Sound and sign: some notes and reflections on the modalities of signification in music
Marco Ligabue · Contemporary Music Review · 1998
The paper aims to link up with that ideal line of debate concerning the application — or applicability — of semiotics in the field of music. Although it has been in existence and specifically studied for more than twenty years, musical semiotics still runs into fundamental problems, the resolution of which is not to be found simply in the generalization of specific principles, or in the departures from them allowed by those same principles. This is so much so that the problems tend to be ignored. Questions about the if and how of a potential process of semiosis in music therefore become — both in these terms and actually — a priority and epistemologically indispensable, given that one really wants to know how pertinent a semiotic approach to musical facts can be.