Musical Semiotics and Meaning
How music functions as a system of signs and conveys cultural and referential meaning.
Definition
The study of music as a system of signs and of how musical materials acquire and convey cultural, referential, and conventional meaning.
Scope
Covers the semiotic study of music: how musical gestures, conventions, and 'topics' function as signs that carry culturally coded meanings, the tripartite analysis of musical signification (the made object, the creative process, the listener's interpretation), and theories of musical reference and markedness. Distinguished from the study of emotion by its focus on signs and conventional meaning rather than felt affect.
Core questions
- In what sense, if any, does music signify?
- How do conventional 'topics' carry coded meaning in tonal music?
- How do production, the work, and reception each contribute to meaning?
- What is markedness and how does it generate musical interpretation?
- How does musical meaning differ from linguistic meaning?
Key theories
- Tripartition of musical signification
- Nattiez, following Molino, analyzed musical meaning into three irreducible levels — the poietic (the process of creation), the neutral (the material trace, the work itself), and the esthesic (the listener's perception) — arguing that meaning must be studied across all three rather than located in any one.
- Topic theory and markedness
- Topic theory, developed by Hatten and Agawu among others, holds that conventional musical figures (topics) such as the march, hymn, or pastoral function as culturally recognizable signs, and that the marked/unmarked opposition between them organizes expressive meaning.
History
Musical semiotics emerged in the later twentieth century, applying structuralist and Peircean sign theory to music; alongside it, Ratner's recovery of eighteenth-century 'topics' was developed by Agawu and Hatten into an influential account of conventional musical meaning.
Debates
- Whether music genuinely signifies
- Semioticians disagree with formalists over whether music carries referential meaning at all, and among themselves over whether such meaning is intrinsic to the sound or supplied by listeners drawing on cultural convention.
Key figures
- Jean-Jacques Nattiez
- Robert Hatten
- Kofi Agawu
- Leonard Ratner
Related topics
Seminal works
- nattiez1990
- hatten1994
- agawu1991
Frequently asked questions
- What is a musical 'topic'?
- A conventional musical figure or style — such as a hunting horn call, a hymn, or a dance type — that listeners of a period recognized as carrying particular associations, functioning as a culturally coded sign.
- Does music really have meaning like words do?
- Semioticians argue music signifies, but through conventional and gestural signs rather than fixed propositions; its meaning is more open and culturally dependent than linguistic meaning.