Following
Roman Jakobson,
Kofi Agawu adopts the idea of musical semiosis being introversive or extroversive—that is, musical signs within a text and without. "Topics", or various musical conventions (such as horn calls, dance forms, and styles), have been treated suggestively by Agawu, among others. The notion of
gesture is beginning to play a large role in musico-semiotic enquiry. There are strong arguments that music inhabits a semiological realm which, on both
ontogenetic and
phylogenetic levels, has developmental priority over verbal language. Writers on music semiology include Kofi Agawu (on topical theory,
Schenkerian analysis), Robert S. Hatten (on topic, gesture),
Raymond Monelle (on topic, musical meaning),
Jean-Jacques Nattiez (on introversive taxonomic analysis and ethnomusicological applications),
Anthony Newcomb (on narrativity),
Thomas Turino (applying the semiotics of
Charles Sanders Peirce), and
Eero Tarasti (generally considered the founder of musical semiotics).
Roland Barthes, himself a semiotician and skilled
amateur pianist, wrote about music in some of the essays collected in
Image, Music, Text and
The Responsibility of Forms, as well as in the essay "Eiffel Tower", though he did not consider music to be a semiotic system. Signs, meanings in music, happen essentially through the connotations of sounds, and through the social construction, appropriation and amplification of certain meanings associated with these connotations. The work of
Philip Tagg (
Ten Little Tunes,
Fernando the Flute,
Music’s Meanings) provides one of the most complete and systematic analysis of the relation between musical structures and connotations in western and especially
popular, television and
film music. The work of
Leonard B. Meyer in
Style and Music theorizes the relationship between ideologies and musical structures and the phenomena of style change, and focuses on
Romanticism as a case study.
Fred Lerdahl and
Ray Jackendoff analyze how music is structured like a language with its own semiotics and syntax. ==See also==