We have taken a somewhat unusual route to this point.
We began with a simple question:
Why does music matter?
The question led us away from meaning rather than toward it.
We found value before symbolism.
We found signalling before signs.
We found coordination between organisms.
We found rhythm as a way of organising bodies together in time.
We found the ensemble as a social system.
And then we discovered that music can enter the semiotic world.
It can acquire conventions.
It can become associated with identities, places, rituals and histories.
It can become a sign.
But then we had to make an important correction.
Music can do all this without needing to mean anything in the symbolic sense.
It can remain rich in significance while lacking determinate semantic content.
So now, finally, we can ask the question we postponed:
What happens when meaning arrives?
The answer, I think, is both less and more dramatic than we might expect.
Meaning does not transform music into something else.
But it does change the world in which the music operates.
And, once that happens, the music can begin to do something that neither sound nor social coordination could do alone.
It can participate in a culture's construal of reality.
Meaning arrives late
The first point is perhaps the most important.
Meaning is not where music begins.
By the time a sound becomes meaningful, a great deal has already happened.
There is physical organisation.
There is biological responsiveness.
There is value.
There may be signalling.
There may be reciprocal coordination.
There may be social practice.
There may be rhythmic organisation.
There may be cultural convention.
Only then does symbolic meaning necessarily enter.
This matters because it reverses a familiar picture.
We often imagine communication as beginning with a message and ending with a response:
meaning → expression → interpretation → action
But our investigation suggests another possible genealogy:
difference → value → response → coordination → social pattern → convention → meaning
Meaning is not the foundation.
It is an achievement.
And music provides an unusually clear demonstration of how such an achievement can occur.
The musical sign
Once a musical pattern becomes conventionalised, it can begin to function as a sign.
But what exactly does that mean?
Suppose a particular musical figure repeatedly accompanies the appearance of a character in a film.
At first, the audience simply hears the figure.
Then they hear it again.
And again.
Eventually, the figure becomes associated with the character.
After sufficient repetition, the figure can appear before the character does.
The audience recognises what is coming.
The musical pattern now participates in a symbolic relation.
It can function as a sign of the character.
But notice what has happened.
The music has not stopped being music.
Its rhythm, harmony, timbre, dynamics and temporal organisation remain.
The semiotic relation has been added to an already organised phenomenon.
This is why it may be better to say that music can be semiotically recruited rather than that music simply is a semiotic system.
Meaning changes what we hear
Yet the addition is not superficial.
Once we know what the musical figure signifies, we hear it differently.
Before the association is established, the figure may be merely an interesting musical gesture.
Afterward, its appearance can produce recognition.
It can create anticipation.
It can evoke the absent character.
It can create irony if the character does not appear.
It can produce suspense if the audience recognises the sign before the characters do.
The symbolic relation therefore feeds back into the musical experience.
This is a crucial point.
Meaning does not merely sit alongside the music.
It can alter the affordances of the music.
The same sound can now do something that it could not do before the convention existed.
It can refer.
And reference changes the possibilities of participation.
The sign creates a new kind of anticipation
Before meaning arrives, musical anticipation can be temporal.
We hear a phrase and expect its continuation.
We hear a cadence and anticipate resolution.
We hear a rhythmic pattern and expect the next beat.
Once meaning enters, another kind of anticipation becomes possible.
We hear a musical figure and anticipate a person, event, place or idea.
The music can now point beyond itself.
This is a profound new capability.
The musical pattern no longer merely organises what happens within the musical event.
It can organise expectations about what happens elsewhere.
That is what symbolic reference makes possible.
The sign creates a bridge between one domain of experience and another.
From presence to absence
This may be the deepest transformation.
A purely musical signal can coordinate what is present.
A symbolic sign can evoke what is absent.
A melody can indicate that a character is approaching even when the character is not visible.
A song can stand for a nation even when the nation is not physically present.
A musical motif can recall a past event.
A ceremonial melody can invoke a tradition extending across generations.
A song can make an absent person feel present.
This is one of the extraordinary powers of semiosis.
It liberates social coordination from immediate presence.
Once a sound becomes a sign, it can participate in relations across time and space.
The absent can become socially operative.
The past can become present.
The imagined can become actionable.
Music acquires a new temporal and cultural reach.
The anthem again
We can now return to the anthem, but with a sharper understanding.
Before it becomes an anthem, the melody is music.
It has rhythm.
It has form.
It can coordinate singers.
It can evoke emotion.
It can create a collective experience.
Once a community establishes it as a national anthem, however, something new happens.
The melody becomes linked to an abstraction:
the nation.
A nation is not physically present in the sound.
Nor can it be reduced to the people standing in the room.
The anthem can nevertheless make the nation symbolically present.
This is precisely what a sign can do.
It can allow something distributed, abstract or absent to participate in immediate experience.
The people sing the melody.
The melody evokes the nation.
The nation becomes present as a cultural construal.
The semiotic system has transformed what the musical event can accomplish.
But the symbol depends upon the music
There is an important asymmetry here.
The anthem's symbolic power depends partly upon the fact that it remains musically effective.
Imagine an anthem that was impossible to sing together.
Its symbolic function would be severely compromised.
Imagine one with no memorable rhythm, no recognisable structure and no capacity to coordinate collective performance.
It could still be declared an anthem institutionally.
But its ability to function socially would be diminished.
The symbol therefore remains dependent upon the social and musical systems that sustain it.
This is a useful corrective to purely semiotic accounts.
A sign does not float free of the material and social processes through which it is realised.
Meaning requires a world in which signs can be enacted, perceived, remembered and reproduced.
The semiotic system depends upon its realisations.
And music can be one of those realisations.
Meaning as a new affordance
This suggests a useful way of describing what meaning adds.
Meaning creates a new kind of affordance.
A non-semantic musical pattern can afford movement, attention, anticipation and coordination.
A meaningful musical pattern can additionally afford construal.
It can invite us to construe something as something.
A melody can be heard as belonging to a tradition.
A rhythm can be heard as marking an identity.
A musical gesture can be heard as referring to a character.
A song can be heard as an expression of political allegiance.
A musical style can be heard as invoking a social world.
The sound has entered a new relational space.
It can now participate in symbolic distinctions.
The music becomes culturally thick
This is why culturally familiar music can feel much "thicker" than unfamiliar music.
A listener hearing an unfamiliar piece may encounter primarily its musical organisation.
A culturally knowledgeable listener may hear much more.
They may hear a genre.
A historical period.
A social identity.
A political position.
An ironic quotation.
A musical reference.
A parody.
A memory.
A convention.
A rebellion against a convention.
None of these properties need be acoustically encoded in a simple sense.
They arise from the history of the sound's participation in a cultural system.
The culturally competent listener therefore hears several layers simultaneously.
The music has become semiotically thick.
But the thickness does not erase the underlying musical organisation.
It accumulates upon it.
Quotation
Musical quotation is particularly revealing.
A composer can introduce a recognisable melody into a new work.
The quoted melody carries its history with it.
The listener recognises it.
That recognition can produce humour, nostalgia, irony, criticism or homage.
The quotation therefore does something that an unfamiliar melody could not do.
It activates a cultural memory.
The original melody becomes a sign within the new context.
But the new work can also transform that sign.
The quotation can be slowed.
Distorted.
Fragmented.
Reharmonised.
Placed in an unexpected context.
Meaning therefore becomes dynamic.
The sign enters into new relations.
Its previous significance becomes part of the new musical organisation.
This is a particularly vivid example of how semiotic and musical systems can become recursively coupled.
Irony
Irony makes the point even more clearly.
Suppose a musical passage conventionally associated with triumph is placed beneath an image of disaster.
The musical material has not changed.
Its symbolic associations have not necessarily changed either.
But the relation between the sign and its context has changed.
The result can be ironic.
The music now means something different because the surrounding semiotic environment has changed.
This tells us something important:
Meaning does not reside entirely in the sign.
It arises from relations among signs, contexts, participants and systems of expectation.
Music becomes meaningful not because a melody contains a meaning like an object contains a substance, but because the melody participates in a larger semiotic ecology.
This is very close to the broader SFL insight that meaning is not a property of isolated forms.
It is realised in systems of choice and relation.
The listener changes too
When meaning arrives, it is not only the music that changes.
The listener changes.
A listener who has learned a musical convention can hear distinctions that an unfamiliar listener cannot.
A particular cadence may become culturally charged.
A particular rhythm may evoke an identity.
A quotation may become immediately recognisable.
A musical cliché may become comic precisely because it is recognisable as a cliché.
The semiotic system therefore expands the listener's repertoire of possible construals.
Cultural learning changes perception.
This is one of the most important consequences of treating meaning as systemic.
Meaning is not simply added to experience.
It changes what differences become available to the participant.
From mattering to meaning
We can now revisit our central distinction.
Something matters when it has value within a system.
Something means when it participates in a symbolic system through which it can be construed.
The two are not opposites.
Meaning is a special way of mattering.
A sign matters because of what it means.
But its meaning does not exhaust all the ways in which it matters.
This is why a meaningful song can still move us musically.
Its symbolic content is one layer of its significance.
Its rhythm is another.
Its history is another.
Its social function is another.
Its personal associations are another.
Meaning has entered.
But meaning has not conquered.
The danger of semantic reduction
There is therefore a danger at the end of our investigation.
Having spent several essays insisting that music does not need meaning, we might now swing to the opposite conclusion and say that once meaning appears, it explains everything.
It does not.
A national anthem is not merely a proposition about national identity.
A protest song is not merely a political argument with a melody attached.
A hymn is not merely theology set to music.
A love song is not merely a collection of statements about affection.
The musical organisation remains causally and experientially important.
Indeed, the symbolic meaning may derive some of its power precisely from the musical means through which it is realised.
The relationship works in both directions.
Music helps realise meaning.
Meaning reorganises the experience of music.
Neither side is reducible to the other.
The semiotic system needs a body
This returns us to one of the broader lessons of our series.
Semiotic systems do not float above physical and biological reality.
Language requires bodies.
Signs require perception.
Communication requires organisms.
Culture requires social organisation.
Meaning is realised in material events.
This is why Halliday's distinction between levels of organisation remains useful.
We need not collapse the levels in order to connect them.
The physical sound is not the social relation.
The social relation is not the semiotic meaning.
The semiotic meaning is not the sound.
But they can form a hierarchy of realisation.
Each level depends upon the lower levels without being reducible to them.
Music sits in a particularly interesting position within this architecture.
Its primary organisation can be understood socially rather than semiotically.
Yet it can become a powerful realiser of semiotic distinctions.
It can carry meaning without being reducible to meaning.
Music and language
This may finally allow us to say something more precise about the relationship between music and language.
Music is not simply a language with a different vocabulary.
Language is fundamentally organised as a semiotic resource.
Music can be used semiotically, but its primary organisation need not be symbolic.
Language makes distinctions available for construal.
Music makes relations available for participation.
Language can tell us that something is the case.
Music can make us inhabit a temporal organisation.
Language can refer.
Music can also acquire reference.
Language can describe.
Music can also evoke, associate and symbolically invoke.
The overlap is real.
But the difference remains.
And perhaps the difference is precisely what makes their combination so powerful.
When music and language meet
Consider a song.
Here we have two semiotic and social histories entering into relation.
Words bring symbolic meaning.
Music brings its own organisation of rhythm, melody, harmony, timbre and form.
The result is not simply language plus accompaniment.
The music can alter how the words are experienced.
A line can become ironic because of the harmony beneath it.
A repeated phrase can acquire force because of rhythm.
A word can become emotionally salient because of melodic emphasis.
The music can make a semantic distinction feel urgent, intimate, absurd or transcendent.
Conversely, the words can alter how we hear the music.
A melody that previously seemed serene can become disturbing when paired with violent imagery.
A beautiful harmony can become bitter when placed beneath a cruel text.
The two systems become coupled.
Meaning and mattering interact.
The song as a meeting place
Perhaps the song is therefore one of the most interesting objects in human culture.
It brings together:
- physical sound,
- biological responsiveness,
- social coordination,
- musical organisation,
- symbolic meaning,
- memory,
- identity,
- history.
It is not reducible to any one of these.
A song can be danced to.
Sung together.
Remembered.
Quoted.
Parodied.
Used in ritual.
Used politically.
Used privately.
Analysed semantically.
Experienced bodily.
And still, after all this, remain music.
The song demonstrates what happens when different systems become deeply coupled without becoming identical.
Meaning changes the evolution of music
Once musical forms can carry meaning, cultural evolution acquires new possibilities.
Composers can deliberately invoke conventions.
Musicians can play against expectations.
Genres can differentiate themselves.
Traditions can be contested.
New identities can emerge.
Old symbols can be reappropriated.
Music can become a site of cultural struggle.
A musical innovation is no longer merely an innovation in sound.
It can become an innovation in meaning.
And this is where music becomes particularly interesting from the perspective of conceptual evolution.
A new musical form can create a new way of organising experience.
A new association can create a new cultural distinction.
A new convention can alter what later generations hear.
The evolution of music is therefore not simply the evolution of sound.
It can become the evolution of the space of possible construals.
Meaning does not merely decorate reality
This point extends beyond music.
A semiotic system changes what a community can distinguish, remember, communicate and imagine.
Once a distinction has a stable sign, it can travel.
It can be taught.
It can be compared.
It can be criticised.
It can be combined with other distinctions.
It can enter arguments.
It can become an object of reflection.
This is why meaning is such a powerful evolutionary achievement.
The sign makes something available to collective cognition in a new way.
Music can participate in this process when it becomes symbolically organised.
But the underlying social and biological capacities remain.
Meaning adds a new dimension to an already organised world.
The final inversion
We can now invert the question with which we began.
At first we asked:
Why does music matter?
We assumed, perhaps without noticing, that the answer would have something to do with what music means.
We now know that the causal order can be very different.
Music matters because it can organise living systems.
It can alter bodily states.
It can coordinate organisms.
It can create shared temporal structures.
It can stabilise social relations.
It can generate expectation and participation.
It can acquire cultural associations.
And then, under particular historical conditions, it can become meaningful.
Meaning is not what makes music significant.
Meaning is what allows some of that significance to become symbolically organised.
That is a much more interesting story.
The semiotic does not replace the social
Perhaps this is the deepest lesson of the series.
When meaning arrives, it does not abolish the social system from which it emerged.
The ensemble remains.
The bodies remain.
The rhythm remains.
The shared activity remains.
The value remains.
The signal remains.
The sign is added to the ecology.
And once added, it can transform that ecology.
This is not a hierarchy in which higher levels make lower levels irrelevant.
It is a hierarchy of new possibilities.
The physical makes biological organisation possible.
Biological organisation makes social organisation possible.
Social organisation makes increasingly elaborate semiotic organisation possible.
And each new level can feed back upon those below it.
Music provides a beautiful example because it can participate across several of these levels at once.
From mattering to meaning — and back again
There is one final twist.
We began by distinguishing mattering from meaning.
But after everything we have discovered, perhaps the relation between them is not simply:
mattering → meaning.
Meaning can itself create new forms of mattering.
A national anthem can matter because it means something.
A song can matter because of the history it symbolises.
A musical style can matter because it marks belonging.
A melody can matter because it evokes someone who is absent.
Once meaning exists, it feeds back into value.
The semiotic world changes what matters.
This is why cultural evolution can become so powerful.
Once a community can symbolise, it can create new objects of collective value.
The sign does not merely describe a world of values.
It can reorganise that world.
Meaning can therefore become causally significant.
A final distinction
We can now make the distinction with which the series began, but in its mature form.
Mattering is a relation of value.
Signalling is a relation in which a difference can alter the behaviour or state of another system.
Coordination arises when such relations become mutually organised.
Meaning arises when differences become organised within a symbolic system so that they can be construed as something.
These are not competing explanations.
They are different modes of organisation.
Music can participate in all four.
But it need not begin with the fourth.
That is the point we were trying to recover.
What music teaches us
Music therefore teaches us something surprisingly general.
It teaches us that a world can be organised before it is represented.
It teaches us that organisms can coordinate before they communicate propositions.
It teaches us that societies can establish value before they formulate concepts.
It teaches us that significance can precede meaning.
And then it teaches us something equally remarkable:
Once meaning appears, it can transform the significance that was already there.
The sign does not descend upon an empty world.
It enters a world already full of differences that matter.
It finds bodies already responsive.
It finds organisms already coordinating.
It finds societies already organised.
It finds rhythms already binding people together.
It finds practices already carrying histories.
And it gives some of those differences a new possibility:
they can mean.
The music remains
Perhaps, then, we should resist the temptation to end by saying that music finally becomes meaningful.
It was meaningful enough before, if by meaningful we mean significant.
What arrives is something more specific.
Symbolic meaning arrives.
And when it does, the music becomes capable of participating in a world that can construe itself.
It can represent.
Invoke.
Remember.
Identify.
Criticise.
Celebrate.
Ironise.
Imagine.
But beneath all this, the beat remains.
The sound remains.
The bodies remain.
The ensemble remains.
The possibility of moving together remains.
The music continues to matter even when we know exactly what it means.
And perhaps that is why music is such a revealing phenomenon.
It shows us, in a form we can hear, something that is otherwise easy to forget:
Meaning is not the beginning of significance.
It is one of the things significance can become.
The world mattered before it meant.
Organisms mattered to themselves before they could represent their world.
Organisms mattered to one another before they could exchange symbols.
People could move together before they could say what they were doing.
They could sing together before the song became an emblem.
And somewhere along that long history, a remarkable new possibility appeared.
The world could begin to signify itself.
Music stands on that threshold.
It can remain on the side of signal, value, coordination and participation.
It can cross into signification.
And, most wonderfully, it can do both at once.
A song can mean something and still move the body.
A melody can signify something and still create anticipation.
An anthem can represent a nation and still be a piece of music.
A rhythm can mark an identity and still make us dance.
Meaning arrives.
But music remains.
And perhaps that is the final answer to our original question.
Music matters because meaning is not the only way a world can matter.
And when meaning arrives, music shows us what happens when a world that already matters learns to say something about itself.
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