Gianni Schicchi: Irony & Comedy Analysis in Puccini's Opera

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An analysis of the ironies and other comical resources in the Gianni Schicchi
opera of G. Puccini
Chapter · January 2017
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Making Sense of Music
Studies in Musical Semiotics
Costantino Maeder & Mark Reybrouck
3
This publication was made possible through the support provided by the Centro di studi italiani (CEIT)
and GLOBALIT, Université catholique de Louvain, and the Musicology research group of the KU Leuven–
University of Leuven.
We want to express our gratitude to the many colleagues and collaborators who have helped us in the
preparation of this book, in first line Emmanuelle Fantoni and Mathilde Flumian.
Many thanks as well to Sonia Henrot and Nathalie Coisman for their administrative and organisatorial
help.
© Presses universitaires de Louvain, 2017
Registration of copyright: D/2017/9964/60
ISBN: 978-2-87558-640-7
ISBN PDF version: 978-2-87558-641-4
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4
Table of contents
Introduction
Mark Reybrouck and Costantino Maeder—Making sense of music.........................7
1- Classical music ………………………………………………………….. 15
James William Sobaskie—Allusion as premise. Two mélodies of Fauré ............... 17
Tijana Popović Mladjenović—Structure, sense, and meaning of Debussy’s La Puerta
del Vino. Interpreting the self through music ........................................................ 29
Rui Magno Pinto—The Portuguese symphonic poem (1884–1909) ...................... 43
Jean Marie Hellner—Robert Schumann’s Drei Romanzen, op. 28. An Entwicklungsroman................................................................................................................. 65
Matteo Giuggioli—A grammar of pathos. Fandango as a topos in Boccherini’s chamber music............................................................................................................ 79
Małgorzata Gamrat—Between the sound and the word: methodological challenges in
the analysis of Liszt’s piano transcriptions of his own Lieder ............................... 91
Francesco Galofaro—The different musical semiotic systems in Domenico Zipoli’s
Sonate d’Intavolatura per Organo (1716) .......................................................... 107
Damjana Bratuž—Bartók’s improvisations for piano. A musical frontier ............ 117
Julie Walker—La Polonaise op. 53 comme manifeste du dernier style de Chopin.
Contexte et analyse narrative............................................................................. 129
2- Contemporary classical music............................................................... 139
Luciano de Freitas Camargo—The zavod topic .................................................. 141
Justyna Humięcka-Jakubowska—Musical representations in the context of music information retrieval and some ideas of the Darmstadt school composers .............. 155
Yves Knockaert—The meaning of repetition in Wolfgang Rihm’s music of the 1980s
........................................................................................................................ 169
3- Folk and ethno…………………………………………………………. 181
Julia Shpinitskaya—The universe of sound. A comparative study of the vibration
sound in cultural traditions: variations without theme......................................... 183
Heloísa de A. Duarte Valente—“Una musica dolce suonava…” Memory and nomadism in the Italian-Brazilian song ........................................................................ 197
Ricardo Nogueira De Castro Monteiro—A semiotic approach to Native-Brazilian
music. Challenges and possible contributions..................................................... 207
4- Opera, songs…………………………………………………………… 221
Jean-Marie Jacono—Sémiotique, interprétation et mise en scène de l’opéra ........ 223
Johan Wijnants—Musical signification in (the first decade of) opera................... 233
Paolo Rosato—Sense-making in opera: a stratified dialectic among linguistic, perceptive, and cognitive processes. Some examples from Verdi’s works ................ 243
Icíar Nadal García—An analysis of the ironies and other comical resources in the
Gianni Schicchi opera of G. Puccini .................................................................. 255
5- Theory…………………………………………………………………. 267
Konstantin Zenkin—Composition technique among the semiotic systems of a piece
of music ........................................................................................................... 269
Robert Michael Weiß—Musical clock face value. Geometrical metaphors for musical
properties ......................................................................................................... 279
Stefano Jacoviello—It is a matter of style. Language, grammar, style and meaning
between semiotics and musicology .................................................................... 293
Panu Heimonen—From a conversational point of view. Enhancing music analytic
meaning ........................................................................................................... 305
6- Education………………………………………………………………. 317
Alessia R. Vitale—The semiotics of gestures in learning how to sing. Dynamics and
prospects .......................................................................................................... 319
May Kokkidou & Christina Tsigka—In search of musical meaning. Looking for
answers by the standpoint of music education .................................................... 331
Mary Dawood—The Cartons Piano at the national library of France. Rediscovering
forgotten music................................................................................................. 345
7- Transmediality………………………………………………………… 355
Kevin Clifton—Sound and semiotics in Hitchcock’s coming attraction: locating and
unraveling meaning in Rope’s movie trailer ....................................................... 357
Zhenglan Lu—Transsemiosic paradox in film music. Red music in chinese films on
the cultural revolution ....................................................................................... 365
Alessandro Bratus—More real than the real thing. The construction of authenticity in
popular music recordings and audiovisual texts.................................................. 375
Nicholas P. McKay—Stravinsky’s opera in a postmodern age. An intermedial
semiotic reading ............................................................................................... 387
Daniel Nagy—Myth creation and intertextuality after Wagner. The Ring cycle and
Thomas Mann’s Joseph and his brothers. ......................................................... 403
6
Making sense of music
Mark Reybrouck, KU Leuven–University of Leuven
Costantino Maeder, Université catholique de Louvain
For a long time, the idea that music signifies has been implicit in writings on music, but only in the last decades research on musical signification has established itself
as a discipline. This is evidenced by the exponential growth of writings on music,
signification and meaning, and confirmed by the seminal research association which
gathers researchers from all over the world: the “Project on Musical Signification”
founded by Eero Tarasti in 1985. Signification and meaning, however, do not tally
with sense-making. The latter implies an active involvement of the sense maker, while
the concepts of signification and meaning tend to be immanent to the music object or
artwork.
In many semiotic, object-oriented, structuralist frameworks, musical sense-making was often sidestepped, neglected or ignored. The integration of it must be situated
accordingly in the broader context of musicology, pragmasemiotics and neurosemiotics. This broader look will allow to reinvestigate major questions which are still not
totally resolved, as for example the tension between music as structure and music as
aesthetic experience.
Focusing on sense-making implies that researchers have to rethink what musical
semiotics is, but also its relation to musicology as a discipline: is there some common
ground or should we deal with a tension between an object-centered approach to music
as opposed to a subjective and hermeneutical approach to musical sense-making? Is
there a distinction in contents and methodology or is it possible to conceive a broader
framework that brings together the objective and the subjective, the artwork and the
receiver, the immanent meaning and the attributed meaning? These introductory questions suggest that musical semiotics needs to open up to cognitive sciences, neurosciences, psychology and other related fields, probably providing the glue that brings
together all those diverging fields of investigation.
Musical semiotics, as an autonomous area of inquiry, is a rather young field of
research. As a discipline, it is still in continuous development (Agawu, 1991; Hatten,
2004; Maeder & Reybrouck, 2015, 2016; Nattiez, 1990; Sheinberg, 2012; Tagg, 2013;
Tarasti, 1994, 1996, 2002, 2003) and it is still positioning itself in the broader context
of musicology as well as semiotics. The relation with musicology, in particular, is not
yet totally clear. Being itself a rather young discipline, musicology was established as
an academic discipline around the second half of the 19 century. Adler’s well-known
essay on the scope, method and aim of the “science of music”—Musikwissenschaft—
has been seminal in this regard (Adler, 1885). Though he proposed a division in three
th
Making sense of music.
sub-disciplines, namely the historical, systematic and comparative musicology, it became quite obvious that the historic branch would receive the bulk of attention. The
systematic approach, on the other hand, was conceived as a joint discipline that comprises both systematic and comparative aspects to study the organization of musical
structures in a transdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach (see Schneider, 2008;
2008b). Both terms, moreover, designate a specific and effective approach: the systematic approach stands for a sophisticated, thought-out and well-organized procedure
of thinking as opposed to arbitrary, inconsistent access to observations; the comparative approach makes it possible to order objects, structures and elements in relation to
each other by studying them systematically with regard to their distinctive features.
Classifications, in the comparative approach, are based on categories of identity, difference and variety (Elschek, 2008).
Though the three approaches were conceived originally as equal parts of a broader
framework—Adler’s system was meant as a universal model that encompassed both
existing and established fields of research as well as fields that were envisioned
only—, the historic and systematic branch evolved in different directions, due partly
to their different methodology. The historic methodology, in fact, relies mainly on
philological skills, descriptions, musical analysis, hermeneutic understanding and interpretation; the systematic methodology instead relies on measurement, experiment
or empirical investigations, data analysis, statistics and modelling. The two disciplines, therefore, have different orientations which can be coined either as historicalphilological-hermeneutic or scientific-experimental-comparative (Schneider, 2008b).
It is tempting to subsume the field of musical semiotics under one of those two
branches. In the early days of systematic musicology, musical semiotics had its place
within this discipline, and the systematic approach is still present in the structurally
oriented approach to musical analysis. Yet, there have been other developments that
are more related to the philological-philological-hermeneutic approach as well. Musical semiotics, in fact, has its own disciplinary history, revolving around concepts,
aims, scope and methodology. As such, it is still in a continuous search for positioning
itself both within the broader disciplines of semiotics and musicology.
Semiotics, as a scientific discipline, has a long tradition as “science of signs”. It is
difficult, however, to provide a general definition of the field. Three major descriptions have been proposed to describe its contents and methodology: semiotics as the
science of signs and communication systems, semiotics as the descriptive science that
leans upon linguistic methodology, and semiotics simply as scientific description
(Nattiez, 1973). The linguistic approach has received most attention with a strong impetus stemming from French structuralism. This approach has been challenged, however, for not having taken sufficiently into account the role of the sign user in the
process of sense-making. Semiotics thus had to broaden its approach form a dyadic
(the distinction between signifier and signified) to a triadic approach by encompassing
also the role of the interpreting mind. This had been emphasized already within the
fields of analytical philosophy, action theory, general systems theory and the semiotic
tradition of Peirce and Morris, which stressed the dynamic relationship between three
8
Mark Reybrouck and Costantino Maeder––Introduction
levels of semiotic reference, namely the material sign vehicle, the object it refers to
and the final interpretation by the sign user. A most interesting attempt to broaden the
field has been also initiated by Morris’ division of semiotics in three dimensions: syntactics, semantics and pragmatics (Morris, 1975 [1938]).
Musical semiotics has capitalized on this distinction, with the bulk of contributions
being related to the syntactic level of analysis. Scholars such as Molino (1975), Nattiez
(1990) and Ruwet (1975) have been exponents of this approach, with a focus on taxonomic-empirical research, in an attempt to select and identify classes of sounds by
arranging them in terms of similarity and difference. This is basically an approach
“from text to code”, i.e. an inductive-heuristic approach that tries to infer general rules
from particular instances. There have been contributions in the field of musical semantics as well (Laske, 1973; Kühl, 2007; Reybrouck, 2013) with a major distinction
between musical meaning as referring to something outside of the music (the field of
external or real semantics) or as referring merely to itself (the field of internal or selfreferential semantics). The distinction is still a subject of discussion and there is actually a lot of overlap between the syntactic level and the level of self-referential semantics. The most challenging dimension, however, is the pragmatic level of musical
sense-making. It investigates the relations between sign vehicles, their users and the
processes that are involved in the interpretation of the signs. This means that meaning
cannot be defined merely in terms of ontological categories, but rather in terms of
dispositions to react to stimuli. Semiotics, in fact, has seen recently a paradigm shift.
Starting from an initial opposition between the continental tradition of semiotics with
a principal orientation to the schools of de Saussure and Hjelmslev and the AngloSaxon tradition which was oriented primarily to the theoretical framework of Peirce,
there have been signs of a growing rapprochement between both orientations as the
result of the pragmatic turn in philosophy (Bernstein, 2010; Parret, 1983; Rorty,
1982). This has been obvious in the case of music and performing arts, analyzed and
scrutinized as a performing process, a historical-cultural phenomenon or a cultural
aesthetic practice. Music, in this view, can be considered as a spectacular phenomenon
with multiple dimensions which can be studied in its intermedial and transmedial dimension (Helbo et al., 2011; Maeder & Reybrouck, 2015, 2016).
As such, it is possible to investigate the history of musical semiotics in its relation
to traditional musicology. The domain, however, is still in full development and must,
to some extent, even still come to age. There are, in fact, multiple new developments
which are related to the phenomenon of musical experience (Maeder & Reybrouck,
2015) and the role of embodiment and emotions as related to music (Reybrouck &
Eerola, 2017; Schiavio et al., 2016). Much is to be expected here from recent developments in fields such as biosemiotics and neuropragmatics. There is, however, a distinction between the aims and scope as intended in theoretical and programmatic contributions and the actual research as it is conducted nowadays all over the world.
This edited volume is an example of this claim. It assembles 31 contributions from
18 countries, not only from Europe, but as well from the USA, Canada, South Amer-
9
Making sense of music.
ica, Russia and China. They were presented at the Twelfth Congress of the International Project on Musical Signification, whose main aim is to foster a better and comprehensive understanding of how music works semiotically. The book is organized in
seven chapters with some of the papers reflecting on concepts and methods from a
rather broad perspective whereas others report on actual research and its findings.
They have as a common ground a search for musical sense-making and signification
and are illustrative of the breadth and scope of musical semiotics today. As such, they
encompass traditional musical analysis but in a broader context of structural, phenomenological or hermeneutical approaches. Many papers are related to classical music,
to contemporary classical music, to folk and ethno, opera and songs. Other papers deal
with broader claims and are concerned with music theory, education and transmediality.
The first two chapters start with a collection of essays that rely on a more structuralist-analytical semiotic approach to music. The first gathers essays on classical
music. The authors delve deeply into the analytical paradigms and rely heavily on the
study of the score. These contributions embrace musical works by individual composers as Fauré, Debussy, Schumann, Boccherini, Liszt, Zipoli, Bartók and Chopin as
well as more general stylistic genres such as the Portuguese symphonic poems. The
second chapter focusses on contemporary classical music. The first paper deals with
the representation of noises produced by machines as exemplified in the Zavod topic
of socialist realism. The second is oriented towards the interdisciplinary field of music
information retrieval. It provides insights from musicology and computer science, and
investigates musical questions related to computational approaches such as automated
analysis of music by the Darmstadt school composers. The third paper investigates
the role of repetition in the music by Rihm and tries to give a new meaning to this
phenomenon by defining it as an element of questioning rather than as a confirmation.
The third chapter, about folk and ethno, naturally opens up to new fields: sensemaking as such is key to the understanding of these forms of music. The first contribution provides a comparative study of the universe of sound with examples of vibration sound in diverse cultural traditions. The second contribution is about memory and
nomadism in Italian-Brazilian song, and the third one is a methodological and epistemological exercise of approaching a non-Western cultural environment, focusing on
native-Brazilian music. It questions the possible contributions of semiotics to the
study of cultural heritage, also encompassing the anthropological studies regarding
myth and music.
The fourth chapter is about opera, from the first decade of its origins (between
1600 and 1610) to the works of Verdi, Puccini and Mussorgsky. It raises the question
which distinguishing elements make a work of art into an opera, stressing a triadic
analytical description in terms of a musico-poetico-dramatic sign. It defines opera as
an intermedial object with a stratified dialectic among linguistic, perceptive and cognitive processes. It provides an analysis of different musical comical forms such as
grotesque, satire, irony, parody, mimic, etc., and it investigates the function of scenic
representation.
10
Mark Reybrouck and Costantino Maeder––Introduction
The fifth chapter addresses several theoretical issues. It deals with semiotic systems of a piece of music, recalling precompositional techniques as orally transmitted
pre-images of the music. It considers the possibility of using visual metaphors to provide deeper insights in musical structures. It investigates the relationship between language, musical grammar and style. It questions the conversational approach to musical meaning by bringing together existential semiotics and the analysis of conversation.
The sixth chapter covers musical education. It describes the role of gestures in
learning how to sing both as a clinical method and from a phenomenological approach. It investigates the musician’s perception of the meaning of music by bringing
together the fields of aesthetics, musicology, cognitive science, neuroscience, music
psychology and music education. Moreover, it provides a means for rediscovering
forgotten music.
The seventh chapter, finally, is about transmediality. It describes the relationship
between sound and semiotics and the transsemiotic paradox in film music. It investigates the construction of authenticity in popular recordings and audiovisual texts. It
points to the possibility of intersemiotic translation of sonic music into literary poetry
or vice versa. And it provides an example of intertextuality on the basis of myth and
mythopoeia.
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