This handbook for advanced students explains the various applications to music of methods derived from linguistics and semiotics. The book is aimed at musicians familiar with the ordinary range of aesthetic and theoretical ideas in music; no specialized knowledge of linguistic or semiotic terminology is necessary. In the two introductory chapters, semiotics is related to the tradition of music aesthetics and to well-known works like Deryck Cooke's The Language of Music, and the methods of linguistics are explained in language intelligible (...) to musicians. There is no limitation to one school or tradition; linguistic applications not avowedly semiotic, and semiotic theories not connected with linguistics, are all included. The book gives clear and simple descriptions with ample diagrams and music examples of the 'neutral level', 'semiotic analysis', transformation and generation, structural semantics and narrative grammar, intonation theory, the ideas of C.S. Peirce, and applications in ethnomusicology. (shrink)

First Published in 1998. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Strauss's opera Capriccio of 1942 may be viewed as pure escapism, a fantasy about the question of the primacy of words or music in opera, set in eighteenth-century France. It is, however, in several ways a denial of time: dramatic time, in that it has no plot or denouement; historic time, in that it ignores the crisis of war and violence contemporary with its performance; cultural time, in that its musical style is self-consciously reactionary and takes no account of twentieth-century (...) developments. It is more than mere escapism, however. It represents an extreme form of the flight from the terror of time that marks idealist philosophy, Enlightenment rationalism, and Romantic aesthetics. On a trivial level, this flight may be connected with the “aesthetic politics” of 1930s Germany; but modern thought — for example, that of Habermas — has not broken free from the rationalist flight from time, and we must finally concede that Capriccio is supported by Romantic aesthetics, no less than the masterpieces of the Western tradition. If we are resolute it condemning it, we must also reject the whole conception of the masterpiece. (shrink)