Textual Language and Musical Language

The relationship between verbal language and musical language has been at the heart of discourse from numerous perspectives and different fields of scientific research throughout centuries.
I would like to focus attention on the possibility of employing devices specific to rhetorics as a trait d’union between the understanding of the “musicality” of a literary text and the understanding of a “purely” musical composition with a narratological stamp. For this very aim, I have taken into consideration the recording of an excerpt of the eighth chapter of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, read by the author himself. I will analyse how the Irish author declaims the text in order to deliberately enhance his poetic style and his language through the use of a pre-linguistic code connected to musical features (rhythm, intonation, intervallic relations). For what concerns music, I have used Luciano Berio’s Sequenza IX for solo clarinet and analysed how the organisation of the material creates a series of figures that can be categorised by analogy with rhetorical devices as formalised in literature.

Keywords

semiotics, Berio, Joyce, rhetoric analysis, linguistic and music