Synopses & Reviews
People chat about music every day, but they also treat it as a limit, as the boundary of what is sayable. By addressing different perspectives and traditions that form and inform the speaking of music in Western culture--musical, literary, philosophical, semiotic, political--this volume offers a unique snapshot of today's scholarship on speech about music. The range of considerations and material is wide. Among others, they include the words used to interpret musical works (such as those of Beethoven), the words used to channel musical practices (whether Bach's, Rousseau's, or Hispanic political protesters'), and the words used to represent music (whether in a dialogue by Plato, a story by Balzac, or in an Italian popular song). The contributors consider the ways that music may slide by words, as in the performance of an Akpafu dirge or in Messiaen, and the ways that music may serve as an embodied figure, as in the writings of Diderot or in the sound and body art of Henri Chopin. The book concludes with an essay by Jean-Luc Nancy.
Review
A rare, useful, and rich book, destined to attract musicologists, philosophers, theorists of all sorts, and philosophers of language.-Pierre Saint-Amand, Brown University
Throughout the book there are imaginative insights and unique perspectives that challenge preconceptions and give new directions for further investigation.-Kenneth Gloag, Cardiff University
About the Author
Keith Chapin is Lecturer in Music at Cardiff University.
Andrew Herrick Clark is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Fordham University.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Speaking of Music: A View across Disciplines and a Lexicon of Topoi
Keith Chapin and Andrew H. Clark
Speaking of Music
Lawrence Kramer
Waiting for the Death Knell: Speaking of Music (So to Speak)
Laura Odello
Mattheson's Words, Bach's Silence: Humanist and Professional Ways of Speaking of Music
Keith Chapin
Making Music Speak
Andrew H. Clark
Rousseau: Music, Language, and Politics
Tracy B. Strong
Listening to Music
Lawrence M. Zbikowski
Mi manca la voce: How Balzac Talks Music-or How Music Takes Place-in Massimilla Doni
John T. Hamilton
Speaking of Music in the Romantic Era: Dynamic and Resistant Aspects of Musical Genre
Matthew Gelbart
Weather Reports: Discourse and Musical Cognition
Per Aage Brandt
Messiaen, Deleuze, and the Birds of Proclamation
Sander van Maas
Parole, parole: Tautegory and the Musicology of the (Pop) Song
Peter Szendy
Speaking of Microsound: The Bodies of Henri Chopin
Kiene Brillenburg Wurth
On the Ethics of the Unspeakable
Jairo Moreno
Récit Recitation Recitative
Jean-Luc Nancy
Notes
List of Contributors
Index