Music as Discourse

Patrick McCreless, Professor of Music Theory, Yale University Kofi Agawu is widely known as one of the pioneers of musical semiotics. Now, in Music as Discourse, he offers a focused study that shows semiotics in action, engaging with a familiar and cherished repertory in a way that provides valuable insights to both scholar and student.

David Lidov, Department of Music, York University, Toronto At a moment when referential and structural interpretations of music threaten divorce, Agawu's fresh initiative supports synthesis and debate. These are splendid new analyses of important works.

Raymond Monelle, Honorary Professor of Music, University of Edinburgh, Scotland Excitement, radicalism, challenge: these qualities have seldom been associated with advanced courses in analysis. This book, with its lapidary clarity, its surprising insights, and its emphasis on musical meaning, is going to change all that.

Tempo Confirms [the author's] status as one of the foremost semiotic analysts of our time. . . rarely can a treatise that ponders on matters so weighty have had such a light, intensely readable, touch.

Notes An excellent example of . . . analysis as a kind of 'performance'.

Theoria Remarkable . . . inspiring . . . a reminder of how playful and rewarding music analysis can be. . . . One finishes Agawu's book with new methods to probe music's unfathomable meanings, new ways to refashion the tools we already know, a conviction that the real value of analysis lies in the doing of it rather than the 'truth' it uncovers, and a desire to get down to work.

Music and Letters The painstaking clarity of the analyses will surely be imitated by a generation of bright students. . . radical and challenging . . . easy to absorb yet infinitely sophisticated. . .This elegant and rich book needs to be lived with and digested. Of how many analytical manuals can one say that?