The Contemporary Literature-Music Relationship

This book explores the relationship between words and music in contemporary texts, examining, in particular, the way that new technologies are changing the literature-music relationship. It brings an eclectic and novel range of interdisciplinary theories to the area of musico-literary studies, drawing from the fields of semiotics, musicology, psychoanalysis, music cognition, emotion and affect, cosmopolitanism, globalization, ethnicity, and biraciality. Chapters range from critical analyses of the representation of music and the musical profession in contemporary novels, to examination of the forms and cultural meanings of contemporary intermedia and multimedia works. The book theorizes cross-culturality in the word and music relationship, arguing that crossings between words and music create emergent structures and meanings that can facilitate forms of cultural crossing, particularly transnationalism and cross-cultural exchange. The convergence of these formal and cultural crossings is conceptualized as musico-literary miscegenation, using interracial sexual relationships as a metaphor. Smith also inspects the dynamics of improvisation and composition, and the different ways they intersect with performance. Further, the book explores the huge changes that computer-based real-time algorithmic text and music generation are making to the literature-music nexus. This volume provides fascinating insight into the relationship between literature and music, and will be of interest to those fields as well as New Media and Performance Studies.

Hazel Smith is a research professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney, Australia.