Cher/es collegues,
Pour le International Colloquium 20th/21st Century French Studies a Hartford, Connecticut, au printemps prochain une musicologue (Linda Cummins, University of Alabama) et moi ont propose une session sur le sujet de l'articulation de la musique et de la litterature.
Comme la date limite n'est que le 30 septembre, nous cherchons des interesses qui aimeraient nous joindre.
Voici le "proposal":
Articulations Of Music and Literature The need to express beyond the boundaries of a single medium may lead the composer to resort to text and the writer to resort to music. This can extend beyond traditional songs and song texts, opera, and drama to the inclusion of printed music in a literary text and the use of printed text in the score of a work of music. One can even affect structures within the other, i.e. by translating a musical form into a literary genre and vice versa.
The marriage and juxtaposition of the two mediums suggests a particular tension but possibly also a complementary relationship between the two. Music as the art without words reaches across borders of language and of social status; it does not need translation and is therefore less limited to a specific cultural context. Could it also be that music glosses over the limitations of expression that become so painfully obvious and a stylistic means in itself in literature? But then what does text add to or bring out in music? Is the contrast one between the visceral and the rational or located somewhere else altogether? Is one more apt than the other to express human experience? This panel will investigate the manifold relationships of text and music from both a literary and a musical perspective, as manifest in 20th century French literature and music.
Linda Cummins, University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, will present a paper entitled "Text as Recollection: Boulez's Use of Text Fragments in Pli Selon Pli". She will examine the literary in works of Pierre Boulez. Boulez set Mallarmé texts to music, in which he allows the singer to select the lines of text during the performance, especially in "Pli selon pli." Ina Pfitzner, Louisiana State University, will focus "Music that tells: in Panait Istrati's Mes departs, Romain Rolland's Jean Christophe and in the poem "L'Asile Ami" by Robert Desnos." In the first text, the music and the melodies the narrator remembers seem to serve his memory while also emphasizing the "authenticity" of the account. This is similar in Rolland's novel, but here music is viewed as a phenomenon that is deeply rooted within a specific national culture. In Desnos' surrealist nonsense poem the musical notes continue the poem without words.
En attendant vos propositions,
Thank you,
Ina Pfitzner, Ph.D.
Louisiana State University
ipfitzn@lsu.edu