Is Language a Music? Writings on Musical Form and Signification

If music is a universal language, is language a universal music?
Is Language a Music? presents broadly ranging explorations of musical reference that address how and why language cannot be the only measure of meanings. Music, the author insists, is pervaded by significations, but often their erasure is as pertinent to artistry as their construction. This volume's 15 essays in musical semiotics are grouped into sections that treat issues in structural description, present alternative views of theoretical foundations, consider the elaboration of gestural references to form musical discourse, explore some stylistic issues in 20th-century music, and examine the resistance to reference which is esteemed in the tradition of absolute music.

CONTENIDO:

Preface
Prelude: Is Language a Music?

PART ONE: STRUCTURALIST PERSPECTIVES
Introduction
Structure and Function in Musical Repetition
The Allegretto of Beethoven's Seventh
Mediation as a Principle of Musical Form: Three exemples

PART TWO: SEMIOTICS POLEMICS
Introduction
Nattiez's 'Foundations for Musical Semiotics'
Our Time with the Druids
Why We Still Need Peirce

PART THREE: FROM GESTURES TO DISCOURSES
Introduction
Mind and Body in Music
'Opera Operta': Realism and Rehabilitation in 'La Traviata'
A Monument in Song (1996): Beverly (Buffy) Sainte-Marie's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee"

PART FOUR: THE MESSAGES OF METHODS
Introduction
Bartók the Progressive
The Art of Music Theory and the Aesthetic Category of 'the Possible'
Technique and Signification in the Twelve-Tone Method
The Project of Abstraction and the Persistence of the Figure in Twentieth-Century Music and Painting: On the Music of Elliot Carter, with a Postscript on the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven

PART FIVE: RESISTING REPRESENTATION
Introduction
Replaying 'My Voice Mail'

References
Index