Transgression, Transcendence and Metaphor – the ‘Other Meanings’ of the B-Minor Mass

Music, unlike ordinary language, can ‘make sense’ or have ‘meaning’ even when it does not refer to anything in particular (other than music). Although we often think of music as a kind of language, on the whole we do not regard it as a ‘translatable’ language, the inherent meaning of which could be sufficiently expressed in a different form. If you strip away the ornaments and metaphors of a poetic text, to discover the straight message (‘degree zero’ language), nothing may remain. Music, too, usually ‘refers only to itself’; it has no ordinary referents other than musical ones. If it could be compared to anything at all, it would be to abstract painting or to a verbal text that is poetic, metaphoric, rhetorical. It has meaning, possibly even a clear meaning, through its artistic configuration. Meaning and reference are complementary functions of language: meaning is what we understand, reference is what makes us aware of something (i.e. of a ‘referent’). Paul Ricoeur, in his book La métaphore vive (1975), has developed a theory of reference in poetry which might illuminate the status of references and meanings in music.1 On ground prepared by Jakobson, Frye and Goodman, Ricoeur integrates the concept of poetic metaphor with referentiality. One condition of his ‘generalised theory of denotation’ is that poetic language operates with ‘split references’ – its references are not straightforward, like those of ordinary language, but ambiguous. This condition may seem to allow music, which is similarly devoid of unambiguous referents, to participate in a generalised ambiguous type of referentiality, similar to that of poetry.