The question of whether music has meaning has been the subject of sustained debate ever since music became a subject of academic inquiry. Is music a language? Does it communicate specific ideas and emotions? What does music mean, and how does this meaning occur? Kofi Agawu's Music as Discourse promises to quickly become a standard and definitive work in musical semiotics. Working at the nexus of musicology, ethnomusicology, and music philosophy and aesthetics, Agawu presents a synthetic and innovative approach to musical meaning which argues deftly for the thinking of music as a discourse in itself--composed not only of sequences of gestures, phrases, or progressions, but rather also of the very philosophical and linguistic props that enable the analytical formulations made about music as an object of study. The book provides extensive demonstration of the pertinence of a semiological approach to understanding the fully-freighted language of romantic music, stresses the importance of a generative approach to tonal understanding, and provides further insight into the analogy between music and language. Music as Discourse will be eagerly read by all who are interested in the theory, analysis and semiotics of music of the romantic period.

Product Description: Written by ten leading scholars, this volume assembles studies of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century music under the broad rubric of communication. That such an impulse motivates musical composition and performance in this period of European musical history is often acknowledged but seldom examined in depth...read more

Product Description: The aim of this book is to stimulate debate by offering a critique of discourse about African music. Who writes about African music, how, and why? What assumptions and prejudices influence the presentation of ethnographic data? Even the term "African music" suggests there is an agreed-upon meaning, but African music signifies differently to different people...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The distinctive quality of African music lies in its rhythmic structure and scholarly work on this music has usually stressed drumming as the site at which 'complex' rhythms are cultivated. Kofi Agawu argues that drumming is only one among several modes of rhythmic expression and that a more fruitful approach to the understanding of African music is through spoken language...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)