Title: Lyric cousins : poetry and musical form /
Authors: Sampson, Fiona; Sampson.
Year: 2016
Subjects: Music and literature.; Music and literature; Poetry; Poetry History and criticism; Musik; Lyrik; Musikalische Form
Abstract: Today, poetry and art music occupy similar cultural positions: each has a tendency to be regarded as problematic, 'difficult' and therefore 'elitist'. Despite this, the audiences and numbers of participants for each are substantial: yet they tend not to overlap. This is odd, because the forms share early history in song and saga, and have some striking similarities, often summed up in the word 'lyric'. These similarities include much that is most significant to the experience of each, and so of most interest to practitioners and audiences. They encompass, at the very least: the way each art-form is aural, and takes place in time; a shared reliance on temporal, rather than spatial, forms; an engagement with sensory experience and pleasure; availability for both shared public performance and private reading, sight-reading and hearing in memory; and scope for non-denotative meaning. In other words, looking at these elements in music is a way to look at them in poetry, and vice versa. This is a study of these two formal craft traditions that is concerned with the similarities in their roles, structures, projects and capacities.
Contents: About time -- Abstract form -- Drawing the line -- Chromaticism -- Density -- The meaning of 'meaning' -- Song -- And story came too : from epic to opera -- Closer still : the total artwork -- The consolations of tradition -- Radical measures -- Performance : the role of the audience.