Emily R. E. Baron
N10038026
Educational Theatre
Spring 2009
E85.1505.001 - The Performing Arts in Western Civilization
SUMMARY
In this section, the reader is introduced to many important ideas and people, one significant person being Susanne K. Langer, who changed how people saw and used referential meaning. Ferrara starts by defining what meaning is and how it is referential. A symbol, like a word, has meaning when you come into contact with it. You see the word, or symbol, think about it, and other words and ideas associated with that original symbol come to mind. This then brings up the ideas about syntax, or rules governing sentence structure, and referencial meaning, which is the thing and the idea of the thing to which it points to.
According to Ferrara, originally, music analysts did not study the vocabulary of music at both the syntactical and referential levels. When the referential meaning wasn't present it was because there were issues of method and not from what the music was capable of meaning. These analysts believed that referential meaning of music could result in chaos, since they thought there was a lack of control and systematization. Objectivity, the method of detachment, and verifiability, the ability to achieve similar results with reenactment, would be almost impossible when trying to find the referential meaning in music, since collecting data is an important part in the process.
One of the firsts to suggest using referential meaning in music was Susanne K. Langer. She suggests that music is expressive of human feelings. It is through her writing that helps her connect the works of past philosophers of language to methods of using referential meaning in music. Immanuel Kant, Alfred North Whitehead, and Ernest Cassirer are just a few of the philosophers whose work she used in order to create her argument.
Langer was inspired by her image of man; a free, active, and rational being. She was amazed by their ways of partaking in symbolization, the process of changing experience into language. Because of this process, she concluded that science is not a passive inspection, but in fact, an active partnership with nature. She examined the ways of Kant and Cassirer, whose views were both very different, but it was through her examinations of their work that she was able to create her own point of view.
According to Kant, meaning from symbols were not provided by experience but by the mind. Kant only thought in terms of science whereas Cassirer connected to ideas that were more culturalistic. Cassirer believed that man is unique in that he is the only thing in nature that can create symbol systems, such as art, science, history, etc., and not just science. Kant and Cassirer are just responding to the problem of Cartesian Dualism.
The Cartesian Dualistic Perspective finds human distinction only possible if man's origin is supernatural. This was thought to be true because some believed that only supernatural conception could account for man to transcend to another level of significance in thought and action. Power was seen as a gift from God, according to philosopher Descartes. He believed that if man were to transcend nature, it was God who gave man that power to do so. However, with the rise of science, the Cartesian Dualistic Perspective was swiftly replaced with the Naturalistic Reductive Perspective.
This new philosophy proposed that man's supremacy came from nature and not God. It was apart of natural selection and was therefore continuous with nature. However, Langer looked down upon this philosophy in that it reduced the meaning of man to laws of a machine. Because of this, she created the Naturalistic Transcendent Perspective. She accepts man's evolution from nature and recognizes his transcendence above other beings in nature. His transcendence comes from his capacity for abstraction through language. The basic theme that arose from this is that humans and animals are both continuous and discontinuous with nature; they are going through evolutionary processes.
Going back to the subject of music however, even though is has rationality and a system, it cannot be evaluated based on rules of ordinary language. Rationality is a form making function that has 2 different means of processing. It deals with 1) discursive systems and also 2) non discursive systems. This presents two contrasting functions of rational behavior with the first being ordinary language which falls under being discursive and the second being music which falls under being non discursive. As Ferrara eloquently wrote: "...music, according to Langer, presents a compelling distinction concerning man's transcendence over the animal world. Music is somehow expressive of man's unique being."
According to Langer, something can only be a symbol if it functions as a symbol for someone. Symbols point to the concept that comes to mind when one hears a word. Langer believed that there must be a one to one correspondence between the logical structure of the symbol and the concept of the thing to which is points.
Continuing with the ideas of discursive vs. non discursive systems, discursive is different in that ordinary language can be translated; there is one meaning. Non discursive symbol systems cannot be translated in that there are no fixed meanings involved. Another observation made is that translation isn't possible from one non discursive medium to another; one can't translate a piece of music to a painting. However, what Langer developed was the idea that discursive systems can be translated into non discursive systems. Music is a symbolic transformation of feelings and in Langer's Living Form, musical form resembles human experience. "It is not actual feeling that music represents but the composer's knowledge of the form or concept of feeling," says Ferrara. Human existence is made up of things that are ever changing yet stay the same. For a composer, essential rhythms of human life are symbolized by music; music is the metaphorical image of actual life and transforms it into virtual form. The catch is that it can't be identical to real life, only related, and it can relate to any experience, not particular in virtual feeling. "Music is capable of expressing the meaning of human feeling in a way that ordinary language cannot."
The new ways of thinking about music established by Langer was not welcomed by everyone. Most of the philosophical community does not consider music an authentic symbol system because it does not follow the rules of the discursive language system. And with that, Langer responded that music was it's own language system. Music expressively articulates the meaning of human feelings and "living form." Music has different rules and we are coming to a day where everyone will accept that.
PERSONAL REACTION
This chapter seemed to be a little bit more confusing than the introduction, and as I finished reading it, I felt as if a big weight was lifted off my shoulders. In reading the material however, I started writing down questions or comments in response to what Ferrara had to say about Langer and all the philosophers in which her theory evolved from.
When Ferrara talks about Langer's overall theme and the fact that music cannot be evaluated based on rules of ordinary language, a question that popped into my mind was: How does one learn the rules of evaluating music if they only know the rules of ordinary language? This question, to me, has been in my mind since the beginning since I myself am unfamiliar with the language of evaluating music. Throughout the course I have picked up some syntax here and there but what happens when someone is completely unfamiliar with it?
Besides several questions running through my head about syntax and learning the language of music, something else I have been trying to solve is how all of this connects to theater. One section in this chapter that seemed to correlate was when Ferrara discusses the symbolic transformation of feelings in music. I start to think about emotional recall, a technique used in acting where the actor, who needs to create an emotion, thinks back in time to when they really felt that emotion in real life. They recreate the feeling they felt in that situation for the specific scene they are working on. Similar to how feelings are used in music, so how feelings are used in drama.
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