Consider this. Someone is seized by fear. What happens? He flees. Or, he freezes into a posture, holds his breath; complete silence. He might emit now a hoarse, loud, scream. Another, in a similar predicament, might just jabber and giggle helplessly. Or, we might hear the distant whine of a child. In another situation someone pants: /ha/ /ha/ /ha/ . . . breathy and rhythmical. When there is less threat and more control, we might hear a guttural voice uttering: No! or am scared. In another context we are members of a congregation that recites in a random cluster of monotones: Give ear to my prayer, O God; and hide not thyself from my supplication. Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and horror hath overwhelmed me. [Psalm 55; 1,5] Or imagine hearing this in a fictitious song performed in a recital that never was: Or, should we hear an exaggeratedly nasal voice intoning with a flourish Oh, how dreadful, or in an opera of the absurd the tremulous yodeling of a half-clad buffoon complaining about being pursued with evil intent, we would be inclined to think that the message is about quite something else, than fear. In all these experiences, save one, there is sound and within it one or another kind of (or, in the case of the complete silence of the first one, a telling absence of both). These reflect back on, and inform about affect, thought, person and situation. What is a text? In a narrower sense, in the present framework, one could suggest that text refers to words (normally existing in a written form) set to music by a composer. As this formulation could prove to be somewhat confining, I am suggesting a different one. I will say that a text, uttered, or written, stands for some kind of mental activity, for some kind of experience, which it is able to express as a result of conscious design, reflex action, or instinct, or a combination of these, m a certain situation (context). To this we may add, that some texts can, and do, become parts oi musical compositions. Now, before we focus on the relationship between text and music, let us think of the notion of text in this broader sense. We all have stories regarding this. I shall recount two recent ones. A few weeks ago I saw a young woman on the train with Plato's Republic held open in her hands. Intermittently, she read and looked up absentmindedly, or so it appeared. Was it an instance of daydreaming, or conversely a concentrated dialogue with Plato? I asked myself. Could it have been a contest between the of the book and another one possibly unrelated to Plato, a contest that might have eventually resulted in a written essay on some aspects of the Republic, or alternately, in a non-verbal, or verbal, act that had little, or nothing, to do with Plato and which might eventually (or never) be expressed in writing? Or it might have resulted in both. The second story is about another young woman, a student on our campus, whom I saw sporting an engineering student's jacket, with the standard oversized lettering on the back: APPLIED SCIENCE. Not quite a tattoo, but akin to a tribal mark, nevertheless; perhaps a somewhat over-eager celebration of belonging. The two stories are unrelated. Yet, in both one can see a relationship between a written text, visible to the observer, and another one that goes on in the mind, and which we can only guess at. However suggestive they may have been, neither one of these little scenes included the modality of oral utterance (which was nevertheless present in its non-markedness) that constitutes a vital dimension of human experience and of interpersonal action between individuals and groups and which often serves also as an intermediate link between thought and feeling on the one hand, and a written text, on the other. I would like to pause here and enlarge on this. I am searching for a suitable paradigm. …