Music and Text
Critical Inquiries

This book demonstrates how musical and literary scholarship can combine forces effectively on the common ground of contemporary literary theory and interpretive practice.

Steven Paul Scher (Edited by)

9780521031028, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 23 November 2006

348 pages
22.8 x 15.3 x 1.9 cm, 0.54 kg

Melopoetics, the study of the multifarious relations between music and literature, has emerged in recent years as an increasingly popular field of interdisciplinary inquiry. In this volume, noted musicologists and literary critics explore diverse topics of shared concern such as literary theory as a model for musical criticism, genre theories in literature and music, the criticism and analysis of texted music and the role of aesthetic, historical and cultural understanding in concepts of text/music convergence. These fourteen essays - united here not by a common ideology but by common subject matter - demonstrate how musical and literary scholarship can combine forces effectively on the common ground of contemporary critical theory and interpretive practice. The concluding essay by interdisciplinary historian Hayden White locates this ambitious enterprise of contemplating 'music and text' in the larger context of intellectual history.

List of figures
List of contributors
Preface Steven Paul Scher
Acknowledgments
Part I. Institutional Dimensions and the Contexts of Listening: 1. Music and literature: the institutional dimensions John Neubauer
2. Privileging the moment of reception: music and radio in South Africa Charles Hamm
3. Chord and discourse: listening through the written word Peter J. Rabinowitz
Part II. Literary Models for Musical Understanding: Music, Lyric, Narrative and Metaphor: 4. Lyrical modes Paul Alpers
5. Origins of modernism: musical structures and narrative forms Marshall Brown
6. Metaphorical modes in nineteenth-century music criticism: image, narrative, and idea Thomas Grey
7. Narrative archetypes and Mahler's Ninth Symphony Anthony Newcomb
Part III. Representation, Analysis and Semiotics: 8. Music and representation: the instance of Haydn's Creation Lawrence Kramer
9. Musical analysis as stage direction David Lewin
10. Poet's love or composer's love? Edward T. Cone
11. The semiotic elements of a multiplanar discourse: John Harbison's setting of Michael Fried's 'Depths' Claudia Stanger
Part VI. Gender and Convention: 12. Whose life? The gendered self in Schumann's Frauenliebe songs Ruth A. Solie
13. Operatic madness: a challenge to convention Ellen Rosand
14. Commentary: form, reference, and ideology in musical discourse Hayden White
Index.

Subject Areas: Western "classical" music [AVGC]