Czech Music Semiology: A Survey of Its Development and Key Ideas

To speak of “music semiology” is already to assign a label. Semiology provides tools to interpret musical syntax and the processes through which a piece of music is structured. In this way, it becomes part of music theory. As a pragmatic system focused on music, semiology can also offer fresh perspectives for music sociology, historiography, and ethnomusicology. Even the emancipatory movements of recent decades have not severed semiology's ties with aesthetics. Questions about signs and meanings remain central to the aesthetics of music.

Scholars generally approach these questions from three broad directions, each with its own variations and cross-fertilizations. One radical standpoint denies that music carries any sign or even a communicative status. A second, sometimes called “non-semiotic formalism”, ties a work’s meaning directly to how it is structured and modelled at every level. A third view holds that music forms a sign structure unlike any other and that musical signs possess distinctive types of meaning.

Talking about signs and meanings does not automatically make someone a music semiologist. The whole issue can be treated from outside the narrower music-semiotic discourse—something Carl Dahlhaus, Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, or Peter Faltin demonstrated. Meanwhile, authors such as Zofia Lissa, Vladimír Karbusický, Christian Kaden, and Jiří Fukač recognized the need for music semiology (or at least a semantics of music) but were aware that the results of semiotic interpretation do not always sound convincing. This awareness may explain why these writers, each in his or her own emphatic style, pointed out difficulties and pitfalls that come with applying the method.

Jaroslav Volek (1981), in his study Musical Structure as Sign and Music as a System of Signs (published in Opus musicum), laid out a possible methodology for Czech music semiology. He expressed not only hopes and expectations but also a conviction that using the general theory of signs and findings from linguistics would solve the riddle of how music can bear specific meanings or refer to something beyond itself. Volek’s work was shaped by a musicologist’s ambition to arrive at the full comprehension of the phenomenon in question, tempered by a scepticism that guards against premature conclusions.

In the same article Volek compared semiotic discourse to the noise of a crowded bazaar—the inflationary invasion of various methodologies and interpretations. Although his assessment targeted the situation at that time, it remains true that no single “leading” conception of semiology exists. Instead, there is a spectrum of schools and scholarly approaches. The statement that semiology today is methodologically non‑homogeneous and fragmented across many fields comes as no surprise. This applies in full to Czech research on the topic (“Czech” being largely synonymous with “Czechoslovak” in many contexts).

So what characterises Czech semiology? If a field’s credibility and legitimacy depend on how many people work in it, this approach counts as marginal. Developed in Czechoslovakia from the late 1950s onward, it has been tied since the 1970s to the Interdisciplinary Team for Systems of Expression and Communication in Art. During the 1970s and 1980s a group of musicologists gathered within that team and became known as the “Prague Team for Music Semiology.” Its core members were Jaroslav Volek (1923–1989), Jaroslav Jiránek (1922–2001), Jiří Fukač (1936–2002), and Ivan Poledňák (1931–2009). An initial wave of enthusiasm and broad interest gave way to a gradual cooling in the 1990s. Today, music semiology appears to stand at the periphery of academic interest, even while it enjoys an “insider’s fellowship.” That diagnosis may sound harsh, but the scarcity of references in scholarly works and the low frequency of papers dedicated to the subject at conferences bear out the pessimistic picture. Although the semiotic commitment of the Prague team faded and the team itself disintegrated after its members passed away successively, the group managed over more than twelve years to create a distinctive conception of musical semiotics.

Members of the team described that conception in numerous periodical articles, monographs, and dictionary entries. Jiří Fukač and Jaroslav Jiránek regularly presented their findings at international conferences. Jiří Fukač, in his study Nomenclature of Music Communication, addressed the issue of music communication. Jaroslav Jiránek set out his individual approach in the book Mystery of Music Meaning. Ivan Poledňák’s summarizing account from 1990, Musical Semiotics: A Report from Prague, made the subject accessible to an English‑speaking readership. The three‑volume Foundations of Musical Semiology became a canonical text. A much longer list of authors and publications could follow, confirming how varied the field really is. Yet all the diverse interpretations are bound by a shared tradition—one that is clearly traceable.

One of the authors most frequently cited in these works is Otakar Zich (1879–1934), a pupil of Otakar Hostinský (1847–1910) and himself one of Jan Mukařovský’s teachers. Another major tributary is the Prague Linguistic Circle, which from 1929 onward consistently formulated a semiotics of art. Their theory built on Ferdinand Saussure’s conception of language as a semiotic system. The semiology that the Prague structuralists envisioned aimed to become a new science—a general methodological foundation for the theory of the arts. It furnished decisive ammunition in polemics against aesthetic doctrines that framed a musical work through direct (causal) links to the composer’s personality, biography (the biographical method or the ‘author’s interpretation of the work’), the ideological tendencies of an era, or purely social‑scientific methods. This new science would treat its object as a structure of signs and values. The essence of art, in this view, is no longer made up of subjective impressions but of words, tones, surface, line, colour. In the post‑war period, too, general semiology and communication theory acted as an arbiter in contentious questions within musicology and especially music aesthetics. In step with the extraordinary surge of interest in structuralism across both social and natural sciences during the 1960s, “structure” became one of the most frequent terms. Following the interwar tradition, music was interpreted as a sign in which the communicative function is dispersed or vague—comparable, one might say, to abstract art.

Let a few broad observations serve as confirmation. Many non‑semantic conceptions grow out of the experience that music draws attention to itself. As we listen, we identify structurally more important sections that seize our focus. The Czech tradition basically aligns with this viewpoint by introducing the binary concept of presentation and representation. For something to function as a sign, it must bring attention to itself—like a figure set against a ground. Motifs or themes from traditional music are examples; they are thematised through repetition. Presentation functions as a secondary mode of the sign, while representation is its primary function, namely pointing to something other than itself. In Czech semiology, besides classification of signs and types of representation, one encounters terms such as interpretation, typified sign, subsign, metasign, paradigm, and syntagm– terms corresponding to langue and parole – alongside content and meaning.

Musical signs are generated to circulate and be communicated. But for them to be communicable, the question of transfer and intelligibility must be solved. If we push further and link the issues of sign and structure to the exchange of signals, we enter the domain of music communication, as Jiří Fukač defined it in the 1970s: “Music, typologically, genetically … belongs to the family of types of sound communication. … Music is simply, by rule and by its essence, a communicatum, it acts as a message and contains information.” In this way Fukač affirmed both the sign nature and the communicative essence of music.

In the 1960s musical analysis inspired by Boris Asafiev’s intonation theory gained ground. Asafiev (pseudonym Igor Glebov, 1884–1949) articulated this approach in his work Musical Form as a Process. In Czech musicology Antonín Sychra developed this line of inquiry further, and Jaroslav Jiránek attempted to build it into a comprehensive system. The aim was to reconcile the seeming opposition between the lived content of a musical work (subjectivity) and its structure (objectivity). Such analysis seeks to interpret a work as a “content‑form.” Another requirement is indispensable for any semantic interpretation: a preceding syntactic (or material) study, meaning a description of the work’s hierarchical layers. In the Czech (Czechoslovak) variant of this analysis, especially a modified Riemannian Funktionstheorie and motivic‑thematic analysis were used. (Motivic‑thematic analysis had been developed within the Czech scene since the 1920s.) Using these methods inevitably predetermined the outcomes of the analyses.

One can sum up: music cannot function as a semantic system merely a priori. Consequently, Czech semiology tried to critique and correct any treatment of music reception as an exact analogue to natural language and any valorization of musicology as a “philology of music.” Despite clear surface similarities to language, music does not work the same way. What seems clear and comprehensible as we listen to a piece stubbornly resists notional translation, either because its signification is indistinct or, quite the opposite, ambiguous. On a general level one can say that the semantic predicament of a musical work forcefully accentuates exactly those problems that underlie natural‑language communication—but turns them into a conundrum. The discussion is not solely about the culturally specific character of musical materials, but above all about how meanings depend on the particular message delivered by specific musical forms, conventions, and traditions. An Oriental musical conception holds no meaning for a European; likewise, music means nothing to an untrained ear. Similarly, the issue of denotation in music steers one toward emotional and evaluative relationships, hard to conceptualize in propositional terms. Ambiguity, vagueness of meaning at different levels, and especially the dependence of meaning on a concrete realization of a work—these become crucial with music.

Despite undeniable successes, musical semiology has provoked its share of objections. We could ask, for instance, whether showing that musical structure can operate as a sign truly yields deeper insight into what music is and does. Also, importing heavy‑duty new terminology or resorting to elaborate statistical and logical machinery frequently leads to trivial, banal, or fully predictable conclusions. Such interpretations may even erase the work as an artefact.

Conventional interpretations of Asafiev’s theory have often ignored its psychological dimension, according to which a composition creates causal relations that, during the listening process, can be felt as logical form—form accessible to the degree permitted by each listener’s skills. Musical analysis then functions as a graphic representation of how we perceive the piece. Understanding a musical work as a comprehensible whole moves from units small enough to be retained in musical memory upward towards compounded unity. The quality of the hidden relations is for the listener to discern—the listener, who searches for the work’s original intention and determines its value.

So what, finally, is Czech/Czechoslovak music semiology? The question must unfortunately remain without a final answer. Pronouncing a judgement while the field is still alive and its future remains uncertain would be a risky venture. None of the students of the aforementioned pioneers summoned steadfast courage or motivation to develop that tradition, which is, without question, richly inspiring. Even so, musical semiology will evidently persist as one of the methods that have shaped the profile of Czechoslovak musicology.