ABSTRACT
The history of aesthetics and of philosophical thought related to music demonstrates a dichotomy, a dual approach, one aspect of which emphasizes the purely theoretical, scientific, or physical features of music, while the other considers it as a type of human communication endowed with expression. Beginning in the mid-1970s, numerous currents of the humanities, such as structuralism, post-structuralism, cognitive sciences, and gender studies, have powerfully influenced musicology. In various geographical regions, depending on epistemological allegiances, and even throughout the decades, the terminology employed to define signifying units in music has varied, sometimes greatly. Since the mid-1980s, West-European musicological writings have used the terms “semes,” “classemes,” or “semantic isotopies” to describe musical signifieds. In the early 1970s, Anglo-American scholars began developing an approach to musical signs as basic units of music signification. The gradual rediscovery of the implicit exploration of music signification has given rise to a permanent research program that can be considered as a work in progress.
