A Semiotic Analysis of Iranian Music in the Drama of Ta ziyah

In Ta’ziyah ceremony, music is employed in two forms: 1. vocal music, 2. instrumental music. In fact, this is the Iranian music including various genres. Music and elegy singing are the most salient elements of Ta’ziyah. In this article, this type of music plus all its detailed features have been analyzed based on the theory of Stratificational Semiotics. Based on this theory, one can study all different strata of a multimedia text, which my consist of acoustical strata including verbal, musical, environmental sounds, as well as meaningful silence, in addition to visual strata such as line, image, and the like. Accordingly, in this descriptive-analytic research, Ta’ziyah is accounted as a text consisting of different strata which together compose a texture in which music is an important strata. Furthermore, the basic concepts of stratificational semiotics like text, texture, contextualization, decontextualization, the hierarchical structure of the text, etc., make the fundaments of this analysis.