Raymond Monelle

Raymond Monelle (19 August 1937 in Bristol, England – 12 March 2010 in Edinburgh, Scotland). was a music theorist, teacher, music critic, composer and jazz pianist. Monelle wrote three books, dozens of articles on music, and many music criticism reviews in newspapers, mainly for Opera and The Independent His main field of research was Music Signification or, as it is also known, Music Semiotics. Towards the end of his life he wrote a novel, yet to be published, entitled Bird in the Apple Tree, about the adolescence of the composer Alban Berg.

Monelle received a Master of Arts degree in Modern History from the University of Oxford and Bachelor of Music degree from the University of London. A member of the Royal Musical Association at least since 1968, he completed his Ph.D at the University of Edinburgh with a doctoral thesis on "Opera seria as drama: the musical dramas of Hasse and Metastasio", which he wrote under the supervision of Prof. David Kimbell.

Monelle was renowned for his research in the field of Music Signification (the Semiotics of Music). His three books, many articles and countless lectures, presented in various venues all over Europe, North America and Israel, had an immense impact on the international music scholarship scene. In 1988 he joined the Music Signification Project, founded by Eero Tarasti two years earlier, and became one of the project's leaders, acting as keynote speaker and editor of proceedings in all the International Congresses of Music Signification that followed.

His publications touch a wide variety of subjects and musical styles, but focus mainly on two subjects: the analysis of music as text and The Musical Topic. In the first subject, Monelle was strongly influenced by Derrida's writings on deconstruction. On the second subject, he presented a research into the topics of the military. Toward the end of his life, he began studying the subject of The Musical Sublime, inspired by the writings of Slavoj Žižek.

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