Dissertation - World Federation of Music Therapy

Figure 8. 1 Nattiez' Tripartition Model
semiological tripartition
Poietic process (creation) Esthesic process (re-creation)
"Producer" Trace “Receiver”
Poietic analysis Esthesic analysis
Nattiez operates with 6 analytical situations:
I. Immanent analysis: the neutral ground, the trace
II. Inductive poietics: internal observations of musical procedures
III. External poietics: external documents are used to highlight procedures
IV. Inductive esthesis: perceptive introspection, researcher as listener
V. External esthesis: information on other listeners’ perception
VI. A final complex synthesis.
Aldridge (1996. p. 163-172) introduced a distinction between three levels of
constitutive rules and one level of regulative rules:
• Level 1 (preceding Nattiez’ analytical situations) is the sound, the performance
and the experience itself.
• Level 2 (corresponding to Nattiez’ situations I-III) is the descriptive level of the
‘trace (e.g. an audio or video recording of an improvisation or a music-listening
period of a BMGIM session, and our dialogue on, or indexing of the music. It is
no longer the experience itself, but our language-bound description of it, meant for
verification and lexical labelling: what happened in the music and in the
relationship, as observed by the researcher and documented by the client and other
participants?
• Level 3 (corresponding to Nattiez’ situations IV-V) is the level of interpretation
and discourse. We try to understand and explain what happened, both through
introspection and through interpretation systems with specific concepts and
epistemology, e.g. clinical psychology or psychodynamic theory. Conclusions are
drawn on the meaning of the music.
• At the level of regulative rules (corresponding to Nattiez’ situation VI) a synthesis
232
is made, or in Aldridge’s own words: “therapeutic interpretation from a fixed
point, but intuitively used in the therapeutic explanation”