A Sign of the Times: Semiotics in Anglo-American Musicology

Abstract

AbstractThis article provides a critical account of the appropriation of semiotics in Anglo-American musicology, its theoretical and discursive foundations, and its impact on the discipline in the period from the mid-1970s to the present. Starting out from the work of Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Philip Tagg in the 1970s, it traces two principal approaches in music semiotics, here termed the ‘structural–analytical’ and the ‘semantic–interpretative’, which draw in significant measure on, respectively, the Saussurean and Peircean legacies. Both differences of musicological tradition and the wider state of the discipline have a part to play in explaining why semiotics never established itself as a discrete and distinctive subfield in the English-speaking world in the way that it did in continental Europe. But with the increasing currency of, among other concerns, topic theory, theories of emotion and affect, and studies of musical gesture and metaphor, it might be argued that semiotics – or, rather, an interdisciplinary aggregation of approaches that might be termed ‘post-semiotic’ – has never had a stronger presence in anglophone musicology than at the present time.