Abstract
Seeing it from a semiotic perspective, musical performance is understood as a communication model in which a series of coded messages are sent or enacted and their meanings received or decoded. For example, in a theatre or an opera performance, which have been for a long-time subject to semiotic analysis, the meaning is encoded and transmitted through the various systems of staging, such as set, lighting, costume, music, etc. In addition, rich and complex significations are provided by the performers/actors themselves, their bodies, actions, and interpretive choices. All this can be said about the art of music performers as well, and, if we think of a musical performance as a mere actualization of a musical score, we obviously underline the potential density of its semiosis.
This chapter aims at presenting some possible model of a semiotic theory of musical performance art that would enable an analysis of the activity of musical performers based on the musical, cultural, and social messages generated and sent by them. From the methodological point of view, the core of the present analysis consists in the application (sometimes adaptation) of some important models produced within musical semiotics, such as Gino Stefani’s theory of musical competence, certain aspects of Eero Tarasti’s existential semiotics, and the addition of the author’s own formulations.
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Notes
- 1.
It is to be pointed out, at this very stage, that this work, especially as purporting to be a semiotic study, presents no consistent disquisition on the topic of “reception” and “receivers” of performance. While fully acknowledging the importance of the issue, a relative lack of treatment of this subject is the practical result of a selection in focuses. The role of musical performance within a society, in relation to a musical work across epochs and places, and in the specific of distinct individual identities, is already too big a task for a single investigation. Moreover, it is obvious that a lot of information still needs to be captured already on the side of those who perform, even without going to the other side (i.e. that of the listener, not to mention the side of the composer as the primary element of the renown “composer—performer—listener” communication chain) as well. Finally, it is my conviction that a scholar, a musicologist, may or may not be a musician, or a composer, but she/he is always a receiver, a listener of musical phenomena. Hence, a musicological research, regardless of the topic, can only avoid conceptualizing the notion of musical receiver, but can never avoid displaying its perspective and projections of the events described.
- 2.
As Aston (1996, p. 57) points out, this was mostly the emphasis of the early works in the field of theater semiotics, while a more recent phase of the semiotic theater study rather focuses on the decodifying activities of the receiver (spectator), starting already from the spectator’s preexpectations of the theatrical event; this perspective is mentioned below as a strong influence on the listener’s perception of a musical performance, whether live or recorded.
- 3.
Even more significantly, Umberto Eco did actually deal with music-related problem, but that was in his presemiotic scholarly phase, during the 1960s (Eco 1964, for instance, having a whole section on the subject, and being, in its days, in the thick of the discussion on popular music in Italy).
- 4.
Eero Tarasti’s past decades of activity, plus his status as internationally acknowledged semiotician, makes him a “general semiotician” too, not only a representative of musical semiotics, therefore, worth of inclusion in this list. Yet, his situation is a bit peculiar, having him started explicitly within the field of musical semiotics: hence, my choice to discuss Tarasti’s work in the company of Stefani and Nattiez.
- 5.
The concept Umwelt belongs to an Estonian-German biologist Jakob von Uexküll, it was also widely used in the work of Thomas A. Sebeok and Martin Heidegger. Umwelt is seen as a semiotic world of any organism (as the concept was conceived in the field of biology and biosemiotics), which encompasses any aspects of the surrounding environment that have meaning to that very organism. Significantly, while interacting with the environment, the organism is constantly recreating and transforming its Umwelt.
- 6.
Originally introduced by Sebeok back in 1979.
- 7.
This broad and miscellaneous concept is used here rather freely. The term “semantic gesture” belongs to the main figure of the Prague structuralism, Jan Mukařovský, and denotes (in the analysis of the individual aspects of a literary work) the uniqueness and entity of a literary sign.
- 8.
For more on this topic, see Tarasti’s reflections on semiotics of resistance, in Tarasti 2009.
- 9.
Due to its wide usage and familiarity, here, the semiotic square is employed merely as a schematized illustration, without its further theoretical explications.
- 10.
- 11.
Modalities of Will ( vouloir), Can ( pouvoir), Know ( savoir), and Must ( devoir), offered by Greimas in the field of linguistics, were for the first time applied in musicology by Eero Tarasti. Modalities provide music with the semantic meaning. In that they can be endogenic, i.e., inherent to the immanent meanings of the music, or exogenic, that is, “activated” from outside depending on how the music is interpreted and performed. While talking about the composer’s work, Tarasti explains the modality of “Will” as follows: vouloir appears in, say, Beethoven’s sonata in those episodes where the composer is particularly heroic, that is, the way he wants to be (here and below—from Tarasti’s Musical Semiotics seminars at the University of Helsinki, 2005).
- 12.
“Can” is an inner force, the possibility to express one’s “Will.” In composition, that would be the author’s creative power, compositional ideas.
- 13.
“Know,” in composition, means how the composer masters his/her compositional technique, and how well he/she is capable of employing the knowledge (of certain rules, for instance) while composing.
- 14.
“Must” is the genre-determined and other rules, norms, etc. that the composer must follow in his work.
- 15.
Given that the majority of Stefani’s early works, including his most important accounts on musical competence, have not been available in English so far, the Italian originals were consulted for the purposes of this study. I am grateful to Dario Martinelli for his competent assistance in providing accurate English translations to the passages cited herein.
- 16.
In order to clarify the correct placement of all the keywords in my argument, it is perhaps necessary to specify that the first step is the musical experience (i.e., the meeting between a subject and an object: say, a performer touching the piano), which generates a musical sense (of different types: an emotional response, a musicological evaluation, etc.), which in turn is organized into a musical competence (i.e., one or more of Stefani’s levels), and which ultimately is manifested and shared in musical discourses.
- 17.
I would also mention a Finnish pianist Oli Mustonen among such examples. Mustonen has been repeatedly, and very harshly, criticized for his overemphasized gestures while playing. However, disturbing or not-always-pertinent those gestures may be, it is rather evident to me, as a listener and concert goer, that a person like Mustonen cannot in fact control or suppress his corporeal identity while onstage.
- 18.
Although Stefani himself warns that it would be a wrong assumption to think that only professionals possess a competence based on this level. The average music lover can also be “acculturized” in musical techniques, although not necessarily “alphabetized” in them, as the professional obviously is (cf. Stefani 1999, pp. 18–19).
- 19.
This model has been presented by the author as part of a conference paper ‘“Creative Lying” and other ways to signify: On Music Performance as a Creative Process’ at the International Conference on The Embodiment of Authority (Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, September 2010), which is now available in the form of publication, see Navickaitė-Martinelli (2011).
- 20.
A somewhat reductionist concept of the “work” employed herein, primarily as denoting the message coded by the composer, is admittedly problematic. As we see from numerous examples, musical semioticians present a much more holistic vision of music and consider the work as something encompassing creation, interpretation and perception; also philosophers (such as Ingarden 1986; Goodman 1968; Kivy 1993, among others) have been pondering upon this issue, often coming to the conclusion that the work is a changing entity; even in traditional musicology it has been stated that “fixing a musical work through notation is not sufficient for constructing the notion of a work” (Dahlhaus, quoted in Nattiez 1990, p. 70); however, in conventional musicological analysis, the musical work may often be reduced to its structural, written-down properties. Hence, for the sake of the model’s simplicity, I find it reasonable limiting the meaning of the “work” concept to its score-based elements and using these two terms as equivalent to each other, since in most cases the score is our only source as to what the work is, and especially because in Western art music it is after all the score that guarantees the work’s identity through its multiple sonorous realizations. I shall sum-up the issue with Nattiez’s claim that “in the Western tradition, the thing that ensues from the composer’s creative act is the score; the score is the thing that renders the work performable and recognizable as an entity, and enables the work to pass through the centuries” (ibid, p. 71).
- 21.
This type of performer’s signification, the ‘composed gestures’ that are embedded in the score and actualized by a performer, is thoroughly discussed by Marjaana Virtanen in her doctoral dissertation Musical Works in the Making: Verbal and Gestural Negotiation in Rehearsals and Performances of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Piano Concerti (University of Turku, 2007).
- 22.
For a condensed account on the contextual, sociocultural, and ideological elements of musical performance, see Navickaitė-Martinelli (2007) and Navickaitė-Martinelli (2010). Particularly, the latter article discusses the relations of the transformations of musical performance art during the twentieth century, such as sociocultural background, matters of repertoire, marketing, schools of performance, and sound recordings.
- 23.
See the study of Richard Leppert, among others; for instance, his The Sight of Sound. Music, Representation, and the History of the Body, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1993.
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Navickaitė-Martinelli, L. (2015). Musical Performance in a Semiotic Key. In: Trifonas, P. (eds) International Handbook of Semiotics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9404-6_34
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