Understanding Musical Meaning: Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and Improvisation

British Forum for Ethnomusicology, 2005 Annual Conference - Music and Dance Performance: Cross-Cultural Approaches, SOAS, London, UK. April 12-15, 2005

Abstract

This paper presents a qualitative analytic method develop in response to the limitations of structuralist and notation-based analytic approaches. Its epistemological orientation is rooted upon a conception of 'meaning as process' rather than 'meaning as structure' out of which its method draws upon phenomenological and interpretative modes of analysis.

The challenge to musicology in the light of post-structuralist and post-modern thought is now a well-rehearsed discussion; however, this paper is, in part, a response to some of the still poorly defined limits of traditional musicological approaches and resultant knowledge. Through consideration of the epistemological framework for understanding musical meaning the analytic method presented offers an alternative approach toward such understanding.

The method presented (combining two approaches: interpretative phenomenological analysis and interpersonal process recall ) allows a psychological analysis of the problem of musical meaning allied to psycho-therapeutic/analytic models of human experience. Case studies are discussed to offer some conclusions about the nature of musical meaning within freely improvised music and within musical experience more broadly. It is hoped that questions concerning the wider application of the analytic method will be raised.

Introduction

The adoption of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis from psychology to consider musical meaning arises from the view of music as a participatory aspect of a lived-in world. Philip Bohlman describes this as the 'ontology of world music' and contrasts it with the Western ontology of music where music is treated as if it were an object, an autonomous entity possessing meaning in-and-of-itself. He has suggested that the complex aesthetic embeddedness of world music is radically different from Western music. As an example he describes how the aesthetic power and meaning of sacred music resides in its ability to do something, to effect change, to transform text, narrative and ritual into meaning. (2002: 13).

Rather than being satisfied to say that it is a matter of discourse that defines the differences of music's 'epistemological status' and that there are other cultures for which music as an object is foreign, this paper argues for an aspect of musical meaning fundamental to its nature as an experienced phenomenon (the ontology of musical experience if you like). It is the position of this paper that music's transformational qualities form a significant part of the meaningfulness of all musical experience. And that with appropriate analytic tools and an informed epistemological outlook this kind of meaning might be considered more universally. Perhaps ethnomusicology (or at least Philip Bohlman) deserves some criticism for perceiving itself as something dealing with music as more embedded, as much as musicology does for insufficiently emphasising music as an experienced phenomenon.

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