This collection of 22 essays has been assembled in honour and memory of Raymond Monelle by former students and colleagues indebted in one way or another to his inspirational teaching, collegial support and intellectual astuteness. Semiotics is intrinsically wide ranging, and throughout his career, Monelle engaged with most aspects of the subject to some extent. Combined with Monelle's published interests in music from J.S. Bach to the present, the diversity of the collection will come as no surprise. For Esti Sheinberg as editor, the task of ordering the essays into a coherent whole must have been a challenging one. If the result is a collection that sometimes threatens to burst its editorial groupings, then that is a fitting tribute to Monelle, whose book The Sense of Music (which is a significant influence on many of the essays in this collection) made explicit his long-term suspicion of formal systems operating in isolation from contextualized meaning.Footnote ¹

The essays vary not only in terms of content, but also in terms of type. Some are essentially reviews of writings by other authors that are more suggestive of a work in progress. Anthony Gritten's essay on Bakhtin's philosophical aesthetics is such a case. Its noble aspiration to examine ‘the role music plays in generating, cultivating and exhibiting wisdom’ (p. 59) progresses as far as Bakhtin's consideration of aesthetic love in relation to the ‘answerable act’ (of, for instance, performance). How wisdom might be manifested in music is not made explicit, though it remains an intriguing prospect. Other essays draw heavily on work published by the essayist (and other authors relevant to their topic) over several decades. Dalia Cohen's chapter on musical rules is one example of this type. Its summary of principles or natural schemata used in the derivation of rule-based approaches to the perception and cognition of music in a variety of formats (score, recording, performance) and cultural contexts might remind us of how music theory used to be practised in the closing decades of the last century. If that is so, then its inclusion in this volume is to be welcomed: Monelle's own work evinced rigour, but the scope of it extended to socio-cultural and historical domains. As Sheinberg puts it in her distillation of Monelle's stance: ‘There is a conciliation looking for a balance between the teachings of structuralism, which see the description of the text as essential but which neglect its sense effects, and the post-structuralist initiative of “deconstructing” a text which has become transparent to itself’ (p. 19).

Taking review a substantial step further, Marina Ritzarev's essay exploring crossings of the gap between folk and art music is anchored in theory explicated elsewhere in her recent publications, in particular, the categories of phylo-vernacular, concerning authentic folk music, and onto-vernacular, relating to the assimilation of authentic folk music by common-practice and other art-music idioms (p. 39). In applying these categories, principally to Russian music since the seventeenth century, fresh perspectives emerge on the vacillating reception of folk elements in art music, specifically the tension between the recognition of folk music as authentically self-sufficient and its potential corruption when incorporated into art music. But it is the suggestion that ‘Stravinsky's Russian works … became the standard models, to which new devices like microtones, aleatory, special sonorities and dodecaphony were added in the course of the twentieth century’ that struck me most (p. 44). That references to phylo-vernacular folk music have become largely unrecognizable in modern music draws attention to a rich vein of musicological enquiry, one that emulates the already extensive study of topics in the classical style, but with a particular focus on how these folk elements connect with the techniques associated with modernism. One of the most impressive essays in this collection (Nicholas McKay's essay, discussed below) does just that in connection with Stravinsky, coincidentally.

Bridging what emerged as a divide between score-based and contextual analyses in the 1980s and 1990s remains a challenge in musicology, if it is recognized as a problem at all. Semiotics has an important role to play in this project, but increasingly it will be played out in the company of psychology, physiology and neuroscience.Footnote ² Historical alliances with philosophy (in which semiotics has its origins) will be less relevant to this particular project, if the modern demise of philosophy in relation to music (in comparison with the nineteenth century) in favour of alliances with the natural sciences continues to be the case.Footnote ³ Apart from Cohen's chapter, only two other essays attempt to address the problem of how signs are to be constructed in a systematic way. Christina Anagnostopoulou and Emilios Cambouropoulos's chapter on the computational modelling of paradigmatic analysis necessarily establishes criteria for pattern recognition as part of its algorithmic architecture and applies these to Xenakis's trombone solo Keren and that perennial favourite of paradigmatic analysis, Debussy's Syrinx. The prospect of comprehensive pattern recognition within the score is daunting enough. When it is acknowledged, in Robert Hatten's contribution, that ‘metaphor actually “creates the similarity” rather than “formulat[ing] some similarity antecedently existing”‘ the scale of the challenge faced in building the bridge is given perspective (p. 88).Footnote ⁴ Some signs might be derived from internal patterns (although even these are predicated on cognitive and perceptual categories), but many more depend on what the listener brings to the music, for instance in terms of repertoire knowledge.Footnote ⁵ By their very nature, metaphors situate elements of music in a context beyond that made explicit in the score, performance or recording. In doing so, even non-patterns in music have the potential to become objects of our attention. But, following Monelle, Sheinberg cautions against relativism. Referring to the scope of musical connections in terms of an aperture she writes that it ‘cannot simply be one of the relative and the diffuse, an infinite chain of interpretants that replaces a “ready-made” approach by an “anything goes” policy’ (p. 19).

In what might be seen as ground-preparing, Ben Curry's discussion of Peircean typology in connection with temporality provides a conceptual basis for ‘theorizing music's segmentation and semiosis in relation to time’ (p. 161).Footnote ⁶ In essence, the categories of firstness, secondness and thirdness are aligned with the signs of icon, index and symbol and the temporal dimensions of present, past and future. Curry's arrival at these parallels is made possible by an unusually thorough engagement with the elaborate complexity of Peirce's typology of signs. As Curry acknowledges, the relevance to music of the many other signs that form part of Peirce's typology requires further detailed examination. Until then, it remains to be seen whether the potential to move from concept to analytical practice can be realized.

Another type of essay to be found in this collection is characterized by an initial emphasis on a particular repertoire or composition that draws on theory, to varying degrees, in order to elucidate some aspect of the music and its context. After a series of theory-first essays, this reversal is both a welcome relief and a reminder that, ultimately, music precedes ‘-ology’. At the theory-light end, essays range over settings of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister poems, Fanny Mendelssohn's cantata Hiob, Bartók's Four Orchestral Pieces Op. 12, John Adams’ Doctor Atomic, Wagner's Parsifal and Ring operas. All of these draw on topic and literary-based theory in response to issues arising out of the music under consideration. Anne Sivuoja's essay on Parsifal is further strengthened by connections with theory elucidated in the previous chapter by Nicholas Cook, in which he distinguishes the elusive musical work from its performances and the recordings of those performances: ‘performances should … be understood as representing works, and recordings as representing performances … In other words, performances and recordings signify’ (p. 173). In Sivuoja's essay, it is the importance of voice in performance that is seen as significant to the understanding of the Grail Knights’ choruses, so Cook's exposition provides a useful theoretical underpinning. The consequences of the distinction made by Cook are wide ranging: both performance and sound production become integral to the creative processes surrounding the artwork, a major departure from naive communication models. Articulating the ‘how’ of these creative processes, as David Lidov observes, requires the development of new paradigms to match those established for the identification of score-based constructs such as topics (p. 170). As the philosopher Gilbert Ryle once encouraged, we need to move away from ‘knowing that’ to ‘knowing how’, i.e. from declarative to procedural knowledge.Footnote ⁷ No doubt he would be heartened by developments in musicology over the last decade or more, some of which are alluded to, or expanded on, in this collection of essays, such as the one by Spitzer mentioned above.

Monelle's final book, The Musical Topic, arguably is the one that has done most to inspire the early years of his legacy.Footnote ⁸ It has led to some essays in the final section of this volume that are themselves inspirational. Doubtless other reviewers would choose to highlight different essays, but to me in terms of Monelle's legacy, those by Spitzer, Tamara Balter, Jamie Liddle and Nicholas McKay stand out for their development of topic theory combined with insightful and enriching applications. In related ways, these essays draw on concepts of superposition, juxtaposition, misplacement, undercutting and troping in the treatment of topics, often in connection with listeners’ expectations. Hatten's earlier essay on metaphor and troping in music is also a valuable adjunct to the theoretical developments illustrated by these musicologists, especially when they consider literary devices such as irony and parody. But of these essays I will return to the one by McKay, which even parallels the title of Monelle's book by listing the people rather than the pastimes of topics: huntsmen, soldiers and shepherds. In the huntsmen section, McKay discusses an exceptional use of topic hinted at by Monelle himself: the ‘cultural hunt’ or ‘chasse écrit’ used by Stravinsky in the ‘Ritual of Abduction’ section of The Rite of Spring (p. 250). Unlike the hunting calls used in the actual hunts of the Middle Ages, this cultural hunt had connotations of heroism and glory, connotations startlingly at odds with the rape and savagery depicted by the ballet. By analysing an attempted reconstruction of the original Nijinsky choreography (now lost) McKay demonstrates that Stravinsky's hunt call is ‘replete with over-encoded rhetorical [dance] gestures intent on thwarting all signs of … the Romantic hunt topic’ (p. 254). For those whose exposure to The Rite has depended on concert performances and audio recordings this is a hugely valuable insight. But if the presence of a noble signifier remains puzzling, despite being countered overall, I proffer the suggestion that Stravinsky is simultaneously representing two different points of view: the delusions of heroism by the perpetrators of rape and the view of savagery from a distance, our view.

On the basis of this and other essays, Monelle's writings are worth mining for their hints alone. I hope he would be reassured to know that those indebted to him are already busy at work doing just that. Others will follow. So, rest in peace, Raymond.