Prosody, melody and rhythm in vocal music

Abstract

The last decades have witnessed a shift from anecdotal remarks concerning the “marriage” of music and lyrics in songs towards a more scientific approach to the matter. Textsetting has thus become the object of more formal analyses accounting for the regularities observed in individual singing traditions with regard to the mapping of linguistic material on musical structures. This paper illustrates the nature of the problem and reflects the status of the research on textsetting in living traditions. It is addressed to a wide audience of linguists interested in the relationship between language and music and points to the challenges that await the further development of this field of studies under the umbrella of linguistics.