Academic and Scholarly Events

  • Linguistics Colloquium Series: Prof. Rolf Noyer

    The Linguistics Colloquium Series is having a talk this Friday, 10/28in Oak 112, at 4:00pm.

     

    We would like to invite you to join us and see Prof. Rolf Noyer's (University of Pennsylvania) talk 'Towards a formal theory of text-setting in art song' (joint work with Luke Adamson). The abstract is attached below. 

    Information about the speaker can be found here: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~rnoyer/home.html  

    The Linguistics Colloquium Series is a student-organized event sponsored by the UConn Department of Linguistics and the UConn Graduate Student Senate. 

    We hope to see you there! 

    Gabriel & Paula

    Abstract:

    Halle & Lehrdahl (1993) first posed the problem of natural text-setting: untutored individuals, after hearing how the the first verse of a song is aligned to music, then have intuitions about well-formed alignments of subsequent verses, even when these verses are prosodically quite different from the first. Just as a natural language grammar defines the set of well-formed expressions in a language, an individual’s text-setting grammar must define the set of well-formed alignments between linguistic texts and the rhythmic events of a piece of music. Various formal models of this grammar have since been proposed, ranging from a deterministic text-to-music matching algorithm (Halle & Lehrdahl 1992, Halle 1999) to a constraint-based grammar employing general but conflicting metrical principles (Hayes 2005).

    This body of research has provided the foundations for us to approach here a related but slightly different problem: how can the text-setting practice of a particular musical composer be formally characterized? Although the theory of generative metrics (Halle & Keyser 1969, Kiparsky 1977) began through formal analysis of the metrical practice of the major poets in English (Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton) there are, to our knowledge, no comparable formally explicit models of the text-setting practice of the major composers of English art song. Yet clearly text-setting in the common practice period was constrained in particular ways and not all settings were acceptable.

    The work to be presented is based on an analysis of the 84 surviving songs written by John Dowland (1563-1626), a contemporary of Shakespeare usually considered, along with Thomas Tallis and Henry Purcell, as one of the greatest exponents of vocal music in English. Whereas naive approaches to text-setting concentrate on how the distribution of surface stressed syllables in a text is aligned with music rhythm, we argue here that text-setting is  a relation among four simultaneous representations: the surface phonology of the text; the poetic metrical structure of the text (nearly all of Dowland’s song texts are metrical poems); the abstract metrical structure of the music; and the rhythmic and harmonic surface properties of the music. Formally we propose that text-settings are well-formed only when the abstract prosodic prominences of the linguistic text (a set not simply coextensive with the stressed syllables) are aligned with various “licensers” in the musical text, including prominence in the musical metrical structure, local durational maxima, and points of pre-cadential harmonic tension.

     

    For more information, contact: Paula fenger at paula.fenger@uconn.edu

If you have any questions, please contact Grad School at 860-486-3617.