In 1854 Eduard Hanslick published ‘The Beautiful in Music’, in which he proposed that music ‘is the self-subsistent form of the beautiful’, in which there is ‘no distinction … between substance and form’, with no connection to anything ‘outside the work’. This is the classic formulation of musical autonomy, the idea that music inhabits an ideal realm, separate from the knowable world. Music expresses nothing extra-musical and this is why it is valuable, unlike language, which is burdened and polluted by the fact that it has to refer to the physical world. This view had a long history and has had a long afterlife (see: ‘Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning’, Daniel K L Chua, 1999); it stands in opposition to the attitude behind my analysis of the following pieces, which all manage to evoke a certain quality of light or an experience of a time of day, and through which I hope to demonstrate a nuanced position on musical meaning.

Listen to the pieces: Morning/Night

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Freddie Hubbard’s ‘First Light’ opens the 1971 album of the same name and, taken broadly, it can be viewed as embodying a sense of gradual emergence. The first chord is ambiguous, not anchored in an obvious tonality, and initiates a series of opening exchanges which lack any sense of pulse. The leader of the group (Hubbard on trumpet) then enters, leading the other instruments one-by-one into the piece, gradually unveiling the piece’s sound-world. We hear each element introduced – the electric guitar, the bass, the various percussion instruments – until a pulse finally emerges in the form of a riff, which will continue throughout the piece, in the fender rhodes, which is then joined, bar-by-bar, by the other instruments – bass, then electric guitar, drums, vibraphone and finally winds. The riff itself, and the answering electric guitar riff, suggest ‘rising’; they both consist of a two chord figure that rises a tone. Finally, the piece is lifted by the soaring trumpet melody, and suddenly linear development, the feeling of process, gets going. The moment at which the shapeless opening shifts into the steady pulse set off by the rhodes riff is like consciousness starting, an embodiment of the day’s first clear thought. So in fact what this piece signifies is not so much the atmosphere of early morning, but a sort of momentary narrative of cognition igniting, the brain’s first light.

This is in contrast to musical depictions of dawn that emphasise its stillness, such as the Cinematic Orchestra’s piece, ‘Dawn’. It is uniformly slow, with very little development at all. The harmony is built around a repeating bass pattern which makes itself felt as a constant return to the tonic. The riff itself is very gradually and subtly embellished – with the dynamics, this provides a very slight sense of ‘opening up’ or development, but the overall effect is one of stasis, with a melancholic undertone, embodied by rich, emotive minor chords in the strings. Bjork uses some of the same musical features – a low repeating bass figure, unvarying harmonic structure, hazy strings – to communicate the early-morning setting of ‘Hyperballad’.

Assertions about musical meaning become trickier when we are given no direct reference to extra-musical content by the title (like ‘First Light’ and ‘Dawn’). All the same, it is my contention that interpretative responses to music which is not overtly descriptive are still valid and valuable. The first movement of Steve Reich’s New York counterpoint strongly connotes the sensation of a perceptual shift from stasis to process, a little like ‘First Light’. The repeating block chords emerge out of silence at an almost unvarying tempo, with no melody or solid tonal centre. Taken together, these elements suggest a sort of pre-conscious state, but it is not the same effect at all of ‘Dawn’; it is an evocation of a sort of bleary perception of a highly active world (like New York City). Then the repeating contrapuntal figures start, again in a measured developmental pattern. The effect initially is of a new clarity and again, melody represents linear process (lines of thought), of the mind starting to think.

[But admittedly, this is subtle music, not easily interpretable. Perhaps this is a mark of great music – music that plausibly contains multiple distinct interpretations: a compromise position between hermeneutists and autonomy absolutists…?]

I want to look at two songs that, by way of contrast, evoke experiences of night-time, and use them to illustrate two ways of interpretive listening. Firstly, I’ll describe my response to Neil Young’s ‘Tonight’s the Night’ in terms of association, and then look at PJ Harvey’s ‘Electric Light’, to suggest that ‘reduced’ listening can also contribute to an interpretation of the meaning of a musical work.

‘Tonight’s the Night’ is the title track of Young’s sixth studio album, recorded in 1973, mostly in a single session. It was an expression of the grief Young and his band, Crazy Horse, experienced following the sudden deaths from drug overdoses of Danny Whitten, guitarist in Crazy Horse, and Bruce Berry, a long-term friend and roadie of the group. Although not quite true, there was a myth about the album that it was written and recorded in its totality in the course of a single night.

‘Tonight’s the Night’ opens the album and immediately presents the record’s pervasive sense of messiness – the sense that feeling is spilling over. In fact there is a steady pulse right from the start – on the hi-hat – but you barely notice it because the way the instruments and vocals come in is so brilliantly loose. Although the hi-hat taps out the pulse, immediately the feel is slackened by the wandering piano and guitar. Young sings solo, then with the others, which might sound pre-meditated, but in fact feels like he’s only just thought of it and is indicating to the others to join in. His singing wavers, even more than usual; it sounds like he’s physically lolling – the mic picks certain words out, pulling them out of balance.

The phrase ‘Tonight’s the night’ is a loaded one – there had been a 1961 Shirelles song (and album) of the same name, as well as a large number of films and plays with that title; the phrase typically indicates excitement about the approaching evening. Young uses it as a deliberate inversion of its regular use, infusing it with rawness and pain, repeating it over and over, constantly encouraging the others to join with phrases like ‘yes it is’. The repeated phrase and the repeating musical figures that gradually gain strength through the song contribute to a sense of ritual; together with what is known about the circumstances of the album, the song triggers an association in the listener with rituals of mourning. To my mind, the song – and the album it opens – enact a sort of wake for the dead men.

This is semantic listening in its associative form – I’m explaining my response to the song by linking musical patterns to particular cultural associations, in this case to the idea of a memorial ceremony or vigil. However, semantic listening can also attend to ‘sound itself’. Or in other words, the concern shown by advocates of ‘reduced’ listening for the physical attributes of sound does not need to exclude the possibility of meaning.

PJ Harvey’s ‘Electric Light’ starts with Harvey’s vocal line, accompanied by a very low bass pattern that repeats irregularly, and in which the bass frequencies are prominent, giving it a slightly distorted quality. The texture is very sparse; there’s a gaping hole in the frequency spectrum. The treble frequencies on Harvey’s vocals seem to have been emphasised, making the consonants harsh and sibilant. Part way through the track her vocal is joined by a second line even more condensed in the upper register. Faint, essentially textural percussion gradually emerges then disappears, and at points there is a very quiet hissing noise, like radio static.

These sonic features relate in a clear way to the theme of the song. Harvey translates ‘the beauty of her under electric light’ into sound by utilising deep spatial metaphors we use to give meaning to music – the sound is divided between very high and very low, which conveys the lyric’s mental picture of a cold light high above some ambiguously-defined woman on a bleak, dark street.

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Those who believe in the autonomy of music are right to the extent that there is nothing in sound that innately contains specific meaning, but then neither do words; both tones and words are empty signs that relate only indirectly to things. However, music is also not a language. Words, whilst inadequate to the task of directly representing the world, are the best medium we have for this task. They crack, strain, and meaning slips, but it is possible to analyse this, and to refer to an independent authority on a word’s meaning; dictionaries can never be the final word on words, and must be flexible, but they are at least possible – with language. No such process is practicable with non-verbal sounds or musical tropes. [Although attempts have been made, see Leonard B. Meyer’s ‘Emotion and Meaning in Music’ (1956) for a good summary].

This does not, however, mean that music is meaningless. For a start, the language that has developed to discuss music inherently refers to non-musical properties; even technical musical terms invariably take us out of the pure realm of sound. It is extremely difficult to describe music without suggesting a non-musical image or idea, i.e. ‘the line rises’, ‘the woodwinds provide a bright overlay to the murky texture created by the double-basses’. And the conception of a self-contained musical ‘work’ that has developed in the west in particular applies itself readily to interpretation, because it embodies a discrete structure, which can be ‘followed’, almost like a narrative.

But there’s no science here: music cannot be definitively translated into language, or paraphrased, but then interpretation of a particular piece doesn’t need to be an attempt to end the conversation on it. It is a creative act which pays tribute to the power of the music and to the personality sensed behind it; it says to the musician ‘I understand; this means something to me’, and which might, especially if it’s perceptive and full of understanding of the musical tradition in question, shed new light on the music for other listeners. Hanslick conceded that the sort of analysis he was interested in – purely formal, divorced from any sort of association or extra-musical meaning – ‘reduces to a skeleton a body glowing with life, it destroys the beauty, but at the same time it destroys all false constructions’.

These ‘false constructions’ are my creative acts of tribute, and they are only as false as someone else takes them to be. The performer and listeners form what Stanley Fish called an ‘interpretative community’. Fish was a leading exponent of reader-response theory, which asserted, after Roland Barthes’ essay ‘The Death of the Author’, that meaning is not something contained within a text but is constructed in the mind of the reader, and in the discourse between readers.

Reader-response theory is stronger, in my view, when it accepts that meaning is not entirely up to the reader for the simple fact that any given text narrows the scope of its plausible readings; it sets the parameters. ‘Uniformist’ reader-response theorists, like Wolfgang Iser, concede this. A similar narrowing of scope goes on in music, except, because it’s vaguer than language or, as a linguist might put it, has fewer standards of correctness, it does not do this to the extent that language does. Because meaning is created in the mind of a listener to a larger extent than it is with a reader, a version of reader-response theory might even be more appropriate in music than literature. In any case, the point that musical meaning is not something inherent in a score but rather is generated in its community of listeners is one reason music should be seen as an intrinsically social activity, and imaginative approaches to musical interpretation welcomed. It is all our responses to a particular piece of music that give it meaning; music starts signifying only through the experience of its audience.