Music and meaning in the commercials

Abstract

What does music mean, if anything? The question is one of the hardy perennials of musical aesthetics, and there is no shortage of answers to it. Indeed, there is a plethora of seemingly unrelated answers. We can talk about music's internal structure, about its symmetries and directional motions, about patterns of implication and their realisation or lack of realisation; moving from ‘the music itself’ to listeners' reponses, approaches like this offer a psychological approach to meaning (and the work of Leonard Meyer and Eugene Narmour provide the best known examples). Or we can approach the music from the opposite direction, talking about the context of its creation, the context of its performance, and the context of its reception; here the assumption is that music acquires meaning through its mediation of society. Or again, we can oscillate between these two viewpoints, on the assumption that meaning arises from the mutual mediation of music and society. That is the central assumption of musical hermeneutics, whether we are applying this term to the work of Hermann Kretzschmar in the 1880s or that of Lawrence Kramer in the 1980s.