Diagrams, musical notation, and the semiotics of musical composition

Abstract

The semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce was responsible for the blossoming of many semiotic approaches to music in the past few decades. Whilst it is clear that musicologists and philosophers of music have benefited from Peirce’s semiotics to better explain and discover aspects of music, the same cannot be said about Peirce’s philosophy of diagrams in particular, that seems to remain widely ignored by semioticians of music. Notwithstanding, music in general, and musical composition in particular, widely rely on schemas, rules, notational systems and other signs that might be understood as diagrams in some sense of the term. Following that clue, in this text we focus on the role played by the musical notation in the compositional process and argue that such role can be understood under the concept of diagram. We analyse an aspect of the compositional process of Beethoven’s Sehnsucht (WoO 146) and argue that the notational system functions here as a diagram that mediates a diagrammatic reasoning process.