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

34 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music Musematic analysis
Intersubjective and interobjective
MUCH BETTER IN CHAPTERS 6 AND 7
OF ’Music’s Meanings’
An account of your own reactions to a piece of music can be called ‘intuitive’, ‘introspective’
or ‘intrasubjective’. For reasons too complex to account for here, arts academe,
from literary criticism to musical ‘analysis’, seems to revel in this approach, while it is
quite unacceptable in social and natural science contexts. This contradiction of approach
is related to the unique type of epistemological schizophrenia from which European
traditions of knowledge seem to have suffered for several centuries, one of
whose symptoms has been that anything to do with aesthetics or feelings are zoned off
into ghettos of art and leisure. Of course, without a ‘gut’ or ‘informed’ personal reaction
to music, without personal preferences, social taste, etc., studying music would not be
much fun. However, socially conditioned personal taste and prejudice in arts academe
has frequently been turned into aesthetic canon, prescribing criteria of artistic value as
though they possessed the same authority as Archimedes’ principle or a papal decree.
Therefore, while it is essential to acknowledge your own reactions to music, it is wise
to treat them as no more than that and to refrain from the use of personal interpretation
as the basis for general statements about musical meaning. Moreover, although music
might be generally thought of as a matter of personal taste, leisure, art, etc., and thereby
seemingly unquantifiable in economic or scientific terms, it should be remembered that
quantification (charts, sales, box office figures, etc.) is the name of much of the game in
the music business and that such quantification relies on many individuals finding the
same sorts of meaning in the same sorts of musical structure.
Since music is a sociocultural as well as an artistic field of study, discussions of musical
meaning must have a substantial degree of concretion outside the values you and the
population(s) you belong to hold as immutable. This type of concretion requires empirical
method, such as that found in intersubjective and interobjective approaches. These
procedures, explained below, can be used to substantiate semiotic observations of the
music you happen to be studying.
Intersubjectivity
It is easy to understand intersubjectivity in terms of a TV advert claiming that nine out
of ten film stars use Brand X soap because they think it’s much kinder to their skin. Obviously,
the advertisers want to sell more of their soap and attempt to do so by trying
to convince people who identify positively with film stars that Brand X is in fact dermatologically
superior to other brands. This sales pitch relies partly on a statement of
intersubjectivity — ‘nine out of ten film stars think that…’
In other words, intersubjectivity depends on the degree to which different subjects (individuals)
relate similarly to the same phenomenon, for example to the feel of a soap
or, more relevantly in this context, to a piece of music, an artist, a musical style, etc. If
different people respond to or say the same sort of thing about the same music, then
that shared similarity of response constitutes an equivalent degree of intersubjective
consistency in relation to that music. 53 Within the social sciences, intersubjectivity is an
approved criterion for validating or falsifying observations, as long as such intersubjectivity
is qualified in terms of (i) number of respondents (subjects), (ii) where, when and
under what conditions the information was gathered, and (iii) appropriate elements of
53. In this text, the word ‘response’ is not used as in experimental psychology (‘stimulus - response’) but
in its everyday meaning.