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Schenkerian Analysis and Existential Semiotics

One of the attractions of Eero Tarasti’s A Theory of Musical Semiotics (1994) is its capacity to embrace a wide range of analytical approaches. Tarasti’s adaptation of the Greimasian generative course – in particular the concept of modalities – presented a way in which traditional analytical approaches might be revitalized as part of an attempt to understand more fully the processes of musical signifi cation. From a Schenkerian perspective, it offered a framework within which to reshape analytical insights and address some of the problematic epistemological assumptions that Schenker’s theories entail. Over the last decade, Tarasti’s basic theoretical model has undergone signifi cant re-orientation in order that semiosis may be understood in terms of acts. His conception of semiotic acts involves three different types of sign, the pre-sign (or enunciant), act-sign and postsign (or interpretant). He states that ‘a semiotic act occurs as the production of an act sign by means of the help of a pre-sign or enunciant/utterant; or the act takes place as the interpretation of the act sign by means of the postsign or interpretant’ (Tarasti 2000: 32) If this seems a little like Nattiez’s tripartite model – with the enunciant taking the place of poietic level and the interpretant standing for the aesthesic level – the resemblance is superfi cial and misleading. Tarasti’s model suggests not that the activity of the composer and listener can be related to a stable and neutral level, but that ‘the sign itself proves to be a rather ephemeral entity lying between these two “transcendences” [of pre and post signs]’ (2000: 32). The models from the ‘classical’ semiotics of Greimas and Peirce on which Tarasti’s earlier theory draws fi nd a place within this new ‘existential semiotics’ as a descrip-