Musical semiotics is a new discipline and paradigm of both semiotics and musicology. In its tradition, the current volume constitutes a radically new solution to the theoretical problem of how musical meanings emerge and how they are transmitted by musical signs even in most "absolute" and abstract musical works of Western classical heritage. Works from symphonies, lied, chamber music to opera are approached and studied here with methods of semiotic inspiration. Its analyses stem from systematic methods in the author's previous work, yet totally new analytic concepts are also launched in order to elucidate profound musical significations verbally. The book reflects the new phase in the author's semiotic approach, the one characterized by the so-called "existential semiotics" elaborated on the basis of philosophers from Kant , Hegel and Kierkegaard to Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre and Marcel. The key notions like musical subject, Schein, becoming, temporality, modalities, Dasein, transcendence put musical facts in a completely new light and perspectives of interpretation. The volume attempts to make explicit what is implicit in every musical interpretation, intuition and understanding: to explain how compositions and composers "talk" to us. Its analyses are accessible due to the book's universal approach. Music is experienced as a language, communicating from one subject to another.

Existential semiotics is a new paradigm which combines classical semiotics with continental philosophy. It does not mean a return to existentialism, albeit philosophers from Hegel and Kierkegaard to Heidegger, Jaspers and Sartre are its sources of inspiration. It introduces completely new sign categories and concepts to the field, recasting the whole of semiotics, communication and signification as integral to a transcendental art. The volume contains essays on music, the voice, silence, calligraphy, metaphysics, myth, aesthetics, entropy, cultural heritage, film, the Bible, among other subjects.

Music is said to be the most autonomous and least representative of all the arts. However, it reflects in many ways the realities around it and influences its social and cultural environments. Music is as much biology, gender, gesture - something intertextual, even transcendental. Musical signs can be studied throughout their history as well as musical semiotics with its own background. Composers from Chopin to Sibelius and authors from Nietzsche to Greimas and Barthes illustrate the avenues of this new discipline within semiotics and musicology.

Existential semiotics is a new paradigm in the studies of signs, signification and communication. This book develops its theory further starting from the continental philosophy (Kant, Hegel, Jaspers, Heidegger, Arendt, Sartre) on one hand, yet remaining also faithful to the tradition of the European semiotics, particularly the Paris school. From the notions of being, doing and appearing the study applies them to crucial social problems of the contemporary world, and moreover to various so-called 'lesser arts' like performance and gastronomy. It also introduces some precursors of the approach. The book represents what can be called neosemiotics, the search for new theories and fields of the discipline.

Thirty high-level essays on various aspects of semiotics by Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian scholars.

Existential semiotics involves an a priori state of signs and their fixation into objective entities. These essays define this new philosophical field.

"Since Tarasti s] is unquestionably the most fully developed narrative theory in the literature, this book is an important landmark... " Music & Letters

Eero Tarasti advances a semiotic theory of music based on information provided by the history of Western music and by various sign theories. A Theory of Musical Semiotics provides a model for the semiotic analysis of both musical structure and semantics. It introduces English-language readers to musical narratology, which has been largely the province of European researchers."