ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author offers the reflections on his intellectual journey because he believe that a semiotic theory of musical style can be fruitful in grounding interpretations of musical meaning, even in an age of postmodern relativism. One of the recurring critiques of semiotic approaches to musical meaning has been that it over-specifies expressive meaning, reducing interpretation to a simplistic decoding. The problems inherent in interpreting musical meaning, however, have not led to any consensus around a semiotic approach, or even a consistent intersubjective agreement about general meanings as opposed to more specific interpretations. Musicologists emphasize the relativity of meaning—and the impossibility of ever recovering the past intentions of composers or the interpretations of listeners. Music theorists reject the structuralist and formalist aspects of some forms of semiotic analysis. The author proposes expressive genres as those distinctive trajectories of dramatic or expressive meaning that may occur in a variety of musical forms—sonata, fugue, variations.
