Musicality Of Language Research Articles

Sensing On the Move

This article is a presentation of, and reflection on the documentary film Music Across Borders. It draws on understandings from oral traditions of the Aŋlɔ-Eʋe language2 , storytelling and music making to discuss ways of making meaning of the everydayness of life in migration in the Global South. The article elucidates examples from the film to address the notion of the ‘multilocality’ of sensing and knowinglinked to concepts of wellness, inequality, and development in migration in the Global South. The article draws on indigenous knowledge and understanding in the Aŋlɔ-Eʋe language to explore the implications of migration on the self, the environment and technology with reference to the MIDEQ Hub’s focus on inequality and development. It illustrates how the film applies the musicality of language and music as language to communicate untranslatable understanding through intuition in the spaces of silence and of the moving body in migration. Processes of storying on screen, create transformative interaction and change which metaphors everyday life and its ‘processes of storying, sensing, and expressing with which people navigate their private and social spaces, including the physical virtual and technological spaces they inhabit with others on the move. Storying and storytelling methodologies used to produce Music Across Borders shed a light on artistic research as a point of synthesis for doing multidisciplinary research in contexts of South-South migration.

Recalling Recitation in the Americas: Borderless Curriculum, Performance Poetry, and Reading by Janet Neigh

Reviewed by: Recalling Recitation in the Americas: Borderless Curriculum, Performance Poetry, and Reading by Janet Neigh Philipp Reisner RECALLING RECITATION IN THE AMERICAS: BORDERLESS CURRICULUM, PERFORMANCE POETRY, AND READING. By Janet Neigh. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017; pp. 256. Recalling Recitation in the Americas focuses on the unexplored relationship between education history and literary form, and investigates the far-reaching effects of poetry memorization and recitation on the development of modern performance poetry in North America. In the first three chapters, Neigh analyzes the work of three celebrated performance poets who refashioned recitation for the sake of linguistic diversity and greater freedom from the constraints of written language: Mohawk author E. Pauline Johnson-Tekahionwake (1861–1913); African American author Langston Hughes (1902–67); and Jamaican author Louise Bennett (1919–2006). Neigh illuminates how the complicated legacies of these three poets as national icons obscure their similar approaches to resisting Anglicization. The fourth and final chapter, titled "Recitation Legacies in Dub and Indigenous Poetics," is dedicated to the dub poetry movement that began in the 1970s and that built "directly on Langston Hughes's rhythmic literacy and Miss Lou's Creole pedagogy" (130). Overall, Neigh's diachronic study of performance poetry offers a coherent account of the twentieth century, meticulously working from case studies of single poets, combined with detailed examination of the poetic movements of their time. This integration of transnational, minority, and genre studies is especially relevant to the field of poetry studies, since performance poetry and orality are often neglected as the field attempts to keep up with the growing output of poetry in print. It is also significant because Neigh has chosen to examine the work of individuals whose relevance extends beyond their role as performance poets. [End Page 409] In the first chapter, Neigh argues that Johnson-Tekahionwake was instrumental in the later development of spoken-word delivery, a claim reiterated throughout the book (cf. 148–49). "Langston Hughes's Rhythmic Literacy" is the topic of the second chapter, which locates Hughes's performance poetry within the sociocultural context of the formation of the Black Panther movement, with a special focus on Hughes's youngest readers (61–92). Neigh contextualizes Hughes's children's reader The First Book of Rhythms, a fifty-page book teaching children how to recognize and decode rhythms in their environment through interactive exercises, as part of his educational approach and jazz pedagogy. Neigh emphasizes that Hughes's instructions also foster body awareness while one is reading (84–92). The third chapter ("Miss Lou Pedagogy and Mimic Women") continues this focus on education by demonstrating how Bennett's playful approach to mimicry within a postcolonial context provides a model for her readers to imitate in their own recitation of her poems (120). Overall, especially since Neigh believes that Bennett, Johnson, and Hughes "refashion recitation practices to abandon the burning deck of the classroom ritual" (14), it would have been helpful to the reader had she, at least in passing, touched upon the larger context of early twentieth-century education in the Western world and on reform pedagogy (14). In chapter 4, Neigh examines the poetry of Lillian Allen, Mutabaruka, LKJ, Jean "Binta" Breeze, Janet Marie Rogers, and Annharte. This chapter is divided into smaller sections that explore the concerns of "Minor Transnationalism," "Dubbing over Memories," "Recycling Nursery Rhymes," "Negotiating Cultural Inheritance," and "Challenging Language Interference." She makes a case for the importance of consulting the oral archive of trans-national minority poetry. Neigh shows that the dub poetry movement's engagement with memory and technology may be related to methodologies in Indigenous poetry. Based on studies such as Chadwick Allen's monograph Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies (2012), in which he argues that Indigeneity needs to be at the heart of comparative frameworks to displace settler interests from the center of intellectual activity and to produce new knowledge, Neigh builds on recent scholarly debate concerning reductive comparisons as a major pitfall in studies of Indigenous poetry. In light of Neigh's emphasis on the musicality of language, she could have devoted more space to the musical aspect of dub and the fact that lullabies are among the few...

Soundscape and Heritage: The Sonic Environment in Roskilde Juxtaposed with James Joyce’s Ulysses

This article is a contribution to a research field positioned in the intersection of theories of sound, place, heritage, memory, and literature. Without clear demarcations this field encompasses subjects as diverse as cultural geography, literature studies, the humanities in general, and music studies, among others. The point of departure is a reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses. In the same way that Joyce transposed Odysseus’ exploration of the Mediterranean space to Dublin, this article transposes Bloom’s experience of Dublin to the city of Roskilde. Joyce virtuously connected sound and words. Literature proves to be extremely powerful in offering insights into issues to which both theory and daily life often remain blind, having thus not only an affective function but also a decidedly epistemological one; that is, of expanding our knowledge regarding both theoretical and experiential issues. What my brief discussion of the chapter “Sirens” hints toward is literature’s incredible potential both to play with the musicality of language and the emotions this aspect engenders and to give rise to powerful theoretical insights into the nature, structure, and functions of soundscapes, thus ultimately refining our understanding of our complex and ambiguous relationship to the myriad soundscapes by which we are surrounded.

Musicality of Language and “Corporeal Writing” in La Tragédie de Salomé (1907)

ABSTRACTThis article explores the seemingly paradoxical role of dance when the aesthetics of a literary movement such as Symbolism aspires to a wordless genre—a paradox articulated by Stéphane Mallarmé in his famous coinage “corporeal writing.” I propose a reevaluation of Symbolist thought on the musicality of language as a possible means of reconciling the disparity between pure words and pure movement. A Symbolist conception of the arts as analogous to one another allowed for poetic writing, through the intervening medium of sound, to approach dance through an integration of meaning and movement. Using the ballet-pantomime La Tragédie de Salomé (1907) as a case study, I argue that Florent Schmitt's score transfers the essence of language into music that, when accompanied by the synesthetic performance of Loïe Fuller, evoked the multisensory theatrical experience to which Symbolist dramaturgy aspired.

Chicago Shakespeare Theater: suiting the action to the word

Shakespeare is widely known for vibrant productions that reflect the Bard's genius for intricate storytelling, musicality of language, and depth of feeling for the human condition. Affectionately known to natives of the Windy City as Chicago Shakes, and now in its twenty-fifth season, this vanguard of Chicago's rich theatrical tradition celebrates its silver anniversary with this bracing collection of original essays by world-renowned scholars, directors, actors, and critics. Bringing together works by such heralded figures as Terry Teachout, Jonathan Abarbanel, and Michael Billington; industry giants like Michael Bogdanov, Edward Hall, and Simon Callow; and interviews with artistic director Barbara Gaines and executive director Criss Henderson, Chicago Shakespeare Theater unveils the artistic visions and decisions that helped shape this venerable institution and examines the theater's international reputation for staging such remarkable and provocative performances.

The Musicality of The Merchant of Venice

This article focuses on The Merchant of Venice in relation to medieval traditions of musical thought. It argues that the play is not primarily concerned with the imitation of specific musical forms, but rather with the idea of music as non-referential discourse that addresses the limitations of representation and offers a vantage point from which to examine the play's discourse on materiality. It goes back to ideas of harmony and mathematical proportion in early medieval theories of music in order to analyse the tension between the corporeal and the immaterial as it emerges in the play. It discusses the musicality of language, the play's symmetrical as well as contrastive patterns of movement and sound as well as its musical semantics in which the process of evoking and discarding significance challenges any view of an immutable harmony.

Corpus-based approaches and discourse analysis in relation to reduplication and repetition

Reduplication is important in language studies. Its linguistic form at the lexical level has long been explored in terms of various formalist theories. However, the linguistic function at other levels such as the discourse layer tends to be ignored. A reduplication corpus (ongoing compilation; 1687 items in total thus far) has been constructed as the baseline for an integrated approach to the interplay of various kinds of repetition in the use of language. The frequency of each token was calculated based on its occurrence in the British National Corpus (BNC). Then a wordlist with the top 102 items was proposed for related research topics such as frequency, percentage coverage, concordance, and collocation in terms of McCarthy's framework (1990 and later) using MonoConc Pro, WordSmith 4.0 and the SARA 3.2 software. The probability of collocation was calculated in terms of mutual information (MI). The higher the MI score, the more genuine the association between two items (Church and Hanks, 1990). A powerful search engine, Google, was further employed to locate relevant texts on websites for the analysis of reduplication from lexical to discourse levels. Both reduplication and repetition do play a significant role and exhibit extensively a certain language musicality in our everyday life.

The Musicality of Language: Redefining History in Suzan-Lori Parks's The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in his The Signifying Monkey. A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (1988), states that black vernacular tradition stands as a metaphoric signpost crossroads of culture contact and ensuing difference which Africa and Afro-America meet (4). However, concept of liminality within Afro-diasporic experiences, and more specifically within (African-)American context, is itself a slippery signifier. As a transitional or marginal state, term also suggests fixedness, or a stopping point--a condition of stasis, or non-movement. This, in turn, places in question possibilities of both voice (the power of enunciation) and agency. At same time, though, historical legacy of slavery and continued experience of racial oppression mean that peoples of African descent are often socially, economically, and politically positioned margins of dominant culture, Africanist presence remains central to foundation of America. Although democratic ideal, in material terms, has not been realized, just as Founding Fathers did not recognize direct contributions of black people in building of American nation, American culture remains (always already) product of black style and innovation. While black cultural production itself continues to endure problems of cross-over invention, freedom movements (particularly white women's and gay liberation movements), music, language use, sports, and fashion are indebted to cultural experiences of African peoples in America.(1) Similarly, while contemporary identity politics suggests that (monolithic) subject is now decentered, such a reconfiguration of History proposes, paradoxically, that condition of dispersed and fragmented is representational modern experience. Indeed, what discourse of postmodern has produced is not something new but a kind of recognition of where identity always was at (Hall 114,115), and as a result margin and de center, to use Mercer and Julien's phrase, is forever a convergence of twain. The crossroads of culture is once both liminal and polymorphous and multidirectional, for juncture represents possibilities of movement (as opposed to confinement or stasis); it is paradigmatic scene of arrivals and (Baker 7). Such arrivals and departures form central motif in Suzan-Lori Parks's play The Death of Last Black Man in Whole Entire World (1989-1992).(2) The death of play's title, however, does not represent end of life as such, for folkloric Everyman that is eponymous figure of drama continues to pass over, and through, Time and Space in a cyclical ritual of adversity and survival. Death of Last Black Man represents, therefore, in musical terms, a quintessential blues experience: impulse to keep painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness (Ellison, Shadow 78). And just as blues are the multiplex, enabling script in which Afro-American cultural discourse is inscribed (Baker 4), so Parks's play is an intricate riff on complexities of identity and subjectivity within context of an African-American cultural realm. The play's protagonist, Black Man With Watermelon (like his significant Other, Black Woman With Fried Drumstick), is caught betwixt and between margin and de center; he is once written out of History, yet placed center of his own (postmodern slave) narrative. Black Man with Watermelon is able to voice his (true) Self through personal pronoun 1, yet he is forever trapped within metaphoric parentheses of stereotype that transcends (linear) Time as History: (I bein in uh Now: uh Now bein in uh Then: I bein, in Now in Then, in I will be. I was be too but thats uh Then thats past. That me that was-be is uh me-has-been. …