This thesis explores text-music relationships in Dallapiccola’s Goethe Lieder. Though the cycle is based on Goethe’s West-östlicher divan, it was Mann’s novel Joseph und seine Brüder that spurred its inception. This seven-song cycle revolves around Suleika, a character from the biblical love story of Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife. Dallapiccola set this text upon reading Mann’s novel, which stems from the same story; however, Mann portrayed the character of Suleika as a sympathetic lover rather than the traditional evil seductress. By conducting a thorough pitch structure analysis of each song, focusing in particular on motives, symmetry and aggregates, this thesis examines text-music relationships to demonstrate how Mann’s Suleika is musically represented. This thesis illustrates that Dallapiccola’s setting is a musical composite of both Goethe and Mann’s Suleikas and thus sheds new analytical and hermeneutic light on an important work by one of the twentieth-century’s most prominent serial composers.

This thesis explores text-music relationships in Dallapiccola’s Goethe Lieder. Though the cycle is based on Goethe’s West-östlicher divan, it was Mann’s novel Joseph und seine Brüder that spurred its inception. This seven-song cycle revolves around Suleika, a character from the biblical love story of Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife. Dallapiccola set this text upon reading Mann’s novel, which stems from the same story; however, Mann portrayed the character of Suleika as a sympathetic lover rather than the traditional evil seductress. By conducting a thorough pitch structure analysis of each song, focusing in particular on motives, symmetry and aggregates, this thesis examines text-music relationships to demonstrate how Mann’s Suleika is musically represented. This thesis illustrates that Dallapiccola’s setting is a musical composite of both Goethe and Mann’s Suleikas and thus sheds new analytical and hermeneutic light on an important work by one of the twentieth-century’s most prominent serial composers.

Although considerable attention has been paid to the texting practices of specific composers and certain repertoires, a comprehensive study of the practice of texting in the sacred Latin‐texted vocal works of sixteenth‐century England remains to be undertaken. How did English composers, scribes, and singers of the sixteenth century set words to music? Today, the general impression that emerges from critical apparatuses of modern performing editions, where manuscripts of vocal music copied by sixteenth-century English copyists are concerned, is negative: they are regarded as casual, often‐contradictory transmissions, replete with idiosyncrasies and arbitrary placement of text. But the detail in five hundred‐year‐old primary sources cannot and should not be so easily dismissed. Through a series of case studies drawn from the largest and most complete music manuscripts of English provenance that date from approximately 1500–90 — the Eton Choirbook, the Lambeth Choirbook, the Caius Choirbook, the ‘Forrest‐Heather’ Partbooks, the Peterhouse Partbooks (Henrician Set), the Sadler Partbooks, the Baldwin Partbooks, and the Dow Partbooks — this dissertation offers a fresh perspective on the many texting variants present in the sources, subjecting them to critical analysis to ascertain what prompted a scribe to copy a passage of music and its text in a particular way. Occasionally, a variant was indeed no more than a result of scribal error or inattention. More often than not, however, a scribe was either resolving an ambiguity that he perceived in his exemplar or deliberately infusing the copy with his own concepts of ideal texting. Three specific areas of interest are traced in the dissertation: the texting of long‐note cantus firmi, the treatment of melismata, and the relationship between music, prosody, and textual syntax. At the outset of the century, cantus firmus lines, as scribes copied them, required a certain amount of interpretation before they could be realised; melismata were an integral part of the compositional style that functioned as punctuation for the music; and textual coherence was unnecessary if it could not be achieved within the constraints of the music. By the close of the century, cantus firmus lines were copied literally with no additional interpretation required on the part of the performer; melismata were reduced to a purely decorative function; and textual integrity and correct prosody had become defining factors in how a piece of music was composed and formally organised. The specifics of what carried musicians from one extreme to the other in the interim is at the heart of this study. This dissertation is part of the growing body of research on the music of sixteenth‐century England. In enquiring into the minutiae of setting Latin text to music during this period, an area that heretofore has been relatively unexplored, it is hoped that this project will contribute to the total knowledge in the wider field of studies in text‐music relations.

Au confluent de l’histoire des idées et de la poétique romanesque, cette thèse s’intéresse aux interactions textuelles multiples entre le genre romanesque et l’imaginaire musical tel qu’il s’est développé au fil du XXe siècle. Elle examine les modalités par lesquelles une idée de la musique, intronisée comme paradigme d’écriture par un certain nombre de romancières et de romanciers français entre 1900 et 1980, informe la composition du roman tout en infléchissant la production du sens, qui, à l’horizon du modèle musical, devient davantage signifiance que signification. Elle appréhende également l’évolution des pratiques romanesques à la lumière des discours sur la musique tels que les réfléchissent et les intègrent les œuvres, afin de dégager les différentes manières par lesquelles le musical, à entendre comme les propriétés dérivées de l’objet musique, s’impose comme le modus operandi de l’écriture, et invite le critique à interpréter l’œuvre sur le modèle herméneutique de la partition. Le récit-partition apparaît sur fond d’une crise de la signification et de la représentation, dont les ferments sont à chercher dans le fonctionnement sémiotique même du langage. La recherche entend montrer comment, dans l’optique de répondre à cette crise du langage et aux nombreuses répercussions qui confrontent la sémantique romanesque à une impasse, certains romanciers du XXe siècle ont envisagé la musique comme une fiction du roman et pour le roman, puis ont façonné à partir d’elle les paramètres d’une nouvelle écriture romanesque. Hérité du topos romantique de la « musique absolue », qui considère l’œuvre musicale comme un pur phénomène sonore, irréductible au langage verbal et, du fait de son autoréférentialité, le modèle de l’organon absolu, ce paradigme d’écriture aurait permis aux écrivains du XXe siècle d’abandonner les prémisses référentielles du genre romanesque et de penser ce dernier à l’aune de nouvelles configurations poétiques, fondées sur la résonance du sens, l’autoréflexivité du médium et une mémoire textuelle plus sensible que philosophique ou morale. La réflexion menée dans le cadre de la thèse interroge en premier lieu les conditions épistémologiques, métaphysiques et discursives qui concourent à l’avènement d’un paradigme musical, lui-même tributaire d’un régime du sensible particulier, qui pousse des générations entières d’écrivains à se tourner vers la musique pour ravitailler une matière romanesque dès lors perçue comme lacunaire. La démonstration se décline essentiellement en quatre temps : le premier chapitre entend prendre au pied de la lettre la métaphore de la partition, de manière à montrer comment les indices paratextuels et structuraux actualisent certains procédés d’écriture qui s’inspirent de la musique ; les deuxième et troisième chapitres interrogeront les modalités de « textualisation » de la musique à travers les prismes respectifs de la création et de la réception musicales représentées dans la fiction, en s’intéressant aux figures de compositeurs et de musiciens (chap. 2), puis aux ekphraseis musicales et aux scènes d’écoute (chap. 3) ; enfin, c’est sur les grands mythes de la musique que débouche notre enquête, mythes antiques mais surtout wagnériens, dont la réécriture plus ou moins conforme avec la matrice d’origine permet de diffracter un rapport complexe à la modernité par une ressaisie du sens, de la temporalité narrative et du discours romanesque au miroir des récits fondateurs et du langage premier et plénier dont ils portent la mémoire. / This dissertation strives to understand the various interactions between 20th-century fictional works and the contemporary musical imaginary that was developed and modulated throughout the century. Rooted in a dual approach – that of the history of ideas and of the poetics of the novel –, this study examines how a given idea of music, inducted as a writing paradigm by many French novelists between 1900 and 1980, models textual composition and becomes a means to rethink the creation of signification in narrative forms. It also traces the evolution of the French novel and its writing practices in the light of musical discourses and aesthetics as reflected by and integrated into novelistic works. To this end, the concept of “narrative score” (récit-partition), as a hermeneutic instrument or reading tool, is paramount in order to grasp the ways in which the musical – i.e. the properties derived from music as an objective or phenomenal reality – imbues the literary text and becomes the modus operandi of fiction writing for some French novelists. The “narrativescore” emerged in the context of an artistic crisis – stemming from the semiotic fabric of language itself – that questioned both the ideas of representation and meaning. The present work will show how this crisis of language and consequential impasse of the novelistic genre lead some 20th-century writers to conceptualize music as a fiction of and for the novel with the purpose of fashioning a new narrative framework by remodeling the genre’s parameters. Descending from the romantic trope of “absolute music” which considers the musical piece as an autoreferential structure comprised of pure sounds without intrinsic meaning thus irreducible to verbal speech, the idea of music as a writing paradigm allows novelists to relinquish the referential premises of the narrative genre to introduce new poetic configurations based on the resonance of meaning, the self-reflexivity of the medium and a textual memory, more engrained in the sensible than in the speakable (dicible) or the philosophical. We will first outline the epistemological, metaphysical and discursive landscape that lead to the advent of a musical paradigm in literature, which is dependent on a specific “partition of the sensible” (Rancière); here, we will explore what motivated several generations of writers to turn to music as a way to replenish the fictional material they perceived as deficient while fulfilling their ideal of an autotelic work of art. The textual analysis that follows will be divided into four parts: in the first chapter, we will consider the score not as a metaphorical notion, but as an actual model; indeed, some paratextual elements and structural configurations highlight the presence of writing techniques directly inspired and shaped by the musical; the second and third chapters will examine the textual actualization and representation of music respectively through the lens of musical composition (poïesis) and musical reception (esthesis) by analyzing fictional composers and musicians (chap. 2), then musical ekphraseis and listening scenes (chap. 3); lastly, we will focus on the great musical myths – ancient myths, but mostly Wagnerian ones – whose rewriting, more or less in line with the original stories, allow the writers to renegotiate their complex relationship with modern times, by re-capturing meaning, narrative temporality and novelistic discourse through the use of these founding myths and the unitary, almost pre-adamic, language.