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This volume assembles twelve interdisciplinary essays that were originally presented at the Second International Conference on Word and Music Studies at Ann Arbor, MI, in 1999, a conference organized by the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA).The contributions to this volume focus on two centres of interest. The first deals with general issues of literature and music relations from culturalist, historical, reception-aesthetic and cognitive points of view. It covers issues such as conceptual problems in devising transdisciplinary histories of both arts, cultural functions of opera as a means of reflecting postcolonial national identity, the problem of verbalizing musical experience in nineteenth-century aesthetics and of understanding reception processes triggered by musicalized fiction. The second centre of interest deals with a specific genre of vocal music as an obvious area of word and music interaction, namely the song cycle. As a musico-literary genre, the song cycle not only permits explorations of relations between text and music in individual songs but also raises the question if, and to what extent words and/or music contribute to creating a larger unity beyond the limits of single songs. Elucidating both of these issues with stimulating diversity the essays in this section highlight classic nineteenth- and twentieth-century song cycles by Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss and Benjamin Britten and also include the discussion of a modern successor of the song cycle, the concept album as part of today's popular culture.

The nine interdisciplinary essays in this volume were presented in 2003 in Berlin at the Fourth International Conference on Word and Music Studies, which was sponsored by The International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA). The nine articles in this volume cover two areas: “Surveying the Field” and “Music and the Spoken Word”. Topics include postmodernism, philosophy, German literary modernism, opera, film, the Lied, radio plays, and “verbal counterpoint”. They cover the works of such philosophers, critics, literary figures, and composers as Argento, Beckett, Deleuze, Guattari, Feldman, Glenn Gould, Nietzsche, Schubert, Strauss, Wagner, and Wolfram. Three films are discussed: Casablanca, The Fisher King, and Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.

This collection of 19 essays is the first one devoted to function-oriented analyses of intermedial interrelationships in literature, art, music, and film. The contributors — among others, Werner Wolf, James Heffernan, Walter Bernhart, Siglind Bruhn, Claus Clüver, Valerie Robillard, and Tamar Yacobi — are leading international scholars in the field of intermediality. The common basis of the essays in this volume — ranging from intermedial studies of medieval liturgical practices, early cinema, modernist art, ekphrasis, music and literature, art and literature, film and literature, hymns, and pop music, to the musical and technological aspects of Concrete poetry — is the ambition to pay attention to the cultural contexts that enhance the significance of these intermedial works and trends under examination. Since the contributions cover different types of intermedial endeavours from various periods and times, a kind of historicizing perspective is outlined. So, in pursuit of a still lacking coherent historical survey of cultural functions of intermediality, this volume might be recognized as a step towards such a Funktionsgeschichte for intermedial exploration.