Music semiology


Music semiology is the study of signs as they pertain to music on a variety of levels.

Overview

Following Roman Jakobson, Kofi adopts the idea of musical semiosis being introversive or extroversive—that is, musical signs within a text and without. "Topics," or various musical conventions, 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, Robert Hatten, Raymond Monelle, Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Anthony Newcomb, Thomas Turino, and Eero Tarasti.
Roland Barthes, himself a semiotician and skilled amateur pianist, wrote about music in some of the essays collected in Image, Music, Text and The Responsibility of Forms, as well as in the essay "Eiffel Tower", 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 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 B. Meyer in Style and Music 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 analyze how music is structured like a language with its own semiotics and syntax.