È possibile una semiotica della musica?

Music has always been a problem for semiotics, to the extent that the semiotics of music is the most neglected among the so–called applied semiotics. Starting from the discussion of this issue through a passage drawn from Ugo Volli’s handbook of semiotics, the paper focuses on the emergence of an aesthetic paradigm that may be called timbric–acousmatic–phonographic, thanks to which, by the second half of the Twentieth Century, music ceased to be an abstract entity to be translated into written notes onto the score and started claiming itself as sound. The difficulties in applying semiotics to music, and especially mediated music, suggest that the development of a dedicated branch, consistent with the structuralist principles, on the one hand, and capable to consider music as sound, on the other, is still needed. A possible pathway may be the recovering of classic semiotic theories such as the Greimassian semiotics of the plastic arts.