There is a peculiar expression we use about music.
We say that a piece of music means a lot to us.
We say that a melody means something.
We say that a song means freedom, means loss, means home, means rebellion.
And sometimes we are quite right.
But there is another kind of musical experience in which the music seems to mean nothing at all.
No object is being represented.
No proposition is being asserted.
No event is being described.
No concept is being named.
And yet the music may be extraordinarily powerful.
It can make us wait.
It can make us move.
It can create tension.
It can release tension.
It can make us remember.
It can transform our mood.
It can make a room fall silent.
It can bring a crowd together.
It can even become one of the most important experiences of our lives.
So we arrive at a strange possibility:
Music can mean nothing and still matter enormously.
Perhaps this is not an exception to our theory of music.
Perhaps it is the phenomenon that makes the theory necessary.
What does "nothing" mean?
We should be careful with the title.
When we say that music "means nothing", we do not mean that it is insignificant.
Quite the opposite.
We mean that it lacks determinate symbolic reference.
A sequence of notes need not stand for an object.
A rhythm need not denote an activity.
A harmonic progression need not name an emotion.
A cadence need not assert that something has ended.
The music can have extraordinarily definite effects without having a determinate semantic content.
This distinction is easy to lose because ordinary language uses meaning very broadly.
When someone says:
"This piece means sadness to me",
they might mean any number of things.
Perhaps it reminds them of a sad event.
Perhaps its cultural associations are mournful.
Perhaps it produces an experience they describe as sadness.
Perhaps they regard it as expressing sadness.
Perhaps it symbolises loss.
These are not equivalent.
The music can matter in all of these ways without necessarily meaning sadness in the way that the word "sadness" means sadness.
Our problem is therefore partly linguistic.
We have allowed significance and meaning to collapse into one another.
Music helps us pull them apart again.
The richness of the meaningless
Imagine listening to an unfamiliar piece of instrumental music.
You know nothing about its composer.
You do not know its title.
You do not know when it was written.
You do not know what cultural tradition it belongs to.
You do not know whether the composer intended it to represent anything.
And yet you can experience it as tense or relaxed, moving or static, urgent or contemplative, playful or severe.
You can anticipate.
You can be surprised.
You can feel the arrival of a cadence.
You can notice a return.
You can hear a pattern being established and then disrupted.
You can experience a sense of completion.
Nothing has had to be named.
The music is not semantically empty.
It is organisationally rich.
That distinction is crucial.
Perhaps we have sometimes called this richness "meaning" because we lacked a sufficiently differentiated vocabulary for talking about significance.
But if so, we have made the concept of meaning do too much work.
Music can be precise without being referential
This is one of the strangest things about instrumental music.
It can be extraordinarily precise.
A composer can control timing, dynamics, rhythm, harmony, articulation, texture and formal structure with remarkable accuracy.
The listener can perceive equally precise relations.
A passage can be exactly too early.
A resolution can arrive exactly when expected.
A silence can be exactly the right length.
A rhythmic displacement can be felt with extraordinary clarity.
And yet we may be unable to say what any of it refers to.
This gives us an important distinction:
Precision does not entail reference.
A musical structure can be determinate without being denotative.
A rhythm can be exact without saying anything.
A melody can be recognisable without standing for anything.
A form can be intelligible without being a proposition.
This is one reason the attempt to translate all musical experience into language is ultimately unsatisfying.
We risk assuming that if something is intelligible, it must be intelligible as a message.
But there are other kinds of intelligibility.
The intelligibility of expectation
Consider a cadence.
We hear a sequence of events.
The sequence establishes expectations.
The next event either confirms, delays or frustrates them.
We do not necessarily interpret the sequence as representing anything.
But we understand what is happening.
We know that something has been prolonged.
We know that something has been resolved.
We know that an arrival has been delayed.
This is a form of intelligibility.
It is temporal rather than propositional.
The music is intelligible because we can participate in its organisation.
We know where we are in relation to what has happened and what might happen next.
This is why a musical surprise can be genuinely surprising even when it conveys no information about the external world.
The surprise occurs within the organisation of the music itself.
The music has created a field of possibilities.
And then it has done something unexpected within that field.
Meaning without a message?
Here we encounter a tempting phrase:
"Music has meaning even when it has no message."
There is something right about this.
But perhaps we can make it sharper.
Music can possess significance without semantic content.
It can matter without representing.
It can be intelligible without denoting.
It can be expressive without asserting.
It can organise experience without describing an object.
This vocabulary allows us to preserve the richness of musical experience without turning every musical effect into a symbolic act.
And it helps explain why the old question, "What does this music mean?", can sometimes feel strangely inappropriate.
The music may not be withholding an answer.
There may simply be no proposition waiting to be discovered.
The temptation to translate
We often respond to instrumental music by reaching for metaphors.
"This sounds like rain."
"This feels like a journey."
"It sounds heroic."
"It expresses longing."
"It is melancholy."
These descriptions can be illuminating.
But they should not be mistaken for translations.
To say that music sounds like a journey does not mean that the music contains the proposition:
A journey is taking place.
The metaphor provides a way of talking about the organisation of our experience.
It may highlight movement, departure, arrival, uncertainty or transformation.
The metaphor is therefore an interpretation of what the music does, not necessarily a decoding of what the music says.
This distinction is important.
Otherwise we may imagine that the music has secretly encoded a verbal message and that our task is to discover it.
Often there is no hidden sentence.
There is only organised experience.
Expression without representation
This brings us to one of the oldest puzzles in the philosophy of music.
How can music express emotion if it does not represent an emotion?
A melody can sound mournful without representing a particular mourning person.
A harmony can sound tense without representing a dangerous situation.
A rhythm can sound joyful without representing a joyful event.
Perhaps the answer is that expression need not be representation.
A musical structure can organise a field of possibilities that resembles, interacts with or induces certain affective dispositions.
The music does not have to stand for sadness in order to participate in an experience of sadness.
This returns us to our distinction between signal and sign.
The music can affect us without telling us something.
It can alter our state without representing the cause of that alteration.
It can matter without meaning.
The body knows before the concept does
This becomes especially clear with rhythm.
A beat can be felt before it is consciously identified.
A groove can make the body move before we formulate a judgement about it.
A sudden change in dynamics can produce bodily alertness before we interpret it.
A prolonged dissonance can create a disposition toward resolution without our saying:
"I am currently experiencing unresolved harmonic tension."
The conceptual description comes afterwards.
This does not mean that musical experience is unconscious or irrational.
It means that conceptual construal is not the only way a system can be organised by difference.
The body can participate directly.
The nervous system can anticipate.
Attention can shift.
Muscles can prepare.
Expectation can build.
None of these processes requires a symbolic proposition.
This is precisely what we should expect if music can operate at the level of value and signalling.
Music as organised affordance
Perhaps we can now formulate the idea more positively.
Music does not merely contain sounds.
It creates affordances for participation.
A beat affords movement.
A phrase affords continuation.
A cadence affords closure.
A pause affords anticipation.
A repeated pattern affords recognition.
A variation affords comparison.
A groove affords synchronisation.
These are not meanings in the narrow semiotic sense.
They are possibilities opened and constrained by organisation.
And because musical organisation unfolds in time, these affordances are continually changing.
The music creates a moving field of possibilities.
The listener participates in that field.
The performer participates in it.
The ensemble participates in it.
The music matters because it changes what can happen next.
This is why "absolute music" is philosophically interesting
The nineteenth-century idea of "absolute music" can seem like a historical doctrine about musical autonomy.
But the phenomenon itself raises a deeper question.
What would it mean for music to be valuable without external reference?
If instrumental music does not tell a story, represent an object or express a determinate concept, why can it still be so compelling?
The answer suggested by our investigation is that the music does not become empty when reference disappears.
It becomes possible to experience its organisation as organisation.
We can attend to relations among sounds.
We can attend to expectation.
We can attend to transformation.
We can attend to the interaction between constraint and possibility.
The music does not need to be about something else.
Its significance can arise from what happens within the relational field it creates.
This may be what musical autonomy really reveals.
Not that music exists outside social life.
Not that music is meaningless.
But that significance does not require external reference.
The significance of form
This also gives us a new way to understand musical form.
Form is sometimes treated as something purely abstract.
But form matters because organisms can participate in organised differences.
A repetition matters because something has happened before.
A variation matters because it differs from that repetition.
A return matters because something expected has reappeared.
A development matters because a possibility has been transformed.
A climax matters because previous events have made it consequential.
The form is therefore not merely a diagram.
It is a history of changing possibilities.
And because listeners participate in that history, form can become significant.
The music can matter through its own organisation.
It does not need to borrow meaning from an external object.
The social dimension remains
Even here, we should resist making music purely individual.
The experience of "meaningless" music is not necessarily private.
A concert audience can become silent together.
A group can laugh at the same musical surprise.
An ensemble can feel the same rhythmic shift.
Listeners can share expectations.
Musicians can negotiate timing.
The significance of the music remains social even when its symbolic reference is absent.
This is important.
If we say that music is not necessarily a semiotic system, we are not saying that it is merely subjective.
Its organisation can be socially shared.
People can learn how to hear a cadence.
They can learn how to participate in a genre.
They can learn what kinds of deviations are surprising.
They can acquire culturally specific musical expectations.
There can therefore be shared significance without shared symbolic reference.
This is one of the most interesting possibilities opened by our distinction.
Culture without semantics?
This may initially sound paradoxical.
How can there be a cultural practice without meaning?
But culture contains many layers.
A community can share ways of moving, dressing, eating, greeting, dancing, building and making things.
Not every aspect of these practices needs to function as a symbolic system in order to be culturally organised.
Music can therefore be culturally transmitted, socially regulated and historically transformed while remaining partly outside the domain of symbolic meaning.
This helps explain why musical traditions can be remarkably stable without having anything like the semantic precision of language.
People learn how to perform.
They learn how to listen.
They learn what counts as appropriate.
They learn what to expect.
They learn how to participate.
Much of this is practical and relational rather than propositional.
But isn't this still meaning?
Someone may now object:
"All right. But if listeners understand the structure, experience tension and release, recognise style and anticipate what comes next, isn't that still meaning?"
The answer depends upon what we mean by meaning.
If meaning simply means "anything psychologically significant", then almost everything meaningful in our present discussion becomes meaning, and the distinction disappears.
But that is precisely what we are trying to avoid.
We need a narrower concept.
Meaning, in the semiotic sense, involves the organisation of symbolic distinctions through which something can be construed.
Significance is broader.
Something can be significant because it matters to an organism, because it coordinates a social relation, because it evokes memory, because it affords an action, because it creates an expectation, or because it participates in a symbolic system.
Only the last is meaning in the strict sense we are using here.
This is not an arbitrary terminological decision.
It allows us to distinguish different kinds of organisation that have different histories and different explanatory requirements.
The great temptation
There is a powerful temptation to say that music must have a hidden meaning because it has such powerful effects.
But that reverses the logic.
We do not need to explain why music affects us by assuming that it contains a message.
We can begin with the fact that organisms are sensitive to organised differences.
We can then explain how musical structures exploit those sensitivities.
Social coordination adds another layer.
Cultural convention adds another.
Symbolic meaning adds another.
The power of music need not therefore be evidence of hidden semantics.
It may instead be evidence of something more fundamental:
organised systems are sensitive to organised differences.
Music is perhaps one of the most elaborate human explorations of this fact.
When music becomes personal
There is another reason music can matter without meaning.
A piece can become part of someone's life.
It accompanies an experience.
It becomes associated with a person, a place or a period.
It can acquire a unique significance that no one else shares.
The music may now "mean the world" to that person.
But again, this does not necessarily mean that the music has acquired a determinate symbolic meaning.
It may have acquired a history of value.
The sound has become connected to a network of experiences.
Its significance is relational and autobiographical.
This is one reason two people can hear exactly the same piece and experience radically different things without either misunderstanding it.
The symbolic content may be identical — or nonexistent.
The histories of value are not.
Nothing and everything
We can now understand the title of this essay.
Music can mean nothing in the narrow sense that it may contain no determinate symbolic message.
And it can mean everything in the ordinary sense that it can matter enormously.
It can be physically precise.
Biologically consequential.
Socially coordinating.
Emotionally powerful.
Aesthetically compelling.
Personally significant.
Culturally resonant.
And none of these properties requires that the music denote an object or proposition.
This is not a failure of meaning.
It is a reminder that meaning is not the only form of significance.
Why this matters beyond music
The distinction has implications beyond our immediate subject.
If we assume that meaning is the foundation of all significance, we will tend to look for symbolic explanations wherever something matters.
But biology suggests otherwise.
Social coordination suggests otherwise.
Music makes the point especially vivid.
There are worlds of organised value before there are worlds of symbolic meaning.
And once we see this, the emergence of language and culture looks rather different.
Meaning becomes something that develops within an already meaningful — in the broader sense — world.
The semiotic does not create significance from nothing.
It gives significance a new mode of organisation.
It allows differences that matter to become differences that can be construed.
Music therefore gives us a glimpse of what the world might be like before the sign.
Not an empty world.
Not a world without significance.
A world already full of organised differences, values, responses, relations and possibilities.
The music that means nothing
Perhaps this is why some of the most powerful music is so resistant to paraphrase.
We can describe its structure.
We can describe its effects.
We can describe our responses.
We can place it within a history.
We can say what it reminds us of.
We can explain its cultural associations.
But eventually there may be nothing left to translate.
Not because the music is obscure.
Because there is no proposition hidden inside it.
The music does not fail to say what we think it says.
It may simply not be saying.
It is doing.
It is organising.
It is relating.
It is creating possibilities.
It is making a temporal world in which we participate.
And perhaps that is enough.
Indeed, perhaps it is something more than enough.
Perhaps it is one of the most important things music teaches us:
A world does not have to speak in order to matter.
The river matters before we name it.
The rhythm matters before we interpret it.
The gesture matters before we symbolise it.
The sound matters before it becomes a sign.
Meaning is extraordinary.
But it is not the beginning of significance.
It is one of its later possibilities.
And this leaves us exactly where we need to be for the final essay.
We have seen how meaning can emerge from a world already capable of mattering.
We have seen that music can remain extraordinarily significant without becoming symbolic.
Now we can finally ask the question we postponed:
What happens when meaning really does arrive?
Does it simply add another layer?
Does it transform the music?
Does it change what we hear?
Does it change what the music can do?
Or, more radically:
Does meaning change the kind of thing music is?
That is the question with which we shall finish.
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