Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics

Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics

by Stephen Rumph
Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics

Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics

by Stephen Rumph

Hardcover(First Edition)

$85.00 
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Overview

In this groundbreaking, historically-informed semiotic study of late eighteenth-century music, Stephen Rumph focuses on Mozart to explore musical meaning within the context of Enlightenment sign and language theory. Illuminating his discussion with French, British, German, and Italian writings on signs and language, Rumph analyzes movements from Mozart’s symphonies, concertos, operas, and church music. He argues that Mozartian semiosis is best understood within the empiricist tradition of Condillac, Vico, Herder, or Adam Smith, which emphasized the constitutive role of signs within human cognition. Recognizing that the rationalist model of neoclassical rhetoric has guided much recent work on Mozart and his contemporaries, Rumph demonstrates how the dialogic tension between opposing paradigms enabled the composer to negotiate contradictions within Enlightenment thought.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780520260863
Publisher: University of California Press
Publication date: 10/18/2011
Edition description: First Edition
Pages: 286
Product dimensions: 6.20(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Stephen Rumph is Associate Professor of Music History at the University of Washington and the author of Beethoven after Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works (UC Press).

Table of Contents

List of Music Examples

Introduction

1. From Rhetoric to Semiotics
2. The Sense of Touch in Don Giovanni
3. Topics in Context
4. Mozart and Marxism
5. A Dubious Credo
6. Archaic Endings

Epilogue

Notes
Bibliography
Index
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