Looking for the musical meaning
the semiotically informed interpretation as alternative to the formalist analisys
Abstract
Historically, it has been widely accepted—without controversy—that music not only possesses meaning but is also capable of conveying it. Indeed, countless artists and philosophers of art have gone so far as to describe it as the “supreme language.” Similarly, it is generally understood that music operates and communicates within a metatextual (beyond its written form, the score) and temporal dimension. In other words, the mere study of its formal properties is insufficient to access the symbolic plane in which it unfolds. Nevertheless, the discipline that has traditionally sought to analyze music has largely remained within formalist paradigms, reducing its symbolic and metatextual nature to its immanent properties: formalism.
This article seeks to propose a new perspective on the matter—a sort of paradigm shift in conceiving the musical object as a sign: Semantically Informed Interpretation (SII). Drawing on semiotics (given that musical language exists within a semiotic ecosystem), hermeneutics (since performers, theorists, and audiences alike make interpretive inferences about the musical work), and narratology (by framing music as a language endowed with symbolic properties), SII positions itself as an alternative to traditional approaches to music and its meaning.
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