Handbook of Semiotics

Music

Music The semiotics of music raises the question whether sounds can be studied as signs, compositions as messages, and music as a semiotic system. The answers have been controversial. Although some have rejected the concept of a musical sign (Benveniste 1969: 238), many scholars have accepted music as an object of semiotic study. Nevertheless, some have defined music as asemantic (Ruwet 1975: 33, Faltin 1985: 72), whereas others have characterized it as asemiotic (Benveniste 1969: 236). But the difference between these evaluations is in part one of terminology. 1. Survey of the Semiotics of Music Traditional aesthetics and musicology have already raised the implicitly semiotic question about meaning in music, often under the metaphorical heading of the "language of music," but an explicitly semiotic theory of music has developed only since the early 1970s. Its beginning was an interdisciplinary dialogue between linguists and musicologists. 1.1 The State of the Art The dialogue between linguists and musicologists began with a contribution by Jakobson (1932) and was resumed by Springer (1956), Nettl (1958), Bright (1963), Harweg (1968), Koch (1971b: 283-95), and Bierwisch (1979). While these contributions discussed analogies between signs and systems in language and in music, the linguist Ruwet (1972~ 1975) turned to analogies between poetics and music. "What is the semiotics of music?" was first asked explicitly in articles by Nattiez (1973b) and Kneif (1974). Special issues of journals such as Musique en jeu 5 (1971), 10 (1973), 12 (1973), 17 (1975), Degres 18 (1978), Bulletin du groupe de recherches semio-linguistiques 28 (1983), Semiotica 66.1/3 (1987), and Zeitschrift fur Semiotik 9.3/4 (1987) and conference proceedings (cf. Stefani 1975) testify to an increasing interest in the new field of research. Nattiez (1975) became the main proponent of the semiotics of music, followed by Stefani (1976), Martin (1978), Schneider (1980), and Faltin (1985). General surveys are also given by Nattiez (1973c), Molino (1975), Keiler (1981), Orlov (1981), Tarasti (1986), and Tarasti et al. (1987). 1.2 Trends in the Semiotics of Music Approaches to the semiotics of music have been developed by various schools and tendencies of semiotics. Linguistic structuralism is the starting point of many of these approaches (e.g., Firca 1972). Nattiez (1973d) distinguishes three structuralist models underlying 1. SURVEY OF THE SEMIOTICS OF MUSIC • 429 the major semIotic approaches to music, Prague School functionalism (see also Jiranek 1975), distributionalism (including LeviStrauss 's text structuralism), and generative grammar (cf. Structuralism 1.-2.). Further approaches to the semiotics of music have been based on Morris (cf. Coker 1972, Boiles 1973), Peirce, and Greimas (cf. Tarasti 1982) and on mathematical linguistics (Cazimir 1976). Several contributions are by Barthes (1985b: 245312 ). Precursors of the explicit semiotics of music are studies based on communication and information theory (e.g., Moles 1958, Meyer-Eppler 1962). 1.3 Semiotics and Semiography Nattiez (1973b) distinguishes two branches within the semiotics of music concerned with different types of signs. The first and major branch, to which this chapter will be restricted , studies music as an acoustic system of signs. The second branch studies the systems of musical notation, which consist of graphic signs representing acoustic signs. For the semiography of music see also Moutard (1974) and Goschl (1980). 1.4 Excursus: Opera and Ballet The semiotics of opera and ballet, situated between the study of music and of theater, requires taking into account additional dimensions of semiotic research such as gestures , facial expressions (Scotto di Carlo 1973), kinesics, myth, and narrativity (Tarasti 1979). For the semiotics of opera see Noske (1977). For preliminaries to a semiotics of ballet , see Koch (1971b: 263-82) and Shapiro (1981). 2. The Musical Sign The question about meaning in music (Coker 1972) and the search for the musical symbol (Epperson 1967) have been of concern to mu430 • MUSIC sicology and aesthetics (Langer 1942) for a long time. Gatz distinguished two major trends in the aesthetics of music according to the answers given to this question (1929: 11-13): The first is the aesthetics of heteronomy. It interprets music as an expression of extramusical content. The second is the aesthetics of autonomy . It prefers to define music as a phenomenon sui generis, without any semantic dimension. The assumption of meaning in music necessarily implies the acceptance of a musical sign. Some have argued that the aesthetics of autonomy refutes the existence of such a sign (cf. Nattiez 1977: 124), but in terms of a concept developed within semiotic aesthetics, music has been interpreted as an autonomous...