Semantics is the study of meaning in language, and Bernstein's third lecture, "musical semantics", accordingly, is Bernstein's first attempt to explain meaning in music. Although Bernstein defines musical semantics as "meani…
Semantics is the study of meaning in language, and Bernstein's third lecture, "musical semantics", accordingly, is Bernstein's first attempt to explain meaning in music. Although Bernstein defines musical semantics as "meaning, both musical and extramusical" (p. 9) this lecture focuses exclusively on the "musical" version of meaning. The following lectures will examine extramusical associations more extensively.
Bernstein proposes that the meaning of music is metaphorical. A metaphor is a statement equating two unlike things, or "this equals that" (p. 123). Bernstein's recurring example for metaphor is the sentence, "Juliet is the sun." He creates an unabridged sentence to explain this metaphor: "The human being called Juliet is like a star called the Sun in respect to radiance" (p. 124). Through the process of deletion, he arrives at the original statement, "Juliet is the sun." Bernstein identifies metaphors, and thus deletion, as a source of beauty.
Transformations in music involve somehow changing a melodic pattern in a variety of ways. To better understand musical metaphors, he examines two main types of metaphor found in music. The first type is "intrinsic", where the metaphor is constructed by altering musical material into new musical material, as discussed in Lecture 2. This includes "Chomskian transformations", such as augmentation, transposition, diminution, inversion, etc. The second metaphor is "extrinsic" which includes "nonmusical meaning" (p. 133). This metaphor involves the association of a musical passage with extra-musical ideas, such as animals, emotions, or landscapes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unanswered_Question_(lecture_series)
