Grant - Experiemental Music Semiotics

Experimental Music Semiotics
Author(s): Morag Josephine Grant

Source: International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Dec.,
2003), pp. 173-191
Published by: Croatian Musicological Society
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M. J. GRANT: EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC SEMIOTICS, IRASM 34 (2003) 2, 173-191 173
EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC SEMIOTICS
MORAG JOSEPHINE GRANT UDC: 78.01
Original Scientific Paper

Prenzlauer Allee 34 Izvorni znanstveni dlanak
10405 Berlin Received: September 15, 2003
Primljeno: 15. rujna 2003.
Germany
Accepted: October 7, 2003
E-mail: engelsam@t-online.de PrihvaCeno: 7. listopada 2003.
Abstract - Resume
This essay suggests that there is a defini- than represent such aspects is reflected in char-
tive difference between ,,experimental music,< acteristic features of experimental music. Com-
and other forms of contemporary composition, positions by Alvin Lucier, James Tenney, Klaus
and explicates this with reference to the sign Lang and Akio Suzuki and others are referred
theory of Charles Saunders Peirce. It suggests to as examples of experimental music's practice
that experimental music is distinguished by a of drawing attention to things, to phenomena
change in the dominant mode of signification and to relationships, and also to show how many
from the symbolic to the indexical: experimen- other features of experimental music - includ-
tal music indicates, or draws attention to, the ing its tendency to simplicity of structure and
phenomena and relationships associated with the increased interest in writing music for spe-
the social practice known as music (for exam- cific environments - can also be related back to
ple, psychoacoustical phenomena, or the social the general, indexical tendency of presentation
relationships between audience, musicians and as opposed to representation.
composers) and thereby offers information on Key words: experimental music, semiot-
how we make sense of music generally. The ten-ics, Peirce, significance, index, Lucier, Tenney,
dency of experimental music to present rather Klaus Lang
A piece by Alvin Lucier entitled The Queen of the South (1972) is written for a
number of instruments connected via amplification to raised, responsive surfaces
on which granulated material is strewn; the surfaces are arranged in such a way
that they are excited by the sounds created by the performers (for example, through
amplification placed directly underneath). In a performance which took place in
Berlin in 1999, each performer played a single, elongated tone. As they played, the
174 M. J. GRANT: EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC SEMIOTICS, IRASM 34 (2003) 2, 173-191
vibrations created caused the material on the surfaces to move. As they continued
to play, the material formed into wave-patterns, slightly different for each instru-
ment. Few pieces could better demonstrate that music, far from being the stuff of
angels, is the stuff of the world, depending as much on physics as metaphysics for
its existence. And Lucier's sonogram in the sand is perhaps the most blatant and
yet effective demonstration possible of that form of signification which distinguishes
experimental composition.
1. Significance in Music
This essay will suggest that there is a constitutive difference between what is
commonly known as >experimental music and other types of contemporary com-
position, and it will try to explain this difference with reference to Charles Saunders
Peirce's sign theory. The term >experimental music<< is used here with the sense
given it in most English-language discussions: in other words, it refers to a
compositional tradition which arose in the mid-twentieth century, particularly in
North America, and whose most famous and influential exponent is - or was -
John Cage. Pace Nyman, many composers continue to create music which struc-
turally and aesthetically reflects and develops key characteristics of this tradition:'
the connections may be muted if we attempt to relate everything back to Cage and
his companions, but that does not mean that the connections are not there, or are
not decisive. I use the term experimental music< to describe this tradition as a
manner of convenience, and will not address the question of what is >experimen-
tal in experimental music - for the moment, at least.2
Having explained in brief what is to be understood from the first part of my
title, I now turn to semiotics<«, and a couple of disclaimers. Firstly, my focus will
not be on meaning but on significance. Furthermore, the focus will not be on signs as
much as on the process of signification. I make these distinctions in response both to
the use of the word meaning« in many musicological discussions, particularly in
recent critical musicology,3 and also in response to a general tendency in musical
semiotics to regard language as the semiotic paradigm; the result in both cases is a
strongly semantic bias, not to mention some gross generalisation regarding what
SI concur in general with Michael NYMAN's Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (Second edi-
tion; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) but not with his assertion in the introduction to
the second edition that experimental music mutated into other things from the 1970s onwards.
2 This definition seems to go against the grain of what I have said elsewhere regarding the con-
nection between European serialism and experimental music, for which see M. J. GRANT, Serial Music,
Serial Aesthetics: Compositional Theory in Post-War Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001),
especially Chapter 8; the term >experimental music<< there had a broader remit, closer in part to the use
of the phrase in French-language discussions, but also with recognition of the points where serialism
and Cage's aesthetic coincide. I apologise in advance for any confusion.
3 It is not the search for >meaning<< as such which is problematic, but the fact that what is under-
stood by this term often becomes clear by implication rather than definition; and this implication often
reveals itself to be indebted to a particular cultural practice and its aesthetic code.
music >,is« or does«. Significance, as I see it, is a broader term: on the one hand
more relative (it may be entirely dependent on the context in question, the same
element being significant in one context and relatively banal in another) and at the
same time more specific (since it is only ever significant in relation to a given con-
text). It can be free of the connotational function of meaning (but does not have to
be), is not limited to the semantic sphere (though it also does not exclude it) and
does not carry the implicit expressionism which colours the term meaning. Most
importantly, if significance is contextual, then the process by which we decide that
something is significant becomes an integral part of its significance: things be-
come« significant because we relate them to something else in the context of which
they become significant. Furthermore, this very significance carries its own impli-
cations for the further course of the process.4
This focus leaves unanswered more general questions regarding the study
and uses of music semiotics,5 but it would be unwise in any case to suggest that
semiotics alone offers the key to exploring music« as a general phenomenon. What
interests me here is not so much the question of whether and how musical prac-
tices can be viewed as a semiotic process, but how semiotic theory can help clarify
the distinction between two closely related practices, experimental music on the
one hand and certain other forms of contemporary composition on the other. It
does not purport to present a general theory of musical semiotics, but to focus on
the issues thrown up in the very repertoire which causes most general theories of
music to fall apart. Thus, the title has something of a double function: a semiotics
of experimental music, but also an experiment in music semiotics. Whether or not
what I say here proves relevant outside the current boundaries remains to be seen.
2a. Experimental Music and the Theory of Signs
There always has to be a starting point, a frame of reference. To clarify what is

different about the significant relationships created in experimental music, I will
refer to Peirce's three most well-known categories of sign: icon, index, symbol.
This reference will, in some ways, be simplistic, and is to be regarded strictly as a
means to an end - I have not, for example, considered Eco's extensive revision of
these categories.6 What makes Peirce so interesting, however, is his insistence on
viewing all thought processes as semiotic processes: this is worth bearing in mind
4 In this sense, >,significance< overlaps with what some semioticians have addressed under the
term ,,isomorphism<<, i.e. the thesis that musical signification may not depend on relatively stable, arbi-
trary signs (such as is generally the case in language) but may be specific to the form of the piece of
music in question. My own approach, in line with the repertoire it reflects, does not limit the investiga-
tion to structural aspects.
5 This applies particularly to the many points raised in Christian Kaden's thorough and often
sceptical article on Zeichen<< in die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, Sachteil Vol. 9 (Kassel etc.:
Barenreiter/Metzler, 1998).
6 See Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979).
considering how often music is discussed as though it constituted a direct link to

the gods (including the gods of composition). As James Hooper describes
The difference between an idea< and a sign< is the heart of Peirce's semiotic. An idea
may supposedly occur, in Descartes' terminology, >clearly and distinctly,< in the mind.
Because the idea is perceived introspectively in the mind, its meaning is intuited, or
immediately known. A sign«(, as Peirce employed the term, is also a thought, but it
differs from an idea<< in that its meaning is not self-evident. A sign receives its mean-
ing by being interpreted by a subsequent thought or action. A stop sign at a street cor-
ner, for example, is first perceived as an octagonal shape bearing the letters S-T-O-P. It
is only in relation to a subsequent thought - what Peirce calls an interpretant - that
the sign attains meaning. The meaning lies not in the perception but in the interpreta-
tion of the perception as a signal to stop or, better still, in the act of stopping. Peirce
held that, like the perception of the stop sign, every thought is a sign without meaning
until interpreted by a subsequent thought or interpretant. Thus the meaning of every
thought is established by a triadic relation, an interpretation of the thought as a sign of
a determining object. Consequently, there is no such thing as a Lockean idea whose
meaning is immediately, intuitely known or experienced.7
This is the background to Peirce's various definitions of sign<<: Anything

which determines something else (its interpretant) to refer to an object to which it
itself refers (its object) in the same way, the interpretant becoming in turn a sign
and so on ad infinitum«;8 and, elsewhere, A sign is an object which stands for
another to some mind«.9 This latter definition concurs to some extent with the
more common description of a sign, which is that it stands for something else, but
Peirce places particular emphasis on the process of referral instigated by the mind.
Moreover, there is no implication that the material entity of a sign is necessarily
that which makes it a sign, nor that the same material entity may not be a sign in
another context; decisive is the nature of the relationship between the object which
refers, that which it refers to, and that which makes this reference possible:
An icon is a sign which would possess the character which renders it significant, even
though its object had no existence, such as a lead-pencil streak as representing a geo-
metrical line. An index is a sign which would, at once, lose the character which makes
it a sign if its object were removed, but would not lose the character if there were no
interpretant. Such, for instance, is a piece of mould with a bullet-hole in it as a sign of
a shot; for without the shot there would have been no hole, whether anybody has the
sense to attribute it to a shot or not. A symbol is a sign which would lose the character
7 James HOOPER (ed.), Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic by Charles Saunders Peirce (Chapel
Hill/London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 7.
8 Charles Saunders PEIRCE, Sign, in Peirce on Signs, 239-240; this quotation, 239. Originally in
James Mark BALDWIN (ed.), Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (New York: Macmillan, 1901-5).
Further references to essays in Peirce on Signs will state only the date of writing (if published posthu-
mously) or of original publication .
9 PEIRCE, On the Nature of Signs (1873), Peirce on Signs, 141-185; this quotation, 141.
which renders it a sign if there were no interpretant. Such is any utterance of speech
which signifies what it does only by virtue of its being understood to have that signi-
fication.'0
In other words (and in Peirce's writings, there are very many renderings of
this distinction in other words): definitive for the icon is similarity with the object
referred to, definitive for the index is contiguity with the object referred to, defini-
tive for the symbol is its dependence on a standard rule of interpretation; the cat-
egories are not mutually exclusive. An earlier description of this triad of signs lays
slightly different emphases:
[T]he first is the diagrammatic sign or icon, which exhibits a similarity or analogy to
the subject of discourse; the second is the index, which like a pronoun demonstrative
or relative, forces the attention to the particular object intended without describing it;
the third is the general name or description which signifies its object by means of an
association of ideas or habitual connection between the name and the character signi-
fied."
Peirce's definition of the index is one of the most interesting aspects of his
theory, as these two quotations indicate (sic). Though many semiotic theories have
discussed natural signs, such as the symptoms of an illness, Peirce broadens this
remit considerably; as Noth describes, the index makes no assertions regarding
its object, but merely shows us the object or draws our attention to it«; its category
is that >of fact, of reality, and of experience in time and space<.12
Though signification generally involves sometimes complex hybrids of these
categories, the type of signification which has the upper hand is a matter of the
function of the sign in a particular context rather than its material constitution. In
line with my introductory comments, my recourse to Peirce's three types of sign,
and hence to three distinctive types of signification, will not operate primarily at
the level of individual musical events and what or how or if they signify, but at
a more global level of how (and why) this particular type of making significant
occurs.13
Which of these categories best describe music? The answer would seem to
depend not only on the type of music in question, but also on the type of semiotician
approaching it. However, it is certainly worth pausing briefy at the symbol, since
this is the category most likely to cause confusion. It may seem plausible to sug-
10 PEIRCE, Sign; this quotation, 239-240.

" PEIRCE, One, Two, Three: Fundamental Categories of Thought and of Nature (1885), 180-185.
12 NOTH, Handbuch der Semiotik (Second edition; Stuttgart/Weimer: J. B. Metzler, 2000) 185, my
translation.
13 Some writers have suggested that various types of signification occur simultaneously in
but at different levels; see e.g. Rossana DALMONTE, Significance in the minimal units of musica
course, Musica Significans: Proceedings of the 3rd International Congress on Musical Signification
porary Music Review Vol 17 Part 2, 1998), 1-10; David LIDOV, Mind and body in music, Semiotica
gest that music« - both the word and the various activities it describes - has
claims to be regarded symbolically.14 After all, it involves attributing a certain type
of significance (or potential for significance) to a particular set of sensory informa-
tion (>music«), as opposed to another type of significance (>kettle boiling«, storm
brewing«< etc.), and this initial distinction is the prerequisite for experiencing some-
thing musically. True as this may be, it does not help us explore the obvious differ-
ences between musical practices and styles. Therefore, let us elaborate on the broad
scope of symbolic significance in the Western compositional tradition, starting from
the premise that significance can occur in a context which is purely musical«, i.e.
in the context of musical events rather than extra-musical events. The develop-
ment or recapitulation of a theme in a symphonic work can only have this formal
significance by referring to the exposition of the theme; in other words, the work
as a whole serves as the interpretant through which the theme's recapitulation has
this function, but this in turn is only possible if this interpretant is referred to that
other interpretant which stipulates that the piece be approached in this way. Both
the immanent thematic working and the tradition to which it gives reference are,
in this sense, also instances of symbolic signification, as long as they are under-
stood in this way.
Let us take another, more elemental example. A tonal interval in an experi-
mental piece may be heard symbolically, i.e. understood as a major third< and
thus related to particular musical systems where major thirds play a defining role,
and to particular tonal functions which it may fulfil. This reference may occur
whether or not it is relevant to the piece in question, just as, when we hear the
word >dog«, the association with a particular animal will be more prominent in
the minds of English speakers than the phonetic characteristics of the word itself.
It is something quite different indeed, however, when the framing of that major
third is such that our reaction to it, our presumptions on what that bundle of fre-
quencies is all about, becomes more important than the fact that it >is« a major
third. The result is not to make the thing in question less important than its ap-
pearance in this context, but rather to draw attention to the thing itself and the way
we otherwise perceive it and relate to it (including drawing attention to its appar-
ently implicit symbolic significance): to recap on Peirce's words, we are dealing
with something which forces the attention to the particular object intended with-
out describing it<.15 For this reason, I will suggest that experimental music can be
(1987), 69-97. I would tend to agree with this in principle, without necessarily agreeing with the classi-
fications offered. Regarding the possibility of treating genres of music as signs, see David LIDOV,
Technique and Signification in the Twelve-Tone Method, in Wendy STEINER (ed.), The Sign in Music
and Literature (Austin: University of Texas, 1981), 195-202.
14 This is the claim famously made in Susanne LANGER, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the
Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942). Symbol<< and
>sign<< are sometimes understood as synonymous: see NOTH, Handbuch der Semiotik, 178-184 for a
fuller discussion.
understood as a shift from a basically symbolic to a basically indexical mode, and

that many of the features of experimental music - from its focus on the social and
geographical dimensions of performance through its use of various types of chance
to its tendency to simplicity of materials and form - are both the reasons for, and
the outward expressions of, this difference.
An Interruption
A telephone rings.
When humans intentionally create a noise, they normally do it to attract at-

tention. Even in the act of conversation, our speech attempts to draw our partner
into the path of our thoughts and opinions. Babies do not wave flags. A telephone
rings, we go and pick it up or wish someone else would. A telephone rings: some-
one wants to speak to someone else. If the ring of a telephone comes to symbolise
>communication« it does so only at one remove from, and with the implicit sug-
gestion of, this underlying function: A telephone rings => someone wants to speak
to someone => ,communication«. Nothing is more frustrating than the line going
dead before or as we pick it up.
But how do we know it's a telephone? Because we've heard one before. Heard
what? A telephone, or more exactly, a telephone ring. So describe the sound of a
telephone ring, describe not only the sound itself, its rhythms, its timbre, its pitch,
but all that goes with it - its social context, its geography (they are not the same
worldwide), its ability to startle us, particularly at 4 a.m. But perhaps we are jump-
ing ahead of ourselves.
A telephone doesn't ring. That can be the most relaxing thing in the world, or,
as Dorothy Parker has so ably described, the most cataclysmic.16
So why don't telephones ring in music? They ring all over the place in litera-
ture. They appear in pictures more often than they do in music. They are the hinge
of countless film plots. Songs are written about telephones but rarely do they in-
corporate the actual ringing of a telephone - except as a sound effect. What is it
about the sound of the telephone that is so problematic? Is it the sound itself, or the
chain of activities it implies? After all, as Jos Kunst pointed out, we may think that
we hear sounds but every time we hear a sound we actually hear events,7 even if
1s PEIRCE, On the Nature of the Sign, 141.

16 Dorothy PARKER, A telephone call (1928), in Complete Stories (London: Penguin 1995), 81-85.
17 Jos KUNST, Making sense in music: An enquiry into the formal pragmatics of art (Ghent : Communi-
cation & cognition, 1978), available online at http://www.joskunst.net/proefschrift/.
the conventions of our musical culture tell us to ignore the event - say, the plac-
ing of a bow on a string - in favour of the sound that bow creates, and, in turn, to
ignore or understate the sound as such in favour of the pattern it does or does not
form with other sounds preceding and following it.
If telephones do not ring in contemporary orchestral or chamber music (the
mobile phones of the audience excepted), it is not merely because this would mark
the infringement of a modern triviality into the hallowed echelons of art music.
After all, despite any number of symphonic odes to nature, there are actually very
few literal quotations of birdsong (Messiaen distorts the statistics somewhat) and
even less of waterfalls. The latter may be excused on the grounds of coming too
close to white noise, but so do storms, which are however no stranger to musical
discourse, albeit in minor keys (I have yet to be able to establish the key of a real
storm). In other words, these phenomena, which have unmistakable aural charac-
teristics, only appear in mediated, indeed mitigated, form. What we have in their
place are any number of means of representing storms or birdsong within the closed
confines of the music in question. A telephone, however, would be exactly the
kind of unmitigated external object which would stick out like a sore thumb, even
if it could be incorporated into some sort of dramatic context. And unlike birdsong
and storms, telephone rings offer precious few chances of thematic development,
though certain telephones have recently attempted to get their own back by steal-
ing themes from works of classical music and using them instead of rings.
In other recent compositions, where the characteristic timbre of the telephone
would not necessarily prove a problem, the absence of telephones could again be
put down to the sheer force of association which they would bring with them: not
only is their sound not generally associated with music, it is very specifically asso-
ciated with something else; it is a signal for a different type of response than a
musical one. While it is possible to imagine a telephone being manipulated in an
electroacoustic work, it is equally possible to imagine what the average critic or
musicologist would make of the result (again, it would probably involve the mean-
ing of the telephone in this context: it would hardly be presumed that it could just
be an interesting noise). In other words, telephones, masters of drawing attention
to themselves, would almost certainly end up in the same vault at times past in-
habited by perfect cadences and octaves.
The case of experimental music is immediately different because it can deal
with the telephone as a telephone, including but not exclusively limited to the
sound it makes. Tom Johnson describes a performance by Robert Ashley in 1977,
in which a telephone, though not its ring, plays a central role:
Spanish-language newspapers were spread neatly around the floor, leaving only a narrow aisle
down to the center, where there was a telephone with the receiver off. Ashley was nowhere to be
seen. Through loudspeakers we heard a low-fidelity blend of Spanish talking and music, prob-
ably emanating from local AM stations. Once in a while Ashley's voice could be heard coming
through the mix, but he was either reading numbers or else unintelligible.
The situation remained unchanged, but quite a few people stayed on anyway, milling around,
talking to one another, theorizing about where Ashley was, and figuring that eventually some-
thing would happen. After 45 minutes we were still stuck with the lo-fi sounds we couldn't
understand and the newspapers we couldn't read. But then one of the bolder visitors decided to
have a closer look at the telephone, which looked quite foreboding on its sharply lit island in the
middle of the room. He happened to say something into it, and much to everyone's surprise, his
voice was heard through the loudspeakers. Ah-hah. Now we're getting somewhere. Can Ashley
hear what someone says into the telephone? Will he respond? But just as I was contemplating
these questions, the man decided to find out what would happen if he hung up the receiver, and
presto, he disconnected everything. Now there wasn't even any lo-fi music to listen to. Several
people tried dialing the number that Ashley was allegedly transmitting from, but they only
received a busy signal. The piece was over.
For a while I wondered if the performance had backfired. Obviously it might have gone on much
longer and much differently if we had explored the telephone/microphone more before hanging
up, and perhaps that would have been more interesting. On the other hand, I suspect that
Ashley anticipated this outcome, along with umpteen other possible outcomes, and had decided
we could have whichever one we stumbled onto. I like that.'8
While Johnson writes, in relation to this and a performance the previous

evening, that he would not claim that this is music< (adding, however, that it
wasn't like anything else either), he nevertheless sensed something quite pro-
found about what was happening. We were not just having a discussion, we were
enticed into becoming aware of the whole experience of having a discussion<<. The
question of whether or not this is music<< is another can of worms, always bearing
in mind that not only audible sound, but active interaction with that sound in a
particular manner, is what defines a musical practice<(. But for the sake of not
getting into this particular argument, let us concentrate again on the sound of a
telephone. I can imagine potential pieces by composers with names like Kagel and
Schnebel in which the sudden and unexpected entrance of the sound of a telephone,
or perhaps two hundred of them, would have dramatic and amusing effect; on a
more understated level, there is George Brecht's Three Telephone Events, the first in
which the ringing telephone is allowed to keep ringing, the second in which the
receiver is lifted and replaced when the telephone rings, and the third in which it
is answered: a musical ready-made, with the important performance note that Each
event comprises all occurrences within its duration<<.19 But I can also imagine the
following, more contemporary scenarios:
1. The audience is faced by a telephone. The telephone rings. Either there are
no performers to answer the telephone, or they ignore it. The latter is my preferred
example, because then we see the telephone not as an abstract player in the non-
action of the piece, but must instead face the fact that a telephone is ringing and
'8 Tom JOHNSON, The Music Talks: Lucio Pozzi and Robert Ashley, in The Voice of New Music:
New York City 1972 -1982 (Eindhoven: Apollohuis, 1991); digital edition from www.tom.johnson.org.
'9 The score is reproduced in NYMAN, Experimental music, 80.
that there is no-one there to pick it up except ourselves. Which we will, of course, not
do - we are, after all, the audience. So it keeps ringing. Or maybe it only rings
once, and then there is deafening silence for ten minutes. The audience, through
becoming so very aware of the telephone, becomes uncomfortably aware of itself.
2. A telephone rings. But its ring is aperiodic, or too short, or too long, or
comes in sevens instead of twos or ones. So we listen to the sound of a telephone,
instead of simply responding to it.
3. A sound installation. Triggered by an invisible sensor, a telephone rings as
we walk by. Are we meant to answer it? We become uncomfortable. The telephone
seems animate: it or someone operating it seems to know we are there. We look at
the telephone, we look at each other, we look at the telephone again, crying with
the insistence of a hungry baby, not allowing us out of its presence.
These three scenarios all draw our attention, but not as the telephone nor-
mally does. They play on our habitual responses, both conscious and unconscious,
to the ringing of a telephone, and make us aware of those habitual responses, of
our expectations, of the colour of the telephone, of the sound of its ring, of the way
we normally respond to the audible information which triggers the realisation A
telephone is ringing. It takes us one step beyond our normal response and indicates
how we are implicated in that response. We do not normally attribute great sig-
nificance to the material objects which create the sounds of music, but treat them
strictly as a means to an end: an identical melody played on a bassoon and on a
penny whistle are understood by us as identical melodies even though the sound
created is very different. Also, scholarly developments of the last ten years or so
notwithstanding, we do not normally focus very much on the social conventions
and practices within which music is embedded, as human activity.20 A concentra-
tion on these media, on this mediality, is, however, a distinguishing feature of
experimental music, and thus the inescapable implications of the telephone in the
sound of its ring present few problems here.
In some ways, the telephone is almost too banal an example. I could have
used any number of other sounds instead: I chose a telephone because there hap-
pened to be one ringing in the background of the bustling cafe where I wrote this
part of the essay. Having formed that relationship with the telephone, I noticed it
constantly thereafter: it rang off and on for most of the time I was there, and then
was oddly silent as I was drawing my conclusions. That I can form this interaction
at all - one that deserves to be called aesthetic, and one which demonstrates neatly
Peirce's belief that all thought is a semiotic process - is thanks to the experience of
experimental music, but by no means simply because experimental composers have
opened up the material boundaries of their compositions to include any sounds or
all. Experimental music not only makes us think about music<, and think about it
20 Most famous of the more recent approaches is Christopher SMALL, Musicking: The meanings of
performing and listening (Hanover, NH/London: Wesleyan University Press, 1998).
differently, but invites us to extend this thinking out of the concert hall and into
the social and intellectual life in which music plays a far from insignificant part.
This drawing attention to processes of cognition which have festered into habit,
this making concrete of something which we had hardly need consider before, this
indicating of the physicality of sound waves, or of the unnaturalness of silence, or
the gravitational pull of a bell, this presentation of the hidden realities of our inter-
actions with the physical and social world around us and the cognitive processes
within us - this is the mode of experimental music. A telephone rings. At the end
of the day, it's just a telephone. But there's no such thing as just a telephone.
2b. Experimental Music and the Theory of Signs
I suggest that the defining difference between experimental music and many
other forms of composition, including new music, is that it doesn't represent some-
thing, it presents something. It doesn't tell us something, it shows us something.
Before I am castigated for suggesting that music can tell us anything at all, may I
qualify this by saying that the form of telling (in the sense that we tell a story, which
implies not only the development of a theme but also a content somewhere above
and beyond the materials used to suggest it) is what is important here; but it is not
operative for all musical practices.
It is here that the index becomes useful.21 According to Peirce, the essential
feature of an index is not, as with a symbol, its absolute dependence on its
interpretant, nor, as with the icon, its similarity to it - both of which are forms of
representation - but its absolute dependence on the real existence and presence of
its object. Many of the examples Peirce gives suggest a straight cause-and-effect
relationship, such as the bullet hole in the cheese. Earlier, however, he had used a
21 My recourse to the index differs quite dramatically from many other writings on musical semi-
otics. For all the differences in nuance, what unites most of these discussions is their concentration on
the direct effect of music on the human body: music can express certain emotions by virtue of its direct
stimulus of these effects; in these cases, the sign is not external to the human body, but the human body
is itself implicated in the sign. See for example David LIDOV, Mind and Body in Music; Vladimir
KARBUSICKY, The index sign in music, Semiotica 66-1/3 (1987) 23-35; for a summary of other ap-
proaches, see Raymond MONELLE, Linguistics and semiotics in music (Contemporary Music Studies 5;
Chur: Harwood Academic Press, 1992), Chapter 7. Many of these authors have noted the connection
between this theory and eighteenth century aesthetics of music, particularly Rousseau's discourse on
the origins of music and language. However, few have been sensitive enough to the fact that such
theories of music and the emotions reflect only one possible aspect of the cultural and aesthetic func-
tions of music. This also applies to the most interesting of these essays, Lidov's 'Mind and body in
music': though this essay must be welcomed for focusing on the corporeal bases of musical action and
affect, the bias of the argument is much closer to a classical Western aesthetics of music than may at first
appear.
more striking example, that of a weather vane.22 Important here is that there is
sometimes, or often, wind. Even if there is no wind at a particular moment, the
weather vane still fulfils its purpose, confirming that there is no wind. More im-
portantly, the weather vane is not a by-product of wind, but created specifically
for the purposes of indicating the direction and force of it. It is specifically created
to draw our attention to something by contiguous relationship with it. Even if
there is never wind again, a weather vane will not stop being a weather vane,
though it may well end up in a museum and thus achieve aesthetic significance
after all (possibly the iconic significance of representing a cockerel, if indeed it
does); it will still refer to the wind, though strictly speaking it is only an index of
wind direction in the presence of wind. And if Peirce had not used the weather
vane in this way, I would have had no reason to smile when I saw one facing my
favoured desk in the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. His text drew my attention to the
weather vane just as the weather vane drew my attention to the direction of the
wind.
It is worth thinking more about this particular relationship between the natu-
ral, the social and the aesthetic, and about the further-reaching implications of the
index's particular character. Experimental music typically draws attention to things,
to phenomena and to relationships which also exist beyond the piece and not just
by means of it, but it generally does so by creating the very phenomena or relation-
ships in question.23 Lucier's The Queen of the South depends not only on the aural
presence of sound waves but their physical impact on inanimate as well as ani-
mate bodies; the waves in the sand do not merely represent the sound waves but
are actually caused by them. Much in experimental music acts as an index for a
particular type of experience, or a particular aural phenomenon, or a particular
social convention (musical or otherwise). James Tenney's piece Critical Band (1988),
to take a well-known example, takes its title from the psychoacoustical feature it
explores, namely the range of difference in frequency at which microtonal fluctua-
tions begin to be heard as differences in pitch and not merely as beats or identity.
Physical characteristics and psychoacoustics are not, however, the only things
which come to be indicated. Much in experimental music is designed to draw our
attention to a specific performance situation: this may involve the use of open form,
where certain elements of the performance are not preordained, or not fully preor-
dained; or it may include the creation of music for a specific place and time -
many sound installations come into this category, but this characteristic also comes
to the fore in other pieces whose structure is so simple (or makes such extensive
2 PEIRCE, On the Nature of Signs, 140. This essay was written before Peirce worked out his
triadic sign classification - here, for example, he writes >There is to be such a physical connection
between every sign and its object< - but the latent distinctions icon, index, symbol are clear to all who
know his later writings.
23 Similar observations (and examples), but from a different perspective, are made in Sabine SANIO,
Aesthetik der Recherche, in Hans SCHNEIDER, Cordula BOSZE and Burkhard STANGL (eds.),
Klangnetze: Ein Versuch, die Wirklichkeit mit den Ohren zu erfinden (Saarbriicken: Pfau, 2000), 27-37; Sanio's
text came to my attention only during the final correction stage of the current essay.
use of silence) that it draws our attention to the environment of the performance;24
this is in stark contrast to the virtual space-within-a-space which forms the basis of
the traditional concert hall, whose dimmed lights urge us to forget the physical
walls around us. Moreover, experimental music often draws attention to the sym-
bolic mode of some other music. It is significant that early experimental music not
only addressed the formal material of the classical compositional tradition, but
both its sonic and social bases. The theatrical commentaries on concert hall prac-
tice which proliferated in the 1960s - such as Schnebel's espressivo (1961-1963)25 -
are another indication of this concentration on the entire scaffold of musical pro-
duction and reception. By parodying ad absurdum the procedures of concert-going
(typically concentrating on one aspect at a time, in the same way that caricaturists
grossly exaggerate individual features of a person's countenance and thus make
them all the more recognisable), they burst the bubble in which the parodied tradi-
tion sits, apparently so far removed from the world around it. Put another way: if
symbolic signification can be understood as a (relatively) self-contained system of
reference, then the indexical mode of experimental music has one foot outside the
circle, or perhaps one foot and one hand, with a pointing finger. Presentation rather
than representation is the favoured mode of communication; presence is the re-
sult. This focus becomes clearer when we compare experimental music with other
directions in contemporary composition.
3. New Music, Experimental Music
The example of the theme and its recapitulation, which I used earlier, relates
to a musical practice in which symbolic significance can be seen to operate both on
the level of individual events and on the longer-scale structural level, through a set
of unwritten rules on how to approach and interpret these events. Much new mu-
sic continues to function symbolically even though the function of individual events
may have become vague, relating much more exclusively to the piece in question
than to a pre-existing syntactical context.26 Saying this is to come closer to the kern
of a potentially difficult issue: What is it that defines the difference between new
music« and >experimental music«? Here, I am using the term new music< in some-
thing like the polemical sense given it by Adorno, but more importantly in the
sense that, by definition, new« implies the continuation of a relationship to the
old. Though experimental music is certainly also a subset of the Western tradition
of composition, and has had a fruitful, mutually influential relationship with new
music over the years (most notably in the 1950s), they have always had different
24 As is the case with much music by composers associated with the Wandelweiser Verlag.
25 This is a Music Drama for One Pianist< wherein >the processes associated with the rendition
of music become the music itself<; Dieter SCHNEBEL, Denkbare Musik: Schriften 1952-1972 (Cologne:
DuMont Schauberg, 1972), 281. Schnebel's classic essay: Sichtbare Musik, Denkbare Musik, 310-355, dis-
cusses these developments in some detail.
26 This is a gross generalisation, but certainly not an untruth.
emphases. There was a time when they could be differentiated on the basis of the
raw material they employed. Take two examples, noise and silence. Composers
from the experimental tradition have always had an interest in noise and in silence
which went far beyond that of contemporaries in the tradition of new music, and
to some extent this is still the case. But why, in this case, does the music of Helmut
Lachenmann or the late music of Luigi Nono still belong firmly in the camp of new
music? The answer - albeit a preliminary one - lies to some extent in the word
which I snuck in a few lines back, namely material«.
Colleagues from other disciplines often get into difficulties when they try to
talk about material with musicologists, who generally use the word - in Adorno's
sense - to describe something already one level removed from the raw materials
which surface in the writings of theorists from other disciplines, where material is
closer to physical stuff, to the medium itself.27 The musicological debate, then, has
elaborated a definition of material which underlines the essential difference be-
tween the physical processes which create the sounds of music, and the aesthetic
processes - among them, the cognitive processes associated with a certain habit
of listening, and the social processes which tell us to do this - which go towards
creating >music«. This is no different to the general aesthetic theory which tells us
that the medium in which an artwork is created is merely the medium and not the
message itself (ignoring for the moment how simplistic this theory is). However,
the musicological elaboration of this has gone a step further, favouring a historicised
understanding of musical material not simply as the raw sound material but the
manner in which this has been rendered in the past; in other words, in musicologi-
cal discussions the material always comes preformed. The first consequence of
this is that certain aspects of music have been marginalised, including categories
such as timbre/sound which supposedly mark the a- or prehistorical stage of the
material. The second consequence is that for Lachenmann, for example, even noise
must at least have the potential to become formal material (in the historical sense),
and to become significant through this constellation alone. Thus, the manner of
treating noise still borrows extensively from the notion of what Lachenmann him-
self would call structural hearing, thanks to a compositional process which he would
term dialectical structuralism.28 The material has to develop, somehow: its signifi-
cance must be established and reestablished in the course of listening to it. This is
of paramount importance - but not in experimental music, as I shall now explore
by way of some more comparisons.
Composers of what I here term new music< active in the past ten years or so
have often made a striking use of metaphors from contemporary science. This ten-
27 This quickly became obvious at the interdisciplinary symposium Material und Technik im
kiinstlerischen Schaffensprozess held at the Hochschule der Kiinste (now Universitit der Kiinste) in Ber-
lin in 1999; selected proceedings in Andreas HAUS, Franck HOFMANN and Anne SOLL (eds.), Mate-
rial im Prozess. Strategien dsthetischer Produktivitdt (Berlin: Reimer, 2000).
28 Helmut LACHENMANN, Horen ist wehrlos - ohne Horen; Uber Moglichkeiten und Schwierig-
keiten, MusikTexte 10 (July 1985), 7-16; Uber Strukturalismus, MusikTexte 36 (October 1990), 18-23.
dency was already clear in the theory and music of Xenakis, but now seems to
have come of age. There are no shortage of cells« in this music, in programme
notes and titles as well as in the conceptualised structure of the compositions, which
unfold with the precision of fractal diagrams.29 What we hear could well be de-
scribed as a polyphony of elements, each highly figured, and evocative of the com-
plex nature of organic development or the statistic movements of heated particles.
And with these cascading elements, the process of development has returned to
new music with a vengeance (if, indeed, it ever went away). It is thematicism re-
visited, where the themes have been replaced by cells, the logic of thematic work-
ing by algorithms; the already highly metaphorical world of the new science takes
the place formerly assumed by the classical conventions of rhetoric and the classi-
cal form of the lyric.
This comment should not be taken as an indictment of this trend, though I
occasionally despair at the lack of honesty regarding what is actually happening
here. It does, however, help us clarify the difference to works such as Lucier's or
Tenney's which do not represent a metaphor of science but present its actual physi-
cal realities (and this extends to our ability to make sense of these processes as
much as the processes as such). Again, Lucier and Tenney's take on acoustics and
psychoacoustics is quite different to its role in the work of composers such as G6rard
Grisey, in whose works the study of physical and acoustical processes is subordi-
nate to the idea of form created with the assistance of these theoretical principles.
At the same festival where I experienced several biochemistry lessons in quick
succession,30 there were also a number of pieces which I immediately sorted into
the ,experimental music« compartment of my brain. The common feature was an
equal concentration on elements outside of the intentional sonic material (includ-
ing the spatial and visual aspects of performance space), but also the lack of devel-
opment of what was in any case a relatively small number of distinct sound events.
Among these pieces was Klaus Lang's der weg des prinzen II/martian pingus (2000).
It bore the hallmarks of much of his music: very quiet, and characterised by fleet-
ing, rhythmic patterns in individual voices, which are repeated briefly and then
disappear as inconsequentially as they appeared - a sense of inconsequence which
resurfaces in Lang's programme notes, small anecdotes which seem to take place
somewhere beside the music itself, just as the music, too, seems to be over there<,
as Emily Dickinson might have put it. The rhythm is the rhythm of a dripping tap,
or of breathing in sleep - regular, but not insistent, and generally unhurried. It is
music in the rhythm of things whose rhythm we never normally notice, as loosely
choreographed as all natural processes are in the infrequent moments when we
stop to observe them - grass blown in one direction by the same wind, to the
29 Cells is in fact the name of a piece by Hans-Peter Kyburz, who uses algorithms to generate
material.
30 Klangwerkstatt, Berlin-Kreuzburg, November 2001. The works in question included Enno Poppe's
Holz (1999/2000); Poppe's programme notes for the piece make the connection between the organic
notion of >cells< and traditional motivic thinking very clear.
accompanying creak of a weather vane. I went walking in the woods one day and
heard several woodpeckers, quietly tapping away rhythmically, each unconcerned
about the others and the soft crossrhythms they were generating between the trees.
I thought to myself, this sounds like a piece by Klaus Lang.
Lang's piece epitomises many features of experimental music which do not fit
any of the more obvious categories, nor on the face of it my characterisation of it as
indexical«. Definitive, however, is once again the tendency towards presenting
things as opposed to working through things, which less favourable critics have
labelled reductionism and have associated pejoratively with mysticism.31 A piece
which functions symbolically, or in which this is the dominant type of significa-
tion, typically builds a (relatively) self-contained context within which individual
elements become significant; and this significance is created by contrast to other
elements introduced in the same context. One of the most distinctive features of
experimental music, on the other hand, is the limitation of material, and the lack of
force with which it is presented. This characteristic extends to the apparent incon-
sequence and unobtrusiveness of other examples - as true of the gentle melodies
in some of Cage's music as of many other pieces so quiet that they almost become
subsumed by their environment. This may be why so much experimental music is
not really suited to traditional concert halls, many of which are so hideously deco-
rated that it is inadvisable to do anything other than dive into the virtual space of
the performance. It is also, perhaps, one of the reasons why some people get very
frustrated listening to experimental music and feel as if their time is being wasted,
or that they are being duped.
Sometimes it is not even necessary to hear a piece before one decides which of
the two categories, new or experimental, will prove most appropriate. When com-
posers start writing thematic groups on the blackboard of the lecture hall, or lines
of letters indicating how the piece moves from A to D (and maybe from D back to
A), you can be fairly sure they do not write experimental music. If they can repre-
sent the structures and processes via letters, then they will also represent them in
music. Similarly, programme notes containing phrases such as >I wanted to con-
vey the sense of...« are generally not written by experimental composers.
4. Icons, Symbols and Indexes Revisited
Another piece by Lucier can be taken as a final devil's advocate against most
of the claims I make here, and I did in fact experience it in a particularly hideous
concert hall; luckily, the piece was inspired by a much more tolerable landscape.
31 See for example Peter Niklas WILSON, Lust und Last des Jetzt: Kleine Gemeinheiten zur
Konjunktur des Prasentismus, Positionen 41 (November 1999), 2-3, also the responses from Stefan Streich
and Burkhard Schlothauer in the following issue.
In Panorama (1993), a trombonist accompanied by a piano plays a mountain range:

the score presents the outline of a range of mountains which the trombonist then
follows, translating it into pitch. Surely, then, he is representing the mountain range
as opposed to presenting it? There is, certainly, an iconic representation of the
mountain range in this piece; there are certain symbolic aspects to its representa-
tion, such as the convention of calling pitches higher if the soundwaves of which
they are made are of a faster (or higher<) frequency. I may appear to be splitting
hairs by suggesting that Lucier is presenting a representation of the mountain range,
but Lucier's piece is not about« the mountain range any more than those pieces
by Cage which are based on the imperfections in a piece of paper are about« the
paper. The closest we can say is that it refers us to those symbolic-iconic aspects of
our musical culture which make it perfectly feasible to associate the upwards
glissandi of a trombone with the upward slope of a mountain. On a structural
level, Panorama is exemplary of experimental music: whereas other pieces of music
may reach a highpoint, this piece reaches highpoint after highpoint and lowpoint
after lowpoint, or rather highpoint after lowpoint after highpoint... & cetera; the
very idea of highpoints and lowpoints loose their power as anything but aspects of
change.
To say that experimental music is basically indexical is not to close the argu-
ment: rather, it is one way of pinpointing a change of dynamic and suggesting
how this could be approached theoretically. There are exceptions to all the exam-
ples presented here, just as there are several candidates which bridge the gap be-
tween experimental and new music, or which could be understood in terms of
either or both (not to mention those compositions which are neither). The blatant
distinction I have drawn here does not solve the problem of borderline cases, or of
the perceptual numbness which tends to ensue when pigeonholes are invented.
But the fact that there are colours which lie somewhere between green and blue,
and that green necessarily includes blue, does not mean that there is not a point
where, for the sake of grasping the world and sharing this grasp with those around
us, green becomes green and blue stays blue, just as, in Tenney's Critical Band,
there is a point where we draw a qualitative line through things which, seen physi-
cally, are continuous. And while it is clearly dangerous to categorise in the manner
I have done with Peirce's index, and his icon and his symbol, since human com-
munication, cognition and interaction are not limited to the artificial boundaries
we create in the world in order to explain the world, it is imperative that basic
distinctions be recognised, respected, and then refined. Only then can we move
the discussion on from the dead end dreamt up by those who have not studied the
road properly: the belief that since Cage supposedly made anything possible, there
is nothing left to do, there are no roads left to explore. But making an impossibility
out of a possibility has always been the speciality of theorists who talk about mu-
sic« when they mean the classical tradition of composition. That does not mean
that it needs to be our speciality as well.
A piece by Akio Suzuki written for the Ensemble Zwischentone involves three
glass plates made into a type of table, with sheets of paper bearing a distinctive
drawing laid underneath each plate.32 Some water is dropped onto the plates, just
enough to create a characteristic squeak when the finger moves with pressure across
the glass: the conductor, directing the proceedings with ceremonial grace, then
gives the sign for each of the three performers to begin tracing the patterns heavily
with their fingers. Each performer traces the same patterns, yet the different tech-
niques of the performers, or perhaps slightly different amounts of water, or differ-
ent skin textures, create an audible difference between each tracing. From time to
time, the conductor removes the sheets one by one, revealing a new sheet under-
neath with a new pattern.
A circle traced on glass sounds different from a jagged line. A square sounds
different again.
Acknowledgement: I am indebted to Antoine Beuger and Wolfgang Fuhrmann for

their thought-provoking critical comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this
essay.
Satetak
EXPERIMENTALNA GLAZBENA SEMIOTIKA
Eksperimentalnu glazbu Cesto se smatra podvrstom nove glazbe. S druge strane, ovaj
esej pokazuje da eksperimentalna glazba ima razlicit nacin funkcioniranja. To se razjaSnjava
pozivanjem na semioticke napise Charlesa Saundersa Peircea, osobito njegovo razlikovanje
ikonickih, indeksickih i simbolickih znakova. Autorica raspravlja o tome da se brojne za-
padne skladbe mogu razumjeti kao primjeri simbolickog oznaeavanja. S druge pak strane,
eksperimentalna glazba upuiuje pozornost na stvari, fenomene i druStvene odnose na nacin
koji se slaZe s Pierceovim opisom indeksa.
Nakon uvodnog primjera iz glazbe Alvina Luciera u dlanku se ocrtava prihvaCeni
semioticki pristup, ukljueujuCi razlikovanje izmedu znaenja (meaning) i oznaeavanja (sig-
nificance). U srediSnjem dijelu eseja raspravlja se o tome sto je bitno u razlikama koje je
Peirce napravio izmedu tri tipa znakova i kako to moZe pomoCi da se objasni razlika izmedu
eksperimentalne glazbe< i >nove glazbe«. Ono sto jest ili ce postati oznaeavajue u
32 kyurukyuttsu from the cycle Ta Yu Ta 1 (2001); premiered in the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum
der Gegenwart, Berlin, June 2001.
eksperimentalnoj glazbi rezultat je procesa koji je u osnovi indeksiCan a ne simboliCan po

prirodi: odnos je vise izravan i blizak nego reprezentativan i metaforican, i najjasnije se
odraZava u naCinu kako nas tini svjesnima procesa ukljucenih u stvaranje i primanje glazbe.
Umjesto glazbene forme u Cijem je Zaristu proradivanje odredenog izbora (cujnog) materijala,
pri Cemu pojedinaCni dogadaji postaju oznacavajui ili u odnosu na druge dogadaje u istom
komadu (kao sto je to slucaj s puno nove glazbe) ili na dodatnog tumaCitelja (kao sto je to
slucaj s mnogo tonalitetne glazbe), eksperimentalna glazba upuCuje pozornost na
psihoakusticke i drustvene cinjenice o >glazbi<. Dok su ti elementi nazoCni u svim glazbenim
praksama, eksperimentalna se glazba razlikuje zahvaljujudi svojem specificnom fokusiranju
na te elemente vise kao na formativne nego uvjetovane imbenike.
Ova je rasprava smisljena s pomocu ekskursa koji pokazuje kako eksperimentalna
glazba moZe uzeti odito banalne dogadaje iz svakodnevnog Zivota i uciniti ih ponovno
oznaCavajuCima. Esej zavrsava usporedivanjem eksperimentalne glazbe izravno s novom
glazbom i sugestijom da je modus prve prezentacija, a modus druge reprezentacija. Daljnje
implikacije ovog razlikovanja objasnjavaju mnoge karakteristike eksperimentalne glazbe,
od njezina tendiranja strukturnoj jednostavnosti do cesto jedinstvena odnosa spram
odredenoga vremena i mjesta izvedbe. Citiraju se djela Jamesa Tenneya, Klausa Langa i
drugih i usporeduju s vrlo razlicitom uporabom obicnog materijala u djelu skladatelja kao
sto je Helmut Lachenmann. Unatoc mnogim graniCnim slucajevima i nu2noj generalizaciji
u eseju, autor dokazuje da je nuzno shvatiti ovo opCe razlikovanje kako bi se pronasao
smisao u pojedinim primjerima i iznimkama.

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Experimental Music Semiotics

Author(s): Morag Josephine Grant

EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC SEMIOTICS

MORAG JOSEPHINE GRANT UDC: 78.01

Original Scientific Paper

2a. Experimental Music and the Theory of Signs

There always has to be a starting point, a frame of reference. To clarify what is

considering how often music is discussed as though it constituted a direct link to

This is the background to Peirce's various definitions of sign<<: Anything

10 PEIRCE, Sign; this quotation, 239-240.

understood as a shift from a basically symbolic to a basically indexical mode, and

When humans intentionally create a noise, they normally do it to attract at-

1s PEIRCE, On the Nature of the Sign, 141.

While Johnson writes, in relation to this and a performance the previous

2b. Experimental Music and the Theory of Signs

3. New Music, Experimental Music

4. Icons, Symbols and Indexes Revisited

In Panorama (1993), a trombonist accompanied by a piano plays a mountain range:

Acknowledgement: I am indebted to Antoine Beuger and Wolfgang Fuhrmann for

EXPERIMENTALNA GLAZBENA SEMIOTIKA

eksperimentalnoj glazbi rezultat je procesa koji je u osnovi indeksiCan a ne simboliCan po

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