Semiosis in Hindustani Music

by Jose Luiz Martinez

For thousands of years music in India has been considered a signifying art. Indian music creates and represents meanings of all kings, some of which extend outwardly to the cosmos, while others arise inwardly, in the refined feelings which a musical connoisseur experiences when listening to it. In this book the author explores signification in Hindustani classical music along a two-fold path. Martineq first constructs a theory of musical semiotics based on the sign-theories of Charles Sanders Peirce. He then applies his theory to the analysis of various types of Hindustani music and how they generate significations. The author engages such fundamental issues as sound quality, raga, tala and form, while advancing his unique interpretations of well-known semiotic phenomena like iconicity, metalanguage, indexicality, symbolism, Martinez`s study also provides deep insight into semiotic issues of musical perception, performance, scholarship, and composition. An specially innovative and extensive section of the book analyzes representations in Hindustani music in terms of the Indian aesthetic theory of rasa. The evolution of the rasa system as applied to musical structures is traced historically and analyzed semiotically. In the light of Martinez`s theories, Hindustani music reveals itself to be both a delightfully sensuous and highly sophisticated system of acoustic representations. JOSE LUIZ MARTINEZ is a Brazilian music semiotician and composer. His principal research interests include musical semiotics, Indian classical music, Western contemporary music and dance. He has published articles in several music theory and semoitics journals. Martinez is an associated researcher at the Graduate Department of Communication and Semiotics of the Catholic University of Sao Paulo. He has founded and is the director of Musikeion, an international forum (e-mail list) on musical semiotics. ".........for the non-Indian the volume constitutes a welcome and significant contribution to the understanding og Hindustani music and indeed Indian music as whole." -Asian Folklore Studies Vol.Lxi-2,2002