The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy

McAuley, Tomas; Nielsen, Nanette; Levinson, Jerrold; Phillips-Hutton, Ariana

doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199367313.001.0001

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Moreover, inter-disciplinary views have sprouted, connecting some of those approaches (e.g., Kühl, 2008), often in an evolutionary perspective (Patel, 2010), in comparison with language (Arbib, 2013). Nonetheless, research on music seems to lack a coherent framework for interdisciplinary discussions (Cross & Tolbert, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Musical Meaning and the Semiotic Hierarchy: Towards a Cognitive Semiotics of Music

Giacosa¹

2023

PJOS

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Research on the meaning of music has a long tradition, with approaches from several fields, but it lacks a coherent framework for interdisciplinary discussions. As a result, the notion of meaning in music is fragmented among contrasting perspectives. I propose a cognitive-semiotic approach to the analysis of the meaning evoked by music listening, adopting a framework that eludes disciplinary limitations and expands the notion of meaning to the phenomenological concept of intentionality. For this purpose, I apply Zlatev’s Semiotic Hierarchy to the experience of listening to music, analysing the diversity of meaning-making processes involved in music as distributed among several layers of experience. As a result, I propose an updated version of the Semiotic Hierarchy, clarifying its structure as based on possibilities of meaning-making, and allowing for temporality to pervade experience throughout all layers. I highlight the connectedness and simultaneity of different kinds of intentionality, resulting in the addition of the dimension of aesthetic experience – which I analyze as characterizing culture-general music listening. A key claim is that experiencing music aesthetically articulates the listener’s body in their inner sense of space and time, making them feel a sense of movement and vitality. This grounds music as a semiotic system, connecting with and fostering virtually uncountable subject-relative and culture-specific meaning-making acts.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Musical Meaning and the Semiotic Hierarchy: Towards a Cognitive Semiotics of Music

Giacosa¹

2023

PJOS

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Utility and the Pleasures of Musical Formalism: Edmund Gurney, Liberal Individualism, and Musical Beauty as ‘Ultimate’ Value

Collins

2019

Music and Letters

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Most contemporary assessments of Edmund Gurney’s musical thinking rely solely on his influential book The Power of Sound (1880), yet much of the work that appeared in this book was initially published in essay form in the liberal press, appearing alongside discussions of politics, economics, moral philosophy, and psychology. With this broader frame in mind, this article investigates the relationship between Gurney’s musical thinking and the traditions of utilitarianism, political economy, and liberalism through his association with Henry Sidgwick’s circle. It argues that one of the central tenets of Gurney’s musical formalism—namely the idea that there is an irreducibly ‘musical’ form of beauty—may be construed in relation to ‘liberal individualism’ as it was framed by the utilitarian liberals with whom he associated, who attempted to combine the cultivation of disinterestedness with the pursuit of pleasure as a means to attaining a balance between self-interest and the common good.

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The Oxford Handbook of Western Music and Philosophy

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Musical Meaning and the Semiotic Hierarchy: Towards a Cognitive Semiotics of Music

Musical Meaning and the Semiotic Hierarchy: Towards a Cognitive Semiotics of Music

Utility and the Pleasures of Musical Formalism: Edmund Gurney, Liberal Individualism, and Musical Beauty as ‘Ultimate’ Value

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