Sound/Music

Despite similar representations of temporality and qualia, Claude Debussy’s Nocturnes cannot be analyzed in the lens of Symbolist poetry. For instance, when speaking of “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” Debussy asserts, “‘the music of this prelude is a very free illustration of Mallarmé’s beautiful poem. By no means does it claim to be a synthesis of [it].’” While his thoughts speak to the inability to align poetry—broadly that of the Symbolists—with music, the tones share a conflicting relationship between time and feeling (both physically and emotionally). This is achieved in how Debussy and the Symbolist poets (namely Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire, and Arthur Rimbaud) arrest their work within the evanescent realm of twilight, where time is briefly apprehended and consequently alters one’s sensory perceptions. Specifically, the “senses blen[d]” and/or create a synesthesiac experience. 

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Likewise, Debussy’s melodies “are not so clearly organized into 4- and 8-measure phrases,” causing them to “blend into and [be] distinct from the moving harmonies that engulf them.” Twilight, then, reflects how qualia impacts one’s questionable state of consciousness that lies on the fringes of reverie, drowsiness, or dreaminess. Initially titled “Three Scenes at Twilight,” each of the three components of Nocturnes enable divergent sentiments and sensations to coalesce: “Clouds” symbolizes tranquility and meditation, “Festivals” suggests boisterousness, and “Sirens” laments disillusion. With changes in tempo, instrumentals, and vocals, Nocturnes converges temporality and qualia. Thus, I intend to examine how Nocturnes auditorily represents temporality and qualia in comparison to the visual-auditory nature of Symbolist poetry, where each art form stimulates different sensory perceptions on behalf of the reader / listener.

The Musicality of Lists: Objects of Literature, Sound and Song

Richard Elliott

Lists have been objects of interest to researchers and practitioners in a variety of fields: as literary devices in prose and poetry; as ways of organising knowledge and events; as proto-narratives and performance prompts; as ways of thinking about ontology; as ranking tools; as ways of abbreviating information or grabbing attention (the infamous ‘listicle’), and much more. While often studied in terms of textual strategy, lists also prompt questions for those interested in the interface of the textual and the sonic. There are particular tonalities that can be detected in lists when read aloud, sung or otherwise performed. 

In this paper I wish to investigate the sonority or musicality of the list from two complementary perspectives. Firstly, using examples from literature, film and performance art, I will attend to the sonority of the written list, listening to what occurs when lists are made audible. Here, I will be interested both in the objects that lists invariably group together and in the names of those objects. Both signifier and signified are what makes lists what they are, but the former are of particular note when lists become sonic events. Secondly, I will explore the use of lists as structuring devices in songs, referring to songs performed by Bob Dylan, Nina Simone, Robert Wyatt and Richard Dawson. Again, words (lyrics) as objects in lists are considered alongside the objects those words label and I will conclude by reflecting on some of the ways in which songs position us in the world of objects.

A Rhythmic Approach to Dance Pedagogy

Darren Moore, Melissa Quek

Teaching rhythm as a stand-alone skill set in dance pedagogy is not common, yet it is pivotal and inherent in all dance. Bresnahan (2020, p.91) defines rhythm in dance as either intentional rhythm, which is regulated by a pulse or emphases of movement, or natural rhythm, that occurs as a by-product of bodily functions. This paper argues that developing rhythmic skills in a method similar to musical pedagogies can improve dance rhythm and deepen engagement in movement. This approach helps students develop greater sensitivity with timing and dynamics in technique classes and increased confidence in creating variations during improvisations and composition. 

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This paper details a series of rhythm workshops given by the authors to students from the Diploma in Dance at LASALLE College of the Arts Singapore in 2020. The workshops taught rhythmic concepts inherent in the Carnatic Indian classical system of music and dance. The students first recited rhythmic syllables over a cycle of claps and finger counts and then adapted them to various dance explorations. The explorations focused on articulation, isolation, duration and spatialisation within various rhythmic cycles. The process helped to improve proficiency in rhythm and offered a new, yet defined approach to dance choreography and performance. 

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Development of James Joyce’s Musicalized Narrative Form: Separation, Imitation, and Fusion

Benang Xuan

Music in James Joyce’s oeuvre has long been the subject of contentious debate, but previous studies have mostly focused on music in only two of his fictional works Ulysses and Finnegans Wake and have overlooked musical models of narrativity in Joyce’s earlier poetry collection Chamber Music and his collection of short stories Dubliners. 

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By analyzing Joyce’s poem “Bid Adieu to Girlish Days” alongside his own musical composition in a church mode, the imitation of the two-part musical structure in “The Dead”, and the employment of sound as a medium to implant multiple musical and cultural meanings into written language in the “Sirens” episode, this paper demonstrates how Joyce’s musicalized narrative form undergoes significant changes, from separation to imitation, and finally to fusion, and how he utilizes the polyphonicity and open-endedness of each of the three musical narratives to construct a covert progression of conflict and betrayal beneath the overt plot of courtship and love, portraying layer by layer the spiritual paralysis of the modern man. 

The paper also reconsiders Joyce’s equivocal claim of the fugue structure in “Sirens” from the perspective of the dichotomy of order versus freedom in music as well as the essential difference between word and sound as two narrative discourses. Taking into account the aforementioned development of Joyce’s musicalized narrative form and the critical history of Ulysses, it argues that in “Sirens”, Joyce capitalizes on the instability of the sound-sense connection within the word to overcome the temporal, spatial and rhetorical limitations of textual narratives, instead of reproducing the alleged fugue structure by stitching together phoneme-morpheme units or verbal-textual fragments.