ИСТИНА

The International Congress on Musical Signification has been the world’s most important venue for musical semioticians since 1986, the year of its first meeting in Imatra, Finland. The fact that, 24 years later, we introduce the proceedings of the 10th congress is testimony to the longevity and significance of this event. The jubilee edition of the congress, ICMS10, took place in Lithuania from the 21st to the 25th of October, 2008, at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre in Vilnius and the Kaunas University of Technology. The Tenth International Congress on Musical Signification, devoted to the theme “Before and After Music,” has encouraged the discussion and exchange of ideas about both the “archaeology” of music and its after-life. By aiming to transcend recent research on similar themes represented by historical musicology, cultural musicology, and related disciplines, the congress has invoked musical semiotics as a platform for providing a refreshing rethinking of musical worlds and the capacity of music to decode and construct human reality from cultural practices to their theoretical conceptualisations. This collection contains fifty-five essays based on the papers delivered during the ICMS10. The articles have been grouped into eight thematic sections according to the following categories: Ex Cathedra Epistemologies, Theories, Paradigms Semiotics of Culture and Society Multidisciplinary Perspectives Philosophies of Performance Opera and Drama Musical Signification in Cinema Twentieth-Century Compositional Practices.