Introductory notes to the Semiotics of Music - Philip Tagg's home page

4 P Tagg: Notes on Semiotics of Music General semiotic concepts
cal world or the world of ideas.’
Which word(s) to use?
Native speakers of French tend to use sémiologie while Anglophones and Italians seem
to prefer ‘semiotics’ when referring to the systematic study of sign systems. As can be
seen from the preceding paragraphs, all three words can mean basically the same thing.
This confusion is likely to be resolved in a similar fashion to the VHS versus Betamax
battle in which the latter and more adequate system was ousted by the former, which
was more widely used and marketed. Strictly speaking, ‘semantics’ should be used to
refer to studying interpretations, messages and meanings in a sign system, this being
— at least theoretically — distinguishable as a subset of activity inside semiotics (or
semiology). In this text, however, we shall be using the word semiotics to denote the
systematic study of signification.
Peirce’s basic sign typology
Icon
Icons are signs bearing physical resemblance to what they represent. Such resemblance
can be striking, e.g. photograph, (traditional) painting, but maps and certain types of
diagram are also iconic because there is structural resemblance (though not striking)
between them and what they purport to represent. The representation of rising and falling
pitch, of legato slurs and staccato dots in musical notation can also be qualified as
iconic.
Index
Indices are signs connected by spatio-temporal proximity or by causality to what they
represent. Examples of causal indices are smoke meaning fire or dark clouds meaning
rain. This sign type is particularly important in music semiotics. Indeed, all musical
sign types can be viewed as indexical in this Peircean sense. 7 Verbal language’s metonymies
and synecdoches are indexical and therefore useful concepts in music semiotics.
Metonymy uses phenomena connected in time or space to refer to each other, e.g.
‘Champagne’ signifying a certain type of wine because it happens to be produced in a
region of the same name. A synecdoche is a part-for-whole expression, for instance ‘the
crown’ meaning the monarch and royal power in toto, not just a bejewelled piece of
metal headgear, or ‘50 head of cattle’ meaning not only the animals’ heads but 50 complete
bovine beings.
Conventional or arbitrary sign (‘symbol’)
In Peirce’s terminology, a symbol is only connected by convention with what it represents.
To avoid confusion, I shall call Peirce’s symbol arbitrary sign or conventional sign.
Examples of conventional signs are ‘table’, ‘because’, ‘grass verge’, ‘think’, ‘but’, ‘grateful’,
‘pullover’, ‘semiotics’ and most other words and verbal phrases in any language.
These signs are called conventional or arbitrary because it is supposed that there is
nothing apart from convention preventing a word like ‘theology’ from denoting a canopener,
whereas it is unlikely that an indexical sign like ‘Champagne’ will ever mean
Polish vodka or denote a lawn-mower, and impossible that smoke from a fire will mean
the fire has gone out or that you have run out of sugar. In this sense, conventional signs
(Peirce’s ‘symbols’) can also be called ‘arbitrary signs’ because the relationship between
7. For convincing arguments on the intrinsic indexicality of all musical signs, see Karbušicky 1986. See
also ‘Anaphone’ (p. 25) and ‘Genre synecdoche’ (p. 28).