Interdisciplinarity

Musical settings are by their nature collaborative works in which a composer takes an independent poetic text and sets it to music, an act that calls for both literary sensibility and musical creativity. Although incorporated into a new entity, the poem nevertheless maintains its identity (think of a song’s printed lyrics); however, the poem’s meaning within the setting is now supplemented, shaped or even distorted by musical meanings. How do we interpret the poetic text once incorporated into a musical setting—a joint effort that may be the result of an immediate and cooperative collaboration; or a composer’s faithful and sympathetic interpretation of the text; or, by contrast, an artistic appropriation that takes place across considerable removes geographically, temporally and interpretively? The relationship between music and text has been much discussed by musicologists, who generally recognize that in composition and performance, musical settings are interpretations of the poetic text. Edward T. Cone has suggested that “there can be only one justification for the serious composition of a song; it must be an attempt to increase our understanding of the poem” (p. 15). A song is understood as “a supplementary expression of poetic meanings” (Kramer, p. 126), and as Geoffrey Chew writes, since the song aims to faithfully express the text, a song can be evaluated on its interpretation of the text, and a song can be criticized “on the grounds that the music constitutes a misreading of the text” (“Song”).  

Musicologists have also proposed a variety of models for the text/music relationship, ranging from paradigms that are parasitic to ones that are predatory. In the more parasitic models, the music is slavishly subservient, entirely guided and dominated by the poetic text; such settings serve to reinforce a poem’s textual meaning by adding music whose aim is to express musically the same meanings that the poem is conveying through words, thereby amplifying the expressive impact of the poem. In the more predatory models, the composer utilizes the poem as a mere pretext, as “raw material” to be adopted, digested, assimilated, and transformed in the service of musical expression. Suzanne M. Lodato also catalogues various models that lie somewhere between these parasitic and predatory paradigms. In any model, within the new composition text and music enact a contest over meaning; and as musical gestures reinforce or resist textual meanings, the reading of the poem is altered.

Musico-literary genres

Rossetti’s poetry can be profitably explored in relation to music, and in order to do so Rossetti studies must develop further in the direction of an interart and intermedial inquiry within the field of word and music studies. From the perspective of a literary critical inquiry, how can we approach the variety of musico-literary genres into which Rossetti’s texts have been adopted, including popular song, art song, cantata, song cycle, choral works, hymns, sacred song, musical theatre, orchestral song, vocal chamber music, oratorio, opera, and program music? And how do we interpret the poetic text once incorporated into a new creative entity that is a collaboration of poet, composer, and musicians? The examples that are gathered in this archive demonstrate how a re-negotiation of meaning happens in any serious musical setting, sometimes a re-negotiation within a direct collaboration between poet and composer that leads to an authorially approved variant text, as is the case with Emanuel Aguilar’s Goblin Market: Cantata (1880), or sometimes within a “strong reading” of a text that reshapes understanding of the poem and charts new interpretive possibilities, as does Ruth Gipps’s cantata Goblin Market (1954).

Sources: 

Aguilar, Emanuel Abraham. Goblin Market: Cantata, for Treble Voices. Words by Christina Rossetti. London, Hutchings & Romer, 1880.

Chew, Geoffrey. “Song.” Oxford Music Online. Accessed 25 Feb 2013. www.oxfordmusiconline.com/.

Cone, Edward T. “Words into Music: The Composer’s Approach to the Text.” Sound and Poetry. Edited by Northrop Frye. Columbia UP, 1957, pp. 3-15.

Gipps, Ruth. Goblin Market: Cantata for Two Soprano Soloists, S.S.A. Chorus and String Orchestra (or Piano). Words by Christina Rossetti. London, Novello, 1954.

Kramer, Lawrence. Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, U of California P, 1984.

Lodato, Suzanne M. “Recent Approaches to Text/Music Analysis in the Lied: A Musicological Perspective.” Word and Music Studies: Defining the Field. Edited by Walter Berhart, Steven Paul Scher and Werner Wolf, Word and Music Studies 1, Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA, Rodopi, 1999, pp. 95-112.