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Music and the Written Word
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Music and the Written Word

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 March 2025 | Viewed by 9109

Special Issue Editor

Dr. Gillian Dooley

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University, Adelaide 5000, Australia
Interests: English literature; literature studies; literary criticism; fiction; arts and humanities; music history

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Words and song have long been thought to spring from the same expressive impulse. In Disgrace, JM Coetzee writes that "the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul". But what happens when the spoken word becomes text? To what extent can written language behave as though it were a type of music—or music act as a language? This Special Issue will explore the many ways in which music and literature may be linked: music as a theme and a motif in fiction; rhetorical links between music and language in literary texts; the musician as author and the author as musician. Some questions which might be addressed include:

  • What is the nature of the challenge faced by a composer setting a literary text to music, and what makes a song succeed?
  • What is lost, and what is found, when a literary work is transformed into an opera?
  • Can instrumental music tell a story, or move beyond mimesis of extra-musical sounds to convey abstract ideas?
  • What are the limits of writing about music? How can words convey music’s effect and its affect?
  • How do oft-repeated narratives about composers’ personal lives affect the reception of their music?

Scholars and practitioners in both music and literature are invited to submit proposals for this Special Issue. Practice-based, empirical, and theoretical approaches are all welcome.

Dr. Gillian Dooley
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

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Further information on MDPI's Special Issue policies can be found here.

Published Papers (6 papers)

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Research

15 pages, 274 KiB  
Article
Is This the Gate?: J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello and Its Operatic Adaptation
by Xingyu Lin
Humanities 2025, 14(3), 55; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14030055 - 9 Mar 2025
Viewed by 132
Abstract
Premiered at the 2024 Adelaide Festival, Is This the Gate? is an opera excerpt composed by Nicholas Lens and set to a libretto written by J. M. Coetzee. It is adapted from the last section of Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello (2003), revolving around [...] Read more.
Premiered at the 2024 Adelaide Festival, Is This the Gate? is an opera excerpt composed by Nicholas Lens and set to a libretto written by J. M. Coetzee. It is adapted from the last section of Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello (2003), revolving around the eponymous character’s trial before the gate in the afterworld. This article explores the literary, musical and dramaturgical elements of Is This the Gate? and contends that the adaptation, despite its brevity and incompleteness, indexes and reworks some of the most important intertexts, localities and motifs that connect Coetzee’s early and late works. Allusions to Kafka and Dante frame the scenario for Costello in limbo—a state mirroring a writer’s late-in-life predicament—while references to Australia’s weather and fauna reflect Coetzee’s relationship to his South African roots and adopted home. Further, Costello’s conviction that she is “a secretary of the invisible” holds clues to Coetzee’s deployment of voices and fictional personae since his debut, Dusklands (1974). The last few acts of the opera excerpt evoke themes of desire and mortality that chime with Coetzee’s other Costello narratives, including his latest collection, The Pole and Other Stories (2023). The adaptation ends with Costello’s declaration of her subjectivity, which suggests a writer’s yearning and resolution to go beyond the threshold of life and death. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Music and the Written Word)
13 pages, 206 KiB  
Article
‘I Heard Music’: Mansfield Park, an Opera by Jonathan Dove and Alasdair Middleton
by Gillian Dooley
Humanities 2025, 14(2), 26; https://doi.org/10.3390/h14020026 - 7 Feb 2025
Viewed by 843
Abstract
When composer Jonathan Dove first read Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, he immediately saw its operatic potential. In a newspaper interview, he is quoted as saying that the novel ‘haunted me for years’. He was particularly affected by Fanny Price and her [...] Read more.
When composer Jonathan Dove first read Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, he immediately saw its operatic potential. In a newspaper interview, he is quoted as saying that the novel ‘haunted me for years’. He was particularly affected by Fanny Price and her predicament. When the opportunity came to write the opera, Dove worked with librettist Alasdair Middleton to create an operatic work that builds on and reinterprets Austen’s novel. It is a chamber opera, originally scored for piano duet, and although Dove later made an arrangement for a chamber ensemble, he retained the piano, identifying it as a sound world with which Austen was intimately familiar. In this paper, I track the transition from the printed page via the score and the libretto to the opera, and analyse the means by which Dove and Middleton create this popular adaptation, including telescoping the plot, using and adapting Austen’s own language, incorporating music inspired by eighteenth-century glees, and using characters as a chorus, with music that enhances the impact and translates the powerful emotions on Austen’s page into raw and urgent feelings. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Music and the Written Word)
18 pages, 306 KiB  
Article
How the Music Machine Makes Myths Real: AI, Holograms, and Ashley Eternal
by Victor Robert Kennedy
Humanities 2024, 13(5), 140; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13050140 - 21 Oct 2024
Viewed by 1471
Abstract
Since ancient times, music has been instrumental in giving life to the stories we build our identities and cultures around. I will examine how, in our time, music creates new myths by creating its own heroes and heroines through capital and the star [...] Read more.
Since ancient times, music has been instrumental in giving life to the stories we build our identities and cultures around. I will examine how, in our time, music creates new myths by creating its own heroes and heroines through capital and the star system. In traditional literary and cultural analysis, a distinction was drawn between the natural and the supernatural when discussing literary mythology; in the twentieth century, an equivalent distinction was made in works of art that, in Baudrillard’s terminology, make use of the realms of the real and the “hyperreal” (1981). In today’s mythmaking, the supernatural has been largely replaced by the technological, and recent developments blur the line between science fiction and fantasy; tech has become megalotech. A recent episode of the television series Black Mirror, “Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too” (2019), explores these concepts with an examination of the pros and cons of replacing human performers with AI simulacra. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Music and the Written Word)
20 pages, 4297 KiB  
Article
‘After All the Years of Separation’: Musically Representing Author L.M. Montgomery’s Suspended Romances
by Merri Bell
Humanities 2024, 13(4), 104; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13040104 - 11 Aug 2024
Viewed by 938
Abstract
Canadian author L.M. Montgomery did not set out to write stories about romance. As she indicated in her journals, she wrote character-driven stories of young girls navigating their way through girlhood. However, she understood that the public, and her publishers, expected these girls [...] Read more.
Canadian author L.M. Montgomery did not set out to write stories about romance. As she indicated in her journals, she wrote character-driven stories of young girls navigating their way through girlhood. However, she understood that the public, and her publishers, expected these girls to experience romance that culminated in marriage, following the societal traditions of the time. Montgomery managed this dichotomy by having many characters experience a suspended romance, delaying the romantic aspect of the relationship for as long as possible. Arts-based practice is a mode of analysis and offers the opportunity to find a new way of understanding and communicating Montgomery’s type of suspended romance. Music is, in many ways, considered romantic, so it is an appropriate medium to communicate Montgomery’s romantic narrative structures. This paper investigates Montgomery’s use of suspended romance in her novels and how this delay provided her characters with time to develop other areas of their lives. An arts-based methodology was used to identify and analyse recurring themes in Montgomery’s work, as the question is not can Montgomery’s theme of romance be musically represented but how. The result of this creative experimentation is a new musical composition that articulates these suspended romances using six different musical devices. This creative work exemplifies the intertextual link that exists between Montgomery’s work and new musical compositions. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Music and the Written Word)
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15 pages, 230 KiB  
Article
Bruce Springsteen, Rock Poetry, and Spatial Politics of the Promised Land
by Shankhadeep Chattopadhyay
Humanities 2024, 13(3), 75; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13030075 - 13 May 2024
Viewed by 1467
Abstract
The humanistic-geographical associations of popular music foster the potential to articulate the production and reproduction of an activity-centered politicized ontology of space in the everyday social life of any creative communitarian framework where an alternative set of lifestyles, choices, and tastes engage in [...] Read more.
The humanistic-geographical associations of popular music foster the potential to articulate the production and reproduction of an activity-centered politicized ontology of space in the everyday social life of any creative communitarian framework where an alternative set of lifestyles, choices, and tastes engage in a constant play. A cursory glimpse at the (counter-)cultural artistic productions of the American 1970s shows that the lyrical construction of real and imaginary geographical locales has remained a distinguishing motif in the song-writing techniques of the celebrated rock poets. In the case of Bruce Springsteen, whether it is the ‘badlands’, constituting the rebellious and notorious young adults, or the ‘promised land’, which is the desired destination of all his characters, his lyrical oeuvre has numerously provided an alternative sense of place. Springsteen’s lyrical and musical characterization of fleeting urban images like alleys, hotels, engines, streets, neon, pavements, locomotives, cars, etc., have not only captured the American cities under the changing regime of capital accumulation but also contributed to the inseparability of everyday social lives and modern urban experiences. Against the backdrop of this argument, this article seeks to explore how the socio-political and cultural aesthetics of Springsteen’s song stories unfurl distinct spatial poetics through their musical language. Also, the article attempts to delineate how Springsteen’s unabashed celebration of the working-class geography of the American 1970s unveils a site of cultural struggle, wherein existing social values are reconstructed amidst imaginary landscapes and discursive strategies of resistance are weaved. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Music and the Written Word)
14 pages, 266 KiB  
Article
“The Noise of Our Living”: Richard Wright and Chicago Blues
by Jeff Wimble
Humanities 2024, 13(1), 28; https://doi.org/10.3390/h13010028 - 31 Jan 2024
Viewed by 1814
Abstract
Historicizing the musical genre known as “Chicago blues,” I further complicate Richard Wright’s already complicated attitudes toward “the folk” and modernity. Utilizing close readings of 12 Million Black Voices, I show how Wright’s apparent denigration of the blues as an outmoded, pre-modern [...] Read more.
Historicizing the musical genre known as “Chicago blues,” I further complicate Richard Wright’s already complicated attitudes toward “the folk” and modernity. Utilizing close readings of 12 Million Black Voices, I show how Wright’s apparent denigration of the blues as an outmoded, pre-modern artistic form is dependent on his historical situation writing before the advent of a new electrified form of blues that developed in Chicago shortly after the book’s publication. Utilizing biographical details of the life of Muddy Waters, I show how his work as a musician in Mississippi, then in Chicago, and his development of an electrified blues style, parallels and personifies the shift from an African American perspective rooted in an agrarian, pre-modern south to an industrial, modern north documented so effectively by Wright. Furthermore, the Chicago blues musicians’ transmogrification of the rural Delta blues into an electrified, urban expression manifests the vernacular-modernist artistic conception which Wright seems to be envisioning and pointing toward in 12 Million Black Voices. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Music and the Written Word)
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