The dawn of music semiology showcases the work of ten leading musicologists inspired by the work of Jean-Jacques Nattiez. Reflecting the energy and diversity of the young field of music semiology, chapters in this volume discuss music and gesture, the psychology of music, and the role of ethnotheory, and offer new research on topics as diverse as modeling folk polyphony, spatialization in the Darmstadt repertoire, Schenker's theory of musical content, and modernism from Wagner to Boulez.

Series statement on p. [4] of cover, paperback edition.

Bloomsbury Semiotics offers a state-of-the-art overview of the entire field of semiotics by revealing its influence on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. With four volumes spanning theory, method and practice across the disciplines, this definitive reference work emphasizes and strengthens common bonds shared across intellectual cultures, and facilitates the discovery and recovery of meaning across fields. It comprises: Volume 1: History and Semiosis Volume 2: Semiotics in the Natural and Technical Sciences Volume 3: Semiotics in the Arts and Social Sciences Volume 4: Semiotic Movements Written by leading international experts, the chapters provide comprehensive overviews of the history and status of semiotic inquiry across a diverse range of traditions and disciplines. Together, they highlight key contemporary developments and debates along with ongoing research priorities. Providing the most comprehensive and united overview of the field, Bloomsbury Semiotics enables anyone, from students to seasoned practitioners, to better understand and benefit from semiotic insight and how it relates to their own area of study or research. Volume 3: Semiotics in the Arts and Social Sciences presents the state-of-the art in semiotic approaches to disciplines ranging from philosophy and anthropology to history and archaeology, from sociology and religious studies to music, dance, rhetoric, literature, and structural linguistics. Each chapter goes casts a vision for future research priorities, unanswered questions, and fresh openings for semiotic participation in these and related fields.

Of all the repertories of Western Art music, none is as explicitly listener-oriented as that of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet few attempts to analyze the so-called Classic Style have embraced the semiotic implications of this condition. Playing with Signs proposes a listener-oriented theory of Classic instrumental music that encompasses its two most fundamental communicative dimensions: expression and structure. Units of expression, defined in reference to topoi, are shown here to interact with, confront, and merge into units of structure, defined in terms of the rhetorical conventions of beginning, continuing, and ending. The book draws on examples from works by Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven to show that the explicitly referential, even theatrical, surface of Classic music derives from a play with signs. Although addressed primarily to readers interested in musical analysis, the book opens up fruitful avenues for further research into musical semiotics, aesthetics, and Classicism. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The question of whether music has meaning has been the subject of sustained debate ever since music became a subject of academic inquiry. Is music a language? Does it communicate specific ideas and emotions? What does music mean, and how does this meaning occur? Kofi Agawu's Music as Discourse has become a standard and definitive work in musical semiotics. Working at the nexus of musicology, ethnomusicology, and music philosophy and aesthetics, Agawu presents a synthetic and innovative approach to musical meaning which argues deftly for the thinking of music as a discourse in itself--composed not only of sequences of gestures, phrases, or progressions, but rather also of the very philosophical and linguistic props that enable the analytical formulations made about music as an object of study. The book provides extensive demonstration of the pertinence of a semiological approach to understanding the fully-freighted language of romantic music, stresses the importance of a generative approach to tonal understanding, and provides further insight into the analogy between music and language. Music as Discourse is an essential read for all who are interested in the theory, analysis and semiotics of music of the romantic period.

Here translated for the first time, Jean-Jacques Nattiez's widely hailed comparative guide to the techniques of music analysis focuses on a single vivid passage from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde.

The international research project on Musical Signification, since its founding over ten years ago, has sought to win new scholars to musical semiotics. To that end, the Department of Musicology at Helsinki University has already organized five international doctoral and postdoctoral seminars. They have become something of a tradition. The anthology consists of papers presented in the three first seminars covering areas from music philosophy and aesthetics to the analysis of vocal and instrumental as well as electro-acoustic music, interrelationships of arts, music history, post-modernism, etc.

In this collection of previously unpublished essays Jean-Jacques Nattiez applies his theoretical foundations of musical semiotics to theorists such as Lévi-Strauss, Hanslick, and Brailoiu; novelists such as Proust; and poets such as Baudelaire. The author treats problems which musicologists and music lovers alike need to address: the artistic product in music of oral tradition, the nature of musical facts, and questions of fidelity and authenticity in performance practice. Nattiez tackles these perennial issues with an originality born out of his focus on the status of time in the works considered. This approach allows him to take sides, sometimes in a provocative manner, in the ongoing debates which pit adherents of modernity against apologists of postmodernism.