Word and music studies

The article concerns a specific model for reading a work inspired by musical forms: the author proposes to include the poetics of experience into music-and-text research and to treat the fugue as an inspiration for artistic elaboration of the topics of subjectivity, identity, and experience in a literary text. This question is deliberated with reference to «Fuga», a very recent novel by a Polish author Wit Szostak, and its interpretative context – one of the most celebrated examples of musico-literary experiments: the “Sirens” chapter of Joyce’s «Ulysses». The intermediary world of human experience as a modern vision of reality is the subject of representation in modern literature, integrally linking it with intersubjectivity and thresholds of expression. Both Szostak and Joyce address the problem of experience of an individual trying to find a new or proper method of articulation; a language overview of this idiomatic, entirely individual experience. Thus, it can be a useful basis for reconsidering the musical entanglement of modern fiction, particularly if it is inspired by a polyphonic form or texture, and usage of new interpretative contexts at the intersection of cultural and literary studies.

This text discusses different perspectives dealing with the impact of cultural studies on musicology within the context of word and music studies. The question under scrutiny is how the field’s foundation in word and music studies has been reconfigured by existing or changing academic structures. The text contends that the increasing emphasis on cultural studies in literary stud- ies and musicology opens up broader perspectives on the field of word and music studies, while favoring a revised version of formal over hermeneutic engagement with music and text.

(Chapter 1 from ‘The Given Note’: Traditional Music and Modern Irish Poetry) Music and poetry have often been viewed together as both are considered “auditory, temporal and dynamic art forms”. Studies of the relationships between these arts have grown throughout the twentieth century. This was underscored in 1997 with the foundation of The International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA), dedicated to the promotion of “transdisciplinary scholarly inquiry devoted to the relations between literature/verbal texts/language and music”. However, its relative youth as a field of enquiry is apparent in the disputed nature of its title. Sometimes referred to as “melopoetics”, this term, as Werner Wolf observes, appears “somewhat arcane […] because it implies, or at least suggests, a questionable, not to say misleading, privileging of some aspects of the interrelations between music and words/literature”. Wolf suggests, therefore, that “word and music studies” seems to have gained the upper hand over “melopoetics” in recent years. The use of the term “melopoetics” does indicate, nonetheless, a major focus of the discipline which has often tended to be from a musical, rather than a literary, perspective. It is also, as Wolf notes “a discipline in which the construction of a theoretical and terminological framework has not received due attention”. Where a framework has been suggested, it is focused primarily on the relationship between classical music and literature and gives little consideration to how the performance of music and song of an essentially oral character or in non-classical forms (such as traditional Irish music) may influence a poet’s work. This essay will examine the existing schemas and argue for a more flexible framework, cognisant of research in orality studies, ethnomusicology and recent literary theory, which may offer a more discerning appreciation of how Irish poets are influenced by traditional music.

In this article I show how the aesthetic disciplines, to which musicology belongs, have suffered from a crisis of creativity for the past decade or so. By crisis of creativity I mean the development of new theories, which can contribute to new knowledge about music, from both historical and contemporary perspectives. With help from theories that normally lie outside of the institutional discourse of musicology, I argue that what is known as an intermedial perspective can contribute to a new understanding of music. The aim with this article is thus to introduce the concept of intermediality and the discipline of intermedial studies into the discussion of musicology as a discipline. Two parallel strands are followed, and thereby four questions are raised. The two strands are: 1) the “interarts” strand, and 2) the “Cultural Studies/media studies” strand. The four questions are: 1) What characterises the intermedial perspective? 2) Which theories appear? 3) What are the similarities and differences between the “interarts” and “Cultural Studies/media studies” strands? and finally, 4) Is there a place for a “new” humanities discipline now and in the future? Question number four deals with the premise that society today is characterised by an intensive media culture, in which all cultural expressions are woven into one another, i.e. a multimodal and intermedial culture. If we accept this premise, then for an intended humanities discipline to understand this culture, a specific, clearly formulated body of theory is needed. There appears to be an increasing demand for such a body of theory within different disciplinary fields that already has been formulated within the field of intermedial studies. My suggestion is that intermedial studies can function as a supplement to the other aesthetic disciplines.

Seeing it as a test case for the experientiality of narrative, I reclaim the concept of diegetic music from film to literature studies. My concern is whether readers can gain musical experience from what Scher dubs “verbal music”—diegetic music’s textual exponent, which I re-theorize in terms of audionarratology. As a storyworld phenomenon, diegetic music is literally heard by characters. However, we can only privilege it over other sonic events of the fictional universe if a specifically musical experience is transmitted across the borders of the diégèse. Seeking a solution to this problem, I borrow theoretical tools from the philosophy of music and cognitive narratology. First, I map three aspects of music—physical sound, tonal movement, and affective narrative—on what I call the “Triangular Iceberg of Musical Experience,” arguing for their complementary presence in individual listening acts, in different proportions. Second, I apply Jahn’s model of externalization/internalization of stories to show the cyclic nature of music’s circulation, which also applies to transitions of music to worlds of narrative fiction and back. Third, my three example case studies of verbal music outline the routes and constraints for readers’ enactive overhearing of diegetic music. Finally, I chart some textual variables to be manipulated in empirical testing of my hypotheses as my proposed follow-up to the present study. The essay demonstrates how “musicalized” prose provides a unique meeting point for reader-oriented narrative theory, intermediality studies, and empirical aesthetics.

In Europe Central (2005), William T. Vollmann narratively transposes several musical works by his protagonist, the fictionalized Dmitri Shostakovich, in the mode of “imaginary content analogies” (Wolf). One passage of Vollmann’s “verbal music” (Scher) focuses on the (in)famous ostinato in the first movement of the Seventh Symphony, which is traditionally pictured as the German advance on the USSR in 1941. Straightforward cinemations of the music along these programmatic lines – from Varlamov’s Stalingrad (1943) to Paradzhanov’s Cinemaphony of the Seventh Symphony (2005) – are available online. Regarding imaginary content analogies as a case of narrative focalization, I investigate how Vollmann replaces the habitual filmic imagery of Shostakovich’s movement with “acousmatic” (Scruton) imaginary content, which idiosyncratically turns the ‘invasion theme’ into a ‘formalist’ piece of absolute music. I show how Vollmann’s disregard of boundaries between narrative levels and focalization types helps him to strip Shostakovich’s life and music of their most stereotypical interpretations.

Since the second half of the twentieth century various routes, including history and literature, are offered in dealing with the catastrophe of World War II and the Holocaust. Historiographies and novels are of course written with words; how can they bear witness to and reverberate with traumatic experience, which escapes or resists language? In search for an alternative mode of expression and representation, this volume focuses on postwar German and Austrian writers who made use of music in their exploration of the National Socialist past. Their work invoke, however, new questions: What happens when we cross the line between narration and documentation, and between memory and a musical piece? How does identification and fascination affect our reading of the text? What kind of ethical issues do these testimonies raise? As this volume shows, reading these musical biographies is both troubling and compelling since they ‘fail’ to come to terms with the past. In playing the haunting music that does not let us put the matter to rest, they call into question not only the exclusion of personal stories by official narratives, but also challenge writers’ and readers’ most intimate perspectives on an unmasterable past.

Focusing on a single concert at the Wigmore Hall in February 2016, this paper explores audience responses to historically-informed concert programming from a dual perspective of historical musicology and social science. The concert programme involved the interspersing of a single cyclical work – Robert Schumann’s 1840 song-cycle Dichterliebe Op.48 with individual numbers from other works, thus breaking up the anticipated sequence in a way typical of 19th-century concert programmes. The small-scale study established the general audience demographic for the concert, and then explored the role of several key factors on their appreciation of the concert, including their age, whether they played a musical instrument/sang, the importance of the venue, artists, repertoire, and finally the effect of the programme order and the historical authority which underpinned it. The writing-up process caused both authors to reflect on the challenges of exploring such phenomena from different epistemological perspectives.

This module is composed of two complementary advanced seminars in textual analysis, foregrounding interdisciplinary research on musical phenomena in literature, with particular attention paid to philosophical and philological aspects of the study. It introduces students to research methods within Word and Music Studies and interdisciplinary comparative studies, embracing performative accounts of literature and applying them in Slavic literary contexts. Thus the module explores moments of mutual understanding and cross-interpretations of the Sister Arts, once united, then split and ever since seeking modes of reconciliation or appropriation, negotiating powers and spheres of influence, using and typecasting one another. Musical settings of existing literary texts constitute a complementary area of interest. Analyses of musicoliterary corpora such as, e.g. Adam Mickiewicz’s ballad Alpuhara and its song interpretations 1828-2018, show how philological questions can be significantly illuminated by musical source work. Students are encouraged to develop and discuss their own ideas and set new questions in the field.

There are five main focus points, according to which students can orient their work (and prepare their seminar paper):

• Music and Poetry in Translation. Slavic Profile
• Aesthetics of the Musicalized Text
• Musical Forms and Themes in Narrative
• Setting Poetry to Music and Vice-Versa
• Musical and Poetic Genres

The module “Word and Music Studies” is taught by Dr Jan Czarnecki. It will be offered again in the summer semester 2021.

Walter Bernhart, Werner Wolf, David L. Mosley

Rodopi, 2001 — Всего страниц: 253

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This volume assembles twelve interdisciplinary essays that were originally presented at the Second International Conference on Word and Music Studies at Ann Arbor, MI, in 1999, a conference organized by the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA). The contributions to this volume focus on two centres of interest. The first deals with general issues of literature and music relations from culturalist, historical, reception-aesthetic and cognitive points of view. It covers issues such as conceptual problems in devising transdisciplinary histories of both arts, cultural functions of opera as a means of reflecting postcolonial national identity, the problem of verbalizing musical experience in nineteenth-century aesthetics and of understanding reception processes triggered by musicalized fiction. The second centre of interest deals with a specific genre of vocal music as an obvious area of word and music interaction, namely the song cycle. As a musico-literary genre, the song cycle not only permits explorations of relations between text and music in individual songs but also raises the question if, and to what extent words and/or music contribute to creating a larger unity beyond the limits of single songs. Elucidating both of these issues with stimulating diversity the essays in this section highlight classic nineteenth- and twentieth-century song cycles by Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss and Benjamin Britten and also include the discussion of a modern successor of the song cycle, the concept album as part of today s popular culture.»