Epilogue

This brief closing section of the book explores how three recent examples of coloratura singing by the rising generation of singers reflects the relevance, importance, and power of the melismatic female singer. Rather than serving as a general sign of technical skill, decoration, or word painting, coloratura now also signals particular intensities, emotions, inflections, madness, and even death, depending on the performer and composer involved. And current coloraturas such as Natalie Dessay, Diana Damrau, Lisette Oropesa, Erin Morley, and so many more continue to revivify the power of the singing voice.

Introduction

The Introduction sets forth a brief history of coloratura singing and identifies historical questions, issues, and contexts in scholarly literature. From opera’s origins, composers employed melismatic text treatment to highlight a singer’s agility, range, and the character’s emotional intensity, as well as for frequent moments of word painting. This tradition of solo singing was still prominent during the “bel canto” period of the early nineteenth century when composers employed coloratura vocal writing as part of normal melodic text treatment. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, coloratura was a rare feature in operatic vocal writing. Coloratura also shifted to the domain of female singers, and often particular sopranos. In providing a historical context for the study of singing, gender, and nineteenth-century opera, the author proposes that the increasing specificity of coloratura led to its eventual identity as a voice-type, becoming an indicator of the modern.

A Call for Hypothesis-Driven, Multi-Level Analysis in Research on Emotional Word Painting in Music: Commentary on Sun & Cuthbert (2018)

This commentary discusses Sun and Cuthbert's (2018) exploratory analysis of emotional word painting in a corpus of English-language popular and folk songs. The authors are complimented for their application of computational tools to an impressively large sample of a somewhat understudied musical genre, and for their detailed level of analysis mapping musical features to the semantic content of individual words. This work, however, suffers from a lack of a priori predictions which causes multiple comparison issues leading to a dramatic reduction in statistical power. The selection of musical features and analytical strategies also seems arbitrary at times due to the absence of motivating hypotheses. It is argued that the ethological literature on affective vocal communication in animals might offer an avenue for future hypothesis-driven research on this topic.

Mesomedes’ Hymn to the Sun

This chapter investigates the relationship between the lyrics and the music of Mesomedes’ Hymn to the Sun. There are many instances of word painting in music. The chapter argues that Mesomedes’ Hymn to the Sun is a piece of music well thought through by the composer. The song’s melodic contours reflect and accentuate the meaning of the words, which can affectively be brought forth in sound if the performer is musically sensitive and is aware of the word-melody relationships. It is argued that the song was most probably composed for monodic performance.

Baudelaire’s Assemblage

Song is a combination of elements, of which the outcome is not always stable. This chapter examines the nature of the bonds formed between poem and music by proposing a new ‘‘assemblage’’ model, which focuses on five key parameters: (a) metre/prosody; (b) form/structure; (c) sound properties/repetition; (d) semantics/word painting; (e) live performance options. This approach bridges methodological gaps exposed through an examination of existing models used in translation theory, adaptation theory, and word/music theory. The two stages in the assemblage model examine: (1) adhesion strength (how closely poem and music stick together); (2) accretion/dilution (how successful the song setting is). The phases of analysis factor in how song is a non-permanent form which goes through multiple iterations of repackaging, including different performances of the same song and different settings of the same poem.

“Il pleure dans mon coeur”: Verlaine, Debussy, Kodály

The poetry of Paul Verlaine inspired several songs by Debussy. Il pleure dans mon coeur is no. 2 in the cycle Ariettes oubliées. The same poem is used as a motto for a short piano piece by Zoltán Kodály: no. 3 in the Seven Pieces for Piano, op. 11 (Esik a városban). The paper describes the madrigalesque word painting of Kodály’s composition on the one hand, and analyzes the modes of its melodic material on the other. In a broader context, the influence of French art (the music of Debussy in particular) on the artistic development of the young Kodály is discussed, as well as the two composers’ mutual estimation of each other.

Ekphrasis

This chapter examines the use of ekphrasis in early modern theatre, with particular emphasis on its effect on the stage and the relationship of ekphrastic speech to the ongoing action in which it is enunciated. It maps the parameters of ekphrasis on the early modern English stage by considering a few examples of the ways in which ekphrasis instantiates early modern theatricality. It also discusses the expressive potential of ekphrastic speech and its transmission to the listener as well as the ironic uses of ekphrasis as a mode of persuasion, whether directed to oneself, an on-stage auditor, off-stage auditors, or all three. It argues that ekphrasis creates nothing less than what it calls ‘the psyche of the play’ and explains how the unusually flexible capacity of the staged word allows it to be used for a wide range of theatrical techniques, including the usual sense of ‘word-painting’. Finally, it looks at William Shakespeare’s deployment of ekphrasis in his work such asHamlet.

Suggestions for Future Corpus-Based Text Painting Analyses: A Response to Strykowski

This commentary provides multiple suggestions for future research on text painting that have been inspired by Strykowski's (2016) quantitative analysis of height-related musical imagery. For example, musical features such as meter, harmony, and position may be incorporated to expand the scope of the research. The commentary concludes by referencing two additional corpora that may further benefit the quantitative study of text painting, namely, repertories that contain a dearth of word-painting, and an upcoming digital repository of Tasso-based madrigals.