Topoi

DOI 10.1007/s11245-009-9054-7

The Crisis of Musical Aesthetics in the 21st Century

Gianmario Borio

! Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract This essay is an attempt to understand the

reasons for the current crisis of musical aesthetics. It
examines the function of this discipline as the mediator
between philosophy and musicology, it inquires into its
connections with the ideals of autonomy, beauty and free
subjectivity. During the 20th Century, major changes in
society and their communication forms happened; anthropology and semiotics began to compete with aesthetics in
explaining musical facts. The last paragraphs test the
chances of resistance of musical aesthetics; musical
meaning appears to be the only question which endured in
spite of the considerable fragmentation and loss of profile
of musical experience.
Keywords Aesthetics ! Musical thinking ! Musical idea !
Adorno ! Musicology ! Musical aesthetics !
Absolute music ! Semiotics ! Symbol ! Meaning in music
Ever since musicology became a generally recognized discipline in Western musical culture, aesthetics has taken on a
major role in its dynamic. In an essay from 1885, that
summarized some of the recent developments and was also
programmatic for the present, Guido Adler distinguished
two large contexts of musicology: the historical one and the
systematic one. Musical aesthetics was placed at the centre
of the systematic compartment, in an intermediary position
between theory and pedagogy (Fig. 1, adapted from Adler
1885). This disposition can be also interpreted as a result of a
systematic vision: aesthetic reflection intervenes after the
highest laws of art1 are made clear, i.e., when the

foundations of musical language have been laid down, and

acts as the premise and regulator of the transmission of such
norms on a practical level. The relevance that Adler was
attributing to aesthetics is reflected in the ample and articulated field in which he considered it being operative:
origin and effect of music, the relationship of tonal art to
nature, the relationship of music to culture, climate, and
the national economic relationships of people, the subdivision of tonal art according to the nature of its origin, or
the locality where it is practised, or the purposes which it
serves, the limits of the tonal art with reference to its
ability to express, the ethical effects.2 The works that
were published in the following decades, above all in the
German-speaking area, owe a lot to this formulation and
often appear as studies of one of the specific fields that Adler
had reserved for aesthetics.3 This perspective became
weaker during the course of the twentieth century due to a
series of factors.
Signals of this weakening are perceptible in the two most
important expositions of systematic musicology from the
second half of the twentieth century: Musikpsychologie und
Musikasthetik by Albert Wellek and Die Systematische
Musikwisssenschaft edited by Carl Dahlhaus and Helga de
la Motte-Haber.4 Wellek intends systematic musicology to
be like a weaving together of the aesthetics and psychology
of music. His strong orientation towards Gestalt psychology
induces him to search for solutions to problems of musical
aesthetics by looking at perceptive processes. On the other
hand, Dahlhaus proceeded with a radical historicization of
1

Adler (1885), in particular pp. 1112.

Adler (1885, pp. 1213).
3
Cf. for example Halm (1913), Besseler (1926), and Mersmann
(1926).
4
Cf. Wellek (1963) and Dahlhaus and de la Motte-Haber (1982).
2

G. Borio (&)
Universita` di Pavia, Pavia, Italy
e-mail: borio@unipv.it

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G. Borio
Fig. 1 Guido Adler,
Articulation of systematic
musicology

musical aesthetics; this has the merit of discussing the

concepts in their temporal evolution, but also the disadvantage of renouncing the regulation of principles and
judgments. His proposal to rethink the aesthetic theory in
terms of a dogmatics5 of art can seem eccentric, but at
least draws the conclusion that the aesthetic systems
(incarnating the idea of a science of beauty) are no longer
able to put forth a claim of universality that is comparable to
that stated, for example, by Hegel. The very nature of the
system becomes problematic in the treatises of post-idealistic aesthetics since there is no longer a consensus about the
existence of a central perspective from which all the phenomenon of art can be observed and evaluated. The place of
a general theory of the art would therefore become occupied
by a much more modest, but also more realistic undertaking: to explain the premises of a certain artistic movement
within the limits of its historical unfolding. The concept of
5

Cf. Dahlhaus (1982).

123

artwork and the problems connected to it (not least the

search for an analytic method) were central to Dahlhauss
idea of dogmatics; this reveals how much the withdrawal
from the idealistic approach implied at least a partial dislocation of musical aesthetics in the most wide-ranging
receptacle of music theory. Among the fundamental criteria
for defining the work there is, in fact, that of musical
logic which gives access to the way the work itself is
formed, to what is generally today defined as structure.
Musical aesthetics was the mediator between philosophy
and musicology; this function derives from the core position which was attributed to philosophy in the system of the
sciences. Philosophy, in its aesthetic declension, gave a
foundation to the concepts through which a discussion
about the arts was made possible. These conceptsbeauty,
expression, taste, work of art, etc.have the characteristic
of being applicable to all artistic genres without damaging
their autonomy or infringing upon the boundaries between
them. However, aesthetics was not only normative (it was

The Crisis of Musical Aesthetics in the 21st Century

not limited to establishing the conditions of the discussion

of works of art) but also evaluative: it established the criteria of judgment of the works, distinguishing beautiful
from ugly, genial from banal, the original from the copy,
the true artist from the impostor. Musical aesthetics
ordained a hierarchy of values: it bestowed a pre-eminence
on absolute music, offered criteria for recognizing and
appreciating the artistic quality and placed the composer in
the spotlight as a demiurge and visionary. In the twentieth
century, this system of concepts and values began to vacillate under the simultaneous effect of various phenomena.
Among them, at least three seem to be of primary importance: 1. The rebellion against beauty on behalf of different
artistic movements. 2. The progressive crumbling of
philosophical systems and, in general, of the idea of philosophy as a coherent and all comprehensive system. 3.
The establishment of the mass society, the progressive
disappearance of the roles and the social interactions that
branded art after the bourgeois revolutions.
Aware of the concentric action of these factors, Adorno
made a rescue attempt: aesthetics becomes a refuge of
metaphysics.6 His main category is no longer beauty but
truth; the work of art helps the truth that is no longer
tangible by logic and theoretical philosophy to emerge. The
truth of the work of art is not understood by Adorno as an
adaptation to reality but rather as its negation. Reality, as it
manifested itself in the mass society after World War II,
appears to the Frankfurt philosopher as ideology and
reification, as totally achieved falsehood. In other words,
since falsehood has permeated every facet of life experience (from politics to science), then art, understood as a
disinterested activity without finality, appears to be the
only sphere where it is possible to oppose resistance to the
universal dominion of instrumental reason. Furthermore,
authentic artunconditional expression of the subject
represents the truth in an eminent way for Adorno, in so far
as it emits, sometimes in a cryptic way or at any rate
through mediations of a technical order, a judgment on
the reified world. A form of judgment such as this requires
an interpretation; therefore the critical-philosophical discourse arrives as an integration and a complement of the
non-conceptual judgment emitted from art. From this, one
eventually deduces that the model of art for Adorno is
music and the relationship between music and philosophy
represents the highest sphere of the Aesthetics Theory.
Adornos philosophical arguments, always supported by
remarks on compositional techniques, aroused great interest among the European composers of the 1950s and 1960s.
Here is the most important instance and perhaps the only
one in modern centuries in which a philosopher had such a
huge influence on the ways of writing about and listening

to music. Among other things, Adorno introduced the

notion of musical material7 that involves a continued
redefinition of the idiomatic elements in the different historical phases; the history of music consequently appeared
to occur, not only on the surfacein its alternating generations and schoolsbut also on deeper levels, in the
compositional technique and in the sound itself. Adorno
intended his contributions to music not as new issues on
musical aesthetics but as a continuation of music theory on
a philosophical level; occasionally specific questions about
compositional technique and then theoretical questions of
great importance (the role of counterpoint, musical form
after tonality, the emancipation of timbre) were discussed
as exemplifications or articulations of philosophical problems (the relationship between the individual and the universal, norm and freedom, necessity and contingency). In
doing so, Adorno refined a juncture between conceptual
logic and compositional technique that was latent in the
Formenlehre of the nineteenth century beginning with
Adolph Bernhard Marx and had assumed new strength in
Schonbergs theory, particularly in his unaccomplished
treatise on the musical idea.8 Adorno was always
opposed to an aesthetics from above, the application of a
pre-existing philosophical reasoning on styles and works;
his philosophical reflection on music was intended as
verbalization and theoretical unfolding of a logical process
immanent to the works. One can argue on the quality of the
results obtained by the strength of this conviction; but there
is no doubt that Adorno placed a watershed between a type
of musical aesthetics conceived in metaphysical terms and
a philosophical theory of composition, the main purpose of
which is to disclose and unfold the contents of truth.
Adorno specified concepts and defined perspectives for
understanding post-tonal music. He attracted attention to
the impact of electronic technology (radio, recordings,
cinema) and of mass diffusion. He placed the relationship
between music and society at the forefront, creating an
awareness toward the evolution of musical language and its
relations with other arts. He accustomed composers to
consider technical questions as aspects of general matters
regarding both psychic and social life. In spite of this,
Adornos philosophy of music is not to be understood as a
positive system; it is rather the sign of an emergency situation. It came about as a reaction to a metaphysics of art
that had developed beyond the styles and the structural
techniques, attributing little significance to the evolution of
artistic languages and sacrificing the understanding of
single works to the consistency of the conceptual system.
After Adornos death, musical aesthetics continued trying
to exorcize this emergency situation and restore an
7

Cf. Adorno (1997, pp. 343344)

Cf. Adorno (2006).

Cf. Schonberg (1995).

123

G. Borio

autonomy to philosophical reasoning. In doing so, it

experienced a definite retreat toward those forms of the
metaphysics of art from which Adorno had distanced
himself. One of the most recent examples of this regression
is The Aesthetics of Music by Roger Scruton, where the
title alone is symptomatic of a unitary and centralized
vision of the discipline. The book contains fifteen chapters,
each of which is dedicated to a specific concept. Although
Scruton criticizes Adorno and comes to popular musics
defence, his list of concepts corresponds precisely to the
canon of Western music aesthetics as established during
the nineteenth century. Scruton constantly tries to fix
concepts to a single version on the basis of which he
pursues his own argumentation; in search of solid and
indisputable definitions, he denies the relevance of the
historical development of concepts: It is not merely that
history has shown that philosophical questions, once discovered, do not dissolve with change of cultural climate. It
is that they are not of a nature to dissolve, any more than
are the questions of mathematics.9 Scruton does not
conceive aesthetics as a field of open discussion on the
values within a community that is historically and geographically able to be circumscribed, but rather as a series
of universally valid principles. In spite of the declarations
of principle, his theory has an authoritarian and anti-democratic stamp.
One of the dilemmas that musical aesthetics needs to
face in our century is that aesthetics as a specific discipline
(or a branch of philosophy) originated in the same epoch in
which the process of achieving autonomy of bourgeois art
came to an end, hence it is unlikely it can disregard the
parameters established by this historic movement. It is of
the utmost importance to keep in mind that music aesthetics sprang from two convergent processes: 1. the
internal differentiation of philosophy in the direction of a
systematic approach to knowledge, 2. the hermeneutic
demand, raised by autonomous music, for integrating the
sound event through the act of understanding. The idea of
music produced by a subject in complete freedom, imbued
with expressive strength and destined to remain as a cultural value urged the aesthetic argumentation to move
within a triangle with composer, score and performance as
vertexes. The concepts of originality, form and interpretation were linked to these three points, giving rise to debate
for numerous generations. Therefore, also in the field of
music, aesthetics set itself up as a theory of the work of art
as individual creation where its meaning is neither dependent upon a social function nor natural norms, rather it is
made up of the relations between the parts and the whole.
Musical cultures that do not define themselves according to
this triangle were considered primitive, unworthy of

theorization, or entrusted to anthropology, in which the

approach to music thus undertook an alternative position
with respect to that of philosophy.
Among the fundamental impulses upon which musical
aesthetics stood was the presence of a contemporary production causing the difference in the continuity to emerge.
In the interstices between what was handed down and what
appeared as new, problematic knots that musical aesthetics
was attempting to master shined through. From Kierkegaard to Adorno, musical aesthetics regarded contemporaneousness even when facing century-long questions. At the
beginning of the twenty-first century, the concept of contemporary music has become insecure. The production that
was considered contemporary in a qualitative and not only
a chronological senseinnovative music that answered
questions implicit in works from the past, reflecting
expressive issues of the immediate presentis now a
particular and restricted compartment of a show industry
that permeates cultural life on every level. The current
crisis of quality of the music of research and experimentation is at least partly separable from the general economic
conditions and can be traced back to the difficulty of
finding such technical questions, i.e., of constructing
coherent reception lines (this was the strength of the avantgarde movements of the twentieth century). Musical aesthetics without an avant-garde can be considered as dead.
The distinction between musical thinking and
thinking about music that Bruno Nettl proposed several
years ago is certainly not surprising for an ethnomusicologist who has often had dealings with a culture in which
music theory is not made explicit in the form of verbal
abstraction; nevertheless this consideration was published
in a collection entitled The Philosophy of Music,10 signaling
the rupture of the relationship between the musical creation
and the reflection upon it, i.e., of the circuit between composition and theory which constituted a cross beam in the
building of musical aesthetics. The ethnographic approach
examples for Mozart and Beethoven that Nettl outlines in
this article are eloquent in regard to the change of perspective or more precisely the break away from the aesthetic sphere. At the historical moment when the music
tradition is secluded in a museum of artworks, the
innovative impulses of contemporary art music grow
weaker, the users (independent of their social class or cultural background) identify themselves preferably with types
of music released from that triangle, and the evolution of the
media favours forms of audiovisual perceptionat this
time the capacity of musical aesthetics to describe, evaluate
and interpret music phenomena has become critical. There
are at least two other disciplines that have proved to be
virtuously competitive: anthropology and semiotics.

10

Scruton (1997, p. 98).

123

Cf. Nettl (1994).

The Crisis of Musical Aesthetics in the 21st Century

In the second half of the twentieth century, as opposed

to musical aesthetics, ethnomusicology experienced a rapid
evolution that equally concerned the widening of its scope
of study, the application of methods, the renovation of
terminology and the assimilation of main themes known to
both historical and systematic musicology (in Adlers cited
diagram it appeared in the area of this last one). For the
questions that I am dealing with, the most relevant aspect is
probably the intense investigation of the relationships
between music and context, relationships that have
appeared larger and more complex than the ones on which
the hermeneutic method had focused on studying the repertoire of art music. From an ethnographic perspective,
music assumed the features of an instance within the
framework of a process of constructing meaning which
involves the entire social structure at any given place or
time. Once the paradigm of absolute music and the canon
of art music became fragile, the ethnographic model
developed over years of field research in a comparative
perspectiveappears transferable to the study of art music.
In fact, on the theoretical level, nothing prohibits considering the twenty-first century European citizen as belonging to an ethnic group having no priority or exceptionality
with respect to the surrounding groups. Ethnomusicology is
a science that considers music to be a part and an expression of a determined culture and therefore can consider the
repertory of Western art music with a clear conscience,
even though in a different light than the historical-philologic method. Aside from the question of methodological
legitimacy, it is however a fact that the relevant problems
of contemporaneousness have aroused great interest in the
debates among ethnomusicologists: the formation of new
musical communities, the links between ethnic membership and musical style, the global economic effects on the
production and reception of music, the role of sexual
identity, the impact of electronic technology, the consequences of changes in political power, the vanishing of the
boundaries between music purely for listening and that for
entertainment, and the relationship between music and
other spheres of communicative action. The confines that
separate it from musicology are rather blurry today; for this
reason, a discussion has recently arisen as to whether the
prefix ethno has some sense that doesnt have to do with
the history of the discipline itself.11
Next to anthropology, there is another discipline,
semiotics, that in the second half of the twentieth century
also provided interpretative means of musical facts that can
be considered alternatives to aesthetics. Its not by chance
that among the more or less explicit motivations accompanying the birth of music semiotics there is the rejection
of classic methods of analysis of content, within which the
11

Cf. Bohlman (1992), Agawu (2003), and Taylor (2007).

criticism of ideology (Adorno) and literary hermeneutics

(Ricoeur, Barthes) would represent some up-dated yet
unadulterated versions.12 In a circumstantial critique of
Barthes, dating from the initial formulations of the semiotic
theory of music, Jean-Jacques Nattiez showed how an
improper and tendentious use of the term connotation
led beyond the linguistic area in order to have access to the
more insecure and arbitrary area of social hermeneutics.
Characteristic of this shift is the revival of the notion of
symbol instead of that more transparent of sign: il (Barthes) donnes lillusion de la scientificite a` une procedure
qui nest pas autre chose que le cheminement de lhermeneutique traditionelle: decouvrir derrie`re le sens immediat
(la denotation) un sens cache (la connotation), un sens
symbolique.13 Semiotics proposes itself, therefore, as
corrective with respect to the deviations of musical aesthetics and, on a general methodological level, as an
alternative. Such an alternative has undoubtable values: it
stands as a particular discipline within the grand scheme of
a general theory of signs, of which linguistics represents a
tested and gradually perfected model of application; it is at
the heart of interest and study in contemporary times; its
procedures do not depend on a particular repertory and can
be applied with equal chances to tonal and post-tonal art
music, to those outside of European tradition and to popular music; it does not assume a system of values but
proceeds, at least in its initial phases, in a manner that is
descriptive and objectively verifiable. The problems traditionally faced by musical aesthetics can be found
throughout the network of specific compartments by which
Nattiez articulates his theoretic system. Generally the most
important aesthetic questions the fruition, the contemplation or the reading of the work, the musical interpretation as well as the scientific or analytic approaches to
music14come together in one field of Jean Molinos
(1975) three part model: the esthesic. When Nattiez
enters the thorny field of musical meaning, he constantly
suggests using caution towards the proliferation of interpreters15; he aspires ultimately to the conquest of a
pure dimension of semantic analysis. In citing a passage
of Michel Imberty, he proposes the necessity of dulling
the effects of certain determined stimuli on the listener
beyond every evolved aspect of the historical and cultural
12

Cf. Nattiez (1974).

Nattiez (1974, p. 67). An investigation of these problems is found
in Nattiez (1990, pp. 2837). Cf. also Agawu (2001). Agawu pointed
out that, in the practice of music analysis, Nicholas Ruwet (1972) and
Nattiez prefer the term musical unity, instead of sign, liberating
semiotics from every expectation of a musical meaning which should
emerge in a specific way from a determined historical or social
context.
14
Nattiez (1990, p. 12).
15
Nattiez (1975, p. 189).
13

123

G. Borio

context, this being tightly limited to the socio-cultural

membership of the subject.16 Also in this context, semiotics remains in strong opposition to musical aesthetics, at
least in its post-idealist and hermeneutic version; this tradition considers meaning as a historical unfolding which
moves from the composers imagination and from his/her
cultural context and arrives through intermediate stages of
interpretation at the configuration hic et nunc. But, once
again, aesthetics can perform such operations, without
getting lost in the arbitrariness of attributes extraneous to
the history of the work, because its procedures are
anchored within the Western art music system, at the core
of which are the concepts of composer, work and audience.
Anthropology and semiotics occupy the positions left
vacant by musical aesthetics at the very moment when its
premises are vacillating; yet these do not seem able to carry
out all the tasks intrinsic to that discipline. The model of
the research of sense, truly a Western phenomenon, has the
tendency to generalize despite cultural exchanges and all
mutations brought on by the post-industrial society. In the
sphere of art, it was aesthetics that dealt with this demand
for meaning supplied by a conceptual apparatus and a
methodology that have been guaranteed by the secular
practices of abstraction and dialectics. Field research and
investigations of the verbal associations made by listeners
can offer a snapshot of the meanings attributed to music in
a determined context; nevertheless, they represent the
mirror of the semiotic process and not its explanation. In
this point is probably located the residue that the disintegration of aesthetics systems has left behind. It is about an
element of connection between production and reception of
the music that occurs in different contexts: it regards both
the written and the oral cultures, both composition meant
as a text to be interpreted and the practices of extemporization, both traditional works and contemporary ones, both
music performed live and that which is listened to through
some electronic system. This ubiquity of the research of
sense is probably responsible for the fact that the concept
of meaning has repeatedly over the last ten years found
itself at the centre of musicology debates, independently of
the differences in approach between aesthetics, semiotics
and anthropology. Starting from the observations developed thus far, it is natural to ask whether instances exist in
musical aesthetics that can help circumscribe this question
or if one needs to resort to another methodology or
discipline.
The considerations that Anglo-Saxon musicology has
devoted to the question of the meaning in music are at least
in part compromised by a problem of a methodological
order: the term meaning is often used equivocally for
designating two dimensions that the philosophy of
16

Michel Imberty cited in Nattiez (1975, p. 172).

123

language in its early stage distinguished by using the terms

Sinn (sense) and Bedeutung (meaning).17 Adorno kept
them distinct, even though showing their affiliation in the
totality of the musical experience: on the one hand, one has
to consider the syntactic organization of the material, the
construction of the work that is responsible for the logical
relationship (Sinnzusammenhang) and the coherence
(Stimmigkeit); on the other hand, the recipient always has
to do with the content (Gehalt) and with the horizon of
meanings that such a work catalyzes but which is never
exhausted.18 The most conscientious participants in the
recent debate have attempted to reinstate such a distinction
by means of contrasting terms, for example designative and
embodied meaning (Meyer 1956) or congeneric and extrageneric meaning (Coker 1972). Consequently, however,
this device has caused a heightening instead of a loosening
of the classic tension between the aesthetics of form and
content. The question of meaning maintained its place in an
argumentation of linguistic imprint with a strong accent on
the process of reference; the controversies on meaning in a
strict sense have been established according to the
extremes of those who intend it as property of the music
and those who retain it to be a social type of construction.19
The repertoire of reference has continued to be tonal music,
particularly instrumental production; therefore, also in this
area, there has been no shift with respect to the nineteenth
century aesthetics. This standstill can be interpreted as
another clue to the return to a phase of musical aesthetics
before Adorno, who had given a new formulation of the
problems themselves through a reflection upon the Konstruktion des Sinnlosen (construction of the meaningless)20 practiced in the avant-garde. The fact that the
categories predisposed for the implementation of the
meaning as well as the compositional criteria can be subjected to a variability that in the extreme joins to damage
fundamental principles (such as those of identity and difference) is the counterpart of a mobility of musical
meaning that eludes any referential form. The hermeneutic
perspectivelatent in some steps of the late Adorno
thoughtproposes to consider the meaning of his historical
unfolding. Gadamer also prefers the term Sinn precisely
to mark the distance from a semantic procedure that aims at
fixing the reference of every single word in a text21; the
eminent texts, including those of literature (and probably
those of music), truly have the characteristic of continually
17

Cf. Frege (1975).

Cf. Adorno (2002). I discussed this problem in Borio (2004).
19
The first position is held by Kivy (1990). For the second position
cf. Cook (1998, 2002) and Kramer (2001). A series of debates on
musical meaning is offered by Koopman and Davies (2001).
20
Adorno (1991, p. 242). On these problems cf. Borio (2006).
21
Cf. Gadamer (1993).
18

The Crisis of Musical Aesthetics in the 21st Century

reproposing the question to which they are an answerand

this takes place in an open and infinite process.
Yet, even accepting this position, the consideration
doesnt extend from the context of traditional aesthetics
with its core elements of composer, text and execution. I
already advanced the hypothesis that meaning is the only
enduring question in spite of the dilation and the loss of
profile that the musical experience has been subjected to
over the last decades. The philosophy of hermeneutic orientation has the advantage, compared to other auxiliary
disciplines of musicology, of already having widely sounded and, in part, clarified such problems in a sector of the
artistic production that for two centuries has been considered central and exclusive on the theoretic level. It is thus
worth considering whether the expectation for and the
recognition of meaning take place in a similar, or at least
comparable, manner when it comes to the reception of other
genres of music. The differences between musical genres
regard origins, history and internal norms; they oppose
more than the differences between the groups of recipients
that, as I said, are variablea general theory of musical
meaning. The claim for universals, implicit in many recent
theories, does indeed constitute an ulterior element of fragility. The re-establishment of musical aesthetics as a theory of meaning can occur only through a progressive
verification in various fields and an induction of categories
starting from limited cases; paradoxically, the loss of profile
of the musical experience has a positive role in such a
context, since it is the implication of a horizon of expectations that is more generic but also shared on a larger scale.
A particularly favourable field for testing this formulation is that of rock music. As emphasized by many
recently, it has manifested a gradual, and in certain ways,
surprising process of convergence towards the sphere of art
music: the neo-auratic coding via the recording, the
importance of aesthetic achievement (or even beauty), the
formation of a canon and the assumption of the concept of
opera omnia are symptoms of such a change of perspective.22 Nonetheless these characteristics need not overshadow two differences that could almost be defined as
ontological: 1. Rock music neither presumes nor implicates
theory; 2. The performance dimension is prevalent compared to the textual one. On the other hand, precisely these
differences cater to an aesthetics of performance that
was recently claimed not only for the turning point in
diverse art circles around 1968, but also because it puts into
the foreground the recipients role in the formation of the
meaning.23 An important premise of this approach is that
the texts of the art (a category in which paintings and
22

Cf. Caporaletti (2005, pp. 121134), Frith (1989), and Moore

(2001).
23
Cf. Fischer-Lichte (2003, 2004).

scores must also be included) lack an autonomous semantic

dimension; it is produced in the act of reception, operating
a mediation with the stable dimensions of syntax and
pragmatics. For Erika Fischer-Lichte, theatre represents a
paradigmatic, or at least the most evident case, of a
meaning that reveals itself in the act of performance:
gestures, movements, words and objects have no meaning
in and of themselves, but assume meaning in the framework of the performance processes in which they are put
into play. Action art and happenings have emphasized this
dynamic, placing a particular accent on the interactions
between actors and spectators. Various clues induce the
thinking that, also in rock music, meaning is not deposited
in a single dimension but it materializes through a series of
interactions that happen during the performance. This fact
appears in an obvious way when one studies audiovisual
documents of concerts by groups such as the Jimi Hendrix
Experience, Pink Floyd and Genesis.24 Performance occurs
in a multiple field, in a space that is open on each side. It
can be presented in the following scheme:
scene
(stage, lights, colours, clothing, accessories)
performers
(gestures, looks, movements, ways of performing)
instruments
(amplification system, live electronics)
music
(metric structures, tempo, dynamics, timbre)
words
(song lyrics, performers comments, interjections)
audience
(dancing, applause, verbal approval, screams)
This network of reciprocal references has a specific
importance in that the ritual it derives from is arranged
according to a plan by the group (or its leader) and thanks
to the technicians collaboration. But at the same time, it
absorbs the character of the event typical of performance
art; each performance, taking place in another space and
with another audience, determines a different sequence of
meanings.
The situation is made even more complex by the fact
that the production of an album holds some properties that
are fundamental to the aesthetic texts: the making of the
album implicates the establishment of a formal articulation,
a sound organization and a type of interpretation that
assumes a normative role (although with a certain grade of
flexibility) for the live performances of the band or other
bands that intend to perform the same piece again. Rock
musicor at least a significant portion of ithas the
double characteristic of being a fixed text (that
24

Cf. Cook (2005) and Leante (2007).

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G. Borio

consequently may be handed down) and a transitory and

ephemeral event, in which both the actors (or the authors)
and the recipients participate. It acknowledges an individual reception (via the recording), but it realizes itself
integrally in a collective reception in which the single
audio-spectator shares the experience with others participating as a specific component of a wide-ranging experience. In the bands that I cited it is evident how much the
whole communicative system rotates around the formation
of meaning: at the basis of every piece is an idea or message, that the band fine-tunes through the lyrics, the
musical structure and the electronic technology (such a
message is already conceived in a multimedia sense); the
primary semantic impulse enters into the formation of the
meaning that comes about during the concert depending on
the variables of architectural space, geographic location,
and the social-historical context; the process terminates in
the de-stabilization and restructuring of the system of
meanings of the recipient (namely it becomes consolidated,
in retrospect, due to the emotional and behavioural changes
occurring to those who participated in the event).
The body of relationships that I have just outlined serves
to illustrate the operational field of a musical aesthetics that
gravitates towards the question of meaning. It takes its cue
from the problems already dealt with in traditional aesthetics in the composertextperformance triangle, but
moves the objective into a field where that triangle has no
validity; in making such a shift, it takes possession of
instances of semiotics and anthropology, disciplines that
have occupied antithetical positions with respect to the
aesthetic ones. I have not yet done research in depth to
affirm that any methodological syntheses of this type could
give satisfying results in any one of the numerous sectors to
be found in the musical experience of the twenty-first
century. A further question remains open: whether
approaches of this kind could still be included in the context of musical aesthetics or whether they should be
accepted as specific contributions of a science of multimedia communication which seems not to have found a
wide-ranging theoretical configuration yet.

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