IS LANGUAGE A MUSIC?  New and
Selected Writings about Musical Form and Import

David Lidov
Indiana University Press.  2004.
from the Forward:

        The new and older writings on music collected here do not comprise a system, but they are loosely coordinated by the system constructed in my Elements of Semiotics (1999) a work which treats general semiotics and reflects on musical semiotics en passant.   A theory of general semiotics opens the doors of comparison.  It holds out the prospect that we might compare a sonata with a poem or a symphony with a painting or a fugue with a philosophy while maintaining as much precision and attention to detail as we would expect to bring to the comparision of measure three and measure seventeen.  A further promise of that wide perspective is the freedom not to specialize.  A couple of the papers in this collection, I won’t say which, were instigated simply by the temptation of experimenting with ideas, trusting them to explore music about which, previously, I knew almost nothing. The collection is not specialized in its repertorial interests, and I certainly hope that its mixture of theory and criticism will not suggest a specialization in method.
        In this book, the first and last chapters are new.  The Introductions which precede the five parts of the book are partly new.  Except for Chapter Twelve, extensively recast, the republished articles do not depart substantially from their initial presentations.  As for papers that were read but not previously printed, you know the drill.  I have tried by means of the Introductions to make the various material, all independently conceived, a bit more clear and less repetitious.

Table of Contents, with comments

   1.  Prelude—Is  Language a Music?

            Part I.  Structuralist Pespectives—Introduction
   2.  Structure and Function in Repetition.
           (includes examples from Beethoven, Schubert, Joplin.)
   3.  The Allegretto of Beethoven’s Seventh.
            (my notion--widely misunderstood--of the opposition between design (or pattern) and grammar.)
   4.  Mediation as a Formal Principle in Music: Three Examples.
          (analyses of Debussy, a folksong setting of Brahms, Liszt’s Tasso.)

            Part II. Semiotic Polemics—Introduction
   5.  Nattiez’s Fondements.
   6.  Our Time with Druids.
          (This chapter contests the premises of Lehrdahl and Jackendoff.)
   7.  Why We Still Need Peirce.
          (A contemplation of Naomi Cumming’s work seques to an analysis of Feldman)

            Part III. From Gestures to Discourses—Introduction
          (This Introduction combines previous short conference presentations on
musical embodiment with the review of Clynes’ sentic theory that I originally included as part of the article repubulished as Ch. 8.)
   8.  Mind and Body in Music.
          (An analysis of Chopin’s Third Ballade.  The original article is often cited, but only for its theory, never for its application.)
   9.  Opera Operta:  Realism and Rehabilitation in La Traviata
          (The “method” of Chapter 8 here extended, a bit more fancifully, to another example, which raises the question of semantic hierarchies.)
  10.  A Monument in Song: Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee by Beverley (Buffy) St.Marie.

Part IV. The Messages of Methods—Introduction
  11.  Bartok the Progessive.
  12.  The Art of Music Theory and the Aesthetic Category of the Possible
  13.  Technique and Signification in the Twelve-Tone Method
  14.  The Project of Abstraction in Painting and Music.
          (Chiefly about Elliott Carter.)

Part V. Resisting Representation—Introduction
  15.  Replaying my Voice Mail

Notes / References / Index  --  (I love footnotes. I detest endnotes.  If I can’t put stuff on the bottom or margins of the page, I get rid of all I can.  But maybe that’s what the editors like best.)