Call for papers: dossier “Literature and Music” (31st dossier)

2021-05-04

Call for papers: dossier “Literature and Music”

Music and literature are fields that historically mirror, mix, delimit, expand each other in multiple and complex interlaces. One engenders the other, promotes simulations, analogies, crossings, uses, loans, imitations, complements, extensions, mergers, confusions. There is no time or place where the word has not magnetized the sound, or the music has not touched the verb.

Certainly, the voice is an experimental scene for these encounters and confrontations, caresses, and frictions. From the vocal gesture to the sung word, from the phonetic (and sonorous, vocal, etc.) poetry to the rhythmic improvisation, from the verbivocovisual[1] of the concretists poets to the poems-score (which come at least from Mallarmé and are always reemerging), to the screams and whispers of popular singing. The twentieth century, especially fertile, gave way, both to Luciano Berio's vocal laborintos and to the myriad of experiences that earned him the nickname “century of song”, especially in the cultural strands of the Black Atlantic.

But the interpenetrations of the musical and the literary are not necessarily guided by the voice. Mallarmé sets the tone again: modernity has re-merged genres - literary, musical, from other fields – and opened the possibility for cross-inspirations. The fugues of James Joyce, the waves of Virginia Woolf, the harmonies of Mário de Andrade, the messages from the mountain of Guimarães Rosa, the multitemporal constructions of the new French novel, the orchestrations of Marguerite Duras, the jazz prose of Cortázar, the listening processes of Clarice Lispector, the Carpentier's Baroque Concerto, among so many others.

In this speculative game between two imaginaries, it is necessary to dedicate a look to the conceptual becoming of criticism and theory between the musical and the literary. Musical concepts are transformed (sometimes radically) when used as lenses to read the literary: Leitmotif, tempo, the opposition between tonal and atonal, syncope, harmony, counterpoint, polyphony, series, serialism etc. And the reverse for the concepts of language focused on music: narrativity, discourse, rhetoric, punctuation, binary oppositions, etc.

This dossier therefore intends to bring together a wide range of contributions that will enable (short-) circuits between sound and meaning, revisit moments and pull the threads of history, talk about singing and listen to the lyrics, taste the grain of the voice, listen to structures, and read polyphonies. There is no restriction on the historical period, nationality or language of the authors or works studied.

Axes (suggestions):

  • Poetry and music, music and poetry
  • The becoming music of the word
  • The lyrics, the song
  • The music of prose
  • Vocal experiments in literature and music
  • Improvisation and composition in literature and music
  • The ethical and aesthetic place of silence
  • Dramaturgy and music
  • The current state of musical theater
  • Narrativity in music

 

Contributions that conform to the Guidelines for authors and the different sections of the journal will be accepted. Papers will be received until August 30th and will be evaluated by the double-blind evaluation system.

 

Invited publishers:

Prof. Dr. Maurício Ayer (DLM / FFLCH - USP)

Profa. Dr. Annita Costa Malufe (PUC-SP / CNPq)

Prof. Dr. Rogério Costa (CMU / ECA - USP)

 

[1] It is a neologism created by the Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos, which means the reconfiguration of the phonosemantics of a sentence in a translation process thought as a kind of recreation.