Home Listening to Beethoven’s Ninth as communicational production
Article
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Listening to Beethoven’s Ninth as communicational production

  • Cássio de Borba Lucas ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: February 21, 2022
Semiotica
From the journal Semiotica Volume 2022 Issue 245

Abstract

This paper (1) discusses the communicability of musical listening, (2) proposes a semanalytical perspective to approach it in terms of communicational production, and (3) summarizes an analysis of the production of musical listenings in the case of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Instead of assuming that verbal talk on music banalizes listening (Barthes), or that musical arrangers are the privileged authorities when it comes to transmitting a personal listening (Szendy), our suggestion is that communication produces – in the post-structuralist sense of the word – musical listenings even when it seems to simply try and account for it. In a transmissive, “phenotextual” (Kristeva) comprehension, listening may be understood as a phenomenological, receptive act that pre-exists its communication. Instead, our communicational research on musical listening turns to the listening-accounts in order to grasp the “listenabilities” as they emerge (are permitted or interdicted) within specific listening-territories that “genotextually” produce their regulations and habits (modes of listening). This semiotic production is methodologically investigated, here, in terms of interpretant signs, especially as Normal Interpretants (Peirce), within a particular listening-territory (Brazilian newspapers’ repercussion around the Ninth Symphony’s 1918 debut in Rio). Three remarks are made on the genotextual operations that produce “insufficiency,” “monumentality,” and “distinção” as listening normalities.

Keywords: Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; communicational production; musical listening; semanalysis; semiotics
Corresponding author: Cássio de Borba Lucas, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil, E-mail:

Acknowledgements

I thank my research groups GEIST (www.sonoridades.net), GPESC (gpesc.wordpress.com) and my advisor Alexandre Rocha da Silva for developing along with me the ideas present in this paper.

  1. Research funding: This research was funded by Capes.

References

Adorno, Theodor. 2009. Introdução à sociologia da música. São Paulo: Editora UNESP.Search in Google Scholar

Artes e artistas – música. 1918. O paíz Rio de Janeiro, 8 August. 5.Search in Google Scholar

Barthes, Roland. 1982. L’obvie et l’obtus. Paris: Seuil.Search in Google Scholar

Barthes, Roland. 2004. Inéditos, vol. 1. São Paulo: Martins Fontes.Search in Google Scholar

Berlioz, Hector. 1913. A critical study of Beethoven’s nine symphonies. London: New Temple Press.Search in Google Scholar

Bieletto-Bueno, Natalia. 2018. De incultos y escandalosos: Ruido y clasificación social en el México postrevolucionario. Resonancias 22(43). 161–178.10.7764/res.2018.43.9Search in Google Scholar

Constallat, B. 1918. Chrônica musical – temporada lyrica. O Imparcial 14.Search in Google Scholar

Derrida, Jacques. 1967. L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.Search in Google Scholar

Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari. 2014. Kafka: por uma literatura menor. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica Editora.Search in Google Scholar

Fitzgerald, John. 1966. Peirce’s theory of signs as a foundation for pragmatism. The Hague: Mouton.Search in Google Scholar

Flusser, Vilém. 2016. The surprising phenomenon of human communication. Metaflux.Search in Google Scholar

Foucault, Michel. 2005. A arqueologia do saber. São Paulo: Forense Universitária.Search in Google Scholar

Gilberto, João. 1959. “Chega de Saudade” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWXGsgI-QGk&ab_channel=Jo%C3%A3oGilberto (accessed 12 February 2022).Search in Google Scholar

Jakobson, Roman. 2015. Linguística e comunicação. São Paulo: Cultrix.Search in Google Scholar

Kasunic, David. 2013. On “Jewishness” and genre. In Siobhán Donovan, Nicole Grimes & Wolfgang Marx (eds.), Rethinking Hanslick: Music, formalism and expression, 311–338. Rochester: University of Rochester Press.10.1515/9781580467957-019Search in Google Scholar

Kristeva, Julia. 1974. Révolution du langage poétique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.Search in Google Scholar

Kristeva, Julia. 1975. Pratique signifiante et mode de production. In Julia Kristeva (ed.), La traversée des signes, 11–29. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.Search in Google Scholar

Kristeva, Julia. 2012. Introdução à semanálise. São Paulo: Perspectiva.Search in Google Scholar

Marx, Karl. 1987. Manuscritos econômico-filosóficos e outros textos escolhidos. São Paulo: Nova Cultural.Search in Google Scholar

Moraes, Jota de. 1983. O que é música. São Paulo: Brasiliense.Search in Google Scholar

No municipal. 1918. A época, Rio de Janeiro, 27 September. 9.Search in Google Scholar

O 4o concerto symphonico – A 9a symphonia de Beethoven e oratorio Rebbeca, de Cesar Franck. 1918. Gazeta de noticias Rio de Janeiro, 8 October. 4.Search in Google Scholar

Peirce, Charles S. 1931–1966. The collected papers of Charles S. Peirce, 8 vols., C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss & A. W. Burks (eds.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [Reference to Peirce’s papers will be designated CP followed by volume and paragraph number.]Search in Google Scholar

Peirce, Charles S. 1976. The new elements of mathematics, 4 vols., C. Eisele (ed.). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter; Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. [Reference to Peirce’s New Elements will be designated NEM followed by volume and page number.].Search in Google Scholar

Reynolds, Simon. 2011. Retromania. New York: Faber and Faber.Search in Google Scholar

Rezende Martins, Amélia de. n. d. As nove sinfonias de Beethoven. São Paulo: Irmãos Vitale.Search in Google Scholar

Ross, Alex. 2007. O resto é ruído. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.Search in Google Scholar

Santaella, Lucia. 2009. Matrizes da linguagem e pensamento: Sonora, visual, verbal. São Paulo: Iluminuras.Search in Google Scholar

Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1995. Cours de linguistique génerale. Paris: Payot & Rivages.Search in Google Scholar

Stockfelt, Ola. 2013. Adequate modes of listening. In Christoph Cox & Daniel Warner (eds.), Audio culture: Readings in modern music, 76–81. New York: Bloomsbury.Search in Google Scholar

Szendy, Peter. 2009. Listen: A history of our ears. New York: Fordham University Press.10.2307/j.ctt13x002mSearch in Google Scholar

Theatros e musica. A 9a symphonia de Beethoven. 1918. O Imparcial, Rio de Janeiro 6 August. 7.Search in Google Scholar

Veloso, Caetano. 2012. Verdade tropical. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.Search in Google Scholar

Wright, Mark Peter. 2012. Listening as territory. Musicworks 114. https://www.musicworks.ca/winter-2012 (accessed 2 April 2021).Search in Google Scholar
Received: 2021-05-19
Accepted: 2021-10-05
Published Online: 2022-02-21
Published in Print: 2022-03-28

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Gesture, a tool for synthetic reasoning
  3. From matter to form: the evolution of the genetic code as semio-poiesis
  4. Models as signs of the imaginary: Peirce, Pierce, Langer, and the non-discursive sign
  5. Speaking one’s mind: the sign as subject of interpretation in the manuscripts of Charles S. Peirce, between the theories of rhetoric and communication
  6. Sense, reference, and contemporary “predicativism”
  7. Languaging dynamics of classroom interactivity: a distributed view of the pedagogic recontextualization in L2 tertiary settings
  8. A Lotmanian semiotic interpretation of cultural memory in ritual
  9. The “empirical vocation” of the semiotics of Umberto Eco in his works on the media and mass communication
  10. Quand l’éventail du désaccord laisse parler au-delà des paroles: Etude historico-sémiotique de la légende du Coup de l’Eventail
  11. Listening to Beethoven’s Ninth as communicational production
https://doi.org/10.1515/sem-2021-0074
Keywords for this article
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; communicational production; musical listening; semanalysis; semiotics

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Gesture, a tool for synthetic reasoning
  3. From matter to form: the evolution of the genetic code as semio-poiesis
  4. Models as signs of the imaginary: Peirce, Pierce, Langer, and the non-discursive sign
  5. Speaking one’s mind: the sign as subject of interpretation in the manuscripts of Charles S. Peirce, between the theories of rhetoric and communication
  6. Sense, reference, and contemporary “predicativism”
  7. Languaging dynamics of classroom interactivity: a distributed view of the pedagogic recontextualization in L2 tertiary settings
  8. A Lotmanian semiotic interpretation of cultural memory in ritual
  9. The “empirical vocation” of the semiotics of Umberto Eco in his works on the media and mass communication
  10. Quand l’éventail du désaccord laisse parler au-delà des paroles: Etude historico-sémiotique de la légende du Coup de l’Eventail
  11. Listening to Beethoven’s Ninth as communicational production
Sign up now to receive a 20% welcome discount
Institutional Access
How does access work?
Have an idea on how to improve our website?
Please write us.
© 2025 De Gruyter Brill
Downloaded on 19.11.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2021-0074/pdf
Scroll to top button