ICMS 13

th
13 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS ON MUSICAL SIGNIFICATION
4 – 7 April 2016
CANTERBURY CHRIST CHURCH UNIVERSITY
CANTERBURY, UK

WHAT DOES A CONCERT MEAN?

SEMIOSIS OF MUSICAL PERFORMANCE
David Baltuch, PhD
d.baltuch@skynet.be

Abstract
The impact of classical music on Western society seems to decrease : less spectators attend classical
concerts than in the past, less classical CD and DVD are sold worldwide, and classical music
receives less and less support from the school system. The cause of this phenomenon may partially
lie in the decreasing meaning that classical music live events seem to bear for the modern listener.
This paper puts musical performance into historical, functional and semiotic perspective: how did
musical performance evolve for the last 2,000 years; how does musical performance function today;
and how can we analyse classical music performance through modern semiotics? This paper also
raises the question of how to assist modern performers in their efforts to reassess the meaning of a
classical performance, to comprehend the audience's expectations and to propose innovative concert
formats that may foster anew the public's interest.

The subject of this paper has been the focus of many observers of the musical phenomenon, notably Norman
Lebrecht, Christopher Small, John Rink, Colin Lawson, and many other scholars whose works have informed
mine. My presentation is bound to be incomplete, as I deal with a fairly vast subject, and is likely to present traits
that are not often found in academic presentations. Many times, a lecture sums up the results of previous
research. In this case, I shall primarily investigate possible ways to go about my subject. Many times a semiotic
research studies phenomena through the lenses of a semiotic model and attempts, through this model, to reveal
new aspects to the observer. In this case, I shall review several semiotic theories that may be instrumental in
analysing musical performance. Finally, many times the audience has to intuitively infer the lecturers'
motivations behind their presentations. I this case, my intentions will be clearly explained from the outset. So,
why don't we start with this?

My aim in exploring the meaning of musical performance is to find possible ways to thwart the ongoing decrease
of impact that classical music seems to have on our society, and provide performers with the knowledge that
would enable them to understand more broadly what it is that they are doing onstage, to perceive more
thoroughly the audience's expectations and, hopefully, to steer performers' practice towards a performance of
style and content that would be more meaningful to all concerned: spectators, composers and performers.

I shall use three methods.

1. A historical approach:

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I shall be tracing succinctly what musical performance has been for the last 2,000 years in Western civilisation as
exposed notably in the impressive book edited by Colin Lawson in 2012, and in so doing, I'll be trying to access
some sort of cultural DNA present in each of us, and reach our historically remote selves, in the hope that our
perception of the past will help us put into perspective our current role as modern performers.

2. My second approach will substantially rely on the book edited by John Rink in 2002, Musical Performance, in
which various authors describe the functioning of a musical performance. I shall argue that these aspects are not
only attached to the functioning of a performance but also to its very meaning.

3. Finally, I shall briefly review several semiotic theories and try to identify what they can possibly teach us
about musical performance and how they could promote a better understanding of it.

What do I mean by meaning? In his book The Joy of Music, Leonard Bernstein devotes a section to the meaning
of music: “It always seems strange to a musician – he says – when the literary mind begins associating music
with all kinds of extra-musical phenomena, like hills and sprites and silver turnips”. He continues “Music, of all
arts, stands in a special region, unlit by any star but its own, and utterly without meaning”. For anyone who has
seen Bernstein conduct and gesturally metaphorise on timbres, rhythms, melodies and rests, it appears that music
did mean to him, on the podium, all sorts of these extra-musical things (literary or otherwise), which he was
eager to convey to the orchestra. But this is not what I mean by meaning. I do not refer directly to the meaning of
music, but, to borrow Christopher Small's term, to the meaning of “musicking” on a stage. What does it mean for
a musician to be the focus of hundreds of eyes and ears, and for a spectator to sit in a concert hall and be
subjected to these sound waves that we call music? What does it mean for a civilisation to invest time, money
and effort in the construction of concert halls and in the promotion of musical events? Unless we try and grasp
what it all means, we may find ourselves, sooner or later, performing meaningless concerts or attending
meaningless performances.

Some authors did cross the line, suggesting that this loss of meaning has already begun, imperilling our classical
music heritage. Is it not what Norman Lebrecht suggests in his book Who killed classical music?? There are,
indeed, alarming indicators, and this is not new: the number of orchestras worldwide is receding, musical
education is increasingly absent from schools, many concert halls are half-empty. Lebrecht argues: “Perlman,
whose name was once guaranteed to sell five thousand seats at London's Royal Albert Hall, was left looking at
empty rows in the half-sized Royal Festival Hall.” We can't fail to notice also that, for about a century, the
concert repertoire has been standardised, centring on works composed about 150 years ago or more. In 2012,
Leon Botstein clearly stated; “the typical concertgoer can look forward to hearing repeatedly the same hundred
or so works on instrumental concert programs year in and year out”. Lebrecht's arguments revolve around the
detrimental role played by managers and corporations. But let us remember Einstein's words of wisdom: “The
world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do
anything about it”. Indeed, Lebrecht continues: “concert fixers and ticket sellers, publishers and promoters,
agents and impresarios, acousticians, accountants, sound engineers, interior decorators, […] critics [...] all play a
greater role, for better or worse, than has been publicly acknowledged.”

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1. History of performance
Up to fairly recent times, 5 main trends could be observed in music history:
a. Public music making was assigned to lower classes of citizens. Upper classes (nobles, clergy and people from
the haute-bourgeoise) practised music mostly privately;
b. Music was most times associated with other events (theatre, religious or royal celebrations, banquets or
ballrooms, street or military parades or, indeed, activities on the battlefield);
c. Performers were most times as important, if not more important, than the composers being performed;
d. Most of the music being performed was written by living composers;
e. The only way to hear a musical event was to physically attend it.

From the end of the 19 th Century (at times even earlier) these 5 trends have been discontinued. Composers and
performers reached increasingly higher social status (and financial rewards). Music, especially instrumental
music, was dissociated from extra-musical events (and meaning, as Bernstein seems to suggest), becoming an
event on its own. Public buildings were erected all over Europe and were devoted to the dissemination of
musical works. Composers began to write down more, and more precise, information on their scores, implicitly –
and, in the case of Stravinsky and Ravel, explicitly – considering performers to be at the service of their scores.
More and more concerts featured works from the past, establishing a canonic repertoire. Bach, Handel, Haydn,
Mozart and Beethoven were the first composers to benefit from this canon. Short afterwards, a canonic way to
perform this repertoire appeared as well, which, interestingly, evolved over time. Finally, the sound of music
was dissociated from their sources in time and space, allowing listeners to hear music produced far away, or a
long time ago, or both.

These changes, occurring in the last 120 years or so, represent a real cultural landslide. Little wonder that modern
musicians lost their bearings and are now trying to answer questions they only recently learned to ask. What
Romanticism brought with it was the result of a slow, sometimes winding evolution. As in our modern times,
Ancient Greece cultivated the idea of musical contests, Medieval musicians experimented with new musical
technologies and instrument making, Renaissance musicians were gathering to create musical ensembles and
experiment with acoustics. During the Renaissance and Baroque eras music schools were opening and teachers
were designated to guide the neophyte into the art of music, and the first concert halls were built to accommodate
a growing audience.

In Western Europe, music ceased being considered a science and started to belong more closely to the arts,
notably by its acquaintance to rhetoric and poetry, which was its initial environment in Ancient Greece. Baroque
and early classical performers were expected to take an active part in the interpretation, and sometimes the
elaboration, of the composer's score, and Romantic performers such as Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt were
establishing the tradition of playing music from memory. Many seeds of our current musical practice have been
sown way back in our distant past.

2. Current musical practice

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As pointed out by Colin Lawson, music history has primarily recounted the history of the composers and their
works. The book he edited, The Cambridge History of Musical Performance, aims to correct this shortcoming.
The reader is made aware that music was not only composed, but also performed! Perhaps future research will
acknowledge that music was also heard by an audience. John Rink devotes his book Musical Performance to the
performer's side of the process. Little is said about “the role of the reader” as Umberto Eco would put it, that is
the role of the audience, for example in shaping the musical taste and fashion, or in decoding the composer's
message. However, now that previous performance practice has been established with an acceptable degree of
consistency, the question naturally arises: how was music perceived in previous times? Some research, fairly
marginal to my knowledge, deals with the slippery subject of history of perception.
In an attempt to construct meaning as it appears to the modern listener (and who else's task would it be to make
sense of a musical performance if not the spectator at whom this performance is aimed?) I shall briefly discuss
one chapter of Rink's book as if read from the audience's perspective. One of the necessary elements in
experiencing the catharsis in Ancient Greek tragedies was for the spectator to identify with the character on
stage, and this process remained relatively unchanged all along the history of theatre, up to the fairly recent
theories of distanciation developed by Bertold Brecht. It is not unreasonable to think that musical performance
also works, at least to some extent, with the principle of identification. So, what does it mean *for the audience*
to see a musician perform from memory?

As evoked earlier, this tradition has been established by Clara Schumann and Franz Liszt. It received mitigated
reception at first (from critics and audience), if not downright hostile, for reasons that probably had to do with
the breaking of previous habits and the apparent sensationalism that came with it. Nowadays, for concert soloists,
performing from memory is the rule rather than the exception. Scholars and musicians have argued that it helps
establish a deeper contact with the audience. It also seems to warrant a higher degree of preparation from the
performer. However, artists such as Bela Bartok firmly opposed this practice. Can the audience really detect a
memorised performance from a non-memorised one? Experiments have shown that memorised performances
received higher rates than non-memorised ones. However, in one of these experiments, the playing from memory
was made possible through further study of the same piece by the same performer. Is it then the deeper
knowledge of the music that the listeners rated or is it the memory itself? Further, thanks to a closer camera
angle, the NON-memorised performance was filmed with no music stand obstructing the view. Is it then the
proximity of the instrumentalist that received higher rates, or is it the non-memorised performance as such?

Since 2007, the International Symposium on Performance Science studies performance in a scientific way. I was
interested to note that issues involving the audience were increasingly addressed. For example, researchers have
studied the difference between expert and naïve listening, the impact of programme notes and background
knowledge on the public, the role that critics play in the audience's opinion, or the impact of the performer's stage
entrance on the listener's interest.

3. Semiotics
I shall now briefly discuss the semiotic implication of a musical performance, which leaves me no choice but to
be alarmingly superficial. As we know, human beings communicate through signs. Fortunately, or unfortunately,

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a person cannot download his or her ideas, concepts, or sentiments, onto the brain of another person. Human
beings use interfaces to communicate, be it metaphors, connotations, denotations, symbols, comparisons and so
forth. Music and musical performance may be seen as one of these interfaces, which semioticians call ‘sign’. But
of what would a musical performance be the sign?

The first semiotic theories were conceived at end of the 19 th Century and concerned spoken languages (Saussure,
then Jakobson and Chomsky). However, none of these theories was a perfect fit for music, as it appears, for
example, in Bernstein's Harvard Lectures dealing with the application of Chomsky's linguistics to music. Peirce
developed a concept of triple trichotomy, taking on board not only the signifier and signified (which he called
representamen and representatum), but also the context of the communication (which he called interpretant) and
the nature of the sign (quali-sign, sin-sign and legi-sign, which belong to the broader categories of firstness,
secondness and thirdness). He also developed the concept of abduction, some sort of inference informed by the
circumstances of the communication, an idea similar to Henri Bergson’s concept of intuition, leading to what
Bergson called absolute knowledge versus relative knowledge. Eco developed a vast semiotic system, notably
the notion of ratio facilis and ratio difficilis. For example, nothing essential would be lost in the written
communication if we, literally, don’t dot our “i's” or cross our “t's” (a case of ratio facilis), but take the horns out
of Beethoven Fifth Symphony (a case of ratio difficilis) and the symphony will lose a great part of its meaning.
These concepts seem particularly suitable for artistic productions, as they deal with the circumstances in which
they were encoded and the conditions for their optimal decoding.

From the 1950' or so, semiotic theories, dealing more specifically with music, were developed, notably by
Molino and Nattiez (the concepts of poiesis, neutral level and aesthesis), Barthes (somathemes and grain of the
voice), Monelle (topics and subjectivity) Hatten (gestures and tropes), Tarasti (musical modalities). They all shed
light on various aspects of musical signification. It now seems beneficial to try and integrate these semiotic
theories into a comprehensive system, and thoroughly investigate live performances of classical music.

4. Conclusion
I argue that we should not conceive of this semiotic approach only in absolute terms, but also in comparison with
other art forms such as theatre, dance, pop music, rock, folk, world music and jazz, or relative to situational
factors such as recorded and/or broadcasted performances, whether on radio, TV or over the Internet . This
exploration would assist performers in their efforts to better comprehend what it is that they do onstage and
perhaps, with the help of new technologies and innovative concert formats, revive our classical music heritage.

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