The Organic Principle in Music Analysis: a Semiotic Approach
Paolo Rosato · 2013
Music analysis is an expression that covers a wide field of meanings and phenomena. We can analyze music as an anthropological condition of human beings; or as a set of historically determined social systems; or finally, as a concrete, individual musical expression. The latter can be regarded from the sides of enunciation and of utterance, which in turn take the opposing forms of text-system (not necessarily written) and performed-text. My aim is to demonstrate that a common organic principle joins together all these different musical facts. That principle is homeostasis, a term coined by Walter Bradford Cannon at the end of the 1920s, and first applied to music by Fulvio Delli Pizzi in 1984. Homeostasis is the property that a system or an organism must maintain in a stable and constant condition in its own internal environment. When applied to analysis of musical utterances, homeostasis allows us to give to musical signs a proper content: composers, performers, and listeners can deal with musical signs as people usually do with all the signs of natural languages. The proper homeostatic content in turn finds its roots in tensional-relaxation processes within human body. Homeostasis regulates both melodic and harmonic processes, at least of the Western musical tradition, and allows them to obtain an internal syntactic meaning that is neither merely structural nor merely formal. Pitches, as our analyses demonstrate, are not neutral in their interactions and relationships. In fact, homeostasis arranges melodic and harmonic elements - as it can do with all musical parameters - into significant units that act as organic parts of a musical whole. I do not deny that musical signs are also historically, socially, and culturally codified. I only claim that historical, social, and cultural internal musical meanings result from a dialectical process between natural , transcendental conditions, and their actualization in space and time. (In this respect, it seems that Raymond Monelle's theory of topics can cover just a part of the problem of musical meaning.) Main references in my research are drawn from the semiotic perspectives of Umberto Eco and Eero Tarasti, from Louis Hjelmslev's linguistic theory, and from Delli Pizzi's musical theory, this last adapted to my personal approach. In most of this book, I present my original analyses of music of the Western tradition, from ancient plainchant to contemporary music. In Chapter 1, I elaborate an enlarged musical-organic model: like other complex natural phenomena, music may be comprised of organic and/or inorganic parts, and regarded as a complex system endowed with living properties. In Chapters 2 and 3, respectively, I present melody and harmony as two systems. Starting from sound waves as a physical system, I analyze the evolution of melody as a symbolic, syntactic, and semantic system. Moreover, I develop Delli Pizzi's harmonic theory, while arguing that Schenker's, Riemann's, and de la Motte's approaches are neither organic nor functionalist in the strict sense. In Chapter 4, I point out the strong relations between Tarasti's existential semiotics and my homeostatic perspective; this allows me to apply the model constructed in Chapter 1 to musical pieces regarded as organic text-systems. Finally, I elaborate in Chapter 5 a new model capable of explaining relations among musical subjects - entrepreneurs, composers, performers, customers, and so on - who can interact, even though very distant from each other in space and time. To do this, I introduce the concept of Manifestum, drawn from Martin Heidegger's thought, but adapted to my specific aims.