Semantic transformations in the musical themes of Domenico Scarlatti’s Clavier sonatas

Abstract

The general precept for study within the semiotic sphere of Russian musicology and, in particular, of the Laboratory of Musical Semantics of the Ufa State Institute of Arts, is based on acknowledging music as a part of the communicative artistic system (http://lab-ms.narod.ru/index/0-32). The stable intonational turns endowed with stable meanings frequently encountered in musical texts, labeled as semantical figures, are essentially bearers of musical meaning. They are concretized by means of assimilating extra-musical phenomena and indications of the external world and, by penetrating into the musical text, organize the sign-related metaphorical mechanism of musical utterance. The study of the mechanism of semantical transformations of intonational vocabulary is especially important on the level of studying musical themes, since the intonational formulas migrating from one musical text to another reveal the “genetic code” of musical compositions and concretize the semantical perceptions of the performer and the listener. In Domenico Scarlatti’s sonatas for clavier the migrating intonational formulas may be observed most clearly on the level of the musical theme. It is particularly this segment of the musical text in the case of many composers which, according to Mark Aranovsky, presents “an object of heightened semantical concentration.