Song Studies

I'm devoting the last three weeks of my graduate course to the relationship between poetry and song, teaching entirely from my ipod with its almost 5,000 "songs." The scare quotes are because some of these songs are movements of Mahler symphonies or discrete sections of The Art of the Fugue. I did a thematic approach in this course, and we looked at violence, sexuality, alcohol and drugs, and, now, music.

The thematic approach worked fine with this group. I don't know that I would repeat it or do something completely different, like use the performance / performativity / music dimension during the entire semester.

I never liked the idea of a "symptom" very much (in cultural studies). In the first place, symptom implies disease, something wrong, so a poem, a story, a song, or a dance being "symptomatic" of some larger phenomenon implies that it's like a rash that is a symptom of an infection. Something is wrong and the painting or building or motet is a sign of that. Secondly, the larger, seemingly more significant phenomenon the symptom is a symptom of is going to be something less interesting than the drawing or movie or cantata. The idea of the symptom, however, reduces the novel or play or fugue to a secondary status.

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Make two piles, in one put the human condition, getting along better together, what makes us truly human, what it means to be American, learning about other cultures...

In the other put, the works of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, Paul Klee, Robert Creeley, Frida Kahlo, Basho, Issa, Bach...

Which pile would you choose? In other words, can you only justify the second pile by using the vague humanist rhetoric of the first? Isn't it, rather that we want to have the pile of actual works and feel the need to use some kind of mealy-mouthed rhetoric to justify our interest in them?

From the idea that poetry is closer to music than it is to "literature" as conventionally defined, I draw four areas of study that might be fruitful. Maybe these areas will help clarify what I mean by this statement.

(1) Poetry can renegotiate its relation to literature. If poetry were the major subject, and the novel was seen as marginal, there would be a de-emphasis on longer narrative structures. The relation of literature to society would not be centered on the mimetic portrayal of society on the broad canvas, but on the social function of music and poetry.

(2) Poetry would renegotiate its relation to music as well. There would be a new interdisciplinary field called "song studies."

(3) Performative aspects would take center stage, as they do now in the study of theater.

(4) If music, why not visual art too? Or dance. Poetry would be one of the arts.

Tomorrow, I will break down each of these ideas.

My basis for making the assertion in the first place relies on

(1) Historic connections between poetry and music. Lyric poetry arises historically as the words to songs.

(2) Even after the great divorce between the music and the words, there are still songs with words. Words not meant to be set to music are still set to music. The poem can still aspire to be a song. Poets still think musically; there is no good poet I know who doesn't have a fairly deep interest in some genre of music. Hell, there's not even a bad poet I know who doesn't have a deep interest in music. Poets think musically. The more you think about this subject the righter you'll realize I am.

(3) Poetry and music are the only two things that have meter, and they have meter in analogous ways. Sure, a bouncing basketball has a rhythm, but poetry and music have a rhythm in a way that's closer to one another than either is to the bouncing ball or the movement of the tides.

(4) Sure, there are areas of poetry less connected to music. You can have those. In other words, I'll give you those and I'll keep the musical part. If you hesitate to make this bargain, then you know deep down I'm on to something here.

I am developing a course for when I come back, a graduate seminar called "Ritmo, cante, voz." It's basically my "song studies" idea cast as a single course. I think it will work.

I was reading Barthes' essay "The Grain of the Voice" last night. I think that would be a good place to start. That along with García Lorca's "Juego y teoría del duende." What else would you put on the syllabus for theoretical texts, aside from obvious choices like Bernstein (ed.) Close Listening?

There was a breathless-toned pop book about the human voice I saw a few months ago. That kind of thing might be useful.

What would happen to my song studies field in the real world of academic institutions?

The linguists would view the true subject here as the fit between words and music. They would get NIS Grants to produce highly technical studies and ignore everyone else.

The English department would just see this as Cultural Studies all over again and apply Foucault to analyses of Madonna songs from the 1980s. Creative writers would just add another section to the existing curriculum, placing lyric writing along side fiction and "poetry."

Cultural anthropology would see this as ethnomusicology. They would just continue as before. They were always already song theorists.

The singer-songwriters would want their own niche where they could teach students to write songs, encouraging them to ignore any history or theory. Only the "craft" of songwriting would be taught.

The music department would give voice lessons for aspiring opera singers.

In other words, no one would do anything different from what they were doing before, but everyone would boast of being interdiscipinary, especially the English Department.

Someone should establish an interdisciplinary field of study called song studies. Isn't that a fundamental category of human culture? That fundamental union between word and music that is present in just about every culture, and at every level of cultural production from high to low and middle. Then there would a small area of song studies that studied musicless songs, otherwise known as poems. Orphan songs that have lost their music or musical tradition. Among "orphan songs" there would be several categories;

(1) Song texts whose specific music or entire musical tradition has been lost.

(2) Song texts that are written without music, but that are still fundamentally song texts. Their music has just not been written yet.

(3) Songs written with an internal song music, that don't need musical settings because the music is in the words. [Is there any difference between (2) and (3)?]

(4) Poems that have one foot in the song tradition, but really have stepped over into the written poem tradition. Most renaissance sonnets, for example.

(5) Other kinds of poetry that are relatively alien to anything that might be sung.

The last category moves out of the orphan song into the new genre, which we might call still call "poetry" but that is relatively alien to most poetic traditions historically and anthropologically.

Cross posted to Refraneros y cancioneros