Signs of Music: A Guide to Musical Semiotics

Description

Music is said to be the most autonomous and least representative of all the arts. However, it reflects in many ways the realities around it and influences its social and cultural environments. Music is as much biology, gender, gesture - something intertextual, even transcendental. Musical signs can be studied throughout their history as well as musical semiotics with its own background. Composers from Chopin to Sibelius and authors from Nietzsche to Greimas and Barthes illustrate the avenues of this new discipline within semiotics and musicology. Foreword Contents Part one: Music as sign Chapter 1 Is music sign? 1.1 Introduction 1.2 Music as semiotic: A historical perspective 1.3 Peirce, Greimas, and music-semiotic analysis 1.4 Understanding / misunderstanding musical signs Chapter 2 Signs in music history, history of music semiotics 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Signs in music itself 2.3 History of musical scholarship in the light of semiotics 2.4 Main lines in the development of musical semiotics Chapter 3 Signs as acts and events: On musical situations 3.1 Situation as communication and signification 3.2 Situation as act and event 3.3 Situations as intertextuality 3.4 Articulation of situations Part two: Gender, biology, and transcendence Chapter 4 Metaphors of nature and organicism in music: A “biosemiotic” approach 4.1 On the musically organic 4.2 Sibelius and the idea of the “organic” 4.3 Organic narrativity Chapter 5 The emancipation of the sign: On corporeal and gestural meanings in music Chapter 6 Body and transcendence in Chopin 6.1 Are corporeal signs iconic? 6.2 Are corporeal signs indexical? 6.3 Analysis Part three: Social and musical practices Chapter 7 Voice and identity 7.1 Voice and signification 7.2 Text 7.3 Transcendence 7.4 Orality 7.5 Singing as social identity 7.6 National voice types 7.7 Gender 7.8 Education 7.9 Empirical methods 7.10 Conclusion Chapter 8 On the semiosis of musical improvisation: From Mastersingers to Bororo indians 8.1 Musical improvisation and semiotics 8.2 Improvisation as communication 8.3 Improvisation as signification: A peircean view 8.4 Improvisation as signification: A greimassian view 8.5 Conclusion: Improvisation and existential semiotics Notes References Name index