ABSTRACT
Music in general, and pieces of music in particular, obviously mean a lot to humans as individuals and groups. The modes of musical signification are elusive and shifting, and their linguistic description is unavoidably metaphorical and vague. There are various ways of explaining what the ineffability of musical meaning is all about. There have been many efforts towards fixing the meaning of music and musical structures or motifs. Different contexts and instrumentations of musical figures have remarkably different effects, depending also on the listener and the form of musical culture. Fixed musical meanings as well as fixed subjectivity are, in this regard, like snapshots of this phenomenologically more fundamental level of experience. The notion of atmosphere has interesting consequences for the study of musical meaning. To recap, musical meaning has roots in an experience of atmospheric “in-between” of subjectivity and objectivity. A powerful, immediate, atmosphere-like experience of music can really appear as whooshing up, welling up.
