Fifty years off-key: A map of musical semiotics from the Italian perspective

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. First, the paper 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.