Semiotics of Music

This thesis focuses on a particular stylistic period of Frederic Chopin. The 1840s show an important evolution of Chopin’s musical language and correspond to an aesthetic turning point, characterized by a difficult historical and biographical context. All along our research, we will try to build a transversal definition of Chopin’s last style by highlighting the recurrent characteristics of this period. In this purpose, a corpus of twenty-two works will be analyzed through several levels (traditional and formal, semiotic, narrative and thymic), to grasp all the issues of the last period of the polish composer.

Cette thèse s’intéresse à une période stylistique particulière du compositeur Frédéric Chopin. Les années 1840 manifestent une évolution importante dans son langage musical et correspondent à un tournant esthétique marqué par un contexte historique et biographique difficile. Tout au long de ce travail, nous allons tenter d’ériger une définition transversale du « dernier style » de Chopin, en recherchant les éléments caractéristiques récurrents de cette période. Dans ce but, un corpus de vingt-deux oeuvres musicales sera analysé selon plusieurs niveaux (traditionnel et formel, sémiotique, narratif et thymique) afin de saisir tous les enjeux de la dernière période du compositeur polonais.

La musica si offre al nostro orecchio e al nostro esserne gli interpreti bilanciando sempre quelle che sembrano essere le sue due qualità distintive e contrapposte: l’ineffabilità e la capacità di comunicare sensazioni, atmosfere, storie in maniera chirurgica. La faccenda si complica ulteriormente quando abbiamo a che fare con la musica che ascoltiamo tutti i giorni, attraverso quelli che ci ostiniamo a chiamare dischi. È la musica che chiamiamo registrata e che, però, quasi mai è registrata e basta. La musica rappresenta un problema per la semiotica, che come tale l’ha sempre trattata. Al punto che è forse questo il suo campo di applicazione più trascurato. Il significato della musica è stratificato: ha a che fare tanto con i suoni che essa contiene, e che ci sottopone in presa diretta o in forma mediata, quanto con le parole e le pratiche che costruiamo attorno a questi suoni, e che finiscono per orientarne profondamente il senso. Questo libro si concentra su alcune questioni centrali per una semiotica della musica che voglia comprenderla come fatto comunicativo, proponendo alcuni modelli per provare ad attraversare questo campo con uno sguardo — un orecchio — nuovo: la mediazione e il linguaggio fonografico; l’enunciazione e le sue diverse configurazioni; la nozione di genere e i generi musicali intesi come sistema discorsivo, dove la musica si dà appieno nella sua dimensione sociale e al cui interno tradizione e innovazione finiscono per sciogliersi l’una nell’altra.

An attempt to reconsider an area that has become semiotically unknown: musical notation in its twentieth-century developments. What this study proposes is an introductory reflection to semiotics of notation considered both as a reflection on notation in the light of semiotics and as a semiotic work which is typical of notation as such.
On the one hand, it is a matter of taking into account the historicity of the phenomenon and the semiotic reflection that has stimulated it; the particular scale of the problem in the period 1950-70 is then investigated in relation to causes that could be defined both as "internal" (the changed state of musical matter, serial and post-serial compositional practices, happening and improvisation) and "external" (the relationship with other sectors of culture: from visual arts to literature, to philosophy).
On the other hand, the examples considered in the text are a test bench of absolute importance for the observation of the dynamics underlying a semiotically central problem such as that of notation, and of the double order (between what signs and what is signed) that it immediately evokes.

In five steps this text tries to convey a semiotic analysis of the phenomenon of  ‘live VR music concerts’.Through this paper it becomes clear that the meaning of live music and virtual live music is not always clear. Virtual does not want to be like the real. It does not intend to create the same music experience. It is a globalising trend that seeks to go beyond. In contrast, maybe the real becomes more like the virtual. Experimenting with virtual experiences results eventually in the dissolving of the boundaries between the real and the virtual. The meaning of live music is changing and is strongly interpreted in the context of culture. Pandemic culture insinuated the interpretation that VR is just arriving, but actually it was already here for a while. With the semiotic square we analysed the virtual and real through the ‘here and now’. It is the ‘here and now’ (authenticity?) that gets questioned in live virtual concerts. It is legit to present a live concert in other ways, because that is one of the aims of VR. The virtual concert does not necessarily want to substitute real-life concerts. Peircian interpretations led into new kinds of music experience and new music industries/business models. A virtual concert experience constructs experience of identities of experience of collectivity that are real. Even in a manipulated or determined world the emotions that music creates are real. ‘Liveness’ shows the (intersubjective) power of music.

Resumo: Discussão sobre os conceitos de hibridismo, musicalidade, fricção e fusão de musicalidades e tópicas da musi-calidade brasileira. O objetivo é refletir sobre a questão da mudança e a transformação nos gêneros musicais, bem como a da permanência de elementos e figurações musicais que, por sua vez, carregam consigo nexos sócio-culturais e históricos que, de alguma forma, são experimentados pelos músicos e audiências. Tendo como foco questões da música brasileira, este artigo apresenta a busca de tópicas musicais (" brejeiro " , " época-de-ouro " e " nordestina ") como uma ferramenta para enfrentar o problema das transformações no mundo da música. Palavras-chave: hibridismo; musicalidade; tópicas musicais; música brasileira. Abstract: Discussion about concepts such as hybridism, musicality, friction and fusion of musicalities, and the topics of the Brazilian musicality. It aims at reflecting on the question of the change and transformation in musical genres, as much as that of the permanence of musical elements and figurations that, in its turn, carry socio-cultural and historical connections that are somehow experienced by musicians and audiences. Focusing on questions of the Brazilian music, this article presents the search for musical traces called topics (" brejeiro " [maliciously smart ], " época-de-ouro " [good times], and " nor-destina " [northeasterly Brazilian]) as a tool to face the problem of the transformations in the world of music.

The contributions to Iconic Investigations deal with linguistic or literary aspects of language. While some studies analyze the cognitive structures of language, others pay close attention to the sounds of spoken language and the visual characteristics of written language. In addition this volume also contains studies of media types such as music and visual images that are integrated into the overall project to deepen the understanding of iconicity – the creation of meaning by way of similarity relations. Iconicity is a fundamental but relatively unexplored part of signification in language and other media types. During the last decades, the study of iconicity has emerged as a vital research area with far-reaching interdisciplinary scope and the volume should be of interest for students and researchers interested in scholarly fields such as semiotics, cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor studies, poetry, intermediality, and multimodality.

Felix Mendelssohn and Paul Hindemith, composing about one hundred years apart, integrated visual elements, including drawings and illustrated notations, into musical manuscripts they designed as gifts for women they admired. The two documents, illustrating Mendelssohn’s Schilflied (1842) and Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis (1942), are strong declarations of compositional and artistic ideology. This article examines the scores as reflecting, respectively, aspects of nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century conceptions of musical composition and form, and their relation to visual media.

NB: Translated by Farshad Moshfeghi for Iran's Music Report Magazine (2012)

This paper, which is a significantly revised version of one I gave at the Zurich IMS meeting in 2007, explores how the meaning of dance music changed during the early 19th century. As one index of this change, where dance topics were (as Wendy Allanbrook showed) a ready means to structure musical discourse during the late eighteenth century, they are much less in evidence in the early nineteenth. I argue that this change reflects a growing distrust of dance as a source of embodied meaning.

Da Cage ai Pink Floyd, da Schaeffer e i suoi eredi ai Soft Machine, da Edgar Varèse a Iannis Xenakis, dai compositori acusmatici ai DJ contemporanei, la ricerca elettroacustica ed elettronica ha vissuto e continua a vivere una felicissima stagione in ogni parte del globo; una stagione che è il momento di ricostruire in modo più ampio e, laddove possibile, interpretare, non solo all'interno dei confi ni della storia della musica.

L'articolo affronta con un approccio semiotico il ruolo della musica, e del sonoro in generale, all'interno degli spot, ovvero degli audiovisivi pubblicitari.
In particolare affronta semioticamente: il ruolo del sonoro nel testo sincretico, le funzioni del parlato e della musica, un confronto tra vecchi (Carosello) e nuovi formati televisivi, le funzioni dei jingle, il rapporto tra musica e immagine, e l'impiego delle canzoni pop negli spot.

"Carter's music poses struggles of opposition, for instance in timbre (Double Concerto), space (String Quartet No. 3) or pulse (String Quartet No. 5). His preference for the all-interval tetrachords, 4–Z15 [0, 1, 4, 6] and 4–Z29 [0, 1, 3, 7], is also well known. From these facets of Carter's music, I develop a narrative interpretation of his Petrarch sonnet–inspired solo flute piece, Scrivo in Vento (1991). Specifically, I forge narrative pathways by imagining the two tetrachords as active agents opposed in competition. Previous Scrivo analyses (Capuzzo 2002; Childs 2006) stress continuity by revealing Q-transforms and common-note voice leading between the tetrachords. While acknowledging such features, my analysis emphasises oppositional struggle by tracing the tetrachords as separate entities which cooperate and conflict as they manoeuvre to outdo each other.

The analysis advances three theses: (1) it guides listening to and reading Scrivo in a way which resonates with Carter's concern for the aesthetics of oppositional struggle, his choice of a sonnet as inspiration and his affinity for all-interval tetrachords; (2) it shows that music-analytical detail can be organised into dramatic narratives by (a) projecting dramatic roles onto categories asserted by a formal theory and (b) treating the formal theory's relations metaphorically as actions performed by each role as the musical work unfolds; and (3) it shows how detailed pc-set analysis can support a Heraclitean view of music: a flux of opposing forces seeking and resisting unity."

El concepto de “hiperrealidad sonora” fue acuñado per el neuro-científico y músico Daniel Levitin en 2006 para definir aquellas “impresiones sensoriales que nunca tendríamos verdaderamente en el mundo real". Desde la perspectiva propuesta por Levitin, la noción sonora de lo hiperreal se desmarca del concepto de hiperrealidad empleado en ocasiones por la semiótica post-estructuralista (Braudillart, Borgmann o Eco) y abre un camino hacia el análisis de las capacidades creativas de la producción sonora. Tal propuesta encuentra en teóricos como Simon Frith, Paul Théberge o Simon Zagosky-Thomas un claro antecedente para el estudio la tecnología como herramienta creativa capaz de generar sonoridades hiperreales que son aceptadas como naturales por el consumidor.
Sin embargo, des de la musicología no existen apenas aproximaciones que nos permitan una disección profunda de los elementos que a lo largo de los últimos sesenta años dibujan la evolución de la hiperrealidad sonora en el pop. La presente comunicación plantea un recorrido diacrónico a través de los procedimientos de producción de audio que han ido contribuyendo poco a poco a una conceptualización social del sonido hiperreal: desde los primeros overdubs experimentales de Les Paul y Mary Ford a las actuales texturas imposibles de Daft Punk, pasando por la progresiva aceptación de planos sonoros acústicamente inverosímiles a través de las técnicas de simulación espacial, panoramización, y compresión dinámica. A partir de este recorrido histórico se plantea una propuesta inicial para la clasificación de distintos tipos de hiperrealidad sonora en el marco de la música pop.

Musica Speculativa and the Nexus of Music and Nature 2 Unpublished Paper of Raymond Monelle Recently Recovered IX The papers in these first two sections correspond to different aspects of Monelle's theories and reflect either critical studies on his writings, such as Yonatan Bar-Yoshafat's essay, or his musical topic theory, such as the papers by Andrew Haringer, Lauri Suurpää,

How does a musician's system of coding influence their sonic perception? As part of a greater research project involving Greek musicians (Athanasopoulos and Kitsios, 2015) we asked participants to depict a short excerpt of Western 'art' music and a piece of traditional Greek music as images in a free-drawn design, adopting the method used successfully by , in which participants heard brief musical stimuli and were asked to represent them graphically on paper. The participants shared the same store of symbols (literate in Greek and musically literate in western standard notation and/or tablatures) and had comparable sociocultural norms due to their upbringing. They were selected based on these similarities in order to ensure that any cases of Codal Incompetence or Codal Interference would be primarily the result of their variable musical performance background, which was European classical, or mixed traditional and classical. Without establishing a hypothesis as to the results, our purpose was to examine whether this difference would influence the method in which they would code their responses, with a particular interest in noting whether the resulting visualisations could be classified as scores of either prescriptive or descriptive nature .

‘Star Wars movies are basically silent movies, therefore the music has a very large role in carrying the story’ (George Lucas, 2002). For the music of Star Wars, John Williams employed the leitmotif as a structural, developmental and musico-dramatic device which is associated with characters, emotions, and situations on the screen. Leitmotifs, pioneered by Wagner in Der Ring des Nibelungen, differed from their representational predecessors through their developmental nature and the process by which they gradually accumulated association (Bribitzer-Stull, 2015). The influence of Wagner and his leitmotifs looms over film music, consequently the motif has been transmuted from the operatic stage to the film screen. This thesis investigates the most commonly recognized function of the leitmotif: its ability to generate associative meaning, and the significance of recall and nostalgia within that function. Motifs have their own unique referentiality within these films; yet externally, they also are important to the audience which has formed an attachment to them, years after the films were made. As a result of the rebirth of the Star Wars saga (with The Force Awakens (2015)), Williams’s motifs from the original movies now have an even greater sense of meaning than they once held.
This thesis examines the sentimental function of the leitmotif: how associativity is established, the relevance of Wagnerian and pre-Wagnerian precedents, and how Williams’s recent Star Wars scores might affect our understanding of these aspects. Williams’s new scores have yet to be thoroughly analysed, similarly the nostalgic function of leitmotifs remains a mystery. Ultimately, the aim is to answer the questions: How does musically created nostalgia influence the reading of an operatic/filmic plot, how is the reminiscence function of a leitmotif created and used, and what is the consequence on an overreliance of older thematic material?

The object of the present proposal is a semiotic analysis of the song Leci liście z drzewa, op. 74 n.17 by Chopin. In particular, the analysis will focus on the relationship between four different plans: (I) the form of the expression plan of the poetic text by Wincenty Pol; (II) the content plan expressed by the poem; (III) the form of the musical expression plan, and (IV) the musical content plan. If the poetic expression provides a rhythm which influences the melodic structure, on the other hand the music reorganizes the verses in different ways, by accelerating or slowing the poetic speech, by underlining and repeating some keywords (<<O Polska kraino!>>) or entire verses (the final stanza), or by constructing musical links between distant textual elements. The complex musical form and the different harmonic modulations are more sensible to the content expressed by the poem and its mood, which often shifts from the epic narration of the insurrection in Warsaw, to the didacticism about the consequences of the revolution. Even in these cases music is not a simple textual subordinate, but gives a contribute to meaning as a whole thanks to the emotional manipulation of the hearer suggested by the harmonic and rhythmic construction of the musical tension: thus the semiotic point of view on song as a case of syncretism between multiple plans - and the subsequent typology of the functions between them - helps in clarifying the link between form and emotions.

Il canto gregoriano, in quanto categoria storica, musicale ed epistemologica, è diventata una manifestazione performativa in cui l’interpretazione – intesa come tradizione e ricezione – si è evoluta in modi assai diversi sin dalle origini medievali fino ad oggi. La moderna opera di studio e restaurazione gregoriana – ovvero l’intenzione intellettuale di riportare la prassi esecutiva al suo stato primordiale – portata avanti da personaggi come Guéranguer o Cardine, si è fondamentata su un approccio semiologico che potrebbe considerarsi una forma di medievalismo esegetico in cui la grammatica gregoriana, intesa come la memoria e il significato di un segno, va oltre qualsivoglia possibilità espressiva e comunicativa della notazione musicale moderna. Sebbene molti manuali e trattati siano stati scritti sulla teoria notazionale di questo repertorio, sulla sua pedagogia, analisi e interpretazione, la semiologia in quanto disciplina medievalistica è in grado di rivelare solo parzialmente ciò che il canto gregoriano ha da dire, poiché i diversi modi in cui ha da dirlo, in cui può dirlo, e il perché di essi, va oltre i suoi confini naturali. Allora l’ermeneutica viene nel suo ausilio. Rampi e De Lillo (2019) nella loro opera “Nella mente del notatore. Semiologia gregoriana a ritroso” hanno fatto un grande tentativo di ricostruzione e approccio alla semiografia gregoriana non soltanto dallo studio della ricezione semiologica, ma elaborando una teoria innovativa di retroversione attraverso non di un trattato grammaticale in senso tradizionale, bensì dello sviluppo graduale del pensiero primordiale del trascrittore medievale. Una sorta di esercizio pratico-filosofico alla base dell’espressione semiologica gregoriana. Quindi, il presente studio cerca di capire i suddetti presupposti nell’opera di Rampi e De Lillo (2019) e comprendere in quale modo questi funzionino come base di una dimensione ermeneutica superiore negli studi sul canto gregoriano.

This article examines the semantic properties of several characteristic triadic shifts in the film and ceremonial music of John Williams. These shifts result from particular modal inflections in major keys, which include the mixolydian subtonic (associated with the heroic and/or patriotic), and the lydian supertonic (associated with magic, wonder and flight). My aim in examining Williams’ use of modal interchange is both to gain a more precise understanding of one particular aspect of his style, and to place it into the larger context of the musical tradition in Hollywood.

This essay presents a philosophical account of musical performance within the tradition of European art music. Although the 19th and 20th century formulation of performance as reproduction has been critiqued in recent scholarly texts, I will argue the case that reproduction—when not exclusively conceived of as the reproduction of the musical work—still provides a useful and accurate characterization of the performance process.

The questions that logically follow are “who” and “what” is reproduced? Answering the question of “who,” I will refer to Naomi Cumming’s account of subjectivity as it is maintained in the synthesis of musical signs. Answering the question of “what,” I will diagram the work’s object ontology proposed by Theodor W. Adorno. Having followed these nuanced approaches to the development and maintenance of music’s subjects and objects, I will propose that it would be useful for scholars and musicians to think of templates for musical reproduction. The template concept on the one hand draws attention to the technical and technological nature of performance, the structures of which emerge historically. On the other hand, templates index the subject’s unique cultural position and voice.

To this end, the essay will look at three case studies of templates for performance: Fritz Kreisler’s distinctive lilt (deriving from Viennese Ländler and Waltz rhythms), elements of Jascha Heifetz’s bodily formalism (tracking these specifically from some of his teacher, Leopold Auer’s, pedagogical instructions), and Hilary Hahn’s conformity to a metric and sonic consistency as it appears represented in notation.

Since the first musicological studies oriented to urban popular music, the main approach has been and continues to be that of sociology. This has become a key element in the renewal of the anthropological perspective of the musical event since it offers invaluable information about the uses and functions of music in different social contexts. But a complete image of what happens in the musical event can only be obtained if all the aspects that constitute it are analyzed. These are elements that both this sociological perspective and notational analysis leave, in some way, aside: sound in its physical aspect and its relationship with all the elements of meaning. Although it is evident that the notation seeks to translate sound into symbols on paper, it is equally clear that it has only been able to represent a small part of its wide range of characteristics. On the other hand, musical analysis runs the risk of falling into subjective appraisals that do not have a sufficiently solid basis for current musicological study. Therefore, it is convenient to offer new interpretive perspectives that start from an objective element. The proposal of this work is to take the electromechanical effect as a reference. This element has been fundamental in the development of the sound vocabulary of urban popular music since its first uses in the 1950s and, however, musicological study has been systematically left out.
This research takes Philip Tagg's (2013) analytical model and conducts a case study. Based on the decomposition of the song "Ogre Battle" by the rock group Queen and the study of the use of effects, a semiotic analysis is proposed that allows us to understand, on the one hand, the significant depth of the quartet's sound discourse and, on the other hand, the techniques used in the exploitation of this language. The results of this study want to highlight the need to explore this path already proposed in 1982 by Tagg himself, but still to be developed.

Семиотика эзотеризма (черновой вариант статьи) Область изучения эзотеризма и мистицизма, довольно сложная для исследования дисциплина, требующая многогранного научного подхода. Такие срезы могут быть в областях истории эзотерических учений, в социальном срезе как изучения различных мистических обществ их влияние и развитие, возможно изучения через феноменологический подход и иные другие гуманитарные и естественно научные взгляды. В начале XXI века мы можем говорить о дисциплине, с легкой руки С. В. Пахомова, названой -Эзотериология. Одним из разделов этой научной дисциплины можно будет считать эзотериологическую семиотику. В данной статье я постараюсь наметить основные черты данного направления, его цель, методику, а главным образом тот материал, с который будет исследоваться через семиотическую парадигму.

Having found several erroneities, chimerae, lacunae, malaphors and their sequalae, or (at least generally considered) 'sub-literate' comments and notations in the work of renowned SuperPhysicist Albert Einstein, I have concluded that it is incumbent upon me as a sentient witness, thereof, that I convey and expose the flaws of Mr. Einstein's mildly eccentric ideas to those who are willing to listen and learn.

Fra i vari tipi di ‘materie’ che si prestano ad elaborazioni artistiche, quella sonora si rivela particolarmente effimera e sfuggente. Arte temporale per eccellenza, che muore nel momento stesso in cui nasce, la musica ha sempre affascinato per il suo ambiguo oscillare sulla soglia dell’inesistente; eppure essa ‘tocca’, coinvolge la mente e il corpo, persino l’anima. Proprio le difficoltà dell’‘afferrare’ una ‘materia’ tanto eterea e fascinosa al tempo stesso, del com-prenderla (cioè del coglierla come un tutto unitario), conducono spesso l’ascoltatore a fare riferimento a campi più familiari dell’esperienza, come quello dell’interazione fisica con oggetti e sostanze materiali. Il lessico dell’analisi musicale tradizionale opera da sempre una ‘sostanzializzazione’ degli elementi musicali (un tema può ‘entrare’, una linea melodica può ‘salire’, delle voci possono ‘sovrapporsi’, ecc.). Tali ‘oggetti’ musicali possono essere caratterizzati, in certi casi, nella qualità della materia di cui sono composti: un suono può dunque essere ‘vaporoso’, ‘compatto’, ‘duro’, ‘ruvido’, ecc. In certe esperienze d’ascolto, sembra che la musica non si lasci solo osservare, ma anche toccare, per rivelare i suoi più intimi segreti non tanto all’orecchio dell’analista che decompone le forme o all’occhio che scruta il pentagramma, ma alla mano che esplora la materia stessa del suono. In questo intervento proveremo ad analizzare i meccanismi percettivi e immaginativi che portano un ascoltatore a vivere la musica come se si trattasse di materia con cui è possibile entrare in contatto fisico.

¿Constituye la música un lenguaje?. Si es así, ¿existe un lenguaje propio y único de la música cinematográfica?
Durante más de un siglo, el cine y otros medios audiovisuales (la televisión, el vídeo o la multimedia) han ido desarrollando un lenguaje de comunicación que paralelamente ha incluido el de la música específica aplicada a estos medios expresivos. Durante todo este tiempo la música audiovisual ha elaborado un sistema de códigos propios en relación con la imagen que dan un producto nuevo, fruto de esta interacción multidisciplinar. En este trabajo, Alejandro Román propone dotar de contenido y justificación la presencia de este ya no tan nuevo lenguaje musical, al que ha denominado acertadamente “Lenguaje Musivisual”, en una integración total de los elementos sonoros con los específicamente visuales. El libro explora la semiótica y los aspectos de significación de este lenguaje en relación siempre a los elementos presentes en la imagen, para desarrollar más tarde, a partir de este planteamiento semiótico, la existencia también de una estética propia y original de la música cinematográfica que, con sus virtudes y defectos, ha de plantear siempre nuevos retos en la creación de nuevas formas de expresión estética abandonando los estereotipos en favor de una mayor originalidad musical, pero sin perder nunca la justificación en la propia imagen. Para ello, el autor incluye multitud de gráficos, cuadros sinópticos, imágenes, partituras y ejemplos que hacen más atractivo y directo el acercamiento a este complejo y difícil tema. A través del análisis de cuatro partituras de música cinematográfica (“Los Otros”, de Alejandro Amenábar, “Vértigo”, de Alfred Hitchcock, “Los Puentes de Madison”, de Clint Eastwood, y “El Contrato del dibujante”, de Peter Greenaway) se ejemplifican los aspectos tratados, acercando al compositor, estudioso y aficionado a la música de cine, a este apasionante tema.

È estatico ogni discorso che, costruendosi nel linguaggio e col linguaggio, rappresenta nondimeno una fuoriuscita da esso, un bloccarsi della semiosi, un venir meno delle distinzioni che fondano il senso. Trattasi dunque di un’impostura? Dell’evocazione impossibile, fra le maglie dell’immanenza, di una dimensione trascendente nella quale e verso la quale la prima si sfaldi, perdendo la consistenza di strutture e opposizioni? Rispondere affermativamente sarebbe forse semplicistico, sarebbe considerare l’estasi come puro effetto ottico, come sorta di trompe-l’oeil mistico. In realtà, come ogni trompe-l’oeil, anche l’estasi rinvia a qualcosa di più della propria semplice rappresentazione. Essa rimanda ai pregiudizi inconfessati di un’ideologia semiotica, alla trama nascosta, al negativo segreto che regge tutta la concezione moderna del senso e del linguaggio. Il discorso mistico, che corre parallelo e invisibile, spesso represso, a volte perseguitato, lungo tutta la storia delle religioni, esprime allora questo dubbio: e se il senso non fosse distinzione, separatezza, dualità? Se l’immanenza articolatoria che lo viviseziona non fosse che illusoria? A questo punta ogni racconto dell’estasi: al sospetto che i fondamenti della modernità, anti-mistici per definizione, non siano altro che una delle possibilità dell’umano, e che una storia non detta, in filigrana, si dipani accanto e sotto al moderno come traccia sbiadita di un altro percorso, di un altro modo d’intendere e di dire.

This dissertation is an investigation of the percussion used to accompany Chinese martial arts and lion dancing at Toronto, Canada’s Hong Luck Kung Fu Club. It is based on six years of participant-observation and performance ethnography there, as well as a nine-month period of comparative fieldwork in Hong Kong. The diasporic environment presented questions of identity, and the research also engaged with the emerging field of martial arts studies. The discussion’s primary lines of inquiry are the use of percussion-accompanied lion dance and kung fu in the construction of identity for performers and audiences in a multicultural context; embodied knowledge in the movement and music that undergirds a Chinese, martial way of being-in-the-world; and the experience of learning, performing, and observing these practices. This study draws on phenomenology, semiotics, practice theory, and cognitive semantics, which have been tempered by discipleship at Hong Luck. The primary argument of this dissertation is that, despite the challenges of diaspora, Hong Luck’s transmission process uses intense physical training to engrain a distinctly Chinese, martial habitus onto practitioners; this set of dispositions is the prerequisite for becoming a drummer and is sonically—and physically—manifested in percussion-accompanied kung fu and lion dancing with important implications for the identity of performers and patrons. The main thesis is augmented by an argument for experiencing combat skills through music. With over fifty years of history, the ideals of self-strengthening, resistance to domination, and respect for Chinese culture that are embodied in Hong Luck’s practices have had a lasting impact on not only the local Chinatown community, but also the Greater Toronto Area and beyond.

Signatim è termine raro. Compare in un passo attribuito all’autore Caio, all’interno dei cosiddetti Gromatici veteres, una raccolta di testi di agrimensura compilata nel V secolo d.C. “Gromatico” è infatti tutto ciò che si riferisce alla misurazione, divisione, e rappresentazione di terreni. Il termine deriva da “groma”, uno strumento che gli Etruschi prima, e poi i Romani, utilizzarono per tracciare sul territorio allineamenti ortogonali, necessari per la delimitazione di nuove città, quartieri, e strade, ma anche per suddividere il terreno in quadrati o rettangoli, e renderne così calcolabile la superficie.
Nel passo di Caio si descrive una tecnica gromatica. Al fine di poter identificare anche in futuro i paletti interrati che delimitano il terreno, è necessario contraddistinguerli con un segno a forma di stella, la cosidetta “stella junior”. In questo contesto, “signatim” è dunque avverbio che designa la scrittura e la lettura di segni nella delineazione di frontiere. Quale parola più appropriata per evocare il lavoro della semiotica della cultura, la quale pure si occupa dei segni, delle tracce, delle marche che gli individui e le società producono nell’istituire la diversità? Per cartografare non colture ma culture, non gromatiche ma grammatiche, riconducendone le forme esuberanti all’ortogonalità di strutture soggiacenti?

According to the theory of embodied cognition, gestures are at the very heart of human cognitive processes. The idea of embodied cognition is based on cognitive schemata and categories that emerge from the amassed experience of being and acting in the world. In human cognitive processes, many features of cognition are shaped by aspects of the entire body of the organism, so the physical domain serves as a source domain for understanding an idea or conceptual domain, using the tools of metaphor. As a basic element of the physical domain, the phenomenon of gesture has garnered particular attention and it has been recently studied in various fields such as phenomenology, EMT (Extended Mind Thesis), psychology, neuro-phenomenology, neo-cognitivism, robotics, critical theory, linguistics, neuroscience, constructivism, but also in music theory. In music, gestures encompass a large territory-from purely physical (bodily) on one side of the axis to mental (imagined) on the other. From a student's adopting of a teacher's posture, even facial expressions, to the syndrome of "watching" music, as in conductors' and players' gestures, both practical (sound producing) and expressive (auxiliary), to metaphorical concepts of up and down in intervals, scales, or as recognizable idioms of a composer's language (strategic) or style (stylistic), the phenomenon of gesture in music can be explored and perceived from many different viewpoints. In this paper, the issue of the inseparability of body and sound in musical practice will be explored, especially how these two basic types of gesture in music can intertwine and help deepen its performance. For this purpose, Alexandra Pierce's embodied analytical exercises will be used, those which enable the performer to explore gesturally the expressive meaning of a musical piece. It will be demonstrated that musical gesture supports performance-oriented analysis more than we think, know, or imagine.

This paper lays out the foundation for new semiotics of music - that is in line with the most up-to-date research on neurophysiology of emotion. It shows how the traditional before the 20th century view of music as a language of emotions can indeed hold true in relation to perception of music.
This is the English translation of the original paper that was published in Spanish, in 2015.

This is an overview of the available multi-disciplinary data on the history of “hemiolic” musical modes that use a melodic interval of the augmented second (e.g., Arabic and Turkish Hijaz). Such modes are extremely popular in Mediterranean, Balkan, and Central Asian countries, and originate from the Ancient Greek chromatic and enharmonic genera. Hemiolic modes form a special type of tonality – “Phrygian” – forming the “Dominant keys” as opposed to the “Tonic keys” of the Western classical music tradition. Hence, the vast area from Spain to India should be regarded as home to the hemiolic "Mediterranean tonality", in contrast to the Western tonality that is based on the diatonic system, expanded into the chromatic system through the course of its historic development. The structural, aesthetic and semantic differences between the Western and Mediterranean tonalities reflect the growing divergence between the Western and Eastern cultures of thought, which in turn seems to be fueled by the cultural opposition of Western Christian and Islamic ideologies.

This essay relates part of Roland Barthes' theories to a quite unique contemporary cultural artifact - a music album which is in itself a criticism of the album format, by a controversial artist who is arguably one of the most polarizing figures in today's music business: the American rapper Kanye West and his latest album Yeezus. The essay is not an all-encompassing analysis of Barthes' work, since such a task would entail an in-depth critical discussion which would take more space than what was allowed for this assignment. The author analyses some of Barthes' essays and books which he still finds highly relevant, and demonstrates how, five decades after Barthes' death, these can still be effectively used to make sense of the world we live in and the culture we share.

Parece exagerado desde el punto de vista del investigador, hablar de captura de audiencias de un medio como la radio mientras frente a nuestra vista desfilan oyentes con sus auriculares, mientras viajamos en automóviles y transportes públicos invadidos por textos radiofónicos o mientras nuestros compañeros de trabajo se hacen acompañar por programas del medio. Pocas realidades sociales pueden estar más a mano para ser estudiadas.
Sin embargo, frente a la larga lista de fracasos en el esfuerzo de estudiar esa/s auciencia/s cautivas, este libro centrado en los efectos de la radio, no se propone estudiar su público sino contribuir a la generación de las condiciones requeridas para que ese tipo de estudios sea fecundo: se trata de capturarlo conceptualmente. La estrategia elegida obligará, por un lado, a indagar y poner en evidencia de qué hablamos cuando hablamos de radio y, por el otro, a dialogar con otras estrategias de investigación de larga tradición teórica y empírica; el diálogo no se establecerá desde una posición erudita –por otro lado, insostenible—sino desde una modesta búsqueda de complementariedad.
Si bien es un estudio que pretende ser completo sobre los problemas de investigar ciertos broadcastings por esa misma condición problemática, su lectura puede tener utilidad en épocas de networking en el que la interacción está en el centro de la escena. Como se verá, la interacción de las audiencias con sus emisores ha sido siempre interactiva en el mundo de lo radiofónico.

This comprehensive volume offers a wide-ranging perspective on the stories that art music has told since the start of the 20th century. Contributors challenge the broadly held opinion that the loss of tonality in some music after 1900 also meant the loss of narrative in that music. To the contrary, the editors and essayists in this book demonstrate how experiments in approaching narrative in other media, such as fiction and cinema, suggested fresh possibilities for musical narrative, which composers were quick to exploit. The new conceptions of time, narrative voice, plot, and character that accompanied these experiments also had a significant impact on contemporary music. The repertoire explored in the collection ranges across a wide variety of genres and includes composers from Charles Ives and the Pet Shop Boys to Thomas Adès and Dmitri Shostakovich.

[Table of contents etc: http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/product_info.php?cPath=1037_5718_5753&products_id=806644 ]
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A leitmotif is a representative compositional tool which aids in storytelling. This compositional device was adopted by Richard Wagner in The Ring which premiered in 1876. A century later the leitmotif is used by John Williams in his score for the first film in the Star Wars saga – A New Hope. Due to the scores extreme popularity, Williams would continue his musical relationship with the fantastical universe for the following thirty years.  This dissertation examines the use of the leitmotif by Williams with reference to Wagner.
Motifs are representative of character, place and emotion. Parallels of certain aspects of the mythic stories which they embody exist respectively between The Ring and Star Wars – can the same be said for leitmotifs written over a century apart? The employment and deployment of selected motifs will be studied in relation to how they change, how they are representative, and how they relate to each other.
Informed by works by both music and film scholars, this dissertation will examine the effectiveness of the motifs, how they belong to the work and how their meaning is acquired and subsequently used. In essence, how is a German-romantic compositional device employed in a galaxy far, far way?

Theorists and musicologists have asked what particular musical works mean, what particular musical objects represent, what they narrate or disclose, and how those meanings got there. Recently, some thinkers have jettisoned music-language parallels in favor of investigating music’s ineffability, its sensuous effects, and the materialities of its performances. However, both routes of inquiry, whether sympathetic to the music-language analogy or not, rest on assumptions about the concept of meaning itself. Both typically ground the music-language analogy in the semantic aspects of language meaning—how language repressents, refers to, or discloses the world. If meaning and semantic representation are conflated, music’s efficacy—which exceeds its representational modalities—becomes, dissatisfyingly, the other of its meanings.

This project challenges the status of representation in conceptions of the music-language analogy, developing an alternative foundation for understanding musical meaning from philosopher J. L. Austin’s concept of “performative utterances.” Austin and other thinkers in a tradition now called “ordinary language philosophy” rejected the view that language meaning is chiefly a matter of how it represents states of affairs or states of mind—its constative dimension. The performative dimension of language, however, names the ways words and sentences are used to accomplish semiotic actions and produce effects. This concept grounds language meaning in the efficacy of language use in social praxis. In Chapter 1, I develop an analogous theory of musical meaning, grounded in the semiotic actions and effects produced by music as utterance. Music is often said to be, if anything, expressive; but expression—strictly speaking, the mapping of inner content to outer signifying form—is a weak conceptual basis for what we think of when describe music as expressive. Instead, conceiving of music’s meaningfulness in terms of its efficacy as sonic utterance supplies the condition of possibility for musical expression, reference, and disclosure while also eliminating the false dichotomy between music’s meanings and its effects.

In Chapters 2 through 4, drawing on fieldwork at European festivals of new music including the Darmstadt Summer Courses and Donaueschinger Musiktage, I explore works by four living composers and sound artists: Michael Beil, Peter Ablinger, Stefan Prins, and Ashley Fure. These works exemplify what I call an aesthetics of efficacy, and their meanings centrally involve the performance of communicative actions such as: the incitement of particular modes of listening, the construction of narrative identities, and the enactment of changed attitudes through musical sound and story. For instance, Ashley Fure’s The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects (2016) is a musical engagement with the problems of the Anthropocene. Through the lens of performative utterance, I characterize it as an ecocritical intervention. Fure’s work creates an abstract narrative that seeks to bring out a sense of the vibrancy and animacy of the non-human objects that star in the piece: vibrating speaker cones, percussion instruments, and elements of the mise-en-scène. Fure aims to incite listeners to leave the concert space with stronger senses of empathy and productive anxiety towards the vibrational events of the Anthropocene, including fracking-induced earthquakes or the calving of glaciers into warming oceans. The encouragement of empathies and incitement of anxieties towards the planetary ecosystem are highly salient aspects of the piece’s meaning, and these are, fundamentally, semiotic actions performed by musical sound.

To fully probe performative utterance and understand its value for musical study, we must expand beyond the study of art music to investigate music in contemporary social life. Like scholars who have used Austin’s work to investigate the injurious efficacy of hate speech, I turn to examine the ethico-political stakes of the performative utterance concept, theorizing music’s potential to become injurious utterance. In Chapter 5, I critique tendencies to frame discussions concerning music as violence in materialist terms, and expose some shortcomings of this materialist, vibrational model. In Chapter 6, I conduct an observational cyber-ethnography of web forums for adult entertainers and their patrons, showing how both groups discuss strip club music’s capacity to elicit erotic dance and facilitate forms of sex work that take place in adult entertainment establishments. I argue that, for victims trafficked into strip clubs, music’s efficacy surpasses its prompting and facilitating functions, becoming the semiotic enactment of sexual violence. Music functions contextually to induce behaviors that promote precarity and rob victims of sexual agency, prompting striptease and lap dances as well as the forced solicitation of commercial sex within grossly uneven power differentials. The final chapters offer a corrective to the admittedly attractive view that music is inherently personally and socially therapeutic, arguing that such thinking is ideological and politically inefficacious.