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.

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.

An award-winning account of the importance of semiotic play in Classic instrumental music, including that of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven 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 fact. In Playing with Signs, Kofi Agawu 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 fruitful avenues for further research into musical semiotics, aesthetics, and Classicism.

"Since [Tarasti's] is unquestionably the most fully developed narrative theory in the literature, this book is an important landmark . . . " —Music & Letters Eero Tarasti advances a semiotic theory of music based on information provided by the history of Western music and by various sign theories. A Theory of Musical Semiotics provides a model for the semiotic analysis of both musical structure and semantics. It introduces English-language readers to musical narratology, which has been largely the province of European researchers.

Transdisciplinary and intermedial analysis of the experience of music Nowadays musical semiotics no longer ignores the fundamental challenges raised by cognitive sciences, ethology, or linguistics. Creation, action and experience play an increasing role in how we understand music, a sounding structure impinging upon our body, our mind, and the world we live in. Not discarding music as a closed system, an integral experience of music demands a transdisciplinary dialogue with other domains as well. Music, Analysis, Experience brings together contributions by semioticians, performers, and scholars from cognitive sciences, philosophy, and cultural studies, and deals with these fundamental questionings. Transdisciplinary and intermedial approaches to music meet musicologically oriented contributions to classical music, pop music, South American song, opera, narratology, and philosophy. ContributorsPaulo Chagas (University of California, Riverside), Isaac and Zelia Chueke (Universidade Federal do Paraná, OMF/Paris-Sorbonne), Maurizio Corbella (Università degli Studi di Milano), Ian Cross (University of Cambridge), Paulo F. de Castro (CESEM/Departamento de Ciências Musicais; FCSH Universidade Nova de Lisboa), Robert S. Hatten (University of Texas at Austin), David Huron (School of Music, Ohio State University), Jamie Liddle (The Open University), Gabriele Marino (University of Turin), Dario Martinelli (Kaunas University of Technology; International Semiotics Institute), Nicolas Marty (Université Paris-Sorbonne), Maarten Nellestijn (Utrecht University), Małgorzata Pawłowska (Academy of Music in Krakow), Mônica Pedrosa de Pádua (Federal University of Minas Gerais, UFMG), Piotr Podlipniak (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan), Rebecca Thumpston (Keele University), Mieczysław Tomaszewski (Academy of Music in Krakow), Lea Maria Lucas Wierød (Aarhus University), Lawrence M. Zbikowski (University of Chicago)

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

Musical signification has been implicitly discussed for a long time in work on music. Only recently has it been established as an explicit discipline, focusing mainly on sense-making as a major constituent of signification and meaning. A number of questions are still pending. How does one deal with the tensions between an object-centered approach to music and a subjective, cognitive, and hermeneutic approach to musical sense-making? Is there a distinction in content and methodology? How can the objective and the subjective, the art-work and the receiver, the immanent meaning and the attributed meaning be brought together? Making Sense of Music is an attempt to answer these questions through the insights of several diverging fields. Revolving around the central concept of musical sense-making, this volume includes 31 contributions of scholars from 18 countries, which encompass semiotic musical analysis and phenomenological, hermeneutic, and/or cognitive approaches.