Sheinberg E., Dougherty W.P. (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Music Signification

New York: Routledge, 2021. — 427 p.The Routledge Handbook of Music Signification captures the richness and complexity of the field, presenting 30 essays by recognized international experts that reflect current interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches to the subject.
Examinations of music signification have been an essential component in thinking about music for millennia, but it is only in the last few decades that music signification has been established as an independent area of study. During this time, the field has grown exponentially, incorporating a vast array of methodologies that seek to ground how music means and to explore what it may mean. Research in music signification typically embraces concepts and practices imported from semiotics, literary criticism, linguistics, the visual arts, philosophy, sociology, history, and psychology, among others. By bringing together such approaches in transparent groupings that reflect the various contexts in which music is created and experienced, and by encouraging critical dialogues, this volume provides an authoritative survey of the discipline and a significant advance in inquiries into music signification.
This book addresses a wide array of readers, from scholars who specialize in this and related areas, to the general reader who is curious to learn more about the ways in which music makes sense.List of figures
List of tables
List of musical examples
List of contributorsMusic signification and philosophy
“Musik ist das nicht”: On Romantic incomprehensibility in Chopin
From semio-ethics to a semiotics of speech in music and musicology: Theoretical (and Utopian) projections
Music and reality
From Ursatz to Urzemic: Avenues for theories and analyses of music signification
usic signification and semiotics
The musical signifier
Barthes’s “The Grain of the Voice” revisited
Britten and Stravinsky’s neoclassical operas: Signs, signification, and subjectivity
Fundamental concepts for the semiotic interpretation of musical meaning: A personal journey
Music signification and topic theory
Patterns and topics as elements of signification in late eighteenth-century music
“Mad day” and the “march of Bacchus”: Figaro in Mahler’s Third Symphony
Topics and stylistic register in Russian opera, 1775–1800
She spins and she sighs: The spinning-wheel topic and the lamentation of the romantic female
Charles Griffes’s Xanadu: A musical garden of opposites
Music signification and narrative
Music narrative: Theory, context, subjectivity
Motivic linkage and actantial pairing in Britten’s operas
The narrative rhetoric of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
From music signification to musical narrativity: Concepts and analyses
Music signification and society
Musical vernaculars and their signifying transformations
Multimodal reinforcement and worlds of sense: A political approach to musical emotions
Reading meaning in and out of music from Theresienstadt: The case of Pavel Haas
FKA twigs and popular music signification: The challenge of fluid clarity
Lost innocence: Signifying East, signifying West
Music signification and emotion, cognition, and embodiment
Four flavors of pre-modern emotion
Music as experience: Musical sense-making between step-by-step processing and synoptic overview
Melody as representation
Music signification and education
Musical semiosis as a process of learning and growth
A pragmatic map of music signification for music analysis courses
Music signification and intermediality
The operatic principle: Negotiating contradictory demands of signification
Pianto as a topical signifier of grief in contemporary operas by John Adams, Thomas Adès, and Kaija Saariaho
Musical ekphrasis: The evolution of the concept and the breadth of its applicationIndex of names
Index of terms and concepts