Apparently I've missed something interesting in my neighborhood. I recall this date, but failed to get the details in time... sheizer.
Resurrecting, in the hopes of giving a public airing to, the attempt to make an analogy between music and text (for lack of a better catch-all term). Instead of trying to describe the problem, I'll just jump in:
If one were to make an analogy between music and language, spoken or written, what would the specific analogies be. For instance, the musical note, taken as a kind of atom, could be analogous to a given word, or a given letter, or a given phoneme, or a given morpheme, or something else. How many features of the musical note could each of these be said, reasonably, to mirror. One feature of a note is that, if you are in a tonal context, the function, or "meaning", of the note changes relative to other notes surrounding it in time. "G" played direcly before "C" suggests about G that it is the dominant, or "5th", of "C". Played in similar temporal relationship to "E" might suggest it is the minor 3rd (although this relationship is probably more ambiguous without more context).
Can we find similar functions in language? Where is it the case that the temporal combination is significant and that significance, that meaning, can be altered by recombination? A morpheme might mean differently in combination, but not so drastically differently as to have a separate significance from one combination to the next. What about a phoneme- if we randomly assign note values to a set of phonemes in a language (preferably one with the same number of phonemes as distinct musical notes in our musical language), would the two behave at all similarly in composition?
Now try wrapping your head around how fucked all of this gets if your musical system is 12-tone instead of diatonic.
I'm going to bed
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3 comments:
i am studying all of this renaissance and early baroque shit right now, and this is exactly what those cats try and look at. they even got to the point where they were simulating the specific inflection of words in their music. of course, as it got deeper into the baroque they kept tying it up with a bigger and bigger bow, and paying less attention to sensitive placement of text. But some of those late 16th century madrigals (especially monteverdi) are incredible in how they hew so close to the text, and yet musically stand alone. Of course, they were coming from poetry that presumably DIDN'T suggest movement as well as music does, thus the use of music.
can you suggest titles, either text or recordings. that sounds amazing.
so monteverdi's career can roughly be divided up into three pieces: his earlier, more exact text-painted madrigals (very nice, but the poetry is not exceptional--torq..? tasso is the poet on most of those)--that would be anything from his "Second Book of Madrigals" (his first is ok, but the second one is fantastic). later he got into the thicker poetry (guarini is the poet mostly), which is more introverted, and pretty complex. the music matches it on an incredibly precise level without getting as illogical as gesualdo, etc, and i think that it gets best with book four and five of madrigals (there are more recordings for these, some good ones are "cruda amarilli" "ah delntre partita" "sfogave con le stelle").
the end of his career was mostly dramatic, opera, etc. that is cool, but the harmonies to our modern ears sound pretty basic, and you have to dig deeper and with a score to get all the nuance.
good luck.
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