The Relations between Music and Literature as a Field of Study

Abstract

T IS PRACTICALLY certain that music and literature, usually combined with dance, arose as a single activity long before the concept of an art existed. In later stages of history, the connections between the musical and literary arts have varied from nation to nation and period to period. The relationship was close in Elizabethan England and remote in Augustan England. It has always been close in the folk epic. The Homeric minstrel, the Anglo-Saxon scop, and the twentieth-century Yugoslavian singer of tales cannot function without a musical instrument. But in the literary epic has been at best vestigial, and the connections between the Aeneid or Paradise Lost and music are in general negligible. As soon as the arts of music and literature began to draw apart, the possibility of one's influencing the other arose. Instrumental music in its modern tradition is only some five centuries old, but Plato could complain that instrumental music is a bad thing because, in the absence of words, it is very difficult to recognize the meaning of the harmony and rhythm, or to see that any worthy object is imitated by them.' By Plato's time narrative program music was already two centuries old. In 582 B.C. the Pythian Games introduced a composition for aulossolo, the prescribed subject being Apollo's victory over the python, in five episodes. This contest, with the same subject and the same rules, held its place in some of the Greek games for more than three centuries.2 As the art of criticism was added to the others, naturally