Theodor Adorno's writings on jazz remain at best a puzzle, and to many an acute embarrassment. To jazz historians they merely contain ‘some of the stupidest pages ever written about jazz’ (Hobsbawm 1993, p. 300) and are generally dismissed without further comment. Adorno scholars, on the other hand, are unlikely to see in them anything more than preliminary steps to his later and more substantial studies in the sociology of music, or – in the words of Martin Jay (1984, p. 132) – a ‘gloss on The Authoritarian Personality’. Nor are matters helped by Adorno's own attitude. In the preface to volume 17 of his Gesammelte Schriften he clearly distances himself from his early jazz writings, referring to his ignorance of the specifically American features of jazz, his dependence on the German-Hungarian pedagogue Mátyás Seiber in matters of jazz technique, and his willingness to draw hasty psycho-sociological conclusions without clear knowledge of the institutions of the commercial music industry. If these essays are belittled by their own author, why should we bother to study them at all?

What does music mean, if anything? The question is one of the hardy perennials of musical aesthetics, and there is no shortage of answers to it. Indeed, there is a plethora of seemingly unrelated answers. We can talk about music's internal structure, about its symmetries and directional motions, about patterns of implication and their realisation or lack of realisation; moving from ‘the music itself’ to listeners' reponses, approaches like this offer a psychological approach to meaning (and the work of Leonard Meyer and Eugene Narmour provide the best known examples). Or we can approach the music from the opposite direction, talking about the context of its creation, the context of its performance, and the context of its reception; here the assumption is that music acquires meaning through its mediation of society. Or again, we can oscillate between these two viewpoints, on the assumption that meaning arises from the mutual mediation of music and society. That is the central assumption of musical hermeneutics, whether we are applying this term to the work of Hermann Kretzschmar in the 1880s or that of Lawrence Kramer in the 1980s.

A conviction that rock is the central manifestation of the post-War mass culture and the most common form of mass cultural activity, seems undoubted for rock analysts. The question as to whether rock music is able to play any significant role in a process of political change evokes, however, scepticism rather than endorsement (Rosselson 1979; Hibbard and Kaleialoha 1983; Orman 1984; Pattison 1987; Grossberg 1991).

In the course of the last decade, the body of writing on music video has grown to sizeable proportions. The reason for the present addition to this bulk of literature, in spite of the subject seemingly approaching the state of exhaustion, is that musical semiotics are still rarely applied to the field. It is a fact that pop and rock music have always been heavily infused with socially determined meaning such that an autonomous musical aesthetics appears clearly insufficient to explain their significance; however, to what extent and how this significance is linked in with particular musical structures as such is still largely uninvestigated. In my view, music video may perhaps be less interesting as a phenomenon in itself than as source material for an ‘empirical semiotics’ of popular music, shedding light on signification processes of a more general applicability. Furthermore, the distinctive features of music video may arguably be better explained on the basis of an understanding of the syntactical characteristics of popular music than by prevalent theories of postmodernism; the latter appear problematic not only due to their speculative and unsubstantiated nature with regard to media reception processes (cf. Frith and Horne 1987, p. 11), but their explanatory value as regards syntactic features of music video also seems to be limited (cf. Frith 1988, p. 207).

This article is part of an on-going analysis of a Spanish television documentary series entitled Rito y Geografía del Cante. This larger on-going analysis treats the programmes in this series as ‘cultural performances’. The programmes are assumed to model personhood as they go about presenting information about flamenco music. This particular article focuses on the role of the body in these performed models of personhood.

In 1974 Time magazine placed Van Morrison fifth in a curious little league table of ‘Greatest Living Songwriters’ behind Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Leonard Cohen. This in itself has little value and probably less meaning but serves to illustrate a point; one could in all probability fill this room with books and critical articles which have been written about Bob Dylan, and while the scholars have not spent so much energy upon Lennon and McCartney, popular approval of their work is perhaps greater than that for Dylan – we all ‘know the story’ of The Beatles. Leonard Cohen, the most ‘cultish’ among Time magazine's Gang of Four is perhaps closest to Morrison in terms of reputation, but is known also as a literary figure with some record albums and volumes of poetry issued under the same title. Some might argue that this is just a glorification of a lyric sheet; this observation may be made flippantly but does actually lead to a problematical but fascinating relation between what is written and what is sung – to which we shall turn later. My point is that in comparison to this quartet and on these terms, Van Morrison is almost invisible. There have been only two published studies of Morrison, both long out of print. The first was a piece of well-intentioned but now rather dated hagiography, Into the Music by Ritchie Yorke (1975). However, this book has the great advantage of being written with the co-operation of its subject. The second was produced by Johnny Rogan, a professional biographer of rock musicians.