Words and Music Liverpool Music Symposium 3 Words and Music edited by John Williamson LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS First published 2005 by LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS 4 Cambridge Street, Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © Liverpool University Press 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 ISBN 0-85323-619-4 cased Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and the publishers will be pleased to be informed of any errors or omissions for correction in future editions. Edited and typeset by Frances Hackeson Freelance Publishing Services, Brinscall, Lancs Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books, Bodmin, Cornwall Contents Notes on Contributors vii Introduction John Williamson 1 1 Mimesis, Gesture, and Parody in Musical Word-Setting Derek B. Scott 10 2 Rhetoric and Music: The Influence of a Linguistic Art Jasmin Cameron 28 3 Eminem: Difficult Dialogics David Clarke 73 4 Artistry, Expediency or Irrelevance? English Choral Translators and their Work Judith Blezzard 103 5 Pyramids, Symbols, and Butterflies: ‘Nacht’ from Pierrot Lunaire John Williamson 125 6 Music and Text in Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw Bhesham Sharma 150 7 Rethinking the Relationship Between Words and Music for the Twentieth Century: The Strange Case of Erik Satie Robert Orledge 161 vi 8 ‘Breaking up is hard to do’: Issues of Coherence and Fragmentation in post-1950 Vocal Music James Wishart 190 9 Writing for Your Supper – Creative Work and the Contexts of Popular Songwriting Mike Jones 219 Index 251 Notes on Contributors Derek Scott is Professor of Music at the University of Salford. His books include The Singing Bourgeois and From the Erotic to the De- monic, and he is the editor of Music, Culture and Society: A Reader. He is the General Editor of Ashgate’s Pop and Folk Series, and a mem- ber of the Editorial Boards of Popular Musicology and the internet Critical Musicology Journal. He is also a composer whose works in- clude two symphonies for brass band. Jasmin Cameron is Lecturer in Music Education at the University of Aberdeen. Her research interests lie with sacred Italian and German music of the late Baroque and Classical periods, analysis (particularly of texted music and the issues that arise thereof), rhetoric and music, development and transmission of musical conventions, and editing. Her book The Crucifixion in Music: An Analytical Survey of Settings of the Crucifixus between 1680 and 1800 is being published by Scare- crow Press. David Clarke is Reader in Music at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He is the author of two major books on Tippett and editor of Tippett Studies for Cambridge University Press. His current research deals with issues of cultural pluralism and uses a variety of techniques from music analysis, psychology, semiotics, linguistics, and philosophy. Judith Blezzard is an Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Liverpool. She has numerous editions of choral music in print from various publishers, and has provided sung translations for many pieces from the French and German small-scale and unaccompanied choral repertories, both sacred and secular. Her books and editions include The Tudor Church Music of the Lumley Books, Borrowings in En- viii glish Church Music 1550–1950, and German Romantic Part-Songs. Bhesham Sharma is currently Professor of Music at the University of Western Ontario and author of Music And Culture In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction. Robert Orledge is Professor Emeritus and Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Liverpool. Well-known for his books on Fauré, Debussy, Koechlin, and Erik Satie, he has recently completed an edi- tion of the orchestral full score of Satie’s additional music for Gounod’s opera Le médecin malgré lui from the surviving parts in the Library of Congress. James Wishart is a Lecturer in Music at the University of Liverpool. He is mainly a composer, whose recent works include pieces in a pro- jected cycle of compositions based on the Orpheus legend, and a mu- sic-theatre work set amidst the mayhem of a mental hospital. He is currently engaged in writing a book on the history and practice of transcription and arrangement. Mike Jones is a Lecturer in Music at the University of Liverpool, spe- cializing in the music industry. He was the lyricist for Latin Quarter who enjoyed a top twenty hit with ‘Radio Africa’ in 1986. Continuing success in Europe saw the act release seven albums – five for RCA and two for independent labels. His doctoral thesis explored the impact of major label signing and release policies on aspirant pop acts. John Williamson is Professor of Music at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of The Music of Hans Pfitzner and Richard Strauss: ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’, and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner. Introduction Word and Music’ studies today have a new stature in the Humanities. They have a home (the International Association for Word and Music Studies), with a web site (http://www.goshen.edu/wma/index.html), a new series of dedicated publications of which the first three volumes have already appeared, regular conferences, and, since 1989, a shiny new term, melopoetics, coined originally by Lawrence Kramer.1 The organizers and the moving spirits reflect the birth of the idea in de- partments of Comparative Literature but musicology has come to contribute its full share in the interdisciplinary movement. As one of the founders noted, ‘interdisciplinary’ was the magical buzz word that sanctioned the expansion of, and growth of confidence in, a move- ment that was initially more than a little apologetic.2 Worries about professional competence among the practitioners themselves all too often arose from a reluctance to engage with music theory, particu- larly at a time when the categories of Formenlehre, with which many non-musicians were reasonably familiar, were being rethought in the terms of Heinrich Schenker.3 As music theory became seized with post- 1. Lawrence Kramer, ‘Dangerous Liaisons: The Literary Text in Musical Criticism’, 19th Century Music 13 (1989/90), 159. 2. Steven Paul Scher, ‘Comparing Literature and Music: Current Trends and Pros- pects in Critical Theory and Methodology’, in Zoran Konstantinovic´ et al. (eds), Literature and the Other Arts: Proceedings of the Ninth Congress of the Inter- national Comparative Literature Association (Innsbruck: University of Innsbruck, 1981), p. 216. 3. Lawrence Kramer’s essay on ‘Music and Representation: The Instance of Haydn’s Creation’ is an interesting example of the inventor of the term melopoetics en- gaging with Schenker on ground prepared by that master of the colourful meta- phor Tovey: see Steven Paul Scher (ed.), Music and Text: Critical Inquiries (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 139–62, in particular pp. 143–8. 2 Words and Music modern doubts in the 1990s, as musicologists ceased to read Schenker and instead agonized over Lacan, so the tracks of analysis and literary criticism began to converge. In this the explosion in Popular Music studies also played an obvious part, though initially melopoetics took the canon of ‘high’ European classical music as its inevitable territory. Steven Paul Scher defined the categories of melopoetics as: 1 music in literature (word music, formal parallels to music in literature, verbal music); 2 music and literature (vocal music); 3 literature in music (programme music).4 Partly because of the role of comparative literature, the first cat- egory was well represented in the early growth of the movement. Scher’s own monograph on Verbal Music in German Literature, Calvin S. Brown’s writings on De Quincey’s Dream-Fugue and Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés, and the same writer’s attempt to define what uses poetry could make of musical form were notable examples of a certain type of criticism that looked at music as metaphor for non-musical mo- ments within literary works.5 This was certainly less interdisciplinary than it seems, for as Claudia Stanger pointed out, the arts of music and literature were still treated as separate in ‘simple opposition’; the talk was always of the influence of one art on the other. She proposed another axis, the metonymic, which read music as a signified without signifier, and literature as a Derridean ‘sliding signifier’ without a nec- essary referent.6 She did not proceed to cases, however, though she noted that the logic of her thinking led to a study of song (and opera). 4. Steven Paul Scher, ‘Einleitung: Literatur und Musik—Entwicklung und Stand der Forschung’, in Steven Paul Scher (ed.), Literatur und Musik: Ein Handbuch zur Theorie und Praxis eines komparatistischen Grenzgebietes (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1984), pp. 9–12. 5. Steven Paul Scher, Verbal Music in German Literature (New Haven and Lon- don: Yale, 1968); Calvin S. Brown, ‘The Musical Structure of De Quincey’s Dream-Fugue’, ‘The Poetic Use of Musical Forms’, and ‘The Musical Analogies in Mallarmé’s “Un Coup de Dés”’, reprinted in Jean-Louis Cupers and Ulrich Weisstein (eds), Musico-Poetics in Perspective: Calvin S. Brown in Memoriam, Word and Music Studies 2 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 133–60 and 167– 89. More recent studies in this area include Hans Joachim Kreutzer, Obertöne: Literatur und Musik (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1994). 6. Claudia S. Stanger, ‘Literary and Musical Structuralism: An Approach to Inter- disciplinary Criticism’, in Konstantinovic´ et al., Literature and the Other Arts, pp.