Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music. By Kofi Agawu.

Abstract

It is good to be blessed with surprise, and Kofi Agawu’s new book offers two surprises. First, his earlier work on semiotics (Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton, 1991)) strongly implied that music topics were of primary importance in the music of the eighteenth century; in the following century they became more ‘ambiguous’ (Playing with Signs, 44). But now we have a set of analyses embracing Liszt, Brahms, Mahler, and Stravinsky, in which the theory of topics is alive and well; ‘the historical persistence of topoi’ is affirmed (Music as Discourse, 42). The other surprise is to find that Nattiez-style paradigmatic analysis, which seemed to have died with the dodo, is the basis for Agawu’s new analytical technique. There is more to say about this, however. The author is convinced that repetition is a non-trivial aspect of our music, and he finds paradigmatic charts useful in demonstrating this. But unlike Nicolas Ruwet and Nattiez, his segmentation is not governed by positivism and ‘science’ , denying the intuition of the analyst; on the contrary, it encloses a hermeneutic spirit, interpreting and describing the ‘units’ in terms of their implications, their structural significance, their mutual dialogue, and dealing with whole harmonic textures, not merely the monodies chiefly studied by Nattiez. And gone are Nattiez’s pages of melodic fragments printed vertically under each other; after quoting the salient units, Agawu simply numbers them and places the numbers in a paradigmatic chart. It is revealed that the positivisms of the earlier writers and the paradigmatic idea were not inseparable. Agawu finds musical repetition a meaningful aspect of seriality. His charts are not simply founded on logical distinctions of identity and difference but are meant to be interpretative as well as analytical; they are, in a sense, hermeneutic charts.