Reale und fiktive Sender-Adressaten-Konstellationen in Fußball-Fangesängen – mit romanistischen Beispielen

Football chants have been researched in several disciplines – from musicology to ethnology to linguistics – for quite a while now. They have been most intensively investigated in the German speaking countries, thus focusing on German chants; Kopiez/Brink 1998 is still the reference work in this respect. Other languages and cultures, however, have been studied much less; this paper therefore proposes an investigation of the (lyrics of) football chants of Romance language cultures using a corpus of French, Spanish and Italian songs. The analysis follows a new categorizing scheme, namely “participant constellations”, i.e. constellations of senders and addressees (fans towards their own team, fans towards referees, fans towards opponents’ fans etc.). The results reveal that constellations can be both real and fictitious; in the latter case, the fans sing a text which takes the position of a first person and is sung from the perspective of one exemplary fan. This is the case in chants which stylize the fan’s connection with his/her team as a romantic relationship. The corpus also contains other, sometimes very original fictitious speakers that are linked to the feeling of togetherness among the fan base and show creativity and humour.

Adventures in Music Translation: Italian Songs and Arias (aka “The Yellow Book”) and Me

This article is a general exploration of translation issues involved in the translation and performance of the art song, arguing that although critical interest in recent years has been growing, the problems involved in these hybrid translation projects involving both text and music present a number of conundrums: primacy of text or music, focus on performability, and age-old arguments about fidelity and/or foreignization vs domestication. Using information from theatre translation and input from singers themselves, the author argues that this particular area of translation studies will work best in the future with a collaborative approach that includes translators, musicologists, and performers working together in order to produce the most “singable” text as possible for the art song in performance.

The structure of metrical patterns in tunes and in literary verse. Evidence from discrepancies between musical and linguistic rhythm in Italian songs

A first exploration of acceptable and unacceptable discrepancies between linguistic and musical rhythm in Italian songs has uncovered two kinds of discrepancies which do not have counterparts in literary verse: durational discrepancies between adjacent syllables and stress-beat misalignments that involve nonadjacent syllables. The latter type is explored in greater detail than the former. Our survey suggests that analogous misalignments are in principle impossible in literary verse composed in accentual or accentual-syllabic meters, because, on the one hand, the abstract metrical templates that characterize such meters are not anchored in measured time, and, on the other hand, they do not recognize more than two degrees of metrical prominence.

Music-Language Correlations and the “Scotch Snap”

in this study we examine a rhythmic pattern known as the Scotch Snap (SS): a sixteenth-note on the beat followed by a dotted eighth-note. A musical corpus analysis shows that the SS is common in both Scottish and English songs, but virtually nonexistent in German and Italian songs. We explore possible linguistic correlates for this phenomenon. Our reasoning is that languages in which stressed syllables are often short might tend to favor the SS pattern. The traditional distinction between long and short vowels correlates partly with the SS pattern across languages, but not completely. (German allows short stressed vowels, but the SS pattern is not common in German music.) We then examine the duration of stressed syllables in four modern speech corpora: one British English, one German, and two Italian. British English shows a much higher proportion of very short stressed syllables (less than 100 ms) than the other two languages. Four vowels account for a large proportion of very short stressed syllables in British English, and also constitute a large proportion of SS tokens in our English musical corpus. This is the first study known to us that establishes a correlation between speech rhythms in languages and musical rhythms in the songs of those languages.

Phrasing in medieval song: perspectives from traditional music

During the course of a series of articles relating medieval Italian songs to oral and unwritten traditions, Nino Pirrotta comments on a peculiar anonymous two-voice setting from the fourteenth century whose verses seem to have been broken and shattered by the music. Word repetition ‘does not result in a more effective or more understandable rendition of the text; on the contrary, it so fragments and stutters it that any meaning is lost, except as a pretext for the melody which submerges it’. The song in question, Dolce lo mio drudo, is part of a group of unica with Calabrian associations found in the oldest layer of the Reina manuscript. Pirrotta transcribes the song in full and analyses the text and its cognates in detail. It is a ballata with irregularities. I quote in Example 1 just the refrain, together with an indication of the syllable count, in order to facilitate comparison with what follows.