First Post

How Semiotics Erupted from a Music Theory Thesis on a Densmore Collection

 

In 1988, I submitted a master’s Thesis in Music Theory to the University of Iowa entitled Language, Space and Dimension in Choctaw Music: The 1933 Frances Densmore Collection. I used semiotics heavily as an analytic tool for the collection in the attempt to create a theory behind the music that was not Western in origin.

My use of semiotics in the study of Indigenous American music was precipitated by the musical semiotic work of Nicolas Ruwet and Jean-Jacques Nattiez. Ruwet first, then Nattiez used American Indigenous music of Canada to show how placement of signs and signals determined the progression of musical activity. This progression occurs on a moment-by-moment basis rather than on any attempt to designate an arching structure. Thus structure is determined by instant signals rather than any concept of overall direction or shape.

The semiotic character of this process was first introduced to me from a non-musical source, the writings on popular culture of the late 1950s and early 1960s of Roland Barthes (especially in his Mythologies) and his American champion, Susan Sontag. Though Barthes and Sontag found only a small place in my master’s Thesis, their work was an impetus for my theory. Even when I left the concerns of music theory behind, I carried with me this germ of a motivation into further studies of literature.

I may have left behind the academic study of music, but I did not abandon the theory of semiotics.

I fear the same cannot be said for the practice of semiotics in music. The practice appears to have fallen into disfavor in the 1990s along with the perceived arrogance of Western description of indigenous materials as objects-of-study, a placement of the ethnomusicologist above the object of their inquiry as explainers of it. I must admit that I felt the guilt of this assignation as I have no biological connections to indigenous America. My intentions were to create a non-Western method of explaining the musical make-up, but, unfortunately, this process meant that I was placing the music in a spot of objectivity and dissection. This process inevitably holds a position of audacity, even if unintentional.

As I say, I left the world of music academia, but I continued with the process of semiotic interpretation, the moment-to-moment appreciation of aesthetic culture, as a part of my worldview. This type of interpretation will always yield to the influence of Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation" in which she bemoans the prison in which the interpreters of strict structures as a determinant of artistry place the art-consumer.