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In this 1986 interview by his doctoral student Marcello Castellana, Greimas sketches a number of avenues in which semiotics could explore music. In the framework of his research that culminated in  De l’imperfection  (1987), he describes each piece as alternating between prolonged slack periods and flashes of intensity in which the listener can become one with the world, in which subject and object virtually merge. The force of the musical signifier and its affective charge may justify examining the experiences as passions of the body rather than of the soul, to adopt Descartes’s distinction. Examining music would allow semioticians to grapple with temporality, a problematic heretofore neglected in their research. On the syntagmatic dimension, an analysis of the Italian terms used to characterize the tempo of classical compositions could identify the aspectual forms that characterize a piece on the temporal plane. In a paradigmatic mode, the timbre of the instruments played together at a given time could be analyzed as a syncretism comparable to the phoneme. Passages of many compositions manifest a symbolic system comprising a minimal array of opposing acoustic effects mapped to passional correlatives; the resultant tempered sequence of inversions and shifts can be disrupted by bursts of extrinsic sounds. Comparisons between musical and plastic structures could reveal whether temporal and spatial forms share a more abstract common denominator or not. Semiotic investigations should aim to formulate universals and not just descriptions of particular musical compositions or performances.

Inédit 3 (1986): Le sens et la musique. Propos recueillis par Marcello Castellana (1986)