Music and Text Critical Inquiries [Hardcover]

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