BMA Narrative Archetypes

Chapter 5.5 serves as the first of two Interludes addressing musical narrative. Following from the original proposition that motives must move and move readers, narrative is established as a necessary mechanism for structuring complete, meaningful analyses. The chapter first rehearses the argument that untexted music implicitly possesses narrative qualities. Evidentiary support is taken from seminal works both from literary theory (Propp, Frye, Liszka) and from the fields of musical semiotics and narrative (Nattiez, Hatten, McClary, Guck, Newcomb, Maus, Schmalfeldt, Almén, and Klein). The interlude continues by presenting four “archetypes” for organizing and animating (ascribing motion to) motivic findings. The first archetype, called BMA-1, communicates the progress of a single motive. The other three archetypes, all forms of BMA-2, model multiple motives or motivic elements in dialogue. The possible interactions are “Non-Engagement,” “Synthesis,” and “Triumph.” The BMA archetypes are demonstrated through discussion of works by Beethoven and Chopin.

Musical Semiotics – a Discipline, its History and Theories, Past and Present1

Musical semiotics begins from the premise that music is a signifying phenomenon. However, the field itself has developed according to two distinct paths. The first one starts by considering music and its history. In the study of classical music, for instance, it will begin by considering rhetoric and affect during the Baroque period and then move to consider the topics of the Classical style or the interartistic aspects of Romanticism. The other path consists instead of applying general semiotic theories to music. A more proper approach, I believe, lies somewhere in the middle : it ought to configure general semiotic concepts to the special or historical problems of music. In this essay I give examples from my own work borrowing methodology from the Paris School of Semiotics developed by Greimas and from my own Existential Semiotics model.

Narrating Near-Death Experience

Rarely do the worlds of classical music and video games collide explicitly; when they do, as in the 2007 JRPG Eternal Sonata, the result is of marked semiotic interest. The game’s complex metafictional plotline – involving multiple levels of narrative seeking to blend fantasy and reality – invites speculation and interpretation, particularly concerning its multivalent ending. This article uses recently developed analytical methods from the burgeoning field of musical semiotics to glean poignant interpretative meaning from the video game’s musical surface. By invoking music-theoretic work in intertextuality (Klein 2004), musical narrative (Almén 2008), and virtual agency (Hatten forthcoming), I argue that the video game’s musical score is a hermeneutic key for decoding artistic meaning in Eternal Sonata. Thus, ludomusicology contributes vitally to the semiosis of a video game’s meaning as a holistic, multimedia entity.

Boris Asafiev's intonatsia in the context of music theory of the 21st century

The term intonatsia has been used ubiquitously in Russian and Soviet music analysis and pedagogy since Boleslaw Yavorsky introduced it in 1908 and Boris Asafiev developed it into a universally applicable concept. It proved to be rather vague and complex because of the overwhelming range of meanings and polysemic etymology, considering that one may identify intonatsia not as a term but as a category. Today, this older term can acquire newer shades of meaning if placed in the context of latest achievements of music theory in the areas of musical semiotics, theories of topics, Satzmodelle and partimenti.

Inhalt (‘content’) as a technical term in musical semiotics

Inhalt (‘content’) is so common that it could hardly pass as a technical term. The purpose of this article is to show that from the 18th to the 20th century it was nevertheless used particularly to denote the specifically musical meaning arising from what music ‘contains’ of notes, rhythms, melodic cells, etc. Hegel, Marx, Hauptmann, Hanslick, Schenker, Schoenberg and probably others shared the same view that music has a content of its own, one that cannot be translated in verbal language.

Musical Semiotics as a Tool for the Social Study of Music. By Óscar Hernández Salgar. Translated by Brenda M. Romero.

Recent studies on musical signification have been characterized by an apparently insurmountable gap between disciplines that focus on the musical text as sound (music theory, musicology), those that focus on the hearing subject (cognitive sciences, psychology of music), and those that focus on social discourses about music (ethnomusicology, anthropology, sociology). This article argues that the most recent theoretical advances in music semiotics provide means to overcome this gap. After a brief examination of some key concepts in music semiotics, the author identifies three approaches to this problem: the semiotic-hermeneutic approach, the cognitive-embodied approach, and the social-political approach. This classification allows him to introduce a brief methodological proposal for the study of musical signification from different academic perspectives.Originally published in Spanish in Cuadernos de Música, Artes Visuales, y Artes Escénicas 7, no. 1 (January 2011):39-77.

A typology of music information for studies on information seeking

Purpose – A need to renew music-related information notions arises from both information-seeking models and literature of musical semiotics. The purpose of this paper is to create a music information typology, which aims at facilitating the examination of music information types at varying levels of abstraction in the context of information seeking. Design/methodology/approach – Literature of musical semiotics and information seeking are juxtaposed to develop a novel approach to music-related information. The grounding concepts are Bruner’s enactive, iconic and symbolic modes of representation. The modes of representation offer a universal scheme of knowledge that is applied to the domain of music by defining their content through Tarasti’s Theory of Musical Semiotics. Findings – This conceptual paper results in a music information typology ranging from the enactive music information representations to the abstract ones as follows. Music making as the first mode of enactive representations; music listening as the second mode of enactive representations; iconic representations of music; technological models of music as the first mode of symbolic representations; and ideological models of music as the second mode of symbolic representations. Originality/value – The present paper develops a music information typology that encompasses broadly different music information facets by categorizing music information sources according to their level of abstraction. When applied into empirical research, the typology opens a new window into the perceived roles of music information types in the context of information seeking.