Document Type
Article
Keywords
Art song, Lied, Song, Alto Rhapsody, Gretchen am Spinnrade, Erlkönig, Dichterliebe, Book of the Hanging Gardens, Transmemberment, Ninth Symphony
Disciplines
Comparative Literature | English Language and Literature | Music | Musicology | Other Arts and Humanities
Abstract
This revised version of an essay first published in 1984 sustains the impetus of the original to upend the traditional understanding of song, in particular of art song, as a harmonious fusion of words and music. Song in general, and art songs or Lieder in particular with their generically mandated dependence on preexisting poetic texts, produces a much wider range of text-music relationships than mere fusion, many of them riddled with tension, cross-purposes, and even outright antagonism. Among song genres, the Lied stands out historically for giving prominence to the diversity of these relationships, starting in the early nineteenth century. The essay theorizes the complex character of word-music interaction in the art song and explores a sampling of them in Lieder or Lied-related music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Arnold Schoenberg, with some attention to other traditions both earlier and later
Publication Title
Lawrence Kramer, Song Acts: Writings on Words and Music (Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2017)
Article Number
1011
Publication status
pre-submission, Spring 2017; The author holds the copyright and has licensed Brill to reprint the article
Publication Date
2017
Language
English
Recommended Citation
Lawrence Kramer, Song Acts: Writings on Words and Music (Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2017).
Version
Published
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Content Type
Text
Included in
Comparative Literature Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, Musicology Commons, Other Arts and Humanities Commons
