TURNING EARS, TUNING HEARTS: MUSICAL LANGUAGE IN THE ROMANTIC ACOUSTIC SOUNDSCAPE by Laura Kinderman A dissertation submitted to the Department of English Language and Literature in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada (August, 2015) Copyright ©Laura Kinderman, 2015 Abstract This study re-imagines the relationship between music and poetry in the Long Romantic period. It centres on a selection of lyrics by male canonical poets before moving into an analysis of texts by women who were prolific in their own time, with the aim of establishing a contextual canon of musical responsiveness that is characterized by a form of musical declamation in poetry. Beginning with an exploration of the cultural intersections of words, music, texts, and songs, I present a British Romantic poetic soundscape in which acts of reading, speaking, and writing are animated as live speech and performed as music. I engage with a number of thematic elements that assist me in identifying, categorizing, and analyzing often overlooked references to music in the lyrics of Charlotte Smith, Joanna Baillie, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, John Keats, Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, and John Clare. Each chapter unfolds around a dominant metaphor that describes a different facet of the musical experience of poetry. As a testing ground for my approach, I apply the argument, that musical language is interwoven with Romantic culture, to two national song collections: Lord Byron’s and Isaac Nathan’s Hebrew Melodies (1815, 1816) and Felicia Hemans’s and John Parry’s Welsh Melodies (1822). The overarching message of this study is that we should read texts in ways that are sensitive to the dynamics between authors, readers, speakers, and performers who contributed to shaping the Romantic creative act. My approach is rooted in the theory of new formalism, which anchors itself in historical evidence while maintaining its focus on the text. The interdisciplinary terminology that I employ is drawn from literary studies, musicology, elocution, rhetoric, sound studies, and word and music studies. This study was motivated by a proliferation of musical references within Romantic lyric poems, and actively counters claims that these are superficial and supplementary rather than integral and essential to our understanding of the culture and ethos of the Romanticism. ii Acknowledgements This research was generously supported by a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship, E.G. Bauman Fellowship, Ontario Graduate Scholarships, Queen’s Graduate Award, and Dean’s Doctoral Travel Grant. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the many individuals who supported this project, including my supervisors, Dr. Shelley King and Dr. David Pugh, my second reader, Dr. Clara Marvin, and the members of my examining committee, Dr. Judith Thompson, Dr. Deborah Knight, Dr. Christiane Arndt, and Dr. Leslie Ritchie. I thank my friends, colleagues, and family for sharing the journey. iii Dedication For Shane iv Table of Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................................................. ii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................... iii Dedication ............................................................................................................................................. iv List of Figures ....................................................................................................................................... vi List of Examples ................................................................................................................................... vii Chapter 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 8 Chapter 2 Music in Words, Song in Text ............................................................................................. 20 Chapter 3 Romantic Lyrics Responding to Music ................................................................................ 40 Chapter 4 Poetic Cadence and Musical Declamation ........................................................................... 74 Chapter 5 Affective Contour in Poetico-Musical Lines ..................................................................... 119 Chapter 6 Afterword ........................................................................................................................... 163 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................................... 169 Appendix A Poetico-Musical Terms with Definitions ....................................................................... 201 Appendix B On the Origin and Separation of Speech and Song ........................................................ 202 Appendix C Selections from Elocutionary Treatises ......................................................................... 205 v List of Figures Figure 1. Notation for accentuation, Chapter 2 (Chapman 6) .............................................................. 94 Figure 2. Notation for quantity, Chapter 3 (Chapman 9) ..................................................................... 94 Figure 3. Notation for pauses, Chapter 4 (Chapman 12) ...................................................................... 94 Figure 4. Cadences and their rhythmical divisions into musical time, Chapter 7 (Chapman 27) ........ 95 Figure 5. Thesis and arsis unaffected by small words replacing arsis, Chapter 5 (Chapman 20) ........ 96 Figure 6. Dotted rhythms as in music, Chapter 5 (Chapman 22) ......................................................... 97 Figure 7. Difference between prose and verse, Chapter 10 (Chapman 47) .......................................... 98 Figure 8. Missing cadences with Greek method of scanning, Chapter 13 (Chapman 69) .................... 99 Figure 9. Examples of musical scansion, Chapter 14 (Chapman 79) ................................................. 100 Figure 10. Similarity between musical scansion in drama and poetry, Chapter 15 (Chapman 85) .... 101 Figure 11. “Sonnet to the Nightingale,” by Charlotte Smith, Chapter 16 (Chapman 100-101) ......... 103 Figure 12. Different weightings of cadence, Chapter 5 (Chapman 14) .............................................. 104 Figure 13. Notated poem including all levels of musical scansion, Chapter 18 (Chapman 129) ....... 105 Figure 14. Conventional and musical scansion in Baillie’s “Sweet Power of Song” ......................... 107 Figure 15. Conventional and musical scansion in Hemans’s “Lyre’s Lament” ................................. 108 Figure 16. Conventional and musical scansion in Hemans’s “The Nightingale’s Death Song” ........ 109 Figure 17. Conventional and musical scansion in “To a Lark” .......................................................... 114 Figure 18. Chapman’s emphasis within the word “musical” (61) ...................................................... 115 Figure 19. Conventional and musical scansion in “To a Lark” (cont’d) ............................................ 116 Figure 20. Number of Documents by Term Frequency, 1780-1830 (NCCO) .................................... 121 Figure 21. Hebrew Melodies (title images, Vols. 1 and 2, Burwick and Douglass, 46, 115) ............. 130 Figure 22. Hebrew Melodies (title image portraying Anne Wilmot, The Illustrated Byron 440) ...... 136 Figure 23. Melisma in stanza one of Byron’s "She Walks in Beauty" ............................................... 139 Figure 24. Comparison between melisma and musical notation in “She Walks in Beauty” .............. 140 Figure 25. Welsh Melodies (title image, Parry and Hemans, Courtesy of Cardiff University) .......... 146 Figure 26. Musical scansion of cadence and rhythm in “The Rock of Cader Idris” (1-8) ................. 157 Figure 27. Musical scansion of cadence and dynamics, “The Rock of Cader Idris” (23-30) ............. 158 vi List of Examples Example 1. “She Walks in Beauty,” Vol 1. No 1. (bars 16-39, Nathan 5) ......................................... 138 Example 2. “Sun of the Sleepless,” Vol. 2 No. 12 (bars 24-29, Nathan 129) .................................... 141 Example 3. “Chant of the Bards before their Massacre,” Vol 1. No.16 (bars 1-4, Parry 61) ............. 149 Example 4. “The Ash Grove (Llwyn Onn),” (bars 1-27, Ellingboe n. pag.) ...................................... 155 Example 5. “The Rock of Cader Idris,” (bars 1-19, Parry 13) ........................................................... 156 Example 6. “The Lament of the Llywarch Hen,” (bars 26-34, Parry 18) ........................................... 160 Example 7. “Prince Madoc’s Farewell,” (bars 62-65, Parry 44) ........................................................ 162 vii Chapter 1 Introduction Ludwig: Indeed, in that far realm which often envelops us in curious presentiments, from where mysterious voices echo down to us and awaken all the resonances dormant in the burdened breast, which once awake shoot joyfully upward like tongues of fire, so that we become partakers in the bliss of that paradise—it is there that poets and musicians are closely kindred members of one church; for the secret of words and sounds is the same, unveiling to both the ultimate sublimity.