Resonances and Polysemy: Musical Forms and Meanings in the Literary Text

Call for contributions:

Between XVII.34

Resonances and Polysemy: Musical Forms and Meanings in the Literary Text

2027 Issue

Submission Deadline: 27 May 2027

Publication Date: 15 December 2027

Editors for the Issue
Stefano Franceschini (Roma Tre University); Fiorenzo Iuliano (University of Cagliari)

In Chapter 25 of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947), Mephistopheles promises the protagonist, Adrian Leverkühn, twenty-four years of uninterrupted musical creativity in exchange for his soul, assuring him that he will “in drunken indulgence taste every bliss of almost intolerable infusion” and that, “in certain wanton moments,” he may “plainly and honestly deem himself a god.” Attracted yet alarmed by such an offer, the young composer asks to know the details of the transaction. Mephistopheles replies: “You would have knowledge of the pernicies, of the confutatio? […] one may use and fashion a great many words, yet all of them are but representative, stand for names that do not exist, can make no claim to designate that which can never ever be designated and denounced in words. That is the secret delight and security of hell, that it cannot be denounced, that it lies hidden from language.” The devil refers to the inadequacy of language when faced with something as elusive as the essence of hell.

The same can be said of music as the art of the ineffable, as Augusto Romano defines it in Musica e psiche (2021). Too often, however, the ineffable tends to be equated with the meaningless, what cannot convey any meaning at all: music, in other words, would possess no expressive means beyond a recursive exercise in self-reference (Hanslick 1854). This perspective, confining musical meaning within the boundaries of the work itself, has been challenged by approaches emphasizing music’s capacity to produce historical and cultural meanings that cannot be reduced to formal principles alone (Kramer 2001). Yet one need only consider artistic practices such as program music and film scores, the entire range of discourses centered on music – from interpretive analysis and aesthetic-philosophical treatises to reviews and literary works – as well as the far more subjective experiences of musical transport, whether emotional, imaginative, or synesthetic, which have also been widely debated, to see how difficult it is to sustain the understanding of music as a system characterized by mere semio-phenomenal processes.

Although its roots lie in a much older tradition, the relationship between literature and music acquired renewed prominence with modernism, on both the thematic and formal levels. Literature, and fiction in particular, increasingly turned to music as a thematic and structural model (Bucknell 2001; Wolf 1999). If, on the one hand, technological and industrial innovations around the turn of the twentieth century profoundly transformed access to music in domestic spaces – through the spread first of the phonograph and subsequently of radio (Sterne 2003), later leading to modern sound reproduction systems – on the other, the expansion of increasingly noisy urban environments had a sociocultural impact that over time radically reshaped individual acoustic experience (Schafer 1977). Many writers have consequently devoted considerable attention to sound, and particularly to music, as a vehicle for aesthetic, historical, and cultural reflection: from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Ritter Gluck” (1809) and Honoré de Balzac’s “Gambara” (1837), through Lev Tolstoy’s Krejcerova sonata (1889), E.M. Forster’s Howards End (1910), Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point (1928), and Mann’s aforementioned Doctor Faustus, to Marguerite Duras’s Moderato cantabile (1958), Alejo Carpentier’s Concierto barroco (1974), Thomas Bernhard’s Der Untergeher (1983), Pascal Quignard’s Tous les matins du monde (1991), Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992), Roberto Controneo’s Presto con fuoco (1995), Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music (1999), Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing (2003), Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations (2007), Claudio Morandini’s Rapsodia su un solo tema. Colloqui con Rafail Dvoinikov (2010), Mathias Énard’s Compass (2017), and Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos (2021), to name but a few.

What strategies can a written text employ to represent music? Can a literary text identify and illuminate a network of musical meanings? To what extent can different literary forms – narrative, poetry, and drama – incorporate such meanings into their structures and distinctive expressive modes, making music available to characters and other textual components as a means through which to reflect upon and intervene in reality?

This issue of Between aims to explore the forms and modes through which literature, in its various expressions – fiction, poetry, and drama – engages with music, understood not simply as a theme or object of representation, but as a language, a means of knowledge, and a potential principle of formal organization. How does a literary text evoke, rework, recode, or reconstruct musical experience? How can it incorporate musical syntax – rhythm, melody, harmony, tonality, forms, and compositional procedures – and turn it into a means of producing new meanings?

From this perspective, the relationship between music and literature may be approached on formal and aesthetic as well as historical, social, and political grounds. Music can contribute to the construction of subjectivities and identities; organize temporality and memory; define generational, cultural, or national affiliations; shape space and everyday experience; or provide a terrain on which the literary text can reflect upon its own limits and its expressive and epistemological possibilities. At the same time, the encounter between word and music raises broader questions concerning intersemiotic translation, intermediality, and the relationships between different systems of signification.

The issue welcomes theoretical and methodological contributions as well as studies devoted to individual authors, works, or corpora, with particular emphasis on comparative approaches. Proposals that combine formal analysis with attention to the specific historical, cultural, and media conditions within which musical experience is produced, received, and reworked are especially welcome. Possible areas of inquiry include, but are not limited to: 

• music as a means for the production and articulation of meaning in literary texts;
• musical forms, structures, and practices in the construction of literary texts: rhythmic organization, counterpoint, polyphony, variation, thematic development, serialism, and improvisation; forms and functions of composition, performance, and listening in literary texts;
• music, memory, and affect; music as a means of interpreting historical, social, and political processes;
• technologies of musical composition, recording, reproduction, and circulation and their interaction with literature;
• voice and vocality between literature and music;
• intersemiotic translation, intermediality, musical ineffability, and the limits of verbal representation.

Selected Bibliography

Bernhart, Walter, Steven Paul Scher, and Werner Wolf, eds. Word and Music Studies: Defining the Field. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1999.

Bucknell, Brad. Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce and Stein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 

Gracyk, Theodore, and Andrew Kania, eds. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Music. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. 

Hanslick, Eduard. The Beautiful in Music: A Contribution to the Revisal of Musical Aesthetics. Trans. by Gustav Cohen. London: Novello and Company, 1891 [1854].

Isacoff, Stuart. Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization. New York: Vintage, 2003.

Kramer, Lawrence. Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001.

Macedo, Frederico. “Space as Metaphor: The Use of Spatial Metaphors in Music and Music Writing.” Signata. Annales des sémiotiques / Annals of Semiotics 6 (2015).

Messiaen, Olivier. Music and Color: Conversations with Claude Samuel. Portland, OR: Amadeus Press, 1994. 

Pennacchia, Maddalena. “Intermedialità letteraria. Note sul nomadismo mediatico della letteratura.” In Il testo oltre i confini: Passaggi, scambi, migrazioni, edited by Lucia Perrone Capano. Bari: Palomar, 2009. 

Petermann, Emily. The Musical Novel: Imitation of Musical Structure, Performance, and Reception in Contemporary Fiction. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014. 

Rajewsky, Irina O. “Intermediality, Intertextuality, and Remediation: A Literary Perspective on Intermediality.” Intermédialités: Histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques 6 (2005). 

Romano, Augusto. Musica e psiche. Milan: Raffaello Cortina Editore, 2021.

Scher, Steven Paul. “Notes toward a Theory of Verbal Music.” Comparative Literature 22, no. 2 (1970): 147–56. 

Smith, Hazel. The Contemporary Literature-Music Relationship: Intermedia, Voice, Technology, Cross-Cultural Exchange. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. 

Varèse, Edgard. Il suono organizzato: Scritti sulla musica. Milan: Ricordi-Unicopli, 1983. 

Wolf, Werner. The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999.

How to submit proposal

Submission Deadline: 27 May 2027; Publication Date: 15 December 2027

Authors are invited to consult the selected bibliography provided at the end of the call for papers. For questions or further information, please contact the editors at the email addresses ([email protected] and [email protected]).

Articles ready for publication, not exceeding 40,000 characters including spaces and formatted according to the provided template, with title, abstract, and metadata in English, must be submitted to the journal by 27 May 2027, following the instructions available on the Submissions page of the Between website (Please note that the Between Journal website is currently under maintenance. Further submission details will be available starting in November 2026). Accepted articles will be published on 15 December 2027.

Contributions are accepted in Italian, English, and French, as well as in bilingual versions. Submissions in a language other than Italian, or in a bilingual version in which one of the languages is English or French, are particularly welcome and encouraged.