The Semantic Emptiness of Music

I was listening in my car to Mompou's music for a ballet based on Lorca's Perlimplín. I was thinking, then, that I couldn't identify, from the music alone, where I was located in the plot of the play at any given time. Yes, the music is kinetic, I could imagine it as a ballet, but I probably wouldn't be able to guess what the various parts of it represented, even if I had the script in front of me and was trying to follow along.  

Then I thought of Ellington's suite of music based on Shakespeare, Such Sweet Thunder. I've listened to these pieces many times, of course, but I've never associated them with the plays that they are inspired by. I couldn't tell you why the piece about Cleopatra is "about" her. I'm sure someone could find correspondences, but I could probably find correspondences between a piece and some other character that the piece is not about.  

It's not that music is not meaningful, in two senses of the word: it has meanings and it is consequential. But these meanings end up not being semantic, in the sense of being paraphrasable as semantic content. We know this because we have to be told what those meanings are. They are the product of an explanatory apparatus, or of the literary content of the verbal text (when there is one).

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There are semiotic codes, or signs, in music. We can think of some.  A trumpet fanfare announces the entrance of the king in a play. A jazz saxophone line ascends along with the movie camera as it reveals the femme fatale from the shoes up. French horns evoke a hunting scene. We might say that some flamenco chords on a guitar, used in a film, put us in Spain, or think of the way on old movies they would play a pentatonic riff to put us in Japan.  

Mostly, though, these signs evoke moods or ambiences. Ellington was a fairly "programatic" composer in wanting to suggest specific things, as he himself said I think, but I don't find his Far East Suite to be particularly "orientalist." That is a good thing too.