Icons in music: A Peircean rationale

Abstract

Various cultures have dealt with questions of musical meaning for as long as musical practice has existed. Here one may recall concepts in Chinese philosophy that relate music with social-political structures and cosmology. Also in this context, one should not forget the Indian nada (primordial sound) and om, as well as the Indian theory of rasa (aesthetic emotion), itself a remarkable semiotics. Hebraic, Christian, and Islamic cultures also somehow relate acoustic ideas with religion and cosmology. Even so-called 'primitive' cultures mix sonorous activities not just with their mythologies and social organizations but also use (musical) sounds as means of functional communication. In the West, music as social education in classical Greece, and its subsequent development in the Middle Ages, concerned questions of musical meaning above all others. Musical signification was of first importance during the Baroque and Romantic style periods. Recall, for instance, the Affektenlehre in the former era and program music and Wagner's operatic ideas in the latter.Studies of musical signification based on semiotics, though, date only from the second half of the present century. The constant search for suitable methods and approaches to various questions of musical signification began to overcome, little by little, the weaknesses of earlier approaches to musical meaning. Linguistics and structuralism, having evolved into semiology, were at last explored in musical studies.Yet the few tentative analyses of music through the semiotic theory developed by the American scientist, philosopher, and logician Charles Sanders Peirce have remained unsatisfactory. Reflections on musical meaning indeed turned to Peirce's semiotics as a possible theory on which to base musical signification studies; still, a truly Peircean semiotic theory of music has not been achieved.A reasonably complete survey of music semiotics based on Peirce's ideas would mention scholars such as Wilson Coker (1972), Willy C. de

Multimodal emergens via musik - Eksemplificeret ved en reklamefilm og en dokumentarfilm [Emergent forms of meaning-making using music in multimodal compositions - Exemplified through a television commercial and a television documentary]

“…i hans bestraebelser på at revitalisere 1700-tallets rationalistiske 'affektlaere', og som i nyere tid er blevet videreudviklet af bl.a. Tarasti (1987), Karbušicky (1987), Monelle (1991), Tagg (1992), Martinez (1996) og Kühl (2007), der alle i større eller mindre grad har ladet sig inspirere af Peirces tresidede tegnbegreb (ikon, indeks og symbol) som overordnet teoretisk udgangspunkt for at begribe musik som et udtrykssystem med et betegnende indhold. Som det vil fremgå senere, er såvel valsens gestiske kvaliteter som dens referentialitet i spil i den fremanalyserede multimodale og emergente betydningsdannelse.…”