Meaning and artistic symbols

For Reimer, art as aesthetic experience transcends ordinary life in the sense that aesthetic experience is not a matter of the practical, intersubjective, or ethical.

Meaning “in” aesthetic objects is unique. Reimer uses a comparison between language and art in order to clarify how artistic symbols function differently from non-artistic symbols. In language signs and signals as symbols designate certain references. In a work of art, however, all non-artistic symbols need to become immersed in the artistic qualities of the work so that they do not function in the

“language-like”, “conventional” and “usual” sense where symbols have “designated references”⁵¹⁸. In other words, the listener hears music as something but this “as”

does not mean that the listener would relate the sounds to other non-musical things as sound-referents. According to Smith’s interpretation, Reimer means that art transcends content through its form so that “there is more to a work of art than its ostensive subject matter and that this ‘more’ is the expressiveness and import supplied by form”⁵¹⁹.

In principle one can understand Dewey’s immediate experience and meaning in the above-mentioned sense. However, Reimer’s interpretation brings forth an unnecessary contrast between artistic and other meanings. Although art means sharing, Reimer does not explain how this sharing takes place. A musical work as an embodiment of feelings put into it by its creator somehow raises the same feelings in its perceiver although, as Reimer writes, it “lacks everything good communication ought to

517 Reimer 1995a, 29-30. See also, Dewey 1934, 52.

518 Reimer 1989a, 42.

519 Smith 1999, 19.

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have”⁵²⁰. Art does not follow the same principles of action-based meaning-making as human cultural life in general. Reimer’s theory of artistic meanings therefore raises questions.

First of all, since musical expression often uses words, it is worth noting that Reimer has adopted a rather limited view of language. According to Reimer, linguistic communication proceeds by choosing a message, a conventional sign that is then transmitted by encoding the message into a signal. The receiver decodes the signal back into the message.⁵²¹ For Dewey, however, language was not only for changing messages as objects between subjects. There is a similarity between various forms of human communication. Language

is a release and amplifi cation of energies that enter into it, conferring upon them the added quality of meaning. The quality of meaning thus introduced is extended and transferred, actually and potentially, from sounds, gestures and marks, to all other things in nature. Natural events become messages to be enjoyed and administered, precisely as are song, fi ction, oratory, the giving of advice and instruction.⁵²²

Reimer thus overlooks the ability of linguistic expressions to build up situations and to have consequences.

Language is also used in contextual situations where the linguistic signs gain their content through contextual interpretation and not merely by summing up the details of the message. Linguistic expressions gain their meaning in use in principle in the same way as musical sounds although the uses are different. In Dewey’s worlds:

“The story of language is the story of the use – –, a use that is eventual, as well as eventful.”⁵²³ Although the uses are not equal, the function of signs, words and sounds, can be understood as involving interpretation that is contextual.

Similarly as language is used for various purposes, musical sounds are also sounds used for various purposes. This does not mean that language could replace art. Since Reimer searches for the uniqueness of musical sounds he, however, sees a need to demarcate the difference between sounds as language and sounds as music. He cites Dewey:

520 Reimer 1989a, 67.

521 Ibid., 57.

522 Dewey 1958, 174.

523 Dewey 1958, 175.

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If all meanings could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist. There are values and meanings that can be expressed only by immediately visible and audible qualities, and to ask what they mean in the sense of something that can be put into words is to deny their distinctive existence. ⁵²⁴

Reimer’s citation of Dewey does not, however, illustrate anything more than that there is a remarkable technical difference between thinking with words and thinking in terms of tones. Hence, as Dewey writes, “there is no difference as far as dependence on emotionalized ideas and subconscious maturing are concerned”⁵²⁵ between thinking with words and thinking with sounds. Symbols, according to Dewey, gain their meaning through context and “messages” are always interpreted instead of merely decoded⁵²⁶. If we wish to understand this process, we have to examine the question of meanings in a wider perspective of social use and interpretation. Similarly as the origins of language are in social situations, so are the origins of musical ideas in shared situations. If we can then use feelings and musical thoughts as signs after that, it does follow that musical signs are born in soliloquy or that they are not to be communicated.

As Reimer does not examine meanings in the action-framework, he explains them as artistic or non-artistic referents. He acknowledges that there are aspects that do not seem to be inherently musical but which somehow seem to infl uence musical experience quite radically. Therefore, also nonartistic references in art, such as “the words in a song, the story in program music, the crucifi xion scene in a painting, the political confl icts in a play”⁵²⁷, are infl uential in the experience. Yet, Reimer claims, in experience they are transformed and transcended by the internal artistic form.

“The artistic meaning and value is always and essentially above and beyond whatever referents happen to exist in a work”⁵²⁸. This is why works, which have referents, can exist as “timeless monuments of art” and why works with important referents can be

“trivial and even demeaning as art”⁵²⁹. Non-artistic references are included but not as creating social situations and socially shared signifi cance but as “one part of the interior”⁵³⁰. According to Reimer, the non-musical sign and symbol does not only contribute in the artistic experience but “becomes an integral part of the sounds which

524 Reimer 1989a, 42; also Dewey 1934, 74.

525 Dewey 1934, 73.

526 See also, Dewey LW 6:4-5.

527 Reimer 1989a, 27.

528 Ibid., 27.

529 Ibid., 27-28.

530 Ibid., 28.

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are expressive as sounds, so that it loses its identity as a symbol”⁵³¹.

It is obvious that the non-musical symbol is not working in the same way with or without musical sounds. But it could be asked whether it is possible that, instead of losing its identity, the symbol value could be enforced through music. Through the ages, people have realized that national, political, religious or other meanings can be enjoyed in a more effective way through music. The symbolic “fl avour” does not diminish the musical value nor is the experience the same without it⁵³². It is there for the symbolic and artistic use. As Addis writes:

Our ‘deep, emotional, and abiding interest in pure musical syntax and structure’

exclude neither the possibility that music represents something that is not music nor, perhaps more to the point, the possibility that such representation is part of the explanation of the interest.⁵³³

For Dewey, musical sounds, as having multiple meaning connections within a situation form an event and an experience where all parts are in relation to other parts. Dewey held that in art, as in any conscious experience, “the instrumental and the fi nal, meanings that are signs and clews and meanings that are immediate possessed, suffered and enjoyed, come together in one”⁵³⁴. This does not necessarily mean that the artistic signs are beyond any other signs or clews. It also does not means that the experience of ‘oneness’ needs to be reduced to the inward subjectivity.

Human beings use musical sounds to improve their individual and social existence in various contexts and situations. Musical sounds work then as value objects, which have temporal power to develop actions and experience toward certain cultural and situational results and goals. Meanings in musical works are then, like Addis argues, more a matter of a continuum in which there is no sharp distinction between surface meaning and deeper meanings⁵³⁵. Particularly in education, it is important to note how “the general interest”, as Addis notes, can be built up by aspects—such as words in songs—that are not pure musical syntax and structure. The “pure musical” is not perceived as such but through a more general positive approach to the subject matter and its signifi cance to the experience of the student.

531 Ibid., 42.

532 Reimer argues that symbolic character is dissolved in the musical sounds loosing its identity but remains like a fl avor in the stew (Ibid., 42-43).

533 Addis 1999, 83, my italics.

534 Dewey 1958, 359.

535 Addis 1999, 99, fn 1.

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Reimer’s position seems to change, however, in his later writings. In 1995 he wrote that a signifi cant experience is “a dimension of meaning unperceived in the stimulus itself yet at the same time experienced in light of that stimulus”⁵³⁶. This unconscious side of meanings, according to Reimer, occurs regularly through religion. Meanings are “embodied in the particular expressive conditions of the particular musical materials”⁵³⁷, but they point beyond themselves to the signifi cance of our experience.

Meaning-search then means anticipation of certain experiential consequences, as Dewey argued. In 1997, Reimer admits that associated learnings and values can be recognized and honoured and are not contradictory. He argues that musical learnings are embedded in the larger world of human meanings and there must be a balance between intrinsic and extrinsic values that the study of music entails.⁵³⁸ However, if we read this in relation to Reimer’s earlier work, the signifi cance of experience still seems not to be found also in the socially shared and socially lived, but rather in a solipsistic consciousness where the sound-object with its intrinsic and extrinsic values has causative power. Art that exists “as a bearer of expressive or artistic or aesthetic quality”⁵³⁹ is perceived in inward experience. The individual experience is still the fi nal end in view. One can therefore ask: Can social transformation be a goal that really affects musical decisions or is it merely a “non-musical meaning”?

In document Bridging experience, action, and culture in music education (sivua 125-129)