scholarly journals Musical Semiotics – a Discipline, its History and Theories, Past and Present1

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 19-51
Author(s):  
Eero Tarasti
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Classical Style ◽  
Musical Semiotics

Musical semiotics begins from the premise that music is a signifying phenomenon. However, the field itself has developed according to two distinct paths. The first one starts by considering music and its history. In the study of classical music, for instance, it will begin by considering rhetoric and affect during the Baroque period and then move to consider the topics of the Classical style or the interartistic aspects of Romanticism. The other path consists instead of applying general semiotic theories to music. A more proper approach, I believe, lies somewhere in the middle : it ought to configure general semiotic concepts to the special or historical problems of music. In this essay I give examples from my own work borrowing methodology from the Paris School of Semiotics developed by Greimas and from my own Existential Semiotics model.

Expressive Microstructure in Music: A Preliminary Perceptual Assessment of Four Composers' "Pulses"

1989 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 243-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruno H. Repp
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
Random Order ◽  
Preliminary Test ◽  
The Other ◽  
Musical Experience ◽  
General Music ◽  
Cyclic Patterns ◽  
Computer Controlled ◽  
Perceptual Assessment ◽  
Essential Prerequisite

According to a provocative theory set forth by Manfred Clynes, there are composer-specific cyclic patterns of (unnotated) musical microstructure that, when discovered and realized by a performer, help to give the music its characteristic expressive quality. Clynes, relying mainly on his own judgment as an experienced musician, has derived such personal "pulses" for several famous composers by imposing time and amplitude perturbations on computer-controlled performances of classical music and modifying them until they converged on some optimal expression. To conduct a preliminary test of the general music lover's appreciation of such "pulsed" performances, two sets of piano pieces by Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert, one in quadruple and the other in triple meter, were selected for this study. Each piece was synthesized with each composer's pulse and also without any pulse. These different versions were presented in random order to listeners of varying musical sophistication for preference judgments relative to the unpulsed version. There were reliable changes in listeners' pulse preferences across different composers' pieces, which affirms one essential prerequisite of Clynes' theory. Moreover, in several instances the "correct" pulse was preferred most, which suggests not only that these pulse patterns indeed capture composer- specific qualities, but also that listeners without extensive musical experience can appreciate them. In other cases, however, listeners' preferences were not as expected, and possible causes for these deviations are discussed.

Memory Slip: Stage Fright and Performing Musicians

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 679-700 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Jaffee Nagel
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
Performance Anxiety ◽  
The Other ◽  
Stage Fright ◽  
Physical Injury ◽  
Developmental Issues

This paper discusses stage fright as seen primarily in classical music performers. A confluence of narcissistic sensitivities, developmental issues, shame dynamics, physical injury and pain, and terrors pertaining to both psychic and bodily disintegration can fuel anxiety reactions in many people but hold particular relevance for the performing musician. Two classical music performers who struggled with stage fright are discussed: one was in treatment with the author; the other is the author herself, reflecting on her own performance anxiety as revealed through her analysis and her countertransference to her patient.

Fission and Fusion: From improvisation to formalism in law and music

2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Desmond Manderson
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
The Other ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Textual Interpretation ◽  
The Relationship

Law and classical music are both performative disciplines. Both became concerned with practices of textual interpretation, and with questions of the authority of those texts and the legitimacy of those interpretations. But exactly how did that happen, and with what social consequences? The relationship between law and music across the centuries shows striking parallels and echoes. If we study them carefully each can illuminate the other, binding them together so that we can see them as two aspects of the same process and the same histories. The insights we gain from the novelty of their conjunction help us to understand these social changes better and differently. This conjunction will also help us see how much our disciplinary blinkers prevent us from observing the far-reaching social forces which these cultural practices at each moment both echo and animate.

BMA Narrative Archetypes

2021 ◽  
pp. 165-182
Author(s):  
Brent Auerbach
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
The Other ◽  
Musical Narrative ◽  
Musical Semiotics

Chapter 5.5 serves as the first of two Interludes addressing musical narrative. Following from the original proposition that motives must move and move readers, narrative is established as a necessary mechanism for structuring complete, meaningful analyses. The chapter first rehearses the argument that untexted music implicitly possesses narrative qualities. Evidentiary support is taken from seminal works both from literary theory (Propp, Frye, Liszka) and from the fields of musical semiotics and narrative (Nattiez, Hatten, McClary, Guck, Newcomb, Maus, Schmalfeldt, Almén, and Klein). The interlude continues by presenting four “archetypes” for organizing and animating (ascribing motion to) motivic findings. The first archetype, called BMA-1, communicates the progress of a single motive. The other three archetypes, all forms of BMA-2, model multiple motives or motivic elements in dialogue. The possible interactions are “Non-Engagement,” “Synthesis,” and “Triumph.” The BMA archetypes are demonstrated through discussion of works by Beethoven and Chopin.

Notation and identity in contemporary popular music

Popular Music ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 215-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Stith Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
The World ◽  
Long Term Changes ◽  
Western European ◽  
Rock N Roll

Popular music, like all manifestations of popular culture, lives on in spite of recurring criticisms that cast it as somehow inauthentic. In fact, defences against this discounting are built into popular music (for example, the Rolling Stones' classic: ‘It's only rock 'n' roll but I like it’) and built in, as well, to the identities of those who make the music a part of their lives, be they players, producers, consumers or critics. On the other hand, so-called classical music, not unlike other manifestations of Western European art culture, lives on in spite of popular music and provides the touchstone of authenticity that creates the defensive popular response. The ideas I am advancing here are intended to allow the players in this authenticity contest to be recognised as evidence of unique historical circumstances: recognised, that is, not only as stock dramatists of ethnocentrism, but as indicators of long-term changes in music cultures in all parts of the world.

scholarly journals Against Nature? or, Confessions of a Darwinian Modernist

2014 ◽  
Vol 75 ◽  
pp. 151-182
Author(s):  
Murray Smith
Keyword(s):  
Final Section ◽  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
Musical Expression ◽  
Musical Sound ◽  
Musical Sounds ◽  
Western Classical Music ◽  
The Way

A few years ago I gave a paper on the aesthetics of ‘noise,’ that is, on the ways in which non-musical sounds can be given aesthetic shape and structure, and thereby form the basis of significant aesthetic experience. Along the way I made reference to Arnold Schoenberg's musical theory, in particular his notion ofKlangfarbenmelodie, literally ‘sound colour melody,’ or musical form based on timbre or tonal colour rather than on melody, harmony or rhythm. Schoenberg articulated his ideas aboutKlangfarbenmelodiein the final section of hisHarmonielehre(1911). ‘Pitch is nothing else but tone colour measured in one direction,’ wrote Schoenberg. ‘Now, if it is possible to create patterns out of tone colours that are differentiated according to pitch, patterns we call ‘melodies’…then it must also be possible to make such progressions out of the tone colours of the other dimension, out of that which we simply call “tone colour.”’ In other words, traditional melodies work by abstracting and structuring the dominant pitch characterizing a musical sound, while ‘sound colour melodies’ work, Schoenberg argues, by structuring the combined set of pitches contained in a given musical sound (the overtones as well as the dominant pitch). Schoenberg is emphatic that, although a neglected and underdeveloped possibility within Western classical music, ‘sound colour melody’ is a perfectly legitimate and viable form of musical expression; indeed for Schoenberg it is a musical form with enormous potential.

Mediating and Disrupting the Flow

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-158
Author(s):  
EVELYN KREUTZER
Keyword(s):  
Media Studies ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Student Writing ◽  
Moving Image ◽  
History Of ◽  
Listening Experience ◽  
The One ◽  
Nam June Paik ◽  
The Relationship

This essay explores the relationship between ‘highbrow’ classical music traditions and ‘lowbrow’ associations with television culture in the collaborative oeuvre of Charlotte Moorman and Nam June Paik. Contextualizing them within the history of classical music broadcasting conventions on TV on the one hand, and the countercultural avantgarde on the other, I argue that Moorman and Paik’s acts of disrupting and breaking with musical, performative, and/or televisual notions of flow prevent the immersive listening experience that had marked classical music and TV discourses, and in so doing empower the listener in an anti-authoritarian, participatory appeal. This article is the winner of the 2019 Claudia Gorbman Graduate Student Writing Award, selected by the Sound and Music Special Interest Group of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in conjunction with Music, Sound, and the Moving Image.

Edge of Insanity

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 109-126
Author(s):  
Kevin Fellezs
Keyword(s):  
Heavy Metal ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Black American ◽  
Black Musicians ◽  
Classical Style

In this essay, I mean to re-examine the notion of virtuosity, which has been characterized as a Romantic reaction to bourgeois rationalism that mobilizes virtuoso musical technique in the service of critiquing bourgeois understandings of art. Furthermore, most critics accuse virtuosos of providing vulgar spectacle in place of sober execution linked to questionable ethics. Pace those assessments, I mean to argue that virtuosity represents, at least in the hands of a black American guitarist such as MacAlpine, a liberatory strategy, that despite being rooted in Romantic notions of autonomous art, challenges a critical stance which views black artistry as merely expressive. I argue that MacAlpine does not simply seek the discursive legitimacy that performing classical music (or in a “classical” style) can give a heavy metal musician but, as a black American guitarist, uses the kind of virtuosity that is linked to the European concert tradition as a means for transcending the stereotypes of black musicians as intuitive talents who draw on reserves of emotional excess, rather than as thoughtful musicians whose abilities have been trained and crafted by diligent study and practice.

Eclectic Styles and Classical Performance: Motivation and Self-Efficacy Belief at Two Summer Music Camps

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-49
Author(s):  
Karin S. Hendricks ◽  
Tawnya D. Smith
Keyword(s):  
High School Students ◽  
Mixed Method ◽  
Self Efficacy ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Social Experiences ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mixed Method Study ◽  
Music Learning ◽  
School Students ◽  
Negative Experiences

String teachers and scholars have suggested that classically trained students may be motivated to engage in eclectic (e.g., rock, pop, jazz, groove, folk) styles. However, we do not fully understand the ways in which students’ motivation to engage in new styles might be influenced by their perceptions of their ability to perform in those styles. In this mixed-method study, we draw upon quantitative, qualitative, and arts-based data from 120 middle and high school students at two camps (one emphasizing classical music, the other emphasizing eclectic styles), to explore various ways in which students develop self-efficacy beliefs and motivation to perform in a variety of musical approaches. According to analysis of all data, students at both camps generally expressed having positive musical and social experiences. Negative experiences, while less common, stemmed from confusion or frustration with music learning, boredom with music that was too easy or not interesting, and competitive comparison with others. Based on findings from qualitative and arts-based data, we suggest that these students may have benefited from additional teacher support when encountering new musical techniques.

La musique – Discours national ou langage universel?

1988 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Wolfgang S. Freund
Keyword(s):  
Classical Music ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
The Other ◽  
Industrialized Countries ◽  
Universal Language ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Eastern Music ◽  
The One ◽  
The Military

SummaryThe present essay questions the idea generally admitted that „music” could be, under all circumstances, an universal language likely to pull down ideological borders and prejudices between people and civilizations. For his argument, the author takes advantage of the opposition prevailing between european and middle-eastern music on the one hand, pointing out on the other hand the importance of different kinds of music such as classical music, light music, music for publicity, as well as military music. The military music is understood in terms of an epistemological code for different artistico-cultural articulations, specific to highly industrialized countries. In conclusion, the author is forwarding substantial doubts as to understanding music as language without borders, insisting on its socio-cultural, and therefore regional profiles.

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