Both the natural (verbal) language and musical (intonational) language of sounds are a manifestation of human thought, dressed in a particular grammar. This is understood as a comprehensive system of language, comprising the entirety of formal and semantic means of organising a linguistic (and therefore musical) text. The function of any language is to register and convey meanings which correspond to some kind of content. The meaning depends on the energised informative capacity of the expression. Understanding language as a way of speaking (sound expression), and understanding what the language is saying, are not the same thing. The understanding of musical language is achieved in specific ways which enable one to get close to the sense which it expresses. The concept of analogy (from the Greek aná meaning duality; and lógos meaning science, word and the like) is suitable for describing the juxtaposition of language and musical phenomena. Analogy should not be confused with relatedness. Relatedness is a simple similarity, while analogy is the proximity of different things. Analogy entails a certain duality: similarity and difference combined. “The subject brings ‘sense’ to abstract, moving sound forms only in the process of listening to (hearing—J.R.) music, by modalizing a musical structure in the same way that a speaker modalizes speech with wishes, will, belief, and emotions.”Footnote 1 Steve Reich states: “The pleasure I get from playing is not the pleasure of expressing myself, but of subjugating myself to the music and experiencing the ecstasy that comes from being a part of it.”Footnote 2

Both language and music are fixed by signs but the former simply points to the meaning of the words, while the latter directs one to the meaning to be discovered behind the signs and through them.

In its dual existence, musical language is similar to verbal language (or rather, analogous to it—J.R.). After all, in verbal language too, there are real and abstract units (phonemes, morphemes, syntagmata etc.). An abstract system is inherent in any [linguistic activity]. Thanks to abstraction, we can distinguish the main mechanisms of musical language. These are grammars and models. They have different functions. Grammars control “atomized” units, defining their behaviour in the text, and models “collect” them into syntactic-level structures so that they can be manipulated when constructing a musical form. […] The factual grammatical unit of music is not only, and not so much, the sound, but primarily the relations of sounds, which in musical theory have acquired the name of modal functions.Footnote 3

As with any other construct of signs, musical language belongs to the sphere of semiotics. Semiotics is the science of signs and their systems, or the science of natural and artificial languages serving as systems of signs. In turn, a semiotic object is any totality of meanings which has become the object of analysis.

An understanding of the relationship between sounds and meanings in music can best be approached in terms of a comparison between the role of sound in language and the role of sound in music. The conventional wisdom concerning the relationship between sounds and meanings in language is that it is “arbitrary”. There is no necessary connection between the inherent characteristics of sounds and the meanings they evoke, although, in the case of onomatopoeia (from the Greek onomatopoiíā, meaning a creation of words, or imitation of sounds by reflecting an underlying sound, instrumentation or rhythmics—J.R.), there may be one in practice. Sounds of words can signify without invoking the sonic manifestations of the phenomena to which they refer.Footnote 4

When we give a sound form to a musical text, just as when we read a written text with verbal language, we have to form words from the alphabetic signs (because we think in words) and recreate their phonetic form in our minds; similarly, the reading of the written musical notation should be based not on the perception of the individual notes—the “letters”—but on the perception of their particular constructs—their structures, that is, on hearing them before we give them sound, not only according to the parameter of pitch but also according to the features meeting the requirements of intonation (timbre, stroke, character of dynamics and movement etc.). In some cases, when musical perceptions are of a higher level than the power of expression, the artistic truth is nevertheless revealed—for example, in the case of singers (in pop music) who are talented from a musical perspective but do not have any special voice.

However, the relationships between sounds and meanings in music seem much more confusing than in speech. After all, the art of music is the art of sounds, and the meaning which they express is of a non-conceptual kind. Here the quality of the expression in sound is very important. The sphere of mastering an instrument has quite rightly much improved, though sadly too often without serving the artistic purpose. (The entrenchment of instrumentism is dealt with in a separate chapter.Footnote 5) The traditional semiotic statement about the signifier and the signified is to be understood as a principle of substitution describing a sign as something that stands in place of something.Footnote 6 A sign is “something by knowing which we know something more” (Charles Peirce).Footnote 7 A sign is a “two-sided psychological entity” where the concept and the sound-image are “intimately united” (Ferdinand de Saussure).Footnote 8

When referring to musical semantics as the science of the meaning of (musical) language units, one must distinguish two types of semantics recognised by modern European musical tradition: intra-musical and extra-musical. The former is the semantics of music itself—potentially always autonomous art: the work as an object in itself. All intra-musical semantic signs—compositional, genre-related, harmonic and others—belong to sign relations, which give the work inner syntactical stability—important for the semiotic understanding of the text. On the other hand, “[T]he conclusion that musical signs do not have cognitive meanings by no means implies that musical utterances cannot have cognitive effects.”Footnote 9 This aspect of musical perception is connected with the overall development of the personality. The influence of extra-musical semantics is very important here. In this one can find signs close to any other humanistic or artistic activity not directly related to music by its nature. Extra-musical semantics are philosophical-aesthetic ideas transferred into musical, expressive realities, that is, into musical—sound—expression. All this happens at a subconscious level. One can make a comparison here with the food which we consume, where the organism, when processing it, diverts useful substances in a beneficial direction, supplying itself with energy and health. It is the same with spiritual food. Contact with objects of spiritual culture enriches a person’s inner world. “The soul of culture is the culture of the soul”: from this we acquire “many incentives to create the inner culture and to form the inner person.”Footnote 10 The quality of the inner person is disseminated in their activity. Expression is the unfolding of inner experience which has been acquired also through the extra-musical contacts of the interpreter. “A person must, as a duty, make use of cultural signs and use them to create their own signs.”Footnote 11 Such a transformative approach towards cultural signs can appear paradoxical for the settled episteme in which one desires straightforward, indisputable clarity and artisanal accuracy (not veracity). However,

a painting and a poem are simply pretexts. The only meaning they have is the one—or those—which we give them. Behold! The “we” has been raised to the ultimate instance of meaning. It commands the cultural filter of our perception of the world. It also selects and organizes the epistemes that “become implicit” in specific objects such as paintings, poems, and narratives, and are the result of the intertwinings of the signifier. The operation has succeeded; meaning has been evacuated from signifying objects; relativism has won the day: meaning is no longer there; all meanings are possible.Footnote 12

This quotation can easily be read as relevant also to the issue of our search for meaningfulness in music. Here, the “we” resolves the problems of meaningful expression, and the result, obviously, depends on the quality of that “we,” the power of artistic decision, not just the will. “The soul is a spiritual vessel filled with light. When light comes, a person sees their positive and negative qualities with regard to the qualities of the light,”Footnote 13 claims Michael Laitman, a proponent of Kabbalah (an esoteric school of Jewish thought).

There are two things on which all the performance of human activity depends, will and power. If either of them is lacking, there is no activity that can be performed. In the absence of the will, a man is unwilling to do something and therefore does not undertake it; and in the absence of the power to do it, the will is useless.Footnote 14

In addition to will and power, desire and experience are very important too. Desire gives birth to will, and will to experience, and from experience comes also power.

Any existential experience is existential not only because it is an event. It becomes both an event and an experience because it is understood in one way or another. […] But experience is also experience because there is always something in it that surpasses the understanding that has occurred. Experience is hermeneutic. It is at the same time both an event and an understanding. […] The event forms understanding and is formed by it. The event attracts the attention of the whole being (the person—J.R.) and requires a response—an understanding (and therefore, the possibility of expression).Footnote 15

Musical language is not to be learned from its signs alone. Music as art is an element of a person’s spiritual inquiry (spiritual movements). The connection between a person and music is not the relationship between subject and object—it is the relationship of subject and subject (I—You). The “You” is the revelations of the creator’s spirit encoded in the signs. For this reason the primacy of hearing (the ear) over speaking (sound expression) is very important. When we have heard (understood) the language, only then do ways—means—emerge to reveal that hearing in sounds. That is exactly why Gadamer looks for linguisticality even in music, art and architecture. And it is why the influence of rhetoric in establishing the rules of musical language is so important. “Music is a ‘language’ whose chief beauty is multiple meaning.”Footnote 16 Musical compositions—the documents of musical language—are not constant (stable) derivatives of the signs, like words in verbal language. Musical language does not have a stable lexical composition, a vocabulary with fixed meanings. Through its text we can pinpoint barely any one thing precisely. The efforts of composers to signify their wishes as far as possible through various indicators are somewhat futile. The question arises what determines the preconditions for deviations from the texts (of course, in moderation)—what type of deviations are permissible, and even unavoidable in the interpretive process. These “inaccuracies” are discussed more fully in the chapter of this book devoted to intonation.Footnote 17 “Truth appears in concealment” is an ancient Greek saying. But you want to find it… What is the artistic truth whose revelation the form demands through the signs it has provided?

It is said that music is the embodiment of the intellect latent in sound, as if, by saying so, extending a wish for the generator of the sound to have such a quality (of intellect). From the standpoint of Thomist philosophy, the intellect is the potential of the essence in a person. The concept of intellect is often distorted by taking it to mean the knowledge of facts, or specific “correct” ways of acting, or a bundle of skills, and not as a basic creative capability based on values. The artistic intellect can be considered as the artistic will, the spiritual origin as the driving force of artistic activity, the ability to penetrate a work; to hear its language through the veil of the signs, feel its form, and thus get close to the “something” which is its artistic quality. As far as experience is concerned, musical intellect is the ability to read and understand musical language, the logic of its structures and through them the general idea of the work. This happens through expression which, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s view, is “the matter that has been made sense of, or […] materialized meaning, as an element of freedom that has permeated necessity.”Footnote 18 In this respect, when looking at the actualisation of music through expression (“art is expression”—Wittgenstein), the system of notation operates only as a moderate limitation on arbitrariness. The criterion of expression is not the accuracy in giving sound to the signs but the goal of penetrating through them (the so-called experience of the vertical dimension of the text).

The existing thing does not simply offer us a recognizable and familiar surface contour; it also has an inner depth of self-sufficiency that Heidegger calls its “standing-in-itself”.Footnote 19

It is universally acknowledged that the subject of the humanities is an expressive and speaking being (in our case—through creating sound). This being never coincides with itself like a sign with the signified. In music, this being is the sign waiting to be prompted to speech. The sign is an associatively constructive means of music, indicating the direction (which acts as an indicator) in the search for meaning, but does not itself represent that meaning. The quality of operating on a single plane, linearity, can only be avoided by an artistic personality who is “the living activity of self-creation, communication and attachment, that grasps and knows itself, in the act, as the movement of becoming personal. To this experience no one can be conditioned nor compelled.”Footnote 20

The perception of the meaning of music requires, in addition to an intuitive sense (intonational capacity), thought, internal culture, imagination and the perception of many other—extra-musical—things. Just staring at the text of a musical work will not open up its vertical (semantic) dimension. The perception of both linguistic and musical texts requires an intelligent reading of them. Only this type of relationship gives birth to meanings.