Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T06:41:50.035Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Communication, Music, and Speech about Music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2019

Steven Feld
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Music has a fundamentally social life. It is made to be consumed—practically, intellectually, individually, communally—and it is consumed as symbolic entity. By “consumed” I mean socially interpreted as meaningfully structured, produced, performed, and displayed by varieties of prepared, invested, or otherwise historically situated actors. How does this happen? What does it mean? How can one know about it? These questions focus on the nature of the music communication process, and to rethink them I turn back to the question posed often by Charles Seeger: what does music communicate? To answer he also needed to ask: what does speech about music communicate? Through diagrams and dense prose, Seeger (1977:16–44) argued that to address the issue of what music communicates requires specifying what it could not communicate. The logical preoccupation with differences between the speech and music modes led to the notion that speech is the communication of “world view as the intellection of reality” while music is communication of “world view as the feeling of reality” (ibid.).

Type
Articles
Information
Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 16 , 1984 , pp. 1 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © 1984 by the International Council for Traditional Music

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References Cited

Bateson, Gregory 1972 Steps to an Ecology of Mind. NY: Ballantine.Google Scholar
Baudrillard, Jean 1981 For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign. St. Louis: Telos Press.Google Scholar
Becker, Judith and Becker, Alton 1981 “A musical icon: power and meaning in Javanese gamelan music,” Steiner, Wendy, ed., The Sign in Music and Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press, 203–215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blacking, John 1981 “The problem of ethnic perceptions in the semiotics of music,” Steiner, Wendy, ed., The Sign in Music and Literature. Austin: University of Texas Press, 184–194.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bley, Carla 1978 The Carla Bley Band: European Tour 1977. NY: Watt Records.Google Scholar
Boilès, Charles 1982 “Processes of musical semiosis.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 14:24–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burke, Kenneth 1945 A Grammar of Motives. Englewood, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.Google Scholar
Feld, Steven 1981 “Flow like a waterfall: the metaphors of Kaluli musical theory.” Yearbook for Traditional Music 13:22–47.Google Scholar
Feld, Steven 1982 Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Feld, Steven 1983 “Sound as a symbolic system: the Kaluli drum.” Bikmaus 4(3):78–89.Google Scholar
Feld, Steven 1984 “Sound structure as social structure.” Ethnomusicology (in press).Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford 1982 “Art as a cultural system,” Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 94–120.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving 1974 Frame Analysis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Jakobson, Roman 1960 “Linguistics and poetics,” Sebeok, T.A., ed., Style in Language. Cambridge, MIT Press, 350–377.Google Scholar
Keil, Charles 1966 “Motion and feeling through music.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 24:337–349.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lidov, David 1977 “Nattiez's semiotics of music.” Canadian Journal of Research in Semiotics 5(2):13–54.Google Scholar
Lidov, David 1980 “Musical and verbal semantics.” Semiotica 31(3/4):369–391.Google Scholar
Meyer, Leonard 1956 Emotion and Meaning in music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Meyer, Leonard 1973 Explaining Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Molino, Jean 1975 “Fait musicale et sémiologie de la musique.” Musique en jeu 17:37–62.Google Scholar
Nattiez, Jean-Jacques 1975 Fondements d'une sémiologie de la musique. Paris: Union Générale des Editions.Google Scholar
Seeger, Charles 1977 Studies in Musicology 1935–1975. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Shepherd, John 1977 “Media, social process, and music,” John Shepherd, et. al., Whose music? A sociology of musical languages. New Brunswick: Transaction, 7–51.Google Scholar
Shepherd, John 1982 “A theoretical model for the sociomusicological analysis of popular musics.” Popular Music 2:145–178.Google Scholar
Shutz, Alfred 1951 “Making music together: a study in social relationship.” Social Research 18(1):76–97.Google Scholar
Tagg, Philip 1982 “Analysing popular music: theory, method, and practice.” Popular Music 2:37–68.Google Scholar
Wachsmann, Klaus 1982 “The changeability of musical experience.” Ethnomusicology 26(2):197–216.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Worth, Sol and Gross, Larry 1974 “Symbolic strategies.” Journal of Communication 24(4):27–39.Google Scholar
Zemp, Hugo 1979 “Aspects of ‘Are'are musical theory.” Ethnomusicology 23(1):6–48.Google Scholar