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 texts of all of Debussy's songs, together with translation and notes essential for an understanding of his creative impulse.

Playback is the technique of rebroadcasting natural or synthetic signals to animals and observing their response. The ability to present a putative signal in isolation, without the potential confounding effects of other activities of the signaller, is the main reason for the depth and range of our knowledge of communication systems. To date, playback of sound signals has predominated, but playback of electric signals and even video playback of visual signals suggests that playback will become just as prevalent in studies of communication in other sensory modalities. This book is one of the outcomes of a workshop on playback held at Thombridge Hall in the Peak District National Park, England during August 1991. There were two reasons for organising the workshop. First, the considerable and lively debate in the literature about the design and analysis of playback experiments -the pseudoreplication debate -was in danger of generating more heat than light. A workshop forum seemed the obvious place to clarify and, if possible, resolve the debate. Second, with the number of new playback and analysis techniques increasing rapidly, it seemed an opportune moment to discuss these techniques and to review some rapidly developing areas of interest in sound communication.

Song Translation: Lyrics in Contexts grew out of a project dedicated to the translation of song lyrics. The book aligns itself with the tradition of descriptive translation studies. Its authors, scholars from Finland, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, Norway and Sweden, all deal with the translation of song lyrics in a great variety of different contexts, including music and performance settings, (inter)cultural perspectives, and historical backgrounds. On the one hand, the analyses demonstrate the breadth and diversity of the concept of translation itself, on the other they show how different contexts set up conditions that shape translational practices and products in different ways. The book is intended for translation studies scholars as well as for musicologists, students of language and/or music and practicing translators; in short, anybody interested in this creative and fascinating field of translational practice.

A monthly journal for the musician, the music student, and all music lovers.

Although the song is often the subject of monographs, one of its forms remains insufficiently researched: the vocalised song, communicated to the spectator through performance. The study of the song takes one back to the study of vocal practices, from aesthetic objects to forms and to plural styles. To conceive a song means approaching it in its different instances of creation as well as its linguistic diversity. Jean Nicolas De Surmont proposes ways of research and analysis useful to musicians, musicologists, and literary critics alike. In his book he takes up the issue of vocal poetry in addition to examining the theoretic aspects of song objects. Rather than offering an autonomous model of analysis, De Surmont extends the research fields and suggests responses to debates that have involved everyone interested in vocal poetic forms.