Mu­sic as a Mean­ing­ful Art

Opening speech by Dean Kaisa Rönkkö at The 16th International Congress on Musical Signification, held at the Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki on June 2nd, 2026.

“It is my great pleasure to welcome you to the University of the Arts Helsinki and to the 16th International Congress on Musical Signification. We are especially delighted to host this prestigious event in Finland, forty years after the first ICMS was held in Imatra in 1986.

There is something particularly meaningful about that history.

When the first congress gathered in Imatra, Finland was still living in the shadow of the Cold War. Located only a few kilometres from the Soviet border, Imatra was a place where East and West existed in close proximity separated by political systems, yet connected through geography, history, and culture.

As someone from Eastern Finland, I have witnessed how dramatically that border has changed in meaning. As a kid, in 1994, only a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I cycled across it into Russia Vyborg. At the time, such journeys felt like symbols of a new era of openness and connection. Today, after another period of profound geopolitical change, many of those ideals have been overturned. Long-standing cultural, social, and economic ties have been disrupted, and what once felt ordinary can now seem surprisingly distant.

There are moments when cycling from Finland to Vyborg appears more absurd than the Cold War once did. Such experiences remind us how quickly historical realities can shift, and how unstable our assumptions about the world can be.

Perhaps this is one reason why semiotics, scholarship, and the arts matter so much. They do not make uncertainty disappear, but they offer frameworks through which we can interpret change. They help us recognise patterns, preserve memory and create continuity amid disruption. When the world becomes difficult to read, culture provides ways of making sense of it.

I guess semioticians, such as Yuri Lotman, would not have been surprised by this. Lotman understood that borders are never merely lines on a map. They are places where meanings are created, translated, contested and transformed.

He wrote, “The semiosphere is the semiotic space outside of which semiosis itself cannot exist.” In other words, meaning does not emerge in isolation. It emerges in the shared cultural spaces that we inhabit together.

I would love to hear more voices and analysis of semiotics and arts researchers in media today: A few weeks ago, during a Russian state visit in Beijing, the military orchestra welcoming President Vladimir Putin performed a familiar piece: the Dance of the Little Swans from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake.

For many listeners, it was simply a famous melody. For others, such as as semioticians, however, Swan Lake carries a very different set of associations. It recalls moments of political uncertainty, historical turning points and collective memories that reach far beyond the concert hall.

Whether anyone intended those meanings is almost beside the point. What matters is that music was functioning as a sign.

A nineteenth-century ballet suddenly became part of a twenty-first-century geopolitical event.

This is precisely what makes the theme of this congress so important.

When we ask how music creates meaning, we are not asking a narrow academic question. We are asking how we as societies remember. How identities are formed. How emotions become collective. How symbols travel and translate across borders. How culture shapes the ways we understand ourselves and others.

Looking at the programme of this conference, we find discussions of cultural identity, politics, nationalism, activism, memory, ecology, artificial intelligence, embodied mind, performance, listening, and communication.

These are among the defining questions of our time and this congress feels particularly relevant today.

We live in an era marked by geopolitical tensions, wars, technological transformation, and profound uncertainty about the future. In such times, there is often a temptation to focus only on what seems immediately practical or measurable.

Yet history teaches us that societies do not live by facts alone. They live by the meanings we collectively assign to things. They live by stories, symbols, memories, rituals, images, sounds, and shared cultural experiences.

The arts help us recognize these dimensions of human life. And scholarship helps us understand how they work.

This is one reason why international academic communities matter so much.

At a time when borders are becoming more visible in many parts of the world, scholarship remains one of the places where dialogue continues across nations, languages, and traditions.

Every international conference is an opportunity not only to exchange knowledge, but also to strengthen the relationships and mutual understanding on which future cooperation depends.

For the University of the Arts Helsinki, it is therefore a privilege to welcome  international researchers, artists and scholars.

Your presence enriches our university. And it reminds us that knowledge is created collectively.

Perhaps that, too, is a lesson of semiotics.

Meaning is never produced alone. Meaning emerges in encounter.

With that thought, I would like to thank the organisers, the speakers, the participants, and everyone who has contributed to making this conference possible. I wish you inspiring discussions, new ideas, new friendships, and a wonderful conference here in Helsinki.

Welcome to ICMS 16.”

For more information about the conference, please visit https://www.uniarts.fi/tapahtumat/icms-16-music-as-a-meaningful-art/ .