Gesture, Sign, and Song: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Schumann’s Liederkreis Opus 39

Based upon the writings of Mead and Peirce, the gestural-semiotic approach employed in this work explicates the connotative domain of music, the denotative domain of poetry, and their confluence in Schumann’s Op. 39. As a work of literary and musical criticism, this study examines the poetics of Eichendorff and the musical aesthetics of Schumann in ways not previously discussed. Most importantly, in this radically interdisciplinary study the phenomenon of song is treated bilaterally - as a hybrid aesthetic expression, not unilaterally - as the domain of either music or poetry.