What's In a Title (of music)?

Programmatic titles for instrumental music are always problematic. Is the performance of the music supposed to evoke in us what the title describes? Does the title tell the listener what the composer was thinking about when they wrote the piece?

For example, I recently published a piece in three movements for a woodwind quintet entitled, Speaking in Parables. I chose this title because, throughout the process of writing the piece, the challenge seemed to be to bring these diverse voices (Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, French Horn, and Bassoon) together in a musical dialogue. This challenge further reminded me of how a listener might be provoked by a biblical parable to not merely listen passively, but to place oneself in the story. However, I certainly do not expect people to think about parables when they listen to my woodwind quintet, but rather to be engaged with the sounds themselves.

Generic titles for compositions, with an illusion to a general form, like "Sonata No. 2 in F Major" or "Fifth Symphony," might have the advantage of allowing the audience to be more open to the sonic experience without immediately translating that experience into a verbal or written description. This last point raises a secondary question that I find fascinating as a musician and music educator: what potentially does a piece of instrumental music mean?

There is an American philosopher whom I believe addressed questions like this in the most convincing way to date: Susanne Langer (1895-1985). Langer wrote extensively about how art forms like instrumental music defy the modern tendency to doubt that something significant “can be known which cannot be named” by words (Langer, 1948). In his essay entitled, “Symbol as Need,” the novelist and Catholic intellectual Walker Percy (d. 1990) draws a comparison between Langer’s ideas on art and Catholic scholastic ideas on art and concludes, “it is Mrs. Langer who has come the longer way” (p. 291).

I find Percy’s summary of Langer’s thought to be the clearest I have read so far, and the clearest answer to the question above: what potentially does a piece of instrumental music mean? So, I will reproduce part of his summary from “Symbol as Need” as a conclusion to this post:

The communication of meaning… is not limited to the discursive symbol, word, and proposition; the art symbol conveys its own appropriate meaning, a meaning inaccessible to the discursive form. In each medium, the virtual space of the painting, the virtual life of the poem, the virtual time of music, the form which is created represents, symbolizes—not just the thousand and one subject matters of the various arts but rather the feelings, the felt life of the artist and so of the observer. Music symbolizes passage, “the form of growth and attenuation, flowing and stowing, conflict and resolution,” the pattern in time of sentience. (p. 288)

Langer, S. (1948). Philosophy in a new key. A study in the symbolism of reason, rite, and art. A Mentor Book: Published by the New American Library.

Percy, W. (1954). Symbol as need. In The message in the bottle (pp. 288-297). New York, NY: Picador.

For an overview of Langer’s thought see:

Chaplin, A.D. (2020). The philosophy of Susanne Langer. Embodied meaning in logic, art, and feeling. London: Bloomsbury Academic.