Listening to Beethoven’s Ninth as communicational production

Abstract

Abstract This paper (1) discusses the communicability of musical listening, (2) proposes a semanalytical perspective to approach it in terms of communicational production, and (3) summarizes an analysis of the production of musical listenings in the case of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Instead of assuming that verbal talk on music banalizes listening (Barthes), or that musical arrangers are the privileged authorities when it comes to transmitting a personal listening (Szendy), our suggestion is that communication produces – in the post-structuralist sense of the word – musical listenings even when it seems to simply try and account for it. In a transmissive, “phenotextual” (Kristeva) comprehension, listening may be understood as a phenomenological, receptive act that pre-exists its communication. Instead, our communicational research on musical listening turns to the listening-accounts in order to grasp the “listenabilities” as they emerge (are permitted or interdicted) within specific listening-territories that “genotextually” produce their regulations and habits (modes of listening). This semiotic production is methodologically investigated, here, in terms of interpretant signs, especially as Normal Interpretants (Peirce), within a particular listening-territory (Brazilian newspapers’ repercussion around the Ninth Symphony’s 1918 debut in Rio). Three remarks are made on the genotextual operations that produce “insufficiency,” “monumentality,” and “distinção” as listening normalities.