Searching for Semantics in Music: A Global Discourse
Synopsis
Hans-Joachim Koellreutter defined music as an art that uses a system of sound signs, or a language, as a means of expression. Signs have three levels, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic, and music is an art whose signs do not have the semantic level, or a relationship with the external world.
There were many attempts in history to establish a semantic level of music. This article examines that the level of these attempts has a relationship with the level universality of that particular type of music.
The semantics and universality of music are analyzed with a historical perspective, and two examples are used to illustrate this phenomenon. One is the “global” characteristic of the nationalism in Brazil in the beginning of the twentieth century with the Anthropophagite Manifesto. The other is how the Japanese ancient culture could incorporate the western influence, but it is actually being dominated by it.
This paper was published in the book: Imagining Globalization: Language, Identities, and Boundaries