Significance and meaning are not the same. Although everyday life, and everything that appears, is enriched with significance, it is without meaning, since meaning can be understood only beyond everyday life.

Significance is only a springboard (as the sign-form of the work), propelling us towards the meaning which somewhere exists. In terms of significance, the text is a sequence of informational units (signs) appearing in consecutive order. But in terms of meaning, the text appears as a semantic (structural) unit (as a creative work). The meaning is the logical essence of a thing. We must distinguish between two cases of musical semantics: the musical “utterance” (fixed in signs) and the musical “telling” which, when “pronounced” in an appropriate way, gives semantic meaning to the interpretive act. A musician is someone who knows that meaning and is able to express it, whereas a craftsperson who only gives sound to the notes cannot be called a musician, just as a person who only professes the religious signs and participates in the rites, and does not know or understand the truths of the faith, cannot be called a believer. “Knowledge is an insertion of becoming into schemes created by humans which are none other than rules of activity. Knowledge is required to master a particular sphere of life. […] Thus the basis of knowledge is ‘belief’ or a peculiar imperative.”Footnote 1

Significance is a reference to what is human and only human; meaning is a reference to what is beyond human. […] For this reason, significance is without meaning, and meaning is without significance (which is why only giving sound to signs of significance is without meaning, as this does not involve transcendence beyond the “surface” – J. R.). And the more significant the human world, the more meaningless its existence.Footnote 2 (The greater the focus on the instrumental sphere of expression, the further one moves away from the goal – the revelation of meaning – J. R.).

Significance is what a given thing, a word, a gesture, a sign signifies or hints at, while meaning is not only the goal, the basis, of an act, but also its inner content, the logical essence of the thing. To understand (to “get a sense”) means to grasp the meaning, the essence, the thought, with the mind. “Anything acquires meaning if it is connected with, or indicates, or refers to, something beyond itself, so that its full nature points to and is revealed in that connection.”Footnote 3 Significance and meaning are connected with another—different but related—pair of concepts: the text and the work, where, basing oneself on the text, one needs to open up the work through understanding—and interpreting—it. Understanding and interpretation are fundamentally one and the same thing. “Interpretation is the interaction of information reflecting the perceived qualities and relations of a being with the elements of a person’s experience which are actualized during the act of interpretation.”Footnote 4 The yearning to know and to feel a firm foundation in action is connected with the duality of the person’s being. In the world of empirical existence, a person is in the power of the present moment, of what is on the surface, hic et nunc (here and now). In our case, this is when we do not try to look behind the signs of the notes for the causes which give rise to them. There is another dimension of the human existential world where a person is not satisfied with the data of empirical experience but tries to discern the meaning of what is signified. This requires experience which is accumulated from a theoretical perspective, based on a relationship with relevant sources which create the possibility of deeper insight.

Cognitive, value-based and activity-based meanings are usually related. No activity is possible without cognition and evaluation. The quality of experience, and its value-based direction, shapes the quality of consciousness, and its immanent content. “‘When one means something, it is oneself meaning’; so one is oneself in motion. […] Meaning something is like going up to someone.”Footnote 5 When one also is meaning the intoned structure—and hearing it—a natural conduit of sound emerges in the intonational process. “Consciousness has no meaning apart from the world. Consciousness is nothing apart from its objects, meaning not the empirical object, but the ideal object, or better, the essence (the eidos).”Footnote 6 Consciousness is always the consciousness of something, it is intentional and directed towards a perceived object. The activity of consciousness is determined by the dimension of values—the value basis colours and inspires activity. That is to say, the understanding of the essence provides access to the means of its expression. The essence must go outwards, it must emanate (from the Latin emanatio, meaning outflow, diffusion). The emanating phenomenon in which it reveals itself is expression.

It is important to give meanings back to what has become automatism, inertia, routine. “A person realizes themselves only insofar as they attain meaning.”Footnote 7 Once one has understood the insufficiency of what is visible (the signs), there is point in embarking on the search for meaning. Since to understand the text is to pass from what it says (signifies) to what it talks about and how.

Man’s final goal [is] “to live while contemplating (theōrein) the truth (alētheia) and the order (taxis) of all things and by contributing to the establishment of them […] insofar as possible”. [Poseidonius] We can contribute to seeing that order reigns in all things to the extent that we are ourselves a part of that order. But we must still become aware of that order by having an exact vision of it, by interpreting it correctly.Footnote 8

This is knowing what you would like to understand and how to manifest one’s understanding. And this will be a contribution to the creation of order in one’s actions and the legitimation of one’s human duty.

The text becomes a work of art once it is manifested and enriched by expression—since the text and the creative work, though related, are different things. The text is the sensory form of the work, whereas the work already exists before the text emerges; the work originates before it is transformed into the appropriate signs on paper, only partly capable of representing the energy and action which were the cause of these signs. That is why the act of interpretation is necessary, so that the text is transformed into the work, which is transferred through understanding into the inner being of the interpreter—their consciousness and their feelings—and becomes immanent. This is confirmed even by the definition of the means to carry out this action. “A musical instrument is any tool, instrument or mechanism with whose assistance our inner musical world (my italics—J. R.) is conveyed through specific sounds.”Footnote 9 Thus, intonation can be considered synonymous with meaning, since it is only through intonation that the meaning—the idea—and the affect is manifested. To this end, there should also be mastery of the instruments as tools of expression, to fulfil the demands of intonation. “Music is made of conventionally organized sounds. It signifies only itself. [Such is] the condition of music and the self-contained autonomy of the musical code.”Footnote 10 Meaning (that of the work as well) is not something given but a challenge which is posed. It has to be discovered through the given—through the questions of the signs.

While we remain on the surface of “significant” things or events, we cannot encounter the fullness of meaning or meaning in its full form. But perhaps everyday life is not as flat as we are accustomed to believe. Maybe it has depth and another, invisible, side which is hidden from us, but not everywhere and not always. […] The veil of significance hides the other side of everyday life. And each of us has moments when that veil is torn and suddenly something else is revealed, which we never encounter when we walk on the stairs of the everyday. These are moments of recovery of sight, of a turning point, of the sudden invasion of another reality into our horizons; these are flashes which open up the extraordinary, the sacred, the mysterious of ordinary things.Footnote 11

Interpretation, as access to meaning, is a never-ending action. It is always different, never repeating itself. The composer, when creating their texts, also interprets (explains) their ideas by fixing them through the form of signs; one needs to understand these ideas to explain to oneself and reinterpret the composer’s creative interpretation. “Meaning never emerges as a final given thing but, by achieving clarification myself, I can move forward, endlessly, across horizons that are continually awakened anew.”Footnote 12

To understand interpretation as the act of the expression of meaning, it helps to explain the Latin word expressio. The prefix ex- forms the first part of the compound word, indicating direction from or out of something. Thus, the ex- direction—in the case of expression—is an action moving from the understood meaning to its external manifestation in sound.

When we refer to activity, each sort has its own characteristic and necessary type of thinking which corresponds to it. The object of musical thinking is primarily the relationships between sounds, which are operands accommodating a musical idea in the structured text of the composer. Ernst Kurth said that it is not the sounds that are important but what is between them. He claimed that a psychic energy flows between them, forcing the sounds to move (this is already the sphere of the interpreter). But psychic energy forces not the sounds themselves to move but the relationships determined by particular grammars, which change depending on the context. The sonic relationships not only enable the sonic idea itself to exist but give it meaning. This is, of course, a purely musical meaning which no one has yet managed to explain in verbal language. For us to understand music, we require the ability to think musically: to structure the sound phenomena and to decipher their meaning. “In order to understand a thing as existing according to its own necessity, only one move is possible—to understand it as a causa sui, that is, at the same time as the cause of itself and as a consequence.”Footnote 13 Yuri Lotman was right when he said that music is characterised by relational semantics, that is, the semantics of relations. There are models of musical structures from which text is composed. This is syntax (a term borrowed from linguistics)—the structure of sentences of a language (and thus, of musical language) or their elements. These are motifs, syntagma (from the Greek syntagma, meaning something joined together; a combination of two or more adjacent significant intonational units), phrases, as well as sets of “superphrases”: in this case, there is a complete analogy with syntactical structures of verbal language, and the link between music and language is indisputable.

Musical language is the sphere of musical expression and texts. Musical expression realises the possibilities of (musical) language lying implicitly in its grammars. Not only the text itself but also each of its elements belongs to musical language and must be understood as part of the interpretive act. Musical language is a system of possibilities which forms the basis of musical expression. “A piece of music is a particular meaning embodied in a (real or imaginary) musical fabric which sounds. The dualism of sound and meaning features in many formulations describing the relationship between form and content in music. However, many of these definitions do not refer to the uniqueness and unrepeatability of the sound and the meaning realized only in that work.”Footnote 14 The task of interpretation, therefore, is to grasp that individuality and the intonational—affective—narrative form and, following this, to express all this. The grasp of artistic reality—of meaning—requires a competent relationship with the text of the musical work, a thorough analysis of its structure. That is why the hierarchical relationship between the parts and the whole is so important. Activity based on structural analysis must be founded on knowledge of the subject of general and musical culture.

One person’s reason has been led to see things by the aid of another person’s reason, and is none the worse for that. It is thus still an open question whether each person’s reason exists absolutely on its own or whether it is the result of some (rational) cause—in fact, of some other reason.Footnote 15

Thus, it is only in relation to cultural objects, to important “others,” that a person acquires cultural experience and the power to act in a cultured and competent way.