Understanding musical content: from classical forms to Adornian analysis and the hip-hop sublime

Understanding Musical Content: From Classical Forms to Contemporary Analysis

Categories of Musical Content

Music theorists have identified several distinct types of content that can be found within musical works:

1. Technical and formal content — the structural and compositional elements of a piece
2. Depictive content — what the music directly portrays or represents
3. Allegorical or meta-depictive content — symbolic or higher-order meanings conveyed through music
4. Symptomatic or evidentiary content — what the music reveals about its social and historical context

These categories help analysts move beyond purely technical descriptions toward richer interpretations that connect musical details to broader cultural meanings.

Historical examples illustrate these distinctions vividly. Plautilla Nelli's The Last Supper (1568) and Michelangelo's Moses (1515) show how visual art can carry multiple layers of meaning simultaneously, a model that music analysts have adapted for discussing sound-based works.

Topic Theory and the Fantasia Style

Leonard Ratner, in Classic Music: Expression, Form, and Style (1980), identified the fantasia style as a recognizable musical topic characterized by "elaborate figuration, shifting harmonies, chromatic conjunct bass lines, sudden contrasts, full textures or disembodied melodic figures." This style conveys a sense of improvisation and loose structural connections. Ratner noted that near the end of Haydn's D minor Quartet, Op. 76, No. 2 (1798), the measured minuet rhythm gives way to an extended fantasia-like passage.

In eighteenth-century opera, the fantasia style invoked the supernatural through what was called the ombra — representing ghosts, deities, moral codes, and punishments — and stirred feelings of awe and terror. Mozart wove church-style elements — alla breve and stile legato — into the introduction of his Don Giovanni overture (K. 527, 1787) and later reprised that music in the duel (Act I) and the supper scene (Act II). Beethoven likely had the ombra concept in view during the introduction to his Symphony No. 4 in B-flat major, Op. 60 (1806).

Adorno and Musical Isomorphism

Alison Stone, in The Value of Popular Music (2016), unpacked Theodor Adorno's position on music's relationship to society. For Adorno, it was not the autonomous work as a totality that mirrored the self-governing human individual, but rather the freely developing motive. By this logic, the entire work becomes analogous to a society where all agents are free to arrange their relationships into a coherent whole. The autonomous musical work thus models an ideal society that grants freedom to every member. Certain musical works, on this view, are structurally isomorphic with particular forms of social organization in how their parts relate to wholes. When musical motives — as constituent parts — freely generate and shape their relationships through their own inherent qualities (as in Beethoven's Fifth Symphony), the resulting network of part-whole relations shares the same structure as a society where individuals can relate freely rather than being forced into predetermined roles. Such works demonstrate that material particulars in music can develop autonomously and that this is desirable — implying that the same principle should apply to material individuals. In short, autonomous musical works convey truths about right social order.

Post-Fordism: Critiques and Updates to Adorno

Adam Krims, in "Marxist Music Analysis after Adorno" (2008), observed that the social conditions underlying Adorno's theories were historically contingent and lacked the permanence Adorno assumed. What Adorno interpreted as a relentless, unstoppable trajectory turned out to belong to a specific historical moment with a developmental path he could not foresee. The key intervening development, which Adorno could not have theorized during his lifetime, was the emergence of flexible accumulation — often termed post-Fordism. Krims outlined ten defining features of this economic shift:

1. A move from mass production to small-batch, frequently changing product lines
2. Heightened design intensity in production, enabled by automation and programmability for rapid design changes
3. A shift away from manufacturing toward producer services (payroll, back-office operations) in developed economies
4. Increased individual consumption of personal services alongside goods — from restaurant delivery to specialized mail services and spiritual counseling
5. Vertical disintegration of large corporations, which now subcontract tasks once done in-house, spawning service firms from FedEx to temp agencies
6. Flattened corporate hierarchies as job descriptions expand and merge
7. Precarious labor conditions for large segments of the workforce, with more new jobs being part-time, temporary, and lacking traditional benefits
8. Tighter feedback loops from consumers integrated into the design process (for example, customizing a CD or building a computer online)
9. Mergers and acquisitions forming massive multinational conglomerates
10. Outsourcing and regional specialization, with manufacturing moving out of inner cities to overseas locations, suburbs, exurbs, or rural areas

Semiotic Approaches in Music Analysis

Krims, in Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity (2000), described a common analytical strategy: inserting an extra-musical interpretation at the point of a musico-poetic anomaly or other remarkable moment, then subordinating the rest of the musical structure to that figure-ground relationship. While this approach avoids aesthetic isolation, Krims warned that the analyst's choice of interpretation secretly becomes a matter of homology. For instance, one might label a jarring pitch interval as a sign of social conflict, using the hidden premise that some social group bears a relationship to society analogous to that interval's relationship to the tonal order. Yet the apparent interruption still relies on the music's self-relationality as background — the musical object ends up as isolated as before, linked to culture only through metaphor, simile, or at best metonymy.

Krims later acknowledged that unprecedented consolidation of the music industry does not necessarily drive product homogenization or standardization leading to deadening similarity. Listening need not regress to grasp the diverse landscape of contemporary popular music. On the contrary, the sheer proliferation of music can legitimately be called sublime in the most literal sense, producing both the pleasure of musical adventure and the fear of being cognitively overwhelmed by endless developments.

Tracing Capitalism in Expressive Culture

Krims maintained that the core project of Marxist analysis in the humanities — "the tracing of the systematic aspects of capitalism in the production, circulation, and reception of expressive culture" — retains its essential importance. The challenge for analyzing rap music and the urban ethos is to uncover hidden social relations within genre developments, specifically by tracing flexible accumulation in the very sound of musical tracks.

Krims offered a semiotic argument linking musical details to social conditions through several steps:

1. Reality rap frequently uses detuning — its harmonic and melodic strands do not all follow the same pitch standard.
2. Detuned music creates a sublime experience. The de-tuned layers "are separated by intervals that can only be measured in terms of fractions of well-tempered semitones, so no pitch combination may form conventionally representable relationships with others." Where the hip-hop sublime topic appears, "musical layers pile up, defying aural representability for Western musical listeners." The incommensurability of these layers constitutes the sublime: it "defeats the conceptual boundaries and unifying descriptions in our categories of pitch combination."
3. This sublimity-inducing detuning gives reality rap its alluring menace and aggression.
4. That menacing aggressiveness serves as "a classic case of musical semiosis" that "indexically, for artists and consumers, encodes musically the urban conditions of community devastation and danger that the lyrics in the genre most describe."
5. These dire urban conditions were themselves produced by flexible accumulation — neoliberalism more broadly.
6. Thus, detuning forms part of reality rap's technical-formal content, community devastation constitutes the allegorical or meta-depictive content, and flexible accumulation provides the symptomatic content.

Challenges to the Semiotic Argument

Several problems emerge from Krims's position. First, there appears to be an equivocal use of the word "represent." The fact that detuned rap cannot be easily notated using conventional Western staff notation does not mean it eludes cognitive representation. Countless dimensions of music — expressive performance nuances among them — are perfectly familiar, intelligible, and discussable yet not readily inscribed in score notation. Second, most Western music listeners do not read staff notation and lack command of the symbolic conventions of representable pitch relationships. So the difficulty of notating detuned music could not explain how these listeners experience it. Third, a question arises about the bounds of representation: are these musical effects truly outside notation? If someone added designations for each layer's pitch standard to the transcription, would the effect not be notationally captured? Krims claims the layering defeats conceptual boundaries while himself providing a unifying description using reasonably bounded concepts.

The concept of "aural representability" itself proves slippery. If a thing "defies aural representation," this might simply mean it cannot be represented audially (like the color red for a non-synaesthete) — which would mean that aspect is absent from ordinary aural experience, not sublimely present. Alternatively, if it means "troublesome to understand," detuning loses its special status. Furthermore, what constitutes the standard of detuning? Are honky-tonk pianos automatically sublime? It would seem to follow from Krims's reasoning that all detuned music qualifies as sublime, yet the sublime descriptor appears inappropriate for much detuned repertoire.

Cross-Cultural Tuning and Contemporary Practice

Kevin Volans, in program notes for White Man Sleeps, described the compositional constraints that alternative tuning systems create. When the MusICA concert series at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London) commissioned a piece to complement his earlier African-inspired works, the specific tuning systems posed a challenge. Volans realized he could include viola da gamba because its movable frets could accommodate the needed pitches. Drawing from Tswana and nyanga panpipe music, San bow music, and Basotho lesiba music and concertina style — plus his own invented folklore — his approach was not purist. The music underwent filtering, slowing by "time-octaves," recasting into non-African meters (including a thirteen-beat dance pattern), and redistribution among players. Volans later found this treatment "unacceptably Germanic," reflecting his then-identity as a Cologne composer; he felt the piece ultimately has more to do with 1980s European music. The title alludes to a moment in nyanga panpipe performances where musicians stop playing their loud pipes for a few cycles and dance only to ankle rattles — to let the white landowner sleep.

Ellen Arkbro's CHORDS takes a minimalist approach, using precise, subtle synthesis to stretch, extend, and obscure instruments' timbral character. The piece explores chords' sonic materiality and harmonic quality, foregrounding how compositions occupy space rather than time. As part of Arkbro's systematic investigation of harmonic sound, CHORDS proposes a departure from conventional listening — active embodiment of sound itself, where subtle movements of head and body reveal inner complexities.

Social Semiosis and the Hip-Hop Sublime

For listeners in a particular historical moment, the hip-hop sublime framed the fears and pleasures of the black inner-city ghetto — images that both fascinated and horrified rap audiences. This musical strategy served as a figure for viewing inner-city menace from the perspective of a trapped underclass. It operated powerfully in commercially prominent artists including Wu-Tang Clan, Dr. Dre, Nas, and Mobb Deep. A charged mixture of social knowledge and uncomfortable enjoyment, the hip-hop sublime anchored "reality" within reality rap, providing a sonic shorthand for urban conditions inseparable from projected identities of the underclass and inner city. Krims's project of revealing social relations hidden within musical sound — tracing flexible accumulation's imprint on the very sonic fabric — aims to demonstrate how music not only reflects but participates in encoding social conditions.