Dear Members,
Best wishes for the new semester! I am terribly sorry that, because of my much work and travelling, this letter reaches you only now. My last message to you was sent almost precisely a year ago. Thus, this calendar of events in our field will be rather long. But you do not need to read this letter all at once.
Please note, however, that this will be one of the last circulars to be sent by regular mail. We shall be moving to electronic communication. That way you can receive the news more promptly and at any time. For this purpose, please send your email address to my assistant, Mr. Paul Forsell: paul.forsell@helsinki.fi He will make a list of email addresses, and you will get the news from now on by that means. We have also opened an internet page at http://www.music.helsinki.fi/musigpro/index.html, where I shall post all the news. So continue to inform me of any information related to your research in the field, publications, courses, journeys, lecture tours, plans, promotional announcements, and so on. Send to: eero.tarasti@helsinki.fi It is very important that you keep me informed !
Before I recount last year's news, let me tell you about some changes in future events. Some of you may have heard that the next big congress, ICMS7, was planned to be held in October 2000 in Helsinki. Helsinki, however, will be one of the cultural capitals of Europe this year, and thus extremely crowded during October. For this and other reasons, we have decided to postpone this congress until June 8-12, 2001, and instead of having it in Helsinki, to hold it in Imatra instead. That way it can be coordinated with the traditional annual semiotic summer congresses of Imatra. This arrangement has many advantages over Helsinki. For one, we shall be staying at the idyllic first-class hotel and having the congress in the same place. Also, we shall have a permanent staff there arranging everything. Moreover, many of you will likely find June a more pleasant time of the year than October to visit Finland.
The theme of the ICMS7 will be "Music and the Arts". The honorary committee of the congress includes these professors: Daniel Charles, Márta Grabócz, Robert S. Hatten, Leonard B. Meyer, Costin Miereanu, Raymond Monelle, Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Charles Rosen, Gino Stefani and Bernard Vecchione. For this conference, we shall send you a separate call for papers and invitation in about two months.
Instead of the ICMS7, we shall arrange in Helsinki the 8th International Doctoral and Postdoctoral Seminar on Musical Semiotics, in mid-October, 2000. The registration forms for this seminar will be sent to you at the same time as the invitations to the ICMS7. Do not confuse the two! As my co-directors for the doctoral seminar we have invited Márta Grabócz, Robert S. Hatten, Jean-Marie Jacono and Vladimir Karbusicky. As you recall, this seminar is intended for any scholar in our field who is planning a Ph.D. or has recently defended a thesis. Much time will be allotted to each participant, and the papers will be published.
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Much has happened since my last circular letter of February 3, 1999. I spent the winter of 1999 as a guest professor at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis. Neither musical semiotics, nor semiotics in general, is much known in that area of the world. Still, I met two scholars there who were studying music and media in a semiotic sense: Ronald Rodman of Carleton College (Minnesota), and James Buhler, now at the University of Texas at Austin. Together with them, I founded the "Minnesota Semiotic Circle".
After Minnesota, my visit to Bloomington was a welcome change. There I found that Robert S. Hatten had just been appointed a Professor of Music Theory at Indiana University, Bloomington. Already he has a handful of gifted students in musical semiotics, among them Bettina Hahn, who is preparing a thesis on Brahms's Alto Rhapsody. Hatten reports that he completed eight lectures on musical gesture for the Cybersemiotic Institute, which are available at the following website: http:/www.chass.utoronto.ca/epc/srb/cyber/hatout.html His lengthy essay, "The Expressive Role of Disjunction: A Semiotic Approach to Form and Meaning in Bruckner's Fourth and Fifth Symphonies", will appear in a volume of Bruckner studies edited by Crawford Howie, Tim Jackson and Paul Hackshaw, to be published by Ashgate Press in 2000. He has also been invited to present papers at conferences on the Beethoven String Quartets (Victoria University, Canada, March 24-26), the nineteenth-century symphony (Cracow Music Academy, April 20-21), and the music of Schubert (International Schubert Conference and Festival, Univ. of Leeds, June 29).
You might not know that Hatten is also active as a librettist. His libretto for an opera about Bonhoeffer (with music by Ann K. Gebuhr from Texas) was premiered in a partial concert performance and dramatic reading at Penn State University, in conjunction with an international interdisciplinary conference on "Bonhoeffer's Dilemma" (the use of violence against evil). Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran theologian who, despite his pacifist convictions, joined the plot to assassinate Hitler he was executed in a concentration camp shortly before the end of the war.
Hatten also relates the following: "The Society for Music Theory conference in Atlanta in mid-November featured several semioticians as guest speakers at a special plenary session devoted to music theory in non-Anglophone countries. Two of Eero Tarasti's former doctoral students, Danuta Mirka (Poland) and José Luiz Martinez (Brazil) gave excellent papers. Kofi Agawu (Princeton) was respondent to the well-attended session, which also included a paper on African rhythm by Willi Anku". I have included a report on the Atlanta meeting, written by Danuta Mirka (see the enclosures).
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Let us not forget other Bloomingtonians, or "Hoosiers", as Indiana residents call themselves. Please note that the 80th Birthday of the legendary semiotician Thomas A. Sebeok approaches. It will be celebrated in connection with next summer's Imatra Congresses in Finland on June 14-18, 2000. The guests at this remarkable event will include Umberto Eco (!), Marcel Danesi, Lucia Santaella, Winfried Nöth, Lisa Block de Behar, and others. The whole program of the Imatra ISI congresses, registration forms, and its new brochure have been included here. You may also attend these symposia in order to present any kind of paper dealing with music, beyond the official headings, as part of the Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of Finland.
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Along with Bob Hatten, Bloomington boasts such music scholars as Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, who specializes in feminist studies and also teaches music theory, as do her colleagues Mary Wennerstrom and Lewis Rowell. David Pickett, conductor and head of the Recording Arts Studio at IU in Bloomington, has left that institution for Edinburgh, where he is now director of the Napier University Music School.
Lewis Rowell reports that The School of Music at IU has undergone a crisis due to the recent departure of the Dean. An interim Dean is serving for one and a half years. David Neumeyer, professor of music theory at IU, has devoted much of his time to administration, but might return to teaching film music. As to Lew Rowell himself, the University of Rochester presented him with a Rochester Distinguished Scholar Medal at the Ph.D. commencement ceremony. He is now working on several new Indian projects, mostly theoretical studies of more recent music. He has a paper coming out in Music Theory Spectrum this coming fall: "Scale and Mode in the Music of the Early Tamils of South India". He is also working on a paper on pentatonic ragas, and another on the "Nine Planets" cycle by Dikshitar.
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After Bloomington, in early March I visited Victoria College at Toronto University. This institution has the most developed curriculum of semiotics in North America. It is run by Marcel Danesi, who was formerly professor of Italian but has now joined the Spanish Department. He has recently published many useful introductory textbooks on semiotics, such as Sign, Thought, Culture: A Basic Course in Semiotics. This book, published by the Canadian Scholars' Press, is a revised and expanded version of his earlier work, Messages and Meanings, from the same publisher. In his Introduction to Semiotics course each year, Danesi has about 150 students, and his seminar on semiotics gathers about 20 students, all of them very sophisticated. The assistant of the program is Laura Shintani. A group of 8 Toronto students visited last year's Imatra Summer congresses, furthering interaction between Canadian and Finnish semioticians. The Victoria College campus includes the Conservatory, which sets apart from the University. The Conservatory was the home institute of Glenn Gould.
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Bruno Nettl, always very active, visited the Department of Musicology at Helsinki University on April 19, and lectured on "Oral Traditions in Czech Music Culture". We must remember that he is originally from Prague, although he forged his career in the USA.
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San Marino University's International Center for Semiotic and Cognitive Studies arranged a symposium last May 21-23 on the theme, "The Future of Memory". It was intended primarily for library and media personnel, since the focus was on how information can be preserved by modern digital electronic means. The speakers included leading library specialists from many countries. Umberto Eco, who was expected to speak there, did not appear after all. The most radical participants said that traditional libraries would no longer be needed in twenty years. Upon hearing this, an Italian lady, director of Bologna University Library, exclaimed: "And we poor people in Bologna just inaugurated a new library building!" The director of the San Marino Semiotic Center is Patrizia Violi.
On my way home, I met Gino Stefani and Stefania Guerra Lisi in Bologna, and was able to follow a little a therapy session at their private school, as well as tour their facilities. Also, I met a very gifted student from Bologna, Dario Martinelli. Thanks to a Finnish Government Award, he is writing a doctoral thesis on the Music of the Animals.
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The Imatra Summer Congresses on Semiotics, arranged by the International Semiotics Institute (ISI), took place last June 10-18. The many symposia and seminars at that event are a kind of mirror of what is current in semiotics everywhere, since anyone can propose a special session for the Summer Congresses and gather papers around it. Last year we had the following sessions:
- Understanding, Misunderstanding, Self-Understanding (a symposium on a two-year research project, funded by the European Union)
- Rituals and Contemporary Societies (organized by José Enrique Finol from Maracaibo, and Georgij Levinton of St. Petersburg). Some papers from this session have already been published in the Swedish journal, Heterogénesis: Revista de artes visuales/Tidskrift för visuell konst, Anno VIII, n229, October.
- Uexküll and Biosemiotics (session directed by Kalevi Kull)
- 7th Doctoral and Postdoctoral Seminar on Musical Semiotics (directors: Eero Tarasti, Jean-Marie Jacono from Aix, Joseph-François Kremer from Paris, and Michael Spitzer from Durham, England)
- Semiotics and Cognitive Sciences (directed by Jörgen Dines Johansen and Mark Johnson)
- Semiotics and Information (directed by Solomon Marcus)
- Fashion and Cinema (directed by Patrizia Calefato)
- Marketing and Management (directed by Henrik Gahmberg)
- Interrelationships of Arts (organized around paintings from Eremitage)
- Città Visuale " The Multidimensional City.
- 18th Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of Finland
- Women in Semiotics
- Many Ways to Semiotics - History of Finnish Semiotics
As usual, these events drew about 200-300 participants, which amounts to something like a "world congress of semiotics" every year in Imatra.
The sessions on musical semiotics included the following papers:
- Johannes Lüdecke, "Understanding and Misunderstanding of Leitmotive". Johannes is preparing a doctoral thesis for the University of Helsinki, in which he applies Genette's narrative theories to Richard Wagner's leitmotifs.
- Juha Ojala, "The Musical Composition Process as Action and Experience".
- Pentti Määttänen, "Naturalistic Approach to Cognition as a Framework for a Theory of the Musical Composition Process. Juha is writing a doctoral thesis for the University of Helsinki, on the use of space musical composition.
- Michael Spitzer, "The Consolation of Curves: Dynamic Models in 19th Century Music Theory". Michael is preparing a book on musical metaphors.
- Guillaume Kosmicki, "La musique techno: Une relecture utopique de l'urbanité", for a thesis to be defended at Aix en Provence Univ. on technomusic in France.
- Dario Martinelli, "Music of the Dump Whales". This is part of Dario's thesis for Helsinki next Dario plans to study the music of wolves and birds.
- Jean-Marie Jacono, "Oeuvre musicale, sens et société", a critical presentation of recent theories on music-as-mediation, by the French ethnomusicologist Hennion.
- Ludovic Bargeon, "L'oeuvre musicale de Costin Miereanu". Ludovic is a pupil of Marta Graboz of the University of Strasbourg.
- Anne Sivuoja-Gunaratnam, "On Kaija Saariaho's Music. Anne is nowadays assistant professor at Helsinki Univ. A review of her doctoral thesis on Rautavaara's serial music is included in the enclosures.
- Eila Tarasti, "The Icons in Rautavaara's Piano Suite, Icons". The presentation included music illustrations at the piano.
- Jeremie Noyer, "L'ideologie et l'utopie liturgiques: Vers une
lecture de la stratigraphie de la Missa en si mineur de Bach". Also a pupil from Aix, Jeremie is preparing a thesis on baroque liturgical music on the basis of Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutic philosophy.
- Nicholas McKay, "Igor's Eccentric Gestures: A Semiotic Decoding of Stravinsky's Syntax and Markedness Theory", an application of Hatten's theory to Stravinsky.
- Eero Tarasti, "On Light in Music: From Synaesthesia to Semiosis", a paper to be published in Semiotica, a special issue on Light, edited by Susann Petrilli.
- Sanna Iitti, "Mind above Body " Evaluating the Aesthetic Experience in Eduard Hanslick's Writing: Questioning the Canon of Western Art Music". Sanna, another student preparing a thesis for the University of Helsinki, has received a Fulbright scholarship to the USA, where she will work in California with Susan McClary.
- Susanna Välimäki, "Infinite Music", part of her thesis for Helsinki on psychoanalysis and music.
- Tiina Vainiomäki, "Speech-Melody in Janacek's Vocal and
Instrumental Music". Tiina, an excellent pianist, has mastered the Czech language thus, she can use all original sources for her thesis on Janacek.
- Barron Mosher, "Every Good Insurrection Needs a Cause: Implied Narratives in the Clash's London Calling". Barron is a gifted student from the Toronto semiotic program.
- Joseph-François Kremer, "La recherche des dieux enfuis". J-F Kremer is a composer, musicologist, and editor-in-chief of a musicological series for the Paris publisher, L'Harmattan.
- Osmo Vartiainen, "Intertextual Coherence in Vocal Music", an analysis of an aria from Delibes' opera, Les jolies filles de Perth, accompanied by vocal demonstrations.
That was the entire seminar. The papers from it, and from two previous doctoral seminars in Helsinki and Imatra, will be published in a very thick anthology entitled Musical Semiotics Revisited, as a joint publication of Acta Semiotica Fennica and Indiana University Press. The previous volume, Musical Semiotics in Growth, has been completely sold out by Indiana University Press. Some copies remain at our Imatra office, however. To obtain one, please contact the ISI secretary, Mrs. Maija Rossi: maija.rossi@helsinki.fi
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In late August I attended the European Academy's Annual meeting in Copenhagen, held at the Schaeffergården Castle. The theme of the congress was "The Sea".
There I met a compatriot, the philosopher Jaakko Hintikka, who told me a lot of interesting things about famous philosophers. For example, in the mornings Edmund Husserl always used to write something quite light at first " anything to gain inspiration and speed. Where his "real" philosophical writing started, he would put a small sign in the text as an indication of the change. But unfortunately, his editors did not know what the signs meant!
Also, in 1949 Husserl lived for a week with Wittgenstein in Cambridge at the home of George Henrik von Wright. There he noticed that Wittgenstein suffered from serious dyslexia. He was unable to form words, syllables, or even letters correctly. Thus, language was a problem for Wittgenstein " which might explain much of his philosophy. Mrs. Maija Hintikka has a dissertation underway on these topics.
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At the very beginning of the semester the new Music Academy Building in Tallinn, Estonia was inaugurated. It is very well-situated in the center of city, quite modern, and features interesting contemporary Estonian architecture. The opening ceremony included a speech by Professor Urve Lippus. We have plans to do a future seminar in Helsinki, in cooperation with Tallinn, since nowadays the latter city can be easily reached by catamaran. The boat leaves every hour from Helsinki, and takes only about an hour and half to reach Tallin (except in winter).
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In the fall, several semiotic courses were launched at Helsinki University, where more and more international students are coming to study on the doctoral and other graduate levels. In addition to those mentioned above, students in the fall included the following: Luiz Fernando de Lima (from Rio de Janeiro, who is writing a thesis on Brazilian popular music with the aid of a four-year grant from the Brazilian Government) Renato Neyra (from Lima, writing a thesis on a Peruvian popular-music genre) Annette Boucleau (from Belgium, writing on the colour-strings pedagogy of the Szilvay brothers) Hans Vessels (from Holland, writing a thesis on masculinity in music).
The University of Helsinki has a weekly seminar on musical semiotics on Monday, and one on General semiotics every Thursday (both conducted in English). The semiotic studies program, worth 40 credits so far, will be expanded into an independent Institute and Discipline this year, so as to better serve the entire University. The Rector has just named John Deely from St. Thomas College at Houston, Texas as visiting professor of semiotics for the whole year of 2000. John Deely is among the best-known American semioticians in philosophy, having published 10 monographs, 2 scholarly editions, 23 edited volumes, and approximately 87 articles " a very remarkable scholar.
An introductory course on semiotics which was to be held by satellite in cooperation with Victoria College, Toronto University, did not take place. Despite much planning with the Toronto McLuhan Technology Center's Professor Kerckhoven, the course failed to meet because of the practical and trivial reason that the room for such satellite emission in Toronto accommodated only 30 students. The project remains viable, however, and is to be realized later.
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The 7th International Congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies (IASS/AIS) took place at the Technische Universität of Dresden on October 6-11, 1999. These are the major international congresses of semiotics, even though in recent years they have lessened somewhat in importance and attendance, because of the many smaller congresses and symposia in specialized fields. Moreover, semiotics is no longer something brand new, or a curiousity, which would attract people by the thousands to congresses, as happened at the international meeting in Vienna in 1979. Semiotics is now a well-established academic discipline all over the world, and many scholars are semioticians even without openly confessing it (or even without knowing it).
Nevertheless, the IASS/AIS is supposed to represent all the semioticians of the world, and therefore its Executive Committee is comprised of 1 or 2 representatives from each country. Members are officially confirmed at the General Assembly of the Committee at these congresses, which in principle convene every five years (but sometimes more often, as happened recently at Guadalajara, Mexico). As a new idea, the secretaries of the IASS, Gloria Withalm and Jeff Bernard, proposed that certain well-known semiotic institutions also have representatives on the Executive Committee. This proposal was accepted, and our Musical Signification Project was included on the Committee. As its representatives the Committee nominated Erkki Pekkilä from Helsinki and Márta Grabócz from Strasbourg.
After the General Assembly had appointed the Executive Committee, it elected the President and Vice-Presidents. There was only one candidate for the new President " Roland Posner, who was elected with 31 votes (10 abstentions). The new Vice-Presidents are John Deely, Gerard Deledalle, Alexandre Lagopoulos, Adrian Gimate-Welsh, and Eero Tarasti.
The general theme of the congress, which had 500-600 participants, was, following the wishes of the host university, "Sign Processes in Complex Systems". Music was well-represented. In fact, there were two session on music: VI.9: "Is Systematic Analysis of Complex Musical Texts Possible"" chaired by Robert S. Hatten and myself, and VI.8: "Musical Signification and the Electronic Media" chaired by Ronald W. Rodman. These sessions drew large audiences and, according to many, were the most interesting of the whole huge event.
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Session VI.9 included the following papers: Robert S. Hatten, "Complexity between the Extremes: Toward a Balanced Model of Musical Understanding" myself, "How to Use the Tarasti-Greimas Model of Musico-Semiotic Analysis"" (this was replaced, however, by a paper on "Chopin, Body and Transcendence") Raymond Monelle, "Musical Representations of Soldiers and Shepherds" Raphaël Brunner, "Contraintes épistémologiques et musicologie: Nécessité et apories de la multiplication des approches musicales" Edson Zampronha, "Complex Systems and Sound Materiality in Music" (this is a young Brazilian composer from Sao Paulo, who will come to Helsinki next April) Michele Ignelzi, "Paradigmatic Analysis and Processes in Music, Part I" Paolo Rosato, same title, Part II Jarmila Doubravová, "Systems of Musical Notation and Semantics of the Score" (Jarmila also chaired another major session, on the semiotics of the Czech philosopher, Ladislav Tondl) Sven Hroar Klempe, "The Role of Overlapping Structure in a Theory about Complexity" Sergio Balderrabano, "Los tractados de armonia de Schenker, Schoenberg y Vinée: Discursos sobre naturaleza, arte y musica" Ruth HaCohen, "Semiotic Paradoxes Underlying Complex Musical Texts: Aesthetic Considerations, Cultural Implications" Marianne Betz, "Sound and Silence in the Context of Musical Sign Processes" (based on John Cage) Márta Grabócz, "Different Approaches concerning Signification and Structure in the First Movement of the 'Appassionata' of Beethoven Eila Tarasti, "Rautavaara's Piano Suite, Icons: An Intertextual Analysis" Anne Sivuoja-Gunaratnam, "Kaija Saariaho and the Musical Discourse of Resistance" Gunta Makane, "Some Thoughts on Fiction and Music Based on Schlafes Bruder by Robert Schneider" Thomas Noll, "Systematization versus Bookkeeping: Considerations on the Structure of Music-Theoretical Discourse Subjects" José H. Sanjines, "Improvisation and Return in Blue Seven" Steven Hamelman, "The Semiotic Function of the Cymbal in Blue Seven".
Music session VI.8, on music and electronic media, contained the following papers: James Buhler, "Especially for You: The Marking of Unmarkedness in the Crooner and Torch Singer Voice" Richard Littlefield, "Gangsta's Parodice" (a rhetorical approach to the analysis of rap music) Scott Murphy, "Aesthetic Idiolects and Greimassian Structuralism in Film Music Analysis" (an application of ideas of Greimas and Monelle to some Hollywood movies) Erkki Pekkilä, "Contrasts and Contradictory Signs as Musical Meaning in Television Commercials" (an analysis of a grotesque Finnish TV ad that uses well-known tango tunes as its point of departure) Ronald W. Rodman also presented a paper on television commercials, and Eufrasio Prates spoke about "Holonymy and Fractals in Music: Holofractal Music as a Semiosic Synthesis". The session also included a round-table arranged by Andranik Tangian, on "How Do We (Musically) Think""
Other round-tables also featured interesting topics, like the one on the "Teaching of Semiotics", arranged by Maria Popova and Kristian Bankov from the New Bulgarian University at Sofia. Of particular interest here was the overview on semiotic curricula in Europe.
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Umberto Eco's highly anticipated key-note speech, "Semiotics in the Next Millennium", provided the culmination of the congress. I repeat here its main points from notes I took during the lecture, which was not distributed to the audience in written form:
Eco started with a history of semiotics, beginning with the Greeks of Aristotle's time (noting that they were surrounded by the presence of barbarians). The Romans considered Latin to be the only language, as scholars and others would do in the Middle Ages. It was during the latter era that the Scholastics made the distinction between signaes. Then came Locke, who coined the term "semiotics". Semiotics has gained in importance, now that communication has become more and more crucial. Communication by mass media also makes moral aspects of semiotics an indispensable consideration.
Eco went on to recall that, at the world congress in California in 1994, the program was organized according to academic disciplines, while its contents ranged over a multitude of topics -much like Diderot's Encyclopedia " from symmetry to crystallography, grammars, iconology, and musicology. These grammars were mostly descriptive, some of them prescriptive. In contrast to these stands "general semiotics", which, for Eco, investigates the nature of semiosis. And yet, the semiotic landscape also includes applied semiotics. Inner conflicts may emerge from the fact that, as Philosophy consists of many philosophies, and Medicine of many subfields, so general semiotics is made up of a variety of independent disciplines. These may sometimes have a crucial family resemblance to speech, as in the distinction between signifier/signified, and yet they remain somehow separate from each other. Can we, then, have any rigorous criteria by which to identify "semiotics" in all its varied forms" In other words, Is there such a thing as "semiotics""
Eco recounted that semiotics has passed through many phases: marxism, structuralism, poststructuralism, New Age, and now, the cognitive sciences. What are the most urgent duties of semiotic research" In the 1960s, reality was seen as a cultural construct (something Wittgenstein had already spoken about). But there are certain "grammar-less" signs that function in, or operate on, the sensory apparatus. What, then, is this most abstract sign" Cognitive semiotics must take into account this "grammar-less" background.
Eco then rehearsed his well-known engagement with Derrida. Deconstruction distinguishes itself from Peirce's thought, in its view that semiosis is unlimited, an infinite play. In this claim Derrida follows Saussure. The concept of reference does not constitute for Peirce any idea of a transcendental subject. To Eco's mind, semiosis is unlimited, but it is surrounded and limited by an extrasemiotic world. Something sets us in a certain direction, on a certain path, and this "something" might be what Peirce called the "dynamical object". For Peirce, the dynamical object is not actually present in the representamen rather, it has been there, or it will be, or it ought to be. "Habits" give us the possibility to act, and acting yields the individual. And it is acting itself that is the transcendental reality (though not the same transcendence of which Kant spoke).
Eco asked, "What should semiotics do in the next millennium"" One answer is that we should return to the dynamical object. He illustrated this suggestion with an anecdote of his experience on the WorldWide Web. Searching there under the term "sign", Eco was referred to, among other things, a book printed in 1652, and from there to an essay on the Lost Tribes of Israel. Such endless referrals, after many hours, led Eco to shut off his computer. At that moment, he noticed that he had forgotten his original intention that is, he could not remember why he had gone to the WWW in the first place. For Eco, this experience suggests that, in the new Millennium, we have to learn to come back, to recover our initiating impulses " a return that might well lead us to the dynamical object.
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After Dresden came the 2nd International Chopin Congress in Warsaw on October 10-17, at the King's Castle in the center of Warsaw. Some of the papers had semiotic relevance. Also, the conference was much larger than the first one ten years ago. A publication from it will appear soon, we hope. To mention a few of the papers presented: Tomi Mäkelä from the University of Magdeburg discussed "Pedagogische rezeption und soziale Funktion von Chopin in Jahren 1830 and 1840 in Deutschland". Jeffrey Kallberg, from the University of Pennsylvania, spoke about "Arabian Nights: Chopin and Orientalism". Kallberg is the author of a recent book on Chopin and gender. I gave the same paper as in Dresden, on Chopin and transcendence.
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Two interesting doctoral theses where defended in Sweden during the late fall. As in Finland, theses in Sweden are printed as books and thus become available to anyone. On December 16, Ulrik Volgsten, a member of our project, defended his thesis on Music, Mind and the Serious Zappa: The Passions of a Virtual Listener. It has since appeared in the series, Studies in Musicology 9, from Stockholm University. An abstract of the book is in the enclosures. On November 19, Klaes-Göran Jernhake defended his thesis, Schuberts C-dursymfoni " kommunikationen med ett musikaliskt konstverk: En tillaempning av Paul Ricoeurs tolkningsbegrepp (Studia musicologica upsaliensia, Nova Series 15). The book is based heavily on Paul Ricoeur's hermeneutics, and although printed in Sweden, it contains a long abstract in German (enclosed here). Jernhake began his research some time ago, under the direction of Ingmar Bengtsson at Uppsala University his work has ripened over the years.
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Vladimir Karbusicky, the author of many important books on musical semiotics in Germany, continues active in his researches. He is writing a Geschichte des boehmischen Musiktheaters (History of Bohemian Musical Theater), about which he says the following: "... Ich gelangte soeben nach der Vorgeschichte (ludi theatrales ecclesiastici) zu Costanza e Fortezza von Fux und dann zu der einmaligen geschichte des Opernbetriebs des Grafen Franz Anton Sporck (1662-1738). Er war katholisch gläubiger Freimauerer (er gründete in Prag die Loge 'Zu den drei Sternen', die zweite nach Paris) und es war kein Gerngerer als Antonio Vivaldi, der 1729-1732 gleich sechs Opernwerke für das Sporcksche Theater komponiert hat. Und als er schon alt war und bereitete sich auf die Reise in die Ewigkeit, schrieb J. S. Bach vier kurze Messen 1737 für ihn...."
Karbusicky also recently published an essay on Gustav Mahler's musical Jewishness, entitled "Gustav Mahlers musikalische Judentum: Kurt Blaukopf in memoriam". It appears in the book, 50 Jahre Musikwissenschaftliches Institut in Hamburg: bestandaufnahme- aktuelle Forschung " Ausblick, edited by Peter Petersen and Helmut Roesing, and published by Peter Lang (1999).
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The Institute of Research in Contemporary Music was founded recently in Pescara by Paolo Rosato. You remember that he, together with Michele Ignelzi, is editor-in-chief of the Italian journal Eunomio. The new institute will sponsor concerts and symposia. Rosato, who stays in touch with Jean-Jacques Nattiez, among other semioticians, is also a productive composer. Some of his music appears on a new CD recording just issued by the Associazione Culturale Eunomio, Pescara, entitled Albumblatt 2, Eunomio e il Novecento: Raccolta di pezzi per strumenti a fiato. The performers are I Fiati dell-Accademia, directed by Giuliano di Giuseppe. In addition to music by Rosato, the recording includes pieces by Scelzi, Fulvio Delli Pizzi, Luca Lombardi, Rosario Mirigliano, and M. Ignelzi.
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Raymond Monelle, soon to be named to chair of music at the University of Edinburgh, has reported on his many activities in our field. First, his book, The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays will appear in the fall of 2000, from Princeton University Press. Unlike his previous book, which we all remember, Linguistics and Semiotics in Music, this one represents more of his own ideas, including some which had their first airing in Helsinki (such as the talk he gave on the musical text " a paper that was published in the anthology, Musical Semiotics in Growth). His new book also discusses topic theory, temporality, subjectivity, and deconstruction, with special looks at Mahler and Ives.
Raymond continues to supervise doctoral students in Tel Aviv. Edith Zack, for one, will soon present her thesis, "Carmen and Turandot: Femme fatale to femme creatrice in opera". Monelle has been invited to address a conference this January in Israel on "Jewish Intellectuals between the Wars", followed by a presentation about Kurt Weill's American songs. Together with Esti Sheinberg, he has inaugurated a new undergraduate honours course in Music Semiotics at the University of Edinburgh. There are six students in the first year of the course, all of them in their third or fourth year of degree study. So far, the course seems to be going well.
Right now Raymond is working with topic theory. Having completed a survey of the "hunt" topic, he has turned to the military and pastoral topics. He plans to write a book on musical topics in due course.
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Michal Bristiger, from the Warsaw Music Academy, tells us about his two new publishing series in Italy and Poland: De Musica and Nuove Pagine. The latter is a continuation of Pagine, of which five volumes have already appeared. These publications, dedicated primarily to Italian culture, are also open to matters of musical signification. Bristiger teaches musical narrativity at Palermo University and in Cosenza
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Jean-Marie Jacono has been visiting at the University of Libreville, Gabon, where, to his astonishment, he found a lively interest in semiotics. One local teacher, M. Victorien Koumba, even knew about the ISI at Imatra. Jacono teaches at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and reports that the working conditions there are very good. The presence of France in this previous colony is still very strong. Jacono, who has been teaching fundamentals of musical research, has another semiotician as a colleague there: Louis-Jean Calvet, known for his books on Roland Barthes.
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Charles Rosen is having a very active concert season. Last summer he recorded three Chopin TV programs for the BBC, with 45 minutes of music in each, plus a half hour of talking. He then spent two and a half weeks in New Zealand giving recitals, followed by a concert with Fred Sherry " whom he calls the finest cellist in America " near Rome, which featured sonatas by Beethoven, Chopin, and Elliott Carter. Next he played the Diabelli Variations in New York, and gave recitals in Canada and California. Last January he plays in Tel Aviv and at the University of Alcala near Madrid. He returns to New York in February. Rosen is coming to Helsinki on May 8-9, where he will lecture on romantic music, and play a recital featuring the Schumann Phantasy and Chopin's Polonaise-fantasy. Harvard University Press recently published his new book, Romantic Poets, Critics, and Other Madmen. The book won a prize in the US and contains essays of direct semiotic interest, such as the one on "Concealed Structures: Heinrich Schenker, Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson", and a fascinating exploration of "Secret Codes in Caspar David Friedrich and Robert Schumann". Charles Rosen has also promised to be present at the next ICMS congress in Imatra.
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Prof. Anna Czekanowska, from Warsaw University, has been visiting Helsinki before continuing to Tampere. She lectured at my seminar on Truth in Ethnomusicology, using rich illustrations from her fieldwork in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. She is interested in how emotions, such as laughter and crying, appear in music. In another seminar, she reminisced about her encounters with Roman Jakobson. A new collection of her articles has just been published by the Musicological Institute of Warsaw, in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of her research. The collection is entitled Pathways of Ethnomusicology, and its table of contents is enclosed.
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Poznan University and its Department of Musicology, together with the Paderewski Music Academy, will organize the Third International Musicological Conference on Theories of Opera on Oct. 23-25, 2000. Its organizers are Maciej Jablonski and Jan Szeweski. Those of you who want to attend should register immediately, since the first deadline has already passed. To do so, please contact either of the following addresses: muzykalo@amu.edu.pl or promag@amu.edu.pl Jablonski's doctoral thesis, which we mentioned in our last circular, has now appeared as an elegant book (as books always do in Poland). It is called Muzyka Jako Znak: Wokól semiotyki muzyki Eero Tarastiego (Music as Sign: Around the Semiotics of Eero Tarasti), and published by the Publishing House of the Poznan Society for the Advancement of the Arts and Sciences (abstract enclosed). The book is currently being translated into English.
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I wonder how many of us have heard about a new branch of semiotics called "biosemiotics"" It is rapidly becoming more and more prevalent in international publications and at conventions. For example, the latest issue of Semiotica is an unusually heavy volume entitled "Biosemiotica", coedited by Jesper Hoffmeyer and Claus Emmeche. (Hoffmeyer is also the author of a successful book, Signs of Meaning in the Universe.) The Estonian scholar Kalevi Kull is also editing a special issue, and at least one member of our project, Mark Reybrouk, will be represented in it, with his essay on the "Biological Roots of Musical Epistemology: Functional Cycles, Umwelt and Enactive Listening". Just after Christmas the Fourth Finnish-Russian Winter School took place at the biological station in Tvärminne (close to Hanko in Finland). 35 top young talents in the natural sciences came from Russia to attend this school, dedicated to the "Information Transfer of Data and Bio-Organisms: From Language to Behaviour". Among other things, the school employed new seminar techniques like "mind-mapping". Each participant drew a map of his/her central ideas, then hung the maps on the walls of the meeting room, and the participants presented their ideas in front of the map. This method functions wonderfully in situations where the participants come from varied backgrounds and do not yet know each other " to be recommended!
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The composer-musicologist couple of Pozzi Escot and Robert Cogan have been extremely active, as usual. Their lecture and concert tours took them throughout the world last spring: Luzern, Paris, Dublin, Hamburg, Cambridge, Spain.... You can order their book, Sonic Design, among others, with the enclosed brochure. Remember that they are also the editors of the journal SONUS, for which they are planning a special issue on musical semiotics.
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Márta Grabócz has been teaching back in Budapest, where she has found several new and enthusiastic young semioticians of music. The Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg are publishing a special volume, Methodes nouvelles, musiques nouvelles: Musicologie et création, edited by herself. It contains articles by members of our project such as François-Bernard Mâche, Patrick Farfantoli, Thierry Poirot, and of course by Márta. Her essay on Beethoven's "Waldstein" Sonata will be translated into English for publication in a journal in the USA.
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In Brazil, José Luiz Martinez is continuing his email discussion group, Musikeion. The discussions there have been quite lively, dealing with such things as Peirce's semiotics, as well as empirical issues of Indian music, with program music, and the theories of Hatten, Nattiez, and David Lidov. Particularly in the Americas, many young scholars have gained important information by means of this email list. The Catholic University of Sao Paulo will start sponsoring the group around Musikeion with grants, which José Luiz himself will be enjoying as well. This is a most welcome contribution to musical semiotics all over the world.
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In Santos, Brazil, the pianist and musicologist Antonio Eduardo Santos has made a new CD recording containing only pieces by the remarkable Brazilian minimalist and naivist in music, Gilberto Mendes. Santos has also published a booklet through the firm of Annablume, together with FAPESP, entitled O Antropofagismo na Obra Pianistica de Gilberton Mendes (first edition, 1997). Antonio Eduardo is planning a Ph.D. at Helsinki University, on Gilberto Mendes's music.
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Back to Europe: The Czech Society of Music will arrange an International Fibich Centennial Conference in Prague on October 11-13, 2000. Prof. Jaroslav Jiránek is one of the organizers of this event, which focuses on the work of the well-known Czech composer. Enclosed here are the program and information on how to register for the conference.
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PUBLICATIONS
Heloisa de Araújo Duarte Valente, from Santos like Antonio Eduardo, has published a book called Os Cantos da Voz: Enre o ruído e o silêncio, at Editora Annablume in Sao Paulo. This book studies noise and silence in the most varied sound landscapes and musical cultures. The chapters are "Levi-Straussian" " headed with musical terms " and the author investigates silence and noise in Muzak, vocal music, music and body, contemporary music, and to conclude, particularly in the music of Gilberto Mendes. The author also discusses music by John Cage, Debussy, Satie, and for film, as well as the intriguing notion of "transfigured silence".
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From Magdeburg we have received a new book edited by Tomi Mäkelä on Topics, Texts, Tension: Essays in Music Theory. The authors are young Finnish and German scholars who deal with contemporary Finnish music by composers such as Heininen, Kokkonen, Lindberg, Meriläinen, Rautavaara, Saariaho, and Sallinen. Among the writers is Mäkelä himself, as well as Anne Sivuoja-Gunaratnam. Manuela Schwarz has edited two volumes on Wagnerism, a very semiotical phenomenon indeed. One is Wagner-Rezeption und Französische Oper des Fin de Siècle: Untersuchungen zu Vincent d'Indy's "Fervaal", published as Berliner Musik Studien Series, Band 18 the book has 384 pages and costs 75 DM. The other, which just appeared in October, is entitled Von Wagner zum Wagnérisme: Musik, Literatur, Kunst, Politik, which Manuela edited together with Annegret Fauser. It is published in Deutsch-Französische Kulturbibliotek, Band 12, and can be ordered from Leipziger Universitätsverlag, Oststrasse 41, D-04317 Leipzig, for the price of 98 DM (650 pages).
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Krystyna Tarnawska-Kaczorowska has published many essays and analyses dealing with contemporary Polish composers (Zygmunt Krause, to name one). You might remember her analysis of Giacinto Scelsi's piece, Anahit, published in English by Ars Nova in Poznan. Hers numbers among the few in-depth analytic essays on the composer.
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Stefania Guerra Lisi and Gino Stefani have edited a collective work on Musicoterapia nella Globalità dei Linguaggi. That is what they call their new method of teaching music on the basis of fundamental elements of music and the synaesthesic correspondences between them. Dozens of institutes in Italy use the methods advanced in this book, which is published by Gio Editing Bologna, 40127 via Michelino 57.
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David Lidov has published a book on general (not just musical) semiotics. Called Elements of Semiotics, it appears in the series Semaphores and Signs, edited by Roberta Kevelson and Marcel Danesi and published by St. Martin's Press in New York (1999). The book offers many fresh and personal views on basic notions of semiotics. It is also based on a very broad range of semiotic schools and theories, accepting some of them, like Peirce, and rejecting others such as Greimas. Reading it, one notices immediately that the book is the result of long lengthy and deep reflection on problems of semiotics. Lidov is also active as a composer thus, he speaks with a composer's competence and authority. Also, he has just published a CD recording of his works.
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Arnolds Klotins, from Riga, Latvia, informs us about the publishing of an important treasure of Latvian culture, namely, an Anthology of Latvian Choral Music. The anthology is accompanied with 12 CDs and cassettes featuring the Riga Chamber Choir Ave Sol. Anyone who has visited Baltic countries knows how important the choral traditions are in those lands. Not all of the CDs and scores have appeared yet, but will by the year 2001. This anthology is an excellent example of how music semioticians also take part in practical musical life.
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Leonard B. Meyer's book of selected essays on music is forthcoming this spring from the University of Chicago Press. Books by Meyer are always a major event in musical and musicological life, and this one should prove no exception. Entitled The Music of the Spheres, it consists of essays on grammaticality, morphology and melodic processes in the classical style, as well as writings on style-change, and on the sciences, arts, and humanities in the broader sense it concludes with an article on the "universe of universals". As you know, Meyer is the Benjamin Franklin Professor of Music (emeritus) at the University of Pennsylvania, now living in New York. You might not know, however, that Meyer was a fellow student of Tom Sebeok at the University of Chicago, where they both used to attend seminars by Charles Morris.
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Roger Scruton's extensive treatise, The Semiotics of Music, came out in 1997 (Clarendon Press). In the book he pays some attention to musical semiotics, too, but unfortunately takes a very limited view of it. He classifies semiotics under the heading "language", and is familiar with some of the work of Saussure and Peirce. Scruton ponders the possibilities of a generative grammar, a little like Leonard Bernstein does in his lecture, The Unanswered Question. The author asks whether music has syntax and semantics, refers to Goodman and Deryck Cook, but seems to know nothing about recent developments in musical semiotics, nor about its continental traditions. This is a great pity, since his books are widely distributed and much used as course texts.
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Tim Jackson, recently named a professor of music theory at North Texas University in Denton (not far from Dallas), has just published a new book on Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 ("Pathétique") in the Cambridge Music Handbooks Series. It is an interesting and thorough analysis of this symphony from many points of view. The chapter titles give a flavor of the book: "Pathetic" metaphors for sexuality and race, gambling and destiny, Deconstructing homosexual grande passion. Especially provocative are his ideas on fascist interpretations and "nazi semiotics", which he discusses in connection with Karajan's and Furtwaengler's interpretations of this symphony in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. Jackson says (p. 102): "According to nazi semiotics, the signifier could be a classical composition and the signified a contemporary political event. Karajan would celebrate the Anschluss as an act of 'liberation' with a performance of Fidelio ... Given this semiotic relationship between classical music and politics, it is illuminating to examine the recorded interpretations of the Pathétique by Karajan, Furtwängler and Mengelberg...." To really hear representations, in a recording, of so-called "nazi semiotics" should prove to be a theoretical challenge to music semioticians.
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Mara Lacche, a doctoral student from Paris IV and pupil of Danielle Pistone, has published an essay on Don Giovanni and Faust entitled "Le mythe et son evolution dans l'imaginaire creatif musical" in the Cahiers de l'O.M.F. no 3, 1998, 1. It is part of her forthcoming thesis (and already partially included in her "Tesi di laurea"), which is called Il mito e la sua evoluzione nell'imaginario creativo musicale, written under the supervision of Prof. Claudia Colombati at the University of Macerata.
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As for my own publications, I would like to add that my book, Existential Semiotics, has, after being edited, now moved to the "production section" of Indiana University Press. It will appear by August of this year. My novel, Le secret de professeur Amfortas, which is a half Wagnerian, half semiotical novel, will come out this spring, published in Paris by l'Harmattan. Also, my Myth and Music will soon be available in a French translation by Damien Pousset, from the same publisher. I have already mentioned that a very thick volume " the papers from the three latest doctoral seminars on musical semiotics " will appear this year as a joint publication of Acta Semiotica Fennica and Indiana University Press.
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That is all my news for this time - please notify me if I have forgotten anything! And remember: let us keep all our news available on-line and on the Internet all the time.
Wishing you a very good semester,
Eero Tarasti
Professor, Chair
Department of Musicology
University of Helsinki