Mastering musical meaning: images as interpretive resources in multimodal music texts

Abstract

In a Music listening examination in the final year of secondary schooling in New South Wales, Australia, successful students use a range of images – graphic notation, diagrams, tables and graphs – as well as language, to build meaning about the concepts of music. Little is known about the ways in which language and image can be deployed as interpretive resources to construct musical knowledge in this high stakes examination. To address this gap, theories of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis are utilised to make the disciplinary and semiotic requirements of this examination clearer. In this article, five types of images are described and classified, analysing ways in which images can construct disciplinary meanings about concepts of music, principles of composition, and providing a range of perspectives on musical time. Analysis of affordances of images and language, as well as intersemiosis, provides some insights into the hidden curriculum of Music as well as the value of images as a significant interpretive resource.