Temporality in Musical Meaning: A Peircean/Deweyan Semiotic Approach

Abstract

Imagine a single musical tone—for instance, the A above middle C that the oboe plays to tune an orchestra. Now imagine this tone, with no variation in dynamics, pitch, or timbre, extended over the course of “an hour or a day,” existing, as Peirce describes in “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (W3:262),1 “as perfectly in each second of that time as in the whole taken together; so that, as long as it is sounding, it might be present to a sense from which everything in the past was as completely absent as the future itself ” (W3:262). Imagine a world consisting of nothing but the sensation of this single oboe A, and having never consisted of anything but it. In such a world, Peirce indicates, there would be no consciousness of the passage of time. It is indeed doubtful whether one would be conscious of the tone at all, since there would be no background of experience in terms of which to interpret the sound, either perceptually or rationally.2 Although the sound waves would register physically in the ear, the distinctive timbre of the oboe would not be perceived because there would be no experience of other timbres with which to compare it. The aural perception of a musical theme or a tune, on the other hand, is inexorably temporal. The performance of a tune unfolds over time. It “consists in an orderliness in the succession of sounds which strike the ear at different times; and to perceive it there must be some continuity of consciousness which makes the events of a lapse of time present to us” (W3:262). The physical sensation of each sound is “completely present at every instant” while it lasts, but the tune or theme—the music—is never given to consciousness as an unmediated presence. The “orderliness in the succession of sounds”—which