Conference Agenda

Semiotics is implicit in discourse regarding film and television leitmotivs: these leitmotivs are, at their core, musical signifiers of onscreen subjects. However, rich semiotic grounding is rarely prioritized in discussions about this type of music. In this paper, I demonstrate the benefits of applying a semiotic framework to analysis of television leitmotivs using the music from HBO’s Game of Thrones (GoT) and House of the Dragon (HotD) as case studies. Diegetically, the events of HotD take place roughly 200 years prior to GoT, but as the order of the shows’ releases reverses this, issues of diegetic temporality and continuity arise, and viewers develop a warped conception of past, present, and future. Ramin Djawadi’s scoring for both series highlights these issues and, based on its foregrounded development of leitmotivic themes, is best investigated through a semiotic lens.

Drawing primarily on the research of Raymond Monelle (2000), Naomi Cumming (2000), and Robert Hatten (1994, 2004, 2014, 2018), I posit five types of semiotic meaning afforded by leitmotivs: (1) leitmotivic, (2) topical, (3) gestural, (4) agential, and (5) tropological. After interrogating them and establishing their definitions, I apply these types in my analysis to reveal the key role of musical semiosis in enhancing and complicating the temporal landscape shared by GoT and HotD. Central to my analyses are the tropological implications of Djawadi’s tracks “The Heirs of the Dragon” and “The Power of Prophecy.” Through robust semiotic grounding, I demonstrate that the semiotic function of leitmotivs like those of GoT and HotD extend beyond one-to-one mappings of music onto characters: within themselves and their combinations, they offer significant opportunities for complex meaning-making, fundamentally enriching viewers’ comprehension of the corresponding narratives.

The "guitar chord" is a characteristic device of Alberto Ginastera’s musical idiolect. In its purest form, the chord consists of the arpeggiation of the six pitches of the guitar’s open strings in standard tuning. Despite its name, it is often performed by instruments and combinations of instruments (e.g., piano, harp, strings, etc.) in works that don’t actually have a guitar, thus functioning as a virtual representation of the instrument and an idiosyncratic manifestation of the broader concept of the “guitar topic” (Plesch 2009). Within the context of Argentine music, this particular topic bears strong connections with the stoic folk symbol of the gaucho (a landless horseman of the Pampas) and its associated iconography and poetic imagery, where the guitar boasts a central role (Schwartz-Kates 2002).

While the chord has been traditionally described as a symbolic compositional fingerprint present across Ginastera’s different stylistic eras (Chase 1957; Gaviria 2010), no studies have shown how its implementation was affected by the drastic changes in style that took place between his self-defined “objective” (1934-1948) and “subjective” (1948-1958) nationalist periods (Suárez Urtubey 1967). While folkloristic character pieces, songs, and stage works abounded in the former, the latter favored instrumental works in abstract classical forms where the folk references were largely subsumed into a complex post-tonal fabric.

My paper presents an account of this development, analyzing different instances of the “guitar chord” drawn from all of Ginastera’s stylistic periods. Additionally, I introduce a classification system, evaluating these chords in terms of their structural role, ranging from surface-level picturesque topoi reminiscent of Argentine cultural symbology to “prime sonorities” responsible for the generation of the pitch content of entire movements (Laufer 2003). Finally, I contextualize Ginastera’s compositional evolution within the milieu of twentieth-century Argentine intellectuals and their troubled sense of national identity as a consequence of the dialectical oppositions (e.g., urban vs. rural; unitary state vs. federalism) that lie at the heart of the nation’s cultural heritage.

Scholars hear a pastoral topic in Beethoven’s op. 101/I (e.g. Hatten 1994). Yet, many topics share the same features, so what influences which topic is perceived? Echard (2017) suggests that differences in listener competencies could influence which topic is perceived as well as topical associations. Building on Echard (2017) and Citron’s (1993) speculation on “a woman’s way of listening,” I show how early nineteenth-century German women, especially mothers, could hear Beethoven’s op. 90/II and op. 101/I as evoking a lullaby topic rather than the more commonly assumed topic—pastoral. Before analyzing this topical ambiguity, I first define the lullaby topic’s features and associations. To determine the frequent features of the lullaby topic, I analyze Reichardt’s 1798 collection of lullabies Lullabies for Good German Mothers. Many of these features overlap with frequent features of the pastoral topic (Monelle 2006) and the singing style (Day-O’Connell 2014). Using a cognitive theory of categorization called prototype theory (Rosch 1975), I show how listeners could perceive a lullaby topic rather than a pastoral or singing style for these potentially ambiguous musical passages. Next, I articulate the lullaby topic’s network of associations by analyzing the lullaby collection’s song texts in light of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourses of motherhood and childrearing (Head 2013, Allen 1991). These intersubjective associations include breastfeeding, nature, among others. But German women—mothers particularly—might have other personal associations with lullabies, too, related to embodied feelings of motherhood and/or feelings of shame. I analyze topical ambiguity by creating two different analytical narratives for Beethoven’s Op. 90/II and Op. 101/I. I construct two historically-grounded albeit speculative listening subjects to explore these multiple interpretations: 1) Franz, a nineteenth-century German father, who hears one piece as a lullaby topic and the other as a pastoral topic; 2) Henrietta, a nineteenth-century German mother, who hears both pieces as a lullaby topic. This paper contributes to historically-informed listening practices by recognizing diversity in historical listeners. Rather than assuming an “ideal” or “experienced” listener, this paper considers differences in competencies to speculate on pluralistic perceptions of topics.