See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323573657 An analysis of the ironies and other comical resources in the Gianni Schicchi opera of G. Puccini Chapter · January 2017 CITATIONS READS 0 180 1 author: Iciar Nadal Garcia University of Zaragoza 20 PUBLICATIONS 6 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Música e inclusión para el cambio Social View project Música e Inclusión para el cambio social View project All content following this page was uploaded by Iciar Nadal Garcia on 08 March 2018. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. Making Sense of Music Studies in Musical Semiotics Costantino Maeder & Mark Reybrouck 3 This publication was made possible through the support provided by the Centro di studi italiani (CEIT) and GLOBALIT, Université catholique de Louvain, and the Musicology research group of the KU Leuven– University of Leuven. We want to express our gratitude to the many colleagues and collaborators who have helped us in the preparation of this book, in first line Emmanuelle Fantoni and Mathilde Flumian. Many thanks as well to Sonia Henrot and Nathalie Coisman for their administrative and organisatorial help. © Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2017 Registration of copyright: D/2017/9964/60 ISBN: 978-2-87558-640-7 ISBN PDF version: 978-2-87558-641-4 Printed in Belgium by CIACO scrl – printer number: 95380 Printed in Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, adapted or translated, in any form or by any means, in any country, without the prior permission of Presses universitaires de Louvain Graphic design: Marie-Hélène Grégoire Distribution: www.i6doc.com, on-line university publishers Available on order from bookshops or at Diffusion universitaire CIACO (University Distributors) Grand-Rue, 2/14 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium Tel: +32 10 47 33 78 Fax: +32 10 45 73 50 [email protected] Distributor in France: Librairie Wallonie-Bruxelles 46 rue Quincampoix 75004 Paris, France Tel: +33 1 42 71 58 03 Fax: +33 1 42 71 58 09 [email protected] 4 Table of contents Introduction Mark Reybrouck and Costantino Maeder—Making sense of music.........................7 1- Classical music ………………………………………………………….. 15 James William Sobaskie—Allusion as premise. Two mélodies of Fauré ............... 17 Tijana Popović Mladjenović—Structure, sense, and meaning of Debussy’s La Puerta del Vino. Interpreting the self through music ........................................................ 29 Rui Magno Pinto—The Portuguese symphonic poem (1884–1909) ...................... 43 Jean Marie Hellner—Robert Schumann’s Drei Romanzen, op. 28. An Entwicklungsroman................................................................................................................. 65 Matteo Giuggioli—A grammar of pathos. Fandango as a topos in Boccherini’s chamber music............................................................................................................ 79 Małgorzata Gamrat—Between the sound and the word: methodological challenges in the analysis of Liszt’s piano transcriptions of his own Lieder ............................... 91 Francesco Galofaro—The different musical semiotic systems in Domenico Zipoli’s Sonate d’Intavolatura per Organo (1716) .......................................................... 107 Damjana Bratuž—Bartók’s improvisations for piano. A musical frontier ............ 117 Julie Walker—La Polonaise op. 53 comme manifeste du dernier style de Chopin. Contexte et analyse narrative............................................................................. 129 2- Contemporary classical music............................................................... 139 Luciano de Freitas Camargo—The zavod topic .................................................. 141 Justyna Humięcka-Jakubowska—Musical representations in the context of music information retrieval and some ideas of the Darmstadt school composers .............. 155 Yves Knockaert—The meaning of repetition in Wolfgang Rihm’s music of the 1980s ........................................................................................................................ 169 3- Folk and ethno…………………………………………………………. 181 Julia Shpinitskaya—The universe of sound. A comparative study of the vibration sound in cultural traditions: variations without theme......................................... 183 Heloísa de A. Duarte Valente—“Una musica dolce suonava…” Memory and nomadism in the Italian-Brazilian song ........................................................................ 197 Ricardo Nogueira De Castro Monteiro—A semiotic approach to Native-Brazilian music. Challenges and possible contributions..................................................... 207 4- Opera, songs…………………………………………………………… 221 Jean-Marie Jacono—Sémiotique, interprétation et mise en scène de l’opéra ........ 223 Johan Wijnants—Musical signification in (the first decade of) opera................... 233 Paolo Rosato—Sense-making in opera: a stratified dialectic among linguistic, perceptive, and cognitive processes. Some examples from Verdi’s works ................ 243 Icíar Nadal García—An analysis of the ironies and other comical resources in the Gianni Schicchi opera of G. Puccini .................................................................. 255 5- Theory…………………………………………………………………. 267 Konstantin Zenkin—Composition technique among the semiotic systems of a piece of music ........................................................................................................... 269 Robert Michael Weiß—Musical clock face value. Geometrical metaphors for musical properties ......................................................................................................... 279 Stefano Jacoviello—It is a matter of style. Language, grammar, style and meaning between semiotics and musicology .................................................................... 293 Panu Heimonen—From a conversational point of view. Enhancing music analytic meaning ........................................................................................................... 305 6- Education………………………………………………………………. 317 Alessia R. Vitale—The semiotics of gestures in learning how to sing. Dynamics and prospects .......................................................................................................... 319 May Kokkidou & Christina Tsigka—In search of musical meaning. Looking for answers by the standpoint of music education .................................................... 331 Mary Dawood—The Cartons Piano at the national library of France. Rediscovering forgotten music................................................................................................. 345 7- Transmediality………………………………………………………… 355 Kevin Clifton—Sound and semiotics in Hitchcock’s coming attraction: locating and unraveling meaning in Rope’s movie trailer ....................................................... 357 Zhenglan Lu—Transsemiosic paradox in film music. Red music in chinese films on the cultural revolution ....................................................................................... 365 Alessandro Bratus—More real than the real thing. The construction of authenticity in popular music recordings and audiovisual texts.................................................. 375 Nicholas P. McKay—Stravinsky’s opera in a postmodern age. An intermedial semiotic reading ............................................................................................... 387 Daniel Nagy—Myth creation and intertextuality after Wagner. The Ring cycle and Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his brothers. ......................................................... 403 6 Making sense of music Mark Reybrouck, KU Leuven–University of Leuven Costantino Maeder, Université catholique de Louvain For a long time, the idea that music signifies has been implicit in writings on music, but only in the last decades research on musical signification has established itself as a discipline. This is evidenced by the exponential growth of writings on music, signification and meaning, and confirmed by the seminal research association which gathers researchers from all over the world: the “Project on Musical Signification” founded by Eero Tarasti in 1985. Signification and meaning, however, do not tally with sense-making. The latter implies an active involvement of the sense maker, while the concepts of signification and meaning tend to be immanent to the music object or artwork. In many semiotic, object-oriented, structuralist frameworks, musical sense-making was often sidestepped, neglected or ignored. The integration of it must be situated accordingly in the broader context of musicology, pragmasemiotics and neurosemiotics. This broader look will allow to reinvestigate major questions which are still not totally resolved, as for example the tension between music as structure and music as aesthetic experience. Focusing on sense-making implies that researchers have to rethink what musical semiotics is, but also its relation to musicology as a discipline: is there some common ground or should we deal with a tension between an object-centered approach to music as opposed to a subjective and hermeneutical approach to musical sense-making? Is there a distinction in contents and methodology or is it possible to conceive a broader framework that brings together the objective and the subjective, the artwork and the receiver, the immanent meaning and the attributed meaning? These introductory questions suggest that musical semiotics needs to open up to cognitive sciences, neurosciences, psychology and other related fields, probably providing the glue that brings together all those diverging fields of investigation. Musical semiotics, as an autonomous area of inquiry, is a rather young field of research. As a discipline, it is still in continuous development (Agawu, 1991; Hatten, 2004; Maeder & Reybrouck, 2015, 2016; Nattiez, 1990; Sheinberg, 2012; Tagg, 2013; Tarasti, 1994, 1996, 2002, 2003) and it is still positioning itself in the broader context of musicology as well as semiotics. The relation with musicology, in particular, is not yet totally clear. Being itself a rather young discipline, musicology was established as an academic discipline around the second half of the 19 century. Adler’s well-known essay on the scope, method and aim of the “science of music”—Musikwissenschaft— has been seminal in this regard (Adler, 1885). Though he proposed a division in three th Making sense of music. sub-disciplines, namely the historical, systematic and comparative musicology, it became quite obvious that the historic branch would receive the bulk of attention. The systematic approach, on the other hand, was conceived as a joint discipline that comprises both systematic and comparative aspects to study the organization of musical structures in a transdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach (see Schneider, 2008; 2008b). Both terms, moreover, designate a specific and effective approach: the systematic approach stands for a sophisticated, thought-out and well-organized procedure of thinking as opposed to arbitrary, inconsistent access to observations; the comparative approach makes it possible to order objects, structures and elements in relation to each other by studying them systematically with regard to their distinctive features. Classifications, in the comparative approach, are based on categories of identity, difference and variety (Elschek, 2008). Though the three approaches were conceived originally as equal parts of a broader framework—Adler’s system was meant as a universal model that encompassed both existing and established fields of research as well as fields that were envisioned only—, the historic and systematic branch evolved in different directions, due partly to their different methodology. The historic methodology, in fact, relies mainly on philological skills, descriptions, musical analysis, hermeneutic understanding and interpretation; the systematic methodology instead relies on measurement, experiment or empirical investigations, data analysis, statistics and modelling. The two disciplines, therefore, have different orientations which can be coined either as historicalphilological-hermeneutic or scientific-experimental-comparative (Schneider, 2008b). It is tempting to subsume the field of musical semiotics under one of those two branches. In the early days of systematic musicology, musical semiotics had its place within this discipline, and the systematic approach is still present in the structurally oriented approach to musical analysis. Yet, there have been other developments that are more related to the philological-philological-hermeneutic approach as well. Musical semiotics, in fact, has its own disciplinary history, revolving around concepts, aims, scope and methodology. As such, it is still in a continuous search for positioning itself both within the broader disciplines of semiotics and musicology. Semiotics, as a scientific discipline, has a long tradition as “science of signs”. It is difficult, however, to provide a general definition of the field. Three major descriptions have been proposed to describe its contents and methodology: semiotics as the science of signs and communication systems, semiotics as the descriptive science that leans upon linguistic methodology, and semiotics simply as scientific description (Nattiez, 1973). The linguistic approach has received most attention with a strong impetus stemming from French structuralism. This approach has been challenged, however, for not having taken sufficiently into account the role of the sign user in the process of sense-making. Semiotics thus had to broaden its approach form a dyadic (the distinction between signifier and signified) to a triadic approach by encompassing also the role of the interpreting mind. This had been emphasized already within the fields of analytical philosophy, action theory, general systems theory and the semiotic tradition of Peirce and Morris, which stressed the dynamic relationship between three 8 Mark Reybrouck and Costantino Maeder––Introduction levels of semiotic reference, namely the material sign vehicle, the object it refers to and the final interpretation by the sign user. A most interesting attempt to broaden the field has been also initiated by Morris’ division of semiotics in three dimensions: syntactics, semantics and pragmatics (Morris, 1975 [1938]). Musical semiotics has capitalized on this distinction, with the bulk of contributions being related to the syntactic level of analysis. Scholars such as Molino (1975), Nattiez (1990) and Ruwet (1975) have been exponents of this approach, with a focus on taxonomic-empirical research, in an attempt to select and identify classes of sounds by arranging them in terms of similarity and difference. This is basically an approach “from text to code”, i.e. an inductive-heuristic approach that tries to infer general rules from particular instances. There have been contributions in the field of musical semantics as well (Laske, 1973; Kühl, 2007; Reybrouck, 2013) with a major distinction between musical meaning as referring to something outside of the music (the field of external or real semantics) or as referring merely to itself (the field of internal or selfreferential semantics). The distinction is still a subject of discussion and there is actually a lot of overlap between the syntactic level and the level of self-referential semantics. The most challenging dimension, however, is the pragmatic level of musical sense-making. It investigates the relations between sign vehicles, their users and the processes that are involved in the interpretation of the signs. This means that meaning cannot be defined merely in terms of ontological categories, but rather in terms of dispositions to react to stimuli. Semiotics, in fact, has seen recently a paradigm shift. Starting from an initial opposition between the continental tradition of semiotics with a principal orientation to the schools of de Saussure and Hjelmslev and the AngloSaxon tradition which was oriented primarily to the theoretical framework of Peirce, there have been signs of a growing rapprochement between both orientations as the result of the pragmatic turn in philosophy (Bernstein, 2010; Parret, 1983; Rorty, 1982). This has been obvious in the case of music and performing arts, analyzed and scrutinized as a performing process, a historical-cultural phenomenon or a cultural aesthetic practice. Music, in this view, can be considered as a spectacular phenomenon with multiple dimensions which can be studied in its intermedial and transmedial dimension (Helbo et al., 2011; Maeder & Reybrouck, 2015, 2016). As such, it is possible to investigate the history of musical semiotics in its relation to traditional musicology. The domain, however, is still in full development and must, to some extent, even still come to age. There are, in fact, multiple new developments which are related to the phenomenon of musical experience (Maeder & Reybrouck, 2015) and the role of embodiment and emotions as related to music (Reybrouck & Eerola, 2017; Schiavio et al., 2016). Much is to be expected here from recent developments in fields such as biosemiotics and neuropragmatics. There is, however, a distinction between the aims and scope as intended in theoretical and programmatic contributions and the actual research as it is conducted nowadays all over the world. This edited volume is an example of this claim. It assembles 31 contributions from 18 countries, not only from Europe, but as well from the USA, Canada, South Amer- 9 Making sense of music. ica, Russia and China. They were presented at the Twelfth Congress of the International Project on Musical Signification, whose main aim is to foster a better and comprehensive understanding of how music works semiotically. The book is organized in seven chapters with some of the papers reflecting on concepts and methods from a rather broad perspective whereas others report on actual research and its findings. They have as a common ground a search for musical sense-making and signification and are illustrative of the breadth and scope of musical semiotics today. As such, they encompass traditional musical analysis but in a broader context of structural, phenomenological or hermeneutical approaches. Many papers are related to classical music, to contemporary classical music, to folk and ethno, opera and songs. Other papers deal with broader claims and are concerned with music theory, education and transmediality. The first two chapters start with a collection of essays that rely on a more structuralist-analytical semiotic approach to music. The first gathers essays on classical music. The authors delve deeply into the analytical paradigms and rely heavily on the study of the score. These contributions embrace musical works by individual composers as Fauré, Debussy, Schumann, Boccherini, Liszt, Zipoli, Bartók and Chopin as well as more general stylistic genres such as the Portuguese symphonic poems. The second chapter focusses on contemporary classical music. The first paper deals with the representation of noises produced by machines as exemplified in the Zavod topic of socialist realism. The second is oriented towards the interdisciplinary field of music information retrieval. It provides insights from musicology and computer science, and investigates musical questions related to computational approaches such as automated analysis of music by the Darmstadt school composers. The third paper investigates the role of repetition in the music by Rihm and tries to give a new meaning to this phenomenon by defining it as an element of questioning rather than as a confirmation. The third chapter, about folk and ethno, naturally opens up to new fields: sensemaking as such is key to the understanding of these forms of music. The first contribution provides a comparative study of the universe of sound with examples of vibration sound in diverse cultural traditions. The second contribution is about memory and nomadism in Italian-Brazilian song, and the third one is a methodological and epistemological exercise of approaching a non-Western cultural environment, focusing on native-Brazilian music. It questions the possible contributions of semiotics to the study of cultural heritage, also encompassing the anthropological studies regarding myth and music. The fourth chapter is about opera, from the first decade of its origins (between 1600 and 1610) to the works of Verdi, Puccini and Mussorgsky. It raises the question which distinguishing elements make a work of art into an opera, stressing a triadic analytical description in terms of a musico-poetico-dramatic sign. It defines opera as an intermedial object with a stratified dialectic among linguistic, perceptive and cognitive processes. It provides an analysis of different musical comical forms such as grotesque, satire, irony, parody, mimic, etc., and it investigates the function of scenic representation. 10 Mark Reybrouck and Costantino Maeder––Introduction The fifth chapter addresses several theoretical issues. It deals with semiotic systems of a piece of music, recalling precompositional techniques as orally transmitted pre-images of the music. It considers the possibility of using visual metaphors to provide deeper insights in musical structures. It investigates the relationship between language, musical grammar and style. It questions the conversational approach to musical meaning by bringing together existential semiotics and the analysis of conversation. The sixth chapter covers musical education. It describes the role of gestures in learning how to sing both as a clinical method and from a phenomenological approach. It investigates the musician’s perception of the meaning of music by bringing together the fields of aesthetics, musicology, cognitive science, neuroscience, music psychology and music education. Moreover, it provides a means for rediscovering forgotten music. The seventh chapter, finally, is about transmediality. It describes the relationship between sound and semiotics and the transsemiotic paradox in film music. It investigates the construction of authenticity in popular recordings and audiovisual texts. It points to the possibility of intersemiotic translation of sonic music into literary poetry or vice versa. And it provides an example of intertextuality on the basis of myth and mythopoeia. References Adler, G. (1885). Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft. Vierteljahrschrift für Musikwissenschaft, 1, 5-20. Agawu, K. (1991). Playing with signs. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Bernstein, R. (2010). The pragmatic turn. Cambridge: Polity. Elschek, O. (2008). Systematic Musicology—anachronism or challenge? A perspective on disciplinary and scientific developments. In Schneider, A. (Ed.), Systematic and Comparative Musicology: Concepts, Methods, Findings (pp. 63–88). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Hatten, R.S. 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