PRAGMATICS OF STRING QUARTET No. 8 BY DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH
Keywords:
pragmatic branch of semiotics, quotations, autobiographical meanings, composer and Soviet authoritiesAbstract
There is still much controversy about Dmitri Shostakovich’s personality in scholarly literature: was he a loyal servant of ideology or did he use creative expression to communicate dissident opinions? If the latter was the case, reflections on the artist’s relations with the Soviet authorities will have found a way into the autobiographic String Quartet No. 8. Quotations and allusions used abundantly by Shostakovich in this and many other works have a considerable semantic potential. They rely on the connotations of the original compositions which have already accumulated explicit verbal interpretations. The intermusicality of Shostakovich’s works is a semiotic tool compensating for the weak semantics of music signs. How should the imported meaning be assessed? Drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce’s classification of signs and the pragmatic branch of semiotics suggested by Charles W. Morris, this paper advances a contextual method of interpretation.
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