The Routledge Handbook of Music Signification

The Routledge Handbook of Music Signification captures the richness and complexity of the field, presenting 30 essays by recognized international experts that reflect current interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches to the subject. Examinations of music signification have been an essential component in thinking about music for millennia, but it is only in the last few decades that music signification has been established as an independent area of study. During this time, the field has grown exponentially, incorporating a vast array of methodologies that seek to ground how music means and to explore what it may mean. Research in music signification typically embraces concepts and practices imported from semiotics, literary criticism, linguistics, the visual arts, philosophy, sociology, history, and psychology, among others. By bringing together such approaches in transparent groupings that reflect the various contexts in which music is created and experienced, and by encouraging critical dialogues, this volume provides an authoritative survey of the discipline and a significant advance in inquiries into music signification. This book addresses a wide array of readers, from scholars who specialize in this and related areas, to the general reader who is curious to learn more about the ways in which music makes sense.

Esti Sheinberg published articles on music signification; Irony, Satire, Parody and the Grotesque in the Music of Shostakovich (Ashgate, 2000); edited Music Semiotics: A Network of Significations-in Honour and Memory of Raymond Monelle (Ashgate, 2012), and Anatoly Milka's Rethinking J. S. Bach's The Art of Fugue (Ashgate-Routledge, 2016). William P. Dougherty, Ellis and Nelle Levitt Professor of Music Theory and Composition at Drake University, has published articles on music semiotics and on the semiotics of the art song. In particular, he has explored settings of the Mignon Lieder from Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.

Introduction Esti Sheinberg and William P. Dougherty - Music Signification and Philosophy - "Musik ist das nicht": On Romantic Incomprehensibility in Chopin Jamie Liddle - From Semio-ethics to a Semiotics of Speech in Music and Musicology: Theoretical (and Utopian) Projections Christine Esclapez - Music and Reality Ben Curry - From Ursatz to Urzemic: Avenues for Theories and Analyses of Music SignificationEero Tarasti - Music Signification and Semiotics - The Musical Signifier Lawrence Kramer - Barthes's The Grain of the Voice Revisited Anne Kauppala - Britten and Stravinsky's Neoclassical Opera: Signs, Signification, and Subjectivity Nicholas P. McKay - Fundamental Concepts for the Semiotic Interpretation of Musical Meaning: A Personal Journey Robert Hatten - Music Signification and Topic Theory - Patterns and Topics as Elements of Signification in Late Eighteenth-Century Music Lauri Suurpää - "Mad Day" and the "March of Bacchus": Figaro in Mahler's Third Symphony Lóránt Péteri - Topics and Stylistic Register in Russian Opera, 1775-1800 Johanna Frymoyer - She Spins and She Sighs: The Spinning-Wheel Topic and the Lamentation of the Romantic Female Chia-Yi Wu - Charles Griffes's Xanadu: A Musical Garden of Opposites Taylor A. Greer - Music Signification and Narrative - Music Narrative: Theory, Context, Subjectivity Byron Almén - Motivic Linkage and Actantial Pairing in Britten's Operas Michael Baker - The Narrative Rhetoric of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony Anatole Leikin - From Music Signification to Musical Narrativity: Concepts and Analyses Márta Grabócz - Music Signification and Society - Musical Vernaculars and their Signifying Transformations Marina Ritzarev - Multimodal Reinforcement and Worlds of Sense: A Political Approach to Musical Emotions Oscar Hernández-Salgar - Reading Meaning In and Out of Music from Theresienstadt: The Case of Pavel Haas Martin Curda - FKA twigs and Popular Music Signification: The Challenge of Fluid Clarity William Echard - Lost Innocence: Signifying East, Signifying West Edward Campbell - Music Signification and Emotion, Cognition and Embodiment - Four Flavors of Pre-Modern Emotion Michael Spitzer - Music as Experience: Musical Sense-making between Step-by-Step Processing and Synoptic Overview Mark Reybrouck - Melody as Representation David Lidov - Music Signification and Education - Musical Semiosis as a Process of Learning and Growth Juha Ojala - A Pragmatic Map of Music Signification for Music Analysis Courses Joan Grimalt - Music Signification and Intermediality - The Operatic Principle: Negotiating Contradictory Demands of Signification Bálint Veres - Pianto as a Topical Signifier of Grief in Contemporary Operas by John Adams, Thomas Adès, and Kaija Saariaho Yayoi Uno Everett - Musical Ekphrasis: The Evolution of the Concept and the Breadth of its Application Siglind Bruhn - Bibliography