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ABSTRACT
Paper presented at the "Semiotics Briding Nature & Culture" congress held
in Guadalajara, Mexico, July 13-18, 1997. Awaiting puplication in the proceedings
of the conference.
CONTENTS:
(i) Abstract
(ii) Complete Paper
The Organic
Presence of the Sign in the Balinese Musical Text
abstract by Zachar Laskewicz
The Balinese musical text, weaving its way in and out of the life of the Balinese,
is deeply embedded in the bodies and minds of the Balinese people, simultaneously
creating and perpetuating Balinese culture. These 'musical' texts are indeed
cultural texts, and are embedded in a multi-medial performance context which
requires a particularly open theoretical approach: the concept of 'musical performance'
has to be redefined to incorporate those elements which have been lost in our
own musical 'disembodiment'. By turning our musical 'texts' into objectified
sources of performance [scores] we have removed time and space from our
theoretical model. The performance is reduced of sensual meaning and becomes
simply an imitation of the permanency inscribed on paper. Balinese musical texts
are very much involved with the 'now' of performance, utilising real physical
space, because it is only through the performance that the knowledge inherent
in the music is transmitted. Through a sensuous actualisation of ancient icons,
these texts become a powerful deictical pointing arrow: they act to direct the
attention of the audience and the gods to the symbolic actions which occur,
making them through their performance a part of the observer's reality. The
music makes the reality tangible, experiencable and sensuous. By examining a
particular Balinese performance, I will be attempting to fine-tune a new theoretical
model based on a reinterpretation of Peirce's sign trilogy and Bourdieu's Habitus.
Such a theoretical approach is certainly multi-disciplinary, uniting sociology,
ethnomusicology and anthropology, using semiotics as the binding tool. It will
be demonstrated that the embedded nature of the performance in a living environment
is crucial to understanding the signification of musical performance.
Major references
Bourdieu, P. (1990) The Logic of Practice, Polity Press, Cambridge.
Jakobson, R. and Pomorska, K. (1980) Dialogues,
Flammarion, Paris.
Kersenboom, S. (1995) Word, Sound, Image: The Life of the Tamil Text
, Berg Publishers Limited, Oxford.
Send mail to zachar@nachtschimmen.eu with questions or comments about this website.
Last modified: 6 June, 2008
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