Semiotics in Music

One field that is particularly undeveloped is Musical Semiotics. It is a field that is ripe for it, because so much of western art music is based on the same foundation: Gregorian chant. Sometimes mining a piece of music for signs is easy: the oft used Dies Irae motif, for instance, or to take it to a higher level, a juxtaposition of Dies Irae with Deutschland Uber Alles could be a rather ham-fisted (yet accurate), sign for Nazi Germany.

The richest pieces to mine for signs are the late Romantics and post-Romantics: Gustav Mahler, Dmitri Shostakovich, Alexandr Scriabin, etc. I was first getting interested in semiotics in college and reading a lot of Eco, Barthes, Culler, etc. About a year into it, I was surprised when out of the blue, my theory professor, Anatole Leiken, announced that we were going to talk about applying semiotics to music. Prof. Leiken used Shostokovich as his example, and we studied a piece of his as being a biting critique of Stalinist cultural policies. It was hard to argue with the content, as the juxtapositions were clear, but there seemed something fishy about it. Why would someone in the middle of such a brutal regime risk his neck this way? Surely it wouldn't be a message in the bottle, since very few would get it outside of Russia.

But the more Prof. Leiken talked about Shostokovich, the more it made sense. They guy already expected to be arrested and enGulagged. To make it easier for his family, he used to spend nights standing outside his apartment, dressed and packed and ready to go when the police arrived. Since he thought he was a dead man, it was a way of getting it off his chest. He also knew that the Stalinists were such blunderheads they would not get the commentary (since he titled everything in an excruciatingly Commie orthodox manner: Ode to the Victims of Fascist Oppression).

Also, there is a rich tradition in Russia that goes back to the Czarist age of hiding political discourse in literary theory and criticism. Shostokovich simply moved this tradition into his own field.

What is interesting in the example of Shostokovich is that he worked in the full conscious knowledge that he was encoding his commentary in his work. I am more interested in the play between the language and the work in which the author is only partially aware, where the language caries its own burdens into the mix, and reveals to us aspects of our culture that we would not think of otherwise (as long as they are possible, plausible and proportionate - see my response to Peony in the last semiotics post).

What is interesting about this approach to musical analysis is that it is predicated on the Catholic foundation of our civilization. It's all based on the Chant!

All of this leads me to an announcement:

Expect the next two parts of The Building Blocks of Music as well as the next analysis this weekend! And please, keep in mind as we discuss Victimae paschali laudes, how these chants work their way into all later Western art music.