Text and Tune

On the Association of Music and Lyrics in Sung Verse

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• Publisher: Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9783034315609
• eBook ISBN: 9783035108385
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Languages

This book offers an overview of issues related to the regulated, formal organization of sound and speech in verse intended for singing. Particularly, it is concerned with the structural properties and underlying mechanisms involved in the association of lyrics and music. While in spoken verse the underlying metrical scheme is grounded in the prosody of the language in which it is composed, in sung verse the structure is created by the mapping of specific prosodic units of the text (syllables, moras, tones, etc.) onto the rhythmic-melodic structure provided by the tune. Studying how this mapping procedure takes place across different musical genres and styles is valuable for what it can add to our knowledge of language and music in general, and also for what it can teach us about individual languages and poetic traditions. In terms of empirical coverage, the collection includes a wide variety of (Western) languages and metrical/musical forms, ranging from the Latin hexameter to the Norwegian stev, from the French chant courtois to the Sardinian mutetu longu. Readers interested in formal analyses of vocal music, or in metrics and linguistics, will find useful insights here.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Introduction
• Poetry and Music in Archaic and Classical Greece. Some Thoughts
• Medieval liturgical drama, "Carmina Burana" and the Arnaut Daniel’s sestina: Music and literature
• "M’es belhs dous chans": Melody, metre and imagery in a ‘love verse’ of early troubadours
• Poetic rhythm in musical notations of the 14th century: The amateur tradition of "grand chant courtois" under the patronage of the autonomous system of "ars musicae"
• For the anisosyllabic whim of the Romance Middle Ages: Disciplines and non-regularity in the lyric poetry
• Creation, appropriation and development of the “Sung Verse” in the medieval musico-liturgical Drama "Officium Stellae"
• Textsetting of multilingual poems: The example of Bruder Hans’ "Ave Maria"
• Norwegian "‘gamalstev’": A millennium of sung verse
• Verse structure and time patterns in the "a mutetus" extemporary sung poetry of Southern Sardinia
• The prosody of Basque songs: A methodological proposal
• Text-to-tune alignment and lineation in traditional French songs
• Stress-to-beat mismatches in French rap
• New directions in Italian song lyrics?*
• Traditional metrics in Javier Krahe’s lyrics: Accords and discords
• The challenge of identifying vowel phonemes in singing
• Textsetting in translation: Rhythmical (non-)equivalence in the works of three Scandinavian ‘singer-translators’
• Three dimensions of singability. An approach to subtitled and sung translations
• What can the cross-cultural study of children’s clapping games teach us about the universality of sung verse?
• List of Contributors