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Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music.

Article Excerpt
Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music. By Kofi Agawu. New York: Oxford University Press. 2009. [vi, 336 p. ISBN-13: 9780195370249. .$45.] Music examples, bibliograpy, index.

In his 1892 essay " Kunstwissenschaft und Kunst" Philipp Spitta wrote: "The methods of aesthetic studies and those of [creative] art must never run together. To protect each held from mutual harm one must draw a sharp dividing line between the two" (quoted in Carl Dahlhaus. "Geschichtliche und asthetische Erfahrung," in Die Ausbreitung des Historismus uber die Musik, ed. Walter Wiora [Regensburg: Bosse, 1969], 245). Kofi Agawu's latest work. Music as Discourse: Semiotic Adventures in Romantic Music, is an example of how far the field has moved away from Spitta's ideal of objective musical analysis. Agawn embraces the subjective nature of analysis in this work, recognizing that "[a]s analysts, we trade in fictions. The better the fictional narrative, the more successful is the analysis" (p. 125).

In order to explain and demonstrate such a creative approach to analysis, Agawu's work is divided into two large parts: theory--an introduction to his idea of "music as discourse" and to the analytical tools he employs; and analyses--specific "case studies" drawn from the romantic and post-romantic canon. This first part of this work is an argument for specific analytical approaches that may encourage the student of romantic music to discover new possibilities within the music; and the second, much briefer section is a demonstration of this kind of analysis as applied to Liszt, Brahms, Mahler, Beethoven, and Stravinsky.

To a certain extent. Music as Discourse picks...

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