Online research in philosophy

Music is said to be the most autonomous and least representative of all the arts.

Metaphors of nature and organism play a central role in the epistemes of the Western culture and arts. The entire project of the 'modern' meant a separation of man from the cosmos and its laws. Signs and symbols are thought to be arbitrary and conventional social constructions. However, there are many returns to iconic imitations of nature and biological principles also in such an esoteric art as music. One of the highest aesthetic categories in Western art music is the so-called (...) 'organic growth' which particularly manifests in symphony. The concepts of 'organic/inorganic' can be used as analytic terms, whereby one might even compare such composers as Jean Sibelius and Gustav Mahler. Music is said to be 'organic' when (I) its theme actors live in their proper Umwelt (or isotopy); (2) all music material stems from the same themes (it is innerly iconic); (3) all musical events follow each other coherently (inner indexicality or the principle of Growth); (4) music strives for some goal (temporality). Moreover the Ueküll idea of a particular lch-Ton of every organism can be turned back to music. Hence we can say that every musical piece is like an 'organism' which has its lch-Ton detennining which signs it accepts and how it acts in the musical environmentof its own and formed by other musical works. (shrink)

(by a semiotician) EERO TARASTI A semiotic interpretation of the two last centuries in the history of Western art music is in many respects a challenging ...

Method and system Francois- Bernard Mdche I want to raise the issue of the possible significance of the use of digital machines for a composer whose work is ...

A new semiotic model for the generation of musical texts is introduced in this article. The idea of a generative grammar is here understood in the sense of the generative trajectory, a model elaborated by A. J. Greimas. Four levels are chosen from his trajectory for the study of musical texts, namely, those of isotopies, spatial, temporal and actorial categories, modalities and semes or figures.As an illustration, the G minor Ballade by Fr. Chopin has been examined through all these levels. (...) The most formalized aspect of the analysis is constituted by what has been called a modal grammar of the piece (the term modality understood here in its philosophico-linguistic sense). The analysis tries to show how the musical form emerges from its inner processual traits, kinetic, epistemic and other aspects of a modal nature. It thus approaches for instance the problem of segmentation from the processual and dynamic nature of musical works. Moreover, the analysis is also an attempt to study the narrativity in music, since the narrative content of a piece like Chopin's G minor Ballade is clearly seen as the result of its modal processes. (shrink)

PART ONE 1. Introduction The purpose of this investigation is to explore the relations between myth and music. Although this research may be said to have a ...