Music semiology

Not to be confused with Semiology (Gregorian Chant). Not to be confused with Semiology (Gregorian Chant). Music semiology (semiotics) is the study of signs as they pertain to music on a variety of levels. Following Roman Jakobson, Kofi Agawu (2008,) adopts the idea of musical semiosis being introversive or extroversive—that is, musical signs within a text and without. 'Topics,' or various musical conventions (such as horn calls, dance forms, and styles), have been treated suggestively by Agawu, among others. The notion of gesture is beginning to play a large role in musico-semiotic enquiry. Writers on music semiology include Kofi Agawu (on topical theory, Schenkerian analysis), Robert Hatten (on topic, gesture), Raymond Monelle (on topic, musical meaning), Jean-Jacques Nattiez (on introversive taxonomic analysis and ethnomusicological applications), Anthony Newcomb (on narrativity), Thomas Turino (applying the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce), and Eero Tarasti (generally considered the founder of musical semiotics).Roland Barthes, himself a semiotician and skilled amateur pianist, wrote about music in some of the essays collected in Image, Music, Text (Barthes 1977) and The Responsibility of Forms (Barthes 1985), as well as in the essay 'Eiffel Tower' (Barthes 1982,), though he did not consider music to be a semiotic system. Signs, meanings in music, happen essentially through the connotations of sounds, and through the social construction, appropriation and amplification of certain meanings associated with these connotations. The work of Philip Tagg (Ten Little Tunes, Fernando the Flute, Music’s Meanings) provides one of the most complete and systematic analysis of the relation between musical structures and connotations in western and especially popular, television and film music. The work of Leonard Meyer in Style and Music (Meyer 1989) theorizes the relationship between ideologies and musical structures and the phenomena of style change, and focuses on Romanticism as a case study. Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff (Lerdahl and Jackendoff 1983) analyze how music is structured like a language with its own semiotics and syntax.