The question of whether music has meaning has been the subject of sustained debate ever since music became a subject of academic inquiry. Is music a language? Does it communicate specific ideas and emotions? What does music mean, and how does this meaning manifest itself? Working at the nexus of musicology, ethnomusicology, and music philosophy and aesthetics, the book presents a synthetic and innovative approach to musical meaning which argues deftly for the thinking of music as a discourse in itself—composed not only of sequences of gestures, phrases, or progressions, but rather also of the very philosophical and linguistic props that enable the analytical formulations made about music as an object of study. The book provides demonstrations of the pertinence of a semiological approach to understanding the fully-freighted language of Romantic music, stresses the importance of a generative approach to tonal understanding, and provides further insight into the analogy between music and language.
Formal and Harmonic Coherence in Franz Liszt’s Ballade No. 2 in B Minor
Source(s) of analysis: Score Musical work: Ballade No. 2 in B minor S.171 Year of creation: 1853 Composer's name: Franz Liszt Methods of analysis: Conventional / Traditional analysis, Formal analysis, Other, Structural analysis
Target Group / Study LevelLevel of music analysis knowledge: Advanced, Intermediate
Study cycle: Bachelor, Master, PhD and professional
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