Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

There is a considerable history to research exploring relations between music and language. We begin with some of this intellectual background to better locate the research questions taken up in the body of this chapter. While these questions -about the linguistic mediation of musical and especially timbral discourse, and the connections between the singing voice and place, class, ethnicity, and identity -are very contemporary ones, they are clearly prefigured historically, in the overlapping legacies of Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and Roman Jakobson, all of whom made a place for music in their programs for the study of the mental, semiotic, communicative, expressive, and discursive roles of language. In ethnomusicology it was their student and contemporary George Herzog, also trained as a linguistic anthropologist, who drew out the musical implications of their ideas and elaborated the importance of bringing linguistic sophistication to the social analysis of music.A review of the key themes in the language and music literature during the formative periods of twentieth-century anthropology, linguistics, and ethnomusicology (Feld and Fox 1994) indicates how those early programs developed into four principal conversations. The first, and perhaps best known of these, is the general and abstract consideration of music as a language. This is the perspective that produced formal linguistic ... log in or subscribe to read full text