Abstract
This paper tells a story of the relationship between “words and music” from the viewpoint of changing tendencies to either convergence or distance between the two forms of communication, depending on whether aesthetic dispositions and cultural conditions favour the merging or the drifting apart of both media. Thus, “fusionist” and “separatist” tendencies in the development of the arts are identified as manifested, in Western cultural history, by the impressive span of intermedial interaction extending from early mythical origins (Orpheus) to most recent manifestations (Bob Dylan). The focus is on the history of European musical theatre and the European song tradition. In the latter case, “interpretive” and “non-interpretive” songs are distinguished depending on whether the link between “words and music” is on the semantic or on the prosodic level. Contemporary pop songs, as represented by Dylan, are finally discussed in the context of the terminological framework presented and in view of the age-old tradition of singer-poets.
Highlights
The title chosen for this text promises to tell the story of “words and music”, a subject most suitable for a conference that is devoted to the study of intermediality
The discussion of the relations between words and music has a venerable tradition, and one can observe something like a friendly competition going on, a paragone, over priority and superiority between the study of “words and music” on the one side and the study of “words and images” on the other
As one critic aptly phrased it in the New York Times: “Bob Dylan does not need a Nobel Prize in Literature, but literature needs a Nobel Prize.”[40]
Summary
The title chosen for this text promises to tell the story of “words and music”, a subject most suitable for a conference that is devoted to the study of intermediality. The old term melos referred to “melody” or “music”, but to “a composition of words, tune, and rhythm”,3 and the melopoioi, the “makers of songs”, were composers and lyricists at the same time who performed their compositions in public These “makers of songs” had a prominent social position in ancient Greece and were epitomized in the common mind by the legendary singerpoet Orpheus, who was to become a powerful element in the cultural memory of our Western civilization. The earliest Greek form of singer-poets from pre-Homeric times were the so-called aoedes, who were oral – mostly blind – story-tellers and divinely inspired preservers of the cultural memory They took their name from Aoede, one of the three ancient original muses (before Apollo’s nine Parnassian muses entered the stage). Similar roles were played by the medieval minnesingers, minstrels, troubadours, and trouvères
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