Sign Semantics and the Integration of Conception in Interpretation on the Piano
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Abstract
The aim of the article is to show the contradiction in the approaches towards the issue of sign semantics. On the one hand, there exists the sign-related type of thinking on the part of practicing musicians (composers, performers) in an individual conception, embracing an integral musical composition and raising its communicative impact. On the other hand, there exists academic musicology, which was formed on the basis of the priority of the composer and the musical text, with its prevailing attention to its separate sides and an underestimation of the effect of impact of the entire musical composition. Its representatives have a skeptical attitude towards the theory of performance (“where there is interpretation, there is no room for theory”). At the same time, the great composers, conductors and pianists Liszt and Rachmaninoff stemmed from the position that it is particularly the inner program of the musical composition, the conception of interpretation that determines the deciphering of the signs of the musical text by the performer.
In interpretation of musical compositions based on performance semiotically related perceptions are interpreted as signs and symbols, which become the operands of musical and object-related figurative thought. On the example of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s personal programmatic commentaries to five of his Etudes-Tableaux (expounded in his letter to Ottorino Respigni, who was working on orchestrating them) the role is shown of the pianist’s perceptions of signs in the formation of the conception of interpretation. An important resource in the integration of the conception is formed by the performer’s thesaurus; the understanding of intertextual connections makes it possible to trace the genesis of semantic parallels, both within the composition and in its interaction with the world of culture.
Keywords: piano music, piano interpretation, integration of conception, semantics of signs
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