Words are, in themselves, definitions wound into spirals.

Anna Kamieńska, Notebook, 1976

For a long time, I thought that music meant something. And that this assertion did not merely refer to a particular quality music possessed, but actually explained its meaning and purpose—its function. I tried to understand and explain to myself the mechanisms by which music generated meaning and performed that function, and to put those mechanisms to work in the process of writing. I did some thinking, some reading and some deliberate listening, trying to observe the processes taking place within me. Not much came of all this—certainly much less than I had expected, given the time I invested—although it would be an exaggeration to say that nothing did. At various times, I had different intuitions and found myself leaning towards different convictions. I also had experiences that gave me the impression that I was on the trail of something important, something that could be named and systematised. I encountered positions that appeared to embody significant insights. I found attempts at synthesis, but I also encountered authors who seemed to have no ambition to integrate different perspectives, or even to acquaint themselves with views other than their own, while proclaiming those views in the tone of someone revealing ultimate truths. Many of these revelations proved mutually contradictory, and none was particularly more convincing than the others, so eventually I began to lose hope of reaching any conclusions at all.

At some point, however—not so long ago—I realised that my efforts were producing some kind of result: that I was beginning to understand something about all this, though not how music means, but rather a few things surrounding that initial hypothesis, which was gradually proving doubtful. Above all, I began to arrive at the conclusions I have so far been trying to summarise here. That is, once again, in the briefest possible terms: that reality is concealed and is not identical with the world. That acting in the world is possible through making distinctions, which in turn consists in assigning and interpreting meanings. And that the mind, acting—and making distinctions—in the world, may gain the impression that meaning gives it access to reality. But perhaps the most important thing I came to understand about music is that the popular claim that music is a language—regarded by many as practically axiomatic—is not a definition but a metaphor, and one that explains considerably less than it seems to promise. Especially in what is perhaps its most common form: music is the language of emotions. For a long time, I remained convinced that this was a fundamental truth. The belief eroded slowly and stubbornly, largely outside my awareness—without my noticing. But one day I woke up without it, convinced instead that statements such as “mathematics is the tissue of numbers” or “biology is the dance of tissues” would explain just as much. Which is to say, almost nothing. This is not to say that music, meaning and emotions—along with many other things—are unrelated. But I believe that the relationships between them operate differently from what is generally assumed, and certainly differently from what I once imagined.

Before I say anything more, I would like to place everything I am about to say inside a large pair of parentheses, preceded by an even larger “as if”. As I have already mentioned, I doubt that anything can be said definitively. Well then: I began to think that many of the elements of the world as it appears to me have the character of a field. One might define such a field as a set of particular states of some—let us say—substance, together with the dynamics of the possible relations and interactions, or resonances, between those states. One might also say that the most fundamental substance of different fields is something for which the concept of energy seems to me the most fitting description. And that not only states within a given field may influence one another, but also states belonging to different fields—as may the fields themselves—generating new qualities and new fields. The capacity to enter into resonance would depend on some property or quality that these states and fields possess to varying degrees—some more, others less—and it is difficult to resist the impression that those possessing more of it are, in some sense, better. If one wanted to construct a universal ontology, one might add that virtually any element of the world could be regarded as a field of this kind: physical objects, organisms, societies, ideas, emotions, mathematical laws, branches and works of art, and so on. And all that exists could be regarded as one vast broth. But I do not trust universal ontologies. I am simply playing with molds in a sandpit. Returning, then, to music: in this picture, music too would be a field, and creating it would consist in manipulating the states of that field in search of the forms that resonate best. Making music is the organisation of matter; neither the matter nor its organisation means or says anything in itself. Meaning constitutes a separate field, which enters into a relationship with the field of music and generates a new field—neither purely musical nor purely semantic—producing an entirely new quality. Just as, say, electric and magnetic fields together produce light. The result is an impression of meaning in musical matter and, conversely—though, for some reason, less often—of musicality in meanings. But music itself does not mean anything. It merely makes it possible to create constellations of states capable of resonating well and entering into relationships both within the musical field and with other fields and their elements—for example, with meaning. But not only with meaning; more on that a little later.

Some of the maps I have looked into

Daniek K. L. Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning

Deryck Cooke, The Language of Music

Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music

Constantin Floros, Music as Message. An Introduction to Musical Semantics

Joan Grimalt, Mapping Musical Signification; Analysing Musical Signification

Robert S. Hatten, Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics and Tropes

Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning. Towards a Critical History

Susan Langer, Feeling and Form

Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music

Aaron Ridley, The Philosophy of Music. Theme and Variations

Roger Scruton, Understanding Music

Richard Taruskin, The Danger of Music