Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music

Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music

Agawu, V. Kofi

Paperback

Series: Princeton Legacy Library

Music Reference

ISBN10: 0691273634
ISBN13: 9780691273631
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: Mar 25 2025
Pages: 166
Weight: 0.76
Height: 0.36 Width: 8.00 Depth: 10.00
Language: English

An award-winning account of the importance of semiotic play in Classic instrumental music, including that of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven

Of all the repertories of Western Art music, none is as explicitly listener-oriented as that of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet few attempts to analyze the so-called Classic Style have embraced the semiotic implications of this fact. In Playing with Signs, Kofi Agawu proposes a listener-oriented theory of Classic instrumental music that encompasses its two most fundamental communicative dimensions: expression and structure.

Units of expression, defined in reference to topoi, are shown here to interact with, confront, and merge into units of structure, defined in terms of the rhetorical conventions of beginning, continuing, and ending. The book draws on examples from works by Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven to show that the explicitly referential, even theatrical, surface of Classic music derives from a play with signs. Although addressed primarily to readers interested in musical analysis, the book opens fruitful avenues for further research into musical semiotics, aesthetics, and Classicism.

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