Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music

An award-winning account of the importance of semiotic play in Classic instrumental music, including that of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven

Of all the repertories of Western Art music, none is as explicitly listener-oriented as that of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet few attempts to analyze the so-called Classic Style have embraced the semiotic implications of this fact. In Playing with Signs, Kofi Agawu proposes a listener-oriented theory of Classic instrumental music...