Semiotic organology: A peircean examination of the bagpipe and hurdy-gurdy in Hungary

Organology, the study of musical instruments, has long been focused on the technology of sound production and on issues of taxonomy, phylogeny, and historical derivation. These concerns represent a lingering nineteenth- and early twentieth-century interest in transmission and verifiable physical details at the expense of social concerns. At the same time more recent ethnographic approaches to musical culture have tended to take the physical form of instruments as largely uninterrogated givens. This dissertation, by contrast, proposes a new framework for studying musical instruments called "semiotic organology." It argues that the semiotic model for interpretation developed by Charles Sanders Pierce (1839-1914) provides a way to unify these two perspectives in order to provide a diachronic account of social use, physical form, and change in musical instruments. It focuses on two examples, the Hungarian bagpipe (duda) and hurdy-gurdy (tekero-lant), to examine how a Peircean model of semiosis can be used to study the physical form of instruments as signifying "texts." It examines the ways in which these instruments have physically changed in response to new social conditions and interpretations as part of the "dancehouse movement" (tanchaz mozgalom), a Hungarian folk music revival movement that began in the 1970s. These changes reflect evolving musical and social requirements in the shift from a peasant/village musical context to an urban revival setting. This dissertation provides a framework for understanding technology as the interpretable result of musical ideologies that have a direct impact on the bodies of instruments. It proposes that instruments are "signs" that are both subject to interpretation and that exercise influence upon subsequent interpretation and use of themselves and other instruments. For example, physical features of Hungarian bagpipes traditionally seen as referential to village contexts have proved to be durable even when they posed solvable technological problems while other features have changed in response to rapidly evolving musical demands. This approach provides a way of addressing the physical/technological concerns of traditional organology in combination with the social, functional concerns of ethnography and suggests ways for organology to become more relevant in the twenty-first century.