Expression and communication in musical performance

Abstract

The issue of communication in music is regarded with some suspicion by music analysts and music theorists for at least two reasons. One is the desire to avoid the pitfalls of a naive and dogmatically intentionalist approach to musical communication in which the composer is the ‘sender’, the listeners are the ‘receivers’, and the work itself is the ‘channel’. The drawbacks of this perspective, exemplified by Cooke (1959), are its rigidly prescriptive tendencies, and its dependence either on loose and unreliable biographical information to establish what the composer ‘really meant’ in a work, or on apparently arbitrary or flimsily supported pronouncements by different commentators as to the intended meaning of a work, all of which tend to deflect attention away from the music itself. A second reason has been the influence of a brand of structuralism which has regarded the work as an object, whose author or composer is irrelevant — a position adopted by Roland Barthes, among others, and encapsulated in the title of his essay “The death of the author” (1977). Because this perspective encourages analysts to explore whatever meanings may be found in a work, without regard for their possible origins in the author’s own mind, it precludes the possibility of regarding a work as a vehicle which conveys meaning from one human ‘sender’ to other human ‘receivers’: the absence of a source removes one of the necessary terms in the communicative chain. The attraction of this approach is that analysts can concentrate on the music itself without having to consider its origins. The approach also highlights the distinction between communication and meaning: the meaning of an object, event or relation is a property that any observer is entitled to pick up or construct for him or herself, without implying any reciprocity between the creator and the receiver of meaning.