Musicolinguistic Approaches to the Study of Song

Abstract

A comprehensive study of song invites a broad range of approaches including but not limited to ethnomusicology, anthropology, sociology, choreology, gesture studies, cognitive science, history, cultural studies, poetry, folklore, literature and linguistics. While the more obvious (and perhaps visible) contributions of linguistics to song are in terms of investigating songtexts, there are also contributions to be made from interactional, multimodal, poetic, performance-based and anthropological approaches to language and from the margins between these approaches and ethnomusicology. In this paper, I argue the case for musicolinguistic and performance-based approaches to song that combine the insights and methods of embodied, interactional and anthropologically grounded linguistics and folklore with rigorous musical analysis and attention to the cultural and wider social and historical context. There is already a broad paradigm of scholarship in this vein and here I attempt to outline the various approaches and the most useful aspects of them for researchers of song.

Notes

1 Fig. 1, extracted from the original publication, includes the Sanskritic Tamil terms ‘swaram’ and ‘avartanam’, with the English plural marker ‘s’. Hyphens were used to indicate that the ‘s’ was not part of a word in its original form. However, as English has long been an established language for discourse about Carnatic music by practitioners, aficionados and scholars, the use of the English plural for these words (i.e. ‘swarams’, ‘avartanams’, ‘ragams’) should not be considered unusual or marked.