Resituating the Icon: David Osmond-Smith’s Contribution to Music Semiotics

After pursuing doctoral studies at the University of York (1968–70), David Osmond-Smith gained two consecutive scholarships, allowing him to research first with Umberto Eco in Milan (1970–71) and then with Roland Barthes in Paris (1971–3). One of the outcomes of his encounters with these highly influential thinkers was a series of articles subjecting musical phenomena to semiotic analysis. The principal concept deployed in these articles is that of the icon or iconism, itself borrowed from the American semiotician and pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce and exhaustively examined, re-examined, and criticized by Eco. This article explains the principles of iconic signification and their use in Osmond-Smith’s work. Central to this explanation is a consideration of Eco’s work on iconism (Barthes’s influence is less apparent) and the somewhat perplexing point that Osmond-Smith embraced iconism despite his awareness – and, at times, apparent endorsement – of Eco’s thoroughgoing critique of the concept. Lastly, the recent resurgence of interest in Peircian semiotics will be invoked in order to propose ways of developing Osmond-Smith’s application of iconism to music in line with pragmatist (or, to use Peirce’s term, pragmaticist) rather than structuralist thought.