Description
Examinations of music signification have been an essential component of thinking about music for millennia, but it is only in the last forty years that music signification has been established as an independent field of study. During this time, the field has grown exponentially. Initially formulated as "meaning in music," "emotion in music," or "musical semiotics," it now includes a vast array of approaches that seek to ground how music means and sometimes even to explore what it may mean. The Routledge Handbook of Music Signification captures the richness and complexity of the study of musical signification by offering essays by recognized international experts that reflect current thinking about issues shaping the field and apply this thinking to a wide variety of topics.
Given their strongly interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary tendencies, studies of musical signification typically embrace concepts and methodologies imported from semiotics, literary criticism, linguistics, the visual arts, philosophy, sociology, history, and psychology, among others. By bringing together such approaches in transparent groupings that reflect music’s social, political, historical, and ideational contexts, and by encouraging critical dialogue, this volume begins to impose some order on the variety and complexity of interdisciplinary incursions into musicological discourse. As such, it provides at once an authoritative survey of the discipline and a significant advance in music signification research.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Esti Sheinberg and William P. Dougherty
- Music Signification and Philosophy
- "Musik ist das nicht": On Romantic Incomprehensibility in Chopin
Jamie Liddle
- From Semio-ethics to a Semiotics of Speech in Music and Musicology: Theoretical (and Utopian) Projections
Christine Esclapez
- Music and Reality
Ben Curry
- From Ursatz to Urzemic: Avenues for Theories and Analyses of Music Signification
Eero Tarasti
- Music Signification and Semiotics
- The Musical Signifier
Lawrence Kramer
- Barthes’s The Grain of the Voice Revisited
Anne Kauppala
- Britten and Stravinsky’s Neoclassical Opera: Signs, Signification, and Subjectivity
Nicholas P. McKay
- Fundamental Concepts for the Semiotic Interpretation of Musical Meaning: A Personal Journey
Robert Hatten
- Music Signification and Topic Theory
- Patterns and Topics as Elements of Signification in Late Eighteenth-Century Music
Lauri Suurpää
- "Mad Day" and the "March of Bacchus": Figaro in Mahler’s Third Symphony
Lóránt Péteri
- Topics and Stylistic Register in Russian Opera, 1775–1800
Johanna Frymoyer
- She Spins and She Sighs: The Spinning-Wheel Topic and the Lamentation of the Romantic Female
Chia-Yi Wu
- Charles Griffes’s Xanadu: A Musical Garden of Opposites
Taylor A. Greer
- Music Signification and Narrative
- Music Narrative: Theory, Context, Subjectivity
Byron Almén
- Motivic Linkage and Actantial Pairing in Britten’s Operas
Michael Baker
- The Narrative Rhetoric of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
Anatole Leikin
- From Music Signification to Musical Narrativity: Concepts and Analyses
Márta Grabócz
- Music Signification and Society
- Musical Vernaculars and their Signifying Transformations
Marina Ritzarev
- Multimodal Reinforcement and Worlds of Sense: A Political Approach to Musical Emotions
Oscar Hernández-Salgar
- Reading Meaning In and Out of Music from Theresienstadt: The Case of Pavel Haas
Martin Čurda
- FKA twigs and Popular Music Signification: The Challenge of Fluid Clarity
William Echard
- Lost Innocence: Signifying East, Signifying West
Edward Campbell
- Music Signification and Emotion, Cognition and Embodiment
- Four Flavors of Pre-Modern Emotion
Michael Spitzer
- Music as Experience: Musical Sense-making between Step-by-Step Processing and Synoptic Overview
Mark Reybrouck
- Melody as Representation
David Lidov
- Music Signification and Education
- Musical Semiosis as a Process of Learning and Growth
Juha Ojala
- A Pragmatic Map of Music Signification for Music Analysis Courses
Joan Grimalt
- Music Signification and Intermediality
- The Operatic Principle: Negotiating Contradictory Demands of Signification
Bálint Veres
- Pianto as a Topical Signifier of Grief in Contemporary Operas by John Adams, Thomas Adès, and Kaija Saariaho
Yayoi Uno Everett
- Musical Ekphrasis: The Evolution of the Concept and the Breadth of its Application
Siglind Bruhn
- Bibliography
About the Editors
Esti Sheinberg Published articles on music signification; Irony, Satire, Parody and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich (Ashgate, 2000); edited Music Semiotics: A Network of Significations—in Honour and Memory of Raymond Monelle (Ashgate, 2012), and Anatoly Milka’s Bach’s Kunst der Fuge (Ashgate-Routledge, 2016).
William P. Dougherty Ellis and Nelle Levitt Professor of Music Theory and Composition at Drake University. Published numerous articles on music semiotics and the semiotics of the art song focusing on the vast amount of Mignon lieder that emanate from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrejahre.
Subject Categories
BISAC Subject Codes/Headings:
- MUS000000
- MUSIC / General