Sound Pragmatics. An emergentist account of musical meaning

Alessandro Bertinetto

Alessandro Bertinetto

Keywords: philosophy of music, musical meaning, pragmatics, improvisation, emergentism

Abstract

In this paper I counter the formalistic rejection of musical meaning and the consequent dismissal of the analogy between music and language. Although musical formalists may concede that music can express emotions and offer sonic analogues of dynamic relations, they claim that, contrary to a linguistic meaning, which would imply the inter-subjectively sharable reference to contents, purported musical meaning is vague, private, and arbitrary. Hence, they argue, music has no semantics, and, consequently, is not like language.

However, the formalist account of linguistic meaning overlooks the pragmatic view of linguistic meaning. According to such an approach, language is a kind of action and linguistic meaning is determined by the use of language in specific contexts. Drawing on pragmatics, I will suggest that musical meaning is structurally and interestingly analogous to linguistic meaning, understood in such a way. A pragmatic understanding of music as communication, which is also supported by philosophical and empirical research on musical power to embody personal traits, is all what we need for answering positively the question of musical meaning. Musical works and musical performances are, like speech acts, communicational actions that activate and determine the vague and undetermined meaning of music, originated by music power of representing dynamic and emotional relations. Music’s determined meaning is actualized in virtue of its “context of use” (accordingly to the cultural-social conventions of practices), while, conversely, musical actions contribute meaning to its context(s).

Generally speaking, musical meaning emerges through contextual relations and interpretational acts. In this regard, focusing on the reciprocal connection between group improvisation and conversation, I will finally provide an emergentist and non-intentionalist account of the pragmatic generation of musical meaning, which may be heuristically adopted also as paradigm of a conversational view of the interpretation of artworks.

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