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Start Over Descriptor "Music and literature" Publisher escholarship, university of california
4 results on '"Music and literature"'

1. Roots of Lorca’s Black Poetry in Van Vechten’s Vision of the African American Spiritual

Author

Orringer, Nelson R.

Subjects
music and literature, African American spirituals, Federico García Lorca, Carl Van Vechten, Poeta en Nueva York, African American poetry
Abstract

Just as Lorca identified the Andalusian Gypsies (hereafter Roma) with deep song, so he equated New York African Americans with their spirituals, as defined in Carl Van Vechten’s 1925 article, “The Folksongs of the American Negro: The Importance of the Negro Spirituals in the Music of America.” Van Vechten notes that Black people felt ashamed of their spirituals for their slave origins, and Lorca surmised that African Americans were uneasy by nature. Yet Van Vechten regards spirituals as the most important contributions of America to music composition. Their sincerity makes them equal or superior to any folk music. Hence Lorca deems African Americans the most American minority of all, the most spiritual and delicate. From spirituals, writes Van Vechten, stem all popular American music. Therefore, Lorca finds Black people to be influential on all North American culture. Van Vechten contrasts what he calls “natural” Black music sung in its original dialect to artificial European operatic techniques for singing it. Accordingly, Lorca opposes African American naturalness in general to Caucasian artificiality. This antithesis permeates all of Lorca’s African American poems: “Norma y Paraíso de los negros,” “El rey de Harlem,” “Iglesia abandonada (Balada de la Gran Guerra),” and “Danza de la muerte.” After summarizing Van Vechten’s article, we use it to clarify that otherwise hermetic poetry.

Published
2023

2. Silenced Keys to Literary and Musical Interplays between Lorca and Falla

Author

Orringer, Nelson R.

Subjects
music and literature, Manuel de Falla, Federico García Lorca, Andalusia, “Andaluza”, Canciones, Poema del Cante Jondo, male and female archetypes.
Abstract

Between 1920 and 1936, Spanish composer Manuel de Falla and his friend and folk-music pupil    Federico García Lorca, Spanish poet and playwright, wrote many of their best-known works, all affected by the other artist.  The many interconnections between them exceeded the printing space available to the author for his 2014 book on those links.  The present article puts those silenced finds into print for the first time.  Falla´s 1908 piece “Andaluza” attempts to express the soul of Andalusia by imitating rhythms, modalities, melodies, adornments, and folk cadences of that southern Spanish region.  The work, together with others by Falla, inspires at least two poems and two poetic dialogues by Lorca: the two “Rider's Songs” from the 1924 anthology Canciones or Songs and two short allegorical dialogues of 1925 gathered into Poema del Cante Jondo or Poem of Deep Song.  While all these analogies between Falla's music and Lorca´s poetry center around a variety of male Andalusian archetypes, still other likenesses between the two artists show up in Falla´s compositions examining feminine innocence and the two Lorca poems “Two Girls,” two studies on Andalusian woman's purity from Poem of Deep Song.

Published
2017

3. Sonic Alterities: On Literature and the Sounds of Intersubjectivity

Author

Schranck, John

Subjects
Comparative literature, African American studies, English literature, alterity, Black studies, epigenetics, intersubjectivity, music and literature, sound studies
Abstract

Sonic Alterities: On Literature and the Sounds of Intersubjectivity explores the spatial, affective and intersubjective significance of sound to develop a theory of self-and-other that moves beyond the gaze. It orients around three nodes: sound studies, literature, and intertwining discourses of intersubjectivity and alterity. Attending to sound in eco-acoustic, beyond-the-human contexts as well as sonic cultural practices the ocularnormative would occlude, Sonic Alterities deconstructs sound as philosophical problem and demonstrates how modernist experimentation and Black epistemologies center sound in intersubjectivity and phenomenal consciousness. The first chapter moves from antiquity (Plato’s Phaedrus) to the present and shows how cicada singing envelops and pierces a dialectic of death and desire. The second chapter, on bells in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, draws on consciousness studies to distill the role of bells and sound waves in metaphors of attunement. The third chapter reframes acousmatic sound (i.e., sound whose source is unseen) and reads Ralph Ellison’s “sound subject” as an inversion of Pierre Schaeffer’s “sound object,” and it likewise argues that call-and-response is as influential to intersubjective theory as continental philosophy. Chapter Four unpacks how William Faulkner’s circumscription of Joe Christmas in “a little island of silence” underscores his alienation as a possibly biracial character in the Jim Crow South. The fifth reads James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” to argue that jazz provides the cultural frame that makes conceptualizing epigenetics in scientific discourses possible.

Published
2022

4. Reading at the Opera: Music and Literary Culture in Early Nineteenth-Century Italy

Author

Jacobson, Edward Lee

Subjects
Music history, historical reading practices, Italian opera, libretti, music and literature, nineteenth century
Abstract

This dissertation emerged out of an archival study of Italian opera libretti published between 1800 and 1835. Many of these libretti, in contrast to their eighteenth-century counterparts, contain lengthy historical introductions, extended scenic descriptions, anthropological footnotes, and even bibliographies, all of which suggest that many operas depended on the absorption of a printed text to inflect or supplement the spectacle onstage. This dissertation thus explores how literature—and, specifically, the act of reading—shaped the composition and early reception of works by Gioachino Rossini, Vincenzo Bellini, Gaetano Donizetti, and their contemporaries. Rather than offering a straightforward comparative study between literary and musical texts, the various chapters track the often elusive ways that literature and music commingle in the consumption of opera by exploring a series of modes through which Italians engaged with their national past. In doing so, the dissertation follows recent, anthropologically inspired studies that have focused on spectatorship, embodiment, and attention. But while these chapters attempt to reconstruct the perceptive filters that educated classes would have brought to the opera, they also reject the historicist fantasy that spectator experience can ever be recovered, arguing instead that great rewards can be found in a sympathetic hearing of music as it appears to us today.

Published
2020

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