Music and Literature
Code
722021020
Academic unit
Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas
Department
Ciências Musicais
Credits
10
Weekly hours
3 letivas + 1 tutorial
Teaching language
Portuguese
Objectives
1. Critical knowledge about major trends of theoretical, conceptual and methodological approaches to vocal pieces (Lied and mélodie) and/or instrumental pieces with latent mythical and literary references.
2. Ability for an Interdisciplinary approach to the works and critical skills; openness to possible interpretations wihin the work´s horizon in aesthetic, hermeneutic and analytic perspectives.
3. Openness to the archetypical, mytical and poetical realms of the work.
4. Ability to grasp intertextual and intermedial crossings in the works.
5. Awareness of the various levels of interaction/expressive tension between the poetic-musical work, the voice and the instrument.
6. Performance criticism, justified with phenomenological, aesthetic, hermeneutical, rhetorical, stylistic, expressive criteria.
7. French and German languages: pronunciation, musical world, temporal, imagetic and evocative realms and their immediate effects in instrumental performance.
Prerequisites
Recommended: reading skills in English and French.
Subject matter
Analytic perspectives of Lied and mélodie around 1900.
1. Aesthetic questions: imitation, evocation, liberation from the semantic realm.
2. Texts and ideas about words and music: Poe, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Ghil, Maeterlinck, Jankélévitch, Barthes, Deleuze; Goethe, Nägeli, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Schoenberg.
3. Between poetry, voice and instrument. Levels of relationship, tension and mutual interaction.
4. Intertextuality; crossings, correspondences, affinities or lack of affinities among the arts.
5. Some literary topics and mythical figures. Comparative approach to their metamorphosis into a vocal-musical setting. Hermeneutic readings.
6. Word, voice, instrument: performance aesthetics of vocal and pianistic German and French cultures.
7. Communication systems regarding the production and performance: places, institutions, patronage and reception.
Bibliography
Agawu, K. (1992). Theory and Practice in the Analysis of the Nineteenth-Century Lied. Music Analysis, 11(1), 3-36.
Bernhart, W. & Wolf, W. (2001). Word and Music Studies: Essays on the Song Cycle and on Defining the Field. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Byrne, L. (2003). Schuberts Goethe Settings. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Bergeron, K. (2010). LArt de dire, or Language in Performance, in Voice Lessons. French Mélodie in the Belle Époque (pp. 183-254). Oxford: OUP.
Bernac, P. (1978). The Interpretation of French Song. New York: Norton.
François-Sappey, B. & Cantagrel, G. (1994). Guide de la mélodie et du Lied. Paris: Fayard.
Faure, M. & Vivès, V. (2000). Histoire et poétique de la mélodie française. Paris: CNRS.
Mitchell, D. (2002). Gustav Mahler: Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death. Woodbridge: Boydell.
Youens, S. (2000). Hugo Wolf and his Mörike Songs. Cambridge: CUP.
Teaching method
a) Study of the writings about music and letters.
b) Expositions by the lecturer.
c) Poetic-musical analysis, followed by collective discussion.
d) Audition and comparative criticism of performances of vocal music, preceded by the poem´s performance. Videos: gesture and bodily expression.
e) Development of insights into the phonetic possibilities of the word and how their effects shape interpretation, characterization and performance. Shaping of silences, atmospheres, energy and plasticity of musical phrasing.
f) Grasping the ways how literary and mythical topics are interpreted by musical works.
Evaluation method
1. Active participation- quality of problematization and argumentation, mature artistic sensibility. 2. Analytic presentations 3. A written essay.