Words, Music, and the Popular

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

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2. Words, Music, and the Popular

   • Thomas Gurke, Susan Winnett

   Pages 1-10

3. Of Silent Notation and Historiographic Relationality: Words, Music, and Notions of the Popular

   • Nassim Winnie Balestrini

   Pages 11-35

4. Popular Form and Pop-Aesthetics

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 37-37

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   2. Experiencing Dylan: The Effect of Formal Structure and Performance on the Popularity and Interpretation of Two Dylan Songs

      • Yke Paul Schotanus

      Pages 39-64

   3. Freewheelin’ with Adorno down Highway 61: Bob Dylan’s Transformative Electric Turn

      • Samuel Caleb Wee

      Pages 65-85

   4. Which Side Is This Ex-Beatle on? A Reassessment of the 1970s Rock Press’ Framing, Interpretation, and Consideration of Paul McCartney and Wings

      • Allison Bumsted

      Pages 87-107

5. The Geopolitics of the Popular

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 109-109

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   2. PJ Harvey as a Modern War Poet: How Let England Shake Challenges ‘English England’ Through the Pastoral

      • Felix Leidner

      Pages 111-132

   3. Transmedia Performance in Scandinavian Singalong Shows: On the Transmediation of Liveness and Participation in Community Singing

      • Lea Wierød Borčak

      Pages 133-153

   4. A Melopoetic Struggle between East and West: Mickiewicz and the Popular Idiom

      • Jan Czarnecki

      Pages 155-177

   5. Post-Sovietness of the Popular: The West, the Post-Soviet Ukrainian Audience, and the Major Ukrainian Pop Star (1990s)

      • Iuliana Matasova

      Pages 179-200

6. Popular Classics?

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 201-201

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   2. Café-Concert Parodies of Lohengrin (Wagner) and Othello (Verdi) in the Context of Popularisation Efforts of the Opéra de Paris in the 1890s

      • Christian Dammann

      Pages 203-223

   3. “The World Wanted to Bleed All the Sass Out My Name”: Interrogating the Popularity of Words and Music in Tyehimba Jess’s Olio

      • Alexandra Reznik

      Pages 225-236

   4. William H. Gass and the (Un)popularity of Words as Music

      • Ivan Delazari

      Pages 237-256

7. Back Matter

   Pages 257-262

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Words, Music, and the Popular: Global Perspectives on Intermedial Relations opens up the notion of the popular, drawing useful links between wide-ranging aspects of popular culture, through the lens of the interaction between words and music. This collection of essays explores the relation of words and music to issues of the popular. It asks: What is popularity or ‘the’ popular and what role(s) does music play in it? What is the function of the popular, and is ‘pop’ a system? How can popularity be explained in certain historical and political contexts? How do class, gender, race, and ethnicity contribute to and complicate an understanding of the ‘popular’? What of the popularity of verbal art forms? How do they interact with music at particular times and throughout different media?

• intermediality
• popularity
• music
• national identity
• jazz
• hip hop
• pop music
• power structures

​“Words, Music, and the Popular is an impressive collection of fresh scholarship on the relationship between the verbal and the musical. The contributors’ international perspective and focus on seeing this relationship as a form of intermediality allows them to open new directions for inquiry by simultaneously employing and interrogating a range of traditional oppositions, such as those between popular and classical music, rock and pop, the accessible and the ‘difficult,’ the canonical and the ‘minor,’ the present and the historical past, liveand recorded music.”
— Philip Auslander is Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA

As a scholar of popular culture, what excites me about this eclectic collection is the way that it explodes any fixed conception of the relationship between elite and popular music in favor of an exploration of the flexible borders between music and lyrics, high and low, text and performance, art and commerce, traditional and emergent, live and mediated, original and remix, spectatorship and participation, and so much more. Each essay offers nuanced, intermedial readings of specific sites of music production, each of which ask fundamental questions about the nature of popular music, past, present, and future.

– Henry Jenkins, author of Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide

• University of Koblenz-Landau, Landau, Germany

  Thomas Gurke

• Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany

  Susan Winnett

Thomas Gurke is Lecturer for English and Cultural Studies at the University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany. His PhD-dissertation focused on the intersemiotic, aesthetic and affective dynamics of music and literature in the texts of James Joyce and is forthcoming as a monograph. Apart from James Joyce, he has also published on contemporary fiction, ecology, the short story and popular culture.

Susan Winnett is Professor of American Studies and Transcultural Studies at the Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany. She is the author of Terrible Sociability: The Text of Manners in Laclos, Goethe, and Henry James (1993) and Writing Back: American Expatriates' Narratives of Return (2012). 

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