Introductory notes to the Semiotics of Music - Philip Tagg's home page

12 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music General semiotic concepts
Of course, sometimes it’s the venue. But what is wrong with the venue? Is it the acoustics?
Was there a harsh predelay that was impossible to counteract through mixing,
equalising and speaker placement? Did the violins have to work too hard to make their
notes last in such a dead space? In such cases the intended message does not even get
out into the ‘channel’ (what you as a ‘transmitter’ want to be heard), let alone reach the
‘receivers’. Maybe your performance or recording sounds fine to you but the message
still doesn’t seem to get across. Is it the wrong audience for your music or did you make
the wrong music for them? Perhaps they laugh when they should cry or gape apathetically
instead of shouting and jumping about the place? Most problems of musical communication
are attributable to codal incompetence and / or interference.
Codal incompetence
Codal incompetence in music arises when transmitter and receiver do not share the
same vocabulary of musical symbols.
For instance, having lived in Sweden for many years, I connote a certain cheery accordion
style with a certain type of old-time proletarian fun and games (gammaldans). If I
were to mix a bit of that style into a signature tune for local TV in Liverpool to promote
a bit of positive populist nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ when ‘ordinary people’ were
supposed to have enjoyed themselves in ‘simple honest ways’, Merseyside listeners
would not know what to make of it. It would amount to codal incompetence on my part
as musical transmitter in a Merseyside cultural context, even though the idea might
once have worked quite well in Sweden. Perhaps my local theme tune would be more
communicative if I had tried to emulate the sound of the older popular artists from the
region, maybe a Searchers pastiche for the sixties or Hank Walters’ on accordion for
earlier days. However, even that might fall on deaf ears because younger Liverpudlians
might not even recognise a Searchers sound, let alone Hank Walters. In this latter case
there would also be codal incompetence from the receiving end, since the young audience
would be unable to relate to musical symbols that would be quite meaningful to
me, as well as to older Liverpudlians.
Another, more common and obvious example of codal incompetence is the fact that I
am sure I could not distinguish music for marriage and burial in the majority of the
world’s cultures. Mixing up funeral and wedding music because you can’t hear the difference
between them shows radical incompetence of musical code in the culture concerned.
20
Codal interference
Codal interference 21 arises when transmitter and receiver share the same basic store of
musical symbols but totally different sociocultural norms and expectations. Codal interference
means that the intended sounds get across and are basically ‘understood’ but
that ‘adequate response’ is obstructed by other factors, such as receivers’ general like
or dislike of the music and what they think it represents, or by the music being recontextualised
verbally or socially.
Returning to rock-and-roll kick-ass for example, those that primarily hate the sounds of
heavy metal and associated genres (and then attack the music’s lyrics and lifestyle) do
not necessarily misunderstand the music. They are codally competent enough to know
that it is supposed to be loud and powerful, that its singers and soloists are supposed
to yell and scream, that it is supposed to make its listeners shout, extend arms in huge
20. For further examples, see Tagg (1993).
21. Thanks to Martin Cloonan (Liverpool, 1992) for useful critique, improvements and additions to the
next few paragraphs.