Playing with Signs

A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music

V. Kofi Agawu

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9780691601922
  9780691631523
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691273624
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

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.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• One: Introduction
• Two: Extroversive Semiosis: Topics as Signs
• Three: Introversive Semiosis: The Beginning–Middle–End Paradigm
• Four: A Semiotic Interpretation of the First Movement of Mozart's String Quintet in C Major, K. 515
• Five: A Semiotic Interpretation of the First Movement of Haydn's String Quartet in D Minor, Op. 76, No. 2
• Six: A Semiotic Interpretation of the First Movement of Beethoven's String Quartet in A Minor, Op. 132
• Seven: Toward a Semiotic Theory for the Interpretation of Classic Music
• Eight: Epilogue: A Semiotic Interpretation of Romantic Music
• References
• Index