Page 204 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

Say It in Singing! 179

modes of expression. Further, it aims at establishing bonds between
individuals and groups. Our main concern is to capture the motiva-
tions of performers and their patterns of communication in this par-
ticular context.
Their ability to create, modify and perform these songs and transmit
their impressive repertory throughout generations, are the components
of an autonomous system of knowledge within communities of women.
Peasant women in Maharashtra often refer to grindmill songs as ‘their
Veda’ in contrast with the highbrow culture carried over by men with
the support and legitimization of writing.
Documentary work indicates that to a large extent the tradition
of grindmill songs crosses the conventional boundaries of family,
village, cast and religion. Thus, it functions as a ‘women’s heritage’,
although not a static, ‘feminist’ set of essentialist world-views, rather
a touchstone for understanding the psychological motivations and the
social constraints of its performers.
The first principle underlying our methodology is that the keys for
‘deciphering’ the musical and textual content may reside in the per-
formance itself—which includes extra-linguistic and extra-musical
features such as gestures and the situation/status of the speaker or
singer. It follows a recent methodological trend in French linguistics,
namely, instructional semantics (sémantique instructionnelle) in
contrast with the classical approach of componential semantics
(sémantique componentielle) (Kleiber 1994). Ours may also be called
a ‘post-Heideggerian hermeneutics approach’, whereby the ‘art of
understanding’ belongs to the musical work itself as much as to its
performers and appreciative audience (Vecchione 1997: 101).
The second principle is that a musical work (here, a particular per-
formance) may be approached as a narrative, a ‘fiction’ whose reference
is more sophisticated than the ones of scientific discourse or mundane
speech communication:

This fiction takes its form thanks to a discourse that the individual
musical work casts to audiences by producing itself as the figuration
of a possible world and projecting itself as an ‘act of speech’ whose
discursive type (figuration, narration, argumentation) is predeter-
mined. As a speech, as a quasi-speech, the musical work is designed
for audiences for some reasons; as a quasi-text, it configures itself,