Music Semiotics

Organized as a festschrift in honor of the late British music theorist Raymond Monelle, this collection of 22 papers explores the semiotics of music, or, in other words, the ways in which music signifies, with a key theme of the volume being the issue of how musical signification is intermodally-connected (or networked) with dramatic, historical, political, and social narratives. Papers explore music's relationship to philosophy, literature, poetry, folk traditions, and the theatre (with a particular focus on opera as an intermodal expression of music); the ways in which music signifies "topics" (such as the "pastoral"); connections between how music signifies and the natural (including the ways in which human brain function and the natural motions of the human body); and Monelle's engagement with Derrida and deconstruction. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Esti Sheinberg is the author of Irony, Satire, Parody and the Grotesque in the Music of Dmitri Shostakovich (Ashgate: 2000). A former student and colleague of Raymond Monelle, Sheinberg's scholarship contributes to the developing field of music signification by combining music analysis and historical research with the semiotics of music.