Abstract
This chapter presents theoretical deliberations and two case studies that demonstrate how conceptualizations of word-music relations and of the controversial classical-popular binary benefit from understanding borders as flexible spaces of intermedial and cultural-historical meaning-production. The first example—Richard Powers’s novel Orfeo (2014)—engages the border between so-called classical and popular music from the perspectives of music history, sociopolitical predicaments, and individual subjectivity. In thinking about this fraught dichotomy of ostensibly opposite musical poles, the protagonist also struggles with intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics of music, words, sound, and silence. The second example—Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2015 musical and the co-authored publication Hamilton (2016)—provides insight into how the stage show and the book draw potential audience members into contemplating work-specific and intermedial meaning-production. Both case studies demonstrate that theoretical concerns in intermediality and in popular music studies gain from approaching borders and contexts with a mindset that interlaces meticulous attention to variations of word-music relations with in-depth contextualization. Popular music scholarship thus has much to offer to word-music research from an intermedial perspective—and vice versa.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis refers to similar understandings of music comprising dance and other sound-related cultural activities in multiple non-European languages and cultures (2019, 20).
- 2.
An influential voice in postmedia thinking is Lev Manovich, whose notions recall those promoted by art historians like Clement Greenberg (see Manovich [2001]).
- 3.
- 4.
Regarding the history of school-related and other poetry recitations by amateurs, see Rubin (2007, 107–164). A search for school recitations of [a]/[t]he “Psalm of Life” on YouTube yields dozens of live recordings, school projects, and adaptations. Also see the historical overview in Rubin (2007, 107–164).
- 5.
Arguing from the perspective of one form of popular poetry today, Bradley claims that rap’s “popularity relies in part on people not recognizing” that it is poetry (Bradley 2009, xiv). While I do not agree with his generalization that “[p]oetry stands at an almost unfathomable distance from our daily lives” (xiv), I find his discussion of the poetics of rap as convincing as his observation about the intermedial core of rap: “Rap’s poetry can usefully be approached as literary verse while still recognizing its essential identity as music” (xvii).
- 6.
As Peterfy poignantly highlights, literary historian Robert Spiller found that if reception were the main criterion for a poet’s national standing, then Longfellow should be considered “the most American poet that America has ever had” (Spiller qtd. in Peterfy 2015, 97).
- 7.
For a convincingly argued and historically well-grounded recent set of case studies that link cultural politics, race, sound production, and sound reception, see Stoever (2016).
- 8.
I would like to thank Susan Winnett for pointing out that a bass aria in Georg Friedrich Händel’s 1741 oratorio Messiah also includes the above-mentioned verses from Corinthians.
- 9.
The novel also incorporates the listening behavior and sound production of Els’s dog, Fidelio. The intermedial reference to Beethoven’s opera underscores the theme of imprisonment and serves to provide an example of a perceiver that is immune to changing tastes in human society: “Fidelio, that happy creature baying at the whims of Els’s clarinet, hinted at something in music beyond taste, built into the evolved brain” (Powers 2014, 10).
- 10.
Els’s perspective resembles Kramer’s claim that “musical meaning consists of a specific, mutual interplay between musical experience and its contexts; the form taken by this process is the production of modes or models of subjectivity carried by the music into the listener’s sense of self; and the dynamics of this production consist of a renegotiation of the subject’s position(s) between the historically contingent forms of experience and the experience of a transcendental perspective that claims to subsume (but is actually subsumed by) them” (Kramer 2002, 8).
- 11.
On the importance of music videos in this context, see Balestrini (2019).
- 12.
See the variegated collection of essays edited by Romano and Potter (2018).
- 13.
On the role of dance in oscillating with effects ranging from realism to its opposite, see Searcy (2018).
- 14.
Regarding the contrastive pair of “overt” versus “covert” musico-literary intermediality, see Wolf (1999, 37–44).
- 15.
Taking this concept from affect studies, Hurley and Warner discuss its usefulness in theatre studies. I would not be surprised if the concept were to become more prominent in intermedial research and, thus, in various media and genre contexts.
Works Cited
Balestrini, Nassim Winnie. 2018. Intermedial on/offstage auto/biography: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, hip hop, and historiography. In Intermediality and life writing, ed. Nassim W. Balestrini and Ina Bergmann, 210–231. Berlin: DeGruyter.
———. 2019. The intermedial poetry of rap: Words, sounds, and music videos. In Poem unlimited: New perspectives on poetry and genre, ed. David Kerler and Timo Müller, 240–253. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Bennett, Andy, Barry Shank, and Jason Toynbee. 2006. Introduction. In The popular music studies reader, ed. Andy Bennett, Barry Shank, and Jason Toynbee, 1–7. London/New York: Routledge.
Bradley, Adam. 2009. Book of rhymes: The poetics of hip hop. New York: Basic Civitas/Perseus/Hachette.
Chapin, Keith, and Andrew H. Clark. 2013. Speaking of music: A view across disciplines and a lexicon of topoi. In Speaking of music: Addressing the sonorous, ed. Keith Chapin and Andrew H. Clark, 1–18. New York: Fordham UP.
Chasar, Mike. 2012. Everyday reading: Poetry and popular culture in modern America. New York: Columbia UP.
Frith, Simon. 1996. Performing rites: On the value of popular music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
Garrett, Charles Hiroshi, ed. 2018. Hamilton forum. American Music 36 (4): 407–506.
Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
Graham, David, A. 2018. How the Pulitzers chose Kendrick Lamar, according to a juror. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/04/regina-carter-kendrick-lamar-pulitzer/558509. Accessed 14 Sept 2020.
Harbert, Elissa. 2018. Hamilton and history musicals. American Music 36 (4): 412–426.
Horner, Bruce, and Thomas Swiss. 2000. Putting it into words: Key terms for studying popular music. In Key terms in popular music and culture, ed. Bruce Horner and Thomas Swiss, 1–2. Malden: Blackwell.
Hurley, Erin, and Sara Warner. 2012. Special section: Affect/performance/politics. Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 26 (2): 99–107.
Jackson, Virginia. 2015. Longfellow in his time. In The Cambridge history of American poetry, ed. Alfred Bendixen and Stephen Burt, 238–258. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Jameson, Fredric. 1979. Reification and utopia in mass culture. Social Text 1: 130–148.
Kajikawa, Loren. 2018. ‘Young, scrappy, and hungry’: Hamilton, hip hop, and race. American Music 36 (4): 467–486.
Kramer, Lawrence. 1993. Music as cultural practice, 1800–1900. Berkeley: University of California Press.
———. 2002. Musical meaning: Toward a critical history. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Manovich, Lev. 2001. Post-media aesthetics. http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/post-media-aesthetics. Accessed 13 Mar 2020.
Margulis, Elizabeth H. 2019. The psychology of music: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1994 [1964]. Understanding media: The extensions of man. Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press.
Middleton, Richard. 1990. Studying popular music. Buckingham/Philadelphia: Open University Press.
———. 2000. Introduction: Locating the popular music text. In Reading pop: Approaches to textual analysis in popular music, ed. Richard Middleton, 1–19. Oxford: Oxford UP.
———. 2006. In the groove or blowing your mind? The pleasures of musical repetition. In The popular music studies reader, ed. Andy Bennett, Barry Shank, and Jason Toynbee, 15–20. London/New York: Routledge.
Miranda, Lin-Manuel, and Jeremy McCarter. 2016. Hamilton: The revolution: Being the complete libretto of the Broadway musical, with a true account of its creation, and concise remarks on hip-hop, the power of stories, and the new America. London: Little, Brown.
Müller, Jürgen E. 2010. Intermedialität digital: Konzepte, Konfigurationen, Konflikte. In Intermediale Inszenierungen im Zeitalter der Digitalisierung: Medientheoretische Analysen und ästhetische Konzepte, ed. Andy Blättler et al., 17–40. Bielefeld: transcript.
Music and poetry. 1993. In The new Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, 803–806. New York: MJF Books.
O’Meally, Robert G., Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin. 2004. Introductory notes. In Uptown conversation, ed. Robert G. O’Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin, 1–6. New York: Columbia UP.
Ochsner, Beate. 2010. Zur Frage der Grenze zwischen Intermedialität und Hybridisierung. In Intermediale Inszenierungen im Zeitalter der Digitalisierung: Medientheoretische Analysen und ästhetische Konzepte, ed. Andy Blättler et al., 41–60. Bielefeld: transcript.
Peterfy, Margit. 2015. The fireside poets. In A history of American poetry, ed. Oliver Scheiding, René Dietrich, and Clemens Spahr, 95–110. Trier: WVT.
Powers, Richard. 2014. Orfeo. London: Atlantic.
Rajewsky, Irina O. 2010. Border talks: The problematic status of media borders in the current debate about intermediality. In Media borders, multimodality and Intermediality, ed. Lars Elleström, 51–68. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Romano, Renee C., and Claire Bond Potter. 2018. Historians on Hamilton: How a blockbuster musical is restaging America’s past. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP.
Rubin, Joan Shelley. 2007. Songs of ourselves: The uses of poetry in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
Searcy, Anne. 2018. Bringing dance back to the center in Hamilton. American Music 36 (4): 448–466.
Shank, Barry. 2006. Introduction to part one. In The popular music studies reader, ed. Andy Bennett, Barry Shank, and Jason Toynbee, 11–14. London/New York: Routledge.
———. 2014. The political force of musical beauty. Duke University Press.
Shenton, Andrew. 2008. Olivier Messiaen’s system of signs: Notes towards understanding his music. Aldershot/Burlington: Ashgate.
Sound. 1993. In The new Princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T.V.F. Brogan, 1172–1180. New York: MJF Books.
Spielmann, Yvonne. 2004. Intermedialität und Hybridisierung. In Intermedium Literatur: Beiträge zu einer Medientheorie der Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Roger Lüdeke and Erika Greber, 78–102. Göttingen: Wallstein.
Stein, Daniel. 2012. Music is my life: Louis Armstrong, autobiography, and American jazz. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Stoever, Jennifer Lynn. 2016. The sonic color line: Race & the cultural politics of listening, Postmillennial Pop Series. New York, New York UP.
van Maas, Sander. 2013. Messiaen, Deleuze, and the birds of proclamation. In Speaking of music: Addressing the sonorous, ed. Keith Chapin and Andrew H. Clark, 169–185. New York: Fordham UP.
Whitman, Walt. 1982. Preface [to ‘Leaves of Grass’]. In Poetry and prose, ed. Justin Kaplan, 5–26. New York: Library of America.
Wolf, Werner. 2015. Literature and music: theory. In Handbook of intermediality: Literature – image – sound – music, ed. Gabriele Rippl, 460–474. Berlin: De Gruyter.
———. 1999. The musicalization of fiction: A study in the theory and history of intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Balestrini, N.W. (2021). Of Silent Notation and Historiographic Relationality: Words, Music, and Notions of the Popular. In: Gurke, T., Winnett, S. (eds) Words, Music, and the Popular. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85543-7_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85543-7_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-85542-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-85543-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)