Music – a Systemic/Functional semiotic approach

Posted by jerry on May 15th, 2007 — Posted in Journal, Music, Theory

Music – a Systemic Functional Approach

Some years ago, when studying under Michael O’Toole at Murdoch University, I began experimenting with some thoughts on applying MAK Halliday’s systemic functional semiotics to music. To my knowledge, even 20 years later no-one else has sketched out such a schema. So, with some trepidation I thought I’d dig out that early naive schema and seek views on whether such a schema might still be useful as a point of entry into musical semiotics, and as a means of finding a language with which to deal with extra-linguistic artistic works. All that remains of that original lecture is the diagram that I developed and which I will lay out below. Then I’ll try to reconstruct a pathway by way of explanation for each element of the schema.

Music – a semiotic schema

FUNCTION >

RANK
\/

IDEATIONAL
(Propositional/representational)

INTERPERSONAL
(Modality)

TEXTUAL
(Compositional)

SCHOOL/PERIOD
(Ideological base)

Religious/Secular
Canonical/Popular

Orientation
i)Form (eg Classical)
ii)Ornament (eg baroque)
iii) Sense (eg romantic)
Genre
WORK Type of orchestration/Intertextuality Modality
– fantasy
-description
-irony
-etc
as expressed by:
-voicing
-key
-dynamics
-‘weight’ etc
Frame
eg song/folk dance/tonepoem/sonata/etc
MOVEMENT

Interplay of
i)thematic structure
ii)sub-themes
eg: statement, recapitulation,cadence (ending), conjunction

Mood
eg slow movement

Mode
eg -major
-minor
-dorian
-lydian
-chromatic
-pentatonic etc

Range
-pitch
-volume

Instrumentation

Textual coherence :
-interplay of theme
-conjunctions/transitions
-sub-themes
modulations:
-to different key
-to different mode
-tonal ambiguities

PHRASE
(Verbal group)

Theme+rhythm:
anticipation
recapitulation
cadence
conjunction

Modifiers
-rhythmic
-tempo

Contrast options:
-rhythm
-tempo
-pitch
-dynamic range(loud/soft)

-pauses

THEME
(nominal group)

Play of figures
(nominal ‘characters’)

Characterisation:
relation to hearer – ‘gaze’
-pointers to key tonality
-colour
-dynamics
-line (melodic sequence)

Deixis:
Tonal qualifiers – flat 5ths/7ths etc

Key statement

Cadences (endings)

MOTIF
(Morphemes)

Lexical content
recognisable figures

recurrent patterns

Lexical Register:
Modified motifs:
-changed mode
-changed key
-inversions
-changed rhythm
Collocations:
-position in theme
-posn in movement
-posn in Work
parallelism/contrasts

NOTE
(Phoneme)

Basic unit of information:

pitch+length

degree of scale:
8-octave
7-leading-note
6-sub-mediant
5-dominant
4-sub-dominant
3-mediant
2-supertonic
1-tonic

Oppositions:

sound/silence
long/short
loud/quiet
high/low (pich)
chord/single note

Position in harmonic series

distribution

collocation

intervals

voicing

Much of this is self-explanatory, and has to do with the orientation of the music to the listener and to the culture into which it is inserted. Like all modes of signification, music has context, and a relationship to that context, whether to music history, or to style, or to genre. Each individual work is made up of elements each with their defining characteristics such as relationship to the key, voicing, sound/silence oppositions and so on.

The object here is to develop a way of talking about non-linguistic artistic texts in a schema that is relatively independent of a formal knowledge of music. That is, to try to come up with a descriptive semiotics of music by observing how it is structured, and how it functions within the culture.

I welcome suggestions on how I might develop this crude model further. In the meantime, I thought that after 20 years it is high time it got some wider exposure. If you use it, please acknowledge the source, but otherwise feel free to use and modify as you see fit.

And I welcome comments.

Cheers
Jerry

 

1 Comment

Comment by Bradley Smith

Hi Jerry, sounds very interesting indeed. I will need more time to look over your proposal carefully, but it is certainly an idea I find absorbing, and hope to pursue. I am studying at Macquarie University researching into intonation systems using the SFL framework. There are some references you might find useful/ interesting: Van Leeuwen ‘Speech, Music, Sound’, and 1991 ‘semiotics of easy listening music’; Steiner, in ‘Linguistics in a systemic perspective’1988; and a few non-SFL things I have been gathering together which I can reference if you like.

Posted on June 28, 2007 at 11:29 am

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.