Browsing by Subject "Semiotics"

This dissertation contains two related documents: a piece of music entitled Hallmarks, Sigils & Colophons for three female singers and chamber orchestra setting excerpts from Christian Bök's Eunoia; and an article entitled "Reorganizing the Rock and Roll: U.S. Maple's Musical Deconstructions." These two chapters are linked by an engagement with the phonic materiality of speech and the polyvalent implications that arise from the intense musical study of that materiality.

Chapter 1, Hallmarks, Sigils & Colophons, is a six-movement work for soprano, mezzo-soprano, alto, and chamber ensemble. Each movement sets excerpts from the individual chapters of Christian Bök's Eunoia, a collection of prose poems inspired by the avant-garde literary group Oulipo. As such, each chapter only uses single vowels: "Chapter A" uses only words with the letter a, "Chapter E" uses only e, and so on. The piece explores the sound worlds of each individual vowel, attempting to create unified musical ideas from each vowel's unique sonic character. I am particularly interested in the ways in which the limited range of vowel sounds changes the affect of a sonic space. I occasionally attempt to mimic (or at least reference) Bök's use of constraints, though I never allow constraint to override musical concerns. Despite using words, this piece tells no unified story, and each movement exists, on some levels, as self-contained wholes.

Chapter 2, "Reorganizing the Rock and Roll: U.S. Maple's Musical Deconstructions," discusses the relationship between the music of the rock group U.S. Maple and Derrida's theories of deconstruction. U.S. Maple's music is often described by critics and fans as "deconstructing" rock music, though the band dismisses the term for its pejorative implications. In this article, I argue that the band's music could, in fact, be read as expanding the Derridean concepts of différance and the "trace" into the realm of music. I describe how US Maple performs what Marcel Cobussen terms "deconstruction in music" to the case of conventional hard rock tropes. I focus particularly on the way in which singer Al Johnson creates a language out of paralinguistic utterances--singing in yelps, growls, grunts, groans, and garbled words--and thereby cultivates the multiplicity of sounds and significations that are typically relegated to subordinate status by other rock singers. I also use Richard Middleton's ideas about repetition in pop music to analyze how the band deconstructs the syntax of rock by imbuing their songs with the affect of improvisation.

This study explores Luciano Berio’s search for a utopian relationship between music and language. This utopian vision of pursuing the “eternal path between sound and sense” led him to initiate a series of “linguistic projects.” I illustrate Berio’s investigation of the relations between music and our cognitive ability, or “universality of experience,” in three areas: the analysis of music, its generation process and its perception.

Although the utopian search was left inconclusive, it allowed Berio to develop what he called a “music of musics” or a “language of languages” in music. I argue that Berio’s “meta-music” generates a signification system similar to artificial intelligence that is able to identify, analyze and produce music elements. The system is based on a hybrid of structuralist discourses addressing human’s linguistic capacity. My study discusses the earlier model of this system established in the electronic work Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1957‒58), its perfecting in the two symphonic works Sinfonia (1968) and Coro (1974), and its expansion onto the theatrical works La vera storia, (1982) and Un Re in ascolto (1984). I show that Lacanian psychoanalysis strongly informs La vera storia as well as its dramatic elements and provides a theoretical basis for the connection between signification and the unconscious. Concerning the perception of music, by deconstructing the hierarchy of a series of oppositions (e.g. sound-silence, Self-Others) in Un Re, I suggest that Berio introduced us to “deconstructionist listening” in relation to the human’s “universality of experience.”

“Scoring Star Trek’s Utopia” investigates music as articular of the Star Trek franchise’s shifting discourses. This study focuses on the role of the fanfare from The Original Series title theme in foregrounding, concealing, or initiating Trek’s ideological tensions. By analyzing how the fanfare is complicit in Trek’s narrative and philosophical efforts—that is, its part in scoring a futuristic utopia—this dissertation uncovers continuities and discontinuities within the franchise’s fifty years of production. Star Trek has become one of the largest brands of the twenty-first century: thirteen films, six television series, interactive concert performances, and thousands of fan creations. The contributions of the fanfare, a near-constant presence, are both lacking in study and vital to a more nuanced understanding of the growth of Trek's brand.

Using previously unstudied archival sketches and scores, the filmic texts themselves, and viewers’ reactions to them, this study grounds an analysis of Trek’s musical-ideological developments within the practice of media consumption. Through archival research and close viewing of Star Trek’s films and television series—arguably its most well-known media—this study traces music’s crucial role in building the franchise’s ubiquity for American audiences. It examines choices made during the filmmaking process, such as where the fanfare appears, how it is altered, musical material derived from its characteristics, and its audiovisual placement. Over thirty different composers have contributed to Trek’s scoring (not to mention the directors, screenwriters, and actors involved), increasing the directions the franchise has taken. Drawing on scholarship that considers the construction of meaning, memory, and nostalgia in music, "Scoring Star Trek's Utopia" argues that viewers can and do retain awareness of the fanfare’s past and present manifestations. Even as Star Trek reifies its past, the potential within its multifaceted directions offers an enduring, yet malleable legacy for the present and future. In so doing, “Scoring Star Trek’s Utopia” approaches an understanding of franchised film and television scoring as well as illustrates music’s integral role in branding an ever-expanding media universe.

Abstract

This dissertation examines the book of Genesis as a functioning literary whole, orienting

post-exilic Persian-era Judeans toward their ideal future expectations. While many have

contrasted Genesis' account of origins with the prophetic books' account of the future, this work

argues that Genesis narrates Israel's origins (and the world's) precisely in order to ground Judean

hopes for an eschatological restoration. Employing a speech-act linguistic semiotics, this study

explores the temporal orientation of Genesis and its indexical pointing to the lives and hopes of

its Persian-era users. Promises made throughout Genesis apply not only to the characters of

traditional memory, but also to those who preserved/ composed/ received the text of Genesis.

Divine promises for Israel's future help constitute Israel's ongoing identity. Poor, sparsely

populated, Persian-ruled Judea imagines its mythic destiny as a great nation exemplifying (and

spreading) blessing among the families of the earth, dominating central Palestine in a new pan-

Israelite unity with neighboring Samaria and expanding both territory and population.

Genesis' narrative of Israel's origins and destiny thus dovetails with the Persian-era

expectations attested in Israel's prophetic corpus--a coherent (though variegated) restoration

eschatology. This prophetic eschatology shares mythic traditions with Genesis, using those

traditions typologically to point to Israel's future hope. Taken together, Genesis and the prophetic

corpus identify Israel as a precious seed, carrying forward promises of a yet-to-be-realized

creation fruitfulness and blessing. Those who used this literature identify their disappointments

and tragedies in terms of the mythic destruction and cursing that threaten creation but never

extinguish the line of promise. The dynamic processes of Genesis' usage (its composition

stretching back to the pre-exilic period, and its reception stretching forward to the post-Persian

era) have made Genesis an etiology of Israel's expected future--not of its static present. Because

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this future will be fully realized only in the coming divine visitation, Genesis cannot be attributed

to an anti-eschatological, hierocratic establishment. Rather, it belongs to the same Persian-era

Judean synthesis which produced the restoration eschatology of the prophetic corpus. This

account of Genesis contributes to a canonical understanding of Second Temple Hebrew literature;

prophetic scrolls and Pentateuchal (Torah) scrolls interact to form a textually based Israelite

identity, founded on trust in a divinely promised future.

This dissertation consists of three distinct parts. The first and second components are my original musical compositions: The Poetics for ten instrumentalists, and Rainy Days Vol. 1 for harpsichord and electronics. The third part is an article that discusses cultural identity through an exploration of musical meaning in Tan Dun’s Water Concerto. Chapter 1, The Poetics, is written for flute, saxophone, two percussion, two pianos, and string quartet. When writing this piece, I was particularly interested in Yuri Lotman’s notion of the semiosphere, which is a realization of a meta-cultural system characterized by heterogeneous communities that are constantly dynamic and asymmetrical; the internal boundaries of the semiosphere’s inner modules are being constantly negotiated, which creates a tension that drives forward the development of our world. I thought this notion to be particularly relevant to our society, which is a multilayered network consisting of small and large communities that are interconnected and in a constant and dynamic state of negotiation. The Poetics explores a musical realization of such a multilayered and tightly connected network. How the seven movements are musically connected will be illustrated in detail in the Introduction. Chapter 2, Rainy Days Vol. 1, is a set of pieces for harpsichord and electronics about rain and Durham North Carolina, where I completed my graduate training. In 2022, I registered a one-minute field recording on my porch of every rain heard from March to May and subsequently logged journal entries for each. Volume 1 of Rainy Days therefore concerns March 2022 and consists of five movements that memorialize and interpret four rains that occurred during the month. I premiered the piece on December 2, 2023 at Nelson Music Room, Duke University. Chapter 3 is an article entitled “An Exploration of Musical Meaning in Tan Dun’s Water Concerto: Expectations, Assumptions, and the Problem of ‘Chineseness’.” Through an examination of Tan’s Water Concerto, I propose that identity is a situated social action that is dynamic and emergent, and therefore never a fixed status. Furthermore, I advocate that as practitioners of Western art music and its theoretical discourse, we should, on the one hand, strive to study and understand the materials we use and avoid insensitive actions such as removing musical elements from their context. On the other hand, we should recognize that today’s world is a multicultural one, and that as the boundaries between different cultures are becoming increasingly blurry, trying to locate the “Asianness” that is synthesized in composers’ musical language is no longer a viable practice of critical inquiry.