See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/323404142

Making sense of music. Studies in musical semiotics.

Book · February 2018

CITATIONS READS

0 2,817

2 authors:

Mark Reybrouck Costantino Maeder

KU Leuven and Ghent University Université Catholique de Louvain - UCLouvain
94 PUBLICATIONS   973 CITATIONS    125 PUBLICATIONS   55 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Muziek en wiskunde View project

Frontiers Research topic: Music and the Functions of the Brain: Arousal, Emotions, and Pleasure View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Mark Reybrouck on 27 February 2018.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

 Making sense
The topic of musical signification has been implicit for a long time in
writings on music. Only lately it has established itself as an explicit

of music
discipline, focusing mainly on sense-making as a major constituent

Making sense of music. Studies in musical semiotics

of signification and meaning. Several questions are still pending. Can
we 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 contents and meth-
odology? Can we bring together the objective and the subjective, the
Studies in musical semiotics
artwork and the receiver, the immanent meaning and the attributed
meaning? MAKING SENSE OF MUSIC is an attempt to answer these
questions by bringing together insights from several diverging fields:
Revolving around the central concept of musical sense-making, it
includes 31 contributions from scholars from 18 countries, which
encompass semiotic musical analysis and phenomenological, her-
meneutic, and/or cognitive approaches.

Costantino Maeder is ordinary professor in Italian literature and

linguistics at the Université catholique de Louvain. His interests are
focused on interdisciplinary research that combines semiotics, prag-
matics, cognitive sciences, and cultural studies.

Mark Reybrouck is emeritus professor of music at the University of

Costantino Maeder & Mark Reybrouck (eds)

Leuven. His research interests are interdisciplinary and bring together
insights from psychology, biology, semiotics and music.

Texts are drifting entities through time and space.

Texts are ephemeral vestiges of impenetrable cultural processes.
Texts defy the growing fragmentation of the World Wide Web of
words, sounds, images, and videos.
Costantino Maeder & Mark Reybrouck (eds)
Texts stay afloat on this multiverse ocean of virtuality that marks
this new Renaissance, as rejects or witnesses.
« Floating texts » aims at offering some new theoretical insights
about texts and their working in an ever-evolving global universe.

95916 XXXX €
Making Sense of Music
2
Making Sense of Music
Studies in Musical Semiotics

Costantino Maeder & Mark Reybrouck

3
This publication was made possible through the support provided by the Centro di studi italiani (CEIT)
and GLOBALIT, Université catholique de Louvain, and the Musicology research group of the KU Leuven–
University of Leuven.

We want to express our gratitude to the many colleagues and collaborators who have helped us in the
preparation of this book, in first line Emmanuelle Fantoni and Mathilde Flumian.

Many thanks as well to Sonia Henrot and Nathalie Coisman for their administrative and organisatorial
help.

© Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2017

Registration of copyright: D/2017/9964/60
ISBN: 978-2-87558-640-7
ISBN PDF version: 978-2-87558-641-4
Printed in Belgium by CIACO scrl – printer number: 95380
Printed in Belgium
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, adapted or translated, in any form or by any
means, in any country, without the prior permission of
Presses universitaires de Louvain

Graphic design: Marie-Hélène Grégoire

Distribution: www.i6doc.com, on-line university publishers

Available on order from bookshops or at

Diffusion universitaire CIACO (University Distributors)

Grand-Rue, 2/14
1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
Tel: +32 10 47 33 78
Fax: +32 10 45 73 50
duc@ciaco.com

Distributor in France:
Librairie Wallonie-Bruxelles
46 rue Quincampoix
75004 Paris, France
Tel: +33 1 42 71 58 03
Fax: +33 1 42 71 58 09
librairie.wb@orange.fr

4
 Table of contents

Introduction
Mark Reybrouck and Costantino Maeder—Making sense of music.........................7

1- Classical music ………………………………………………………….. 13

James William Sobaskie—Allusion as premise. Two mélodies of Fauré ............... 15
Tijana Popović Mladjenović—Structure, sense, and meaning of Debussy’s La Puerta
del Vino. Interpreting the self through music ........................................................ 27
Rui Magno Pinto—The Portuguese symphonic poem (1884–1909) ...................... 41
Jean Marie Hellner—Robert Schumann’s Drei Romanzen, op. 28. An Entwicklungs-
roman................................................................................................................. 63
Matteo Giuggioli—A grammar of pathos. Fandango as a topos in Boccherini’s cham-
ber music............................................................................................................ 77
Małgorzata Gamrat—Between the sound and the word: methodological challenges in
the analysis of Liszt’s piano transcriptions of his own Lieder ............................... 89
Francesco Galofaro—The different musical semiotic systems in Domenico Zipoli’s
Sonate d’Intavolatura per Organo (1716) .......................................................... 105
Damjana Bratuž—Bartók’s improvisations for piano. A musical frontier ............ 115
Julie Walker—La Polonaise op. 53 comme manifeste du dernier style de Chopin.
Contexte et analyse narrative............................................................................. 127

2- Contemporary classical music............................................................... 137

Luciano de Freitas Camargo—The zavod topic .................................................. 139
Justyna Humięcka-Jakubowska—Musical representations in the context of music in-
formation retrieval and some ideas of the Darmstadt school composers .............. 153
Yves Knockaert—The meaning of repetition in Wolfgang Rihm’s music of the 1980s
........................................................................................................................ 167

3- Folk and ethno…………………………………………………………. 179

Julia Shpinitskaya—The universe of sound. A comparative study of the vibration
sound in cultural traditions: variations without theme......................................... 181
Heloísa de A. Duarte Valente—“Una musica dolce suonava…” Memory and nomad-
ism in the Italian-Brazilian song ........................................................................ 195
Ricardo Nogueira De Castro Monteiro—A semiotic approach to Native-Brazilian
music. Challenges and possible contributions..................................................... 205
 4- Opera, songs…………………………………………………………… 219
Jean-Marie Jacono—Sémiotique, interprétation et mise en scène de l’opéra ........ 221
Johan Wijnants—Musical signification in (the first decade of) opera................... 231
Paolo Rosato—Sense-making in opera: a stratified dialectic among linguistic, per-
ceptive, and cognitive processes. Some examples from Verdi’s works ................ 243
Icíar Nadal García—An analysis of the ironies and other comical resources in the
Gianni Schicchi opera of G. Puccini .................................................................. 253

5- Theory…………………………………………………………………. 265
Konstantin Zenkin—Composition technique among the semiotic systems of a piece
of music ........................................................................................................... 267
Robert Michael Weiß—Musical clock face value. Geometrical metaphors for musical
properties ......................................................................................................... 277
Stefano Jacoviello—It is a matter of style. Language, grammar, style and meaning
between semiotics and musicology .................................................................... 291
Panu Heimonen—From a conversational point of view. Enhancing music analytic
meaning ........................................................................................................... 303

6- Education………………………………………………………………. 315
Alessia R. Vitale—The semiotics of gestures in learning how to sing. Dynamics and
prospects .......................................................................................................... 317
May Kokkidou & Christina Tsigka—In search of musical meaning. Looking for
answers by the standpoint of music education .................................................... 329
Mary Dawood—The Cartons Piano at the national library of France. Rediscovering
forgotten music................................................................................................. 343

7- Transmediality………………………………………………………… 353
Kevin Clifton—Sound and semiotics in Hitchcock’s coming attraction: locating and
unraveling meaning in Rope’s movie trailer ....................................................... 355
Zhenglan Lu—Transsemiosic paradox in film music. Red music in chinese films on
the cultural revolution ....................................................................................... 363
Alessandro Bratus—More real than the real thing. The construction of authenticity in
popular music recordings and audiovisual texts.................................................. 373
Nicholas P. McKay—Stravinsky’s opera in a postmodern age. An intermedial
semiotic reading ............................................................................................... 385
Daniel Nagy—Myth creation and intertextuality after Wagner. The Ring cycle and
Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his brothers. ......................................................... 401

6
 Making sense of music

Mark Reybrouck, KU Leuven–University of Leuven

Costantino Maeder, Université catholique de Louvain

For a long time, the idea that music signifies has been implicit in writings on music,
but only in the last decades has research on musical signification established itself as
a discipline. This is evidenced by the exponential growth of writings on music, signi-
fication and meaning, and confirmed by the seminal research association which gath-
ers researchers from all over the world: the “Project on Musical Signification”
founded by Eero Tarasti in 1985. Signification and meaning, however, do not tally
with sense-making. The latter implies an active involvement of the sense maker, while
the concepts of signification and meaning tend to be immanent to the music object or
artwork.
In many semiotic, object-oriented, structuralist frameworks, musical sense-mak-
ing was often sidestepped, neglected or ignored. Its integration must be accordingly
situated in the broader context of musicology, pragmasemiotics and neurosemiotics.
This broader look will allow for the reassessment of major questions which are still
not entirely resolved, such as the tension between music as structure and music as
aesthetic experience.
Focusing on sense-making implies that researchers have to rethink what musical
semiotics is, but also its relation to musicology as a discipline: is there some common
ground or should we deal with a tension between an object-centered approach to music
as opposed to a subjective and hermeneutical approach to musical sense-making? Is
there a distinction in content and methodology or is it possible to conceive a broader
framework that brings together the objective and the subjective, the artwork and the
receiver, the immanent meaning and the attributed meaning? These introductory ques-
tions suggest that musical semiotics needs to open up to cognitive sciences, neurosci-
ences, psychology and other related fields, probably providing the glue that brings
together all those diverging fields of investigation.
Musical semiotics, as an autonomous area of inquiry, is a rather young field of
research. As a discipline, it is still in continuous development (Agawu, 1991; Hatten,
2004; Maeder & Reybrouck, 2015, 2016; Nattiez, 1990; Sheinberg, 2012; Tagg, 2013;
Tarasti, 1994, 1996, 2002, 2003) and it is still positioning itself in the broader context
of musicology as well as semiotics. The relation with musicology, in particular, is not
yet entirely clear. Being itself a rather young discipline, musicology was established
as an academic discipline around the second half of the 19th century. Adler’s well-
known essay on the scope, method and aim of the “science of music”—Musikwissen-
schaft—has been seminal in this regard (Adler, 1885). Though he proposed a division
in three sub-disciplines, namely historical, systematic and comparative musicology, it
Making sense of music.

became quite obvious that the historic branch would receive the bulk of attention. The
systematic approach, on the other hand, was conceived as a joint discipline that com-
prises both systematic and comparative aspects to study the organization of musical
structures in a transdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach (see Schneider, 2008;
2008b). Both terms, moreover, designate a specific and effective approach: the sys-
tematic approach stands for a sophisticated, thought-out and well-organized procedure
of thinking as opposed to arbitrary, inconsistent access to observations; the compara-
tive approach makes it possible to order objects, structures and elements in relation to
each other by studying them systematically with regard to their distinctive features.
Classifications, in the comparative approach, are based on categories of identity, dif-
ference and variety (Elschek, 2008).
Though the three approaches were conceived originally as equal parts of a broader
framework—Adler’s system was meant as a universal model that encompassed both
existing and established fields of research as well as fields that were only envi-
sioned—, the historic and systematic branch evolved in different directions, due partly
to their different methodology. The historic methodology, in fact, relies mainly on
philological skills, descriptions, musical analysis, hermeneutic understanding and in-
terpretation; the systematic methodology instead relies on measurement, experiment
or empirical investigations, data analysis, statistics and modelling. The two disci-
plines, therefore, have different orientations which can be termed either as historical-
philological-hermeneutic or scientific-experimental-comparative (Schneider, 2008b).
It is tempting to subsume the field of musical semiotics under one of those two
branches. In the early days of systematic musicology, musical semiotics had its place
within this discipline, and the systematic approach is still present in the structurally
oriented approach to musical analysis. Yet there have been other developments that
are more related to the philological-philological-hermeneutic approach as well. Mu-
sical semiotics, in fact, has its own disciplinary history, revolving around concepts,
aims, scope and methodology. As such, it is still in a continuous search for positioning
itself within both the broader disciplines of semiotics and musicology.
Semiotics, as a scientific discipline, has a long tradition as “science of signs”. It is
difficult, however, to provide a general definition of the field. Three major descrip-
tions have been proposed to describe its content and methodology: semiotics as the
science of signs and communication systems, semiotics as the descriptive science that
leans upon linguistic methodology, and semiotics simply as scientific description
(Nattiez, 1973). The linguistic approach has received the most attention with a strong
impetus stemming from French structuralism. This approach has been challenged,
however, for not having taken sufficiently into account the role of the sign user in the
process of sense-making. Semiotics thus had to broaden its approach from a dyadic
(the distinction between signifier and signified) to a triadic approach by encompassing
also the role of the interpreting mind. This had been emphasized already within the
fields of analytical philosophy, action theory, general systems theory and the semiotic
tradition of Peirce and Morris, which stressed the dynamic relationship between three
levels of semiotic reference, namely the material sign vehicle, the object it refers to

8
 Mark Reybrouck and Costantino Maeder––Introduction

and the final interpretation by the sign user. A most interesting attempt to broaden the
field has been also initiated by Morris’ division of semiotics in three dimensions: syn-
tactics, semantics and pragmatics (Morris, 1975 [1938]).
Musical semiotics has capitalized on this distinction, with the bulk of contributions
being related to the syntactic level of analysis. Scholars such as Molino (1975), Nattiez
(1990) and Ruwet (1975) have been exponents of this approach, with a focus on tax-
onomic-empirical research, in an attempt to select and identify classes of sounds by
arranging them in terms of similarity and difference. This is basically an approach
“from text to code”, i.e. an inductive-heuristic approach that tries to infer general rules
from particular instances. There have been contributions in the field of musical se-
mantics as well (Laske, 1973; Kühl, 2007; Reybrouck, 2013) with a major distinction
between musical meaning as referring to something outside of the music (the field of
external or real semantics) or as referring merely to itself (the field of internal or self-
referential semantics). The distinction is still a subject of discussion and there is a
considerable overlap between the syntactic level and the level of self-referential se-
mantics. The most challenging dimension, however, is the pragmatic level of musical
sense-making. It investigates the relations between sign vehicles, their users and the
processes that are involved in the interpretation of the signs. This means that meaning
cannot be defined merely in terms of ontological categories, but rather in terms of
dispositions to react to stimuli. Semiotics, in fact, has recently seen a paradigm shift.
Starting from an initial opposition between the continental tradition of semiotics with
a principal orientation to the schools of de Saussure and Hjelmslev and the Anglo-
Saxon tradition which was oriented primarily to the theoretical framework of Peirce,
there have been signs of a growing rapprochement between both orientations as the
result of the pragmatic turn in philosophy (Bernstein, 2010; Parret, 1983; Rorty,
1982). This has been obvious in the case of music and the performing arts, analyzed
and scrutinized as a performative process, a historical-cultural phenomenon or a cul-
tural aesthetic practice. Music, in this view, can be considered as a spectacular phe-
nomenon with multiple dimensions which can be studied in its intermedial and trans-
medial dimension (Helbo et al., 2011; Maeder & Reybrouck, 2015, 2016).
As such, it is possible to investigate the history of musical semiotics in its relation
to traditional musicology. The domain, however, is still in full development and must,
to some extent, even still come of age. There are, in fact, multiple new developments
which are related to the phenomenon of musical experience (Maeder & Reybrouck,
2015) and the role of embodiment and emotions as related to music (Reybrouck &
Eerola, 2017; Schiavio et al., 2016). Much is to be expected here from recent devel-
opments in fields such as biosemiotics and neuropragmatics. There is, however, a dis-
tinction between the aims and scope as intended in theoretical and programmatic con-
tributions and the actual research as it is conducted nowadays all over the world.
The present edited volume is an example of this claim. It assembles 31 contribu-
tions from 18 countries, not only from Europe, but as well from the USA, Canada,
South America, Russia and China. They were presented at the Twelfth Congress of
the International Project on Musical Signification, whose main aim is to foster a better

9
Making sense of music.

and comprehensive understanding of how music works semiotically. The book is or-
ganized in seven chapters with some of the papers reflecting on concepts and methods
from a rather broad perspective whereas others report on actual research and its find-
ings. They have as a common ground a search for musical sense-making and signifi-
cation and are illustrative of the breadth and scope of musical semiotics today. As
such, they encompass traditional musical analysis but in the broader context of struc-
tural, phenomenological or hermeneutical approaches. Many papers are related to
classical music, to contemporary classical music, to folk and ethno, opera and songs.
Other papers deal with broader claims and are concerned with music theory, education
and transmediality.
The first two chapters start with a collection of essays that rely on a more struc-
turalist-analytical semiotic approach to music. The first gathers essays on classical
music. The authors delve deeply into the analytical paradigms and rely heavily on the
study of the score. These contributions embrace musical works by individual compos-
ers as Fauré, Debussy, Schumann, Boccherini, Liszt, Zipoli, Bartók and Chopin as
well as more general stylistic genres such as the Portuguese symphonic poems. The
second chapter focusses on contemporary classical music. The first paper deals with
the representation of noises produced by machines as exemplified in the Zavod topic
of socialist realism. The second is oriented towards the interdisciplinary field of music
information retrieval. It provides insights from musicology and computer science, and
investigates musical questions related to computational approaches such as automated
analysis of music by the Darmstadt school composers. The third paper investigates
the role of repetition in the music by Rihm and tries to give a new meaning to this
phenomenon by defining it as an element of questioning rather than as a confirmation.
The third chapter, about folk and ethno, naturally opens up to new fields: sense-
making as such is key to the understanding of these forms of music. The first contri-
bution provides a comparative study of the universe of sound with examples of vibra-
tion sound in diverse cultural traditions. The second contribution is about memory and
nomadism in Italian-Brazilian song, and the third one is a methodological and episte-
mological exercise of approaching a non-Western cultural environment, focusing on
native-Brazilian music. It questions the possible contributions of semiotics to the
study of cultural heritage, also encompassing the anthropological studies regarding
myth and music.
The fourth chapter is about opera, from the first decade of its origins (between
1600 and 1610) to the works of Verdi, Puccini and Mussorgsky. It raises the question
which distinguishing elements make a work of art into an opera, stressing a triadic
analytical description in terms of a musico-poetico-dramatic sign. It defines opera as
an intermedial object with a stratified dialectic among linguistic, perceptive and cog-
nitive processes. It provides an analysis of different musical comical forms such as
grotesque, satire, irony, parody, mimic, etc., and it investigates the function of scenic
representation.
The fifth chapter addresses several theoretical issues. It deals with semiotic sys-
tems of a piece of music, recalling precompositional techniques as orally transmitted

10
 Mark Reybrouck and Costantino Maeder––Introduction

pre-images of the music. It considers the possibility of using visual metaphors to pro-
vide deeper insights in musical structures. It investigates the relationship between lan-
guage, musical grammar and style. It questions the conversational approach to musi-
cal meaning by bringing together existential semiotics and the analysis of conversa-
tion.
The sixth chapter covers musical education. It describes the role of gestures in
learning how to sing both as a clinical method and from a phenomenological ap-
proach. It investigates the musician’s perception of the meaning of music by bringing
together the fields of aesthetics, musicology, cognitive science, neuroscience, music
psychology and music education. Moreover, it provides a means for rediscovering
forgotten music.
The seventh chapter, finally, is about transmediality. It describes the relationship
between sound and semiotics and the transsemiotic paradox in film music. It investi-
gates the construction of authenticity in popular recordings and audiovisual texts. It
points to the possibility of intersemiotic translation of sonic music into literary poetry
or vice versa. And it provides an example of intertextuality on the basis of myth and
mythopoeia.

References
Adler, G. (1885). Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft. Viertel-
jahrschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 1, 5-20.
Agawu, K. (1991). Playing with signs. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University
Press.
Bernstein, R. (2010). The pragmatic turn. Cambridge: Polity.
Elschek, O. (2008). Systematic Musicology—anachronism or challenge? A perspec-
tive on disciplinary and scientific developments. In Schneider, A. (Ed.), System-
atic and Comparative Musicology: Concepts, Methods, Findings (pp. 63–88).
Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Hatten, R.S. (2004) Four semiotic approaches to musical meaning: markedness, top-
ics, tropes and gesture. Musicological annual, XXXXI(1), 5–30.
Helbo, A., Bouko, C., & Verlinden, E. (2011). Performance et savoirs. Brussels: De
Boeck.
Kühl, O. (2007). Musical semantics. Bern, Oxford: Peter Lang.
Laske, O. (1973). Musical semantics: a procedural point of view. Computer music
association reports. San Francisco, California: Computer Music Association.
Maeder, C & Reybrouck, M. (2015). Music, Analysis, Experience. New Perspectives
in Musical Semiotics. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Maeder, C. & Reybrouck, M. (Eds.) (2016). Sémiotique et vécu musical. Du sens à
l’expérience, de l’expérience au sens. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
Molino, J. (1975). Fait musical et sémiologie de la musique. Musique en jeu, 17, 37–
62.

11
 Making sense of music.

Morris, C. (1975 [1938]). Foundations of the Theory of Signs, Vol.1, nr.2, Chicago &
London: University of Chicago Press.
Nattiez, J.-J. (1973). Linguistics: a new approach for musical analysis? International
Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 4(1): 51–68.
Nattiez, J.-J. (1990). Music and Discourse. Toward a Semiology of Music. Princeton
(N.J.): Princeton University Press
Parret, H. (1983). Semiotics and pragmatics: an evaluative comparison of conceptual
frameworks. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Reybrouck, M. (2009). An experiential approach to musical semantics: deixis, deno-
tation and cognitive maps. In J. Deely & L. Sbrocchi (eds.), Semiotics 2008 (pp.
806–818). Ottawa: Legas.
Reybrouck, M. (2013). From sound to music: an evolutionary approach to musical
semantics. Biosemiotics, 6, 585–606.
Rorty, R. (1982). Consequences of pragmatism: essays, 1972–1980. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Ruwet, N. (1975). Théorie et méthodes dans les études musicales: Quelques re-
marques rétrospectives et préliminaires. Musique en jeu, 17, 11–36.
Schiavio, A., van der Schyff, D., Cespedes-Guevara, J. & Reybrouck, M. (2017). En-
acting musical emotions. Sense-making, dynamic systems, and the embodied
mind. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 16(5), 785–809.
Schneider, A. (Ed.) (2008a). Foundations of Systematic Musicology: a study in his-
tory and theory. In Schneider, A. (Ed.), Systematic and Comparative Musicol-
ogy: Concepts, Methods, Findings (pp. 11–61). Frankfurt a. M.: Peter Lang.
Schneider, A. (Ed.) (2008b). Introduction. In Schneider, A. (Ed.) (2008), Systematic
and Comparative Musicology: Concepts, Methods, Findings (pp. 7–10). Frank-
furt am Main: Peter Lang.
Sheinberg, E. (Ed.). (2012). Music Semiotics: A Network of Significations in Honour
and Memory of Raymond Monelle. Farnham: Ashgate.
Tagg, P. (2013). Music’s meanings. A modern musicology for non-musos. New York
& Huddersfield: The Mass Media Music Scholars’s Press.
Tarasti, E. (1994). A Theory of Musical Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Tarasti, E., Forsell, P. & Littlefield, R. (Eds.) (1996). Musical Semiotics in Growth.
Imatra—Bloomington: Indiana University Press—International Semiotics Insti-
tute.
Tarasti, E. (2002). Signs of Music: A Guide to Musical Semiotics. Berlin—New York:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Tarasti, E. (Ed.) (2003). Musical Semiotics Revisited. Acta Semiotica Fennica XV.
Imatra: International Semiotics Institute.
Tarasti, E. (Ed.) (2006). Music and the Arts. Proceedings from ICMS7. Acta Semiotica
Fennica XXIII—Approaches to Musical Semiotics 10. Imatra: International Se-
miotics Institute.

12

View publication stats