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Communication, Music, and Speech about Music

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2019

Steven Feld
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Extract

Music has a fundamentally social life. It is made to be consumed—practically, intellectually, individually, communally—and it is consumed as symbolic entity. By “consumed” I mean socially interpreted as meaningfully structured, produced, performed, and displayed by varieties of prepared, invested, or otherwise historically situated actors. How does this happen? What does it mean? How can one know about it? These questions focus on the nature of the music communication process, and to rethink them I turn back to the question posed often by Charles Seeger: what does music communicate? To answer he also needed to ask: what does speech about music communicate? Through diagrams and dense prose, Seeger (1977:16–44) argued that to address the issue of what music communicates requires specifying what it could not communicate. The logical preoccupation with differences between the speech and music modes led to the notion that speech is the communication of “world view as the intellection of reality” while music is communication of “world view as the feeling of reality” (ibid.).

Type
Articles
Information
Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 16 , 1984 , pp. 1 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © 1984 by the International Council for Traditional Music

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