Music and Literature

The thematic line on Music and Literature LML (Linha de Música e Literatura) promotes advanced studies of song and literature-related instrumental music, exploring also the multiplicity of relations between word and music. It integrates also cinema and visual arts related with the main focus. The thematic field of LML involves problems in the realm of philosophy, aesthetics, criticism, theory, analytical methodology, hermeneutics, rhetorics, poetics and performance. The LML intends to recover the traditional linguistic richness of the Humanities, stimulating studies about works conceived in different idioms, like Latin, Portuguese, Castilian, French, Italian, English, German, among others. Operating in the realm of the Intermediality Studies, the LML interacts with researchers from these realms of knowledge, favoring both national and international cooperation. The Advanced Studies will focus mainly on topics common to both Literature and Music of European Culture, relying also in intercultural approaches pertinent to the case in question.

The LML embodies an informal network of researchers from CESEM (FCSH-NOVA), IELT (FCSH-NOVA) and CEC (FL.UL), and other external collaborators, converging on specific projects. The starting core-group is constituted by the coordinator of this thematic line and contact-persons in each of the institutes involved.

Coordination: Manuela Toscano (FCSH-NOVA)

Core-members: Mário Vieira de Carvalho (FCSH-NOVA)

Manuel Pedro Ferreira (FCSH-NOVA)

Ladan Effekthari (CESEM)

João Pedro Cachopo (CESEM)

Our aims should materialize as follows:

  1. Providing a ground for advanced studies in musicology and literature, stimulating encounters between scholars with interests on intertextual and intermedial artistic works.
  2. Developing the study of intertextuality involved in concepts and representations common to both literature and music. The cultural horizon of both terminologies is also included.
  3. Promoting advanced performance studies involving vocal music, taking into account both aesthetical and theoretical levels, as well as the research about the performative and expressive implications of pronounciation.
  4. The field of music and word interaction will take into account the following aspects:

a) ideas about music and literature in several writings;

b) levels of interaction and of tension between word and music in vocal pieces;

c) musicality in poetry, poetic prose and narrative devices;

d) levels and modes of appropriation, adoption, adapttation or distortion of literary references in musical works and vice versa;

e) thought about music and literature beyond referential meaning;

f) intertextual relationships relationships and constructions of meaning;

g) the understanging of the dynamics shaping cultural and institutional spaces of reception of the arts involved.

Foreseen actions:

  1. organization of seminars, conferences or symposia;
  2. bilingual scientific publications on intermedial studies;
  3. dissemination of knowledge.

 

This thematic line has a partnership with the Centro de Estudos Comparatistas – Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa (CEC/FLUL).