Sfinksy. Motywy znaczące jako próba usemantycznienia struktury muzycznej
The Audible Landscape Sphinxes. Significant Motifs as an Attempt at a Semantisation of Musical Structure

Summary/Abstract: The author used the term “significant motif” (or ”sphinx”) in music to describe a small motif structure composed, as a rule, of several sounds, which apart from emotions and mood transmits also detailed non-musical and non-illustration information – concrete semantic contents: own name, brief linguistic phrases, etc. The article discusses (using many examples) three types of “sphinxes”: (1) morphological (the semantic meaning of the musical motifs stems from the letter or solmisation names of particular sounds); (2) apodictic (the source of the motif is the composer’s arbitrary declaration); (3) situational (the source of the meaning ascribed to a particular motif is an anecdote).

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