Instantiation, realization and multimodal musical semantic waves

Abstract

Halliday (1991/2009) describes texts as simultaneously realising their context of situation and context of culture while instantiating the system of language. To examine the use of music notation in student texts, it is useful to understand how notation instantiates the system of music and realises the contexts of culture (jazz) and of situation (music conservatory). This paper combines the examination of instantiation and realisation with the semantic codes of legitimation (Maton, 2011a, 2011b, forthcoming) from Legitimation Code Theory for the characterisation of notation types and applies them to a multimodal analysis of music notation, adapted from Unsworth and Cléirigh (2009), to identify underlying organisational principles involved in the intersemiotic construction of meaning. Drawing on a corpus of research projects from honours students of jazz performance, the different types of notation used are examined. The notation varies in the degree to which it is connected to a concrete, embodied performance, or offers space for a range of performances. This variation is connected to the concept of semantic gravity. By considering how information is variously unpacked from the notation into text, and repacked into generalisation with greater abstraction, this analysis provides insight into the ways notation operates in a text, and how it contributes to a co-construction and prosody of meaning throughout the text.