There is a curious question we rarely think to ask about music.
Not What does music mean? That question is familiar enough. Philosophers have argued about whether music represents emotion, whether it expresses feeling, whether it tells stories, whether it possesses a syntax, whether instrumental music can refer to anything beyond itself.
The more primitive question may be different:
Why does music matter?
The question sounds almost trivial until we notice how much it contains. Music can move us, excite us, calm us, frighten us, console us, energise us, unite us and sometimes even alter the way a group of people behaves. A rhythm can make bodies move together. A pulse can establish collective expectation. A melody can become inseparable from a memory. A chord can make us wait for what comes next.
And yet none of this requires music to mean anything.
That is the puzzle with which we shall begin.
Mattering is not meaning
We have become accustomed to treating significance and meaning as almost synonymous. If something is significant, we are inclined to ask what it signifies. If something matters, we look for the meaning that explains why.
But these are not the same question.
Something can matter without meaning.
A sudden movement at the edge of our visual field may make us turn our head before we have identified what moved. A change in temperature can alter our behaviour without representing anything. The cry of an animal can produce an immediate response without constituting a symbolic proposition. A rhythm can draw a group of bodies into synchrony without saying what they are doing.
In each case, something makes a difference.
That difference is not yet meaning.
We might therefore distinguish two very different relations:
Something matters when it makes a difference to the activity of a system.
Something means when it participates in a system of distinctions through which something can be construed.
The first is a question of value.
The second is a question of semiosis.
The distinction matters because value is older than meaning.
Long before an organism could have anything resembling a symbolic vocabulary, things could already matter to it. Food, danger, temperature, light, movement and the presence of another organism could alter what it did. Life is not indifferent to its environment. It continuously discriminates among possibilities according to what matters for its continuing organisation.
Meaning arrives much later.
This does not make meaning unimportant. Quite the opposite. It makes its emergence more interesting.
From value to significance
Edelman's account of biological value gives us one way of thinking about this primitive distinction. Organisms do not simply encounter a neutral world and subsequently attach values to it. Their organisation is already shaped by what has mattered to their survival and development. Value becomes a principle through which possible responses are differentially selected.
We can generalise the insight without assuming that every form of value is biological.
At the most basic level, we might say:
Value is organised difference in consequence.
Something matters because its occurrence, absence, intensity or timing changes what a system can or will do.
Once we move from organisms to groups of organisms, something new becomes possible. What matters to one organism can become relevant to another. Behaviour can become coordinated. Responses can become mutually constraining. Signals can establish expectations. Rhythms can synchronise activity.
Value becomes social.
This is particularly important because social organisation does not necessarily require symbolic meaning.
A colony of social insects can coordinate its activity through chemical and physical signals without possessing a language in the human sense. Individuals alter their behaviour in response to one another, and collective organisation emerges from these reciprocal differences.
Something matters to one organism because it changes the behaviour of another.
That is already communication in a broad sense.
But it is not necessarily semiosis.
The signal before the sign
This gives us a useful distinction between signal and sign.
A signal can simply trigger or modulate a response.
A sign does something more: it participates in a system in which something can be construed as something else.
The difference is subtle but profound.
A signal can operate through:
event → response
A sign operates through something more like:
form → construal
The signal need not stand for anything. It can simply make a difference.
The distinction should not be made too rigidly. Signals can become signs, and signs can certainly produce effects. Human communication is full of cases in which the two are intertwined.
But the distinction allows us to see something that is otherwise easily obscured:
communication does not necessarily begin with meaning.
Coordination can precede representation.
And this is precisely where music becomes philosophically interesting.
Music matters
Consider rhythm.
A rhythm does not have to represent anything in order to organise activity. A repeated pulse can establish anticipation. It can invite movement. It can bring movements into synchrony. It can create a shared temporal framework within which many individuals become coordinated.
A drummer does not need to tell an audience, in words or symbols, move now.
The rhythm can simply make movement more probable.
The same thing happens within the music itself. A musical phrase establishes expectations about what might come next. A repetition confirms an expectation; a variation disrupts it; a delay prolongs it; a cadence resolves it.
The listener is not merely decoding information.
The listener is being organised in time.
This is one reason music can be so powerful even when we cannot say what it means.
The music matters because it changes the organisation of our activity.
And when several people experience it together, the effect can become social. Bodies breathe together. Attention converges. Movement synchronises. Anticipation becomes shared. A crowd becomes temporarily organised by sound.
Something is happening here that is more primitive than symbolic communication.
The strange case of music
This gives us a useful way of revisiting an assumption that has become almost automatic: that anything culturally significant must itself be a semiotic system.
Music is certainly part of culture. But it does not follow that music, in itself, is a semiotic system.
Halliday's taxonomy of complex systems gives us another way of seeing the issue. Physical, biological, social and semiotic systems are not simply different kinds of objects. They involve different forms of organisation, and the semiotic level introduces symbolic value: meaning.
Music can be understood, in its primary organisation, as a social system.
It involves organised relations among organisms: performers, listeners, dancers, audiences, communities, traditions and practices. It establishes values within those relations. Certain rhythms, timbres, tempi, gestures and patterns become significant because of what they do within a shared activity.
But social significance is not necessarily symbolic meaning.
A musical passage can matter enormously without standing for anything.
This is why the familiar statement that "music is a language" can be misleading. Music certainly possesses organisation. It has patterns, expectations, contrasts, repetitions and transformations. It can even acquire conventional associations.
But organisation is not by itself semiosis.
A flock can be organised without speaking a language.
A colony can be organised without possessing a symbolic grammar.
A group of dancers can be coordinated by rhythm without the rhythm having to mean anything.
And music can do the same.
The distinction becomes clearer when we ask the right question
Suppose we hear a piece of music and ask:
What does this passage mean?
We may find that the question has no determinate answer.
But suppose instead we ask:
What does this passage do?
Now the possibilities multiply.
It may create tension.
It may delay resolution.
It may induce movement.
It may establish intimacy.
It may separate one section from another.
It may coordinate a group.
It may evoke an emotional disposition.
It may make us anticipate.
It may make us remember.
It may make us wait.
None of these effects requires the passage to denote an object or proposition.
Indeed, one of the most remarkable things about instrumental music is precisely that it can produce extraordinarily determinate effects of organisation while remaining radically indeterminate about symbolic reference.
Music can be specific in what it does while being ambiguous about what it means.
Perhaps that is not a deficiency.
Perhaps it is the clue.
The mistake of beginning with meaning
If we begin our theory of music with meaning, we are likely to spend our time asking what musical sounds represent.
If we begin with mattering, a different picture emerges.
We can see music as participating in a much older history of organised value:
the physical event makes a difference;
the organism responds according to what matters;
organisms become coordinated through signals;
social practices stabilise patterns of coordination;
and only sometimes are these patterns incorporated into symbolic systems.
Meaning has not disappeared.
It has acquired a history.
Music therefore gives us a particularly clear opportunity to investigate a larger question:
How does a world of things that matter become a world of things that mean?
That question takes us beyond music. It reaches into biology, social organisation and semiotics.
And it suggests that we should not imagine meaning as the first form of significance.
Perhaps meaning is a later achievement built upon something more fundamental: the capacity of organised systems to discriminate what matters.
Music allows us to hear that distinction.
Before a sound can mean, it can matter.
Before it can represent, it can affect.
Before it can become a sign, it can become a signal.
And before it can become part of a cultural grammar, it can already organise bodies, attention, expectation and social relations.
The deepest mystery of music may therefore not be that it sometimes means something without words.
It may be that it can matter so profoundly without needing to mean anything at all.
That is where our investigation begins.
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