GEORGINA BorN Goldsmiths’ College London UNDERSTANDING MUSIC AS CULTURE: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM POPULAR MUSIC STUDIES TO A SOCIAL SEMIOTICS OF MUSIC 1, INTRODUCTION In this paper I want to give a view of the contribution that studies of popular music can make to the development of musicology at large. I will focus on some recent innovations in popular music studies, from which it is possible to pursue what might be called a social semiotics of music.! My aim is to develop a theory of musical signification that encom- passes music as culture in the broadest sense — a sense which owes something to anthropology, but which is now more widely employed by historians and sociologists of culture; as it was by Michel Foucault in his pioneering analyses of what he called “discursive formations”’.? By “music as culture” in this broad sense, I refer to the ensemble or constellation of practices, beliefs, communications, social relations, in- stitutions and technologies through which a particular music is ex- perienced and has meaning. And I will suggest that semiotic concepts are necessary to understand this broad conception of music-as-culture. Why might this be of interest? For several reasons. First, the social and broader cultural dimensions of music have been a subconscious con- cern of composition throughout this century, occasionally erupting onto the surface of the musical scene. This can be seen across a range of 1 Tt is worth clarifying at the outset that my own use of semiotic methods involves no commitment to the positivism and formalism of some structuralist theory. Instead I suggest, in line with many others, that they can productively inform a hermeneutic approach. 2 See M. FOUCAULT, The Archaeology of Knowledge, London, Tavistock, 1972.212 GEORGINA BORN diverse phenomena: from Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Per- formances, to Boulez’s sociological speculations on the ‘“‘museum cul- ture” of concert-life, to the playful exploration of the immediate social relations of performance characteristic of both European music theatre and of American experimental music. We see here a range of social con- cerns, from questions of the audience and of the institutions that pro- mote new music, to more micro-social issues to do with the social rela- tions of musical practice and performance. Of course, in many of these developments — music theatre, experimental music — the cultural scope is wider, and the concern is equally with verbal or written text, with visual, multi-media, symbolic and ritual elements. And yet, it seems that criticism and analysis of serious music have baulked at theorising these more complex socio-musical totalities, or at least at developing a method appropriate to their complexity. Urban popular music, on the other hand, has always been defined as a “‘social fact”, by those who defend it as much as those who attack it, since it is hard to ignore the sheer economic power of the popular music industry, the social and symbolic power of its stars and its performances. The 1985 televised Live Aid concert, for example, was the largest cultur- al event in world history, experienced simultaneously by an estimated one billion people in 150 countries worldwide — one quarter of the global population.’ Popular music studies had their genesis, in Britain and the USA, in sociological studies of popular culture which were attempting to transcend the mass culture critique. This led in two directions: towards macro-sociological analyses of the history, political economy, institutions and politics of the pop music scene and industry;* and towards more micro-sociological analyses of musicians’ practices, lives and working cul- tures.’ The latter studies often used the anthropological method of ethno- 3 For a discussion of Live Aid and other recent interventions by pop musicians in global politics see: S, RVEN-W. Straw, Rock for Ethopia (1985), in World Music, Politics and Social Change, ed. S, Frith, Manchester and New York, Manchester University Press, 1989, pp. 198-209. + See, for example: C. GILLETT, The Sound of the City: the Rise of Rock and Roll, New York, Outerbridge and Dientsfrey, 1970; P. Hirsch, The Structure of the Popular Music Indus try, Ann Arbor Mich., University of Michigan, Institute for Social Research, 1973; R. DENISOFF, Solid Gold: the Popular Record Industry, New Brunswick N.J., Transaction, 1975; S. CHAPPLE and R. GAROFALO, Rock'n Roll is Here to Pay: the History and Politics of the Music Industry, Chicago, Nelson-Hall, 1977; S. FRITH, The Sociology of Rock, London, Constables, 1978; D. HARKER, One for the Money, London, Hutchinson, 1980. 5 See, for example, H. BECKER, The Culture of a Deviant Group: the Dance Musician, reprint- ed in BECKER, The Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance, New York, The Free Press, 1973. See also the following studies by Becker's students: R. FAULKNER, Hollywood Studio Mu- sicians, Chicago, University Press, 1971; E, KEALY, The Real Rock Revolution, unpublished PhD, Northwestern University, 1974; H. $. BENNETT, On Becoming a Rock Musician, Amberst, Univer- sity of Massachussetts Press, 1980.UNDERSTANDING MUSIC AS CULTURE ies 213 graphy;¢ and indeed some key work came from ethnomusicologists, such as Charles Keil’s 1966 study Urban Blues.’ However, the cultural com- plexity of popular music has tended to evade those who have focused ex- clusively on its sociological being: whether as ideology, as capitalist cul- tural industry, or indeed as sexualised collective ritual.* This classic split — art music studied as music, popular music as social form — has now often been remarked upon. And calls are being made for the split to be healed.’ Joseph Kerman, for one, has suggested that musicology must address the socio-cultural dimensions of serious music,!° and other musicologists have turned to anthropology for help in this;"! while Simon Frith and other popular music scholars are attempting to de- velop an aesthetics of popular music.? My project, then, is a contribu- tion to what may be a more unified future, in which we have modes of analysis suitable for all musical cultures, and in which we address all lev- els of the totality of their existence — the musical, the cultural and the social. Nor would this be for purely intellectual ends, since such a theory might be better suited to informing the complex and subtle creative choices and judgemens involved in any area of musical composition and practice. 2. THE SOCIAL, AND THE QUESTION OF THE “MUSIC ITSELF” Despite these grandiose claims, however, I admit that the mode of anal- ysis that I will propose has a central absence: it fails to address 6 Recent ethnographic studies of popular music, from an anthropological perspective, in- clude: $. CouEN, Rock Culture in Liverpool: Popular Music in the Making, Oxford, University Press, 1991; and R. FINNEGAN, The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town, Cam- bridge, University Press, 1989. My own ethnographic study of contemporary art music, specifi- cally of IRCAM in Paris, will be published under the title Rational Music: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalisation of the Avant-Garde by the University of California Press in 1994. 7G, KEIL, Urban Blues, Chicago and London, Chicago University Press, 1966. 8 There is now a recognition in popular music studies of the benefit of bringing together social, political-cconomic and more culturalist modes of analysis. For a recent study which at- tempts to do this, see: P. WICKE, Rock Music: Culture, Aesthetics and Sociology, Cambridge, University Press, 1990. 8 The clearest recent call is the collection edited by R. Leppert and S, McClary, Music and Society: the Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, Cambridge, University Press, 1987. See in particular the Introduction by the editors (pp. XL-XIx), and Foreword: the Ideology of Autonomous Art, by J. WOLFF (pp. 1-12). Another recent collection with the same aim is: Music and the Politics of Culture, ed. C. Nortis, London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1989. 10 See J. KERMAN, Musicology, London, Fontana, 1985. 11 For example, see L, TREITLER, What Kind of Story is History?, and G. TOMLINSON, The Web of Culture: a Context for Musicology, both in «19th-Century Music», VII, 3, 1984, pp. 363- 373 and pp. 350-362. 2 See S, FRITH, Towards an Aesthetic of Popular Music, in Music and Society cit. pp. 133- 150. See also P. WICKE, op. cit.214 GEORGINA BORN the problem of analysing the music itself — an absence that Kerman has criticised in appraising studies dealing with social and cultural con- text. Yet this may not be so absolute, nor so simple; since a founding and continuing concern of popular music studies, along with ethnomusi- cology and the sociology of music, has been to tease out how elements of the social and cultural may enter, or may be immanent in, the music itself. In this sense, then, there may be no failure or absence so much as a radical re-thinking of the ontological status of the ‘‘music itself”; and, for some musics at least, a questioning of the assumption of com- plete aesthetic autonomy. Only a handful of theorists have dared to tackle this problem over the century; and most that have — starting with Max Weber — have argued for some kind of fundamental homology between the musical system at issue and the character of its social and cultural context. All in all, these analyses tend to be reductive, not just in regard to the music, but also in terms of the ideal-typical social models employed — which usually depend on gross notions of feudalism, industrial capital- ism, rationalisation, bureaucracy and so on.'4 They have also risked tautology, reading into the music the very social and cultural forces that they have expected to find ‘‘immanently” there. The exception is Adorno, a theorist rare in his attempts to integrate analyses of the aesthetic and the social; and whose work — despite its monolithic pessimism — depends upon a far more sophisticated and em- pirically grounded grasp of the range of, and the interrelations between, musical and social, economic and technological phenomena. Yet even Adorno, like the “homology” theorists, assumes a basic parallel between musical and social processes — for example in his analysis of standardi- sation as a property, simultaneously, of the aesthetic and the commodi- ty forms of popular music."* By contrast, the studies I discuss later ex- plore the existence of contradiction and dislocation between levels of the music-and-cultural whole. It must also be said that the neglect of the “music itself’’ until re- cently in popular music studies was due not only to the sociological ori- gins of the field, and the lack of musically trained scholars, but to the 1 See J. KERMAN, op. cit., p. 180. ¥ See, for example, J. SHEPHERD, The Musical Coding of Ideologies, in Whose Music? A Sociology of Musical Languages, ed. J. Shepherd et al., London and New Brunswick, Transaction, 1977, pp. 69-124 15 TW. ADORNO, On Popular Music, in On Record: Rock, Pop, and the Written Word, ed. S. Frith: A. Goodwin, New York and Toronto, Pantheon, 1990, pp. 301-314.UNDERSTANDING MUSIC AS CULTURE - 215 aesthetic character of urban popular musics. This aesthetic, as with ma- ny non-western musics, centres on those elusive qualities that have so far proven resistant to music analysis in general, even in relation to art music. I am thinking of timbral inflection (often exaggerated in popu- lar music), micro-tonal slides, minutely subtle shifts of rhythm within a highly structured but repetitive basic metre, and all of these employed in quasi-improvisational ways. So that to analyse these popular musics (let’s say, a blues by B. B. King, a ballad by Stevie Wonder, or a hit by Madonna) primarily in terms of pitch, melody, harmony, instrumen- tation, or “global” structure is to miss the musical point. Thus the problems posed by popular music for the concepts and techniques of music analysis are not unique: they are shared with non-western musics, and with much electronic and computer music — in which the structur- ing role of timbre and the use of micro-tonal pitch movements are also crucial. The neglect of the ‘music itself” in popular music studies, then, is due not so much to sociological reductionism but, at least in part, to the lack of appropriate tools of music analysis per se. But this situation has produced constructive thinking. Since, while it has been difficult to adequately analyse popular music as music, writers have argued that to focus exclusively on the musical sound is in any case reductive of the aesthetic experience of popular music. Indeed the wider cultural character of popular music, as of non-western musics, forces a reconsideration of the concept of the aesthetic itself — if, by aesthet- ic, we understand the ways that music-as-culture produces both mean- ing and pleasure. The point is that, in these cultures, since meaning inheres in the social, visual, discursive and technological mediations of music as well as in the musical sound, we may consider the aesthetic as subsuming these mediations. From this perspective, then, the social, the visual, the discursive and so on are all constitutive of the aesthetic. 3. Music AND SIGNIFICATION: THE MEDIATIONS OF MUSICAL SOUND In the rest of the paper, I sketch a general theory of musical signifi- cation; and I exemplify this by reference to some recent popular music and ethnomusicological studies. I suggest that, more than the represen- tational arts, we should conceive of music as inherently multitextual — or liable to many kinds of mediation — and intertextual. I will then indicate why this approach may be fruitful not just for the analysis of popular musics, but for all musics, including western art music. The core of music-as-culture is its existence as organised and meaning-216 GEORGINA BORN ful sound. This can best be grasped by contrast with the other arts. Musical sound in itself is alogogenic, completely unrelated to language, non-artefact, having no physical existence, and non-representational, refer- ring in the first place to nothing other than the specific musical sys- tem(s) or genre(s) to which it is related. That is, musical sound is a self-referential, aural abstraction. This bare core must be the start of any socio-cultural understanding of music, since only then can one build up an analysis of the mediations surrounding and constructiong it, and so of its multitextual being. We can clarify by extending Barthes’ theory of signification to music. In terms of denotation, music contrasts with representational media since it denotes nothing other than its musical expressivity as part of a specific musical system. It calls to mind only its difference from other possible musical expressions within the same genre. This peculiar degree of self-referentiality is why music may be considered a relatively empty sign, akin to the formal level of other media. It is worth noting here that most orthodox analyses of music take as their object either music-as-sound, or music-as-notated-text, or music- and-words. A recent issue of the «Contemporary Music Review» enti- tled Music and Text,” for example, was limited to an exploration of music-and-literary text alone, so ignoring the broader semiotic possibili- ties of examining musical culture writ large as text. Furthermore, despite this limited conceptualisation of how music produces meaning, confu- sions abound because of a failure to distinguish between the various specific mediations of music. Thus it is common to fail to distinguish between music-as-notated — the ideal, unrealised work, which fore- grounds its systemic and structural character, and which is, of course, music mediated in visual form — and music-as-sound — its aural reali- sation. Yet especially in the modernist era, some notated musics have resisted aural realisation, and have primarily existed (and gained notori- ety) as visual texts; while many electronic and popular musics are non- notated, and exist only in aural form, mediated by performance and by electronic technologies. We have to develop a theory of musical meaning that can account for these distinctive forms, without which, for example, it would be impossible to grasp the specific importance of the visual, the notational or the conceptual in the modernist aesthetic, or of the aural, the elec- tronic and the performative in popular music. Just as, in terms of aural 16 See R. BARTHES, Myth Today, in Mythologies, London, Cape, 1972, pp. 109-159. 17 See Music and Text, «Contemporary Music Review», V, 1989.UNDERSTANDING MUSIC AS CULTURE 217 realisation and reception, we have to distinguish between live perfor- mance — the immediate social realisation of music — and the various forms of technologically-mediated reception (by record, radio, television, film and so on). The point is not, therefore, to debate the relative priority of music as aural or visual text, as live collective event or isolated experience; but to move beyond the currently impoverished and essentialist notions of how music conveys meaning by developing an analysis of the multiple, specific forms in which it is experienced. Thus, as a basis for understanding how music conveys meaning, we need to tease out the phenomenological character of the many mediations through which it is experienced: to as- sess both their distinctiveness, and the effects of their simultaneity and relatedness. A first principle, then, is the multitextuality of music-as- culture; and the need to analyse its particular forms — aural, visual and notated, technological, discursive, social (and here we include both the social structural or institutional, and the more immediate and micro-social experience of performance and reception) — as an ensemble. I want to outline three further reasons why this approach is insightful. First, it can help to clarify confusions concerning the technological mediation of music. Grasping the inevitable mediation of music allows us to move aesthetically beyond the nostalgia for a pre- or non- electronically mediated music, or for a return to an idealised ambient soundscape: both forms of yearning for the “‘authentic’”’ in music. Rather, the mediations can be perceived, and embraced, as inherently part of the aesthetic. For example, it is still common in the classical music world for musicians and sound engineers, when recording or amplifying instruments, to talk of aiming to reproduce faithfully the instruments’ acoustic sound: a phenomenological impossibility, since recorded or amplified instruments are inevitably transformed by that process and cannot be experienced either acoustically or physically as “‘the same as before’. It is the same nostal- gia, at a second order — the idea of technology as redemptive, or restora- tive, of an original acoustical experience — that feeds the fallacy of the compact disc, the marketing of which claims that it comes closer to “‘real”” or “live sound” than previous forms of reproduction. Whereas, it is in fact simply another form of electronic transformation than the LP, perhaps cleaner, less noisy, more acoustically heightened and colourful. Radio, LP, cassette, CD, video disc — all are aesthetically distinct forms of musical reproduction, all equally “‘artificial’”’ or “authentic”, all attesting to the absence of a “natural” or original sound.!® 48 I should clarify here that I am not arguing for the superiority of, nor for a special, primary status for, technologically mediated music vis a vis ambient or live music. This would 6218 GEORGINA BORN This aesthetic principle has best been grasped, as a practical logic, by the popular music industry, as shown by the common practice when preparing an album of mixing the same tracks differently — or adjust- ing the aesthetic — for different technological outlets: car radio, cas- sette, LP, CD. The final mix of pop chart material is tried out, in the midst of high fidelity digital technologies in the studio, on tiny car ra- dio speakers so as to assess how the sound comes across on that format — so that the voice, rhythm section, treble and bass can be made to reach out musically over the throb of the engine and ambient street sounds. It would be even more appropriate if those “extraneous” sounds were also reproduced as part of the total soundscape or listening con- text in the studio. ‘A second reason for attention to multitextuality is because, as I hinted earlier, certain musics have attempted to innovate (and to critique previ- ous forms) not primarily or only in terms of the aural or the notated, but also in terms of the social relations of music production. Good, and related, examples are the attempts at a new performance division of labour characteristic of both experimental and improvised music in the 1960’s and 70’s, in which the lines between composer, performer and audience were blurred; or the collective musical composition of free jazz in the same period — all attempting to deconstruct and demystify the role of the composer-author. To look at these musics, then, as aural or notated texts is to miss a major dimension of meaning. Yet it would equally be a mistake to ignore the visual text: while some of these mus- ics had none (free jazz, improvised music), the simplistic scores of ex- perimental music were central to that music’s Dada-esque and pointedly “unserious”’ critique of the extreme complexity and abstraction of the scores of the dominant post-War avant garde, and of the mystified and directive role of the “‘serious” composer. A third reason why attention to multitextuality is important is be- cause only with such an analysis of simultaneous levels in the produc- tion of meaning can one uncover either cumulative and reinforcing ef- fects or, more interestingly, contradictions and tensions operating between the levels of the ensemble. In terms of reception, if pleasure can be derived from the various levels of musical experience, so can displeasure; and the meaning of one level may be in tension with the meaning of another, just as one level repeat the error that I am criticising: the prioritising of ambient music. 1 am simply arguing for a recognition of the particularity of each, and for their difference, in terms of the production of meaning and pleasure.UNDERSTANDING MUSIC AS CULTURE 219 may create pleasure while another produces displeasure or invites hostility. This gives us a way of understanding why an audience may be unable to tolerate the experience of a music — for example classical music, or heavy metal rock — not due to the music-as-sound, but due to the associated forms of discourse (respectively, the elitist theories of genius associated with classical music, or the sexist iconography of heavy me- tal); or the places and modes of performance through which particular musics are experienced. (Here I am thinking, respectively, of the in- hibited concert hall ritual of classical music; or the violent and omnipo- tent mobs in vast sports stadia characteristic of heavy metal). On the other hand, it may also be that people are drawn to a music not because of the sound, but because of its social forms, or its politicised discourse — which may override an uniterest in the sound. (I have often won- dered if this could be the case for some folk music devotees, or those of so-called ‘‘women’s music’). This sensitivity to contradictory levels of experience in reception, then, gives us a way of understanding am- bivalence towards the musical object. Several recent studies of popular music provide, in different ways, this kind of reading of musical meaning and pleasure. They include Bar- bara Bradby’s work on Buddy Holly and “girl-group” songs,” and Philip Tagg’s studies of the Kojak television theme tune and the songs of ABBA.” Both writers focus on the music or music-and-lyric alone, and they innovate in two ways. First, in focusing on implicit and “un- conscious” factors; and second in drawing out implicit contradictions between the levels of the whole — between the musical figures and words, the non-verbal and verbal, between different elements of the instrumental accompaniment. Bradby and Tagg use quite distinct methods for these analyses. Tagg is one of the few musicologists working on popular music. His work is purposefully devoted to the ‘‘most popular music’’ of our day, such as the theme tunes for hit television shows, which pass almost unno- ticed and yet are extraordinarily evocative to their audience. Tagg ar- gues that there is a level of purely musical semiotics at work in these dominant popular musics, whereby they recycle a repertoire of stereo- typical and cliched, genre-specific musical figures. There is thus a vast and rich field of inter-musical connotations at work, which has grown See B. BRADBY, Pity Peggy Sue, «Popular Music», IV, 1984, pp. 183-205; and Ip., Do- talk and Don't-Talk: the Division of the Subject in Girl-Group Music, in On Record cit., pp. 341-368. 20 See P. TAGG, Kojak - 50 Seconds of Television Music, Gotheborg, Gothenburg Universi- ty, Department of Musicology, 1979; and ID., Analysing Popular Music: Theory, Method and Prac- tice, «Popular Music», II, 1982, pp. 37-67.220 GEORGINA BORN up over the history of popular music and its related entertainment fields — film, radio and television. In order to trace these connotations Tagg develops a complex method of hypothetical substitution of musical units, a kind of Popperian falsification process, through which he isolates which precise element of the musical whole is producing which element of con- noted meaning. This is applied to every dimension: melodic and har- monic figures, rhythmic patterns, timbre and instrumentation, even basic “feel”. In his analysis of the ABBA song Fernando, for example, Tagg traces an opposition between the overt meaning of the chorus lyric and the implicit musical meaning that accompanies it. While the lyric speaks of a yearning to rejoin the freedom fighters of Latin America, the har- monic figure — a cycle of falling fifths, a classic cadential resolution — undermines this restless and radical spirit with a message of concilia- tion and self-satisfied contentment. Bradby’s analysis of the Buddy Holly song Peggy Sue focuses on the interplay between verbal and non-verbal, instrumental elements. To get at the meaning of the guitar solo, for example — in which harmony is simple, melody non-existent and only the rhythm is subtly varied — she traces how the guitar rhythms are the same as the words to part of the verse, so that the solo recalls them and evokes a sequence of imaginary words. This is no simple repetition, however, but a new im- plicit message given a new syncopated emphasis. She draws from this a reading of the relation between the explicit verbal and the implicit non-verbal meanings, such that while the song’s overt message is of the singer-subject’s desire for his idealised love, the implicit message is one of profound ambivalence and sexual timidity. The implicit meanings and internal tensions revealed by these ex- tended semiotic methods suggest that, rather than meaning being uni- fied in these texts, it is at key points ridden with structural faults and internal contradictions, which are shown only when the different levels of the multitextual whole are brought together for critical scrutiny. Other studies are more interesting in taking the multitextual approach even further. Here I will mention studies by Dave Laing on punk rock 24 and ethnomusicologist Marina Roseman on the Temiar of peninsular Malay- sia.2? Both analyses move beyond the music-and-lyric to embrace the to- tal musical culture, including the discursive, the social and the performative. 21 See D. LANG, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock, Milton Keynes, Open University Press, 1985. 22 See M. ROSEMAN, The Social Structuring of Sound: the Temiar of Peninsular Malaysia, «Eth- nomusicology», XXVIII, 3, 1984, pp. 411-445.UNDERSTANDING MUSIC AS CULTURE 221 Laing’s study of punk traces every level of meaning — from organisa- tional forms and production practices, to the naming and philosophies of bands, fanzines and record companies, to performance and musical styles (vocal, physical, instrumental), to audience rituals and the punk “look”. He analyses the way that each level of the whole creates mean- ing through difference; so that, for example, the organisational and tech- nological forms of punk were not only socio-economic strategies, but also stylised symbolic interventions in, and rejections of, the institu- tional forms of the mainstream rock industry. Thus punk’s experiments in collective and anarchic, independent (non) organisation were com- ments on the entrepreneurial, hierarchical and profit-directed rock busi- ness, Equally, at the level of musical style, punk vocalisation — mur- mured indistinctly or shouted hysterically, usually way off-key or hovering in-between pitches — aimed above all to avoid the musicality, the pitch- centredness, the smooth, relaxed and assured communication of most pop and rock vocals. It becomes clear that the movement worked above all symbolically through the systematic and often unconscious negation of every aspect of mainstream rock. Laing suggests that the meaning of punk can only be grasped by analysing the simultaneous juxtaposi- tion of these many levels in the bricolage, and by exploring how they work either cumulatively or, more often, against each other in wilful, stylised contradiction. As an example of contradiction between levels of the whole, Laing discusses the woman singer Poly Styrene: leader of the group X-Ray Specs, and one of the best-known surreal punk personas. Poly used an unnerving “‘infantile” voice which satirised common representations of female sexuality as “little girlish”. This “‘sexy little girl” image was both extended, and yet the sexuality brutally anulled, by her having a mouth full of ugly adolescent teeth braces which flashed silver as she sang. Her clothing and body were, meanwhile, bizarre variants on the early 60’s suburban housewife look: comfortably round, pink wool suit and hat. Her manner on stage was aggressive, belying the little girl/house- wife look. The group’s big hit was her song Oh Bondage! Up Yours!, which begins with cliches of sexual masochism («Bond me, Tie me, Chain me to the wall / I wanna be a slave to you all»), but breaks this up in the chorus with rebellion («Oh bondage, up yours! Oh bondage, no more!»). Laing comments wryly that the BBC, unable to grasp the con- tradictory lyrics, censored the record and refused to broadcast it. The BBC were clearly, then, unable or unwilling to decode the totality of Poly’s complex signification. The kind of contradiction raised by Roseman in her study of an enti-222 GEORGINA BORN. rely different, non-western musical culture is equally fascinating. She finds that the beliefs and ritual practices around Temiar musical performance, rather than reflecting the gender differentiation found in Temiar social life at large, systematically invert and negate it. The social character of musical performance, then, exists as a kind of implicit critical commen- tary on, and questioning of, the dominant social order. Through the myths and feelings associated with their singing, women enjoy a kind of empower- ment in fantasy, a utopian premonition of social change towards a more sexually egalitarian society. Roseman thus problematises the relationship between the musical culture and Temiar social order, indicating that the two may not be continuous but opposed, in tension; and suggesting, like Laing, that music may provide an arena for social and symbolic struggle. 4. INTERTEXTUALITY AND PROJECTION: CONSTRUCTING THE MUSICAL OBJECT Turning to the question of intertextuality, we can draw again on Barthes. It is at Barthes’ second, connotative order of signification — the order of myth — that music becomes particularly subject to extra- musical meanings through its extraordinary evocative power. The signi- fieds that music connotes at this level can be of many kinds: visual, sensual, emotional, and intellectual — such as theories, domains of knowledge, compositional systems. All are essentially metaphorical in relation to musical sound. And they can remain singular metaphors, ex- perienced simultaneously. Or they can combine, cohere and extend into fields of discourse, theory or “knowledge’’ surrounding music. But the point is that the relation of these extramusical connotations to music- as-signifier is cultural, historical, established by convention and in so- cial practice. Yet they are experienced as “inherent in” or “immanent to” the music by a process of projection of the connotations into the musical sound object. It is this process of projection that achieves what Barthes calls the “‘naturalising”’ effect: the connotations appear to be natural and universal where they are cultural and historical. It is, then, the forms of talk, text and theory around music — the metaphors and rhetoric explaining and constructing it, whether propounded by com- poser, theorist or critic — that constitute its inherent discursive inter- textuality, and that may be liable to analysis as ideological. Barthes sees denotation as providing an explicit, ‘‘blameless’”’ alibi for the deeper, implicit levels of ideological connotation. Paradoxically, in mus- ic, the lack of a denotative alibi does not have the effect of undermining naturalisation, but rather the opposite effect: the intertextual connota-UNDERSTANDING MUSIC AS CULTURE 223 tions become even more transparently, “naturally” and firmly attached to the music. This may elucidate, for example, the way that much early music historiography ? and sociology have been liable to a kind of theo- retical pre-determination. It may also help to explain the historical recur- rence of two kinds of universalising musical theory: that music represents the emotions, or that music is «sounding mathematics».?* In both cases, these properties are read as immanent to music. We can now understand better why, because of music’s transparency as a form of signification, it offers little resistance to these kinds of discursive invasion. The stress on intertextuality also accords with some recent ethnomu- sicology, which places metaphors around music at the centre of the anal- ysis of both how musical expressivity is translated into verbal and com- municable form; and also who controls the production and communica- tion of knowledge and theory about music, and so how power is dis- tributed in musical cultures. Roseman, again, explains that « ... in- digenous musical theories are often articulated using terms drawn from «extra-musical» domains ... The resultant perception of likeness in un- like terms constitutes metaphor».26 Roseman argues that studying music as culture involves grasping « ... primarily the cultural logics informing (the) sound structures .... We need to elicit the symbolic classifications and metaphors whereby the terms of one domain are layered with mean- ings drawn from another domain».”” As she implies, these layers of metaphor and intertextual discourse do not just express the pre-given experience of musical sound, but construct that experience through in- forming composition, performance and reception. This analysis, then, indicates the omnipresence of metaphor and dis- course as mediations of music-as-sound, and the need for attention to their arbitrary and specific cultural character, their intertextual connec- tions with other, non-musical realms of discourse, other areas of knowledge and practice. It also raises their role in the construction of musical authority, legitimation and power; since having questioned the self-evidence of all discourses around music, it is possible to deconstruct their rhetoric and become sensitive to their strategies of legitimation. 2 See W. D. ALLEN, Philosophies of Music History: a Study of General Histories of Music, New York, Dover, 1962. 24 See C. DAHLHAUS, Esthetics of Music, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982, p. 17. ® See for example S. FELD, Sound Structure as Social Structure, «Ethnomusicology», XXVIII, 3, 1984, pp. 383-409; and M. ROSEMAN, op. cit, pp. 383-409. 2 M, ROSEMAN, op. cit., p. 438. 27 Ibid., p. 411.224 GEORGINA BORN 5. FROM AN INTRA.CULTURAL TO A SOCIO-HISTORICAL SEMIOTICS OF uk The above arguments might, perhaps, stand as justification of the fertility of a non-formalist semiotic approach to music. But recent so- ciological extensions of semiotics have gone further, and have stressed the necessity of moving beyond a conception of cultural and symbolic domains as self-contained entities, sufficient to themselves. Instead, they are conceived as part of greater cultural and social fields; and their ‘‘au- tonomous”’, “‘internal’’ properties are analysed in terms of how they con- struct, implicitly and explicitly, their difference from other, contiguous domains. Here we again approach, from another direction, the theoreti- cal terrain mapped out by Foucault, when he wrote of tracing the inter- nal regularities, but also the dispersal and differentiation, of discursive formations. It is here, also, that questions of history, of temporality, of the reproduction or transformation of cultural systems potentially re- enter the analysis;?* since to move beyond the “‘internal’’ is to raise how a cultural system relates not only to coexistent systems, but also its relations with prior and subsequent cultural systems. It is to raise the higher order structuration, both ‘‘socio-spatial’”” and temporal, of cultural systems. Such an approach has been developed in various ways in socio- linguistics, as well as in relation to non-linguistic cultural forms.” But the strongest example, both theoretical and empirical, is the work of the French sociologist Bourdieu, as in his classic study of the different cultural dispositions, consumption patterns and life-styles of French so- cial classes.” In all of this social semiotics, related cultural forms — whether co-existent, or historically consecutive — are analysed in terms of their strategies for the construction of difference. And from this work, it emerges that there are two fundamental forms ference discerni- ble in these processes: the first centred on antago! , Opposition, ne- gation — in other words where one cultural domain antagonistically im- plies the other (‘‘A : not-A’’); the second constructing a difference which 28 See M. SAHLINS, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1981; and ID., Islands of History, London, Tavistock, 1985. 29 For socio-linguistic work of this kind sce, for example, W. LaBov, The Logic of Non- standard English, in Language and Social Context, ed. P. P. Giglioli, London, Penguin, 1972; and. M. A. K. HaLupay, Language as Social Semiotic, London, Edward Arnold, 1978. For more gener- al social semiotic analyses of cultural forms, see R. HODGE-G. Kress, Social Semiotics, Cam- bridge, Polity, 1988; D. HEDBIGE, Subculture: the Meaning of Style, London, Methuen, 1979. 3 P. BOURDIEU, La Distinction: Critique Sociale du Jugement, Paris, Minuit, 1979. For an early theoretical exposition of the issues, see ID., Intellectual Field and Creative Project, in Knowledge and Control, ed. M. Young, London, Collier Macmillan, 1971, pp. 161-188.UNDERSTANDING MUSIC AS CULTURE 225 is absolute, so that one domain has «no relation whatsoever» with the other (“A ; B”),?! It is beyond the scope of this paper to explore fully the potential of this kind of approach to analysing musical culture; and I will leave aside completely the complex issues concerning the analysis of temporality. But of the studies already discussed, those by Laing and Roseman ex- emplify the insights gained by broadening the focus beyond an internal symbolic analysis. Both locate the specific properties of the musical cul- ture at issue in relation to a wider, dominant social (Roseman) or socio- musical (Laing) order; and in both cases, the privileged relation between the two domains, variously embodied, is that of negation. I will sketch here just two more examples of the potential uses of a higher level social semiotics for examining differences between dis- tinct and contiguous contemporary musical cultures. We might, for example, consider different constructions of author- ship. In the post serialist avant garde, the author-composer remains in- vested with all the trappings of the romantic artist, his authorial inten- tions absolute and autonomous, and epitomised in the score — a sacred text, seen as the authoritative embodiment of creativity. While the role of the author in post-Cageian experimental music is deconstructed through the negation of much that the post serialist author stands for: by recourse to chance and aleatoric operations, by the collective rituals and improvisa- tory procedures of performance, by a questioning and satirising of the authority of the score, and by apparently offering performers and au- dience the final power in the production of meaning. By contrast, and absolutely different to these, the author in popular music is completely effaced or dissolved: this function is taken, in practice, by the “group”, the score as authoritative text becomes obsolete, and the relation be- tween star-‘‘authors”’ and audience becomes a glossy, surreal and hyper- bolic restatement of the cult of the romantic artist. As another example, we might contrast the typical forms of discourse associated with popular music and the modernist avant garde respec- tively. Popular music discourse — verbal, as in the speech of empirical real-time music production in the studio, but also written, as in rock criticism and the popular music press — is often lighthearted, stresses the personal, and for legitimation brings to bear only the “truth” reflected in the ordinary pop-lover’s bodily and emotional response, or the sheer >! For a more extensive discussion of this kind of analysis of difference in relation to dis- course, see E. LACLAU, Populist Rupture and Discourse, «Screen Education», XXXIV, 1980, pp. 87-93.226 = GEORGINA BORN market power reflected in the weekly sales charts. While the discourse typical of the modernist avant garde is extremely serious, impersonal, universalising and objective, often scientistic, and sees itself as beyond any immediate audience response, responsible only to the future. This almost perfect discursive antinomy, then, is no mere accident, but is reproduced within the cultural unconscious through a mutual relation of difference. In summary, from the approaches outlined we have a way id lich to analyse both the specific mediational ‘“‘contents” — discursive, so- cial, technological and so on — of different musical cultures, and their juxtaposition. But we also have a method by which to look beyond these “autonomous”, “‘internal’”’ contents and forms, and to examine how they relate to the wider space delineated by other, co-existent or prior, musics. 6. IRCAM: OUTLINE OF A SOCIAL SEMIOTICS OF A CONTEMPORARY MUSICAL CULTURE I want in this last section to cite briefly my research based on an ethnographic study of Boulez’s IRCAM in Paris, in order to indicate further the uses of the method outlined for the analysis of contemporary art music. In this research it has been necessary to analyse both the multitextuality of IRCAM culture — its complex theoretical, techno- logical and social mediations; and its intertextuality — the many scien- tistic rhetorics, from acoustics and psychoacoustics, from computer science and cognitive science, from fractal geometry and chaos theory, that ap- pear to drive music production in the institute, and that serve to legitimise it in the eyes of the mystified public, and of the civil servants who monitor IRCAM’s expenditure and its work. In order to understand the reality of IRCAM, it has also been cru- cial to trace the contradictions within the institute’s musical culture as a whole: whether the distance between Boulez’s original intentions and the institute’s actual form; the disparities (quantitative and qualitative) between the expected and the actual musical results; the gap between the extreme public confidence and the profound private doubts expressed by musicians working there; or the difference between the rational the- ory of computer music technology and the ad hoc, trial and error methods by which many of the most musical effects are eventually achieved. It has been impossible, finally, to grasp the character of IRCAM without understanding also its explicit and implicit antagonisms towards both its predecessors and its contemporary rivals in the field: including,UNDERSTANDING MUSIC AS CULTURE 227 nationally, the school of musique concréte at the GRM, with its less intellectualised, “empiricist” orientation; and internationally, the Ameri- can computer music centres, with their closer links to commerce and industry. IRCAM was set up with the aim of avoiding the shortfalls of each of these. More deeply, and temporally, IRCAM stands as Bou- lez’s attempt to move forward the entire monolith of western art mus- ic, through his analysis of the malaise that assailed it, and his diagnosis of what is necessary to supersede that malaise. Boulez has described this project as beyond the constitutive negations of the serialist peri- od.” But ironically, the rhetoric that he employs in arguing the need to overcome the historicist impasses of musical life itself contains im- plicit negative critiques: of the limitations of current concert halls, in- struments and technologies, timbral and intervallic possibilities. Yet more fundamental to the IRCAM project, and some may think so banal as not to require comment, are its foundations in an implicit assertion of absolute difference from the commercial, ‘‘mass’’ music and technology fields: its embodiment of the classic, seemingly unconscious, opposition between modernism and “mass” culture. In contrast to the quite conscious and articulable antagonisms above, these absolute differ- ences barely ‘“‘merit’’ articulation: they appear, within IRCAM, to be accepted as “‘self-evident”” by most IRCAM subjects. However through ethnographic access to certain subjects’ musical work beyond IRCAM, and to their private views, it becomes clear that ‘‘mass” popular music plays an important, if partial, role in many of their musical lives; so that it is not so much ‘“‘absolutely absent” as constantly repressed. These phenomena hint at the following, far from obvious, realities: first, at the fragmented musical subjectivities of young IRCAM musicians; and second, at how heavily constructed is the “absolute difference” on which IRCAM rests, and what powerful ideological work must go into reproduc- ing such a discursive strategy. This view of IRCAM may seem peremptory towards a “utopian ex- periment” now only some fifteen years old. I suggest, however, that it may approach closer to the complex reality of this musical culture in its context than the enchanted publicity and polemical attacks to which it has often been subjected. To conclude, we can now extend some basic issues raised earlier. The implications of the paper are to argue for the benefits of a unified methodological and theoretical approach to the study of music as cul- ture, and for all musics to be studied in this way; but also to insist 32 P. BOULEZ, Where are We Now?, in Orientations, London, Faber and Faber, 1986, p. 463.228 GEORGINA BORN that one cannot understand the meaning of one musical culture in isola- tion, without reference to its implicit and explicit relations with other, coexistent musical cultures — without the attempt, at least, to analyse musical culture in terms of totality.> Thus the most important and elu- sive insights drawn from my IRCAM study, as from the studies of La- ing and Roseman, come from analysing an apparently self-contained en- tity in relation not only to the most obviously adjacent social and cul- tural systems, but by reaching beyond that to examine the “cultural field” (Bourdieu) as a totality. It is notable, finally, that such an exten- sion of social semiotics beyond ‘‘internalist’”’ cultural analysis may also contribute to integrating two theoretical lineages which have often been depicted as irreconcilable: that of French (post) structuralism, and that of German critical theory. From the former we may derive modes of analysis of the kind that I have proposed. From the critical theory of Adorno and Benjamin we may remember the need to unsettle all self- evident cultural categories through a relentless process of de-idealisation and de-centring; and that this is only possible through the (always im- possible) attempt to think in terms of totality. 88 My own preliminary sketch of an analysis of modern musical culture in terms of totali ty can be found in G. BORN, On Modern Music Culture: Shock, Pop and Synthesis, «New Forma- tions», II, 1987, pp. 51-78. Bia ences secs bese Ree ae asa erman critical theory, see P. Dews, Logics of Disintegration: Post Structuralst Thought tnd ie Cain of Ciial Thcoe, Landon an New York, Vero, 198,