Music and Ideology: Notes toward a Sociosemiotics of Mass Media Music Theo van Leeuwen Introduction Linguistic (or linguistically inspired) approaches to the semiotics of music have usually treated music as an abstract system of tonal and tem- poral relations—a semiotic without a “content plane,” in Hjelmslevian terms (e.g. Ruwet; Nattiez, Fondéments; Lehrdahl and Jackendoff; Winograd). Hence they implicitly subscribe to a conception of music which has been dominant in 20th century Western art music practice and appreciation—the idea of “absolute,” “autonomous” music. This idea is as often voiced by semioticians (“Music, by itself, signifies nothing”— Nattiez, “Situation” 8) as by practitioners: I consider that music is, by its very nature, powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature. If, as is nearly always the case, music appears to express something, this is only an illusion and not a reality. ... (Stravinsky 91) Of course, much recent music in the Western art tradition deliber- ately sets out not to signify anything, and tries to construct an abstract, tonal mathematics. The right appreciation of such music does presum- ably lie in understanding the formal relations set up by the music, in what Adorno (4) called “structural hearing” and rated as the highest form of music listening. Ruwet in fact maintains that a description of such formal relations constitutes the “denotation” of music. But this approach to the semiotics of music is only valid as a description of the explicit motivations behind certain practices of modem Western art music and certain ways of listening to it—and even then the description has serious limitations, as it universalizes culturally and historically specific traditions and is blind to the cultural signifi- ‘This paper was first published in the Sydney Association for Studies in Society and Culture Working Papers 2.1 (1988): 19-44. It is reprinted here by permission of Theo van Leeuwen and the publisher. The paper appears here as it was published then, with only some minor and stylistic changes. Many of the ideas begun in this paper are contin- ued in van Leeuwen, Speech, Music, Sound. 2526 + Popular Music and Society cance of these musical movements and to the meanings which inevit- ably attach themselves to the music as it is disseminated more widely and makes its influence felt on other musical practices—as it becomes subject, in other words, to the inevitable processes of recontextualiza- tion. Within this kind of semiotics, music, if it has (or seems to have— Stravinsky’s “illusion”) any meaning, is said to have only connotative meaning (e.g. Ruwet) or meaning only insofar as this meaning is derived from the verbal or situational context (e.g. Nattiez). In contrast to lan- guage, it is argued, music has no “denotative” or “independent” mean- ing, and refers to nothing outside itself. In this paper I will take a different view and argue that musical systems (systems of melody, har- mony, rhythm, timbre, etc.) do have “independent” meaning, in the sense that they constitute meaning potentials which specify what kinds of things can be “said”: with melody or harmony or rhythm. In the second section of the paper I will argue this point in a general way, and in the fourth section I will analyze one of these meaning potentials in more detail and show how it can be represented as a network of options, or system network. Meaning potentials can, of course, only become actualized within specific social contexts. Meaning potentials delimit what can be said, the social context what will be said. But this is so, not only in music, but also in language. More generally, the contrasts between language and music which linguistically oriented semioticians have posited have often derived from a limited understanding of language, in which de Saus- sure’s methodological restrictions (the synchronic approach, langue as the object of study for linguistics) have been turned into epistemological restrictions, as if language had no history and no parole, as if it wasn’t constantly immersed in, and inseparable from, sociohistorical processes. These same restrictions, however, were not applied to music: hence the notion that meaning in language is “independent” and meaning in music “dependent.” But, despite differences of degree, language and music are both systematic as well as, partially, unsystematic, both independent as well as shaped by (and shaping) social context, both synchronic as well as diachronic, both denotative as well as connotative. The difference is merely that linguistics has, by now, a longer history of ignoring every- thing that is not systematic, and of abstracting from social context and from history. My own approach to the semiotics of music is also linguistically inspired, but it is based on a different kind of linguistics, namely on the social semiotic theory developed in systemic-functional linguistics (cf. e.g. Halliday; Halliday and Hasan). This theory is, in my view, the onlyMusic and Ideology + 27 semiotic theory which has made significant advances in theorizing the relation between social context on the one hand, and the semiotic sys- tems that serve to realize certain domains of meaning on the other. The musical “texts” I will use in this article are “mass media” texts—television and radio news themes and advertising jingles. The role of music in these types of text has been ignored almost entirely, in mass media studies as much as in text linguistics and musicology. While the linguistic structures of, e.g. news reports and advertisements have by now been dissected from a number of different angles (for news, e.g. Fowler et al.; Van Leeuwen, “Levels,” “Impartial,” “Persuasive,” and Consumer”; Van Dijk, “Structures” and News; for advertising, cf. e.g. Leech; Vestergaard and Schrgder) and while the connotations and rhetor- ical structures of, e.g. news and advertising images have been semioti- cally scrutinized in a number of different ways (Durand; S. Hall; Barthes), music has, with a few exceptions (Tagg’s Kojak, “Analysing,” “Understanding,” and “Musicology”; Wiisthoff; Helms) been avoided, or at best “only ever translated into the poorest of linguistic categories: the adjective” (Barthes 179). The systemic-functional approach lends itself not only to an analysis of the musical strands in mass media texts in which semantic function and realization are always related to one another, but also, particularly now that systemic-functional work on images has also begun (O’Toole) to the possibility of bringing the same conceptual framework and the same methodological apparatus to bear on the verbal, visual, and musical components of mass media texts, and indeed of any other texts which realize meanings simultaneously in a number of different semiotic modes. Moreover, the systemic-functional approach can, I believe, do so without requiring music and images to fit in the mold of language, as was so frequently the case, with little suc- cess, in French structuralist semiotics of images and music (e.g. Metz, 1968; 1971; Nattiez, “Situation” and Fondéments). The question is not: To which degree is music structurally like language? Does it have “double articulation”? Are its signs “arbitrary”? and so on. The question is, simply: By means of which systems do language, music, and images realize which kinds of meaning? That way of formulating the question alone is enough to guarantee compatibility of linguistic, musicological, and iconological analysis. Psychological approaches to the semiotics of meaning often con- struct musical meaning as a personal, emotional “response” which can only be studied experimentally—for instance by having experimental subjects respond to musical “stimuli” in terms of a choice of adjectives (e.g. Imberty; Nielsen). Although the affective quality of music is one of its most important characteristics, this approach denies that music is28 + Popular Music and Society also, and simultaneously capable of realizing other kinds of meaning. That these other kinds of meaning tend to be apprehended unconsciously and that music, in the main, is talked about only in terms of personal emotional “responses” or “effects” is a historically and culturally spe- cific situation, and part of a wider development in capitalist countries which also includes the repression of conscious knowledge of rhetoric, of iconological signification, and of moral systems. Some of the domains of “nonemotional” musical meaning will be discussed in the second sec- tion of this paper. The important question of the emotive power of music will not be developed further here, except by saying that music makes us apprehend what are, in themselves, “nonemotional” meanings in an emotional way, that it binds us affectively to these meanings and makes us identify with them. This process, in which the ideological power of music is vested, is of course all the more effective if we are denied access to conscious knowledge of just what it is that we are emotionally identifying with. In short, my aim in this paper is to make a first step in the direction of a sys- temic-functional semiotics of music as well as a first step towards the analysis of the musical component of news and advertising texts from the broadcast media. In this way I hope to come closer to an understanding of the relation between social context and musical semiosis. Some Musical Systems This section of the paper briefly discusses a number of musical sys- tems, in order to lend some support to my claim that musical systems serve to realise certain domains of meaning. It does not yet provide a systematic treatment or a definite or complete inventory of systems (but cf. inventories in Lomax; Tagg, “Analysing”) and it draws primarily on musicological and sociomusicological references. The systems I have selected for discussion are in fact those I willl need to draw on in the analysis of news themes presented in section 3. Major/Minor Major tonality came to the fore as the unmarked option, the “normal” and in a sense normative tonality in western art music in the late Middle Ages. Before that time the ideologically dominant music, the music of the Church, shunned the Ionian mode (which corresponds to our present major), although that mode was widely used in secular music. Often quoted in the musicological literature is this pronounce- ment of Pope John XXII, from the middle of the fourteenth century:Music and Ideology + 29 Certain disciples of the new school . . . display their method in notes which are new to us... . They stuff our melodies with upper parts made out of secular songs. .. . Their voices are incessantly running to and fro, intoxicating the ear. . .. We now hasten therefore to banish these methods . . . and to put them to flight more effectually than heretofore, far from the house of God. . . . Let noth- ing in the authoritative music be changed. (Harman and Mellers 123) The ascendance of major, then, was linked to a gradual but irre- versible shift in cultural hegemony from the Church to the rising mer- chant class, and major came to be associated with what could be called the positive values of that class: belief in progress through human achievement, science, industry, exploration, and so on. Minor, by con- trast, literally depresses the major scale, by lowering the third, the sixth, and the seventh, and so presents the negative image of these values and becomes associated with everything that stands in the way of progress and human self-fulfillment—for a long time pieces in a minor key had to have a “happy ending” (the “tierce de Picardie”). These meanings have remained remarkably stable. In this century Shostakovitch has been urged by the Soviet culture controllers to make greater use of the major triad, so as to “give enduring expression to the heroism of the people’s lives in the period of the victory of socialism” (Nestyev 458). Wherever the Western ethos of industrial and scientific progress gets a foothold, the major triad follows. Cooke (55) notes that, after Independence, Indian sitar players began to add major thirds to the bass drone of ragas, which, until then, had always been a “bare fifth.” In the West we have increasingly repressed conscious knowledge of the relation between music and ideology, and constructed music as expressing “private” emotions. Hence we speak of major as “happy” and minor as “sad.” But in fact music creates a fusion between ideology and emotion, linking positive values to positive emotions and negative ones to negative emotions—pleasure to what is ideologically correct and unpleasure to what is ideologically deviant in the given social group. Systems of the Organization of the Musical Group: Monophony, Polyphony, Homophony In monophonic music, all voices and/or instruments sing or play the same notes. Alan Lomax, in his ethnomusicological world survey of song styles (156) notes that societies in which monophony (“social unison”) is the dominant form, are often “leaderless” societies in which there is an emphasis on consensus and conformity. In a variant of monophony, heterophony, all voices and/or instruments also sing or30: Popular Music and Society play the same notes, but in an individualistic and, to Western ears, anar- chic manner—with strongly different timbres, timings, embellishments, etc. In polyphonic music society no longer sings in unison, but the dif- ferent voices nevertheless fit together in a harmonious whole and none of the melodies can be said to dominate the others—they are “equal but different.” Lomax notes that two-voiced polyphony, in many of the soci- eties in which it is used, symbolizes gender roles, even when both parts are sung by men, and that this tends to occur in societies which have a complementarity between the productive labor of men and women (Lomax 165 ff.). In homophonic music one voice becomes dominant, becomes the “hegemonic” voice. The other voices become accompaniment, support, “backup” for the hegemonic voice. The parts of these subordinated voices are not equal to the part of the dominant voice, and not melodi- cally meaningful in isolation: they become meaningful only in relation to the dominant voice and to each other. They have no value in themselves, only in relation to the whole. This value in relation to the whole is har- monic value: the accompanying voices constitute the chordal pillars on which the melody of the dominant voice rests. But with harmony comes disharmony—muffled tension, muffled dissonance/dissent behind the hegemonic voice—dissonance which the music must constantly resolve if it is to continue to progress forward (note the metaphorical resonance of the technical terms “resolution” and “chord progression”). Monophony, polyphony, and homophony, then, are ways of inte- grating the members of musical groups which reflect structures of social organization and dominance in society as a whole. As such structures changed in history, so the systems of integrating members of musical groups also changed. Early medieval music, for example, was mono- phonic. From the ninth century onwards polyphony began to develop, first in the form of what we would now call “harmony lines” (and this already involved a certain degree of dominance, although it was the middle voice rather than the top voice which was dominant), later in the form of counterpoint. Around 1600, in the work of the Italian opera com- posers, homophony began to develop. By the time of the Industrial Rev- olution this mode had become dominant, to the exclusion of everything else—and it still is, in the vast majority of western popular music, although in our century it is, from time to time, challenged by nondomi- nant musics—e.g. jazz, especially early jazz, which had a more poly- phonic character. This is not to say that, for instance, 19th-century European composers never used polyphony. They did, for instance in duets. But they did so in the framework of a mode of music in whichMusic and Ideology + 31 harmony and homophony remained the essential core of musical syntax. In other musics, for instance certain forms of contemporary dance music such as drum ’n’ bass, this is not necessarily the case any longer. Har- mony becomes a “prosody,” a touch of color, rather than the basic struc- tural frame of the music. The Key Center The musical systems of a society have developed the way they have to give expression to the social organization of that society. In the medieval modes, based as they were on the pentatonic, any note of the scale could stand in any intervallic relation to any other note. Hence any note could provide a “sense of ending,” a sense of resolution and conclu- sion. Any note could become what we would now call the “key center.” But in the music of the newly dominant merchant class a strict hierarchy became established between the fundamentals, so that any melody, what- ever the harmonic progressions it traverses, must, ultimately, return to the same predetermined note, to the tonic, the note “in the key of which” the whole piece is scripted. In this music there can be only one center, only one resolution, only one outcome, only one conclusion. Notes other than the tonic become: . . . pre-existing atoms to be placed at will in a piece in the same way that workers in a capitalist society are seen as impersonal sources of labour to be placed at will in a pre-determined economic system. (Shepherd et al. 105) In other words, while the intervallic relations of medieval music reflected and gave expression to a social system that can be character- ized as “a vast system of personal relationships whose intersecting threads ran from one level of the social structure to another” (Marc Bloch, quoted in Shepherd et al. 91), the intervallic relations in the new music gave expression to the more centralized and absolutist system of social organization which had replaced the earlier ones: . .. the architectonism of the tonal structure articulates the world sense of industrial man, for it is a structure having one central viewpoint (that of the key note) that is the focus of a single, unified sound-sense involving a high degree of distancing. (Shepherd et al. 105) A similar change can be seen in the development (and, today, the gradual abandonment) of central perspective in the visual arts.32+ Popular Music and Society Regular/Irregular Time The handling of time is a crucial element in social organization, and the music of a society tends to express how that society conceives of and lives with time. In polyrhythmic music, for example, each voice or instrument has its own time, yet all fit together. Much Caribbean and South American music is polyrhythmic and, as Edward Hall (Silent; Dance) has pointed out, these are societies in which our punctuality, our timetabling, our ways of synchronizing people to the mechanical time of the clock have not found anywhere near as strong a foothold as in the so- called developed countries. The same applies to African music (see Chernoff). In Europe, on the other hand, a society developed in which people became alienated from subjective, experiential time and sub- jected to the clock, with its scientific division of time in hours, minutes, and seconds, a society in which the regime of time was, and still is, fun- damental to most social institutions, the school, the factory, the hospital, the media, etc. The development towards this way of structuring time, which was very much in the interest of the newly dominant merchant class (if only because it allowed time to become the object of calcula- tion), led to the disappearance of the unmeasured, “eternal” time of plainchant, and to the introduction of the musical equivalent of the clock, the barline, and its concomitant subordination of all the voices and instruments playing a piece of music to the same metronomically regular beat. The introduction of this change in the “high” music of European society worried Pope John XXII no less than the elevation of the Ionian mode to its position as the “major” scale. This change, too, he would have liked to banish “far from the House of God”: [The new school] occupies itself with the measured dividing of time and pesters every composition with semibreves and minims. (Harman and Mellers 123) More recently, the influence of African music has, via jazz, challenged the classic Western order of time. In modern popular music, however much it may stand fully in Western traditions in other respects, the beat is often displaced, anticipated, or delayed, played around with, and triple and duple times may be superimposed on one another in a limited polyrhythmicality. The regular metronomic beat of Western music becomes subverted here, rebelled against, and this rebellion does not remain restricted to subcultures, but has become part of a large sector of the dominant entertainment music which thus moves away somewhat from the discipline of the clock and the work ethic, in the direction of pleasure and leisure time self-gratification. The degree to which this takes place in the different forms of modern popular music (and henceMusic and Ideology - 33 the degree to which music still binds people affectively to the discipline of the clock) may vary. Tagg (“Understanding” 32), for instance, argues that disco is far less subversive of clock time, far less a “human appro- priation of the mechanical pulse” and hence far more an “affective acceptance of and identification with clock time” than rock. Duple Time/Triple Time As measured time and regular meter made their appearance in the dominant music of Europe, duple time and triple time became the domi- nant meters, to the exclusion of more complex and less regular meters— which, however, continued to be used in folk music, and would be rediscovered by the composers of the dominant music in the late 19th century. The semiotic significance of this development can be shown by looking at the kind of dances with which these metres were associated— there often is a close connection between musical metre and dance, and, in turn, between dance and the main productive activities in a society (cf. Lomax 224 ff.). Out of dances in which the dancers stood opposite each other in rows or danced in a circle, there developed two new kinds of dance—the procession dance, associated with duple time and eventually culminating in the March, and the closed couple dance, initially, as in the Volte and the Minuet, still involving gestures towards the group as a whole, toward “society,” one might say, later, in the Waltz, turning the couple into a world of its own, physically together with others in the ballroom, yet not communicating with these others, in the way that neighbors in a suburb may live close to each other, yet never communi- cate. So there is, on the one hand, the procession dance, symbolizing, with its forward movement, progress, exploration, expansion, etc., and, on the other hand, the closed couple dance, expressing the ethos of pri- vacy which develops in bourgeois society, the ethos of the self-contained “nuclear” family which will engender so many new emotional ties and so much refinement of interpersonal sentiment. Two tendencies—the “heroic” and the “sentimental,” to use the terms of Marothy—one asso- ciated with the public, one with the private values and sentiments of the industrial age. Ascending/Descending Melodies can be characterized as ascending, moving upwards in pitch, or descending, moving downwards in pitch (there are other, related systems which will not be discussed here). According to Cooke (102 ff.) ascending melodies are more “active,” more “outgoing,” more “dynamic” than descending melodies, and he links this to a physiologi-34 + Popular Music and Society cal concomitant of singing: ascending in pitch requires increased effort, while descending in pitch allows a singer to decrease expenditure of vocal energy. The meaning potential provided by this system, then, relates to what the musical text is trying to do to or for the audience. In the case of ascending, the music energizes, rallies the listeners together for the sake of some joint activity or cause. In the case of descending, the music aims to relax, to incite the listeners to share their thoughts and feelings. Hymns are as good an example as any to show how this musi- cal function may be verbally anchored to specific contexts: example 1 represents a proselytizing, missionary, “heroic,” “public” modality of religion, example 2 an inward-looking, resigning, “sentimental,” “pious” modality: —er Sol diers of Christ a rise and put your armour on Example 1. “Heroic” hymn (Australian Hymn Book, number 481) Take my- lifeand let- itbe conse- crated Lord- to Thee Example 2. “Sentimental” hymn (Australian Hymn Book, number 520) Large Intervals/Small Intervals Examples 1 and 2 also demonstrate that the “heroic” tends to be associated with large intervals, large strides upward, energetic leaps, and the “sentimental” with smaller intervals—chromaticism, which uses the smallest intervals possible in Western tonality, is a standard device of “sentimentality” in music. Systems of Duration The contrast between the “heroic” and the “sentimental,” between the “public” and the “private,” is, in the Western tradition, also realized by certain of the systems of durational patterning of melodies. This is demonstrated in example 3, by taking a simple sequence of intervals (1) and first “heroicizing” it, step by step, by adding a definite 4/4 time (2), by repeating each second note with a dotted rhythm (DAA-de-DAA-de- DAA) (3) and finally by means of “anticipation,” that is, by adding anMusic and Ideology + 35 upbeat (4). The same sequence of intervals can be “sentimentalized” by adding a 3/4 time (5), and by applying different degrees of “suspension,” of the stretching out of notes (6 and 7). (1) Theme Ee soz | (2) Theme with 4/4 time signature (march tempo) ~ + (3) Theme with dotting (4) Theme with anticipation () Theme with % time signature (waltz tempo) os (6) ‘Theme with suspension = E #- ¢ + (7) Theme with increased suspension i a — a (oe Example 3. Sequence of intervals with “heroicizing” and “sentimentalizing” transformations.36 + Popular Music and Society The sonata form, perhaps the crucial form of the Western art music tradi- tion, in fact posits and works through precisely this opposition. In exam- ple 4, the first few bars of the opening movement of Haydn’s Piano Sonata 1, the first 4 bars have large intervals and dotted rhythms, while bars 5 to 9 have suspension and passing notes to diminish the size of the intervals, even to the point of chromaticism. Incidentally, many musicol- ogists refer to the two themes of the sonata form as the “masculine” and the “feminine” theme, which goes to show how many of the fundamental dichotomies of a society can be mapped onto gender. Leader-Chorus Interaction Systems “Call-response” patterns are common in many musics and always involve the interaction between a real or symbolic leader (a priest, a rock star, the solo voice in an advertising jingle or instrumental work) and a real or symbolic community (the congregation, the backup vocalists, the choir, the full orchestra) which affirms what the leader sings or plays in a secular or sacred “Halleluiah” or “Amen.” Lomax (158) notes that leader- chorus systems are only found in societies which have some degree of political complexity, of hierarchy or extralocal control. As societies become more complex still, leadership becomes more exclusive and solo singing without interactive community response more common. This aspect of musical structure will be discussed in more detail in Section 4. Instrumentation and Connotation Ever since the beginnings of opera, around 1600 in Italy, music has increasingly been used as a means of representation rather than interac- tion, for instance to signify the “essential” qualities of characters, set- tings, etc. in dramatic contexts. The means of doing so have not been restricted to Tonmalerei, the imitation of “natural” sounds, speech pat- terns, etc., but have also included the connotative use of musical signi- fiers. The meaning attached to the use of a particular instrument, for example, may well derive from some system or convention internal to Western art music, but it may also derive from a source outside the music from which the instrument is taken. Thus in French music of the late 18th century, hurdy-gurdies were introduced in the orchestra, because these instruments were used in the folk music of the country, and hence connoted the values of unspoilt rural life which played such a significant role in the dominant culture of the period. The hurdy-gurdy eventually didn”t make it in the orchestra, but the drone it produced per- sisted as a feature of pastoral themes, and so became “part of the system.” A similar argument could be made, for example, about the introduction of the sitar in the music of the Beatles in the mid-1960s.Music and Ideology + 37 Heroic’ theme Example 4, First 9 bars of the Allegro from J. Haydn, Piano Sonata 1. Realistic music works not only with the connotations of instru- ments, it also borrows musical genres, tonalities, rhythmic patterns, etc. from “other” musics. It may be one of the characteristics of modern mass media music that it signifies almost exclusively by means of con- notation. The surrounding “classical” framework, still present in sym- phonic Hollywood scores, disappears in advertising music, the incidental38 Popular Music and Society music of television series, etc. Rather than forming its own conventions, this music draws from all genres, all rhythmic patterns, all tonalities, all instruments that can at all be “placed” by the listener, however vaguely. Some Preliminary Conclusions The musical systems we have discussed all draw on one source of meaning, the field of social organization. Leader-chorus interaction sys- tems and systems of the organization of the musical group (monophony, polyphony, homophony, etc.) make possible the abstract representation of forms of social coordination and patterns of dominance in society; the role of the tonic in classical Western harmony allows a hierarchical and centralized social structure to be symbolized; the contrast between regu- lar and irregular time signifies the reign of the mechanical time of the clock (or its relative absence). Other systems (the contrast between duple and triple time, various systems of melody) express a set of overlapping dichotomies fundamental to bourgeois society—the dichotomy between the “heroic” and the “sentimental,” the “public” and the “private,” the “male” and the “female.” Music can be seen as an abstract representation of social organization, as the geometry of social structure, and hence as concerned with what, in systemic-functional semiotic theory, is called the “interpersonal” metafunction of communication. But the distinction between the “ideational” and the “interpersonal” is somewhat blurred in the case of music. Music not only “represents” social relations and “sig- nifies” ideologically crucial dichotomies, it also and simultaneously enacts them and rejoices in them. In an advertising jingle, for example, the relation between advertiser and public may be symbolically repre- sented as the relation between a male solo voice, signifying (by virtue of connotation: adapted “country” style, Australian accent, a certain “lar- rikin” lazy understatement and lack of vocal tension in the singing style) the stereotypical “Crocodile Dundee”-type Australian male, and a female choir signifying (by virtue of timbral cohesiveness) unity and consensus, and (by virtue of its antiphonal role) acceptance of and compliance with the message of the advertiser. But the ad also enacts this relation, and makes our bodies respond to its rhythms. It is itself a communication between the two parties which are symbolically represented in it. Thus the ideational “third person” of the music becomes a metaphor for the interpersonal first and second person. When music moves into other domains of meaning it must take recourse to less systematic means, to imitation and borrowing, to Ton- malerei and connotation. Some of these imitations and borrowings may then become a permanent feature of the musical language and, in the long run, appear conventional. This is the case for instance with the dis-Music and Ideology * 39 tinction between major and minor. Gaining its significance originally from its association with nonhegemonic secular music, this association was eventually lost—and musical theory subsequently “rationalized” the system, though only with partial success (cf. Weber). Insofar as they are not onomatopoeic or connotational or iconic of physiological processes (as in the case of ascending/descending, and also of tempo: the range of the metronome corresponds to that of the human heart, 40 to 200 bpm [cf. Tagg, “Understanding” 21]), musical systems seem to be iconic of the patterns of social organization they signify—the way the members of a musical group synchronize themselves to the regular beat (“like so many horseback riders riding the same horse” [Cage 40]) resembles the way social institutions require subjection to the mechanical time of the clock; the relations between intervals in the musical system of a society resemble the relations between the members of that society, etc. It is for this reason that there may be some truth in the assertion that music is a universal language. Because they use similar semiotic processes, differ- ent cultures, however wide apart geographically and/or culturally, do develop completely different ways of saying the same kind of things with music. Cultures which have only local leaders, who reach their decisions in continuous interaction with the group, for example, will have in their music a form of interaction between solo voices and cho- ruses in which the two will overlap rather than be separated by a pause (Lomax 158). But to say that music is a universal language is not to say that music can be understood cross-culturally. Not only are the sounds themselves physically unfamiliar to members of another culture, but to understand the music of another culture one must know that culture inside out. And to respond to it in the way music is meant to be responded to, to “feel” it, one must be a member of the culture, and share its values and beliefs. Two Television News Signature Themes The news theme shown in example 5 was played before all news broadcasts of the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), Aus- tralia’s publicly financed, national broadcasting network, from 1953 to 1985. In 1985 it was replaced by other themes, except on the ABC’s “highbrow” radio stations, whose programming is dominated by “fine music” and “serious talks,” e.g. Radio 2FC in Sydney. The major theme opens with a motif displaying many “heroic” fea- tures (major key, 4/4 regular time, dotted rhythm, large intervals) and played by unison trumpets. The motif is responded to by the full orches- tra, featuring in the background a synthesizer pattern which sounds like a harp glissando. The essence of the news is constructed here more or less40 + Popular Music and Society brass unison Example 5. “Majestic Fanfare,” the “old” ABC News Signature Theme. as follows: the hegemonic voice, the voice of the nation (perhaps the Empire, in this case), a voice resonant with military, imperialist connota- tions (i.e., the voice of radio news) rallies behind it the whole nation, unified in harmony, despite its diversity (i.e., the listeners) and resolves, in the process, the opposition between the “heroic” and the “sentimen- tal,” the public voice and the private home in which it is heard, through its dilution of the “heroic” with smaller intervals, its use of a “harp,” its relaxing of the tempo (something similar can be seen in British war doc- umentaries: Myra Hess playing the piano in Humphrey Jennings’s Listen to Britain). The theme then ends on a major third, which renders the piece unfinished, to be completed by the news itself, and so, together with the news, part of one larger text; and which also, by virtue of its quintessential majorness, lends extra prominence to the idea of “progress,” to the onward “march of time.” The theme which replaced this theme on ABC television in 1985 is shown in example 6. It has much in common with the older theme: the brass still predominates, the structure is still antiphonal, and there is still much of the “heroic” in evidence. But there are also significant differ- ences. To begin with, the piece is no longer in major, but in minor, as though something of the belief in the old-style values of the ABC and its news has gone, as though the notion of “progress” has become question- able. Secondly, the piece opens with an amorphous synthesizer drone, and the connotation of this is anchored by the visual which shows the universe with a revolving satellite in the foreground: news no longer emanates from the central leadership of a human nation or empire, but from space, in a dehumanized process, inevitable and inescapable because of its very technicality; the backcloth is no longer history, no longer the “march of time”; but the timelessness of space, an eternity bereft of meaning. Thirdly, syncopation makes its entry and shifts the music away somewhat from the classical Western discipline of time and from constructing the news as an official, public message, moving it in the direction of entertainment and the private pleasures of petty trans-Music and Ideology + 41 piccolo trumpet Example 6, New ABC News Signature Theme.42 + Popular Music and Society gression against the norms of the public world. Finally, the boundary between the musical theme (ideological banner of the news) and the news itself (the “facts”) has become somewhat blurred; during part of the music a voice-over is heard. In this voice-over section the use of musical realism is extended: an ostinato pattern of repeated notes sug- gests telex messages coming in continuously and so signifies the imme- diacy of the news. Indeed, in many other news themes, sound effects (e.g. typewriters) are combined with the music to achieve the same effect. This relative interchangeability of music and sound effects may be another important aspect of realism in mass media music, and was in fact foreshadowed in musical experiments of the 1920s (Satie, in the ballet score Parade [1916] already added typewriters to the orchestra). Overlaid on this ostinato pattern are short melodic fragments in which the brass and the synthesizer alternate, the brass sounding abrasive and harsh, the synthesizer more lyrical, so that, while the voice over reads the headlines, the music signifies the variety of the news, with its mix- ture of “hard” and “soft” news, of the “heroic,” “public” world of poli- tics and international affairs, and the “sentimental,” private world of “human interest.” Clearly, these changes reflect a change in the values of the ABC which, around 1985, increasingly moved towards types of programming and styles of presentation previously more characteristic of commercial radio and television. Clearly, also, news themes not only serve to call the listeners to attention, but also to characterize the essence of the news as constructed by a particular station in a particular era for particular listen- ers. Presenting Musical Systems I suggested earlier that musical meaning derives not only from con- notation, but also, perhaps most importantly, from a number of different musical systems which operate simultaneously and are designed, so to speak, to allow the expression of certain domains of meaning. One set of such systems, those pertaining to the interaction between a solo voice and a choir (or its orchestral equivalent) will now be discussed in more detail. There are different types of leader-chorus interaction, and when, in a piece of music, one of these types is selected, certain interpersonal meanings are simultaneously selected. These meanings can be repre- sented in the form of a system network that specifies the various ways in which a chorus can relate to a leader (insofar as these can be expressed musically) as well as the way in which these options are realized musi- cally. Such a network can be seen as a piece of musical “grammar.” ButMusic and Ideology * 43 the term “grammar” does not imply that music should be described as if it is like language in every respect, in the way that European languages have long been described as though they were like Latin in every respect. Representing musical systems as networks of options does not mean that the specificity of music as a semiotic system is not left intact. The system network presented in figure 1 is based on an analysis of 40 television advertisements collected during September-October 1986. This corpus is small and register-specific, and it is possible that further, less frequently selected, options will have to be added to the network. Because only advertising music has been analyzed, the network is spe- cific for advertising music. It is of interest to construct a network for a specific register of music, yet, in principle, networks should not be regis- ter-specific and include all permutations, all the systems of, for instance, leader-chorus interaction which a culture’s music, at a given point in its history, has brought forth or incorporated. Particular musics or musical registers can then be specified in terms of the options they typically select from networks, and these options could be “weighted” according to the frequency with which they are taken up. Advertising music, for example, uses leader-chorus interaction more often than solo or choir only, but the latter two options are also used. In this way the musical system networks represent what can be said with music, while the con- textual descriptions constrain what, in all likelihood, will be said (cf. sec- tion 5). Research towards a more “universal” network for leader-chorus interaction is in progress and will include data from various forms of Western church music, from rock music, and from music of non-Westem societies. The present network is a first step in this direction, although it is probably detailed enough to be of use in the analysis of advertising music. The first system in the network provides two options: overlapping, in which solo singing alternates with singing by leader and chorus together, and alternation, in which the parts of the leader and the chorus remain segregated, and in which leadership is therefore more exclusive. Overlapping, in advertising music, does not give the chorus as indepen- dent a role as one might expect. The cues still come from the leader. It is still the role of the chorus to support the leader, rather than, for example, to complement, vary, or challenge it. Moreover, the voice of the leader remains dominant, also during the overlapping sections (mainly due to recording techniques). So, although overlapping represents, in principle, a more inclusive form of leadership than alternation, in advertising music leadership continues to be rather strongly asserted, even in the case of overlapping. Were the network to be extended beyond advertis- ing, however, a number of other systems would have to be added (e.g.Popular Music and Society 44 “BUISTOAPE Joy YOMJOU VONSeIOVUT sNIOYD-Jopes’y] ‘| INS] aur] auo yin spuadsaa snaoy.y K a voneUayyE [20 udyt ‘oyDusoyp suagiuoU HOY apmuas pun ajpui ‘ata auo ynar xpuodsas snsoy, uonenpial auoqdyue asian ajoyn yiin spuodsas snioy.) — ® asuodsas UONRUIIE asuaa yona fo aulf ispy swpada4 smtoy,)® woyve[NUD feonnodas aut] yon sipadas snacy,) woRINAysUL uoyaesoput snaoya aapea| 28i08 wp uo dapnoy ch syang snioy,) odds aaysnjau0a dupsaao oe les axdaa yana for ata isn] ter topnay dn syong sndoy,) RK yaoddns quannUsay if ] Wn] wer 4oppay dn syn0q SNAOY, ULI UMusic and Ideology + 45 leader’s voice dominant/nondominant). As it stands, the only further option relates to the extent of the support given by the choir: either the concluding, final line of each verse is sung by leader and chorus together (intermittent support), or the last verse as a whole (conclusive support), or both. There are two basic forms of alternation: the chorus can either repeat what the leader has sung or played (repetition) or respond in a more inde- pendent manner (antiphone). Repetition entails a further option: the choir may repeat each line, in quasi-instructional, “say after me” fashion (instruction), or repeat the last line of each verse, an option which I have called emulation. Antiphones may be brief affirmations (secular “amens” and “halleluiahs”) or consist of a more extensive refrain (response). In one commercial the first affirmation was sung solo by a male member of the choir, the second by a female member, the third by the whole choir, while in the last the leader also sang. The use of such alternations between individual choir members I have called individuation. The labels I have used (support, emulate, etc.) express the fact that musical systems are functional and designed to allow the expression of certain meanings. This becomes more evident once one also takes into consideration the roles represented by leader and chorus. In the case of advertisements directed at children, for example, I found two types: “children (chorus) emulate child (leader)” and “children (chorus) respond to male adult (leader) who has a funny, clown-like singing style.” If analysis of a larger number of children’s ads would find that these are common patterns, as I expect they are, this would not only show the importance of appealing to peer-group pressure in children’s advertising, and the way advertisers seem to think that only adults who play down their adulthood and act like children are credible models for children, but also the vital involvement of music in the realization of such advertising strategies. Similarly one could study the musical real- ization of gender relations in advertising (e.g. “women [chorus] affirm message of male rock star (leader).” In short, the kind of musical gram- mar proposed here can serve as a tool for a socially meaningful analysis of musical texts, and allow musical analysis to begin to play a role in media studies and to be related to, for instance, the literature on advertis- ing. Music and Social Context: Two Approaches Systemic-functionalist theorists usually describe social context in terms of three contextual variables: field, defined as “that which is going on and has recognisable meaning in the social system . . . including sub- ject matter as one special aspect,” tenor, defined as “the socially mean-46 - Popular Music and Society ingful participant relations . . . including the speech roles that come into being through the exchange of verbal meanings,” and mode, defined as “the status that is assigned to the text in the situation; its function in rela- tion to the social action and the role structure, including the channel or medium and the rhetorical mode” (Halliday 143). Most often the actual description of a social context consists of a brief summary of the values of these three variables in a particular context, more or less as in figure 2. There are several reasons why this way of describing social context is not entirely satisfactory. The first lies in the sociological inadequacy of the descriptions. They are brief and potted, and it is not clear by means of which criteria they have been derived. How does one describe adver- tising, for example? From the point of view of the advertiser? From the point of view of the sociologist? If so, from the point of view of what kind of sociologist? If systemic-functional semiotics is to be adequate as semiotics and as social theory, its descriptions of social contexts should perhaps engage more explicitly with existing sociological analyses of these contexts, so that, for example, a description of the tenor of adver- tising can be seen as an adequate description of the social relations involved as well as be adequate to the text. The second problem lies in the nature of the contextual variables themselves. The last word has not been said about these and there is some disagreement about their nature and number. While Halliday, for example, sees the generic purpose of the text (the “rhetorical mode”— persuasion, instruction, etc.) as part of mode, because it is realized in the thetorical structure of the text, Gregory sees it as part of tenor, because it pertains to the relation between participants and specifies what the par- ticipants are trying to do to or for each other by means of the text. Halli- day recognizes the somewhat different status of mode: it has an “enabling” function with respect to the other contextual variables—but should mode, in that case, not be a kind of intermediate level, an inter- face between context and text, rather than one of three simultaneous and equivalent variables, more or less in the way Hasan conceives of genre as an interface between context and text (e.g. in Halliday and Hasan)? Again, the distinction between monologue and dialogue (and the various degrees of turntaking in between) are often seen as part of mode (e.g. Halliday; Martin), yet they clearly also relate to degrees of status differ- ence between participants, and hence to tenor. I hope to return to this problem in more detail elsewhere, but here I will use Gregory’s “func- tional tenor,” because it provides a useful label for what I want to talk about, and because I am concerned, not so much with the “enabling” as with the interactional aspects of rhetorical strategies.47 Music and Ideology “BuISMIOApy Jo 1xoWOD eID0g oY, “7 NBL uorsayoo pue uN EWI ourays yo sunaysis njoqimas-soyuy pure -e4p sBuyunau pensxay, suopjsod soyer2ads Supooua s2j3ue ‘esawea tessuie> opus syool Jassauppe Be 1 1oapx9] 3-9 :a8onSuny sapow syo}uios yuadagpIp Jo WorveuIquIOD :umnypaun sseuI Jo asn ‘anBojouopy (9x95 01 poudtsse 102) apoyy, aauaypme sseui — r0ymoqunuaMtoD sup, qed uaassyoq suopeje4) sows euossad.s93uy eos 40/pue ame puesg e994 01 1UsUI9>NpUL tuonerjadde jearSoqoop1 :s0914195 40 sionposd uyeiqo 01 uoIsEnsiag (Granoe so asod.nd) soway peuonouny suosn pus sosn sayy :s2010495 pue stonposd pasirioapy sSurueau jeuoneapy (aameur y9afqns) platy waisss a8unyoxa Supowuiod jo aanj10ddns -apedy 1exys94940 K JoUDIPNe Jo UoPEIUIsoAdas poquIAs k {euayp sou g [ouueyD 9) aBojouout (oun; 3av 2u pus plo) uostun ‘ojos x99anos Saou Jo UOHEZTeA3N09 PUE ssouaagsnyoxo F- 40u9} kh Teuosiadsozuy (2uny Day Mau pur pjo) es}saq220 jo ssouaaisayoo syuNpANA pu afuoULsey KadTaIPHE Jo snsuastod eum 3aV Mou pus plo) uonsesoiu snioys-s9ped| exisaqauo NSU Jo dYss9pLD| k (un) dav plo) awn parnseau seinBaz KaMITdrOsIp ke - k - wonBuLojuy (eum SAV plo) swiss Kpojout ke pue uonesnp ‘uonmuaumnysuy ‘CfeU0} ‘aur woay stondo ,s10194,K ax94ds ayqnd. tous) [suopauny (um Day #90) uopedoouds KouNdrostp Jo souasqe k - k : juawruysyiayua (@um av au) suays6s Spojsas ke pur woneanp ‘uonemmoMNASH ‘Cyyeuo) oun wo4y suondo ,jeiuaUINUas,RAOBALG owe fe swau ¢ jauueyD 9) uoneanp 3p {uowwy Jo suonEInuLiad YSnosys asuadsnsK BUIEAP (eum Sav pio) - saytyenb ,Jepuassa, Play (eum Dav pio) (ouns ay Mou) sisesjuoa jeyusuinsrsut pur UNYRAH ‘1pO}—uI FR ‘aoutea52 - Popular Music and Society however “one-way” television is, as a medium. But I believe that view- ers, provided they have, like most of us, grown up in a world replete with news and advertising, will always also understand news and adver- tising the way the text urges them to understand it, even if they have, alongside this understanding, other ways of understanding available, and even if they reject the hegemonic “reading” implicitly or explicitly. Text analysis can deal with this problem also, but only by studying other texts: interviews with members of the public, “readings” of the news by critical media sociologists, etc., in short, the whole constellation of social contexts and texts surrounding the reading of a particular kind of text. But this falls outside the scope of this paper and I mention it only because I want to avoid giving the impression that the mode of text analysis proposed here necessarily favors the producers rather than the readers of hegemonic texts. Finally, reconstructing the context from the text is, ultimately, only a methodological strategy. Text is shaped by context as much as context is shaped by text. I believe that the descriptions of social context pro- duced by the methods I have proposed here must be compared to and made commensurate with constructions of the same social contexts derived in other ways. Only in this way can we work towards a sociosemiotics that is both sociologically and semiotically adequate. References Adorno, T. W. Introduction to the Sociology of Music. New York: Seabury P, 1976. Australian Hymn Book. Sydney: William Collins, 1977. Barthes, R. Image—Music—Text. London: Fontana, 1977. Cage, J. Silence, New York: Calder and Boyars, 1961. Chernoff, J. M. African Rhythm and African Sensibility—Aesthetics and Social Action in African Music. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979. Cooke, D. The Language of Music. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1959. 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Wisthoff, K. Die Rolle der Musik in der Film-, Funk- und Fernsehwerbung. Berlin: Merseburger, 1978. Theo van Leeuwen is Professor of Communication Theory at the London Col- lege of Printing. At the time of writing this article he was Lecturer in Mass Communication at Macquarie University, Sydney,