Abstract
This paper investigates musical semiotics (how listeners experience meanings in music). It discusses what bearing listeners’ experience of meanings may have for their aesthetic experience of music. The study is rhetorical because its focus is effect, not meanings in themselves. It employs “aesthetic protocol analysis,” a design where informants write about their responses and associations while they experience an aesthetic artifact—in this case the first movement of Edward Elgar’s Cello Concerto. It is found that listeners’ experienced meanings are fleeting and of multifarious types, showing both intersubjective overlap and divergence. The main claim is that finding meanings in music should not be the purpose of listening; rather, engagement with musical meanings should be seen as a source of, and a means to, aesthetic experience.
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- 1.
In the piano score used here, I have, for each numbered section, inserted the time count at which that section begins in the du Pré/Barenboim YouTube video. The time counts in the video for the numbers in the score are the following: 0: 0.08—1: 1.18—2: 1.38—3: 2.00—4: 2.23—5: 2.47—6: 3.09—7: 3.45—8: 4.26—9: 4.45—10: 5.02—11: 5.26—12: 5.45—13: 6.11—14: 6.42—15: 7.05—16: 7.28—17: 7.53.
A performance of the entire concerto, with orchestral accompaniment and with the same cellist playing the solo part as in the present study, can be heard and seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3apFfcFbjg.
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Kock, C. (2018). The Semiotics and Rhetoric of Music: A Case Study in Aesthetic Protocol Analysis. In: Kjeldsen, J. (eds) Rhetorical Audience Studies and Reception of Rhetoric. Rhetoric, Politics and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61618-6_7
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