Intersecting Semiotics and Musicology: New Prospects of Communication, Narratives and Meanings in Contemporary Music Culture

The aim of the InterMuSe project is to develop an innovative and complex framework for integrated approach to the composer's creative process, compositional techniques, musical texts, their reception, cultural and philosophical context. A novel methodological approach will be employed, integrating different branches of musicology with the cultural semiotics of Juri Lotman and the Tartu-Moscow school. The pioneering application of Lotman's cultural semiotics to the analysis of musical texts provides a flexible toolbox for examining the complementarity of different artistic texts and dynamics of cultural boundaries. The methodological focus will be on Lotman's holistic approach to artistic text as an integral sign, on mechanisms of communication and autocommunication, and his concept of the semiosphere. By integrating contemporary art music into the domain of complex cultural studies, the interdisciplinary project will also significantly change the horizon of music semiotics. The study focuses on the work of Arvo Pärt, a composer of major importance in contemporary music culture. It serves as a model for the disruption of communicative isolation within the context of predominantly elitist contemporary art music, and for the adaptation and transformation of the aesthetic principles of modernism and postmodernism. The project undertakes a comprehensive analysis of Pärt's oeuvre (1958-2023), as based on the wide range of materials from the archive of the Arvo Pärt Centre, reflecting on the composer's creative process and his aesthetic and philosophical context. This allows for an in-depth study of the reception of a musical corpus and its interconnections with the structures of musical life. By examining the musical rhetoric and communicative patterns present in Pärt’s compositions, we propose a modelling framework for the processes in post-WWII European art music with a focus on Eastern Europe, as well as models for the communicative aspects of contemporary art music.