Content area
Full Text
Music's meaning is enigmatic; unlike other modes of expression, it tends to shy away from translation in a linguistic sense. The trouble is, notes and rhythms lack analogous counterparts in language, and the only clues as to their extra-musical meaning tend to derive either from extraneous sources such as program notes, or from an internal accomplice: text. Choral music can offer a particularly illuminative angle from which to examine music's signification because it almost always pairs music with sung (or spoken) text, which offers its own independent, readily discernable meaning.
The prevailing supposition about vocal music is that music should paint or support its text in sound. Indeed, countless composers have succeeded in highlighting music's capability to illuminate text. Techniques like text-painting and use of leitmotivs have assisted the listener in "hearing in"1 the music qualities that are depicted textually: descending figures can "mean" weeping; ascending leaps can "represent" a reference to the heavens; a recurring motive can "reference" a hero's honor or even a love potion.
However, music's communicative potential is much broader than mere word-painting: music can enter into a dialogue with text, challenging the very words that it sets, criticizing, coloring, and molding them into a new idea. This article will explore the theory that music is capable of criticism on a literary level. It will seek to show that music-regardless of its reputation for alleged linguistic dysfunction-can engage text in its own game, functioning as a species of textual commentary on a par with traditional literary criticism. Analysis of a short choral piece will help demonstrate how music can speak to its text: Aharon Harlap's Shiru l'Adonai-a twentieth-century a cappella setting of Psalm 96-will serve as a model.
There is no scholarly consensus as to how music can speak to an audience, linguistically or otherwise. Edward T. Cone asserts that music is a language, replete with its own syntax, rhetoric, semantics-and meaning-but concedes that "no two authorities seem able to agree on what that meaning is."2 Theodor Adorno likewise offers that "what is 'said' by music, if there is such a thing, evidently presents much greater obstacles to translation into other media than other art."3 Moreover, Cone admits of scholars' difficulty in assessing not only "what music says" but "how,...