Leibniz and the Semiotic Material of Music

  • Fabrício Fortes Universidade Federal da Bahia / Doutor em Filosofia

Abstract

This paper aims to characterize musical material from Leibniz’s epistemological and semiotic viewpoints. On the one hand, we argue that, according to Leibniz’s theory of perception, our access to the musical phenomenon is symbolic in the sense of a perception of the multiple in the form of a unit. On the other hand, we seek to explain composition in terms of blind manipulation of signs, taking as example the use of traditional music notation in tonal music. Thus, we argue that, according to Leibniz’s ideas, the use of some semiotic system in composition is not a merely psychotechnical resource, but it is as a constitutive element of music itself.

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Published
2022-05-15