Meaning

Transcript

• 00:01

  It took me several times to appreciate the profundityand philosophy of the piece, really,but now it's one of my favorite musicals.George Sava was famous for being so focused on his workthat he could not have normal human relationships.The story of the musical tells of a relationship

• 00:23

  with a woman that goes wrong.She leaves him because he's simply not available to her.So she makes a choice to have a life.Stephen Sondheim created a pointillistic score sowhen you see Seurat painting "An Afternoon on La Grande Jatte,"you hear the music going dat, dat, dat, dat, dat, dat, dat,

• 00:44

  dat, dat, dat, dat, dat, dat, as he takes the brushand make dots on the canvas.We felt it was right to perform the piecein English, because a, you can attract the best performersif you do it in English.France-- music theater is developing in France,but it's not quite at the level wherewe could find French speaking people who could really

• 01:06

  do it justice.And also the lyrics are so much a partof the construction of the piece and there'sso much cleverness and wordplay in the lyricsthat it would be a shame to translate it.

The concept of meaning (and music) or the construction of musical meaning has been the object of elaborations influenced by a vast array of perspectives such as ethnomusicology, philosophy, psychological anthropology, social psychology, the cognitive sciences, and cultural studies. It purports to decode in what ways music is meaningful, the relationships that people establish with sounds in various moments and spaces in their lives, and what they believe music “means.” A number of thoughtful questions have been raised by scholars that address issues such as the temporal and experiential aspects of music; its structural, syntactical, and semiotic content; or music as an artifact of discourse significantly permeated by the human imagination and capacity of operating through metaphor.

Philosopher Mark Johnson proposes a way of understanding the construction of meaning as inherently connected with bodily experience. He recognizes the way that humans make use [Page 679]of sensory-motor experience to formulate what and how they think, and how they express and communicate symbolically. In his latest book, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding, he delves into aspects of embodied meaning by introducing the aesthetic dimensions of experience, meaning, and action.

Musicologist Martin Clayton remembers that in 1956, Leonard B. Meyer, in his seminal work, Emotion and Meaning in Music, suggested that music had meaning if referring to anything outside of itself. Although considering the definition operational in its essence, Clayton pointed out its problematic conception as containing the following fallacy: accepting that it meant that music should be understood as a thing referring to another thing.