Music and Text: Critical Inquiries

Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 3/5/1992
EAN 9780521401586, ISBN10: 0521401585

Hardcover, 348 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English

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.