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In a video commentary, pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim (2016) discussed the dangers of verbal descriptions of music by presenting two seemingly contradictory explanations about the ‘meaning’ of the theme of the final movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op.10/3 given by pianists Edwin Fischer and Claudio Arrau. We examined the tempo and dynamic fluctuations obtained from the studio recordings of this theme by Fischer in 1948 and 1954, and by Arrau in 1964 and 1985 by using the Sonic Visualiser software (Cannam et al., 2010), and interpreted these results by using Steve Larson’s (2012) theory of musical forces, and Robert Hatten’s (2018) theory of virtual agency in western music. According to our analyses, the differences in the performances of Fischer and Arrau can be metaphorically correlated with the different meanings these pianists attributed to Beethoven’s theme. We concluded that the seemingly contradictory verbal descriptions of these pianists indicate different aesthetically warranted emotions they aimed to communicate through their performances of Beethoven’s theme.

Music conveys expressive meaning, and it elicits affective and associative responses in listeners. Historical documents from the 19th century contain reflections about the perceived expression of and affective responses to music in a wide range of works, including symphonies and operas. Therefore, we asked what verbal descriptors found in contemporary writings from the 19th century provide information about the perceived expressive qualities. Additionally, we examined whether the sources hint at situational / contextual factors. To this end, we investigated the descriptors used to describe the perception of a specific type of music, defined through a set of 16 features. We called this type of music “Glorifying Hymnic.” We searched a large amount of 19th-century symphonic music to identify as many excerpts displaying these features. Then, we investigated the description of the listening experience of the excerpts mainly using the RIPM (Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals) database. We found 47 compositions with 48 excerpts that matched our rather strict criteria and 102 textual sources that provided sufficiently concrete information regarding how several of the excerpts have been perceived. We found a very high degree of consistency in the description of the music: It has been described as glorious, powerful, triumphant and victorious, grand, joyous and happy, solemn, exciting, noble, tranquil and sometimes proud. It also elicited associations with singing, especially choral singing, and with religion. Only very few connections between music perception and situational factors were detected relating to religious associations and associations of the music with choral singing. They might refer to special circumstances in France and Germany respectively. We discuss our findings in the context of both historical perspectives and musicpsychological models.

In many ways the school music curriculum has become increasingly diverse since the 1970s. For example, ‘pop’ and ‘world’ musics have been listed in UK curricula and syllabuses with an aim of becoming more inclusive. However, this article argues that such approaches to curriculum as content have confounded social justice in school music, and in particular when perpetuating a prejudicial discourse. To understand this discourse, three ‘distortions’ of the material nature of musical knowledge are explored as potential sources of ongoing student alienation from school music: reification, hegemonic appropriation and the loss of meaning. These distortions are also exemplified through a case study critique of social realism and the UK government’s Model Music Curriculum. By way of conclusion, and as a possible resolution to the distortions, some characteristics of a curriculum as process are proposed that have implications for decolonisation and wider issues of social justice, such as class and gender.

In this article, I theorize a new conception of musical meaning, based on J. L. Austin’s theory of performative utterances in his treatise How to Do Things with Words . Austin theorizes language meaning pragmatically : he highlights the manifold ways language performs actions and is used to “do things” in praxis. Austin thereby suggests a new theoretic center for language meaning, an implication largely developed by others after his death. This article theorizes an analogous position that locates musical meaning in the use of music “to do things,” which may include performing actions such as reference and disclosure, but also includes, in a theoretically rigorous fashion, a manifold of other semiotic actions performed by music to apply pressure to its contexts of audition. I argue that while many questions have been asked about meanings of particular examples of music, a more fundamental question has not been addressed adequately: what does meaning mean? Studies of musical meaning, I argue, have systematically undertheorized the ways in which music, as interpretable utterance, can create, transform, maintain, and destroy aspects of the world in which it participates. They have largely presumed that the basic units of sense when it comes to questions of musical meaning consist of various messages, indexes, and references encoded into musical sound and signifiers. Instead, I argue that a considerably more robust analytic takes the basic units of sense to be the various acts that music (in being something interpretable) performs or enacts within its social/situational contexts of occurrence. Ultimately, this article exposes and challenges a deep-seated Western bias towards equating meaning with forms of reference, representation, and disclosure. Through the “performative” theory of musical utterance as efficacious action, it proposes a unified theory of musical meaning that eliminates the gap between musical reference, on the one hand, and musical effects, on the other. It offers a way to understand musical meaning in ways that are deeply contextual (both socially and structurally): imbricated with the human practices that not only produce music but are produced by it in the face of its communicative capacities. I build theoretically with the help of various examples drawn largely from tonal repertoires, and I follow with lengthier analytical vignettes focused on experimental twentieth and twenty-first century works.

What forms of practices can we observe in music education settings? Is it always music just because there are instruments in the room and some sounds are produced or because we can identify some pieces of a musical work now and then? Or is it because the children are engaged in self-determined activities? Or does the verbalization of behavior in musical terms prove this to be musical practice? This and other thoughts that guided the initial interpretations in a teaching research project based on video materials have shown to be fallacies during deeper analyses. Since the indicators that this paper argues to be fallacies seem to be quite common-some in participatory observation of music practice (reflective practice of music educators) and others in theoretical and research work on music education—the identification and reflection of these fallacies could be of general value for music education discourse and practice. Various examples demonstrate how undifferentiated or even fallacious interpretations of practices in music education settings can undermine possibilities for aesthetic experience and musical practice. The paper argues that the necessary differentiation in observation depends on a reconsideration of philosophical questions and concepts from the past.

As a former member of the New Music Studio (1970-90), Barnabás Dukay (1950) started his career in the context of American minimal music and European serialism. Nonetheless, his music has little in common with that of the members of the Studio. Dukay breaks the continuity of tradition, avoiding to define himself in reference to the past, and so his music can become a means of self-recognition. This music is 'without qualities' insofar as it cannot be identified with anything outside of itself, and thus in effect turns against itself. Therefore, in Dukay's approach, professionalism loses its autonomy, being over-ridden by ethics. In his compositional technique, however, Dukay takes sides with premodern thinking, above all polyphonic procedures, primarily canonic treatment, as well as certain generic labels (symphony, quodlibet, motet, song-motet, canonic motet). Archaic thinking also plays a role in his works: in his composition for orchestra entitled To the Setting Sun Dukay restricts the playability of the fifteen variations to certain phases of the zodiac. Each of the parts includes only two notes, which the conductor determines by means of the calendar and certain charts. The fact that Dukay has exclusively set traditional or mystical texts (Tao Te Ching, Jeremiah, The Gospel of Matthew, The Revelation to John, John the Baptist), rather than literary ones, bears witness to an understanding of sacrality, which considers the individual religions as manifestations of a universal tradition. Hence this music can be called sacral, but does not give itself over to the dogmatics of any historical religion. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Distinct performances of the same song can mean very different things. Yet the meaning of the song may be fixed. Gracyk's immediate purpose is to show how the interplay of semantics and pragmatics generates different meanings in different performances. Context-dependent aspects of a song's meaning should not be confused with context-dependent aspects of a performance's meaning. Gracyk's more general purpose is to advance our understanding of musical meaning. Musical performances are rich in meaning because semantic information, contingently associated with a musical structure, generates myriad possibilities for generating pragmatic contextual supplementation of the work during its performances.

Davies raises two questions: what compositional strategy should one adopt if one wants to compose a song that works?; and, how should we understand the contributions of words and music to the \"meaning,\" in a broad sense, of songs, and how should we explain why many successful songs seem to employ \"limp\" texts? Davies argues that the issues raised by these two questions may be closely related. It is plausibly because of the ways in which words and music work together in generating the \"meaning\" of a song that the most successful general strategy of song composition accords the music rather than the words the guiding role.

The causal-manipulative approach makes a strong distinction between meaning as a property of communicative acts, and meaning as social value or significance. The former sense is relevant to an investigation into musical communication. The matter of whether music is capable of semantics is dismissed, as this capability is theoretically possible for any system of observable actions, provided there is a community of speakers and public convention. Instead, a model of communication is proposed where content is located not in the musical utterance itself, but rather in the minds of conspecifics in the form of propositional and non-propositional mental states. Content, instead, is constituted by mental states, and these mental states are caused by musical communicative acts. Communication therefore has as its goal the manipulation of mental states in conspecifics, by causal means. It is the conscious perception of a complex of propositional and non-propositional mental states that gives rise to the phenomenon of communicative meaning in music. Glazbu se često smatra komunikacijskom. U ovom se članku predstavlja pristup glazbenom značenju koji odbija tipicnu 'semanticku' i 'komunikacijsku' nomenklaturu (kao što je 'prijenos informacija') i koji tvrdi da je glazbeno značenje rezultat uzročnih procesa u međuljudskim interakcijama koje su primarno manipulacijske. Članak počinje isticanjem razlike između komunikacijskog značenja i 'značenja-kao-vrijednosti'. Komunikacijsko značenje svojstvo je komunikacijskog čina, a značenje-kao-vrijednost je sociološka, kontekstom potaknuta vrijednosna proejena. Ukratko su opisana stapanja dvaju značenja termina 'značenje' u glazbenoj literaturi. Zatim se tvrdi da je upotreba termina 'semantika' (kao posebnog slucaja 'glazbene semantike') obmanjujuca jer termin 'semantika' ima povijest filozofijske uporabe koja je nepodobna za raspravu glazbenoj komunikaciji. Nadalje, iznosi se model komunikacije koji sugerirá da je komunikacija u svojoj biti manipulativna po tome što pojedinci koriste komunikacijske akcije da bi izmijenili mentalna stanja drugih. Predstavljeni uzročno-manipulacijski model tvrdi da se glazbeno značenje nalazi u percepciji kompleksa propozicijskih i nepropozicijskih mentalnih stanja u slušatelju. Ta su mentalna stanja uzrokovana zvukovnim svojstvima samog glazbenog podražaja u okviru manipulacije mentalnim stanjima. Prilikom suočavanja s drugim koncepcijama glazbenog značenja uzročno-manipulacijski pristup prevladava nekoliko izazova: postavljen je dovoljno siroko da izbjegne problem etnocentrizma, stoga se može primijeniti na širok spektar glazbenih tradicija; ograničavanjem sadržaja iskljucivo na mentalna stanja eliminira dvojbeno poimanje posebne vrste »glazbenog sadržaja«; ne priklanja se niti jednom ontoloskom statusu glazbenih djela; značenje ne smješta u glazbenu strukturu, nego u mentalna stanja koje struktura uzrokuje; i konačno, kompatibilna je s fizikalističkim koncepcijama urna i mentalnih procesa.

Festivals dedicated to various forms of the Goddess Devī are celebrated throughout the Indian and Nepalese Himalayan region. The Būṅkhāl Melā is one such festival that is held annually in the central area of the Indian state of Uttarakhand. In this paper, the Būṅkhāl Melā serves as a case study for examining how sonic theology manifests as ritual activity. Drumming, dancing, processing, singing, and possession form part of ritual action designed to worship the Goddess. Music and action at the melā illustrate how sound is both a sacred essence and a functional element in worship. The movement and sound of melā participants are a material expression of the theoretical explanation of sonic theology - a theology that may be found in the broader Hindu textual traditions. Consequently, the festival provides a site for observing and hearing Śākta-Tantra practices expressed through the sounds of drums and singing in association with dancing, processions and possession.