Semiotics

What it means

Semiotics is the study of signs and their meaning. Applied to music, it asks in what sense music means something and how this meaning comes about — whether through similarity, through reference, or through mere convention. Within musicology it is one direction among several, not a uniform procedure.

Musical use

Several levels are to be distinguished. Musical notation is a sign system in the narrower sense: signs stand, by convention, for pitches, durations, and manners of playing, and whoever does not know the convention can read nothing. The semiology of Gregorian chant specifically examines what the additional signs of the oldest neume manuscripts say about performance.

To be separated from this is the question of the meaning of the sounding thing itself. Some of it rests on similarity — tone-painting imitates birdcalls, waves, or steps. Some on reference: horn fifths evoke the idea of hunting and forest, because the horn was at home there. And much rests on convention within a style: that minor is felt as dark and major as bright is, according to cross-cultural studies, largely learned. The leitmotif and the idée fixe are special cases in which a musical theme explicitly stands for a person or an idea.

The limits of interpretation are to be taken seriously here: music does not mean in the way language means, and attributions often say more about the expectations of a period than about the piece.

Important representatives of musical semiotics include Jean-Jacques Nattiez, with Musicologie générale et sémiologie (1987; in English 1990 as Music and Discourse), and Eero Tarasti, with A Theory of Musical Semiotics (1994). Tarasti draws on general sign theory from Saussure through Peirce to Lotman and connects it with narratology. Another branch studies topics, that is, stylistic formulas such as horn call, dance, or chorale that point to extra-musical content.

Performance practice

Watch the references a piece evokes — dance forms, signal figures, chorale quotations, horn sounds — and shape them so that they become recognizable. Where a motif returns and designates something, make the re-entry audible. And be wary of interpretations that have no basis in the notated text; they do not help with playing.