Fordham University DigitalResearch@Fordham Art History and Music Faculty Publications Art History and Music 2017 Song Reconsidered: Words and Music, Music and Poetry Lawrence Kramer Fordham University,
[email protected] Recommended Citation Lawrence Kramer, Song Acts: Writings on Words and Music (Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2017). Follow this and additional works at: https://fordham.bepress.com/art_hist_facultypubs Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, Musicology Commons, and the Other Arts and Humanities Commons This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Art History and Music at DigitalResearch@Fordham. It has been accepted for inclusion in Art History and Music Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of DigitalResearch@Fordham. For more information, please contact
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[email protected]. 1 Song Reconsidered: Words and Music, Music and Poetry Lawrence Kramer Sphere-born harmonious sisters, Voice and Verse, Wed your divine sounds, and mixt power employ, Dead things with inbreathd sense able to pierce. (John Milton, "At a Solemn Music”) No carnage, but this single change: Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn The silken skilled transmemberment of song. (Hart Crane, "Voyages III”) This essay is a revised version of the chapter on song in my first book, Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (University of California Press, 1984). The chapter aimed to upend the traditional understanding of song, particularly art song, as a harmonious unity of words and music, and it has been fortunate in its reception. Over the years, like many other authors, I have idly mulled over the question of what the chapter would be like if I were to write it “today.” The publication in 2017 of a collection of my writings on the general topic, Song Acts: Writings on Words and Music (Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers) gave me the opportunity to ask the question seriously.