Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology
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On Ruwet’s semiotically oriented theory of music
Get PDFThe article deals with Nicolas Ruwet’s semiotically oriented theory of music, which constitutes the canvas of his taxonomic analysis. Ruwet adopts from Jakobson’s semiotic structuralism the binary model of the sign, together with its key concepts of equivalence and introversive semiosis. Structural understanding of art began with the poetic function of language distinguished by Jakobson, which is defined as the projection of the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination. The principle of equivalence, regarded by Ruwet as the regulating principle of musical syntax was, in Jakobson’s view, the answer to the question about what kind of semiosis was involved in music. The latter, described by Jakobson as introversive, deserves attention not only in view of its association with taxonomic analysis, but also because of its conceptual convergence with Leonard B. Meyer’s theory of meaning and formal iconisms of David Osmond-Smith
An unknown collection of music manuscripts from Otyń (Wartenberg)
Get PDFThe Museum of Musical Instruments in Poznan (a branch of the National Museum) is in possession of a very important collection of music manuscripts from the former Jesuit monastery in Otyń (Ger. Wartenberg), which was dissolved in 1776. The activities of this centre were associated primarily with the figure of Karol Reinach, the monastery’s last superior (from 1753). Reinach maintained friendly relations with Frederick II the Great, who was an ardent flautist, as we know, and visited Otyń from time to time. The Otyń manuscripts were bequeathed to the museum in 1947, along with three preserved instruments: a pair of kettledrums and a bass viola da gamba. At present, the collection of manuscripts from the Jesuit ensemble of Otyń contains fifty-six compositions, written between 1753 and 1768. Thirty-one pieces have fully certified provenance, reflected on the title pages of the manuscripts in the form of inscriptions, such as ‘pro Choro Residentiae Wartenbergensis’, and in the names of the Otyń transcribers. Twenty-two compositions were classified as belonging to the Jesuit collection on the basis of its inventory number, placed in the top right corner. Seventeen of the preserved manuscripts were provided with exact dates of origin (ten compositions were dated to the day, the other seven to a particular year). In these manuscripts, one can find compositions of the following types: offertoria, antiphons, Marian hymns (mostly arias), litanies, carols, a cantata, a dialogue and a sequence. All of them are vocal-instrumental. The lyrics were written in Latin and German, and their subject matter is mostly connected with the Marian cult (the antiphons Ave Regina Caelorum, Alma Redemptoris Mater and Regina Coeli Laetare\ the hymn Ave Maris Stella), Jesuit themes (a litany of St John Nepomucen, a prayer of St Francis Xavier, O Deus Amo ego te) and Christmas (carols). The well-known composers include Frantisek Xaver Brixi (1732-1771), Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf (1739-1799), Carl Heinrich Graun (1704-1759), Johann Adolph Hasse (1699-1783) and Karel Loos (1724-1772), and there are also the less well-known or nearly unknown, such as Carolus Gaebel [Gebel], F. Passelt [?], Joseph Rhodigez, Antonio Josepho Ronge (or Runge [?]), Francisco Rudolph and Wollmann. The continued examination of the collection will certainly reveal more details that are unknown or as yet barely identified. The research is due to be capped with the publication of a thematic catalogue of Otyń’s music manuscripts and their registration in the RISM database
A Peircean approach to musicality
Get PDFMusicality is central to musical processes and music research. Yet, there is no consensus of what is understood by the term. It can be assumed that in large populations musicality is distributed according to a bell curve — just as any trait of personality. It is also clear that musical skills can be improved, regardless of a possible stigma of unmusicality. Depending on the conception of musicality, musicality research confronts issues and trade-offs relating to ecological validity of the concept (how musicality connects to actual music), methodology (which methods of study yield valid and reliable results), epistemology (how the gain knowledge of musicality), and ontology of music (what processes pertain to music, what not, and what is possible shared). These issues are reflected in the primarily psychological theories and tests of musicality. This article makes an attempt at a Peircean analysis of musicality. It has been suggested that the traditional psychometric approach to musicality is followed by a semiotic approach, and assuming musicality has to do with how subjects make sense in musical processes, the semiotic analysis of musicality is critical. This analysis applies Peirce’s notion of thought-sign and his tenfold classification of the sign (suggesting a three-dimensional exemplification of Peirce’s trichotomous, three dimensional model). The ten classes are differentiated by six transitions, that seem to have their correlates in the psychological understanding of cognition: manifestation, definition, filtering, binding, associating and understanding of the sign. The six transitions appear useful in analyzing the concept of musicality. Correspondingly, the conditions for musical signification extend from ability of auditory sensation to those of dynamical memory, auditory filtering, auditory structuring, association sound objects and ability to understand and manage communicational situations in music. In order to understand musicality, all these aspects should be studied with good ecological and methodological validity in mind
The Relationship between Notation and Performance in the Keyboard Compositions of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach. A Composer\u27s Specific Attempt to Communicate with Performers and Listeners
Get PDFThe play of nerves. Chopin in the era of mental disorder
Get PDFThis article concerns the neurotic image of Chopin that took shape in the 1880s and became popular during the Young Poland period. At that time, features highlighted from earlier descriptions of the composer’s character - over-sensitivity, over-sentimentality, excessive delicacy, emotional instability and inner complexity - were most spectacularly portrayed in the works of painters and sculptors such as Władysław Podkowiński, Wojciech Weiss, Bolesław Biegas and the designer of the monument in the Łazienki Royal Baths Park in Warsaw - Wacław Szymanowski. Critics and writers also helped to form the new portrait of the composer: Stanisław Przybyszewski, Cezary Jellenta, Wacław Nałkowski and Antoni Potocki. Their utterances allow us to grasp the dependency of the new picture on the theory of neuroses, advanced in 1881 by George Miller Beard and then developed and popularised during the last quarter of the nineteenth century by Richard Kraff-Ebing and Paolo Mantegazza, among others. Nervousness was considered to be the dominated feature of modern civilisation. These concepts were also influential in music criticism. Representatives of nervousness in music proved to be the Richards - Wagner and Strauss - and also Juliusz Zarębski and Ignacy Jan Paderewski. The latter, in a speech from 1911, depicted Chopin implicitly in terms of nervousness, which was also becoming a feature of the Polish national character. However, theories of neuroses were applied first and foremost to the individual psyche. The fundamental inner conflict of modern man, exposed to a surfeit of external stimuli, supposedly arose between the over-developed brain and the rest of the nervous system, as the centre of feelings and will. And it was the paresis of emotions and volition that brought a growth in the role of music, which, depending on a particular author’s assessment, either was itself the result and expression of nervous disturbance and contributed to the further deepening of the process of destruction (the stance of Antoni Sygietyński) or else filled the space left by subordinated emotions and enabled them to rebuild (the opinion of the novelist Eliza Orzeszkowa). The view of Chopin as a eulogist of new sensitivity was made manifest in Maurice Rollinat’s volume of poetry Les Nervoses, which caused quite a stir in the mid 1880s, and it was represented in Poland by Zenon Przesmycki’s Życie, and a philosophical treatise by Jean-Marie Guyau published in that periodical in 1887
Domain-specific character of tonal cognition and its consequences for the semiotics of music
Get PDFThe experience of tonal relations elicits different emotions of stability in listeners. Thus, tonality can be understood as a tool of emotional communication. For many semioticians every communicative phenomenon should be explained in terms of the sign theory. However, the pre-conceptual character of emotions of stability raises doubts about the applicability of a semiotic framework as a means of interpreting tonality. According to the author’s opinion, the applicability of a semiotic framework in music research is useful only if there is a single system for generating meaning in the brain, which is engaged in the processing of all kinds of meanings in language, music, and other communicative phenomena. Both music and language are complex phenomena which, in fact, share many communicative mechanisms. Nevertheless, they also possess traits which are specific solely to each. If the evolution of music and language branched out at some point in the anthropogenesis, some of music’s communicative features (among them tonality) would have become domain-specific. This means that the interpretation of a tonal message is based on another rule, and not the one involved in the interpretation of meaning in language. Thus, interpreting the message of tonality in terms of the semiotic sign theory is not a legitimate procedure. From this point of view, the only way of applying the semiotic framework to research into tonality is to understand signs in a purely functional sense, independent of the process of interpretation. Such an understanding of signs necessitates, however, a reformulation of semiotics
Culture and transcendence
Get PDFCulture can be approached from an existential semiotic point of view in many ways. The following results can be then obtained: The new notion which the Existential semiotic theory of culture (ESC) tries to launch is transcendence. The ESC theory is an attempt to see and analyse issues from the inside, using a model called Zemic which refers to four modes of Being. It deals with agency like any cultural theory, but now behind the theory is the idea of a subject as a transcendental ego, who is capable of pursuing acts, making choices and enjoying freedom. The theory of ESC can be tested by empirical cases of cultural life and history such as studies in cultural heritage. The theory is non deterministic. There is “linguistic turn” in the sense that a new metalanguage is elaborated to deal with transcultural, supra-rational and metacultural issues. Formal language is used to some extent, stemming from the semiotic square, deontic logic and the grammar of modalities. The proper philosophical style is that of the continental and speculative theory, yet the ESC theory is not any regress in the history of philosophy. ESC theory is non-reductionist, i.e. it emphasizes the phenomena as such
