ABSTRACT
This chapter considers whether it is possible to imagine a rapprochement between activity on musical semantics, one of the principal themes of a 'new' musicology that, according to Lawrence Kramer in 1993. The approach taken by Fred Lerdahl to time-span and prolongational reduction in both tonal and non-tonal pitch spaces would appear to be of particular interest to the Bartók theorist. Scores for film and television have provided particularly fertile sites for recent investigation of music's potential as a communicative medium beyond simple considerations of the iconic carriage of meaning, or self-referential 'syntactic semantics'. The chapter mainly focus on Fred Lerdahl's consideration of Wagner's Parsifal. Lendvai articulated what is probably the most influential and broadly sweeping theorization of Bartók's approach to tonality in the late 1950s through his so-called axis system. There are several semantic levels at play in Duke Bluebeard's Castle that could be taken to be what Lerdahl describes as 'superleitmotives'.
