Written by Grace Coberly and Abigail deVries
What meaning can be drawn from each song we hear on the radio? More specifically:what can be said of the artist’s intention, our own perception, and the form and specific melodic content of the music itself? Jean-Jacques Nattiez, French music semiologist and professor of musicology at the University of Montréal, poses these questions in his work.
Traditional understandings of communication state that a message is sent from the communicator to receiver with little to no perversion:
Nattiez dismisses this framework as too simple and unable to encompass the vast range of interpretations and fluidity of musical expression. Instead, Nattiez centers much of his philosophy around his mentor Jean Molino’s “tripartion” model of semiology. As significant as the symbol — the object of interpretation — surely is, Nattiez and Molino strongly caution against the assumption that the communicator and receiver will have the same interpretation. “Every symbolic object presupposes an exchange,” says Molino, “in which producer and consumer, transmitter and receiver, are not interchangeable and do not have the same point of view on the object, which they do not constitute in the same way at all” (Molino, Underwood, & Ayre, 1990, p. 130). The tripartion model, then, accounts for the significance of the object as well as the inherently differing interpretations of the communicator and the receiver, granting equal weight to all three of these coinciding meanings.
The first level of Molino’s model is the poietic stage. In a musical context, this is the creation stage in which a composer generates musical ideas, or in which a performer plays them. Nattiez is clear that there are infinite ways an individual can use symbols to signify meanings, and there is no one universal standard for those symbols. In the poietic stage, the communicator utilizes their own unique meaning-system to create a musical product.
Once the music is created, it enters the second level of the tripartition model: the neutralstage. This stage is not a mechanized aspect that directly communicates from producer to perceiver, but rather a relatively isolated moment in the symbol’s life cycle. Here the object exists in its purest form; music becomes a collection of specific pitches placed in certain rhythms and can be analyzed as such. At the same time, the neutral stage also contains traces of the poietic and esthesic stages, the footprints of the communicator and the receiver. The neutral level is ever-changing based on the intent and interpretations established within the poietic and esthesic stages.
The final tripartition level, the esthesic stage, is an active stage in which a person receives the neutral stage and interprets the music through the lens of their own understandings and backgrounds. Nattiez emphasizes that esthesic stage interpretations are always varied due to the infinite nature of human experience. Each differing interpretation is of equal value, as no one person’s interpretation of a symbol can ever truly be wrong.
It is important to note that Nattiez sees these levels working when all three are in effect. It is not his intent to reduce these levels to only one. It is the interplay between the levels that allow them to showcase the differentiating meanings and interpretations that come from producing and receiving sound. Molino similarly maintains that “the object is inseparable from the twin processes of production and reception” (Molino, Underwood, & Ayre, 1990, p. 129). Nattiez and Molino’s tripartition model allows us to see how diversity in all three levels of semiological engagement creates infinite possibilities of meaning creation and interpretation. For Nattiez, the tripartition model is not the pinnacle of understanding, but rather a launch pad in discovering the infinite number of ways music can be created and perceived (Bowman, 1998). Music can, will, and should never be universal. The tripartition model lets this be so.
References
Bowman, W.D. (1998). Philosophical perspectives of music. Oxford University Press.
Molino, J., Underwood, J. A., & Ayrey, C. (1990). Musical fact and the semiology of music. Music Analysis, 9(2), 105–156. https://doi.org/10.2307/854225
Philosophy of Music 