Nicolas Ruwet (31 December 1932 – 15 November 2001) was a French

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

, literary critic and musical analyst or Belgian birth. He was involved with the development of

generative grammar Generative grammar is a research tradition in linguistics that aims to explain the cognitive basis of language by formulating and testing explicit models of humans' subconscious grammatical knowledge. Generative linguists, or generativists (), ...

,All: Obituary: Nicolas Ruwet
(Thu. Nov. 15 2001), ''LINGUIST List 12.2879''. and made important early contributions to music semiology.

Life and career

Ruwet was born in Saive,

Belgium Belgium, officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. Situated in a coastal lowland region known as the Low Countries, it is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeas ...

on 31 December 1932. In his youth he studied

music Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all hum ...

: discovering the then little-known music of

Arnold Schoenberg Arnold Schoenberg or Schönberg (13 September 187413 July 1951) was an Austrian and American composer, music theorist, teacher and writer. He was among the first Modernism (music), modernists who transformed the practice of harmony in 20th-centu ...

and seeking a career as a composer. He initially studied Romance

philology Philology () is the study of language in Oral tradition, oral and writing, written historical sources. It is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics with strong ties to etymology. Philology is also de ...

at the University of Liège. As he turned towards linguistics, he studied from 1959 onwards with

Émile Benveniste Émile Benveniste (; 27 May 1902 – 3 October 1976) was a French Structuralism, structural linguistics, linguist and semiotics, semiotician. He is best known for his work on Indo-European languages and his critical reformulation of the linguist ...

Claude Lévi-Strauss Claude Lévi-Strauss ( ; ; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a Belgian-born French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair o ...

, and André Martinet in Paris. Later, he studied with

Noam Chomsky Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American professor and public intellectual known for his work in linguistics, political activism, and social criticism. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a ...

and

Roman Jakobson Roman Osipovich Jakobson (, ; 18 July 1982) was a Russian linguist and literary theorist. A pioneer of structural linguistics, Jakobson was one of the most celebrated and influential linguists of the twentieth century. With Nikolai Trubetzk ...

, both influences, at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

. Ruwet is best known for his work as a linguist and critic, but he was also a significant figure in musical analysis. He attempted to make his analyses completely objective by not making any ''

a priori ('from the earlier') and ('from the later') are Latin phrases used in philosophy to distinguish types of knowledge, Justification (epistemology), justification, or argument by their reliance on experience. knowledge is independent from any ...

'' assumptions about how the music worked, instead breaking the piece down into small parts and seeing how those parts related to each other, thus discovering the

syntax In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituenc ...

of the piece without reference to any external sources or norms. His work in this field constitutes a kind of musical semiology and his analytical methods were later named paradigmatic analysis. ''

Grove Music Online ''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'' is an encyclopedic dictionary of music and musicians. Along with the German-language '' Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart'', it is one of the largest reference works on the history and t ...

'' notes that "Though not primarily a musicologist, he has been a fundamental thinker in the field of the Semiotics of music." Some of his musical analyses were published along with other works in ' 'Language, Music, Poetry''(1972). Among his students was the musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez, himself a seminal music semiotician. Ruwet died at the age 68 on November 14, 2001.

Selected publications

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References

Citations

Sources

External links