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- Title
Description A Common Potential of Words and Music?
- Authors
Wolf, Werner
- Abstract
This essay contributes to the survey of the field of word (or literature) and music studies by singling out one of the many potential areas in which both media appear to overlap, namely description. Although intuitively description seems to be relevant for both word and music studies, it has hardly found scholarly attention from a media-comparative point of view (description here differing markedly from narrativity, which over the past few decades has repeatedly been discussed from this angle). The essay attempts to remedy this neglect. The first part outlines distinctive features of description with reference to fiction as one of the media that are commonly acknowledged as being able to describe. In the second part the respective potentials and limits of fiction and (instrumental) music are discussed by comparing typical objects, techniques and functions of description in these media. It will be argued that the range of describable objects and the precision as well as the imaginative effects of description are, as expected, significantly narrower in music and that description is more frequently employed to "impose an interpretation" (Riffaterre, "Descriptive Imagery" 125) in fiction than in music. In spite of these differences it will be shown that description is not only a well-known and frequent element in literature but constitutes a potential of music, too, albeit a limited one.
- Subjects
ESSAYS; MUSIC &; literature; INSTRUMENTAL music; MUSICAL fiction; MUSIC
- Publication
Word & Music Studies, 2007, Vol 9, p197
- ISSN
1566-0958
- Publication type
Essay