major operas where to pursue
racist and anti-Semitic distinctions and differences, why did he not express them overtly just in his operas but was satisfied to convey this aspect of his vision only through pamphlets? Why these immanent but according to Weiner so vital significations had to remain immanent, concealed? Would he not have exposed his ideology even more efficiently
using artistic signs, a theatre man as he was from head to toe?
Therefore Weiners analysis and interpretation serve, to me, as an illustration of the way in which, with semiotics, one can prove almost anything, if the scholar so desires, in the absence of any reason not to do so.
But what could such reasons be in the present world, dominated by the
desire to be impressive on conference stages, publishers flyers, and so
on?
In any case, if we now return to the gendering problem, which ultimately means, as Ruth Solie shows in her preface to the anthology Difference in Musicology, to create differences, then we could truly think there
are corporeal messages in music itself, messages which could be studied
and further analyzed. Weiners theses are based on the idea that the bodies Wagner created on stage represented, to his contemporaries, an immediate ideological reality which brought these bodies to life. Then one can
only ask, how do they spring to life in our time? They are still fascinating
characters. Are all the admirers of Wagners operas then implicit
anti-Semites among whom Lvi-Strauss included those who considered
Wagner a god in mythology.
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This opening seems so innocently positive in its clear form, that one
only later notices that this sign, felt as a real First in the Peircean sense,
has one pre-sign at least, in the French music history: It is namely the
same as the motif of the Chorale in Csar Francks Prlude, Chorale et
Fugue. But even this pre-sign has its own still earlier pre-sign, such as Wagners bell motif from the Grail scene in Parsifal. Here, that which at the
outset seemed to be a purely masculine, naively corporeal vital sign of a
musical body seems to be a parody of a much more profound, inner, psychologically complex Choral-motif. So there was an Otherness looming
behind this seemingly purely corporeal gesture. However, even this sign
brings us in this reversed direction to another sphere of Otherness, from
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the Gallic spirit to the Germanic one, namely with the evocation of Parsifal.
Yet, the process also goes on in other directions. Later this main motif is not only formally repeated in the recapitulation but it is reintroduced
quite at the end of the piece, when Chausson plays with the cyclical form.
First he seems to let the main theme for them first movement return, via
its fragments in a long development. Then as a surprise in the psychological and tensional climax of the whole piece which I have called, in terms
borrowed from the French existentialist philosopher Jean Wahl, a
trans-descendence and trans-ascendence, it gives place to the main theme
of the second movement. But this theme of redemption, as if the
Proustian lost Fatherland were now rediscovered, does not remain the
last word. The bold gesture of the beginning also recurs but is now united
in a stretto in the bass with the cantabile theme in an overwhelming reconciliation and closure of all previous gestures in this piece. From here
on the conversation can continue no longer. The music has stopped time.
What has been Other has become the Same.
In fact this narrative technique is rather far removed from the German type of thematic construction which produces the Greatness in
the music. Chausson very frequently lets the flow of gestures be stopped
in the timeless feeling of verweile doch Du bist so schn series of dominant-seventh and ninth chords which do not serve any structural tension
but which foreground the colour. This is what we easily consider to be
something very French.
However, the aim of my analysis, which I currently preparing, is to
represent a kind of semiotics without semiotics as an answer to the
question of what can remain of semiotics when all previously-articulated
semiotic theories have been forgotten. Elsewhere, I have classified all the
musical semiotic theories in the epistemic sense into two groups, the
first of which starts with rules and grammars belonging to all music, emphasizing musics surface, which supposes that before the rules set by a
theoretician there is just nothing and consequently when the rules stop
their functioning there remains nothing. This type of semiotics, as a
philosophical style rather than a systematic classification, I would call as
classical semiotics. Here I am inspired by Taruskins wonderful distinction, itself conceived after Boris de Schloezer (a music scholar Greimas
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1. Here I cite Taruskin; these dichotomies seem to fit amazingly even in the area of science, and I
feel that my own theory of existential semiotics, of which I consider all my present fragments
and essays to be parts, could mutatis mutandis be defined in quite similar themes. So: The other
main idea...consists in the radical dichotomization of beauty on the one hand, and a whole discourse
of profundity/strength, loftiness/seriousness/power in a word greatness, on the other. The
distinction was perceived, at the time, in national terms, and so we had best translate our operative
term into German: das Erhaben...
These transgressions arose out of a stubborn adherence from the German national perspective
an outmoded and treasonable adherence to the ideology of the Enlightenment which is to say the
ideology of Zivilisation, which is really to say the ideology of the hated French... (p. 261) As the
discourse of romanticism achieved its maximized expression in what we now look back on as the
modernist period, the dichotomies we have so far encountered, all of them variations on the same
theme, took on an even more radical aspect. What had formerly been expressible as a cleavage
between national schools or between the cultivation of the beautiful and the cultivation of the
sublime, or between the aesthetic of enjoyment and that of contemplation, or between the aesthetic
of pleasure and that of disinterestedness, or between the discourse of enlightenment and that of
transcendence, or of utility vs autonomy, or of convention vs originality, social accommodation vs
social alienation, opera vs symphony, motley vs wholeness, melody vs motive all this eventually
came down to a gross discrimination between the serious and the popular, or even more grossly and
peremptorily, into that between art and entertainment (Taruskin, p. 265).
This also concerns semiotic theories, which in the twentieth century, have inherited much from
the classicist/romantic dichotomy semiotics of the nineteenth century, a dichotomy which,
particularly towards the end of our century, has become trivialized, rendered banal, and mediatized
into such forms of semiotics as are only a kind of postmodern entertainment. Also the romantic
tradition has had its moment of decline in semiotics, leading to the exaggeratedly introverted,
solipsist approaches dangerously detached from the social context and ethical values in the basis of
this approach. However, what is essential is that we be able follow the romantic line from Hegel
via Kierkegaard to Peirce who kindly said of Hegel that there is music in his philosophy (see Max
Fisch) and even to Soloviev, Bakhtin, Lotman, Lvi-Strauss and Greimas. But there is also the
classicist line which follows instead the logical empiricism of Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy.
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