Speaking Songs: Music-Analytical Approaches to Spoken Word
Abstract
If we can conceive of music as performance—indeed, if we tend to agree with director and drama theorist Richard Schechner that nearly anything can be studied ‘as’ performance—then it follows that nearly any mode of performance might also be studied for its musicality. Of course, some modes of performance are more conducive to musical study than others. The present work concerns a particularly responsive mode of performance through which the categorical divisions between language and music begin to dissolve: spoken word.
Spoken word, in its diversity of forms, traditions, and styles, exists not simply on the fringes of any single scholarly field but at the intersections of multiple artistic disciplines. Despite the many interconnections between spoken-word traditions and musical practices, the former traditionally belong to the domains of literary or cultural studies, dominated by discussions of cultural significance or ambiguities pertaining to its literary status. While scholars of a variety of spoken-word forms ardently contend that the work is its performance, few offer insights on how to integrate the sound structures realized through performance into analyses of these works.
Focusing on three distinct forms of spoken word––spoken-word song, slam poetry, and sound poetry––I investigate the rhythmic structures, melodic patterns, formal design, and communicative strategies of selected spoken-word performances using musically centred analytical methods, including recording analysis, formal functions, and motivic analysis. Featuring spoken-word song performances by American singer-songwriter Tom Waits, slam poetry by the founder of the modern poetry slam, Marc Kelly Smith, and the sound poetry of avant-garde artist Kurt Schwitters, this dissertation endeavors not only to offer an array of analytical approaches and listening strategies that can provide a basis for future investigations of speech-based contemporary art music; it also strives to recognize the categorical overlap that exists among Spoken Word and music, and to bring Spoken Word further into the view of mainstream musicological research and analysis.