Intertextual analysis of text and music

I går begynte jeg å skrive igjen, og som alltid føles det som en lettelse. Jeg skriver på en presentasjon av Hans Zenders musikktenkning, men varmet opp med en skisse til innledningen. Her dreier det seg om temaet som var starten på prosjektet: en revurdering av forholdet mellom tekst og musikk i tonesettinger:

In this dissertation I seek to gain an understanding of the relationship between text and music in the four works in the series Hölderlin lesen by the German composer Hans Zender. Traditionally, analyses of text and music have treated the combination of two art forms in a “musical setting” as a meeting between autonomous expressions. In this praxis, the lyric poem has been seen as a self-contained unity that the musical setting should try to mirror and heighten. This mimetic view of musical setting will be discussed and criticized thoroughly in chapter two.

But here, before I focus on Hans Zender’s work, I will only question a limited aspect of this view: the idea that the combining of poetry and music is a simple arithmetic, an addition of two distinct elements summing up to a synthesis that is as self-contained as the two forms that were subsumed in it. Of course the concept of interpretation is crucial in most analyses of musical poetry settings, but I am also suspicious of the thought that the composing of music citing a prewritten poem is a strictly individual reading of a definite object. The literary theories of intertextuality and reception of the late twentieth century have shown that neither an art work nor an artist exists in a vacuum. Both formal structures and experienced meanings are parts of flexible and open-ended intertextual networks that reach far beyond the traditional category of influence.

The definition of art as an ongoing weaving of complex intertextual relations has profound consequences for the analysis of musical poetry settings. It means that neither the poem nor the composer’s musical “language” can be regarded as self-contained unities. Regardless of its author’s intention, a poem is a dialogue, not only with other poems, but with works in other art forms. Furthermore, its meanings can be experienced through correspondences with the most disparate strands of historical and contemporary culture, including philosophical and scientific concepts, religious praxises and historical events. The same holds for musical works and compositional “languages”: they are more or less conscious dialogues with other musical works and styles, through affirmation, negation or variation, and they are not only talking to each other, but also to works and concepts in other art forms. Lastly, the thought that the meaning of music should be defined culturally is widely accepted in contemporary musicology, and in my opinion, a combination of this anthropological understanding with the more flexible notion of intertextuality can tell us much about the complexity of the experience of musical meaning.

Defined in this way, both poems and musical works potentially take part in interdisciplinary dialogues and correspondences even before they meet in a musical poetry setting. The insight that neither the poem nor the musical “language” is one, but rather composite of manifold correspondences and open-ended processes, is central to several composers of vocal music after the war. To these composers, the musical setting of a poem is not an alchemic operation where two elements becomes one, but rather a performative play with complex intertextual potentialities, highlighted by the concrete crossing of the art forms in the framework of experienced time. One of the most reflected practioners of this kind of confrontation of poetry and music is Hans Zender.