Poetics Of Song Research Articles

Conceptual Blending and Mendelssohn’s Poetics of Song

Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s model of conceptual blending is especially helpful in illustrating the type of text-music correspondences that often occur in Felix Mendelssohn’s songs and other vocal works. It corresponds to the way he spoke of his “poetics of song” compositions in his writings on the topic. Following a comparison of the Berlin-based approach to the songwriting of Mendelssohn to that of the Vienna-based song composers, such as Schubert, this essay will examine Mendelssohn’s own writings on text-music for such correspondences with the language of conceptual blending. I conclude with a close reading of “Es weiss und räth es doch Keiner,” Op. 99 no. 6, illustrating how Mendelssohn depicts the overall structure and specific meaning of Joseph von Eichendorff’s poem through a variety of musical techniques.

Popular Song and the Poetics of Experience

AbstractThis article argues that songwriting can be an autobiographical activity. I trace a long-standing mistrust of self-expression in popular music through a branch of scholarship fixated with performance and personification, demonstrating its underlying affinities with post-structuralism and modernist dreams of impersonality. What we have lost as a result of this undue insistence on mediation is an awareness of the two-way traffic between life and lyrical craft. A poetics of song should pay increased attention to this intricate relationship – not reducing lyrics to biographical contingencies, but rather viewing autobiography itself as a complex process of self-reading, a public act of autobiographical making. My argument is illustrated with reference to three contemporary singer-songwriters who have interpreted aspects of their lives through song: Vic Chesnutt, Sun Kil Moon (Mark Kozelek) and Anohni (formerly of Antony and the Johnsons). Their work ultimately traverses and obscures the interstices between experience and imagination.

송수권의 詩論 정립을 위한 試論 ― 남도의 3대 정신을 중심으로 ―

송수권의 詩論 정립을 위한 試論 ― 남도의 3대 정신을 중심으로 ―

“The Abstract Pathos of Song”: Carl Sandburg, John Lomax, and the Modernist Revival of Folksong

This essay examines the collaboration of poet Carl Sandburg and folklorist John Lomax, who formed a salon in Chicago from 1917 to 1920 for the performance, exchange, and study of American folksongs. Sandburg and Lomax helped to introduce a poetics of song into American literary modernism. Meanwhile, their folklore scholarship helped to revive and reinvent the concept of folksong as a category for addressing the tumultuous racial politics of the interwar period. In examining Sandburg’s recorded performances of African American folksongs from the 1920s, this essay posits a modernist poetics of song that should be understood as an indigenous art of the age of sound recording and reproduction. Treating the aural elements of poetry as acoustic rather than linguistic phenomena—as the stuff of wavelengths and frequencies rather than phonemes and sound shapes—this poetics of song also used phonography’s disembodiment of voice to cast racial and ethnic markers as audible signifiers that could be mixed and recombined in performance as the stuff of new composite identities. Sandburg’s poetics of song, the essay argues, challenged Lomax’s traditional view of folksong as the expression of homogenous communities and promoted instead an ethnic and cultural pluralism that was deeply informed by the labor struggles of black and white workers in interwar Chicago.