SEMIOTICS OF MUSIC

This is a brief account of my erstwhile effort, at Moscow University, to develop a thesis on the Semiotics of Music, under the official academic supervision of a very interested Professor Sebastian Konstantinovich Shaumyan.

Here is the bottom line. This project seemed indeed very interesting, but I am glad that, having no time for this larger-than-life undertaking (with, perhaps, another prospective job and a PhD offer from some excited professorial quarters?), due to my marital distractions of the year 1971/1972, I switched to Permyakov and to his structural paroemiology. Otherwise, I would have remained committed to a project, suitable for a music scientist, rather than for a music artist, and I would surely have ended up deeply disappointed in my awfully ambitious endeavor to “dissect music like a corpse,” (which is of course a semi-quote from Pushkin’s Mozart and Saglieri, naturally, put in the mouth of Saglieri, Pushkin’s epitome of mediocrity).

My lucid understanding of this rather unhappy connotation of my Semiotics of Music should be credited to my rereading of Pushkin (rereading in my mind, not in a book: I still keep much of Pushkin’s poetry vividly etched in my memory, reciting it from time to time to myself), in light of Schopenhauer’s analysis of music as a direct copy of Der Wille, not as a science of any kind, nor, mind you, as some tortuous copy of a copy, which precludes me from all consideration of music through the second-hand prism of musicology, even if the latter is hiding under the fancy name of structural musicology.

Having said that, I must repeat my acknowledgment of the fact that forty years ago the idea of writing this intriguing thesis was indeed very much on my mind, greatly bolstered by my special pride in the brilliantly short and effective title Semiotics of Music. To my credit, I never intended to reduce all music to a formal semiotic system. My interest was in creating a fancy formal system which could be applied to music with a number of noteworthy conclusions to be made.

I am not particularly anxious to dig up the corpse, after allowing it to stay buried for forty years, but a few fleeting reminiscences, which come to mind, can get themselves committed to paper (figuratively speaking), if only as a faraway memory.

In a broad-brush sketch, I regarded music as a system very similar to the system of natural languages, with a classification closely following the latter. Each notable composer of music represented a separate language of his own, these languages grouped into families and branches.

Individual notes constituted phonemes, while their vertical clusters corresponded to morphemes. Musical sequences were treated on several levels of complexity, corresponding to words, phrases, idioms (clichés) and such. The differences in timbre, such as involving the use of different instruments, etc., corresponded to metalinguistic phenomena, such as intonation in speech, for instance.

My Semiotics of Music employed in large measure the elements of Theory of Music and Musical Harmony (I was rather proud of my uncommon accomplishments in this abstruse field, and desired to show them off), but these were seen as the syntax of music only. My work went beyond syntax, of course, treating music as a well-developed communication system with signs and symbols denoting and connoting within groups of “lexicological” units. I went well beyond the musicologists’ preoccupation with various musical elements, to their usage by the composers within their endeavor to develop a personal communication system, which made them recognizable and comprehensible to the recipients of their aural message.

I do not know how this barely-started grandiose project might have worked out. It might have taken me so far away from my core interest in human interaction through politics, bargaining and in other extralingual modes of such interaction, that I would have become ashamed of dragging my pure virgin, music, into the lower world of filth and dissimulation, where it clearly does not belong. But I would never have given up my interest in politics, as doing so, and concentrating on the purely aesthetic enjoyment, would have been an unimaginable surrender, for no aesthetic shield can protect the innocent soul from being manipulated, and eventually corrupted, by the influence of the “lower” world, and without such proper understanding of this corrupting influence, and without exposing it for what it is, there can never be such a thing as a purely aesthetic enjoyment in a blissful out-of-this-worldly vacuum…