A common and quite successful approach in musical semiotics tends to explore semantics locally (for example by means of semantic topoi) and string the semantic units together into an overall narrative. If one looks for a more ‘holistic’ approach, following the notion of ‘organic unity’ which was so important for many music theorists of the 19th and 20th century, one can find that musical works share many characteristic features with complex systems in Luhmann’s sense. Of course it would be naive to describe musical works as autopoetic systems, since one of the most important features – autopoesis – is obviously lacking. However, musical works can reflect properties and principles of real world systems (icons or, more precisely, diagrams in Peircean terminology), thus providing artistic insight into the working of these systems.