Making sense of music. Studies in musical semiotics

The idea of musical signification has been implicit for a long time in writings on music, but only during the last decades it has established itself as discipline. Focusing mainly on sense-making as a major constituent of signification and meaning, it addresses major open questions: What is musical semiotics? What is the relation of musical semiotics to musicology? Should we deal with a tension between an object-centered approach to music and a subjective, cognitive, and hermeneutic approach to musical sense-making? Is there a distinction in contents and methodology or is it possible to bring together the objective and the subjective, the artwork and the receiver, the immanent meaning and the attributed meaning? MAKING SENSE OF MUSIC is an attempt to bring together these diverging claims. Revolving around the central concept of musical sense-making, it includes 31 contributions by scholars from 18 countries, from the USA to Russia, from Brazil to China, which encompass semiotic musical analysis and phenomenological, hermeneutic, and/or cognitive approaches. The contributions investigate classical music, contemporary music, folk and ethno, opera and song, as well as music theory, education, and transmediality