Experimental music semiotics

This essay suggests that there is a definitive difference between "experimental music and other forms of contemporary composition, and explicates this with reference to the sign theory of Charles Saunders Peirce. It suggests that experimental music is distinguished by a change in the dominant mode of signification from the symbolic to the indexical: experimental music indicates, or draws attention to, the phenomena and relationships associated with the social practice known as music (for example, psychoacoustical phenomena, or the social relationships between audience, musicians and composers) and thereby offers information on how we make sense of music generally. The tendency of experimental music to present rather than represent such aspects is reflected in characteristic features of experimental music. Compositions by Alvin Lucier, James Tenney, Klaus Lang and Akio Suzuki and others are referred to as examples of experimental music's practicemof drawing attention to things, to phenomena and to relationships, and also to show how many other features of experimental music - including its tendency to simplicity of structure and the increased interest in writing music for specific environments - can also be related back to the general, indexical tendency of presentation as opposed to representation.
Key words: experimental music, semiotics, Peirce, significance, index, Lucier, Tenney,
Klaus Lang