Petar Jankovic performance

For this week's blog, I am going to talk about a forum event I attended this week and how it relates to our class discussions. I went to see Petar Jankovic perform classical guitar Tuesday night and he was incredible. He was definitely a master of classical guitar and it was obvious to detect his passion while playing for his audience. I can't even begin to think about how many times he has strummed a guitar while practicing in order to play perfection. Just watching his hands move so fast but yet so gracefully was amazing all by itselft.

Jankovic's performance was also a text, since we learned that anything thing that can be interpreted or "read" is considered a text. In class we used a wedding ring as an example. By itselft, it is just a piece of metal. However, when it is put under textual analysis it has a much larger meaning. It symbolizes marriage, a lifelong committment, not available, off the market, taken, etc. Jankovic's performace was also had a deeper meaning that what was on the surface. He was simply a man with a piece of wood with strings on it but he was able to make magnificent sounds through his instrument.

While listening to Jankovic play, I tried to envision what his music was expressing since there were no lyrics. I imagined such things as sunsets and Spanish people dancing and felt things like loneliness and calmness. Just as texts have dominant readings and alternative readings, interpretations of Jankovic's music differ from person to person depending on how they read his text.

We also discussed semiology, the science of signs and study of sign systems. Sings are similar to texts. This is what I came up with when I applied semiology to Jankovic's performance. The sign was the music that Jankovic was playing, the signifier was Jankovic and his guitar, and the signified was whatever meaning the members of the audience were constructing.

As we see, semiology can be a great tool to use for media analysis. It's advantages include its practicality, which gives us guidlines of what to look for when we face an image. It also compares the wider social and cultural meanings of the sign or text. What I like best is that by breaking signs into signifiers and signifieds helps to understand that texts are constructions of meaning. Jankovic's text was amazing and I'm pretty sure that was agreed on by the entire audience.