I try to indicate this special quality of classical intelligibility by linking it with the notion of "dual structure," a notion which should not be flattened to mean any sort of intelligibility to those listeners deemed "competent," especially if the term "competence" is used without qualification. Dual structure in music, as I construe it, is an intrastructural system of reference between pairs of discrete semiotic constructs both members of which are in some sense wholly embodied in a given musical structure. (...) These constructs include a general ground of meaning and more particularized semiotic configurations derived from that ground; and because both are present in the musical structure, the relationship between them—the meaning of the music—can be retrieved directly, wholly, and on a general scale. No extrastructural mediating explanation or specialized information or training is needed; the interpreter need merely use the musical equivalent of reason. The archetype of such a system in music seems to be the relation of implication or self-generation that obtains between premise and conclusion within a pure system of logic, which, as described by Kant in his account of theoretical reason, would be universally intelligible. Rose Rosengard Subotnik, assistant professor of music at the University of Chicago, is the author of articles on nineteenth-century music. Her essay which prompted this exchange, "The Cultural Message of Musical Semiology: Some Thoughts on Music, Language, and Criticism since the Enlightenment," appeared in the Summer 1978 issue of Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

The absence of a clear distinction between notions of the individual and the social or general must, in fact, raise particularly strong reservations about any critical method as preoccupied as French structuralism is with comparisons between art and natural language. To be sure, this preoccupation has led to the isolation of many suggestive likenesses and differences between music and language. Among the likenesses, for example, is the assertion that both language and music constitute semiotic media within which the same techniques (...) for verifying competence and correctness of usage can be applied. Lévi-Strauss is insistent that musical as well as linguistic usage must be subject to verification through reference to some sort of "double articulation," or what will more generally be called here "dual structure," that is, through some method whereby, in effect, speakers and listeners can test each other's competence by altering the relationship between a more general and a more particularized level of a system and observing each other's responses.1 Nattiez essentially rejects this method of verifying competence, but he proposes two others which have analogues in the linguistic theory, respectively, of Zellig Harris and of Noam Chomsky ; interestingly these methods, which appear to be more "modern" than Lévi-Strauss', rely far more heavily on faith in fundamentally unexplainable judgments by single individuals, especially by individual "experts." · 1. Lévi-Strauss' somewhat obscure account of double articulation in Raw and Cooked differs from standard accounts such as André Martinet's and John Lyons' in Noam Chomsky , pp. 19-20. Lévi-Strauss appears to include both phonemes and morphemes in the code level, whereas it is more usual to oppose to the phonemic or sound level a level of meaning which is both semantic and morphemic. Rose Rosengard Subotnik is an assistant professor of music at the University of Chicago. She has written on Adorno's criticism of nineteenth-century music and is currently studying the relation between nineteenth-century German music and philosophy. She has contributed "Tonality, Autonomy, and Competence in Post-Classical Music" to Critical Inquiry. (shrink)