Guest: Gibran de Souza, Literary Interpretations of Music: Verbal Music, Ekphrasis of Music and Beyond

This week the IMS guest PhD Gibran de Souza will present a paper draft titled Literary Interpretations of Music: Verbal Music, Ekphrasis of Music and Beyond

Abstract

Literary interpretations of music are verbal representations of specific musical works that feature a locutor who mediates an interlocutor’s imaginary re-encounter with the music. Examples range from poetry to prose and have always caught the attention of literary scholars. The most common theoretical approaches to the phenomenon are Stephen Paul Scher’s ‘verbal music’ along with Werner Wolf’s revision and Claus Clüver’s general concept of ‘ekphrasis’. Despite being too inclusive, the latter’s detailed explanations of specific examples make it the more flexible and consistent of the three. On the downside, however, like the others, it does not offer analytical tools for studying text-music relations, and unlike them, its practical application may seem problematic for being in direct conflict with the established theoretical basis of ‘ekphrasis’. Therefore, I argue that to take a step further in this theoretical discussion, it is necessary to address two distinct yet related problems: the methodological impasse associated with all three authors and the persistent lack of relevant musico-literary analytical tools, and the theoretical impasse associated with Clüver’s approach. To do so, I will, first, revisit all three approaches to understand how the discussion evolved from Scher to Clüver. Second, I will take the latter’s final considerations on the topic as a point of departure to shape a new, specific concept that can contemplate the phenomenon accurately beyond the constraints of both ‘verbal music’ and ‘ekphrasis’. As for the theoretical framework guiding my endeavor, I will adopt Lars Elleström’s approach to ‘media transformation’. Overall, it is within my expectations to clarify the issue at hand and the relevance of a pragmatic solution while demonstrating how a concept consistent with both literary practice and intermedial theory can pave the way for the development of analytical tools necessary for examining the intermedial relations of literary interpretations of music more adequately.

Bio

Gibran de Souza is a PhD candidate in Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature at the State University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. He is also a Doctor of Musical Arts from Arizona State University and is currently a guest researcher at the Center for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies at Linnaeus University. His line of research is centered on the intermedial relationships of literature and music, which ranges from discussions of interactions between literary and musical works in light of their cultural contexts to theoretical investigations of specific intermedial phenomena in literary texts. In his (ongoing) PhD dissertation, he is developing a hermeneutic model for literary interpretations of music based on fundamental concepts from Intermediality, Philosophical Hermeneutics, and Musical Analysis. 

It is possible to attend the seminar both from Dacke in Växjö and via zoom. Contact us at ims@lnu.se if you want to participate via zoom, or sign up for our external email list to receive automatic updates on our events (zoom link and additional information are sent out one week in advance).

Photo: 'Aurora - Connecting Senses’, Cristina Pop-Tiron & Signe Kjær Jensen