The Play of Signs in a New Mexico Landscape: Michael Mauldin's A'ts'ina: Place of Writings on the Rock.

New Mexico composer Michael Mauldin's string quartet, A'ts'ina: Place of Writings on the Rock, was inspired by the ruins of an ancient Zuñi city at El Morro National Monument (USA) and by the surrounding landscape. Like many of Mauldin's works, the quartet aims to communicate "an environmental essence, rather than ... a literal soundscape." "Art is a metaphor for life," the composer maintains. "Though art includes descriptive gestures from our shared physical experience ... I feel [it] should distill and interpret that experience rather than just describe it ... or randomly recreate it." Mauldin's approach to composition points toward a semiotically-nuanced way of thinking about musical meaning that is rooted in our common experience as embodied human organisms. This essay examines the iconic and indexical roles of musical gesture and voicing to convey embodied experience in the context of landscape throughout A'ts'ina. I draw upon Mark Johnson's theory of the bodily grounding of metaphor to show how this work exhibits and enacts a "play of musical signs" that celebrates, in the words of New Mexico author Peggy Pond Church, one of those "certain places in the earth where the great powers that move between earth and sky are closer and more available than others." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]