Music and discourse: A
systemic-Functional approach
for music analysis in multimodal
contexts
Diego L Forte
Department of Research, National Library of Argentina, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Abstract
Meaning in music constitutes an issue that have risen (and still rises) a strong debate.
Although it has been approached from different perspectives there seems to be no
consensus for its theorization. From a Social Semiotic perspective, music can be analysed
as a part of a bigger construction, sharing the task of making meaning with other modes
(verbal, visual, etc.). This paper aims to make a contribution to multimodal studies
proposing a way to include music analysis in Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis. We
adopt as framework Halliday’s theory (1978; 1994), although we start from Kress and van
Leeuwen (2020) adaptations and include McKerrell (2015) and van Leeuwen (1999). Our
working hypothesis is that, in multimodal contexts, music contributes with the construction of meaning, particularly ideational meaning, establishing a relation with other
modes.
Keywords
Social semiotics, music theory, multimodality, CDA
Music, narratives and discourse
It is often said that music has the power to transport us to places we dream, transform our
moods, and add colour to great moments. We use music for pleasure at different times
during the day and we establish connections between our emotional state and the music
we listen to. When we watch a movie we can perceive the emotional moods in the
Corresponding author:
Diego L Forte, Department of Research, National Library of Argentina, Aguero 2501, Ciudad Autónoma de
Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires C1425EID, Argentina.
Email: dforte@filo.uba.ar
characters, the emotional atmosphere in the music we hear in the background. For the
human species, music posses a meaning that combines with other sounds, visual clues,
scent clues, etc., to construct our representation of the world that surrounds us.
From a Critical Discourse Analysis perspective, music must be considered in terms of
its possibilities of representation, its functioning with other modes and the relations of
power it allows to establish. The aim of this paper is to present a systemic-functional
semiotic approach that allows to analyse music in multimodal contexts revising the
relations music establishes with verbal and visual modes. We adopt Kress and van
Leeuwen’s adaptation of Halliday’s proposal (1996–2020) for the visual mode, and
include categories described by McKerrell (2015) and van Leeuwen (1999) for music.
According to our perspective, music not only works cohesively with the narrative to
establish tension and resolution of conflicts but also interact with verbal and visual modes
building ideational meaning and emotional framing.
The question of meaning in music has been approached from several disciplines and
described in numerous ways. Modern perspectives have taken different paths: currently
music and meaning constitutes a field approached not only by musicians and musicologists but also philosophers, linguists, anthropologists and social scientists of several
disciplines. And yet – or perhaps therefore – there seem to be no consensus for its
theorization.
Margulis et al. (2019), consider that people experience music not just as an abstract
sequence of sounds, but as episodes in an unfolding narrative (2019: 2). Similarly, Walsh
(2011: 63) says is not that music has a meaning but narrative has an influence on it.
Therefore, this author prefers to speak about “narrativization” rather than narrative
meaning in music. Following this logic, we can talk about cycles of action and repose in
unfolding melodies that develop a certain idea of narrative, influenced by other elements.
Similar conceptions have been also adopted by Maus (1991: 4), following Schenker
(1979), suggesting the possibility of a generalized plot structure for tonal music.
The basic premise behind Critical Discourse Analysis is to examine linguistic choices
to evidence unequal power relations constructed in texts that promote inequalities and
exploitation (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2001; van Dijk, 1993). As O’Halloran has noted,
the need for a multimodal perspective lays on the fact that language use is not thought as
an isolated phenomenon (2014: 1). Therefore, analysis of communication must centre in
images, visual design, television, newspapers, monuments, toys and also in and through
music (McKerrell, 2015: 1). Discourse is conveyed in different modes, not just the verbal,
hence the multimodal definition of text as the material manifestation of ideas through
different modes. Discourses can be thought of as models of the world and project certain
social values and ideas which contribute to the (re)production of social life (2015: 5).
Music and sound play an important role in themselves but also in dialogue with other
modes of communication such as image and verbal text. Music within multimodal
communication often brings with it particular affordances that are either difficult to
express via more propositional linguistic texts or images, or in some cases, impossible to
express in other modes (2015: 8–9) and that often elicit irony, unspoken and implicit
arguments.
2 Multimodality & Society 0(0)
Systemic-Functional semiotics
Kress and van Leeuwen (2001, 2020) adapted Halliday’s perspective for image analysis,
expanding the possibilities for a multimodal approach to meaning. Following their model,
we introduce some categories of music theory to expand the multimodal context. We
detail our proposal for each metafunction in the following sections.
Ideational metafunction
Ideational meaning refers to participants, processes and circumstances. As a part of a
multimodal text, music tends to be seen as some kind of process animated participants
represented in the visual or verbal mode carry out or experience. In considering music, we
must consider first the place granted to it in the multimodal construction. The dichotomy
diegetic/non-diegetic music in audiovisual material assigns different roles to music and,
therefore, to the relationship music establishes with other modes. Diegetic sound in films
and television explicitly signals something visible on screen, such as a door slamming, a
dog barking, etc., or music the participants are listening to. It is the sound of the world in
which the participants of the visual mode live in. In the film Green Book (2018), the
character Tony Lip -played by Viggo Mortensen-, is driving the car and telling Doc
Shirley -Mahershala Ali - how he got the nickname “lip” while they listen to Lucille, by
Little Richard. The music is played in the car, it is not background music. In its nondiegetic function, music can construct emotional atmospheres in multimodal texts through
an orchestral soundtrack, songs or music that does not belong in the participants world but
in ours as audience. This is music and sound that we, as auditory can hear, but not the
represented participants. Most audiovisual material often include both, diegetic and nondiegetic sounds, as different modes in the same communicative moment. So, auditory
channel can be inherently multimodal: when someone is talking/screaming/singing over
non-diegetic background music. In that case, the sounds, even when they are heard
simultaneously, are part of two distinct socially accepted channels of communication; and
the audible elements of the multimodal text can be multimodal in addition to whatever
might be going on visually or linguistically (McKerrell and Way, 2017: 12).
Music cannot account by itself a pure and clear ideational meaning (in terms of
describing unequivocally participants and processes) but it can signal it in other modes.
Cross (1999: 15) describes agency in music by its ‘floating intentionality’. Music gives us
the impression of a process but we cannot find a clear agent neither describe in detail what
process is being developed. This seems to be the key that allows music to construct
cohesion and social ties, and also to do the opposite and to function as an element of
conflict between social groups. The ‘floating intentionality’ is rendered more specific in
multimodal texts because of the combination of verbal text and images with sound.
Therefore, music associates with images and verbal material in the construction of
ideational meaning. Images can present participants: humans, non-humans, anthropomorphized objects, etc., constructing them in a discrete and defined way. Lyrics can also
function as the visual mode, by just mention, depicting or describing participants. Also,
lyrics can suggest participants through the use of pronouns and deictic forms. Therefore,
Forte 3
before looking at processes and participants in music, we must analyse what kind of
relationship is music establishing with the other modes present.
If we consider Tchaikovsky’ Solemn Overture, Op. 49 - usually known as the 1812
Overture-, written in 1880 to commemorate the successful Russian defence against
Napoleon’s invasion in 1812, we can find passages of battle, marching troops, and
national motifs as the Marseillaise. Events are established clearly by association with war
sounds, explosions of canon balls and motifs constructed by previous music as representing violent and quiet events. The sense of ‘floating intentionality’seems to become an
actual verbal process and its agency lies in the participants involved, for instance, in the
war: Napoleon, his troops, the Russian army, etc. In a similar way, we can find agency in
the fate motif of Beethoven’ Symphony No. 5. This motif has usually been credited with
symbolic significance as a representation of fate knocking at the door (Jolly, 1966).
When music is combined with images or lyrics, participants and processes are defined
in a more detailed way. Given that sight is our dominant sensory system, visual mode
plays a central role in the multimodal construction. In the film Inglourious Basterds
(2009), the character Shosanna Dreyfus – played by Melanie Laurent ´ – prepares herself to
kill the Nazis at her cinema. She gets dressed, does her make up and drinks wine while the
diegetic music we hear – Cat People (1982) by David Bowie – prays: “putting out the fire
whit gasoline”. In this case, the participant is constructed by the visual mode, and the
music says something about her state of mind, emotional situation, etc. Something similar
happens with lyrics. In the song Before Tomorrow Comes (2007), by Alter Bridge, the first
verse reads:
I couldn’t sleep I had to listen
To a conscience knowing so well
That nothing comes form indifference
I look inside of myself
We, as listeners, can establish a connection between the “I” and the melody, granting
some kind of emotional value to the instrumental music in liaison with the words. To sum
up, in multimodal contexts music conform a conceptual unity with other modes, such as
visual or verbal, in which participants are usually construed by visual or verbal modes and
music adds a feature to it contributing to character descriptions, text dynamics and a sense
of plot development.
Interpersonal metafunction
Interpersonal metafunction refers to relations established through the text: social distance,
status and power. The categories we propose has been adapted from those presented by
van Leeuwen (1999: 5) and McKerrell (2015: 8): 1. Act of demand; 2. Perspective and
social distance; 3. Tonal gravity; 4. Voice quality and timbre; 5. Modality.
4 Multimodality & Society 0(0)
Act of demand. A basic definition of music describes it as tension creation-tension releasing. Tension consists of the anticipation music creates in a listener for relaxation or
release. Reiteration, increase in dynamic level, gradual motion to a higher or lower pitch,
or (partial) syncopations between consonance and dissonance, etc. Tense sections create
expectation to keep the listener involved. Cadences create an expectation that, depending
on the type of cadence, can be released in the resolution; making the listener wait for the
end, detour and take the listener’s attention for a different path, or not release at all. We
consider four main types of cadences: 1. Authentic cadence: its sound, going from V to I
(from dominant to tonic) presents full resolution: creates tension by V and resolves it
going back to the tonic. In terms of multimodal meaning it creates a strong demand that is
provided with a liberation or resolution. 2. Plagal cadence: This cadence also offers full
resolution: goes from IV to I, although its sound is more solemn since IV creates smoother
tension than V. In terms of multimodal meaning it creates a softer demand, like a prayer or
a kind request that is finally answered by the return to the tonic. Half cadence: Its ending
on V sounds incomplete or suspended, calls for continuation because tension is not
resolved. Its multimodal meaning poses tension in wait for a resolution: it resembles a
desperate cry with no answer. Deceptive cadence: when the dominant chord is not
followed by the expected tonic but by another one, often the submediant, tension is not
resolved but detoured, therefore, multimodal meaning resembles a reorientation of the
meaning carried by the melody that creates a feeling of disappointment.
Perspective and social distance. Perspective and social distance involves an imaginary
distance between the producer of the sounds and the listener, creating nearness, remoteness and positions in between. Following van Leeuwen (1999: 27) we identify:
- Intimate distance: Extremely close instance, like a romantic encounter. In the song No
time to die (2020), recorded by Billie Eilish as soundtrack for the homonymous film,
both the softness of the instruments and the delicacy in the recording of the voice
indicate a situation of extreme closeness between the person who produces the
sound and the potential listener. Marginal cases can be considered: the song Justify
my love (1990), performed by Madonna, the voice poses closeness while the instruments build a context a little more rough, closer to sexual contexts.
- Personal distance: It is a conversation between two people who are less than a meter
from each other, barely breaking each other’s personal space. The verses in the song
Unstoppable (2016), recorded by Sia, establish a non-intimate but close relation
between producer and hearer.
- Informal distance: This is the distance among friends. You are The one (2018) by
Greta Van Fleet exemplifies this case.
- Formal distance: this is the distance that is established in a conversation between
people who don’t know each other. We can find this distance in Do I Wanna Know?
(2013) by Arctic Monkeys.
- Public Distance: it is a remote situation. although this does not necessarily means
producer and listener do not know each other. Hallucinate (2020) by Dua Lipa
presents a good example of this distance.
Forte 5
However, when it comes to social distancing, we must remember given that the intrinsic nature of western music dynamics, no piece remains static in a single distance. In
most pieces, regardless of the genre they belong to and the instrumentation they use,
distance vary throughout the entire piece.
Tonal gravity. According to McKerrell (2015: 8–7), ‘tonal gravity’ can be used to explain
how different modes relate to each other metaphorically Table 1, and to analyse metaphorical constructions of proximity, salience and verticality.
Voice quality and timbre. This category can be, according to van Leeuwen (1999: 125)
subdivided in the following: tense/relaxed, rough/smooth, bright/opaque, high/low,
intense/soft, vibrato/flat, nasality/orality, and finally the points of articulation (in the vocal
tract for the human voice, or the point of note formation in instruments).
Modality. The concept of modality, in the same way as in language and images, is related
to the concept of “naturalism” and representation in terms of degrees of truth. In pop
music, modality is usually related to the production work in the making of records. When
we consider the modality of sound, adapting van Leeuwen’s categories (1999: 159), we
can think of the following elements to analyse:
- Detail in articulation (Tenuto, Marcato, Staccato, Legato, etc.).
- Detail in the background (contrast between two sounds playing together).
- Colour saturation in sounds (distortion, flanger, electronic effects).
- Colour differentiation (clean sound vs effects).
Table 1. Griffith and Machin (2014: 88), quoted in McKerrell (2015: 8–7).
Note Scale degrees Meaning potential
1 Tonic Anchoring note
2 Supertonic Something unfinished or about to happen
3 Mediant A state of happy or sad/chilling note
4 Subdominant Building, moving forwards or creating space
5 Dominant Anchoring note
6 Submediant Pleasurable longing, nostalgia
7 Leading note Wistful of painful
Note: 1 defines the note of the scale and, therefore, acts as anchor, bringing a sense of grounding whenever
heard again. Note: 5 also grounds the melody. Note: 3 grants quality: happy, joyful, or lowered by half a note,
giving a sense of sadness or tragedy to the melody (Cooke, 1959: 90). Note: 2 is associated with transition, the
sense of movement about to occur, or the promise of something to follow. Note: 4 gives a sense of moving
forward, space or possibility. Note: 6 has a similar value as Note 3 and adds a sense of brightness to the melody. It
also provides a meaning of flux, so it is generally used to indicate pleasurable longing or nostalgia. Note: 7 is
associated with longing and is often used in love songs; it can sound wistful and a little lamentful (Griffith and
Machin, 2014: 88).
6 Multimodality & Society 0(0)
- Articulation depth (“deep sounds” are commonly associated with low pitch and
sustained duration, while “surface sounds” are related to medium to high pitch and a
shorter duration).
- Light and shadow (light is defined by treble and shadows by bass sounds).
- Degrees of tonal variation (modulation).
Textual metafunction
In music, we refer to structure and form as the systems involved in the distribution of the
meaning in the flow. Although both definitions may overlap at a certain point, we choose
to keep both terms, using ‘form’ for the genre in social context, as a social practice; and
reserve ‘structure’ for a formal description of its composition:
Musical form. The concept of musical form refers to a type of musical piece: Symphony,
Sonata, Suite, Fugue, Concerto, Choral, Cantata, Minuet, etc. (Agawu, 2008: 22). We also
include forms like song, score and modern ways to describe musical pieces that allow us
to establish a connection between the piece and the social practice involved. The aim is to
describe that relation instead of constructing a category to just name a piece.
Musical structure. Structure refers to the organization of the constitutive elements of a
work: its compositional architecture, its development, the arrangement of musical ideas,
their imitations, their re-expositions, etc., that is, the way of organizing a musical piece, to
present the different themes or musical ideas that make it up. Among the most used
structures we find: Primary form: Consisting of a single phrase independent of the introduction or coda Binary Form: Formed by two sections A and B Ternary form: formed
by three sections A, B and C Rondo shape: A, B, A, C, A, Theme with variations: A1, A2, `
A1, A3.
Atomic Blonde and father figure
Atomic Blonde is a 2017 American action thriller film based on the 2012 graphic novel
The Coldest City, which depicts a story about a spy who has to find a list of double agents
that is being smuggled into the West on the eve of the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
The film is directed by David Leitch and it is written by Kurt Johnstad. Between minutes
30:00 and 32:50 a fighting sequence takes place involving the protagonist, Lorraine
Broughton – played by Charlize Theron -, an MI6 agent, and four (at first, later two more
come in) East German police officers. When the scene begins, Broughton has broken into
her dead ex partner, also a MI6 agent, looking for clues about the list whereabouts as she
notices police is arriving. She goes through the door to verify it and takes the hose she will
later use to fight and escape. Realising she is trapped, Broughton locks herself in inside the
apartment, puts a tape on the player, pushes play and hides herself waiting for the officers
to arrive. Before police comes in, the song Father Figure 1987, played by George
Michael, begins to sound in the speakers.
Forte 7
As in every audiovisual piece, participants and processes are constructed visually. As
Lorraine Broughton and the police officers appear in the screen we acknowledge music
will refer to them and the situation they are involved. Actually, this relationship it is set up
by Lorraine pressing the play button on the stereo. This is the first important clue to keep
in mind analysing this sequence because it establishes the place of music in the narrative.
In audiovisual material like films, music is usually used as emotional background for the
images and therefore, non-diegetic. In this case, music merges both dimensions: it is
dialoguing with both worlds. Diegetically, music is an element used by Lorraine to
surprise, stun and confuse police officers in order to gain some kind of advantage given
the fact she is outnumbered. Nevertheless, analysis becomes much more fruitful considering the role of music as non-diegetic.
Non-diegetically, the song is not creating an emotional background in the way a score
would do, but it is the sounding background in the room, and the movie reminds it to us
when the shoot takes police officers outside the apartment. In this shoot, music volume is
lower than it is inside the apartment. However, the song do creates an emotional atmosphere. Being a down tempo ballad with seductive lyrics, Father Figure does not
constitute the prototypical fighting music in the Western world, that would require faster,
heavier, stronger melodies and instrumentation. In this sense, the song seems to be
ridiculing the audiovisual genre while it operates as a temporal mark of the eighties, the
time depicted in the movie.
In terms of the ideational function, we can unfold the diegetic dimension in two:
dimension 1 is the time and space where Lorraine is about to fight the police officers; and
dimension 2, a conversation Lorraine has with George Michael about seduction that is
really directed to the audience. In dimension 1, there is a violent situation going on and the
music mediates between Lorraine and the officers, just because Lorraine included it into
the fight. Dimension 2 presents a situation in which George seems to be seducing Lorraine
through slow music and romantic lyrics. But if we keep in mind it was Lorraine who put
the tape in the first place the table seems to turn: it is not George trying to seduce her but
her refusing to be seduced by showing how she beats up six police officers and leaving the
room in James Bond’style. This meaning is not intended for George but for the audience.
In this case, Lorraine is talking with the audience beating up six guys and turning George
Michael down. The fact that the protagonist of the images is a woman, and the “I” in the
lyrics of the song is a man, presumably -at the time-talking to a woman, a dialogue
between them can be established in which the man is talking to the woman, trying to
seduce her treating her as a child that needs a father figure. Instead, she shows that she is
not in need of a father figure, evidencing she can stand up for herself and be in total control
of the situation. And, going back to the tape, we can also think she is mocking the guy in
the song who is treating girls as if they need a father figure when they can act as Lorraine is
acting. In this sense, the scene -and the film - is also mocking the eighties vision of women
and, for that reason, it anchors the movie in the second decade if the XXI Century, in
which women’s rights are subject of strong debate. It constitutes a XXI vision of the
misogynistic eighties.
The scene ends with a spectacular fall that seems taken from another spy movie: James
Bond’s The World is Not Enough (1999) opening scene ends the same way: the spy
8 Multimodality & Society 0(0)
jumping out of a window with his waist tied to a passed out person. But in the case of
Bond, music is incidental and marks an emotional up tempo development of the scene and
its violence. In Atomic Blond, the final words of the song are pronounced right after
Lorraine punches the last two guards in the ground floor and leaves the building.
On the other hand, it also can be argued that the song is emphasising the concentration
and mastery Lorraine is showing in her performance, being in total control of the situation;
considering the relaxed affect of the song is enhancing this sense of control while, at the
same time, contrasting with the violent sequence in the visual mode. Here, it can be bared
in mind the concept of Moore of considering music analysis as an invitation to hear the
piece rather than decode it (2013: 3). Music analysis evidences a wide range of possibilities in the interpretation of the song in context. Nevertheless, it must be read within
the limits of the film and its meaning constructions. In any case, visual mode takes the lead
establishing participants and processes, but music adds many features to the situation that
expand the construction in terms of ideational meaning.
The interpersonal metafunction presents at least one act of demand. Although the
bridges at the end of each verse create tension that resolves in the chorus, going back to the
tonic, maximum tension is created trough the modulation from BX to GX and resolved
back in BX. This part of the sound is what we hear in the moment that Lorraine takes one of
the men as prisoner with the hose around his neck and two other police officer chase her,
this is, tension in the song as well as in the screen. This can be thought as a moment of
reflection or a moment of patience only expertise can achieve: considering the situation it
is a moment of tension among the three participants involved. Any of them can immediately die. But if we focus on Lorraine, the tension created by the modulation can
represent a moment of carefully thinking about her next step in the fight. In the song, the
tension in GX resolves when the lyrics pray “Hold on Hold on, I wont let you go” as
Lorraine runs jumping out the window with rope around a police officer’s neck, bonding
this way, the situation, the instrumental music and the lyrics. Thus, music is not just
adding ideational meaning but, as part of the interpersonal construction, is adding to the
visual dynamics among participants in the screen. This tension in the dynamics in the
screen is transferred outside the screen because the viewers understand this tension and
will also expect a resolution of the conflict.
Perspective and social distance shows an intimate-personal construction in the song.
Related to the images there is some opposition: music states an intimate distance and
images also in some way, but the intimate distance in the images is not that of lovers, as in
the song, is that of people fighting. Therefore we can think of a “love as fight” or “love/
hate” relationship. In any case the song could suggest that fights are part of love or love
and hate are both sides of the same coin.
Regarding tonal gravity melody unfolds over BX (tonic) and AX (leading note). In the
song, vocal melodies are supported by an instrumental base that moves between BX and
AX in the verses and the chorus. The point of maximum tension is developed by
modulation to GX (submediant) in the bridge. This is also related to the act of demand
above mentioned and the tension that helps to create in the visual mode. The leading note
gives the melody a kind of wishful colour – part of the seductive air of the song – and the
Forte 9
tension created by the submediant makes the longing for resolution of the cadence – and
the hostage situation that is taken place visually – sounds nostalgic, almost sad.
Voice quality and timbre: BX major key, a positive emotion sound. And the high octave
is associated with sharpness. Bright voice, relaxed, variations between intense and soft
moments, oral. It all helps build the intimate situation a lover wants.
Modality is also closer to “naturalism” in terms of Kress and van Leeuwen: there is no
electronic or “out of this world” sounds. Instruments sound more or less clear, They can be
identified easily. Voices too: there are no strange effects that modify them in ways that
make them sound non-human or non-natural. Even though it sounds like a studio recording it could be a band playing live. The song does not introduce futuristic sounds,
although there can be pre-recorded elements. It pretends to be just voices and instruments
even when pre-recorded and synthesized sounds can be there. No saturated tracks either.
This characteristics make the scene very clear too and establish that the meaning added by
music is not that of non-diegetic music, at least primarily: it is not the emotional atmosphere. Instrumentation during the verses create a shadow background while in the
chorus throw light on the song. As mentioned above, there is not much modulation in the
song, only that serves the creation of tension in particular passages. Besides, the song
seeks an emotional connection with the audience in another way: making them remember
what the eighties sounded like and confronts them with their own experience of the
eighties.
Textually, its form is that of a pop ballad in BX, with a structure AABA, although the
first two verses end in a bridge to the chorus and there are also two instrumental parts that
develop with the A sections structure. Bridges at the end of the A sections create the
tension that must be resolved by the chorus, that goes back to the tonic. The B section is
the point of maximum tension in the song because of its modulation to GX.
The scene naturalises the violence and constructs the British as the fair side of the
struggle between the East and the West during the Cold War. Britain and MI6 are the hero
against a communist Germany, constructed as “the bad guys”. We can also find animal
cruelty: Lorraine’s ex partner is a hunter: during the scene a photo of him and another
character, with guns and dead non-human animals is shown. The part music plays in this
construction does not evidence these prejudices built by images and verbal discourse, but
it serves their purposes: tension created in BX, when Lorraine is chased by two police
officers while she keeps another as hostage adds drama to a construction in which she is
presented as some kind of victim. In the 1980s – the times the movie portraits - a woman
would not have occupied that role of a man, an agent of mi6. And hardly would have
appeared in a movie giving that kind of beating to six guys. The use of a female character –
an individual belonging to a group that is being currently empowered - reinforce the
position of the British as good guys: there is a heroine that brings the movie up to date and
makes possible for the audience to relate. The dialogue between Lorraine and George
Michael is a declaration of principles typical of the 21st century and the empowerment of
women, it allows us to think about the empowerment of Lorraine as a woman who does
not need a father figure or a dirty seduction like Michael’s. She fights six guys just to tell
George Michael – and us - she does not need a man to protect her.
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Multimodal music
Ideational meaning in music constitutes a complex issue. Considering music by itself, it
clearly signals participants and movement, although perhaps not in the way verbal or visual
discourse do. These ideas of action and movement are enriched in multimodal contexts
when the specific features presented by music establish relations with what is built through
the verbal or visual modes. Dynamics of music contribute providing a sense of emotional
atmosphere for the processes or events developed verbally or visually. In this way, music
adds information about the quality of the participants or the process, as we have seen in 3,
establishing a sort of graduation from intimate to far distant/violent events. Sometimes it can
be signal social aspects within the narrative – the mastery of Lorraine as MI6 agent -,
sometimes can describe aspects outside the screen – the place grant by the West to the
participants in the Cold War in the eighties -. But even keeping Moore’s perspective and just
listen to the song, the multimodal construction imposes certain limits about the meaning and
what can be recovered from the audiovisual piece. Therefore, having several possibilities for
meaning in music, visual and verbal modes restrict the range.
At interpersonal level, music makes its more important contribution, establishing
complex relations among participants in the narrative and between them and the audience,
also eliciting emotional frames that work as background and as particular trails directed to
capture the audience’s attention. The tension posed by music to create demand can follow
two paths: direct or indirect. In the first case, we must consider the fact that non-diegetic
music is intended for the audience, therefore, the need for resolution, established by the
cadences, is directed to the public’s attention: the demand is directly established. On the
other hand, diegetic music, intended for the characters, is not usually used to convey
tension for resolution, given the characters cannot consider the music they hear as
emotional background for the narrative of their lives. Nevertheless, that music tells
something to the audience regarding the ideational world in which represented participants live. In this case, music signals more a social background than an emotional one.
But cadences still operate as generators of tension. In the example presented in 3, both
worlds mix and combine, creating tension in and out screen. In both cases, tonal gravity
plays its part, shaping social meaning within the music. Quality, pitch and modality
provide also a sense of familiarity or strangeness to the sound.
At textual level, analysis allows to identify social practices for which the particular piece is
intended. Can be a song, a sonata, an original score; or a song used as soundtrack, which involves
two social practices and their contexts: the original social context of the song in its first release; and
the social practice in which it is inserted in the audiovisual. Besides, emotional motifs by means of
repetitions and other resources bring information that must be taking into account too.
Musical meanings, as linguistics meanings, are associated to certain values in societies
and circulate carrying it. We live through these meanings without even notice them. In the
same way newspapers headlines, music can highlight some meanings and mitigate
others. It can even construct violence or smoothness, intimacy or strangeness, targeting
our emotional system when we face a multimodal text. For these reasons, meaning
constructed by music in multimodal contexts must be considered as social meaning and,
therefore, part of an ideological construction that ought to be analysed as such.

1Discourses
of Popular Music
A number of discourses dominate the way we think and talk about
popular music. They shape how we assess what is good and bad
music and what is meaningful and trivial music. They inluence the
way we think about our own musical tastes and knowledge and lead
us to believe that these tell us something about ourselves and in turn
that the tastes of others tell us something about them.
It is these discourses that tell us that a boy band does not produce
music from the heart, whereas a blues artist does. In fact what we actually mean by such an evaluation means is never clearly articulated. But
nevertheless it can lead us to be less forthcoming in expressing our
enjoyment of one of their songs and may even prevent us from enjoying it at all. In a discussion about music in a lecture theatre a student
who confesses to liking a boy band will most likely be mocked by their
classmates. I have seen it happen often. But if it is good pop music
why should it matter? We are not laughed at for our tastes in food
or because we prefer to take our shower really hot rather than cold.
Both these are sensory experiences, as is listening to music. Nor are
we evaluated for the kinds of paintings we prefer. We might consider
that someone has bad taste but this is different to the way our musical
preferences position us. Such notions might sound trivial, but unpicking them to clearly describe the discourses that underpin them
provides a valuable resource for the analyses in subsequent chapters.
In this chapter we explore the idea that the meaning of any piece of
music is not so much in the sounds themselves but in the discourses
we have for understanding them. In other words, we put the meanings there. Frith (1996) has said of music that ‘to understand cultural value judgements we must look at the social contexts in which
they are made, at the social reasons why some aspects of a sound or
spectacle are valued over others’ (p. 22). In subsequent chapters
of this book we present a set of methods for exploring how artists
communicate such cultural value judgements, what we here refer to
14Analysing Popular Music
as discourses, through look, sounds, voices and lyrics. Here we start
to think about what these discourses are.
Authenticity
The discourse of authenticity is at the heart of the way that we think
about music and can be seen signiied in the different semiotic modes
through which artists communicate, through their sound, look, lyrics and what they say in interviews. This idea of authenticity can be
illustrated by the different way we evaluate an indie band as compared to a boy band. We might accept that the indie band is authentic
but a boy band is certainly not. What is important here is why this is
the case and what underlying social values are in operation to bring
this evaluation about. Authenticity is something we take for granted
but seldom try to deine systematically.
To help illustrate the different ways we think about these two
kinds of music Cook (1998: 9) gives an example from the Muppet
Show. There is a scene where one of the puppets plays the part of a
classical musician who has the opportunity to play a duet with guest
blues guitarist Ry Cooder. The puppet is terriied as he cannot play
music without a written score. Ry Cooder gives him a lesson in playing music from the heart, ‘letting it come naturally’. In other words,
natural music, the blues, is contrasted to music of artiice, classical
music. When the puppet does this, letting go and playing naturally,
it sounds just like the blues. So the blues is not simply music but
natural sounds that come from within. Therefore it is about selfexpression as opposed to the structured classical music, which is
not. Classical music is part of a literate tradition where music is written down, where there are formal rules as to how it should be played,
where institutions school performers as to how this should be done
properly. This idea of nature versus artiice underpins much of how
we assess music and there is an established range of conventions for
it to be communicated. What exactly these are in terms of sounds
and performance will be explained in later chapters.
Since the blues is viewed as an authentic expression of an oppressed
race – music from the heart – in contrast to the formality of the classical tradition of concert music from Europe, it is considered to be
the archetype of music that genuinely expresses true emotion and
feeling. In the case of the boy band there is clearly an association of
lack of this deeper expression of feeling. To say a boy band produced
music from the soul would seem inappropriate.
This idea of authenticity has its origins partly in the Romantic tradition where it was considered that artistic creativity comes from within
the soul and is somehow connected to God. Writers such as Goehr
(2007), who have written extensively on the history of music and
15Discourses of Popular Music
composition, show how this is connected to the emergence of the notion
of individual works of art, of creativity being an individual process
rather than something that emerges out of society, out of wider shared
cultural practices. Authenticity suggests the opposite, that creativity is
individual where there should be an absence of artiice or culture.
This view of the meaning of music emerged in the 19th century.
Before this time very different views were held. In 17th-century
Europe it was thought that people of certain temperaments would
be affected by different kinds of music (Cook, 1998). Lang (1972)
cites a theorist from the time who writes: ‘martially inclined men are
partial to trumpets and drums, and they reject all delicate and pure
music’ (Kircher, 0000: 544). The idea was that temperaments would
respond naturally to particular musical characteristics. In this way
music was seen to represent nature itself, into which human character was also tied.
By the 18th century this idea that music represented nature was
altered by the idea of ‘affects’. Here, due to its connection to the soul,
music could convey feelings such as anger, love and pain. This can
be heard in opera. Music could speak of the torments and joys of the
heart and soul in a way that words could not.
In the 19th century musicologists such as Schenker (1979) argued
that music was some higher form of reality entering into our own.
This was a view of music that had been around since the time of
Pythagoras who had hypothesised that the universe was organised
around the same structures as those found in music. The music we
hear therefore is the sound of the force of the existence of the universe. Schenker thought music used genius composers as a kind of
medium to communicate this higher reality with ordinary people.
Music is therefore a window to a different world. During this period,
as science was replacing religion as the dominant belief system,
music ‘provided an alternative route to spiritual consolation’ (Cook,
1998: 38). From this lies the logical association with musicianship
and ethical qualities, being true to oneself, being sincere – qualities
we might group as part of authenticity.
When we assess artists this is often in terms of whether or not they
produce music from the heart and whether their performance has
some kind of sincerity or whether it is contrived. In the case of a boy
band we perceive a look and music designed for speciic markets; in
other words, something that is produced, contrived, of culture rather
than of the soul. We feel, therefore, that there can be no authentic
expression either in sounds, looks or lyrics. This means that such
acts, however catchy their tunes, however innovative they might in
fact be, however inely crafted their songs, will not be taken seriously
as evidence of true musical expression. In fact this is odd considering
the huge amount of marketing and promotional work that goes into
16Analysing Popular Music
most acts. Frith (1996) explains that importantly authenticity is not
something thought through when people use it and only relates to
some kind of sincerity or commitment.
Even music that is clearly predictable can be thought of as being
from the heart if it is the right genre. I have sat in blues bars where
the musicians looked and sounded like a cliché of blues. Yet from the
facial expressions, movements and responses of the punters it was
clear that they were witnessing music from the heart and certainly
nothing contrived.
One of the reasons that folk music manages to maintain its authenticity, no matter how predictable it might be in terms of sounds, looks
and lyrics, is that it is associated with tradition and an older form of
social organisation. It is the authentic sound of the past unpolluted
by artiice. This is why it is important to play acoustic instruments or
‘traditional’ instruments. It is a music unspoiled by urban and technological contamination.
Chapman (1996) shows that the idea of folk being an authentic
roots music is simply not correct. Much of what is known as ‘Celtic’
music, for example, has nothing to do with any concrete relationship
to any kind of place or time. Nor, he argues, are the instruments traditionally Celtic. This is, he says, is about ‘nostalgia for (…) the traditional past, and perhaps a good deal of naivety about the nature of
that past’ (p. 31). He points out that the idea of a separate Celtic music
ignores the fact that if there ever were a Celtic people then they, for
as long as we have records, have been involved in mainstream European events. Also the idea of ‘traditional’ Celtic instruments is equally
ictitious. The three-drone bagpipe is a relatively new invention yet
it is now internationally accepted as an authentic Celtic sound that
speaks of ancient times and people of the land (p. 37).
The musicologist Cook (1986) was interested in the way that we
have assumptions about how older forms of music should sound even
though we have no recordings of original performances nor accurate
transcriptions. For example, we have no idea what medieval music
sounded like yet we attend a themed banquet where there are period
musicians, and they sound just as we expected (p. 56). Musicologists
have demonstrated that we have no real basis on which to make this
assumption and that such music may have sounded completely different. Taruskin (1995: 164) states that:
absolutely no one performs pre-twentieth-century music as it would have
been performed when new. This may be so easily veriied that it is a wonder
anyone still believes the contrary.
He gives the example of the music of Beethoven where eyewitness
accounts from original performances speak of the way composers
would themselves ignore and play around with embellishments and
17Discourses of Popular Music
tempos when performing their own pieces or conducting. Beethoven
himself wrote ‘Tempo of feeling’ on his scores; in other words, ‘play
as you feel it’. Taruskin suggests that such issues are now glossed
over in performances. He believes that Mozart and Beethoven would
listen to contemporary CD recordings of their music with ‘utter discomfort and bewilderment’ (p. 168). He notes that even early 20thcentury recordings of classical pieces sound odd to us now such have
ideas of authentic sound been merged with current requirements
for how the past sounded.
Goehr (2007) points out that the way we now think about classical
works is mistaken. Composers such as Mozart wrote music that they
expected to be disassembled and played according to the needs and
mood of settings. Often what we now know as individual works were
never meant to be so.
I once heard an American colleague who had Welsh ancestors
say that when they heard Celtic music, which included bagpipes, for
the irst time at a Welsh cultural festival they felt that somewhere
deep inside they recognised the music, suggesting that the music
touched them in a special way as it chimed with their own spiritual connection to the land. Of course this is not to take away the
pleasure involved in such imaginings, but it reveals something of
the discourses through which we understand sounds and that this
inluences the way that we hear them. These ‘Celtic’ sounds not only
represent a former time but are literally tied in with the very mists
of the ancient lands and peoples we associate with them. Of course
the colleague would not have wanted to take the point this far and
had made the comment lippantly in a wistful moment over a beer.
And I would be the last person to want to take away the pleasure
that such a feeling brought to him. But it was based on certain cultural assumptions that allowed him to put these meanings into the
sounds and not on anything to be found in the sounds themselves.
Cook (1998) concludes that it is the stories we tell about music that
help to determine what it is. He puts it thus: ‘The values wrapped up
in the idea of authenticity, for example, are not simply there in the
music; they are there because the way we think about music puts
them there’ (p. 14).
In subsequent chapters in this book we will be looking at way
that artists are able to connote authenticity through certain sounds,
looks and lyrics. Authenticity is itself a discourse that can be realised
through a range of semiotic resources.
To raise one inal point on authenticity, another reason that a boy
band is not authentic is that they are not the creators of the music
but performers. Performers do not have so much status, unless they
establish a status as an original interpreter, such as Billie Holiday.
This is slightly different in the case of classical music where certain
18Analysing Popular Music
virtuoso musicians are considered to be geniuses and in touch with
some kind of divine force.
Taruskin (1995) suggests that classical music reveals a particular
contradiction in our idea of authenticity. On the one hand, authenticity is about conviction and expression of emotion. But, on the other
hand, we also like to think about authentic works. So how does a classical performer remain faithful to the original and convey authenticity through the expression of emotion? Cook (1998) explains that
it is odd that such musicians are credited with providing unique
interpretations of compositions yet no one ever discusses where
the boundaries of interpretation and improvisation meet. Therefore,
what interpretation means is never articulated. Yet it becomes a discourse for talking about music and again can be understood as a culturally based way that it has meaning for us.
Body and mind split
I was at a gig enjoying the music of one of my favourite musicians. The
audience had all remained seated for most of the performance but
during the encores began to leave their seats to dance in the aisles or
just to stand where they were and sway and wave their arms about. I
didn’t have the urge to do this and simply sat watching and listening
carefully. After the gig some friends asked if I hadn’t enjoyed it, that
I didn’t appear to get into the music. In fact I had been enraptured.
Here we have another discourse about the meaning of music: how it
relates to our body and mind and how we can use music to express
ourselves. It also shows how people are convinced that there are
correct and incorrect ways to express enjoyment of music. Clearly in
the case of this gig I had not done so in the right way. I was too busy
listening and watching.
For a time I played regular weekly slots in a jazz basement. When I
was playing solos audience members would sit smoking and sipping
drinks thoughtfully and then clap lightly when I had inished or maybe
even just nod a few times or tap the side of their glass with their inger. Occasionally someone might exclaim ‘Yes!’ as I inished the solo.
But there was certainly no raising of arms, leaping around, nor smiling. During the same period I played regular gigs in a blues band.
Here people would whoop during solos, shout ‘Yeah’, would dance
in a walking type of motion and occasionally shake their heads as if
trying to shake water from their hair. But there would be no leaping
around. Earlier in my musical career I performed in orchestras where
the audience would sit completely still in silence and then applaud
rapturously when they were sure the piece was inished, with of
course a few minor ripples, quickly and shyly withdrawn, in some of
19Discourses of Popular Music
the pauses. There were even different facial expressions commonly
seen at the different performances. At the blues gig punters would
screw up their faces; in the jazz basement you would tend to see furrowed brows, head slightly to one side, suggesting concentration. At
the classical concert faces would be open, with the occasional smile.
There are clearly kinds of behaviour appropriate to watching and
listening to different kinds of performance and for expressing our
appreciation of the music. Frith (1996) has discussed the way we
have developed an association of fun with the body and seriousness
with the mind. This also helps to explain how what we think of as
‘African music’ or blues has become associated with the body and
movement and classical music has become associated with the soul,
intellect and quiet contemplation.
Frith (1996: 124) explains that these associations have their origins in Europe and the US in the 19th century. We must be still and
silent during a classical concert or a jazz session as there is something
intellectual going on. Serious music needs to be contemplated carefully. But at a rock concert such behaviour is seen as silly, repressed
or as missing the point. This is the difference between listening with
the mind and listening with the body, which has its origins in the
Romantic dichotomy between nature and culture and their corresponding associations with feeling and reason. Feelings were therefore associated with the body as opposed to the intellect. For this
reason pop music is often seen as simplistic and not requiring intellect. It is not listened to intellectually but physically.
Frith (1996) argues that it is this association with the body and
the natural as opposed to the mind and culture that has allowed pop
music to come to be seen as a way of casting off bourgeois inhibitions.
The distinction between the body, instinct and feeling as opposed
to the mind, intellect and reason sets up the idea that music of the
body is free from restriction of the intellect and of high culture. So
artists, simply through using certain sounds and visual references
that connote this discourse, can indicate that they are of the body,
the low brow and not of the bourgeoisie repressed social condition.
Of course pop musicians can use this to indicate that they are antirespectable to give a sense of challenging social convention, when in
fact they do nothing of the kind. This is convenient for listeners who
can align themselves alongside a spirit of anti-establishment simply
by buying and enjoying a particular kind of music.
Black culture and music is generally viewed as the paradigmatic
music of the body in opposition to the bourgeoisie intellect. Frith
explains this in the context of the Romantic tradition where black
people were seen as primitive innocent people, ‘uncorrupted by culture, still close to a human “essence” ’ (p. 127). The argument goes
therefore that African music is more sexual and physical since
20Analysing Popular Music
Africans are more in touch with the body and are associated with
unmediated sensual states.
Frith’s points help us to understand our earlier example from the
Muppet Show, where black music is intuitive, instinctive and unmediated sensual expression compared to the formal intellectualisation of classical music. Therefore, the blues itself can free us from the
strictures of culture. These points can also help us to understand the
difference between the blues and a boy band. The boy band is not an
unmediated expression of intuitive feeling as they have been contrived
to address a particular audience. Even though the blues band may also
have been designed for a market, both by the artists themselves and
by a record company, they carry more associations of instinct.
One thing we often take for granted in the context of the body and
music is that rhythm and beat are somehow some kind of rhythm of
the body, a pulse or heart beat. Frith (1996) suggests that there is
something odd about this. He asks why beat is never compared to
machines, to clockwork and therefore why these kinds of rhythms
are never thought to affect us in this primitive way (p. 133). As with
authenticity this kind of discourse is not clearly thought through and
appears simply as a natural way to think about music. Using a machine
to talk about an effect on the body appears as contrary to the idea of
the soul, the spirit and expression from the heart, and to the romantic
notion that music connects us to some higher plane. Of course rap
music is able to use the sound of the drum machine to a different
effect. But rap, of course, has a number of other important indicators
of authenticity. We will be analysing these in later chapters.
As well as being the paradigmatic case of authentic, unmediated
music of the body, African or black music is often distinguished in
terms of the centrality of beat. But a number of writers have challenged the very idea of an ‘African’ or ‘black’ music being one category of music at all. Negus (1996) suggests that the very idea of
African music is absurd. Africa is the largest of all continents with
massive genetic, cultural and linguistic variation that is more distinct than across the whole of Europe and between some European
and African areas. Yet it is common to call music ‘African’ or ‘black’.
Gilroy (1994) has discussed the oddness of this particular role given
to black and African music. He describes this as the ‘place prepared
for black cultural expression in the hierarchy of creativity generated
by the pernicious metaphysical dualism that identiies blacks with
the body and whites with the mind’ (p. 97).
The question is to what extent can we indeed ind any evidence
for this ‘bodyness’ in black music? I personally have heard white
musicians saying that they could only ever copy a black musician,
but never really play like them, unless they were themselves black,
meaning of course that black people are more in touch with a bodily
21Discourses of Popular Music
kind of expression. Such white musicians would consider this as a
non-racist statement, as showing respect and reverence for black
musicians. But is there evidence for these things in black music?
Tagg (1989) has argued that all of the features often ascribed to
black music – i.e. African-American music – can be shown to be characteristic of much music played by people around the world and
through history. For example, the blue notes that give blues its sound
can be found in most European folk music. Further, he argues, that
what is generally referred to as European music in contrast to African-American music is highly selective and elitist. Tagg concludes that
there are no intrinsic musical styles that are essential to black music.
Negus (1996) explains that there are hundreds of European musical traditions, many of which contain all the ingredients often attributed to black music – blue notes, syncopation and improvisation
(p. 104). But this is the kind of music that black people have been
allowed, or encouraged to do, which has then become what they do
produce. Artists such as Scott Joplin had their operas ignored while
their ragtime was celebrated. Also the technical aspects of what we
think of as black music tend to be ignored. Kofsky (1970) points
out, for example, that the jazz of Charlie Parker was highly technical
yet is mainly associated with feeling. Much of John Coltrane’s saxophone soloing is highly mathematical and of incredibly high technical rigour. Yet this is not talked about in this way but rather in terms
of its spirituality. One result of all this according to Gilroy (1994) is
that black people can end up using this kind of romantic reference
to deine themselves. The problem, he suggests, is when it is treated
as essentialist, black identity is treated as unchanging, monolithic,
a kind of ethnic absolutism. What being black is can be constructed
through these categories even though this lumps together massive
racial and cultural variations.
Hutnyk (2000) has commented on the way that this essentialist
view of black identity has been a central feature and of its commodi-
ication. What we think of as black music works through a racialisation that has been a central part of the marketing of this music
to both Euro-American audiences and to black audiences themselves.
In agreement with Gilroy, he suggests that this has also served as a
means of ‘presenting identities for self conirmation and internalisation to black communities themselves’ (p. 20). This racialisation
leads to a perception that music can simply represent monolithic
ethnic groups, where black musicians represent music from the
body. At music festivals such as Womad, he points out, African and
Caribbean musicians offer multicultural music based on ethnic
marketing categories.
From this discussion about authenticity and the body notions of
musical affect we can begin to see why we talk about music in terms
22Analysing Popular Music
of the way it says something of our character, why we feel that music
comes from a realm other than culture, that it is associated with the
soul, and that it is connected to nature, and why it can allow us to
challenge bourgeois culture. Of course we rarely ind such discourses
articulated directly, nor do we ind people struggling with the contradictions between them. Taruskin (1995) suggests that these kinds of
discourses have become the ‘moral slang’ of our age. In other words,
we use them to give meaning to our experiences though they are by
no means concrete terms.
How we talk about music
In the introduction I suggested that just as when the linguist analyses grammar and patterns in the use of language in literature and
poetry that this takes nothing away from the pleasures that they can
bring so there is no reason to suggest that a semiotics of music takes
anything away from the way it affects us. However, there is an argument that when we listen to music for leisure we do not attend to
the same features and qualities as we do when we approach it for
purposes of analysis. It is akin to analysing a ine painting in terms
of the kinds of brushstrokes and use of perspective. This is not how
most of us enjoy such works and not why they move us. But there is
a problem with this view of listening as it implies that there is a way
to do it neutrally and completely unmotivated. Again here we see the
inluence of Romanticism where it is assumed that there is a kind
of listening where we simply connect spiritually or bodily with the
music. But how we talk about the way that music affects is a valuable
resource that can give us further access to the discourses we have for
understanding it.
Frith (1996) gives much thought to what we actually think listening to music is since this can tell us something about what we believe
music to be. The music reviews we ind in the music press are one
source of such views. Here is an example of how critics write in a
BBC review of an album by Willie Nelson and Wynton Marsalis called
‘Two Men with the Blues’:
Nelson’s vocals on Stardust are a touch brighter than Hoagy Carmichael may
have intended but the effect is leavened by a smokey, gently twisting trumpet line full of yearning beauty courtesy of Marsalis. Another Nelson standard, Georgia On My Mind, has a sweet, subdued but compelling intimacy
and could legitimately lay claim to the title of ultimate standout track on an
album of standout tracks. (www.bbc.co.uk/music/release/3brg/)
We ind a number of terms to describe the trumpet sound: ‘smokey’,
‘twisting’ and ‘yearning’. Frith says that such descriptions may indeed
appear as elegant ways of describing the work of a musician. But in
23Discourses of Popular Music
other ways he feels they say more about pop history and culture and
what we have come to believe of music (1996: 68). These are clues to
what we think music is and how it should affect us. If we were to comment to a friend about a boy band song heard casually on a radio playing in a café that we thought the trumpet was ‘smokey’ and ‘yearning’ they would think we were mad. And indeed in reviews for the
records of boy bands such things are never mentioned. ‘Smokey’ here
conveys something of the jazz basement and ‘yearning’ of bodily feelings. Such terms are not itting for the music of a boy band. Reviews
for John Coltrane records say little about his technical abilities and
the arrangements but much about the ‘soulfulness’, ‘longing’ and spiritual journey of his music. Clearly the adjectives chosen, as Frith suggests, speak not so much about the music but about pop history and
discourses of music. In fact boy bands are often assessed in terms of
which other artists they sound like, or, if it is a second album, whether
they can be taken seriously as musicians, whether they can mature.
Some have argued that since music can only ever connote and
never denote it is impossible to describe. Ethnomusicologists such
as Charles Seeger (1977) have questioned the degree that words
can express musical experiences. Roland Barthes (1977) made the
point that music in language is ‘only ever translated into the poorest
of linguistic categories: the adjective’ (p. 291). But these comments
suggest that there might possibly be a neutral language for describing
music or that somehow there are affects that are free of the discourses
we have for talking about them. As Frith suggests, these provide clues
as to what we think music is.
So what is music? For Cook (1990) it is not possible to answer this
question in terms of anything to do with sounds themselves. Some
theorists such as Hanslick (1957) have argued that music can be distinguished from nine musical sounds as they involve the use of ixed
pitches, where as all naturally occurring sounds generally do not.
For Cook (1990) this creates problems. Much music does not involve
ixed pitches, such as Japanese shakuhachi music. Morse code has
ixed pitches but we wouldn’t call that music. We might hear workers
on a nearby building site bashing out melodies accidentally as they
hit metal and saw wood. For Cook:
it is not possible to arrive at a satisfactory deinition of music simply in terms
of sound (…) because of the essential role that the listener, and more generally the environment in which the sound is heard, plays in the constitution of
any event as a musical one. (p. 11)
Cook gives the example of John Cage’s 4a 33qfor piano. This is an
entirely silent piece. A pianist arrives on stage, opens the keyboard
and sits motionless for the duration of the piece. What happens is
that people in the audience become hugely aware of the sounds
24Analysing Popular Music
around them. Cage’s point was that anything can be heard as music.
He went on to compose silent pieces to be performed in all sorts of
contexts. For Cook this shows that composing music is not so much
about making musically interesting or appropriate sounds as it is of
creating contexts in which those sounds will be perceived as musically interesting (p. 12). We can argue that this is what pop musicians partly do. They work to make contexts (image, look) that help
to make the sounds they make relevant and more interesting to
people. Making them relevant and interesting, as we have already
shown, may mean creating the right conditions for listeners to put
meanings into the music. So the right look, sound quality or lyric,
the right behaviour off stage, helps the listener to realise particular
discourses, such as authenticity, for example.
We can do courses in musical appreciation, read books, or read
critics in the music press, that teach us to link what we hear in the
music to biographical facts about the composer and historical information about the musical style. Jazz lovers may know lots about a
performer and their music and particular narratives will become
established about these performers. But this is not the case for all
kinds of music. Only authentic artists, or those who exhibit genius,
are to be discussed in terms of biography and inluences.
There is also a resistance to being told by experts about what
we should listen to in music or how we should listen. We feel we
have the right to have our own emotional responses to music. Cook
(1998) points out that in concert notes about classical music or
about jazz musicians at a performance we may have no idea about
what is described in terms of things like ‘large scale tonal structures’
or ‘modal blues’. But we enjoy the music nevertheless and may wish
to vehemently point this out. It feels rather like being told exactly
how to enjoy other sensory experiences such as taking a hot shower
or eating our favourite meal. But as we have seen throughout this
chapter both what experts say about music and the very fact that
listeners claim to have a natural way of listening free of technical
knowledge both offer evidence of the way that culture shapes what
we think music is shaping our listening and participation.
The fact that there are experts in music and that enjoying some
kinds of music is believed to be enhanced by expert knowledge does
have another effect: it drives a high–low culture distinction. Some
have the power to deine what is good music and what is trivial or
no more than simple entertainment. This expertise and authority of
aesthetic sanction brings power. We see this at the level of musicology, rock criticism and even where a group of dedicated indie fans,
as in Hibbett’s (2004) case, pride themselves in having knowledge
about musical tradition and origins, therefore excluding those who
are not real fans. Frith (1996) has thought about this in terms of the
25Discourses of Popular Music
way that we can establish a sense of identity and difference through
this process of displaying the ability to discriminate good, bad and
important music (p. 18). He draws on Bourdieu to argue that
the aesthetic interpretation of high art is, in fact, functional: it enables
asthetes to display their social superiority. (p. 18)
So the very fact that we pride ourselves on recognising talent and
good music is part of perpetuating such distinctions. The audience at
the jazz basement who said ‘yes’ at the end of a saxophone solo are
displaying their aesthetic appreciation and therefore alignment with
jazz heritage. So to understand any kind of value judgement made
about music we must look irst at the social contexts in which we
ind them made. Then we must ask why a kind of music, a sound, a
look, a particular of performance is valued over others. This process
means looking at the way that the kinds of discourses we have been
looking at in this chapter are used as taken-for-granted measures of
what music is. But, crucially for the purposes of this book, it means
that we can establish and inventories the way that certain kinds of
sounds, words and arrangements become associated with notions
like talent and creativity and others not.
Music reflects subcultures
A further way that we talk about music is through its association with
‘subcultures’. We often hear people talk of things like ‘indie culture’ or
the ‘indie scene’. In Cardiff where I live there is a music venue which
attracts a range of genres of acts. When there is a gig queues stretch
out along the street. It is a simple matter to identify the genre of music
by clothing, haircuts and poses. We have already dealt with the way
that being a fan of a particular music can bring a sense of expertise
or can indicate our alignment with authenticity and anti-bourgeois
sentiments. But why the need to dress the same? Can we indeed think
about these groups of genre fans as a kind of subculture or scene?
I have a friend whose highlight of the year is the folk music
festival Womad, from where she usually returns with a range of ‘ethnic’ music and jewellery. This friend is marginally active in Amnesty
International and is always proud to take part in peace and anti-war
demonstrations. When she last returned from Womad she showed
photographs of herself with a ire-juggler, of her participating in
‘African’ dancing, eating exotic foods, and sitting listening to indigenous ‘Latin American’ poetry. These things form a familiar collection
of cultural practices and artefacts. When I have been to this friend’s
house for dinner I have met more of her friends with whom she
attends festivals who share the same set of interests and aesthetic
26Analysing Popular Music
pleasures. But to what extent do they form some kind of identiiable
culture? It is clear, for example, that we will not tend to get the
African dancing, juggling and ethnic jewellery at an indie or rap gig.
At the end of the 1970s Dick Hebdige, in his book Subculture: The
Meaning of Style, discussed what he called ‘style’ in order to explain
the way that subcultures combined elements to communicate a way
of life. He gave the example of punk music that used visuals of torn
clothes, swastikas, spiky brightly-dyed hair and swearing to point to
their dissatisfaction with society. Of course punks had no coherent
criticism of society, nor did they offer any solutions, but they were
able to show their disillusionment through how they looked and
spoke, and also through the distortion and directness of their music.
I recently saw a photograph of a colleague in his punk gear in 1980.
On his jacket was written the word ‘destroy’. This was about indicating a lack of alignment with consensus culture rather than with
physical destruction itself.
Hebdige thought that punk was basically about challenging the
mainstream culture done through appropriation of things from
that culture. All this came from working-class young men who,
disillusioned with much in their lives, found alternative ways to
create meaning. In the case of punk and other subgroups, such
as the mods and rockers of the 1960s, their existence could be
seen to be as a response to speciic circumstances. And given our
discussion of the way that music can be an authentic expression
of the soul and also indicate certain individual dispositions, it is
not surprising that people might see it as being part of the core of
their identity.
Clarke (1990), however, was critical of this view of an active subculture challenging a passive mainstream. Many people who became
punks were not part of any hardcore subcultures but simply had
a particular haircut, wore a few of the clothes for a while, or liked
some of the music. The colleague in the photograph, for example,
went to university, became an academic and has shares in public services that were sold off in the 1980s. But when he had his spiky hair
and carried the words ‘destroy’ and ‘anarchy’ on his jacket he felt
good through his disrespect and difference.
Thornton (1995) thought it useful to think about such subcultures
using Bourdieu’s (1986) concept of cultural capital. Here young people use subcultural capital as a way of distinguishing themselves
from others. For young teenagers there might be important cultural
capital in wearing a particular kind of clothing for a while, or being
able to connote the values of being anti-mainstream. So music and
clothes can be seen as markers of distinction and status. Of course
this can involve an extremely conformist seeking of acceptance and
status, realised in the irst place though acts of consumption. The
27Discourses of Popular Music
question can be posed therefore as to how can this be any challenge
to the mainstream?
Laing (1985) was critical of the view that subcultures of this kind
did ever really offer any kind of challenge. After all, the kinds of punk
bands discussed by Hebdige made a fortune in sales, becoming mainstream themselves. The friend who goes to Womad considers herself
as against the mainstream. Yet she lives in a large 19th-century house
in an opulent area of town, owns several other properties which
she rents out and likes expensive furniture. We could argue, using
Chaney’s (1996) account of lifestyle society that music cultures can
be taken on in the same way that we take on other signiiers of lifestyle identity in consumer society such as the car we drive, the furniture we put in our house or the newspaper we read. Being into indie
music or Womad’s world music could be thought about as lifestyle
choices. This is not to say that when we listen to this music that it
will not affect us emotionally, but that the meanings are part of the
lifestyles that we construct.
Kruse (1993) suggests rather that we use distinctions like ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative music’ in order to differentiate ourselves
from an imagined other. After all, she reminds us, ‘Senses of shared
identity are alliances formed out of oppositional stances’ (p. 34).
For Thornton (1995) the very idea of a mainstream is itself problematic. It is often something proposed by people in order to authenticate their own likes and styles. What we call subcultures cannot
be understood independently from the role of the media and commercial interests. This is all the more the case when we think about
the signiiers of subcultures in terms of lifestyle society where we
are able to indicate the kinds of person we are through consumer
choices (Chaney, 1996). Negus (1996) makes the observation that
much of what we think about as rebelliousness in pop music cultures
is in fact pretty harmless. As we considered earlier, much of the challenge produced by pop music can be due to the way it is able to signify a rejection of bourgeoisie intellectual culture. In later chapters
we will be looking at how this rebelliousness is connoted in sounds,
looks and lyrics.
Negus (1996) asks a further interesting question about the nature
of subcultures. What happens when they become internationalised,
when we see punk in Tokyo, or a rap act in Turkey? A search on the
Web reveals that many countries around the world have rap artists,
who follow a very similar iconography and sing similar kinds of ‘protest’ songs. All wear very similar clothing and strike the same poses
on their promotional material. Is it productive to think about this as
a subculture or music scene? Negus asks whether what we are seeing involves simply imitation and commercial exploitations (p. 24).
Again this brings us back to the idea of lifestyle. Challenges to the
28Analysing Popular Music
social order through music genre such as rap are not systematically
argued nor carried out but are connoted through aligning oneself
alongside an unformulated idea of rebellion though striking certain
poses, wearing clothes and making or listening to particular kinds of
sounds. Rap is able to connote an authenticity of inner-city oppression, and also of macho aggression and pride, all realised closely to
consumerism.
Creativity versus
the music corporation
While the following chapters in this book will be looking speciically
at how bands use semiotic resources – sounds, image and word – to
communicate about themselves, it is important that we are mindful of the way that record companies are also active in this process,
taking an important role in shaping the image of artists, in seeking
market position and addressing audiences. Negus, writing in the
mid-1990s, points out:
Since the beginning of the 1990s, six major recording companies have controlled the means by which approximately 80 to 85 per cent of recordings
sold in the world are produced, manufactured and distributed. These companies are Sony Music Entertainment, Electrical and Musical Industries
(EMI), the Music Corporation of America (MCA), Polygram Music Entertainment, the Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG) and Warner Music International.
(1996: 51)
Musical and visual language of music comes to our attention generally through large corporations. Even bands which are sold as ‘edgy’,
‘indie’, or ‘anti-mainstream’, have often been carefully marketed as
such. In this book we will not be dealing with marketing or record
companies (see Middleton, 1984, 1990). But there are a number of
discourses about the role of corporations and the way that they are
seen to interfere with and be opposed to creativity that are important to how we evaluate bands themselves that relate to music’s or
artists’ authenticity, creativity and social relevance. These crop up in
the discourse connoted by the semiotic resources used by bands.
Stemming from Adorno (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1979) many
commentators have discussed standardisation in the music industry,
where large corporations treat music like any other goods in order to
maximise proits (Chapple and Garofalo, 1977). This can mean that
even if an artist wishes to use their music to challenge capitalism or
wider society this will become watered down through the way it is
processed by corporations (Harker, 1980; George, 1988). Other writers (e.g., Negus, 1991) have pointed to a number of problems with
29Discourses of Popular Music
such views. It is not so much that corporations have no effects at all
on music but that this view involves a romanticisation and simpliication of their relationship to creativity.
From what has been discussed throughout this chapter it is clear
that commercial activity sits in conlict with our idea of the creative
artist who communicates something of the soul through their godgiven raw talent. The big record companies are interested in proit
maximisation. There is in principle, therefore, a difference of interest.
Artists might be manipulated by their record label, become seduced
by monetary gain and therefore ‘sell out’. Worst of all, some bands
become the product of a label, deliberately designed and marketed
to appeal to particular listeners. We can accept that some artists do
become very rich, and this is permitted so long as it as a reward for
talent and not as an end in itself.
In the romantic tradition we also tend to resist the idea that creativity can be a large-scale collective act. We can see this, to step outside of the ield of music for a moment, in the way movies can be
thought of as art only where they are the product of a single director.
In art house cinemas it is the movies of single-named directors that
are shown and celebrated. Such movies sit more easily with our idea
of authorship than studio-produced movies where huge production
teams collaborate to make blockbusters. This is even where such
works produce incredible cinematic experiences. In such cases we
even seek out to name individual talents who make particular contributions, but not think of the whole as art. There is a similar thing
happening in music where it is not acceptable that a musician, or at
least our experience of them, could be improved by the involvement
of the music industry itself. It should be the artists who design their
own sound, look and image. Musicians who, we feel, have become
too processed are thought to have sold out and lost their artistic
integrity in order to sell records. But this will be judged through discourses of authenticity and not through any actual concrete facts.
There is also the idea that independent labels break new and
exciting bands that would have been excluded by the majors, that
the indie labels are much more able to provide room for true creativity. Negus (1992) believes that there is some evidence that such
labels have made signiicant contributions but that such companies
also have inancial concerns as priority (p. 43). Therefore they have
an investment in the same system. In a similar vein, Lee (1995),
after researching independent labels, concluded that they still operate in the same capitalist system as the majors and that while they
may make music for niche groups they do not provide any challenge
to the nature of the market itself. He suggests that as they become
more successful they are likely to move away from any sense of
challenging the system. For Negus (1992) we should not make the
30Analysing Popular Music
mistake of seeing indies and majors as some kind of opposition.
They are connected by ‘complex patterns of ownership, investment,
licensing, formal and informal and sometimes deliberately obscured
relationships’ (1991: 18).
Frith (1983) suggests that the best way to think about such labels
is as talent spotters, reminding us that many are often arms of majors.
Being on an indie label can bring extra kudos, which is important in
the way that artists need to be seen to be authentic. For example,
Blur were on the Food Label which was part of Parlophone records,
which in turn was part of EMI. But this allowed them, for some of
their fans, to be an ‘indie’ band.
But Frith (1987) makes a more important point. He argues that
what we know of as pop music, even that which we have thought
of most creative as most anti-mainstream, has come to exist not in
spite of commerce, but in harmony with it. It was the music industry,
the commercialisation of music, that allowed pop to happen in the
irst place. Pop music as we know it is not something that is apart
from the process of the commercialisation of music, of it becoming
an industry. Rock and roll did not emerge from outside of the system
of capitalist production but is a product of the fusing of creativity
and commerce.
For record corporations a new sound, or creativity, is part of the
way they can make money. On the one hand, this important for what
the public wants. But on the other, Negus observes, while record companies must be proitable their acts are also assessed in terms of creativity by DJs, journalists, fans etc., which means that to some extent
they must attend to these things. Of course this means that commercial decisions, such as which bands to promote, can be about a commercial/creative set of predictions, meaning that at a certain time
particular kinds of music might be preferred by record companies.
But this can mean that at one time it is a new kind of sound that they
are promoting. For Negus (1996) it is important to remember that
what becomes commercially successful is not about the market deciding, yet nor is it a matter of the public getting what it wants (p. 50).
Much music, of course, gets made outside of the controls of record
companies. We can see gigs in a local pub, create our own music on
sound-editing software on our own computers and busk on street
corners. But does this really mean that this music is beyond the inluence of the big labels? After all, Negus (1996) argues, record labels
have been powerful in deining what the cannons are, what we get to
listen to more broadly, how artists sound, play and look, and the attitudes that they should have. When I played saxophone in blues bands
the punters knew what we should sound like as they had heard blues
on records, on the radio, all distributed by corporations.
31Discourses of Popular Music Activity
In this chapter we have begun to look at the discourses that shape
the way that we think about popular music. In the following chapters
the aim is to provide a toolkit for analysing the way these discourses
are realised through the designs of record sleeves, promotional photography, music videos, lyrics and the music itself. In later chapters
we therefore explore how artists are able to help listeners put meanings
into their music

VIDA CHENOWETH ------------
Music as discourse
In this paper I will briefly discuss some structural and analytical correlations between speech and music.
Traditional Western composers commonly begin a musical work
with a brief introduction to establish key, mood and tempo, or with a clear
statement of the subject, the thematic statement.
The commencement of musical discourse in oral tradition is nearly
always by a responsible solo voice, vocal or instrumental. Conductors, as
such, are veritably unknown. In fact, it baffles and amuses non-literate
societies the first time they behold such. The arm waving seems to them
an event unrelated to the singing.
In responsorial singing style, a leader begins and the group joins in
subsequently. One way to discern able musicianship among a people that
does not recognize that there are varying degrees of musical ability, is to
notice who begins. He must be responsible to the point of commencing
on or within the correct tonal range, to retain repertoire accurately and
to command sufficient expertise for the rest to be willing to follow.
A great deal of musical variety is possible in responsorial singing.
The group may join the leader, singing in unison with him, or they may
respond antiphonally with contrasting musical material. Sometimes the
group divides into harmony as do the Danis of Irian Jaya. Generally, in
antiphonal response, the group's part remains constant and any improvisation is done by the solo part.
There are elaborate improvizational styles practiced in some oral
traditions. Such a discourse demands a tonal, harmonic or rhythmic plan
or any combination of the three. It is within these bounds that the player
or singer invents a theme or motif, a topic for discourse. The Indian rag a
provides for the musician a strict inventory of pitches with which he then
spends several minutes in introductory musing until a theme crystallizes.
Its development may be by one, two or three other musicians when they
have grasped the theme. They enter then into ensemble with the composer and begin linear (non-chordal) development using imitative devices
for unity and never stepping outside the tonal limits imposed by the rag a.
A particular mood and/or time of day is characteristic of each raga and
its rendition.
A highly contemplative style of improvization heard among Japanese solo players oft he shakuhachi is more difficult to decipher. The sha135
136 WORD, VOLUME 37. NUMBERS 1-2 (APRIL-AUGUST 1986)
kuhachi is an end-blown bamboo flute with 5 fingerholes and resembles a
recorder. The soloist seems to have complete tonal and rhythmic freedom. The Zen soloist most often contemplates something in naturetrees, streams, flowers, etc.-as he improvizes. It is possible for him to
incorporate onomatopoetic sounds into the mood nature affects on him.
His commencement, like the Indian player-composer, is contemplative
and unfixed as to form.
Fixed forms, even unwritten ones such as those played by the Indonesian Ramelan (orchestra), typically begin with the thematic kernel or
with a brief introduction to it. In Western classical forms, a similar beginning is referred to as exposition. If it is announced by one voice, a conductor is unnecessary. The announcement serves to establish tempo and
mood. In compositions where there must be unity of voice played or sung
by a group, someone must give the signal to begin, one of the performers
or a special conductor. No culture known to this writer accepts a ragged
beginning as "good" music.
To summarize, the initial border of a musical discourse consists of a
leading solo voice without a conductor or, in the case of ensembles, a conductor within or apart from the group who signals commencement of the
discourse.
Musical discourse occurs as (I) a closed form, (2) as an open-ended
form without definite closure, or (3) as an organic serial which is composed-often improvized-throughout. The first two are like dramas,
one with a conclusion, the other' 'left hanging,'' so to speak. The third is
more like a stream of consciousness, a soliloquy developing out of itself.
In duet or trio it is like a conversation.
Successful musical discourse maintains a balance between unity
and variety. Excess on the one hand leads to predictability and monotony;
excess on the other hand leads to the loss of direction and bewilderment
on the part of the hearer.
Apart from song and opera, whose text determines the musical
shape, Western composers-unless they purposely set out to destroy
tradition a la John Cage or another who relies on a serendipitous event for
success-prepare a climax to their work. That is to say, the "peak" of
the discourse is the culmination of direction in an event that is uniquely
prepared. Such an event would rarely occur early in the work. Most often
it occurs past midway or may even be reserved for the conclusion. Imagination determines the means of preparation to maximum tension-the
climax-followed by release of tension. Maximum relief of tension may
be immediate, but more often it is gradual.
Some means of obtaining tension are the following: (I) dissonance in
the harmonic structure, released by consonance, a device well exempli-
CHENOWETH, MUSIC AS DISCOURSE 137
tied by Bartok; (2) complexity, as in the amassing of voices in the stretto
of polyphonic works and best exemplified by Bach; (3) reserving the highest and loudest point for maximum tension, a device typical ofTchaikowsky and many others (the most transparent means of achieving musical climax); and (4) rhythm which plays an important role and works in
conjunction with harmony and melody to achieve maximum tension. In
this way, two or three structural conduits reinforce the preparation, climax and resolution. Rhythm creates tension when it strays from the
downbeat, the regular, and ceases to be predictable.
Primitive composers-primitive in the sense that they are not formally schooled in theoretical aspects of composition-do not consciously aim for climax. Western ears seeking it in the terms characteristic of Western composition methods, are frequently left unsatisfied. In
the Papua New Guinea highlands composers render a song faithfully adhering to the rhythm of speech. This in turn affects the shape of melody.
One song sung apart from the ritual or series of which it is a component
does not hold the climax. However, when the collection of songs is sung,
(as in the great fete called sing-sing in Neo-Melanesian) one does indeed
sense the climax. To cite a personal observation:
The Usarufa people and their neighbors in the Eastern Highlands follow similar sinRsinR procedures. It was not unil after I had attended three separate sinJ?-sinRs that the
overall pattern began to emerge. The all-night fete is a welter of events. In addition to
performing a continuous song series with village singers and dancers with drums, there
are guests arriving who may overlay the host performance with the performance of
their own sinJ?-sing. There are intermittent speeches, warming fires made in addition
to the central bonfire, skits take place on the periphery and, from time to time, dancers
are pulled out of the revolving pageant to be fed by the host villagers. The moment of
highest intensity is the entrance of the costumed dancers, wearing decorations made
secretly for this specific event. All singing, drumming and dancing quits as they approach the firelight in order to display their magnificent costumes. Carrying drums
themselves, they give a light tap to the drumhead, a damped sound, every 3 or 4 seconds. It is eerily quiet, and the only event of the night so singularly prepared. After the
costumes are admired, the excitement of the participant-spectators is unleased in ajiJrtissimo not heard previously.
The Sengalese kora (double-harp with calabash resonator) player accompanies himself while he sings long epics, the text of which determines
the climax. The voice and accompaniment swell excitedly upon demand
of the story and diminish accordingly. lmprovization is minimal, enough
to avoid monotony, but not so elaborate as to distract the player's intense
concentration on the ever-changing text. In African song, this seems to
be the general rule: the accompaniment varies little so that the singer can
set it in motion, almost automatically, in order to focus his creativity on
the text.
138 WORD, VOLUME 37, NUMBERS 1-2 (APRIL-AUGUST 1986)
What is it that binds a composition into a whole? Compositional devices which refer back, forms of repetition, holding one or more components constant (contour, rhythm, melody, tonality) while varying one or
more of the others. The cohesive factor, not unlike the verb in language,
is the tonal center from which and toward which all melodic movement
pulls or gravitates. It is the home base.
In European and other written traditions there is a formal cadence.
In oral traditions, cadences are not so clearly defined. Music for a rite or
ceremony, for example, finishes with the cessation of the activity the music accompanies. Singers or musicians may drop out casually or, as in the
case of Guatemalan marimberos, the lead player determines the end. At
a signal from him, the tonic chord is reiterated by all. The uninitiated listener may be startled at the abruptness of a cadence which sometimes occurs midphrase. Oblivious to the foreign listener's dependence upon a
carefully prepared ending, the oral traditionalist does not grasp the question put to him. "When/how does the song end?" It ends when it is finished! Eastern musicians, like those of India, extemporize in their performances. When the thematic idea, passed from one player to another in
imitative development, crystallizes to the satisfaction of the performers,
they join together in a conclusion that mystifies the Westerner and which
at the same time precipitates wild cheering from the local audience.
In a series of musical items which comprise an event, such as an
American pow-wow or New Guinea sing-sing, there are multiple leaders,
their numbers depending on the size of the gathering. Each of these leaders is responsible to begin certain songs. When his are finished, another
leader begins his repertoire, right on the heels of the preceding. Good
performances in New Guinea's Eastern Highlands have no time of waiting between one song and the next. To avoid a lull, a leader often begins
his song before the preceding one is completely finished. Unless one is
familiar with the repertoire, it is difficult to distinguish just where a song
does end.
In other cultures common to Africa, the improvized text dictates the
conclusion. The melodic line repeats over and over, like an ostinato, with
the singer narrating verse after verse. When his news or narrative finishes, the melody ends.
These are some ways in which oral traditions indicate the end of a
musical discourse: (l) by the cessation of the ritual or activity the music
accompanies, (2) by a leader's signal, (3) by mutual consent of the players
who arrive at a musical peak, (4) by the onset of a new song, (5) by text,
(6) by casual dissemination of an event, (7) through fatigue.
CHENOWETH, MUSIC AS DISCOURSE 139
The discourse of music is more akin to literature than to ordinary
speech. It is an art form, if not wholly repeatable, then mainly repeatable.
Although it is readily seen that some musical forms have obvious counterparts in literature, viz. poem and song, theater and opera, it is not so
easily seen that musical discourses have counterparts in literary forms
such as essay and soliloquy nor in extemporaneous forms such as debate,
prayer, interview and conversation. However, such correlations are seldom in the mind of the composer. It must be remembered that music is
not literal discourse but an abstract ''semblance of life'' -a small drama
of its own. Abstract tonal units are not always easy to define, and the
treatment of them is more difficult to comprehend than literal exposition
and development within the language we daily speak. Nor is the mood
and attitude which moved the composer to create necessarily that of the
listener. And therein lies the great freedom of an abstract 'language.'
Happily, the composer's success does not hinge upon whether he has
transferred his own thoughts, mood and attitude. Rather, his success
rests in his ability to form a satisfying discourse from an ingenious structuring of abstract units, in creating a metaphor oflife. Real understanding
of music then does not lie in precise reception of the composer's motives
and feelings but in the observance of his creativity as he goes about a
drama of tonal protagonists who ''fret and strut their little time upon the
stage ... "
Wheaton College
Wheaton, IL 60187 

The Language of Song: Some
Recent Approaches in Description
and Analysis*
MYFANY TURPIN AND TONYA STEBBINS
University of Queensland and La Trobe University
1. Introduction
Singing is an activity that happens in every society. But the ways that texts and music
align with each other and the ways meanings are conveyed, and how the activity fits
into larger contexts vary considerably from society to society. The study of song
draws in not only the discipline of musicology but also many fields of linguistic
inquiry*phonology, poetics, morphology, semantics and pragmatics. Like words and
morphemes, songs are form-meaning units to be included in any complete language
description. The papers in this volume reveal songs to be highly structured art forms
that have the ability to convey complex associations of meaning beyond everyday
spoken language. The papers arise from a workshop that aimed to explore the
linguistic features of song in a cross-disciplinary context with a view to strengthening
ties between linguists, musicologists and anthropologists working in this field.1
The papers relate to two main areas of investigation: (i) the formal properties of
song; and (ii) the meanings of songs. The formal properties of song involve at the
least, a textual component and a musical component.2
The text may be subject to
constraints; it may draw on words from a limited vocabulary, require a set number of
syllables per line or a rhyme in particular positions. The musical component too is
usually organized within a set tonal structure and rhythmic meter, and can also
involve significant contrasts in tempo, dynamic range and voice quality. Accompanying instrumentation may also be part of the musical structure of song. Song may also
+ We would like to thank Jane Simpson for providing helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
1 Workshop on the Language of Song held by the Australian Linguistics Society conference at the University of
Adelaide on 2728 September 2007. We thank all the participants at the workshop for their insightful comments
about issues involved in working on song, and especially for the discussion during the final session which arose
from the question of how to analyse songs, given that by their very nature they require expertise in language,
music and specific cultural knowledge.
2 Here we draw upon the work of Dell and Halle (2008).
ISSN 0726-8602 print/ISSN 1469-2996 online/10/010001-17 # 2010 The Australian Linguistic Society
DOI: 10.1080/07268600903133998
Australian Journal of Linguistics
Vol. 30, No. 1, January 2010, pp. 117
Downloaded By: [La Trobe University Library] At: 01:40 4 March 2010
require text and music to align in a set way, for example stressed syllables to align
with a strong musical beat. Many of the songs considered in this volume are part of a
much larger performance involving dance, gesture, costumes and designs. These may
also be part of the formal properties of song, and their alignment with text and music
should also be considered.
In the area of meaning, songs are of particular interest as they frequently have
distinct readings from that which would be assigned to them on the basis of
straightforward compositional semantic principles, in the same way that phrasal
idioms do. As well, song often conveys more meanings, significances and resonances
than an ordinary speech utterance, and in this respect songs resemble poetry. In
songs, meanings are encoded not only in the text, but also through a complex
interaction of the music, dance, visual designs and their associations with specialized
knowledge, including knowledge about the context of performance. This has led a
number of researchers to perceive songs as a package (Berndt 1965: 247; Tonkinson
1978: 112; Kartomi 1984: 60; Wild 1984: 192; Sutton 1987; Barwick 2000: 329, 2003:
8283; Turpin 2005). A song text itself is often what Sperber and Wilson (1986) call
‘weakly communicative’. This means that the hearer is required to make many
inferences to receive a message, and as a result many interpretations of the message
are possible. Such texts can be described as opaque (Walsh 2007). This contrasts with
various types of ‘strongly communicative’ spoken utterances where the choice of
syntax and words makes explicit the intended message. The ways in which
enculturated listeners derive meanings from songs involve investigating semantic
and pragmatic aspects of the song text,3
as well as specialized cultural and real-world
knowledge, including knowledge of the song performance as a speech event.
Knowledge in all these areas may be evoked when hearing particular songs. The
aesthetic pleasure speakers derive from interpreting songs with opaque song texts
may, in part, arise from the ‘recomposition of something anew’ rather than the
‘composition of something new’ (Fabb 1997: 8).4
1.1. Scope and Context of this Volume
The articles in this volume are concerned with the form and/or meaning of songs,
with a particular focus on the song texts. Viewed as a composite of text and music, a
comprehensive study of song favours a cross-disciplinary approach. Unfortunately,
studies of song do not always travel well between linguistics and musicology since the
same terms can be used in different ways. For example, the terms ‘rhythm’, ‘stress’ and
‘tone’ have different, specific meanings in linguistics and musicology. In order to
manage this issue, we have encouraged authors to define all technical terms to foster
understandings across the disciplines.
3
Following Dell and Elmedlaoui (2008) we use the term ‘enculturated listener’ to refer to the singers or listeners
of songs within a culture, in much the same way one uses the term ‘native speaker’ when referring to linguistic
competence.
4
See Wild (1987) for a discussion of this in Warlpiri.
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The definition of song we use in this volume is a sequence of syllables (‘text’) that
is sung,5 where singing is recognized within the relevant community as the most
appropriate method of delivering the text. Song cannot simply be defined as a
musical setting of words, as many songs contain vocables, such as ‘tra-la-la’, which are
not words and yet are part of a song text (the article by Apted in this volume is a case
in point). Sometimes a whole line may have no identifiable words (Strehlow 1971;
Garde 2007: 41). Our definition of song excludes the spontaneous singing of speech,
as, although this may draw on notions of song, often for humorous effect, the text
itself is not considered a song. By ‘singing’ we mean a vocal style with rhythmic and
usually also melodic properties. In some languages what are often translated as
‘songs’ may be delivered through intoning, wailing or reciting where there is rhythmic
but not melodic variation.6 Different linguistic communities may well define the
boundary between speech and song differently. In casting our net widely, our
definition of songs includes those genres that may be performed without an apparent
melodic structure, such as chants.
In the past 20 years there have been a number of collections concerned with
Australian Aboriginal songs (Clunies Ross et al. 1987; Barwick et al. 2005). Most
recently Studies in Aboriginal Song: A Special Issue of Australian Aboriginal Studies
(2007) contains excellent collaborative work between musicologists and linguists on
Australian Aboriginal song.7
The present volume furthers work on Aboriginal songs
and extends the geographic area of research by including articles on songs from a
diverse range of language communities including English, French, Spanish and lesser
known musical genres from the Pacific and South-East Asia.
We turn now to consider the two main areas of exploration in detail. In Section 2
we consider the form of songs and in Section 3, the meanings of songs. In each
section we describe the types of analytical issues that arise and highlight the
approaches taken by the authors of this volume to these areas.
2. Form and Structural Organization of Songs
At the most basic level, a song must involve text and music. Finer-grained analysis
reveals organizational units that combine to form a song. The organizational units
found in many English songs include lines, couplets, refrains, verses, choruses and
stanzas,8
all of which occur in the songs considered by Rodrı´guez-Va´zquez in this
volume. In many languages the organizational units are not named, just as
grammatical units might not be named. Instrumental introductions, musical
interludes, vocal sections (analogous to verses) and text phrases (analogous to lines)
5 Our use of ‘text’ means the syllables as they are uttered; they need not be a written version or performance of a
written version.
6
Rumsey, for example, refers to such genres in Papua New Guinea as ‘chanted tales’ (2001, 2005).
7
See also Clunies Ross (1986), and Koch and Turpin (2008) for a recent overview of the language of Aboriginal
songs.
8 Note that a ‘line’ of song does not refer to the same thing as a ‘line’ of speech.
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are organizational units in the Kaddikkaddik songs of west Arnhem Land identified by
O’Keeffe in this volume. The organizational structure of a song can have scope over
both text and music. A refrain, for example, is a repeated line of text and melody. A
verse, on the other hand, has the same melody but a different text. Sound patterning
such as rhymes often (but not always) occurs at the end of organizational units. In
this volume Morey finds various types of obligatory rhyme in Tai Phake songs of
north-east India, whereas Walsh finds an absence of rhyme in Aboriginal songs,
though he acknowledges other possible types of sound patterning.9
The musical component alone may have its own structure. For example, the
pitches of notes are bounded by the tonal structure of the particular musical genre or
the musical system of the enculturated listeners. In many songs rhythm is organized
into a repeating pattern of isochronous beats where some beats are stronger than
others, i.e. rhythmic meter. The articles by Nancarrow and O’Keeffe discuss meter in
Aboriginal songs. Duple meter is where every second beat is weaker than the first,
while triple meter is where every second and third beat is weaker than the first (such
as a waltz). Meter is often hierarchically ordered so that in addition to the tactus*the
beats to which one taps*it is possible to recognize larger or smaller divisions of the
beat.10 Where the beat divides into two units this is referred to as simple meter, and
where the beat divides into three units this is referred to as compound meter. In
Australian Aboriginal songs, polyrhythmic meters, where the percussion accompaniment is performed at a different meter to that performed by the voice, are also
common (see Nancarrow, in this volume). Similarly, tempo*the speed of the beats
or underlying pulse of the song*may be constrained by the genre of the song. In
many Aboriginal songs tempo is constrained by the particular meter and beating
accompaniment of the song. This cluster of rhythmic features has led to the term
‘rhythmic mode’ (see O’Keeffe, in this volume).11
In addition to the grammar of the spoken language, a song may have specific
textual conventions. Some songs may prefer particular parts of speech or particular
sounds in the same position of a line. Some may draw from a limited vocabulary,
have a reduced syntax, or a different phoneme inventory to that of the spoken
language.12 In this volume Apted finds a greater number of vowels in Inyjalarrku
songs of north-east Arnhem Land than in everyday speech, a finding in common
with songs from other areas (Strehlow 1971: 67; Sherzer 1990: 16; Turpin 2005:
272). It is important to remember that song is an art form that features the voice as
a musical instrument (Fornas 2003: 49) and vowels are the main pitch-bearing unit
of the voice. Particular types of vowels can help overcome the adverse effects of
9 Many Arandic songs, for example, are subject to alliteration on the final syllable of each line whereby the first
couplet of a verse ends in a pattern which is reversed for the second (final) couplet of the verse, thus creating a
palindrome e.g. a, ay; ay, a (Turpin 2007b).
10 See Patel (2008: 96179) for a detailed discussion of the hierarchical organization of rhythm in music.
11 For examples of rhythmic modes see Barwick (2003), Barwick et al. (2007), Marett (2005) and Treloyn (2007,
2009).
12 See Fabb (1997) and Foley (1997) for an overview of the formal features of many types of verbal art.
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consonant production on tune and tone and allow one to sing softly or quickly
without losing the pitch (Emmons 2002); the voice may thus use sounds purely for
their aesthetic effect. Unlike other instruments, however, the voice also produces
spoken language. We are challenged then to avoid viewing song as a derivative of
speech.
There may also be constraints on the linguistic variety used in song. Recent work
on northern Aboriginal songs has found that particular song genres are associated
with particular languages (Barwick et al. 2007: 8).13 In this volume Apted considers
how Inyjalarrku songs are entirely spirit language and contain no words from
everyday speech. Non-speech words are common in Australian Aboriginal songs, and
researchers have often viewed song texts in terms of their divergence from spoken
language (see, for example, Alpher 1976; Dixon 1984; Donaldson 1984; Merlan 1987;
Sutton 1987; Tunstill 1995). In contrast, the papers by Rodrı´guez-Va´zquez, Crozet,
Morey, Sollis, and Stebbins and Planigale consider songs whose linguistic variety is
primarily that of everyday speech.
Finally, there can be requirements on how text, music and song structure interact.
The length of lines may adhere to a regular count of some aspect of linguistic form.
This is called poetic meter.14 As an example, Dell and Elmedlaoui (2008) find that in
many Berber songs, lines adhere to a repeating four-mora pattern that is referred to as
a ‘foot’.15 In addition, they find that every second syllable of the foot must align with a
strong beat. A similar approach is taken by Rodrı´guez-Va´zquez in this volume. She
compares the extent to which lexical stress must align with strong musical beats in
English and Spanish folk songs, a well-documented requirement for English songs
(Hayes 1983; Hayes & Kaun 1996; Hayes & MacEachern 1998). She also compares the
extent to which the principle of ‘one syllable be set to one note’ exists in English and
Spanish songs.16
Both Morey and Sollis in this volume, consider the way in which lexical tone aligns
with musical pitch.17 To what extent song melodies are constrained by the melody of
speech is a particularly relevant question in relation to tone languages. Morey
observes in Tai Phake songs a trade-off where alignment of one aspect of text to
music provides freedom in how another area of text is aligned. He finds that when
lexical tone and musical pitch align, grammatical units need not match the
organizational units of the song. However, when lexical tone and musical pitch do
13 Arandic songs have a large proportion of their text in a neighbouring linguistic variety (Turpin & Green
in press).
14 Strictly speaking poetic meter refers to the fixing of the length of lines by counting some aspect of linguistic
form, and this counting is associated with control over poetic rhythm or the placement of word boundaries, or
some other aspect of the line’s form (Fabb 1997; Fabb & Halle 2008). Dell and Elmedlaoui put text-setting in the
purview of metricality (2008).
15 Sanskrit song texts also adhere to a four-mora pattern (Deo 2007).
16 This is also the case in many central Australian songs*see Turpin (2007a) for a discussion of a song style
where the temporal unit encodes a syllable, and thus a long note (two temporal units) encodes two syllables.
17 Rumsey (2007) considers how lexical tone is overridden by melody in Tom Yaya sung narratives from Papua
New Guinea; see also Patel for a broader consideration of this issue (2008: 217).
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not align there is strict matching of grammatical units with the half-line unit. In
exploring the relationship between linguistic tone and melody in pikono songs from
Papua New Guinea, Sollis finds that linguistic tone contours and melodic contours
match within the constraints of the melodic structure. A melodic phrase cannot
descend further than an interval of a fifth. Where an intonational decline is over a
long portion of text, this musical constraint forces a misalignment of linguistic tone
contour with melody. In many respects songs show a sensitivity to the relationship
between speech prosody and music. The nature and cross-linguistic variation of this
relationship is the concern of the sub-field of text-setting (Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983;
Halle & Lerdahl 1993; Kiparsky 2006; Fabb & Halle 2008; Hayes 2008; Hayes & Kaun
1996; Rodrı´guez-Va´zquez 2007, Turpin 2007a).
In general we find that the highly structured nature of songs can force
adjustments to the text not normally seen in the spoken form of the language.
This competition between the desire to adhere to the song structures and the desire
to remain faithful to the spoken language has led to Optimality Theory in
phonology being applied to text-setting in song (Hayes & MacEachern 1998).
Rodrı´guez-Va´zquez, in this volume, uses this methodology to show that constraints
which regulate rhythm in spoken language are also those that determine how words
are set to musical rhythm in stanzaic Spanish and English folk songs. This provides
an interesting comparison to Dell and Halle’s work on text-setting in French and
English songs (2008). Rodrı´guez-Va´zquez finds that in Spanish, a so-called syllabletimed language, different texts set to the same melodic line are more likely to
contain the same number of syllables than in English songs, although often at the
expense of aligning prominent syllables with strong musical beats. The reverse is the
case in English, a so-called stress-timed language, where lines are more likely to
contain differing numbers of syllables but less likely to contain stress mismatches.
Such research supports the view that the relation of lyrics to music in songs is
rooted in the sound structure of the language (Fabb 1997), yet contrasts with the
view that the sound structure of speech, literary language and song might have quite
different explanations (Kiparsky 2006: 7; Fabb & Halle 2008).
The use of language to draw attention to the sound qualities of the message itself
rather than its meaning is what Jakobson calls the poetic function of language (1960,
1987: 71). By selecting equivalent and contrasting aspects of languages to create a
sequence, such ‘parallelism’ (Jakobson 1987) gives a temporal dimension to language,
as each sound relates to what comes before and after it. Parallelism can also be
applied to semantics and syntax.18 Walsh, in this volume, considers various types of
parallelism in applying Friedrich’s theory of polytropy (1991) to Aboriginal songs. A
related feature is the repeated use of formulaic expressions. These may be limited to a
particular position in the song or line, and are often set to the same musical pattern.
In contrast to parallelism, a formula need not occur in a regular sequence. In this
18 As an example, Central Australian and Kimberly songs often prefer verbs in line final position (Strehlow
1971: 213; Austin 1978: 531532; Keogh 1990: 74; Ellis 1998: 435; Turpin 2005: 335).
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volume Sollis, Apted, Walsh and Morey identify formulaic text in the songs they
investigate.19 As well as drawing attention to the song’s own form, parallelism and
formulas may assist in the memorizing of songs.
To ascertain the structure of a well-formed song it is not always possible to identify
‘ungrammatical’ songs in the same way ungrammatical speech can be identified. In
some cases songs may form a finite set, and may be perceived as being created
by spirits rather than living people. In such cases it may not be easy to access native
speaker intuitions about a proposed ill-formed song, as the singer may evaluate the
song in terms of its origin rather than its structure. It may be important to analyse
multiple performances of a song in order to understand what aspects of a song’s
structure do not vary and are thus significant and defining, and what aspects are open
to variation and creativity. Variation may signal features of a particular singer, or a
particular social context of a given performance. Crozet, in this volume, considers
three very different versions of La Marseillaise, where she relates their differences to
the socio-cultural discourse of their times; yet all are regarded as exemplars of ‘the La
Marseillaise’.
3. The Meanings and Significances of Songs
Songs are often much more difficult to translate than speech. In some instances the
difficulties may be due to the text containing words that are not of everyday speech or
because the songs represent concepts that are difficult to grasp. In some communities
certain songs are only translatable to particular members of society (e.g. Keen 1977;
Clunies Ross 1986: 242). Thus the inability to translate a song may be due to its
inherently restricted nature, as discussed by Stebbins and Planigale in this volume.
A key difference between speech and song is the more deeply embedded and
artefact-like status of the text, a feature in common with poetry, proverbs, rhyming
slang, proper names and religious sermons. Yet unlike these purely linguistic forms,
song also includes music. This combination of the song text and musical components
has the ability to convey different types of meanings in complex ways. Where song
performance also involves dancing, painting and adornment of special items, these
non-verbal aspects can also contribute to the meaning of a song. So far we have used
the word ‘meaning’ rather loosely as a term covering many types of meanings and
associations. A complete account of song meaning requires a distinction between
different types of meaning and the ways in which meanings are conveyed. Nancarrow
identifies three ways in which Lardil burdal songs convey meaning: through the text
of a song, through the rhythm (musical meaning) and through interpretations
transmitted independently of the song text, what she calls ‘culturally ascribed
meaning’. In the next section we identify different types of meanings that songs can
convey: lexical or word meaning, song text meaning (the meaning of the words in the
19 Rumsey identifies formulas in songs from Papua New Guinea (2001: 194, 2005, 2007). In Australian
Aboriginal songs there is a tendency for formulas to occur at the ends of lines; see, for example, Barwick (2003:
32) and Koch and Turpin (2008: 180).
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context of the particular song), connotative and interactional meanings; and we also
consider the ways in which these are conveyed.
3.1. Word Meaning
All the articles in this volume identify, or are concerned with identifying, the words in
songs and their meanings. Word meaning can also be conveyed through music, such
as the downward interval in ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’ which reflects the meaning of
the downward movement to earth (Patel 2008: 342). Such word painting can also be
conveyed through dance. Nancarrow, in this volume, shows how the accompanying
dance emulating a brolga is the only aspect of the song conveying the meaning
‘brolga’ in a Mornington Island song.
It is not uncommon for words to have a different or broader lexical meaning in
song than in speech.20 As well, songs, like poetry, may have multiple competing
lexical meanings. Here, it is necessary to distinguish the meanings intended by the
composer (which may be multiple and intentional), and those constructed by
listeners interpreting the song. Intentional ambiguity (which is the basis of puns) may
be more widespread in orally transmitted song traditions, as the written form
necessarily favours only one lexical form, obfuscating the aesthetic pleasure of
holding two simultaneous interpretations of a text. Stebbins and Planigale note that
the word ame¯che¯linga in a Mali Baining song means both ‘lizard species’ and
‘ceremonial mask’. Walsh, in this volume, argues that ‘(s)he used his/her hands’ and
‘(s)he said/did’ are two distinct meanings of the same segment of text available to
listeners of a Murriny Patha song, although it is not known whether this was the
intention of the composer.
The music and formal requirements of a song can make it difficult to distinguish
the words of a song and can lead to a listener reinterpreting the original text. A classic
example of this in English has provided a name for this phenomenon, ‘mondegreens’.
It is based on a mishearing in the second line of the English couplet ‘... They have
slain the bonny earl of Moray, and laid him on the green’, which was later reinterpreted
as ‘... and Lady Mondegreen’.21 Mondegreens are no doubt more common in orally
transmitted traditions than in written traditions. Schebeck’s warning against making
hasty interpretations about the form of place names based on interpretations by
native speakers who may be ‘pressed for answers under the assumption that there
must be a simple answer’ (2002: 147148) applies equally to song translation.
So far we have considered the lexical meaning of words*their dictionary
definition. It is also important to consider the referential meaning of words. Again,
it is necessary to distinguish the meanings intended by the composer, and those
constructed by listeners interpreting the song. To illustrate the difference between
20 Compare Fabb’s discussion of Iatmul songs of Papua New Guinea where verbs have more general meanings
when they occur in songs (1997: 7); Koch and Turpin for examples in Aboriginal songs (2008: 180).
21 This term was coined by Sylvia Wright (1954), in an article called ‘The Death of Lady Mondegreen’, in
Harper’s Magazine, November 1954.
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lexical and referential meaning consider a song analysed by O’Keeffe in this volume.
The third line is Kaddikkaddik ka-wokdjanganj, ‘The oyster catcher spoke/sang/cried
out’. Interpreting the lexical meaning of the words in this line involves knowing what
sort of entity an oyster catcher is, including entailments such as it is a type of bird,
and what type of vocal action wokdjangan refers to, and the sorts of entities that
typically perform this action. Referential meaning is, for example, the specific oyster
catcher to which the song refers, which in the case of many Aboriginal Dreaming
songs is a specific ancestral being. Referential meaning is obtained by parsing the
words and constructing an interpretation of them, so a listener may have different
referents from those intended by the composer. For example, the composer of ‘The
bonny Earl of Moray’ had one earl in mind, whereas listeners might have different
referents depending on which Earl of Moray they thought the song was about.
Referential meanings are often more ambiguous in song than in speech. Spoken
explanations about whom or to what a song refers, and knowledge about the song
style or performance context, can play a role in conveying referential meaning.
In societies that recognize composers*individual(s) who are the creators of
songs*these people are often regarded as the legitimate source of meaning, and any
listener’s reinterpretation is regarded as ‘wrong’. In contrast, in societies where songs
are perceived as pre-existing rather than composed by individuals, as in much of
Aboriginal Australia, meanings are legitimized according to the status and genealogy
of the person interpreting the song. A reinterpretation of lexical or referential
meaning is thus of little relevance to the enculturated listeners (see, for example, Wild
1987: 109; Tunstill 1995: 64; Keogh 1996; Turpin 2005: 332).
While words in some songs have multiple lexical meanings, some may have no
lexical meaning. Apted, O’Keeffe and Nancarrow discuss songs where the texts, or
parts of the text, include words that the majority of enculturated listeners cannot
interpret. Where the text makes use of words that are not from everyday speech,
people may perceive the text to involve words whose meaning is no longer known.
Songs are often repositories of archaic words, as they tend to be stable entities due to
their tightly structured form. Alternatively people may perceive the words to involve
spirit language, whose lexical content remains unknown to people, or known only to
specialists of spirit language22 (Apted, O’Keeffe, in this volume). A third possibility is
that the text may contain ‘vocables’*syllables used to fill the structural requirements
of the song or simply for their acoustic properties (Clunies Ross 1986: 242; Koch &
Turpin 2008: 171). Apted observes that non-lexical units are ‘‘‘meaningful’’ in the
more abstract sense of this term’ (see Section 3.3 below). O’Keeffe similarly finds that
the spirit language represents the call of an oyster catcher bird, and a spoken narrative
reveals the oyster catcher to be the subject of the song style; thus the song text
‘encodes the relationship to external narratives’.
22 Marett discusses particular songmen in Arnhem Land who have the ability to interpret songs that are in spirit
language (2005: 43).
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3.2. Text Meaning
For some songs it can be difficult to know what a line or the song as a whole means,
even when the lexical meaning of words is known (see also Merlan 1987: 150). This is
often the case with song texts that have anaphoric words or where there is no
semantic link between lines. Stebbins and Planigale refer to this level of meaning as
‘text meaning’. An example of the difference between word meaning and text meaning
can be illustrated with a line of the Mali Baining song whose words Stebbins and
Planigale gloss as ‘maybe I can go with you’. They explain the text meaning of the
song as ‘a man missing his brother and wishing to go and be with him’. However, not
all songs have readily accessible text meanings. Walsh finds ‘The ‘‘pelican song’’ is
almost entirely composed of ‘‘actual’’ words but remains rather cryptic for this
observer’. He suggests exploring different types of tropes*imagistic, modal, formal,
contiguity-based and analogical*in order to elucidate broader meanings and
structures in songs.
Where songs form part of a larger corpus, particular text meanings can sometimes
be obtained in relation to other songs in the corpus. Curran, in this volume, finds
that a Warlpiri song containing the word for a particular type of tree ‘at this point in
the song cycle indicates that the women are no longer in their home country’.
As with word meaning, there may be multiple, intentional text meanings of a song.
A Pitjantjatjara song with the word ‘cup or mound shape’ is said to be about a termite
mound by one singer, a women’s breast by another, and an insulator on a telegraph
pole by another; and the particular textual meaning one derives, or is given, depends
on one’s own level of knowledge (Ellis 1985: 6264). A number of researchers of
Australian Aboriginal songs have suggested that the ability to have multiple text
meanings ensures songs have relevance and applicability to many contexts
(Tonkinson 1978: 102; Marett 2005: 199).23
Many of the articles in this volume show that specialized cultural knowledge is
required to deduce text meanings (Crozet, Curran, Nancarrow, Stebbins and
Planigale, and Walsh).24 In many societies not everyone has access to the same level
of specialized cultural knowledge, and so there can be varying degrees to which a
listener is enculturated in relation to a particular genre or song. Thus the ‘trajectory’
of understanding of a song will vary depending on one’s knowledge (Walsh, in this
volume).
Some songs have accompanying explanations in the form of a narrative or exegesis
(Donaldson 1979, 1984; Strehlow 1971).25 These elucidate not just text meaning, but
23 In relation to Lirrga songs of Northern Australia, Barwick too finds that the performer has a choice in which
text meanings to highlight in any one performance (2003: 82). Ellis and Barwick note that these multiple text
meanings ‘are never in conflict with each other; and ... are in fact mutually supportive’ (1987: 4445).
24 See, for example, analyses by Austin (1978: 529), Donaldson (1984: 247), Merlan (1987: 146), Hercus (1994:
311), Tunstill (1995: 63), Dixon and Koch (1996: 26), Hercus and Koch (1999: 81), Marett (2005) and Walsh
(2007). Marett conjectures that this is a significant reason why Aboriginal songs are difficult for outsiders to
appreciate (2005).
25 Compare with proverbs in English, or with the Apache place names discussed by Basso (1996).
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can reveal word meanings, especially where the text has a highly constrained form.
Such narratives may form a unique type of speech event (Hymes 1970), distinct from
explanations of other types of phenomena. Where the narrator must be of a
particular social status interactional meanings are also encoded in the speech act. In
parts of Australia only an owner of a song can provide an explanatory narrative.
Understanding the communicative behaviour of specific cultural settings, such as
song performance and explanation, is the subject of investigation of ethnographies of
speaking (Hymes 1970; Bauman & Sherzer 1974; Sherzer 1990).26
Nancarrow, in this volume, refers to the meaning of some songs as ‘learnt’ rather
than ‘interpreted through analysis of song text’, and refers to this source as ‘popular
opinion’. This can be compared to the way school children are sometimes ‘handed
down’ the meaning of their Latin school song rather than through textual translation.
The detailed meanings of songs discussed by Curran demonstrate how text meanings
of Warlpiri songs rely on a listener having specialized environmental, ceremonial and
other types of cultural knowledge.
3.3. Songs as Mnemonics
The tightly interwoven nature of text and music enables songs to be used as mnemonic
devices, especially in preliterate societies, where song and poetry has been documented
as a mnemonic aid for events and places (Weiner 1991: 45; Feld & Basso 1996: 109; Basso
1996).27 Even in contemporary literate societies we find songs used as mnemonics
(consider the ‘ABC’ Alphabet song in English). Recently the Bee Gees ‘Staying alive’ has
been promoted by pediatrics as a song to sing while administering CPR to help people
find the correct compression rate.28 It is not difficult to imagine how a song can then
gain additional significances*especially emotional responses*by use in such different
contexts. It has often been stated that Aboriginal songs act as mnemonics for linked
places, and so the song series as a whole is akin to a musical map (Strehlow 1970: 94).
The case studies of Aboriginal songs in this volume (Curran, O’Keeffe, Nancarrow,
Apted, and Walsh) all include songs that stand for particular places.
3.4. Interactional Meanings
Like other kinds of speech acts, songs have interactional meaning. Interactional
meaning refers to the attitude and expectations between the speaker and the hearer.
26 Merlan’s analysis of how people explain songs from the Roper River area (1987: 146), which contrasts with
casual conversation and narratives, is reminiscent of this approach.
27 Strehlow (1970: 94) argues that the performance of a song series acts as a mnemonic for the location of
important sites. When Central Australian people travelled the country on foot, the location of such places would
have been essential knowledge for survival.
28 See http://firstaid.about.com/od/cprbasics/qt/07_cpr_tips.htm, October 2008. See also ABC News Available
at: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/OnCall/story?id3837780&page1, November 2007, last accessed 25
November 2008. Note that many other songs, such as Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust have the correct
beat for CPR, however due to their less suitable lyrics these have not been promoted.
The Language of Song 11
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In singing, where the role of the singer is often fixed (not anyone can sing), and the
speech act context-driven (singing can only occur at certain times and places),
interactional meanings are dependent on the genre of the song. For example, by
attending a concert featuring a singer, a listener expects to be moved emotionally*or
at least be aesthetically pleased by the singing. In contrast, the addressee of ‘Happy
Birthday’ interprets this singing interactionally to mean that s/he is a special person,
and that the singers think him/her worthy, especially if followed by ‘For s/he’s a jolly
good fellow’. In the genre of political songs analysed by Crozet, the singer signals as
interactional meaning that they want to spur the addressee into political action,
assuming the role of teacher to the listener. In this genre the addressee is
simultaneously the government (often the subject of the songs) and the everyday
citizen listening to the song. Traditional Aboriginal songs can also have multiple
addressees: fellow performers (usually countrymen), listeners (usually outsiders) and
ancestral spirits. This leads to interactional meanings of identity such as ‘I am from
this country’ (see Curran, in this volume; compare also national anthems), ‘I have a
strong attachment to my spiritual ancestors’, or as Apted states ‘... the potency of
one’s spiritual life, which manifests in one’s ability to receive and sing songs from the
spirits’. In Central Australia, singing particular songs can bring about changes to the
physical worlds (e.g. bring about rain), also a type of interactional meaning.
3.5. Connotive Meanings
Songs can connote particular situations, behaviours and events. Such pragmatic and
associated knowledge is comparable to what McConnell-Ginet calls ‘conceptual
baggage’ (2008). Curran, in this volume, argues that visual images in both the song
text, the dance movements and visual designs connote certain concepts, for example
circular shapes ‘represent home, women and protection’. Walsh, in this volume,
discusses connotative meanings of place names in northern Australian Aboriginal
songs, which act as
a kind of shorthand to invoke a chain of connectedness between one specific place,
the other places in the vicinity and/or on the same Dreaming track, the stories
associated with that place through Dreamings, ancestors and exploits by living
relatives at that place to their country as a whole.
Some connotations may be evoked only in the context of a particular song style
and so are the results of knowledge of the particular song style speech event. This can
be compared to the way English speakers know ‘Auld Lang Syne’ is sung on New
Year’s Eve, and so the song connotes the significance of this annual event and
associated behaviours. Stebbins and Planigale refer to this level of meaning as
‘meaning in context’. While this is similar to other context-dependant speech acts
such as religious services (compare ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust’), music provides an
additional modality for evoking the social context of the songs. Indeed, even without
the text, simply humming the melody of a song can evoke its context. The Dreamings
12 M. Turpin and T. Stebbins
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connoted in the songs discussed by Apted are the result of the religious context of
their performance rather than from any lexical meaning of the text.
In the songs discussed by Curran and O’Keeffe, a word for a plant or animal occurs
in a song genre associated with the Dreaming. Through knowledge of this genre a
number of connotations and associated meanings are available to the listener. For
example, in Central Australia a Dreaming song can evoke the place where this totemic
being originated, its activities in the Dreamtime, and the people who own the
particular Dreaming. All this in addition to the non-genre dependant connotations of
the song*such as the cultural uses of the plant or animal and the listener’s/singer’s
own personal experiences with that plant or animal. It may turn out that
connotations of particular flora and fauna may be widespread; for example the
connotation of the peaceful dove with loneliness, noted by Walsh, in this volume, is
also found in Central Australian songs where the emotion relates to the activities of
this bird in the Dreaming and the plaintive nature of its call. Knowledge of the
particular song style speech event may affect the ability to derive not just connoted
meanings but also text meaning, as Stebbins and Planigale find for different styles of
Mali Baining songs.
3.6. Emotional Responses
Music, poetry and other forms of language all have the ability to provoke emotional
responses, yet their means for evoking emotions differ. Crozet, in this volume, argues
that in the French La Marseillaise the combination of march-like music with combat
vocabulary helps put soldiers in an emotional state suited to killing and to selfsacrifice. In Central Australia, Ellis finds traditional wailing begins on a set pitch, and
so for enculturated listeners this pitch can be associated with mourning, even when
the pitch occurs in a different context (1985: 67). While certain broad musical genres
can become associated with particular emotional states,29 specific songs can have
particular meaning through the tight association between text and music, even when
their text is absent or altered. Consider a well-known tune such as ‘God Save the
Queen’, where from the music alone an enculturated listener can derive meanings
related to the text. The ability of a song’s tune to carry associated meanings of its
absent text is the basis of the parody in the songs analysed by Crozet. A related
phenomenon is where well-known songs are used in novel contexts for particular*
often humorous*effect, particularly in news reports, documentaries and in
conversation amongst people who share knowledge about a particular song.
Finally, certain connotations or emotional responses may develop through the
frequency of particular vocabulary or sound sequences occurring in song (see also
Patel 2008: 343). The question raised by Walsh of whether particular vocabulary or
29 Consider the Monty Python skit where a song text ‘Here comes another one’ is set to a different musical
idiom following a request for the song to have more of a particular emotional effect, from their album
Contractual Obligation, 1980 (Charisma Records).
The Language of Song 13
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tropes are widespread in particular languages or traditions, may also reveal these to
have connotative or emotional significances. A phrase or word uttered in the context
of conversation may connote a song or song genre and all that this song signifies for
an enculturated listener. This use of language can be a source of humour and
intellectual pleasure in everyday interaction.
4. Conclusion
Our understanding of the arrangement of musical components and their effect on
linguistic form is still in its infancy. Song, as a universal genre of language, and one ‘in
which musical and linguistic meanings intertwine’ (Patel 2008: 342) also offers a rich
field for investigations into meaning. Collaborative research between linguists and
musicologists is already underway on Aboriginal Australian songs (Marett & Barwick
2007). We hope that this volume highlights the importance of such collaborative
work on songs from all areas in order to promote a deeper understanding of the
nature of song: how particular cultures use language to create song, how language
and music interact, how songs convey meaning, the sorts of meanings they convey,
their intended audience and how knowledge of songs can further our understanding
of linguistic prosody

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