Nicolas Ruwet

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Nicolas Ruwet (31 December 1932 – 15 November 2001) was a French linguist, literary critic and musical analyst or Belgian birth.<ref name="Grove">Template:Cite encyclopedia Template:Grove Music subscription</ref> He was involved with the development of generative grammar,<ref name="Linguist">"All: Obituary: Nicolas Ruwet" (Thu. Nov. 15 2001), LINGUIST List 12.2879.</ref> and made important early contributions to music semiology.

Life and careerEdit

Ruwet was born in Saive, Belgium on 31 December 1932.<ref name="Grove"/> In his youth he studied music: discovering the then little-known music of Arnold Schoenberg and seeking a career as a composer.Template:Sfn He initially studied Romance philology at the University of Liège.<ref name="Grove"/> As he turned towards linguistics, he studied from 1959 onwards with Émile Benveniste, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and André Martinet in Paris.Template:Sfn Later, he studied with Noam Chomsky and Roman Jakobson, both influences, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.<ref name="Linguist"/>

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 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 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.<ref name="Linguist"/>Template:Sfn

Grove Music Online notes that "Though not primarily a musicologist, he has been a fundamental thinker in the field of the Semiotics of music."<ref name="Grove"/> Some of his musical analyses were published along with other works in Template:Ill [Language, Music, Poetry] (1972).<ref name="Grove"/> Among his students was the musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez, himself a seminal music semiotician.<ref>Template:Cite encyclopedia Template:Grove Music subscription</ref>

Ruwet died at the age 68 on November 14, 2001.Template:Sfn