Beyond Structure and Chance: Listener and Irreversible Time in Musical Signification

The chapter discusses the issue of giving a theoretical account of the listener’s meaning-making experience in musical communication. This account is shown as lacking in a brief overview of the historical accounts of musical meaning as form or structure, which early music semiology inherits, and the lack of the notion of the listener therein. A problem remains even as music semiotics turns to the Peircean concepts of interpretant and endless semiosis, re-orienting theoretical perspective to the sign user as it still affirms a dichotomy between structure and listener. I pay special attention to Jean-Jacques Nattiez’s model of musical meaning, which distinguishes between poietic and esthesic levels: the factors of generating and the factors of receiving the message, respectively. The level of encoding and decoding a work often do not correspond, and they are in this model further externalized and distinguished from the text, dubbed the neutral level, immanent level, or trace. While this separation is admirable in placing musical meaning in a lived context, moving toward a dynamic view of the (musical) sign, and a step toward a processual understanding of semiosis, it only implicitly thematizes irreversible time, as Nattiez’s model does not explicitly contain recursivity. He builds analysis around a fixed point of the trace from which a free and unpredictable ‘cunning play of interpretants’ may follow. This chapter seeks a ‘middle way’ between this ‘cunning play’ and a structurally determined account of musical meaning. This middle way is thematized when irreversible time and habit-forming in the context of culture is considered drawing mainly from Jaan Valsiner's cultural psychology, providing a circular model where every new esthesic and poietic act is undertaken in the context of previous ones. Taking a cue from cultural psychology and Nattiez himself, musical meaning-making is seen as a practice of creating and destroying sign hierarchies within irreversible time, with the possibility of creating stable and rigid or free-floating and non-descript signs for novelty and forgetting. This middle way can give an account of the listener’s role in creating, transmitting, altering or destroying musical sign hierarchies.