Intersemiotic translation as a cognitive artifact – from Webern’s serialism to concrete poetry

ABSTRACT

As a projective augmented intelligence technique, intersemiotic translation works as a predictive tool, anticipating surprising patterns of semiotic events and processes, keeping under control the emergence of new patterns. At the same time, it works as a generative model, providing new, unexpected, data in the target system, and affording competing results which allow the system to generate candidate instances. As a metasemiotic tool, intersemiotic translation creates a metalevel semiotic process, a sign-action which stands for the action of a sign. We explore these ideas taking advantage of one example of intersemiotic translations to verbal poetry – from Webern musical serialism to Poetamenos by Augusto de Campos. Poetamenos is an intersemiotic translation of Webern's music. Some properties translated from Webernian serialism were the abstraction of the musical line, the fragmentation of the melody between low, medium and high registers, attention to proportional durations and the exchange of elements, in addition to temporal symmetries. According to our approach, Poetamenos reveals: (i) a dialectical understanding of the sound-silence tension through the fragmentation, dispersion and accumulation of letters, syllables and lexical structures; (ii) the formal and methodological rigor developed by Webern; (iii) the effects of Webernian serialism in the 1950s, through Hans-Joachim Koellreutter.

KEYWORDS:

• Intersemiotic translation
• cognitive artifact
• creativity
• Webern’s music
• Augusto de Campos
• Poetamenos

Acknowledgements

Ana Luiza Fernandes would like to acknowledge the support received, in the form of research grant, from CNPq and CAPES Foundation, the Ministry of Education of Brazil, Brasília – DF 70040-020, Brazil (PhD. studies grant). Pedro Atã would like to thank the Centre for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies of Linnaeus University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Serialism, or serial music, is a method of composition that employs groups of pitches, rhythms, or other musical elements as a way to create musical works. The number of elements can vary, but whenever we refer to dodecaphonic series, all twelve sounds of a chromatic scale must be used.

2 The German word Klangfarbenmelodie can be literally translated as melody-of-timbres, but the word ‘timbre’ itself (Klangfarbe) is formed by two terms: sound (Klang) and colour (Farbe).

3 To listen the sound-musical treatments dedicated to Poetamenos: lygia fingers, by Augusto de Campos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wx0XqXpQtO8; dias dias dias, by Caetano Veloso: https://youtu.be/MpXwgmMQu5c; lygia fingers, by Daniel Duarte Loza. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zy74PDQC7zc

4 ‘Die Idee der Klangfarbenmelodie hat Webern realisiert’ [The idea of Klangfarbenmelodie was realised by Webern] (Adorno, 1926, p. 280).

5 ‘[Aber insbesondere müsste es jedem klar sein, dass ich an] Folgen von Klangfarben gedacht habe, die der innern Logik von Harmoniefolgen gleichkommen. Melodie habe ich genannt, weil sie im selben Maße geformt sein müssten, wie Melodien, jedoch nach eigenen, ihrer Natur entsprechenden Gesetzen’ (Schoenberg, 1975, p. 483).

6 ‘Im Laufe der 1920er Jahre wird Klangfarbenmelodie von Autores des Schönberg Kreises zum Terminus der Musikanalyse erhoben mit (a) der Hauptbedeutung klangfarben wechsel identischer klãnge und (b) der Nebenbedeutung klangfarben wechsel melodischer tonfolgen’ (Schmusch, 1995, p. 221).

7 The word ‘tonality’ refers to tonal music, also known as tonalism, as opposed to atonal music. While the former emphasizes a single pitch as its center, the latter does not create musical structures around tonal centers. An example of atonalism is dodecaphonic music.

8 Dodecaphonism, or dodecaphonic music, is a specific form of serial music that employs all twelve pitches of a chromatic-scale. It was developed by Arnold Schoenberg in the first decade of the twentieth century.

9 Solange Sohl is the codename of Patrícia Galvão (1910–1962), or Pagu, a brazilian modernist writer, poet, translator, cartunist, jornalist and communist militant. Years later, Augusto de Campos wrote a long biography about the writer (Campos, 2014).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by CNPQ.

Notes on contributors

João Queiroz

João Queiroz is a professor at the Institute of Arts, Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, Brazil, where he coordinates the Iconicity Research Group (IRG). He has been teaching courses on Cognitive Semiotics, Intermediality Studies, and supervised Ph.D. and Master students in the fields of Semiotics, Latin-American Art and Literature and Cognitive Aesthetics. He has several publications in international journals, books, and conferences, including the Commens Digital Companion to Charles S. Peirce, with M. Bergman and S. Paavola. Queiroz is a member of the International Association for Cognitive Semiotics (IACS), member of Group for Research in Artificial Cognition (UEFS, Brazil), and associate researcher of the Linguistics and Language Practice Department, University of the Free State (South Africa).

Marta Castello-Branco

Marta Castello-Branco is a professor in the Music Department at the Institute of Arts, Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, Brazil, and in the Postgraduate Program in Arts, Culture, and Languages at the same institution. She did her doctorate at the University of the Arts in Berlin (Universität der Künste Berlin – UdK) on the relationship between Vilém Flusser's philosophy of new media and contemporary music (2014). Among her publications are the books: Reflections on Music and Technique (UFBA, 2012), The Musical Instrument as Apparatus (UFJF, 2015), the organization, translation, and presentation of the book Na Música. Vilém Flusser (Annablume, 2017). In 2018 she did postdoctoral studies at the Aryamarga Institute, India. Current research themes include the relationship between music, culture, and society, studies of the relationship between technique, materiality, and musical expression, universalism, and essentialism in music.

Ana Luiza Fernandes

Ana Luiza Fernandes is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She researches concrete poetry, graphic design, artistic book, photography, intermediality.

Pedro Atã

Pedro Atã is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of the Free State and a doctor in Comparative Literature by Linnaeus University, Sweden. He researches surprise and creativity and arts, cognitive externalism, Peircean semiotics and intermediality, and has published papers on topics such as poetry improvisation, cognitive niche construction in dance, transformational creativity, abductive inference, problem solving, intersemiotic translation and authorship in arts.