Music of Poetry and Poetry of Song: Expressivity and Grammar in Vocal Performance

Abstract

FollowingT. S. Eliot (1942:16) and Friedrich Nietzsche ([1872] 1995:18), th s article develops the claims that singing is (only) discourse?not the superlative site of expression that romantic idealism would have it; and singing is more than (just) language?like verse it organizes utterances in forms not native to language. The boundaries of speech and song have long been among the important topics of ethnomusicology, notably addressed in George List's foundational article (1963), in George Herzog's early explo rations of the relationship between music and text (1934,1942,1950), in John Blacking's account of musical (1982), and in linguistically informed work such as that by Leanne Hinton (1980,1984), Laura Graham (1984,1987), Charles Briggs (1993),Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1999), and Aaron Fox (1992, 2004). This dialogue with linguistics, prominent in ethnomu sicology through the 1980s, has largely receded from view since.1 In this article I revisit a topic of early interst to our discipline by investigating the patterns of sound and gesture that structure acts of speaking and singing as intelligible and interpretable utterances. Recognizing, as Bakhtin notes, that discourse is a social phenomenon ... throughout its entire range and in