CMT: In the first movement of Haydn’s Piano Sonata, Hob. XVI:49—the Allegro—the writing “lies beautifully under the player’s hands,” doesn't it? There’s an elegant appropriateness to the biomechanics of what's physiologically possible and what’s artistically comfortable. Rather than creating a virtuosic gauntlet to run—a high-wire ordeal filled with dangers that are hardly repaid by expressive rewards—Haydn writes things that are organic and natural. He is, of course, writing this piece for his 29 year-old dedicatee, Frau Marianne von Genzinger, and so his knowledge of her strengths and limitations may have played a big part in his compositional choices in this sonata. But other of his writing also exhibits this same naturalness.
DSM: Look! There isn’t any marking of the dynamics at the beginning of this movement. I know some people hold that, for a piece from this period, the absence of a marking here means an implied forte. But, given that this is allegro, what kind of forte is it? Assertive? Playful? Vladimir Feltsman’s interpretation places it somewhere between jesting and puckish. ( Feltsman, Kansas City, October 2006, Friends of Chamber Music )
CMT: And these two-note slurs in the upbeat groups of sixteenth notes in the first movement are somewhat controversial. What do they mean? If they’re articulated with deliberate detachments at the end of each slur, the effect is obsessive or even histrionic. It draws attention to the player and portrays almost a cartoonish quality—surely not what Haydn would've intended. So a problem is how to handle the articulation cleanly but not excessively. Linguists’ theories of language have assumed that there’s a hierarchy to the elements of language—such that certain constructions, rules, and features are unmarked while others are marked; “play” for example, is unmarked or neutral, while “played” or “player” is marked. This opposition, referred to as ‘markedness’, is one of the things that both Chomsky’s generative grammar and Jakobs’ structuralism share.
DSM: You think that the two-note slurs are not just a cue as to the motif (G, A-flat, B-flat in the upbeat to m.1; answered by G, D, E-flat in the next upbeat)?
CMT: There’re some players who elect to ignore the two-beat slurs entirely. This might be like ignoring the diacritical marks and accents in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poems—ignoring a central feature. The words are the same, but the effect and emphasis would be quite different without his hallmark articulation. These are what are called illocutionary acts—the illocutionary acts of the composer, and the (perhaps discrepant— ) illocutionary acts of the player-interpreter.
DSM: The philosopher J.L. Austin identifies three distinct levels of action beyond the act of utterance itself—in music no less than in ordinary speech. He distinguishes (1) the act of saying something, (2) what one does in saying it, and (3) what one does by saying it—and dubs these the ‘locutionary’ act, the ‘illocutionary’ act, and the ‘perlocutionary’ act, respectively. Suppose, for example, that a bartender utters the words, “The bar is closing in five minutes,” reported by direct quotation. He’s thereby performing the locutionary act of saying that the bar (i.e., the one he's/she's tending) will be closed in five minutes (from the time of his/her uttering this), and what’s said is reported by indirect quotation. Notice that what the bartender’s saying, the content of his locutionary act, is not fully determined by the words he is using—they don’t specify the bar in question or the time of the utterance. In saying this, the bartender’s performing the illocutionary act of informing the patrons about the bar’s imminent closing and maybe also performing the act of urging them to order a last drink. Whereas the upshot of illocutionary acts is understanding on the part of the audience, perlocutionary acts are performed with the intention of producing a further response or actions, beyond understanding. The bartender intends to be performing the perlocutionary acts of causing the patrons to believe that the bar is about to close and of getting them to want one more drink and to order that one last drink. He is performing all these speech acts, at all three levels, just by uttering certain words. What do you imagine Haydn's intentions toward Marianne von Genzinger were in this sonata, especially in this first movement? And how did she respond?
CMT: Let's hold that speculation for a minute, shall we? Now, there seems to be a straightforward relationship in your example between the words uttered (“The bar closes in five minutes”)—that is, what's said out loud—and the act of informing the patrons that the bar will close in five minutes. Less direct is the connection between what’s said and the act of urging the drinkers to buy one last drink. There’s no linguistic connection here—the words make no explicit mention of drinks or of ordering. The indirect connection’s inferential. The patrons must be sober enough and bright enough to infer that the bartender intends to be urging them to leave soon and, more than this, it seems that the reason his utterance counts as an act of that sort is that he’s speaking with this likely intention. There’s a similarly oblique connection when an utterance of “It's getting cold in here” is made not merely as a statement about the temperature but as a request to raise the thermostat setting or as a proposal to go someplace warmer. Whether it’s intended (and taken) as a request or as a proposal depends on contextual information that the speaker relies on the audience to rely on. This is true even when the connection between word and deed is more direct than in this example—the form of the sentence uttered may fail to precisely and unambiguously determine just which sort of illocutionary act is being performed. Happens all the time, and we mean for it to be this way. So too did Haydn mean and intend these ambiguities. Consider this: the fact that in shaking hands we can, depending on the circumstances, do any of a bunch of things—introduce ourselves, greet each other, close a deal, signal a warning that a contract has been taken out on the hand-shakee’s life, or say a simple goodbye. How one intends it determines the sort of act it is. The potential for multiple entendres is what makes conversations so interesting—sonatas, too!
DSM: These examples mean that performing a speech act—in particular, an illocutionary speech act—is a matter of having a specific communicative intention in uttering certain words or playing a certain musical phrase. The act succeeds—the intention with which it is performed is fulfilled—if the audience grasps that intention and responds with that understanding. This isn’t magic, of course. You must choose your expressions in such a way that their utterance makes your intention clear under the circumstances. But each utterance you make needn’t “encode” your intention. So, in general, understanding an utterance isn’t merely a matter of “decoding” or syntactically parsing it on the surface level. You’re meant to unwrap it. It’ a gift! It’s a richer, more content-ful gesture!
CMT: Now Austin didn’t take into account the central role of speakers’ intentions and hearers’ inferences. He believed that successful performance of an illocutionary act is a matter of convention, not intention. Indeed, he held that using a sentence with a certain illocutionary force is “conventional” in the peculiar sense that this force can be “made explicit by the performative formula.” P. F. Strawson argues that in making this claim Austin was overly impressed by the special case of utterances that affect public states of affairs, and shouldn't have taken them as a model of illocutionary acts in general. Austin was especially struck by the character of explicit performative utterances, where you use a verb that names the very type of act you're performing. For them he developed an account of what it takes for such acts to be performed successfully—classifying the various things that can go wrong as “flaws”, “hitches”, and “infelicities”. It's only in some conventional circumstances (and a speaker's conventional relation to specific hearers) that certain utterances can have the force they do. Strawson argues most illocutionary acts succeed not by conforming to convention but by the hearer’s highly personal and context-dependent recognition of the speaker’s intention. They're not ‘conventional’ except in the trivial sense that the words and sentences being used have their linguistic meanings by virtue of convention.
DSM: Take the case of an apology. If I say, “I’m sorry I didn't call you back” and intend this as an apology, then I’m expressing regret for something, in this case for not returning your phone call. An apology is just the act of expressing regret for (and thereby acknowledging) something I did that might've annoyed you. An apology is illocutionary because it's intended to be taken as expressing a contrite attitude, a posture remorse, an implicature. It succeeds as such if it's taken as such. In general, an act of communication succeeds if it's taken as intended. Using a special device such as the performative “I apologize” may of course facilitate understanding (understanding is correlative with communicating). But in general this is unnecessary. And in fact it may be a bit too forceful, like over-playing the upbeat slurs in this first movement of the E-flat sonata. Communicative success is achieved if the speaker chooses his words in such a way that the hearer will, under the circumstances, recognize the communicative intention. So, for example, if I spill some wine on you and say “Oops” in the right way, maybe my utterance will be taken as a genuine apology for what I did. If I say it infelicitously, well, then my mileage may vary!
CMT: In saying something, one usually intends more than just to communicate—getting yourself understood is meant to produce some effect on the listener, or else why would we waste our breath? But our speech act vocabulary can obscure this fact! When you apologize, for example, you may intend not merely to express regret but also to seek my forgiveness. Your seeking forgiveness is, strictly speaking, distinct from apologizing, even though one utterance is performing an act of both types. As an apology, your utterance succeeds if it’s taken as expressing regret for the deed in question; as an act of seeking forgiveness, it succeeds if forgiveness is granted. Speech acts, being perlocutionary as well as illocutionary, generally have some ulterior purpose—I’m thinking of Haydn here—but they’re distinguished primarily by their illocutionary type, such as asserting, requesting, promising and apologizing. These types in turn are distinguished by the type of attitude expressed. A perlocutionary act is a matter of trying to get the hearer to form some correlative attitude and to respond in a certain way. For example, a statement expresses a belief and normally has the further purpose of getting the addressee to adopt the same belief—something like what I’m doing with you right now. A request expresses a desire for the addressee to do a certain thing and normally aims for the addressee to intend to and, indeed, actually do that thing. A promise expresses the speaker’s firm intention to do something, together with the belief that by his utterance he’s obligated to do it, and normally aims further for the addressee to expect, and to feel entitled to expect, the speaker to do it.
DSM: Statements, requests, promises and apologies are examples of the four major categories of communicative illocutionary acts: constatives, directives, commissives and acknowledgments. This is the nomenclature introduced by Kent Bach and Michael Harnish several years ago. They put forward a classification in which each type of illocutionary act is characterized by the attitude expressed—in some cases there are constraints on the content as well. There’s no generally accepted terminology here, and Bach and Harnish borrow the terms ‘constative and ‘commissive’ from Austin and ‘directive’ from Searle. Here are assorted examples of each type:
- Constatives: affirming, alleging, announcing, answering, attributing, claiming, classifying, concurring, confirming, conjecturing, denying, disagreeing, disclosing, disputing, identifying, informing, insisting, predicting, ranking, reporting, stating, stipulating, teasing, jesting;
- Directives: advising, admonishing, asking, begging, dismissing, excusing, forbidding, instructing, ordering, permitting, requesting, requiring, suggesting, cajoling, urging, warning;
- Commissives: agreeing, guaranteeing, inviting, offering, promising, swearing, volunteering; and
- Acknowledgments: apologizing, condoling, congratulating, greeting, thanking, accepting (acknowledging an acknowledgment).
What’s said doesn’t uniquely determine the illocutionary acts being performed. I can perform a speech act (1) directly or indirectly, by way of performing another speech act, (2) literally or nonliterally, depending on how I’m using my words, and (3) explicitly or inexplicitly, depending on whether I fully spell out what I mean.
CMT: These contrasts are distinct and have close counterparts in music. The first two are about the relation between the utterance and the speech acts performed. With indirection, a single utterance is the performance of one illocutionary act by way of performing another one. For example, I can make a request or give permission by way of making a statement, say by uttering “I’m getting tired” or “It doesn't matter to me”, and I can make a statement or give an order by way of asking a question, such as “Will the sun rise tomorrow?” or “Can you rescue me?” When an illocutionary act is performed indirectly, it’s performed by way of performing some other one directly. In the case of nonliteral utterances, we don’t mean what our words mean but something else instead. With nonliterality, the illocutionary act we’re performing isn’t the one that would be predicted just from the meanings of the words being used, as with likely utterances of “My mind got derailed” or “You can stick that in your ear”. Occasionally, utterances are both nonliteral and indirect. For example, one might utter “I love the sound of your voice” to tell someone sarcastically that she can’t stand the sound of his voice and thereby indirectly to ask him to stop humming.
DSM: So nonliterality and indirection are the two main ways in which the semantic content of an expression can fail to unambiguously determine the force and content of the illocutionary act being performed by speaking or playing a phrase. They rely on the same sorts of processes that Grice discovered—with what he called 'conversational implicature.' This is just a special case of nonliteral or indirect constatives made with the use of indicative sentences. The ambiguity that emboldens some players to not play the slurs in this sonata's first movement is a possibility that’s supported by the inconsistency through Haydn’s score. There’s a four-note slur in the upbeat to m.5, and two two-note slurs in the upbeat to m.6. Possibly Haydn intended that this should be played with a more active, crescendo thrust—different from the upbeat to m.2? And look at m.137. Some of the editors have tried to “clean up” or make these inconsistencies uniform. But I think they’re wrong. Haydn didn’t forget, and he wasn’t sloppy. The ambiguities were his intention—not just for us but for Marianne von Genzinger as well. And of course it’s possible that his markings were meant as a reminder to himself, of the subtleties of varying meanings that had occurred to him as he wrote this sonata.
CMT: The second theme, m. 37-41, is full of irony and mischief. Possibly Haydn intended this passage as a droll joke for his friend and student, Frau von Genzinger. The eighth notes are delicately detached. But the notation is overloaded, and some ambiguities arise because of that. The arc of the triplet marking (for example, in m. 40) is convex like the arc of a slur. But the contour of the right-hand line here is exuberant, so that we have to conclude that the arc above the triplet is just that—a triplet—and these three eighth notes must not be slurred, or else they would sound comical.
DSM: And the rests in m. 52-53 and elsewhere in this sonata are suspenseful—the listener is left on tenterhooks, wondering what the next statement will be. It’s a moment of ambiguous mood and intent. The silence is a mark of speakerly power. Incidentally, the effect of political power on acoustic variables has been examined in political speeches—given by François Mitterrand and by others before and after leaving office. The temporal organization of speech acts mirrors the politician’s power or distance from office. The pause structure reflects the place of the politician—or a performer or composer—within the social hierarchy in such a way that, the higher the status, the longer the pauses can be. There seems to be a balance between what is being said and what’s left unsaid: silence becomes a symbol for and a rhetorical device of power, but it’s one that’s available mainly to those who possess power and is less available to those who lack it. This is Haydn writing at age 58 years, right?
CMT: The fundamental idea of this approach is that illocutionary acts can only be deduced from the analysis of the agents’ mental states. The illocutionary act of informing and jesting is defined as an attempt by which the speaker (agent A) is committed (in the sense of persistent goal) to the addressee’s knowing that A knows proposition p and is amused by the jest. In other words, agent A is committed to the addressee’s knowing in which mental state A is. Although A is committed to getting the addressee to believe something about its goals, what A hopes to achieve is for the addressee to come to know p . To achieve this goal, it is necessary that the addressee B shares with A the mutual belief that B knows that A knows that p is true. It’s really wonderful to think about Haydn (A) writing these elegant witticisms for his friend Frau von Genzinger (B), knowing that she would understand and be delighted by them. Composer A understood the mental state of B and devised a wonderful entertainment for her, in the key of E-flat Major! To me, these look like the locutionary acts of a teacher, informing his student and friend of the bar’s imminent closing and perhaps also the illocutionary act of urging her to order a last drink or adjourn and continue the conversation elsewhere. Forgiveness comes in a later movement, or in a later sonata.
Here are some useful resources regarding the idea:
- Agawu VK. Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classical Music. Princeton Univ, 1991.
- Alston WP. Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning. Cornell Univ, 2000.
- Atlas JD. Logic, Meaning, and Conversation: Semantical Underdeterminacy, Implicature, and Their Interface. Oxford Univ, 2005.
- Austin JL. How to Do Things with Words. Harvard Univ, 2006.
- Bach K, Harnish RM. Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. MIT, 1982.
- Barthes R. Image, Music, Text. Hill & Wang, 1978.
- Barthes R. Empire of Signs. Hill & Wang, 1983.
- Battistella EL. The Logic of Markedness. Oxford Univ, 1996.
- Bauer L, Trudgill, eds. Language Myths. Penguin, 1999.
- Brown AP. Critical years for Haydn's instrumental music. Musical Quarterly 1976; 62:374-94.
- Burkhardt A. Speech Acts, Meaning, and Intentions. de Gruyter, 1990.
- Cherniak C. Minimal Rationality. MIT, 1990.
- Furberg M. Locutionary and Illocutionary Acts. Almqvist & Wiksell, 1963.
- Goertzel B. Chaotic Logic: Language, Thought and Reality. Springer, 1994.
- Grice P. Studies in the Way of Words. Harvard Univ, 1991.
- Katz J. Propositional Structure and Illocutionary Force. Harvester, 1977.
- Levinson SC. Presumptive Meanings: Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. MIT, 2000.
- Lycan W. Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction. Routledge, 1999.
- Martinich AP. Philosophy of Language. Oxford Univ, 2000.
- Metz C. Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema. Univ Chicago, 1990.
- Pullum GK. The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language. Univ Chicago, 1991.
- Rohrbaugh E. Scalar Interpretation in Deontic Speech Acts. Garland, 1997.
- Searle JR. Construction of Social Reality. Free Press, 1997.
- Searle JR. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge Univ, 1970.
- Searle JR. Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge Univ, 1985.
- Tarasti E. Signs of Music. de Gruyter, 2003.
- Tarasti E. Musical Signification: Essays in Semiotic Theory and Analysis of Music. de Gruyter, 1995.
- Wennerstrom A, Siegel AF. Keeping the Floor in Multiparty Conversations: Intonation, Syntax, and Pause. Discourse Processes 2003; 36:77-107.
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