Music Semiotics A Network of Significations Intro

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Introduction
Esti Sheinberg
The Universe of Musical Meaning

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1 Viktor Emil Frankl, Mans Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy. Translated by Ilse Leach (Boston, 1962). 2 Raymonds choice of Dr Strabismus of Utrecht honoured J.B. Mortons imaginary eccentric inventor, famous for his plethora of ineffective innovations (elliptically implying that, while some may still find the usefulness of music semiotics a rather challenging matter, its aesthetic and intellectual purport stand intact).
The area of meaning that the writers of this collection address is music, and the most important element that unites them all is their indebtedness, in one way or another, to the scholarship of Raymond Monelle. Were it not for the risk of being deemed banal (and lacking in keywords for search engines), this book could be titled The Posthumous Papers of the Dr Strabismus of Utrecht (whom God preserve) Club. Such title would honour Raymond Monelles literary persona,2 his love for Charles Dickens and his rare gift of combining earnest (and razor-sharp unforgiving) analyses with a self-ironizing Doppelgngers gaze at his own work. Indirectly, it would also allude to his diverse taste and overwhelming knowledge of literature, philosophy, history, art and music; in other words, of his being, first and foremost, a truly open-minded scholar.
Viktor Frankls groundbreaking research into the Self is published in English under the title Mans Search for Meaning.1 Its original title, trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen is, nevertheless, more telling about this painfully meticulous portrayal of a persistent quest. This description of a psychological struggle with suffering, its transcendence and final transfiguration into a renewed and courageous existential stance, produced a new term: Logotherapy healing by meaning. We live in a universe of meanings that we create and according to which we live. Paraphrasing Frankl, our life depends on our constantly challenging these meanings with questions, interpretations and analyses, all surrounded by infinite doubts. Certainties divide humankind; questions unite us. The constant search for signification, the very process of inquiry, makes our existence intentional and therefore meaningful.
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Chapter 1
Music Semiotics: A Network of Significations Copyrighted Material

Texts
Raymond Monelle, The Absent Meaning of Music, in Robert S. Hatten, Pirjo Kukkonen, Richard Littlefield, Harri Veivo and Irma Vierimaa (eds), A Sounding of Signs: Modalities and Moments in Music, Culture and Philosophy. Acta Semiotica Fennica XXX (Imatra, 2008), pp. 6789. 4 Text and Subjectivity, in Raymond Monelle, The Sense of Music (Princeton, 2000), pp. 147169. Its first part was published as What is a Musical Text?, in Eero Tarasti, Paul Forsell and Richard Littlefield (eds), Musical Semiotics in Growth (Imatra, 1996), pp. 245260. Earlier discussions at various seminars and conferences sum up to almost 10 years of study, thought and analysis devoted to this subject. 5 A cartoon of Hergs hero was stuck to the wall in Monelles office, just by his desk, showing Tintin walking down a street and muttering to himself: this is indeed very strange!, while his loyal fox-terrier Milou looks up at his master thinking: Oh, no! Not again!. Of all the slogans and cartoons displayed in many offices, I still find this one the most inspiring.
The original subtitle of this collection was Texts on Music Semiotics. Borrowed from one of Monelles most intricate essays, it highlighted a main keyword of his scholarship.4 To understand the nature of a musical text, he argued, one must first define what is a text. Puzzled by this ostensibly simple concept and inspired by French-thinking inquisitive minds such as Rousseau, Derrida and Tintin5 Monelle investigated the nature of texts in literature, poetry and music, and of music texts set to literature and poetry. His early thesis was written precisely on
In an academic world divided by findings, Raymond Monelle cherished search. His relentless study, scholarly integrity and unfashionable insistence on a civilized, respectful discourse inspired a generation of scholars. His courage to contemplate music as a signifying system reminded us of the true meaning of our own work, and his admirable determination to calmly stare into the abyss of musics absent meaning3 became thus a lesson in confronting Life. Monelles articles often started with a faint spotlight a teaser, maybe directed at some obscure corner of a musical work, a something that no one had noticed before, mainly because it was, well, obvious. However, the narrow beam implied, this particular little detail did not quite fit in, was not quite right. Once defamiliarized, the specific element, ne Obvious, became Fascinating, a starting point for a new Thinking-Adventure. Reading his work meant engaging in an exciting game in which he was the Magister Ludi, the one who juggled the ever-moving, ever-changing spaces that weave the endless glass-beads of human thought. Never underestimating his readers, he built his story, developing a characteristically transparent narrative of the inquiry, and inviting us to a mental dialogue that offered no intellectual concession. This volume presents some phases of this dialogue.
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Introduction Copyrighted Material

Monelles doctoral thesis, Opera Seria as Drama: The Musical Dramas of Hasse and Metastasio (University of Edinburgh, 1969), was followed by a period of quiet study (then still allowed within academic circles). The following decade produced Levels of Rhythm in Vocal Music, British Journal of Aesthetics, 22/1 (1982): pp. 1736; and the later Word-Setting in the Strophic Lied, Music & Letters, 65/3 (1984): pp. 229236. 7 Raymond Monelle, Notes on Bartks Fourth Quartet, The Music Review, 29/2 (1968): pp. 123129. 8 Monelle, Text and Subjectivity, p. 147. 9 Ibid., p. 149. 10 Raymond Monelle, Semiotics Threatens No One , in Eero Tarasti, Paul Forsell and Richard Littlefield (eds), Music and the Arts: Proceedings of ICMS 7, Acta semiotica fennica XXIII (Imatra, 2006), pp. 3144.
The theory of semiotics stipulates the principles of signification. Monelle positions it at one pole of two different oppositions: in the first, it opposes all particular manifestations of readings, performances, or texts. Semiotics is a theory, and therefore it does not necessarily prescribe any particular method of communication or of sign reading. Unlike hermeneutics or any other type of interpretation, semiotics does not look at what is signified as much as it looks at how the signification process takes place. The second opposition differentiates semiotics from any set of principles that carry value judgments. Semiotics is innocent: its queries and statements follow no ideology, no agenda. Therefore, semiotics threatens no one.10 As a theory, argues Monelle, semiotics is based on speculative and deductive thought rather
Theory
this relationship,6 and many of his later projects display this interest. Even his earliest paper, on Bartks purely instrumental Fourth String Quartet, focused on the meaningfulness of its musical structure.7 What is a text? A text is a semiosis, something understood.8 A score can become a musical text not as performed, but as understood, its dialectics [between the signifier and signified ES] resolved into intelligibility.9 A text is not a thing; it is an interpretant, a part of a process. It exists only when interpreted. The book you hold is not a text; it becomes one only when it is read and understood. Furthermore: a text is never a text. While its existence requires the meeting of two minds the originator of a message and its reader (or, as all of us well know, the two minds of one originator) any one message can become an infinite number of texts, interpretants produced by semiotic processes, tied by an infinite number of threads to an infinite number of other texts and other minds. A message is a promise for an ever-expanding web of possible significations: of perpetual, eternal semiosis, connecting between periods, places and people. Texts are communications between human minds, ad infinitum renewed and renewable.

Networks
Meaning is intermodal. The simplest pairing of a signifier and signified, inherent in the very idea of a sign, implies a web of inter-systemic correlations. As systems complicate, inter-systematic correlations become interdisciplinary networks. Being aural sign-systems that develop in time, musical works are by their very nature interconnected with other systems: dramatic, political and social narratives, historical contexts and rhetorical devices. Ignoring that music semiotics is based on intermodality necessarily misleads music interpretation. If a text is something that is understood, then all the chapters in this volume are not only intermodal but also intertextual. Musicians writing about music need to be acquainted not only with literature, mythology, poetry, art and history, which so often are
than on inductive processes that characterize, for example, psychology, history or sociology. Examples and particular texts serve as case studies to validate and corroborate (or refute) its stipulations, which must remain clear of any a-priori values. Being a series of principles that offer explanations for the phenomenon of signification, the semiotics of music explains how music signifies. While the phenomenon of music signification is intuitively familiar to each one of us, the theoretical basis on which its principles, ideas and postulates, as well as the criteria for their formation into sets or schemes, is still unfinalized, forming the subject of our quest for accurate definitions and lucid descriptions. While our conviction that music signifies is indeed primarily based on intuition and observation, theoretical thought must be verified through critical processes, making sure that the principles of accuracy, impartiality and transparency are respected and followed at each step. Each point must and should be debatable. While acknowledging that no eye and no mind is innocent, the fact that no Grail of Innocence awaits us at the end of this road does not invalidate what this quest stands for. Insisting on scholarly rigour keeps us from falling into the deepest (and most cynically abused) pit of postmodern theory: the false claim that anything goes since everything is just an interpretation. Our research is geared precisely against entering that tempting comfort-zone; our strategy is based on the ethos of rationality. Reading and writing semiotics is a merciless enterprise, particularly when the writers are, first and foremost, musicians. Focusing on facts and ideas, we are called to set aside our opinions, feelings, natural prejudices, and any immediate gut reactions we were trained to trust in our musical encounters. Being open to discussion and to criticism is, therefore, a main postulate of this collection. The only way in which we can hone our analyses and improve our research is by exposing our thoughts and deliberations to comments and constructive criticism. In a field that is murky with overlapping and confusing terminologies, our aim is clarity of expression and thought.
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11 For example, Monelle, Word-Setting in the Strophic Lied; A Semantic Approach to Debussys Songs, The Music Review, 51 (1992): pp. 193207; and The Literary Source of Topic Theory, in The Musical Topic (Bloomington, 2006), pp. 1119. 12 For example, Mrta Grabczs chapter in this volume (Chapter 10), as well as her comprehensive study, Musique, narrativit, signification (Paris, 2009) and Morphlogie des oeuvres pour piano de Liszt: Influence du programme sur lvolution des formes instrumentales (Budapest, 1986). Eero Tarasti, A Narrative Grammar of Chopins G minor Ballade, in Chopin Studies 5 (Warsaw, 1995), pp. 233249, and his Music as a Narrative Art, in Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.), Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling (London, 2004), pp. 283304. 13 Robert Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation and Interpretation (Bloomington, 1994) and his Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert (Bloomington, 2004). Michael Spitzer, Metaphor and Musical Thought (Chicago, 2004), and his Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethovens Late Style (Bloomington, 2006). Esti Sheinberg, Irony, Satire, Parody and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich: A Theory of Musical Incongruities (Aldershot, 2000), and her Jewish Existential Irony as Musical Ethos in the Music of Shostakovich, in Pauline Fairclough and David Fanning (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich (Cambridge, 2008). See also Chapters 18 and 19 in this volume.
an inseparable part of a musical work, but also with a quite expansive array of philosophical, theological, psychological, linguistic and sociological studies. Monelle wrote on works by Bach, Barthes, Bartk, Baudelaire, Debussy, Derrida, Greimas, Jakobson, Mahler, Maxwell-Davies, Metastasio, Molino, Nattiez, Peirce, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Wagner and iek to mention only a few. We write about music and poetry and learn about the connection between music and movement while wondering about the relationship between music and facial expressions. We engage in the study of opera, literature, mathematics, history, zoology, computers, film and what not, looking for ways in which these systems of signification might relate to ours. Led by the nature of music no less than by our slightly arrogant, lets admit curiosity, we tend to roam through various fields of inquiry. More often than not, we are lucky and grateful to encounter sympathetic minds, our own Virgils and Beatrices. The interrelationship between music and literature was among the first to be explored in studies of music signification. Its centuries-old roots lie in poetic verse theories, but the evolution of these studies from so simple a beginning (as Darwin might have said), is staggering. Monelles interest in the dramatic power of music expanded to its relation to lyrical poetry; his later writings are often related to musics own semantic meaning, but never neglect the manifold interconnections of music with the literary arts.11 Meanwhile, Grabcz and Tarasti developed studies of musics narrativity, based on literary theories of Greimas and Propp.12 Other studies, like those by Hatten, Spitzer and myself, focused on specific areas of the intermodal semantic universe: theories of musical markedness, metaphor and incongruities are related to philosophical, psychological, literary, linguistic and ethnological studies.13 The acceptance of these areas into music scholarship
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For two completely different aspects of the incorporation of syntactics into music semiotics see Chapters 8 and 11 in this volume. 15 See Chapters 7, 9, 15, 16 and 21 in this volume. 16 See Chapters 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12 in this volume. 17 Monelle, Semiotics Threatens No One , pp. 3637. 18 Raymond Monelle, The Postmodern Project in Music Theory, in Eero Tarasti (ed.), Musical Semiotics in Growth (Imatra, 1996), pp. 3756.
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released some former tensions, allowing a recent re-introduction of a semiotic field that was somewhat neglected in the last decade: syntactics. Always hovering in the background of semiotic studies, shaded by its questionable reputation as positivistic, it is regaining its deserved position by the side of semantics, both of which contribute to the signification of music.14 Highly complex sign-systems as multimedia genres offer an obvious area for intermodal explorations. The oldest among them, and a most fertile ground for semiotic inquiry, is opera. Related to drama, literature and poetry, it also reflects political, social and ethical values of both its creators and its audience. Looking into the interrelationship between music and poetry, mythology, society and politics, the studies of vocal music in this volume render a wealth of new food for thought.15 Others went beyond the specific genre, looking into historical processes and philosophical thought that affect (and, dare I say, are affected by) our understanding of music signification.16 Would Raymond Monelle reject studies that incorporate history, sociology or psychology into music analysis, labelling them as non-semiotic, as his critique of the New Musicology might imply?17 Definitely not. Those who knew Raymond could not avoid noticing his absolute fairness, annoying impartiality and complete open-mindedness. Monelle did not mind the incorporation of historical, sociological, psychological or ethnological factors into semiotic analysis. In fact, he constantly did just that. However, he did object to analyses that were dictated by preconceived agendas. He claimed that such interpretations are not semiotic, but political statements. Monelle was a great admirer of postmodern thought.18 He fully realized the great blessing of opening the door to all interpretations as equally legitimate, thus freeing the mind from the fetters of prejudice. Equally, he fully realized the great curse of opening the door to all interpretations as equally legitimate, thus shaking off the responsibility to differ between an interpretation and a misinterpretation, and eradicating any hope for communication. Postmodernism, for Monelle, meant that every interpretation is legitimate as long as it stays clear of agendas. Agendas lead to misinterpretations. Semiotics must remain innocent.
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Topics
19 Leonard Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form and Style (New York, 1980). Musical topics are mentioned for the first time on p. 9. 20 Wye Jamison Allanbrook, Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le Nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni (Chicago, 1983). Wendy Allanbrook had kindly agreed to contribute a chapter for the present volume as a tribute to Raymond Monelle. Sadly, this was not to be. She passed away on 15 July 2010, deepening the loss suffered by the international music community. 21 Raymond Monelle, The Musical Topic: Hunt, Military and Pastoral (Bloomington, 2006). In his analyses of musical topics Monelle often expressed his indebtedness to the eighteenth-century music studies of Kofi Agawu and of Elaine Sisman, and to Robert Samuels work on Mahler. His generous open-mindedness and ability to learn from approaches different from his own is apparent in his choice of dedicatee to his last book: the musicologist Joseph Kerman. 22 Robert Hatten, The Troping of Meaning in Music, paper presented at the Second International Congress on Musical Signification, 1988, rev. and exp. as The Proper Role of Metaphor in a Theory of Musical Expressive Meaning, presented at the 1990 Society for Music Theory national meeting, Oakland, CA. 23 Mrta Grabcz, Topos et dramaturgie: analyse des signifis et de la stratgie dans deux mouvements symphoniques de Bla Bartk, Degrs, 109110 (2002): pp. j1 j18. 24 See Nicholas McKay, On Topics Today, Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft fr Musiktheorie, 4/12 (2007): www.gmth.de/zeitschrift/artikel/251.aspx.
The interdisciplinary nature of music semiotics leads naturally to the study of musical topics. Throughout the last three decades, the study of musical topics has gained the status of an independent theory. Starting with a few pages of Leonard Ratners Classic Music,19 and followed by Wye Jamison Allanbrooks book that became a milestone in this area,20 it developed into manifold research projects, climaxing with Monelles comprehensive analysis of the military, the hunt and the pastoral topics, each with its meticulously detailed historical, cultural and musical references.21 While the terminology of musical topics is relatively new, awareness of characteristic figures that would point to a variety of signifieds is neither new nor consistent. Robert Hatten, who first applied the literary concept of trope to music semiotics, using topics as a primary example, had demonstrated as early as 1988 that tropes of topics deserve separate studies.22 As Mrta Grabcz mentions in an earlier article,23 musical topics are discussed under various terminologies in different countries and cultures: in East European countries they are referred to as intonatsia, in cultures influenced by French studies they are known as genres or stylemes, while in English-speaking countries the term topics is the prevalent one. Nevertheless, as often happens in translations, the division and the range of phenomena covered by each one of these terms is not absolutely consistent, and still await a clear differentiation and definition.24 Musical topics change emphases
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According to Monelle, a topic has two features, both based on negation. First, it does not belong to contemporary culture, and it does not need to be rooted in reality. In the cultural realm, says Monelle, a unicorn is no less real than a lion, although the latter exists in physical reality and the former does not.28 Characteristically, then, a topic is a cultural unit that exists only in texts; it is pure meaning, functioning only in intertextual relations. The second trait that Monelle attributes to a topic is its reference to the past. The topic develops along the axis of time; its reincarnations in literary texts, iconographies and other cultural constructs gain meaning only when it has ceased to carry any practical signification.
25 Monelle, The Sense of Music, p. 80. See also McKays contribution to this volume, chapter 20, doing precisely this. 26 Monelle, The Musical Topic, p. 26. 27 Monelle, The Sense of Music, p. 80. 28 Monelle, The Absent Meaning of Music, p. 68.
not all signifying items are topics. The central questions of the topic theorists are: Has this musical sign passed from literal imitation (iconism) or stylistic reference (indexicality) into signification by association (the indexicality of the object)? And, second, is there a level of conventionality in the sign? If the answers are positive, then a new topic has been revealed, whatever the period of the music studied.27
Monelle supplied clear indications for the identification of a topic:
Musical topics mean by virtue of their correlation to cultural units this meaning is not referential. Cultural units combine to form a culture, as words combine to form a language. Culture defines society, and society operates within history. In order to describe musical topics, there must be a full account of cultural mythology, of literary genre and symbolism, and of social history.26
and character throughout history and between cultures. Grouping different views of the term point at a variety of ways for its analysis and interpretation, and new musical significations emerge through a subtle honing of existing musical topics. Monelle himself called for an expansion of his topic theory and its application to a wider scope of musical types and genres, stating that with time, after gaining an independent profile recognizable by a stylistically competent audience, a topic can be inflected toward more complex significations.25 Topics continue to form throughout history, creating topical layers: some have their roots in very early times, already appearing in mythologies. The pastoral, for example, is based on such a topic. While the basic meaning of a topic does not change, its later layers add, modify, enrich and complicate older ones, forming an intricate web of significations.

Beyond Topics
Topic theory is one of the areas of music semiotics that, beyond asking how does music signify?, inspects the area of what does this music signify?. For the latter, topics reside at the heart of music signification. However, focusing on the artificiality and conventionality of topics as subjects of interpretation may run the danger of ignoring other aspects of text production, music obviously included. What are the other sources of musical conventions? A constant undercurrent of semiotic studies delves into these less tangible areas, where non-arbitrary components contribute to music as a signifying system, trying to find and define the delicate connecting tissue between psychological and even biological motivations and musical conventions. Our minds and bodies are flooded with sounds, not all produced intentionally to function as signs. Yet, all sounds are submitted to the same organs of perception and go through similar interpretation procedures. Music stimulates our most refined analytical powers, but it also resonates through our basic instincts. While it pretends to obey Aristotelian aesthetic teleology, it also responds to physical laws of gravity and balance; while communicating cultural units bound to specific times and spaces, it also rests on universal laws that dictate the forms of our deepest urges and emotional responses. A theory of music signification, thus, cannot stop at the stage of artificiality, but must explore further into the natural laws that affect semiosis. Several chapters in this collection embark on such explorations, trying to connect between culture and nature, conventions and modes of thinking. Musical gesture, for example, is attracting increasing attention. While being, indeed, partially conventional, it is also based on brain functions and natural motions of the human body, providing means for universal communication of signification.30
29 30
See Chapters 13, 20, 21 and 22 in this volume. See Chapters 4, 5 and 14 in this volume.
In Peircean terms, topics are interpretants: signifieds that become new signifiers in the endless semiotic chain of interpretations. A comprehensive analysis of a topic, therefore, needs to take into account its double nature, as a signifier and as a signified (that becomes a new signifier). It must investigate each and every layer of meaning that composes its intricate structure. Studies of topics appear to explore either historical developments of topics-as-signifieds or synchronic functions of topics-as-signifiers within a given culture. Characteristically, Monelles high standards require both approaches: studies that will delve into history and also analyze the interrelationships of signifiers and signifieds in a given time and place. His call for such enquiries is answered in several chapters in this volume, exposing a wealth of ways to interpret the significance of musical topics for music analysis, music performance, and for further thoughts on the place of music in the wider cultural frame.29
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Thus, the theory of topics could, perhaps, be connected to other aspects of human communication: modes of thought organization, on one hand, and emotional expression, on the other.31 In fact, it seems that this was precisely the direction that Monelle would have taken as his next scholarly adventure.
Beyond Deconstruction: The Abyss of the Absent Meaning
Monelles fascination with Jacques Derrida, throughout the 1990s, was probably related to the particular breakthrough that the French philosopher seemed to offer to music semiotics. In his Of Grammatology, Derrida introduced into the structuralist concepts of signifier and signified the element of time. He pointed out that, in contrast to what Saussure had implied, the elements in a signifier/signified pair are not simultaneous: the signified appears after the signifier, creating a time lapse between the two. The appearance of the signified is thus deferred, drawing a time-span margin, a void diffrance in which semiosis occurs. Monelle once embraced this approach, hoping to find in it the inspiration for a subtler, sharper analysis of musical meaning. However, by focusing on margins, Derrida displayed less interest in core significations. Loyal to his constant quest for the Grail of Semiotic Innocence, albeit without navet, Monelle moved beyond deconstruction, declaring the meaning of music as absent.32 This was his Farewell, the last time that Raymond Monelle spoke at the International Congress of Music Signification, a project to which he was devoted for 20 years. From the perspective of that last presentation, it almost seems as if he regarded the musical topic as an interim project, a mid-term challenge that needed to be overcome on his way toward his real goal: understanding the way in which nonconventional, non-topical musical signs signify, those musical texts which mean while seemingly not having any finalized signification. Monelle was fascinated by the meaningful lack of meaning in music. Unsurprisingly, most of his references are, indeed, to purely philosophical writings: Derrida, Frege, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Guattari and, of course, Peirce. With their help he tries to look into the non-topical, to describe the indescribable: what is signified by the unique memory of a madeleine dipped in tea? What is the personal meaning of the scent of a musical phrase? Carried by Monelles rational narrative, the reader is led toward the terrifying domains of the sublime, to the border of the cliff, facing the abyss of absolute meaninglessness, only to fall Gloucester-like into the indifferent sand, to get up and recall lines written years ago, in a humble textbook:
Meaning is not to be found in the emotions of the composer or performer, or in the reactions of the listener, because these emotions are not real emotions. It is not to be found in the fabric of the music, because meaning has to be
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31 32
See Chapters 17 and 19 in this volume. Monelle, The Absent Meaning of Music.

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attributed to music. It is not to be found in the imitations of anything in nature, or in psychological or neurological sympathies. It is not, in fact, to be found anywhere; it is absent.33
33
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Carole Bourne-Taylor and Ariane Mildenberg (eds), Phenomenology, Modernism and Beyond (Bern, 2010), pp. 103122. Copyrighted Material
Raymond Monelle, Linguistics and Semiotics in Music (Chur, 1992), p. 21. Raymond Monelle, Proust, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and a Musical Phrase, in
The impeccably lucid style does not cover the scent of a Kierkegaardian leap of faith into years of research and of quest for a meaning declared absent; Monelles unquestioning trust in the moral, existential value of music, a value that is worth a lifetime of struggle that was deemed by many to be futile. Monelle did not give in to the potential nihilistic repercussions of absence. The meaning of music may be absent, but it lives. Its existence, he writes (quoting Mendelssohn), is tangible and clear. So precise it is, that it cannot be described by language. What was his secret, and how could he use words in his three books and dozens of articles, describing the indescribable? Stravinskys repeated statements about the meaninglessness of music contradict his own music, which is extremely evocative and utterly personal to the point of a self-revealing eroticism. However, this alleged contradiction disappears when the depersonalized generality of music is opposed to the unique specificity of the musical work. Its meaning is unique because it is itself, too specific to be confined into a verbal description based generalizing terminology. Following Merleau-Ponty and Boris de Schloezer, Monelle did indeed compare the meaning of a musical work with erotic love:34 no one can specify the meaning of a beloveds face or being. It is precisely its uniqueness that deprives us of words to express it. We can describe faces and analyse musical topics. We can even describe the face of the beloved, as we can analyse a beloved musical work; but we cannot explain the meaning of the beloveds face or the meaning of a unique, beloved work of art. Such meanings, then, must remain absent. This volume is just one possible signifier of our gratitude for Raymond Monelles inspiration, instruction, collegial support and friendship. A number of interpretants are present in the following pages, all ready for infinite semiosis. Marginalia are welcome.
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The Universe of Musical Meaning

Music Semiotics: A Network of Significations Copyrighted Material

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Music Semiotics: A Network of Significations Copyrighted Material

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Music Semiotics: A Network of Significations Copyrighted Material

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Music Semiotics: A Network of Significations Copyrighted Material

Monelle supplied clear indications for the identification of a topic:

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Music Semiotics: A Network of Significations Copyrighted Material

Beyond Deconstruction: The Abyss of the Absent Meaning

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