Module Code - Title:
MD4094
-
MUSIC, LANGUAGE, SIGN AND TEXT
Year Last Offered:
2025/6
Hours Per Week:
Grading Type:
Prerequisite Modules:
Rationale and Purpose of the Module:
To develop the student's critical understanding of the relationship of language, signs and symbols to music. This will allow students to engage their academic studies in the field of performing arts in a more critical and informed manner.
Syllabus:
In this module students will be introduced to the broad twentieth-century traditions of structuralism, post-structuralism, post-modernism and cognitive linguistics. They will examine the application of theoretical structures from these traditions, in particular those promoted by Saussure, Barthes, Fauconnier, Bahktin, Kristeva, Lakoff, Turner and Foucault, in the contexts of understanding roles of meaning and the interaction of sign, text and language in musical and musicological contexts. Students will be encouraged to examine these theoretical constructs in the constructs of their own performance practices. Students will be provided with written feedback according to BA Irish Music and Dance policy.
Learning Outcomes:
Cognitive (Knowledge, Understanding, Application, Analysis, Evaluation, Synthesis)
Students will have knowledge and understanding of appropriate traditions from literary and cognitive studies.
Students will be able to contrast and associate these traditions where relevant.
Students will be able to apply theoretical structures in a performing arts context.
Students will have developed analytical skills constructed from these academic contexts.
Affective (Attitudes and Values)
Encourage alternative understandings of roles and organisation of meaning and cognition in performance arts practice.
Psychomotor (Physical Skills)
N/A
How the Module will be Taught and what will be the Learning Experiences of the Students:
Research Findings Incorporated in to the Syllabus (If Relevant):
Prime Texts:
Lakoff, George & Turner, Mark (1989)
More than Cool Reason - A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor
, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kingsbury, Henry (1991)
Sociological Factors in Musicological Poetics
, Ethnomusicology, 35 (2), 195-219
Taylor, John R. (1989)
Linguistic Categorisation - Prototypes in Linguistic Theory
, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Barthes, Roland (1977)
Image - Music - Text
, New York: Hill and Wang
Allen, Graham (2007)
Intertextuality, the New Critical Idiom
, Oxon and New York: Routledge
Saussure, Ferdinand de (translated by Roy Harris) (1995)
Course in General Linguistics
, London: Duckworth.
Zbikowski, Lawrence M. (2002)
Conceptualizing Music, Cognitive Structure, Theory and Analysis AMS Studies in Music
, New York: Oxford University Press.
Young, Robert (ed.) (1981)
Untying the Text: a Post-Structuralist Reader
, Routledge: London
Other Relevant Texts:
Ruthrof, Horst (2000)
The Body in Language
, London: Cassell
Keegan, Niall (2010)
The Linguistic Turn at the Turn of the Tune - the language of contemporary ensemble in Irish traditional music
, Ethnomusicology Ireland, Vol. 1. www.ictm.ie
Hutchinson, Patrick (1994)
The Work and Words of Piping in Diamond, Beverley and Robert Witmer, Canadian Music: Issues of Hegemony and Identity
, Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press.
Rice, Timothy (2001)
Reflections on Music and Meaning: Metaphor, signification, and Control in the Bulgarian Case
, British Journal of Ethnomusicology, 10(1), 19-38.
Bakhtin, M.M. & V.N. Volosinov (translated by L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik) (1986)
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language
, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
Programme(s) in which this Module is Offered:
BAIMDAUFA - Irish Music and Dance
Semester(s) Module is Offered:
Autumn
Module Leader:
Niall.Keegan@ul.ie