Fifty Years Off-key

Music has always been a problem for semiotics to the extent that the semiotics of music (music semiotics or musical semiotics) is the most neglected among the so-called “applied semiotics”. Therefore, this paper first exposes how music presents a series of theoretical challenges to the verbally and visually-oriented semiotic episteme. Subsequently, it highlights the pivotal role of Italian scholarship in the field, from the 1970s to the 2020s. A foundational figure is Gino Stefani (1929–2019), a pioneer of the semiotic analysis of music who operated in Bologna under the auspices of Umberto Eco and propitiated a fertile collaboration between musicology, musical pedagogy, popular music studies and semiotics.