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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
MUSIC AND LITERATURE
Words, Music,
and the Popular
Global Perspectives on
Intermedial Relations
Edited by Thomas Gurke · Susan Winnett
Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature
Series Editors
Paul Lumsden
City Centre Campus
MacEwan University
Edmonton, AB, Canada
Marco Katz Montiel

Facultad de Letras
Pontifical Catholic University of Chile
Santiago, RM - Santiago, Chile
This leading-edge series joins two disciplines in an exploration of how
music and literature confront each other as dissonant antagonists while
also functioning as consonant companions. By establishing a critical con-
nection between literature and music, this series highlights the interaction
between what we read and hear. Investigating the influence music has on
narrative through history, theory, culture, or global perspectives provides
a concrete framework for a seemingly abstract arena. Titles in the series,
both monographs and edited volumes, explore musical encounters in nov-
els and poetry, considerations of the ways in which narratives appropriate
musical structures, examinations of musical form and function, and studies
of interactions with sound.
Editorial Advisory Board:

Frances R. Aparicio, Northwestern University, US
Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota, US
Barbara Brinson Curiel, Critical Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies,
Humboldt State University, US
Gary Burns, Northern Illinois University, US
Peter Dayan, Word and Music Studies, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Shuhei Hosokawa, International Research Center for Japanese
Studies, Japan
Javier F. León, Latin American Music Center of the Jacobs School of
Music, Indiana University, US
Marilyn G. Miller, Tulane University, US
Robin Moore, University of Texas at Austin, US
Nduka Otiono, Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Canada
Gerry Smyth, Liverpool John Moores University, England
Jesús Tejada, Universitat de València, Spain
Alejandro Ulloa Sanmiguel, Universidad del Valle, Colombia
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15596
Thomas Gurke • Susan Winnett
Editors
Words, Music, and the

Popular
Global Perspectives on Intermedial Relations
Editors
Thomas Gurke Susan Winnett
University of Koblenz-Landau Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf
Landau, Germany Düsseldorf, Germany
Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature

ISBN 978-3-030-85542-0 ISBN 978-3-030-85543-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85543-7
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Contents
1 Words, Music, and the Popular 1

Thomas Gurke and Susan Winnett
2 Of Silent Notation and Historiographic Relationality:

Words, Music, and Notions of the Popular 11
Nassim Winnie Balestrini
Section I Popular Form and Pop-Aesthetics 37
3 Experiencing Dylan: The Effect of Formal Structure and

Performance on the Popularity and Interpretation of Two
Dylan Songs 39
Yke Paul Schotanus
4
Freewheelin’ with Adorno down Highway 61: Bob Dylan’s
Transformative Electric Turn 65
Samuel Caleb Wee
5 Which Side Is This Ex-Beatle on? A Reassessment of the

1970s Rock Press’ Framing, Interpretation, and
Consideration of Paul McCartney and Wings 87
Allison Bumsted
v
vi CONTENTS
Section II The Geopolitics of the Popular 109
6 PJ Harvey as a Modern War Poet: How Let England Shake

Challenges ‘English England’ Through the Pastoral111
Felix Leidner
7 Transmedia Performance in Scandinavian Singalong

Shows: On the Transmediation of Liveness and
Participation in Community Singing133
Lea Wierød Borčak
8 A Melopoetic Struggle between East and West:

Mickiewicz and the Popular Idiom155
Jan Czarnecki
9 Post-Sovietness of the Popular: The West, the Post-Soviet

Ukrainian Audience, and the Major Ukrainian Pop Star
(1990s)179
Iuliana Matasova
Section III Popular Classics? 201
10 Café-Concert Parodies of Lohengrin (Wagner) and Othello

(Verdi) in the Context of Popularisation Efforts of the
Opéra de Paris in the 1890s203
Christian Dammann
11 “The World Wanted to Bleed All the Sass Out My Name”:

Interrogating the Popularity of Words and Music in
Tyehimba Jess’s Olio225
Alexandra Reznik
12 William H. Gass and the (Un)popularity of Words as Music237

Ivan Delazari
Index257
Notes on Contributors
Nassim Winnie Balestrini is Professor of American Studies and

Intermediality at the University of Graz, Austria, where she also serves as
Director of the Centre for Intermediality Studies in Graz (CIMIG). Her
research interests include US-American and Canadian literature from the
eighteenth century to the present, adaptation and intermediality (as in her
monograph From Fiction to Libretto: Irving, Hawthorne, and James as
Opera, 2005, and in the edited volume Adaptation and American
Studies, 2011), life writing (as in Intermediality, Life Writing, and
American Studies, 2018, co-edited with Ina Bergmann), hip-hop cul-
ture, ecocriticism, climate change theater, the poet laureate traditions
in the US and Canada, and the ever-expanding universe of emerging
and (re-)discovered poets, dramatists, and novelists. She particularly
enjoys comparative and interdisciplinary approaches in her research across
literary genres, media, ethnicities, and cultures.
Lea Wierød Borčak is an international postdoc fellow at Linnaeus
University, Sweden, and Aarhus University, Denmark. Her current
research centers on the forms and functions of community singing in a
Scandinavian context. She has previously published work on intermedial
song analysis, melopoetics, hymnology, and the church hymns of
N.F.S. Grundtvig. She was a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Arts, Aarhus
University, and has taught numerous courses at the Department of
Dramaturgy and Musicology.
Allison Bumsted holds a PhD in Cultural Studies and an MA in The
Beatles, Popular Music, and Society from Liverpool Hope University. She
vii
viii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
completed her BA in History and Political Science at Texas State University.

Her research focuses on all things popular: music, print, media, and teen
fan magazines.
Jan Czarnecki teaches Polish Literature and Language as well as Word
and Music Studies at the University of Cologne (Germany). Born in
1989 in Warsaw, he graduated summa cum laude in Philosophy (BA, MA)
from the College of Inter-Faculty Individual Studies in the Humanities
(MISH), University of Warsaw, and obtained a diploma with honors from
the F. Chopin State Music School in Warsaw. He received his PhD with
honors from the University of Padua (Italy). He has been an associated
researcher at the University of Lille-3 (France) and a Visiting Postgraduate
Research Student at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland). He has per-
formed as a soloist and as a member of chamber and madrigal choirs. He
worked as an editor at Universa. Recensioni di filosofia. His research inter-
ests range from word and music relations in European literature to the
philosophy of music.
Christian Dammann studied orchestral conducting and piano before
obtaining a degree in Romance Languages and Musicology (MA) from
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf and Robert-Schumann-
Hochschule Düsseldorf. He took part in master classes of the Bayerischer
Musikrat and the European Academy for Music and Performing Arts
Montepulciano and had engagements at the Wuppertaler Bühnen and
the Stadttheater Bremerhaven. He is a vocal coach and pianist at the
Deutsche Oper am Rhein Düsseldorf/Duisburg and also teaches
score playing at the Robert-Schumann-Hochschule. In 2018, he
published a monograph on French parodies of Wagner’s Lohengrin
entitled Bonjour Lolo! Französische Lohengrin-Parodien 1886–1900,
which was highlighted in wagnerspectrum as a relevant study on Wagner
and France. He is currently working on a dissertation project on French
Wagner parodies at Folkwang Universität der Künste in Essen.
Ivan Delazari is Associate Professor at National Research University
Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg. His two doctoral degrees
in Philology (2003) and English (2018) are from St. Petersburg State
University and Hong Kong Baptist University. He is the author of
Musical Stimulacra: Literary Narrative and the Urge to Listen (2021) and
other publications on American and comparative literature, word and
music studies, and narrative theory.
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS ix
Thomas Gurke is Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at the

University of Koblenz-Landau. He has a degree in English Literature and
Musicology. His PhD dissertation focused on the intersemiotic, aes-
thetic, and affective dynamics of music and literature in the texts of
James Joyce and is forthcoming as a monograph. His other publications
focus on Joyce, contemporary fiction, ecology, the short-story, and
popular culture.
Felix Leidner is a graduate of the University of Rostock where he
obtained a Master’s degree equivalent (First State Examination) in
Education in British and American Literature and Culture and German
language and literature. His thesis focused on the correspondences
between English War Poetry and the lyrics of PJ Harvey’s album Let
England Shake with regard to national identity using an intertextual
approach. This research is part of his contribution to this volume.
Iuliana Matasova holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and is Associate
Professor at the Department of Foreign Literature at Taras Shevchenko
National University of Kyiv, Ukraine. In 2017, she was a Carnegie Research
Fellow at the Duke University Program in Literature (USA) as well as a
Research Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (Bulgaria). Her
research interests include American-Ukrainian-Russian comparative liter-
ary and cultural studies, post-Soviet studies, women’s and gender studies,
popular culture and popular music studies.
Alexandra Reznik is Assistant Professor of English and Women’s and
Gender Studies at Chatham University as well as the Word and Music
Association Forum Coordinator and liaison to the International Association
for Word and Music Studies. Her work appears in The Routledge Companion
to Music and Modern Literature, The Western Journal of Black Studies,
Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, ESQ: Journal of the American
Renaissance, Ars Lyrica, Lamar Journal of the Humanities, and The
Journal of American Culture.
Yke Paul Schotanus is an affiliated researcher at the Institute for Cultural
Inquiry (ICON) at Utrecht University. In 2020, he was awarded a PhD
for his dissertation: ‘Singing as a figure of speech, music as punctuation: A
study into music as a means to support the processing of sung language’.
His research area is the effect of singing on focusing on and memorizing
texts, the interpretation of those texts, and the consequences of this on the
x NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
position of sung texts in education, health care, and literature. He is also a

teacher of Dutch language and literature, author, writing coach, and
singer-songwriter.
Samuel Caleb Wee is a graduate student working on a PhD in English at
the University of British Columbia, Canada, under the International PhD
Scholarship offered by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
His research is focused on examining the links between mediation
and selfhood in contemporary poetry. As a creative writer, his work
has appeared in publications such as Quarterly Literary Review
Singapore, Esquire, Moving Worlds and Ceriph. He is also the co-editor
of the anthology of anti-realist fiction, this is how you walk on the moon
(2016). His debut poetry collection, https://everything.is, is forthcoming
from AJAR Press in 2021.
Susan Winnett is Professor of American Studies and Transcultural
Studies at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf. 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) and numerous articles on issues of gender and narrative. She is
working on a study of American soldiers’ WW II memoirs, novels and
films, the myth of the Greatest Generation, and the attempts of postgen-
erations to overcome that myth and come to terms with their fathers’
silence about the war.
List of Tables
Table 3.1 URLs of the YouTube registrations of “Ballad of a Thin Man”

and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” mentioned in this chapter 47
Table 3.2 Distribution of song versions over categories of prediction-
based grouping variables, used as predictors 51
Table 3.3 Results of Principal axis factoring analysis with oblique rotation
(direct oblimin). Factor loadings >0.4 bold, and <0.1 deleted 54
Table 3.4 Mean factor scores per song version 56
Table 3.5 Regressions on all factors with random intercepts for age and
Dylan fan. Models with song version (top) and alternative
models (bottom) 57
xi
CHAPTER 1
Words, Music, and the Popular
Thomas Gurke and Susan Winnett
Songs can be described as intermedial combinations of words and music1

which—when smoothed over or roughed up by rhymes, beats, sound-
effects—mute or amplify tensions, struggles, and conflicts. These produc-
tive dissonances occur when diverse media enter into friendly—or not so
friendly—competition and are forced to seek compatible ground. They
also ensue when politically charged discourses are made singable, hum-
mable, or danceable in order to articulate or mask ideological critique. If
the study of the popular is to be “more than a simple discussion of
entertainment and leisure” (Storey 2008, 5) but rather a politically charged
“powerful site for intervention, challenge and change” (hooks 1994/2006,
1
Our decision to regard words and music as media follows the practice of the scholarship
in the field of Word-Music Studies undertaken by the International Association for Word and
Music Studies (WMA) and the Word and Music Association Forum (WMAF) as well as in the
field of intermediality in general.
T. Gurke (*)
University of Koblenz-Landau, Landau, Germany
e-mail: gurke@uni-landau.de
S. Winnett
Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2021
T. Gurke, S. Winnett (eds.), Words, Music, and the Popular,
Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85543-7_1
2 T. GURKE AND S. WINNETT
5) then the complicated relations between the seemingly innocuous

‘words and music’ in our title and the aesthetic and political implications
of their interactions deserve scrutiny.
The language of songs is lyric language; it is not only aimed at com-
munication but rather, in its suggestive literariness, deals in innuendo,
double-entendre and stylistic play. This potential for play is a property it
shares with music which—by itself—is also often perceived as a ‘language’
that communicates ambiguously and covertly through even darker and
vaguer channels. With its rhythms, meters, rhymes, assonances, and ono-
matopoeia, the poetic language of lyrics shares common acoustic ground
with music. These acoustic properties, in turn, include uncategorizable
effects and seemingly imperceptible affects. Both musical and literary
works thus make use of their ambiguities—their ‘sound effects’—which
undoubtedly make us, as recipients, participate in keeping them ‘alive’
through our continuous probing and questioning.
Scholarly research in intermediality has inspired renewed attention to
the subject of ‘words and music’. Although much of this work focuses on
refining our understanding of the types of relations into which words and
music can enter, there is more to the study of word-music-relationships
than typology (Brown 1948/1987; Scher 1968; Goodman 1969; Wolf
1999, 2015; Rajewsky 2002, 2005). This collection goes beyond the
typological by exploring the relation of words and music to issues of the
popular: 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 dif-
ferent media?
The word music—and perhaps as well, the history of the two arts as
media—originates in ancient Greek mythology as mousiké, the union of
song, dance, and word—a techne and an ‘art of the Muses’. The earliest
known examples of such media convergence are the Homeric epics, orga-
nized as ‘songs’, musicalized in poetic meter, and highly popular. Although
words and music are seen as sharing a common origin, words seem to have
assumed a higher status in the course of history, a phenomenon that
Werner Wolf calls the “verbal domination of music” (1999, 97). This pri-
ority of words over music gained currency during the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries; in reaction, the romantic nostalgia for a golden age
1 WORDS, MUSIC, AND THE POPULAR 3
imagined a return to an originary poetic and musical oneness. In the later

nineteenth century, however, instrumental music—what Dahlhaus calls
“absolute music”—was regarded as surpassing language’s expressive
capacities (1978, 14). The dynamic intermedial relationship between
words and music continues to be negotiated in such notions as melopoi-
esis/melopoetics (cf. Barricelli 1988; Kramer 1989; Scher 1999) or melo-
phrasis (cf. Edgecombe 1993) that theorize their unity as a single medium
and suggest both the implied and actual musicality of words in popular
poetry or song.
While Romanticism dwelled on the overpowering capabilities of a
‘music without words’ to express what could not be said through lan-
guage, the popular stages the subliminal poetic effects of words as music.
Some ‘pop-theorists’ consider the foreshortened and redundant informa-
tion contained in the lyrics of pop songs to be a form of embodied com-
munication (Fuchs and Heidingsfelder 2004, 302). The onomatopoeic,
repetitive, indeed, affective wails and cries in the lyrics of popular music
‘smear’ information that is communicated to our perception as music.
Within this theoretical trajectory, ‘pop’ is also considered to be a ‘system’
that operates according to the rules propounded in Niklas Luhmann’s
systems theory (cf. Luhmann 1984). Here, the popular is viewed as
dynamically transforming and constantly changing—literally ‘surviving’—
as a system by subsuming everything in its purview in order to preserve its
own autopoiesis and by making everything it consumes look like itself.2
This characteristic of the popular also explains why some theorists refer to
its “all-inclusive semantics” (Stäheli and Stichweh 2002), thereby calling
our attention to the way in which it paradoxically affects all at once and
everyone individually (Fiske 1989/2006, 2).
As both popular media and media of the popular, words and music
occupy endless streams of media combinations that forge both ordinary
and extraordinary intermedial relationships. Understanding these rela-
tionships allows us better to comprehend the political implications of vari-
ous media interactions while also shedding light on their potential to
dominate and reinforce master narratives and the power structures that
2
The complexities of a systems-theory approach to the popular cannot be explicated here
in detail. In this context it shall suffice to quote from Markus Heidingsfelder’s Pop als System
(2011): ‘The functional differentiation of the system [pop] is established through its origi-
nary form of autopoietic reproduction, i.e. by connecting songs to songs. Through the
medium [of music], the autopoiesis of pop is oriented to function; it does so by encoding the
operations of the system in terms of the distinction hit or flop […]’ (154, our translation).
govern our everyday lives. Like words and music, the popular also com-
municates subversively by operating with covert tactics and has therefore
been subject to ideological critique. This characteristic of the popular has
been attractive to both producers and consumers, since it enables targeted
marketing and easy consumption. Hence, Marx’s dictum that “they do
not know it, but they do it” (Marx and Dragstedt 1976, 36) has been
applied to the popular as it, too, serves as a kind of ideological ‘blanket’
that enables false consciousness. But to some—such as Peter Sloterdijk
and Slavoj Žižek—this false consciousness is itself a form of consciousness
that is not adequately explained as ideological victimization: “they know
very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it” (Sloterdijk qtd.
in Žižek 1989, 29).
Indeed, alternative itineraries both recognize and critique such dynam-
ics of production and consumption by claiming, for instance, that partici-
pation and convergence have always been constitutive of culture itself
(Jenkins 2006, 135; Lessig 2008, 28). These critics see the technological
changes in the media ecology of the twentieth century as displacements of
‘folk’ culture through mass media. However, others argue that the tech-
nologies of the twenty-first century that seemingly cater to the participa-
tory ‘prosumer’ are themselves appropriated and coopted by the popular,
as evidenced in the mainstreaming of such subversive practices as remix,
mash-up and bricolage (see Serazio 2008; Gurke and Zimbulov 2017).
Like contemporary social media—arguably the ‘social cement’ of our
time—the customer here is not subject but rather object and, in the end,
product.
Thus, deeply ingrained in everyday life, the popular survives as com-
modity within mass culture by forging and endlessly reproducing the con-
ditions of that culture itself. Within these dynamics, words and music and
their popular appeal play a decisive role. In an often overlooked passage
from his essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
Walter Benjamin observes:
The mass is a matrix from which all traditional behavior toward works of art
issues today in a new form. Quantity has been transmuted into quality. The
greatly increased mass of participants has produced a change in the mode of
participation. The fact that the new mode of participation first appeared in a
disreputable form must not confuse the spectator. (Benjamin
1936/1969, 239)
Benjamin foresees participatory culture and the impact it may have on

our current view of the popular as both ideology and ideological critique:
for, like everything else that the popular has produced, all objections to it
are already inscribed within it—not as mere fun, leisure, political message
or social concern, but as a confirmation of its originary ideological conceit:
‘not only do we know what we’re doing – we participate and share’. The
participatory nature of ‘sharing’ is one of the main aspects of Benjamin’s
observation and also of popular culture today. Benjamin seems not only to
foresee but also to grapple with these elements introduced by a changing
media ecology. For it is along these lines that media—such as words and
music—also delineate and renegotiate paradigms for considering issues of
social class, gender, race and ethnicity.
The contributions in this volume are as heterogeneous as the field of
the popular itself and represent an overview of the ever-changing land-
scape of popular studies. The immense interest in the popular has gener-
ated a wide range of critical approaches, as recently published collections
make apparent (Burns and Lacasse 2018; Braae and Hansen 2019). In
addition to the many companions and handbooks on the topic (Scott
2009; Richardson et al. 2013; Bennett and Walksman 2015; Partridge and
Moberg 2017; Smith et al. 2017; Scotto et al. 2018; Moir et al. 2019),
further studies have focused on questions of gender (Jennings and Gardner
2012; Harde 2016; Hawkins 2017; Lee 2018), race and ethnicity (Stoever
2016), history, heritage, and memory (Baker et al. 2018), (national) iden-
tity and selfhood (Frith 1996; Auslander 2006; Hansen 2019; Bachleitner
and Werner 2022), age (Bennett and Hodkinson 2012; Bennett 2013),
space (Bennett 2000; Connell and Gibson 2003; Johansson and Bell
2009; Bandt et al. 2009), as well as recording and dissemination practices
(Frith and Zagorski-Thomas 2012; Zagorski-Thomas 2014) within an
ever-changing participatory culture (Turino 2008; Eisentraut 2013).
The present volume addresses many of these issues but refocuses them
through the optic of words and music. In “Of Silent Notation and
Historiographic Relationality: Words, Music, and Notions of the Popular”,
Nassim Winnie Balestrini presents two case studies that demonstrate how
conceptualizations of word-music relations and of the controversial
classical-popular binary benefit from understanding borders as flexible
spaces of intermedial and cultural-historical meaning-production. Her dis-
cussions of Richard Powers’s novel Orfeo (2014) and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s
2015 musical and the co-authored publication Hamilton (2016) enact
dialogues between intermedial, cultural, and popular music studies. She
opens this collection with a strong theoretical argument that considers

how the medium-specific possibilities of the verbal and the musically sonic
require contextual inquiries into Western histories and conditions of
poetry/lyrics, musical styles, and popular music.
The popularity of Bob Dylan is indisputable; the question of what
makes him popular is the subject of Yke Paul Schotanus’s and Samuel
Caleb Wee’s chapters in this volume. Schotanus reports on an empirical
study of the unconventional and irregular forms and metres of Dylan’s
music and prose, their reception, and their regularization in a series of
cover versions. He finds that reception itself tends to regularize what it
hears, while the practice of covering also tends to smooth over the musical
and verbal eccentricities in Dylan’s songs. Both findings offer a further
explanation for Dylan’s popularity and seem to challenge Adorno’s claim
that standardization is merely an effect of the culture industry. Wee’s con-
tribution analyses Adorno’s views on popular music as mass consumption
by examining Dylan’s turn from acoustic to electric. His close readings of
Adorno’s critique of popular music propose that a classical European her-
meneutic cannot account for the ways in which Dylan effected an explo-
sive change in his own work. He analyzes two songs that straddle Dylan’s
folk and electric phases—“Blowing in the Wind” (1962) and “Like a
Rolling Stone” (1965)—and shows how close attention to the musical
and media technical qualities of Dylan’s recordings reveals complexities
undetectable at the mere lyrical level. Allison Bumsted’s archival research
on 1970s reviews of Paul McCartney’s band, Wings, reveals its music to
have been regarded as meaningless, mainstream, mass-produced, bland
pop ‘muzak’ that lacked the authenticity that rock inherited from folk and
protest music. Bumsted examines how the rhetorical tactics, key narra-
tives, and rock aesthetics that make mainstream music happen in the first
place contribute to the ideological divide between rock and pop.
Felix Leidner’s chapter identifies one of the major factors contributing
to the popularity of PJ Harvey’s album Let England Shake to be its inter-
textual engagement with the motifs, images, and language of English War
Poetry and the Pastoral tradition. He discusses how Harvey’s deployment
of these tropes enables her to critique the dominant construction of
‘English’ or ‘British’ national identity present in the cultural memory of
the First World War. That the popular can also function as an ideological
‘blanket’ that ensures a stable experience of national identity is the subject
of Lea Wierød Borčak’s contribution. Her analyses of the Scandinavian
Singalong TV-shows Allsång på Skansen and Live fra Højskolesangbogen

expose aspects of transmediation and liveness that generate an all-inclusive
communion through participation. Her discussion gestures towards the
power of the popular to smooth over socio-political differences by fabri-
cating a unity that seems (a)live.
The Romantic nostalgia for a unity of words and music is at the heart
of Jan Czarnecki’s melopoetic excursus, in which he shows how Adam
Mickiewicz’s poetry mediates between east and west. Czarnecki reads the
2018 album Mickiewicz—Stasiuk—Haydamaky reads it in relation to its
literary sources in Polish and Ukrainian Romanticism and demonstrates
how Mickiewicz’s politically charged melopoesis is here recast as popular
music to make a statement on the situation in contemporary Ukraine.
Iuliana Matasova’s contribution also addresses post-Soviet popular
music—specifically, the seductiveness of American pop culture during the
1990s. Focusing on independent Ukraine’s first pop superstar and singer-
songwriter Iryna Bilyk, she evaluates the necessarily political labor of the
minor actors of popular culture and shows how Bilyk offers an emancipa-
tory practice of embracing an unrecognized post-Soviet difference in
search of a nomination other than post-Soviet.
The final three chapters examine the relation between ‘high’ culture
and the popular. Christian Dammann documents popularization efforts
undertaken in the opera scene of nineteenth-century France. He compares
parodistic adaptations of Wagner’s Lohengrin and Verdi’s Othello to the
originals and explores how words, music, and visual elements allude to
contemporary political and societal issues of late nineteenth-century
France. The nineteenth-century operatic stage is also the subject of
Alexandra Reznik’s discussion of Tyehimba Jess’s poetry collection Olio
(2016). Several of Jess’s texts are fictional testimonies of the Black opera
singer Sissieretta Jones’s (1868–1933) in which she speaks back to a racist
popular entertainment industry that constructs her celebrity status in rela-
tion to European aesthetic standards and cultural practices and thus ren-
ders her invisible as a Black woman and artist. Ivan Delazari’s chapter, too,
addresses the ambivalence of ‘high’ cultural standards in relation to the
popular. He discusses William H. Gass’s formula for evading popularity
with broad academic and non-academic readerships. Focusing on his 1996
essay “The Music of Prose” and other textual, peritextual, and epitextual
indices of musicality in his works, Delazari shows how Gass avoids the
danger of being remediated within the sphere of the popular.
We wish to thank all contributors for their outstanding work during a

truly trying time and extend special gratitude to David Mocken, who
helped with the preparation of the manuscript.
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CHAPTER 2
Of Silent Notation and Historiographic

Relationality: Words, Music, and Notions
of the Popular
Nassim Winnie Balestrini
Introduction
The phrase ‘popular music’ is silent on the role of words, even though—
presumably—many people equate popular music with song rather than
purely instrumental music. Beyond this omission of the verbal compo-
nent, one might ask what the term ‘popular’, which evokes the ‘classical’
as its counterpart, implies when considering words (in particular, poetry
and lyrics), music, and the coexistence of words and music in song.
Intermediality theory necessarily differentiates between media and con-
ceptualizes media boundaries in order to then consider how artefacts the-
matize or imitate borders, how they depict acts and conditions of boundary
crossings, or how they create in-between spaces or experiences of
replacing previously envisioned boundaries by merging words and music
in seemingly border-defying ways.
N. W. Balestrini (*)
University of Graz, Graz, Austria
e-mail: nassim.balestrini@uni-graz.at
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 11

Switzerland AG 2021
T. Gurke, S. Winnett (eds.), Words, Music, and the Popular,
Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85543-7_2
12 N. W. BALESTRINI
In the two theory-focused sections of this chapter, I will briefly intro-

duce the heuristic potential of media borders regarding word-music rela-
tions in songs and then review notions of popularity in poetry and music
scholarship. Two case studies—Richard Powers’s novel Orfeo (2014) and
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical (Broadway premiere, 2015) as well as the
eponymous paratextual book Hamilton (2016)—will provide examples of
how an intermedial perspective can bring both theoretical perspectives
into conversation. Rather than cementing a specific taxonomy, the case
studies explore how navigating borders between media and between clas-
sifications of artefacts requires work-specific ways of configuring distance
and closeness, as well as difference and similarity. The first example dem-
onstrates a fictional character’s impossible attempt to keep his musical
composition entirely to himself by developing an unprecedented form of
notating pitches in an unusual medium—a goal which emblematizes his
lifelong struggle with the classical-popular binary; the second example
illustrates an artist’s desire to cultivate an artist-recipient relationality that
fosters a decidedly intermedial and contextual mode of meaning-
production. As a result, both case studies illustrate why and how intrinsic
artistic features and extrinsic contexts of creation, distribution, and recep-
tion should be considered side by side.
Heuristic Functions of Media Borders

in Studying Songs
Back in the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan argued that “song”—just like “the
written word”—was “a single medium” (1994 [1964], 292). He thus
implied that lyrics and musical sounds can and should not be considered
independently of each other, rather than approaching song as a bi-medial
combination of words and music. McLuhan made this claim at a time
when popular music was revolutionizing the genre of song, but the idea
has had a long history. Ancient Egyptian and classical Greek cultures “did
not make the distinctions we now make between m[usic] and p[oetry]”
(“Music and Poetry” 1993, 803). In fact, the Greek word moûsike com-
prised “dance, m[usic], p[oetry], and elementary education” (804).
Roman culture distinguished between “four elements: m[usic], m[usic]
theory, p[oetry], and rhetorical theory” (805).1 By the eighteenth century,
1
Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis refers to similar understandings of music comprising dance
and other sound-related cultural activities in multiple non-European languages and cultures
(2019, 20).
2 OF SILENT NOTATION AND HISTORIOGRAPHIC RELATIONALITY… 13
European thinkers debated whether music was primarily mimetic (taking

human passions as their point of departure) or whether music produced
meaning without resorting to imitation (see 805).
Furthermore, the function and significance of sound in poetry and its
relation to music remain controversial. The characterization of poetry as
“an ontologically bivalent entity” (“Sound” 1993, 1172) that exists both
as performed sound and as written words relies on an analogy between
poetry and music: both have their own notational conventions (written
words, musical notation systems) which readers/musicians/performers
then transform into audible sound (1172). Thus, questions of whether
and how musical sound creates meaning also pertain to the sound of
poetry—a ‘musical’ feature of this literary genre which has been discussed
both as mimetic and as supportive of lexical meaning, rather than as car-
rying semantic power independently (see 1176). Such attitudes towards
music and words, and towards perceiving performed sounds as opposed to
silently reading written words and musical notation, highlight some of the
difficulties that affect how one understands word-music relations in songs.
What, then, are the benefits of scrutinizing how the spaces between
and/or the characteristics of intertwined words and music figure in pro-
cesses of encoding? Bruce Horner and Thomas Swiss diagnose “an inevi-
table tension between words and music. In songs, music gives life to the
words. But change the words, and you change the meaning of the music”
(2000, 1). Rather than seeing this interdependence as expressing “ten-
sion”, Keith Chapin and Andrew H. Clark posit that “[i]f each medium –
music and language – can supplement the other, it may be that it is the
very gap between them that offers a supplement” (2013, 8). Whether we
prefer the notion of “tension” or of “supplement”, it is crucial to empha-
size that, as Lawrence Kramer argues, ostensible meaning does not first
reside in one medium and is then imitated or repeated: “[i]n dealing with
these materials, it is critical to remember – especially with the texts of vocal
pieces – that they do not establish (authorize, fix) a meaning that the
music somehow reiterates, but only invite the interpreter to find meaning
in the interplay of expressive acts” (1993 , 9–10). In other words, an inter-
medial approach facilitates moving away from a hierarchical perspective on
words and music in songs and from determining a medium-based sequence
in meaning constitution. Individual meaning-making thus presumably
resides in contextually influenced listening practices and other predisposi-
tions or situational components.
14 N. W. BALESTRINI
Claims regarding the inseparability of words and music in songs poten-

tially feed into ‘postmedia’ or ‘media convergence’ arguments2 against
intermediality theory as a heuristic tool: if songs and other polymedial
artefacts did not allow one to identify “tangible borders between individ-
ual media” (Rajewsky 2010, 52), then one could not explore the liminal
space between words and music. By contrast, as Irina Rajewsky argues,
intermedial theory is much more specific because it does not work with a
standardized, universally applicable understanding of borders within all
plurimedial works. It rather considers “the historical processes of the
development and differentiation of so-called individual media”, and it
acknowledges “the justifiably designated ‘construct’ character of media
conceptions” (2010, 53). Thus, arguing at the level of each individual
work rather than generalizing about types of works makes clear that arte-
facts do not provide experiences of a ‘pure medium’ or a combination of
‘pure media’; instead, specific constellations of media features occur in the
production of each work and are received in particular ways that are influ-
enced by social and historical contexts (see Rajewsky 2010, 54).3
As a genre, song connects what we can define as two separate media,
both of which are conveyed through sound. How, then, do listeners expe-
rience songs as sonic entities in which words and music merge aurally but
remain separately discernible? Beyond a simple juxtaposition of reductive
notions of words and music, intermedial research considers that songs may
contain both intertextual and intermusical references to other works in
any medium. Thus, songs can establish entire networks of interrelations
through thematic references, through mentioning specific works, and
through methods of “partial reproduction”, “formal imitation”, and
“evocation” across media boundaries (see Wolf 2015, 468). As a result,
listeners might recognize intermedial relations between verbal and musical
sounds; they might also discern intermedially produced effects that link
sound with visual media. Visuality in songs can occur in the forms of ekph-
rasis or of adaptation. More often than not, it plays a role in song perfor-
mances. Thus, the experience of a song’s words and music can be closely
intertwined with the perception of performers’ outfits/costumes, dance/
2
An influential voice in postmedia thinking is Lev Manovich, whose notions recall those
promoted by art historians like Clement Greenberg (see Manovich [2001]).
3
Similar to Rajewsky, Yvonne Spielmann promotes analytical methods based on compari-
son and dialectics (2004, 78) in order to fathom the dynamic character of intermedial rela-
tions (2004, 79). Also see Müller (2010, 35) and Ochsner (2010, 55).
movement, and visual elements in the performance space/audiovisual

recording.
The interdependence of a song’s media components notwithstanding,
intermedial song analysis conceptualizes borders as functional and as
context-specific in their meaning. Assuming that, at a given point in time
and location, members of a culture share a conventional sense of media
borders, one can contemplate how and to which effect specific artefacts
from this particular context evoke, blur, confirm, or undermine conven-
tional practices (Rajewsky 2010, 64). In this sense, one can perceive bor-
ders as “enabling structures” (Rajewsky 2010, 65) for meaning-making
rather than as static and creatively inflexible fixtures. In a song, acknowl-
edging words and music as separate media permits scrutiny of how they
function individually and how sonic components bring both media into
such close vicinity that the border is perceived as having been erased—an
effect that then invites further analysis and interpretation. For instance,
one could inquire into cultural and other contextual reasons for perceiving
words and music as one.
Understanding the border as a variable and functional component of
artistic expression facilitates scholarly analysis sensitive to historical, con-
textual features and to nuances of meaning production and reception. It
allows intermedial readings that result in work-specific observations. The
assumption that identifying the idiosyncrasies of individual works enhances
our understanding of intermedial structures and their impacts can contrib-
ute to dismantling further dichotomies—such as the opposition between
‘classical’ and ‘popular’ works.
Notions of the ‘Popular’ in Poetry and Music

When scholars in the arts and humanities discuss the ‘popular’, they usu-
ally invoke Theodor W. Adorno’s claims about the so-called culture indus-
try which, as a purveyor of popular culture, ostensibly exerted a detrimental
effect on artistic quality and fostered recipients’ lack of interaction with
aesthetic constituents. Among those who use Adorno and the Frankfurt
School’s arguments as points of departure for developing diverging con-
ceptualizations, Fredric Jameson posits that the notion of “modern high
culture” that provides “a fixed point or eternal standard against which to
measure the ‘degraded’ status of mass culture” should yield to perceiving
“an increasing interpenetration of high and mass cultures” (1979, 133).
This shift allows
16 N. W. BALESTRINI
rethink[ing] the opposition high culture/mass culture in such a way that the
emphasis on evaluation to which it has traditionally given rise, and which
[…] tends to function in some timeless realm of absolute aesthetic judg-
ment, is replaced by a genuinely historical and dialectical approach to these
phenomena. (1979, 133)
Proponents of popular music studies have been applying such an approach

for decades. As scholars mostly trained in various branches of musicology
and influenced by cultural studies theories of the Birmingham School,
they have not accorded the lyrics of popular songs the same degree of in-
depth contextualization within the aesthetic and social dimensions of
‘high-brow’ poetry. This does not surprise, for literary historians them-
selves have only lately been contemplating popular poetry in its own right
and in relation to the legacy of elitist high modernism.
In the first half of the twentieth century, poetry enjoyed popularity in
myriad shapes and contexts (see the extensive list in Chasar 2012, 5), but
“[m]ost of this poetry […] has never been studied” (6). Radio programs
represent one popular context in which recipients did not read but rather
listened to poetry (Chasar 2012, chapter 2). Poetry from commercial con-
texts inspired the work of canonized poets such as Gertrude Stein and
William Carlos Williams without making their poems any less aesthetically
intricate (Chasar 2012, 128, 133, 159–162, 175, 178, 181, 186–187).
Chasar also demonstrates the dialectics of poetry production and recep-
tion in his discussion of Paul Engle, “a poet who bridged popular and elite
poetry cultures” (192) by presiding over the Iowa Writers’ Workshop
(probably the best-known of all creative writing programs in the United
States) at the same time as he wrote for Hallmark—that is, in a genre
which to many people is “synonymous with ‘popular poetry’” (193).
While Chasar lists numerous early twenty-first-century contexts in which
popular poetry is alive and kicking (218), he does not mention song lyrics
as another form in which popular poetry continues to exist.
Literary historians’ increased attention to questions of popularity
offers insights into precursors of careers like Engle’s. In the revisionist
Cambridge History of American Poetry, Virginia Jackson calls Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) “the most popular American poet
in history” (Jackson 2015, 240). His popularity began when his poems
were printed “anonymously in local newspapers” (Peterfy 2015, 96) and
then continued with the sale of his poems to popular magazines, with
myriad book editions, and eventually with instructional use of his poems
(96). Indeed, even in the twenty-first century, high-school poetry recita-
tion contests still feature poems like “The Psalm of Life.”4 This descrip-
tive and context-oriented rather than evaluative stance argues against
reading Longfellow’s immense popularity as a sure sign of the split
between unsophisticated general readers and professional poetry readers
in academia who, as erudite experts, would associate quality with a higher
accessibility threshold.5
Whitman’s attitude towards Longfellow in the early 1880s demon-
strates that the conflict between quantity and quality predates modernist
high-art elitism. Disgruntled by Longfellow’s long-standing popularity,
Whitman dubbed him the “universal poet of women and young people”
(qtd. in Jackson 2015, 238). Seeming appreciation for widespread appeal
simultaneously suggests ostensible disinterest on the part of men, ‘real’
adults, and those who can stomach less easily digestible poetry. Whitman’s
damning praise jars with his ideal of the democratic, egalitarian poet of
and for the people, as described in his 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass
(Whitman 1982 [1855]), unless one were to assume that Whitman had a
more restrictive view of ‘the people’ than he cared to admit. The
Longfellow-Whitman juxtaposition seems particularly ironic because
Longfellow was simultaneously a literature professor at Harvard and a
best-selling poet who catered to the taste of his time, whereas Whitman
desired to be generally loved and appreciated without assuming that wide-
spread acceptance would diminish his poetry’s aesthetic achievements.6
The idea of writing poetry that accommodates, but possibly also deter-
mines, the taste of a general audience is relevant for the discussion of
word-and-music relations in popular music because it again contextualizes
4
Regarding the history of school-related and other poetry recitations by amateurs, see
Rubin (2007, 107–164). A search for school recitations of [a]/[t]he “Psalm of Life” on
YouTube yields dozens of live recordings, school projects, and adaptations. Also see the
historical overview in Rubin (2007, 107–164).
5
Arguing from the perspective of one form of popular poetry today, Bradley claims that
rap’s “popularity relies in part on people not recognizing” that it is poetry (Bradley 2009,
xiv). While I do not agree with his generalization that “[p]oetry stands at an almost unfath-
omable distance from our daily lives” (xiv), I find his discussion of the poetics of rap as
convincing as his observation about the intermedial core of rap: “Rap’s poetry can usefully
be approached as literary verse while still recognizing its essential identity as music” (xvii).
6
As Peterfy poignantly highlights, literary historian Robert Spiller found that if reception
were the main criterion for a poet’s national standing, then Longfellow should be considered
“the most American poet that America has ever had” (Spiller qtd. in Peterfy 2015, 97).
18 N. W. BALESTRINI
categories of value and validity in academic disciplines, canonization pro-

cesses, and epistemologies.
Much as literary scholars with a cultural-historical bent have been
researching Longfellow’s popular poems, the field of popular music stud-
ies has become a viable part of musicology. Like cultural studies-inflected
literary scholarship (such as Rubin 2007, Chasar 2012), works by popular
music scholars have disproved the supposedly ephemeral and ‘merely’
contemporary features of popular music by providing a historical perspec-
tive and discussing social contexts (Middleton 1990, 3). Analogous to
binary conceptualizations of ‘highly artistic’ and ‘popular’ poetry,
[c]lassical music was until recently considered the binary opposite of popu-
lar. It thus provided a useful benchmark against which popular music might
be defined. However, classical music is itself becoming increasingly popular,
literally in the sense that many people buy it, but also because it is used in
popular contexts, such as film, television and advertising soundtracks.
(Bennett et al. 2006, 2–3)
One way of addressing the popular, then, resides in studying the cultural
evaluations intertwined in listening practices (Frith 1996, 8). Popular
music scholars “link musical sounds with socially inscribed and embodied
meaning” by unraveling how such sounds “encode place, race, class, and
gender” (Shank 2006, 11; also see Shank 2014; Middleton 2006).7 Thus,
contextual rather than intrinsic features contribute to understanding
meaning-making in popular song.
How do these developments affect the study of words and music in the
popular realm? Among the necessary changes that have resulted from dis-
solving strict dichotomies and from developing methods and terminolo-
gies applicable to popular music genres, scholars have recognized that,
instead of simple content analyses of lyrics (Middleton 2000, 4), “a more
adequate approach to pop lyrics required the development of an awareness
that they function not as verbal texts but as sung words, linguistically
marked vocal sound-sequences mediated by musical conventions” (7).
Thus, knowledge of “metasonorial features” and “theories of mediation”
(9) can help unravel the particular features of word-music relations in
7
For a convincingly argued and historically well-grounded recent set of case studies that
link cultural politics, race, sound production, and sound reception, see Stoever (2016).
popular song. Literature and jazz scholars Robert O’Meally, Brent Hayes
Edwards, and Farah Jasmine Griffin suggest adopting a transmedial
perspective that is attuned to the borders between media:
The point in this work is not so much to echo old assumptions about the
ways that a novelist emulates or evokes a saxophonist but more to suggest
that certain aesthetic issues, certain modes and structural paradigms, show
up in a number of media—or, more precisely, operate at the edges of media,
at what one might term the interface of sound and script and pig-
ment. (2004, 5)
Such a suggestion coheres with the fact that “scholars—guided by Daphne

Brooks, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Fred Moten, Gayle Wald, and [Alexander]
Weheliye—have recently retheorized the relationship between black per-
formance practice and writing as mutually informative” (Stoever 2016,
16; also see Stein 2012). Connecting an intermedial lens with a contextual
cultural-studies mindset promises to produce scholarship that will facili-
tate a multi-faceted understanding of word-music relations and the popu-
lar. The following two case studies address these relations as well as the
shifting and shifted notions of popularity in different medial
environments.
Time, Taste, and Tunes in Richard Powers’s Orfeo:

Popularity as a Problem
In Powers’s 2014 novel the protagonist, Peter Els, struggles to define the
inherent characteristics of music. Trained as both a composer and a chem-
ist, Els eventually ekes out a low-key career as a composition instructor at
a small college. He launches this career several years after leaving his wife
and young daughter for what he misjudged as a unique opportunity to
reach an understanding audience with his works—an error he sorely
regrets. In his retirement, he rediscovers his love of science and begins to
experiment with altering the DNA of harmless bacteria—not for the sake
of endangering anyone, but in order to use genetic building blocks and
strands as a notation system and material basis that would grant his com-
position eternal life (as long as the bacteria were able to reproduce) with-
out being exposed to listeners who misconstrue his work. While the
composer-chemist’s project becomes the driving force in a road novel
about easily escalating public hysteria in the post-9/11 United States, in
20 N. W. BALESTRINI
the sense that local and federal authorities misread Els’s experimentation
as preparatory work for a bio-terrorist attack, the novel also offers intricate
contemplation of popularity in music culture and, to a smaller extent, of
word-music relations. Rather than upholding the Frankfurt School’s
binary of classical/elitist and popular/mass cultures, Powers addresses the
impact of changing taste, of love relationships, and of listening practices.
Word-music relations recur as a theme which underscores Els’s central
quest: the desire to experience freedom by transcending time (Powers
2014, 2, 107, et passim) and to prove his mantra that “[m]usic […]
doesn’t mean things. It is things” (69). In the following, I will focus on
how the power of musical taste and the occasionally rampant mis-use of
words for assigning meaning to music drive the protagonist towards the
silent materiality of notating his composition in strands of DNA and
towards his conviction that he will experience the essence of music only
after death.
Els’s evolving understanding of trends in music culture is consistently
associated with being hemmed in or liberated. Eventually, he comes to
regard qualitative assessments as dependent on each listener’s sonic hierar-
chy. As an adolescent, his own evaluative response to being force-fed rock
‘n’ roll firmly rests on a dichotomous perception of classical and popular
music. What his brother, Paul, and his brother’s friends experience as
game-changing sounds, Peter considers restricted and repetitive: “Peter
hears only harmonic jail” (Powers 2014, 20). As Middleton points out,
the focus on harmony found in traditional musicology does not disclose
the crucial features of a popular song, particularly timbre (Middleton
2000, 4); thus, young Peter fails to perceive the music’s sonic language.
After his career as a composition instructor, Els experiences an illness
(Powers 2014, 326) that forces him to retrain himself as a listener. He
does so also by listening to a broad variety of popular-music genres with a
mindset different from his classical-music training: “He listened less for
subtle rhythms and harmonic contour, more for melody and timbre.
Everything he heard was new and strange. Two-tone, four-by-four garage,
rare groove, riot grrrl, red dirt, country rap, cybergrind, cowpunk, neo-
prog, neo-soul, new jack swing …” (329; ellipsis in original). The novel
thus depicts how conscious and close/open-minded listening impacts the
sonic experience.
Exhausted by his weeks-long flight from federal agents who consider
him a dangerous terrorist, Els wakes up in his motel room and goes
through another modified-listening experience that prepares the reader
for his death: “it was five a.m. and the clock radio was playing ‘Smells Like
Teen Spirit’, so soft and sad and slow and minor and faraway that the
haunting tune might have been Fauré’s Elegy” (Powers 2014, 315).
Besides the hilarious idea of perceiving Kurt Cobain’s hoarse and frantic
singing in this 1991 Nirvana song as elegiac in the manner of Gabriel
Fauré’s piece from the 1880s, this passage foreshadows Els’s expectation
that he will attain timeless sonic liberty only when he dies since, as is com-
monly known, Cobain ended his life three years after the song’s release.
Similarly, in the last pages of Powers’s narrative, Els is visiting his daughter
and eventually decides to face the anti-terrorism police squad that has
arrived outside her home, anticipating that they will shoot to kill. Earlier
in the novel, the narrator indicates that Els’s understanding of music has
been pushing him towards this moment all along: while the composer
always insisted on the superiority of being over meaning in music, “his
music will circle around the same vivid gesture: a forward, stumbling
surge that wavers […] between the key of hope and the atonal slash of
nothingness” (Powers 2014, 69). The subsequent paragraph shifts the
balance towards hope by providing unidentified Bible quotations (1 Cor.
51–52; St. John 16, 22) that—for instance—Johannes Brahms combined
in Ein Deutsches Requiem (premiered in 1869): “We will not sleep, but
will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. You’ll see me
again” (Powers 2014, 69).8 This promise to be reunited after death
becomes a formula for what Els associates with “the ear” being “on its
way to being free” (69). Significantly, this hope resonates with Brahms’s
requiem that soothes and comforts rather than inspires fear of divine ret-
ribution (as is the case in the “Dies Irae” section of fire-and-brimstone
requiems).
Whereas the elderly Els experiences an unexpected delight in listening
to popular music with a new set of ears, so to speak, his listeners in gradu-
ate school and thereafter did not grant him the kind of openness he desires,
even though mutual borrowing between classical and popular music was a
well-established fact at the time of his studies in the 1960s (Powers 2014,
98). Inspired by a “ditty” hummed by a happy ten-year-old (96), Els cre-
ates a piece for “chamber orchestra, soprano, and four reel-to-reel tape
machines”. When he played it for his instructors, “Mattison condemned
the finished piece as decorative. Johnston liked the virtuoso reach, but
8
I would like to thank Susan Winnett for pointing out that a bass aria in Georg Friedrich
Händel’s 1741 oratorio Messiah also includes the above-mentioned verses from Corinthians.
22 N. W. BALESTRINI
wanted something more purged of familiar harmonic gestures. Hiller

found it intriguing but inchoate. And Brün wanted to know how such
music helped bring about a more just society” (96–97). These value judg-
ments again highlight the fickleness of taste based on what one is listening
for—be it in so-called popular or classical music.
Els’s experiences with responses to music range from confronting his
composition teachers’ preconceived notions to the painstaking process of
re-learning how to listen. His teachers’ and his own lack of openness high-
lights the protagonist’s life-long desire to transcend time and to avoid
other listeners’ censure. In order to reach his goal, he—first—contem-
plates the non-human sounds of birdsong and aligns himself with Olivier
Messiaen’s compositional orientation towards the transcendental. Second,
he re-evaluates his work as a composer in light of the private world of his
emotional ties to his (ex-)wife and daughter, which then inspires his exper-
imentation with a notation system that is to ensure inaccessibility to
outsiders.9
Orfeo recounts how Messiaen composed and premiered his Quartet for
the End of Time under harrowing circumstances in a Nazi prison camp.
This work, which Els teaches to a group of senior citizens, yet again the-
matizes imprisonment and/in time. Messiaen addresses this sense of being
caught and of wanting to escape through words and musical sounds.
According to Andrew Shenton, Messiaen’s “programme notes for the
Quatuor pour la fin du Temps […] are inseparable from the music (indeed
they appear in the score)” (Shenton 2008, 12). Confirming his interest in
significant word-music relations, Messiaen also penned theories regarding
equivalents between different forms and media of expression such as bird-
song, letters, sounds of letters, and the entire repository of possibilities in
instrumental music. After the Second World War, he published three vol-
umes dedicated to birdsong and its use in his symbolic composition tech-
niques (see Shenton 2008, 21), complemented by a posthumously
published seven-volume treatise on his musical language (41). As Sander
van Maas explains, “[f]or Messiaen, the birds carried a number of sym-
bolic meanings, ranging from the naturalistic representation of nature to
9
The novel also incorporates the listening behavior and sound production of Els’s dog,
Fidelio. The intermedial reference to Beethoven’s opera underscores the theme of imprison-
ment and serves to provide an example of a perceiver that is immune to changing tastes in
human society: “Fidelio, that happy creature baying at the whims of Els’s clarinet, hinted at
something in music beyond taste, built into the evolved brain” (Powers 2014, 10).
the divine act of creation and, on the level of the human individual, a
promise of ultimate freedom” (van Maas 2013, 184). To Peter Els, bird
calls equal “[f]resh, surprising music that escaped all human conventions:
the very thing he’d spent his life searching for was here all along, free for
the listening” (Powers 2014, 73). Thus, the non-human animal world
offers sonic fare which is ‘free’ in multiple senses of the word: unencum-
bered with prefabricated forms that are loaded with human-imposed
meaning and not tied to monetary exchange or social obligations.
Els’s notion of freedom as transcendence coheres with the symbolical
iconicity envisioned for Messiaen’s music as sonifying Catholic thought
(see Shenton 2008, 60–63), at least to the extent that Els envisions music
to overcome the limits that time imposes on human existence. Els’s large-
scale idea regarding the power of music again links him to Messiaen. The
French composer’s technique expresses the philosopher Gilles “[…]
Deleuze’s notion of the ‘Cosmos refrain’, that is, the cosmos regarded as
‘a little ditty’” (van Maas 2013, 176). In addition to the “ditty” that stim-
ulated the frenzied process of developing the work that his composition
teachers rudely rejected, Els comes to regard the ‘non-classical’ music
embedded in memories of his love for his ex-wife, Maddy, and their
daughter, Sara, as crucial to his legacy (and thus to his becoming ‘time-
less’ as a composer). Bits and pieces of their shared lives create a mosaic
which, as Els sees it, is completed once he is willing to die in order to hear
unearthly music.
Non-classical songs—which some would dismiss as trifling ditties—fig-
ure prominently in Els’s interactions with loved ones. During Peter and
Maddy’s courtship, “she [Maddy] hums, under her breath, the B-side of
the Byrds’ ‘Eight Miles High’: ‘Why’” (Powers 2014, 127). The inaudible
orthographic difference between “birds” and the rock band “The Byrds”
consists in the “y” (homophonous with “why”) rather than the “i” in the
signifier for the animal. The issue of “why” he eventually leaves his fam-
ily—namely in the hopes of success as a composer—haunts Els for the rest
of his life. Moreover, the song “Why” is said to be based on one of the
band member’s difficulties with his domineering mother, whereas the lyr-
ics shift the meaning towards a struggle between two lovers. In any case,
the reference to the song may be read as foreshadowing difficulties
to come.
Similarly, Els associates emotionally fulfilling moments with Maddy and
Sara with non-classical songs: a folk tune (Powers 2014, 141), a blues-like
number (358), and nursery songs (179). The narrator blithely states that
24 N. W. BALESTRINI
Els needed three decades effectively to work with the folk hymn “What
wondrous love is this, oh my soul?” (141). Shortly before he leaves his
family, Maddy dares Peter to write a song for her. The song turns out to
be a wordless and “trivial tune” (208) which has them all in stitches and
which marks their final moment as a loving nuclear family. During his
flight from the authorities, Peter visits Maddy and, finally, Sara. Again, he
refers to a non-classical tune to characterize his predicament: “There is no
plan. There’s only that old hobo tune: Make me down a pallet on your
floor. When I’m broken and I got nowhere to go” (Powers 2014, 358).
What reassures him before his death is that their family ditty serves as the
ringtone of Sara’s cell phone (366). While he has been trying to encode
the song in DNA, his data-specialist daughter has turned it into digitized
sound. Sara’s attachment to the tune implicitly confirms Els’s sense of her
as “his one perfect composition, however little credit he could take for the
finished work” (314) and as his ideal listener, in whom the young father
wanted to perceive “what the ear might come to hear, when raised on
sounds from a happy elsewhere” (181). The pun on els(e)where, again,
gestures towards his goal of being liberated by gaining access to a world
outside the often disappointing quotidian.
Els projects his notion of transcendent listening onto a realm of free-
dom in order to hold on to his axiom of music’s being rather than mean-
ing. His incessant tweeting during the final stretch of his flight, however,
countermands the power of wordless sound. The novel’s obvious reliance
on the verbal medium and on discourse about music also calls the fulfil-
ment of Els’s desire into doubt. As Middleton argues, “[a]t the level of
popular assumption, the belief that music produces sense, or conveys
meanings, is unquestioned. And it slips very easily into the idea that there
are analogies between music and language” (Middleton 1990, 172). But
the “kind of meaning is music supposed to convey—affective, cognitive,
referential” (172) remains a matter of debate, as “denotation in the sense
in which the term is used in linguistics is rare in music” (220). Significantly,
Els turns to Twitter—which is recognized by its bird icon, but which he
uses to communicate through written words—to make his perspective on
his doings as ubiquitous and freely available as birdsong (see Powers 2014,
350–359). Knowing that his DNA-based notation system has been misun-
derstood, he reverts to the discursive possibilities of words, even though
words have always struck him as obstacles to getting at what music is:
words in the contexts of teaching composition, of responses to performed

music in oral commentary by audience members and printed music criti-
cism, and of personal (love) relationships.
Is the restriction to music as non-verbal sound then an ontological or
an interpretative difference? At least in earthly life, Els’s search for pure
being fails in the sense that he cannot escape context, even if contextual
interpretations are often and potentially even fatally wrong. His wish “to
break free of time and hear the future” (Powers 2014, 2), which the narra-
tor presents in italics like stage directions in a printed drama, can only
come true when Els dies. Having shifted from a third-person to a second-
person perspective (Powers 2014, 363–369) that sounds as if an Olympian
omniscient narrator were addressing the protagonist, the novel’s closing
sentences indicate the transition: “Downbeat of a little infinity. And at last
you will hear how this piece goes” (Powers 2014, 369).
In contemplating the role of the popular in classical and non-classical
music alongside the relation between being and meaning, Powers’s novel
transforms binary oppositions into paradoxical interrelations. Els’s desire
for freedom from stultifying conventional tastes and techniques drives him
towards avoiding two elements that are commonly associated with music:
sound production (notwithstanding temporary silences such as rests) and
the act of listening. But even if Els’s DNA notation concentrates on what
he considers music’s essential being, he cannot escape the subjective mean-
ing that the composition has for him, for Maddy, and for Sara. The fact
that his silent music results in Els’s moniker “Biohacker Bach” (Powers
2014, 265) foregrounds the non-generalizable and the social natures of
musical sound.10 It becomes clear that listeners’ meaning constructions—
which the novel represents in extreme forms like populist rhetoric and,
thus, in verbal formats—can completely blot out a composer’s ideas, as
even the viral verbiage of Els’s tweets fails to amend the
misunderstanding.
10
Els’s perspective resembles Kramer’s claim that “musical meaning consists of a specific,
mutual interplay between musical experience and its contexts; the form taken by this process
is the production of modes or models of subjectivity carried by the music into the listener’s
sense of self; and the dynamics of this production consist of a renegotiation of the subject’s
position(s) between the historically contingent forms of experience and the experience of a
transcendental perspective that claims to subsume (but is actually subsumed by) them”
(Kramer 2002, 8).
26 N. W. BALESTRINI
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Paratextual Education

of Hamilton Recipients
Within polymedial hip-hop culture, rap most prominently links verbal

poetry with music. Rap poetry is deeply embedded in African American
poetic and oral traditions as well as in forms and practices of oratory.
Furthermore, rap as a performance genre is heavily marketed via music
videos, whose composition invites an intermedial research perspective in
order to address sonic features of words and music alongside visual com-
ponents such as dance, filmic techniques, setting, narrative and dramatic
structures, and theatricality.11
The Broadway smash-hit musical Hamilton has garnered much atten-
tion. The bulk of scholarly (but nevertheless astonishingly subjective)
responses to Hamilton has focused on the controversial politics of the
musical and of its potential impact on future generations’ ideas about the
history of the founding fathers. Fewer authors have paid serious attention
to the work as a Broadway musical and as an artefact.12 A special section in
American Music sheds much-needed and detail-oriented light on the
musical’s multiple media components and aesthetic strategies (Garrett
2018). Elucidating the history of the American musical and its relation to
Western English-language theater, Elissa Harbert finds that Miranda’s
“history musical” adopts the Shakespearean “metatheatrical mode” of not
simply representing history, but rather of prodding “audience members
[…] to think like historians, always aware of their position looking back on
the distant past and evaluating it in the present” (Harbert 2018, 417).
Effectively staging history in a dramatic performance partially rests on
manipulating, adopting, and revising “accepted historical interpretations”
(418). According to Harbert, audiences are confronted simultaneously
with “emotional realism” and with constant reminders of the show’s obvi-
ous “artifice” (422).13 As I have argued elsewhere, the companion volume
that Miranda and his co-author, Jeremy McCarter, published about six
months after the Broadway premiere embodies the triangulation of his-
tory, historiography, and theatrical representation in the present moment
(Balestrini 2018). As this book entrusts the historiography of the musical’s
11
On the importance of music videos in this context, see Balestrini (2019).
12
See the variegated collection of essays edited by Romano and Potter (2018).
13
On the role of dance in oscillating with effects ranging from realism to its opposite, see
Searcy (2018).
genesis and early reception into the creative team’s own hands, it demon-
strates the empowerment inherent in telling one’s own story. As a para-
text, the book explicates specific aesthetic decisions and projects hoped-for
recipients’ responses. The show’s artistic creators, thus, aim at precluding
(or battling) what they consider misinterpretations. Rather than retreating
into silent DNA like Peter Els in Powers’s novel, they lay bare some of the
show’s ‘compositional DNA’, hoping that the implications of its being will
replicate specific attributions of meaning.
Two characteristics of word-music relations are at the forefront of
Hamilton: first, the characteristic intertwining of a beat with intensely
rhymed, often strongly narrative or argumentative lyrics in rap, a strategy
which merges musical rhythm and sound with poetry and oratory; second,
the broad variety of song styles whose rhythmic and melodic elements
evoke “gospel”, “boogie-woogie”, “R&B”, “early jazz”, “Jamaican
dancehall”, “reggaeton”, “waltz time over a ‘Bach-like’ harpsichord
accompaniment”, and “British Invasion” (Kajikawa 2018, 469). Averting
the impression that the musical is a mere potpourri, Miranda explains in
his annotations to the libretto (Miranda and McCarter 2016, passim) that
and how he selected musical features to enhance characterization and to
boost the overall effect of rolling the past, the present, and historiography
into one.
Miranda’s Alexander Hamilton is a veritable fountain of words. Not
only does he rap his lines at break-neck speed, but he also spits an abun-
dance of polysyllabic rhymes and indulges in intertextual verbal sampling
of famous rappers. This strategy of connecting the eighteenth-century his-
torical figure with present-day hip-hop poetry stresses the musical’s cen-
tral theme: the need to think about history in light of the contemporary
era and vice versa. Already in the opening number, “My Shot”, Miranda
pays homage to four rap artists (annotation 1: Tupac; annotation 2: Mobb
Deep; annotation 4: The Notorious B.I.G.; annotation 11: Busta Rhymes
[Miranda and McCarter 2016, 26, 28]). Strewn throughout the musical,
such verbal samples also occur in lines rapped by other characters, particu-
larly Thomas Jefferson and Hamilton’s sister-in-law Angelica Schuyler. In
all cases, the focus on speedy articulation within a fast beat functions as a
way of displaying a sharp mind, rhetorical eloquence, and the ability to
defend one’s arguments (most prominently in the two ‘cabinet battles’
that pit Hamilton against Jefferson [Miranda and McCarter 2016,
161–163, 192–193]; see Balestrini 2019). In contrast to Hamilton and
Jefferson, who take clear political positions, the ever-evasive opportunism
28 N. W. BALESTRINI
of Aaron Burr is underscored with the constant movement of dancing. As

Miranda writes about “Non-Stop”, “[o]nce again, dancehall rhythms for
Burr, just as in [Burr’s previous song] ‘Wait for It’” (Miranda and
McCarter 2016, 137n3).
Miranda’s second annotation to “Farmer Refuted”, a number in which
the loyalist Samuel Seabury hesitatingly intones anti-revolution warnings
in dactylic lines accompanied by a ‘classical’ harpsichord while Hamilton’s
fast-paced, biting, and ‘popular’ rapped commentary pulverizes his argu-
ments, confirms that verbal and—more broadly—sonic prowess functions
as a means of characterization: “The fun (and laborious part) of this tune
was having Hamilton dismantle Seabury using the same vowels and
cadences and talking over him. Heed becomes He’d. Rabble/Unravel”
(Miranda and McCarter 2016, 49). Thus, Miranda exacerbates the clash
between the courtly harpsichord and the rapped lines by using homophone-
based verbal puns. The two contenders’ words may sound similar or iden-
tical, but their meanings and implications differ.
This instrumentalization of arbitrary sound-meaning relations recurs in
yet another variant that invites audience members to confront history, his-
toriography, and the present. During his first musical number, King
George III intones “You’ll Be Back” (Miranda and McCarter 2016, 57),
written in the style of a British Invasion break-up song. Juxtaposing the
eighteenth-century monarch and 1960s popular music heightens the sar-
castic analogy between English-American political relations gone bad and
a failed love relationship. The song’s reprise after the Revolutionary War,
“What Comes Next?” (127), uses the same music. The lyrics, however,
differ sharply. It thus becomes clear that—by itself—the music could not
establish the meaning of this song as an intermedial entity and as part of a
longer stage work. In the reprise, George III—of all people—instructs the
American leaders of the Early Republic that peacefully ruling the new
nation will be harder than gaining independence through winning a war.
To Miranda, this song encourages audience members to think about
something that seems ‘natural’ but that should be re-evaluated critically:
“He [George III] becomes an audience surrogate in a strange way, rob-
bing the revolution of its inevitability and kicking the tires on it” (127n2).
And, in case audience members do not catch on during the first reprise,
the British monarch reappears in this function with his last song, “I Know
Him” (218), in which George III flippantly anticipates John Adams’s
inability to lead the United States because he lacks George Washington’s
statesmanship and public standing. While the analogy between
transatlantic political turmoil and a thwarted love relationship remains a

powerful backdrop throughout this triad, the lyrics move from expres-
sions of offended pride to astute political observations made by an insider
turned outsider.
Miranda confirms his goal of linking music, words, and characterization
in his annotation for “What’d I Miss?” (Miranda and McCarter 2016,
152–153), the musical number that showcases Jefferson upon his return
to the newly minted nation after his sojourn in Paris:
Figuring out the “sound” of Thomas Jefferson was a fun challenge. My

reasoning: He’s a full generation older than Hamilton, and he was absent
for much of the fighting of the Revolutionary War, though certainly an
architect of some of the founding documents. So I wrote him in sort of a
Lambert/Hendricks/Ross/Gil Scott-Heron mode—jazzy, proto-hip-hop,
but not the boom bap of Hamilton. He has just as much fun with words,
but they swing and they sing. (152n4)
As in the cabinet battles, Hamilton and Jefferson both know how to use
words to their advantage, but here the music distinguishes between them.
Miranda’s paratextual explanations of his word-music strategies establish
that the musical is not simply an entertaining medley. Instead, audiences
should listen closely and link recurring verbal and sonic features to the
larger questions Hamilton addresses. As part of Miranda’s method, divi-
sions between musical styles evaporate along with the possibility of clear
notions of the classical and the popular. Shakespeare, Broadway, and hip
hop as major inspirations lasso history, historiography, and the contempo-
rary moment into a thought-provoking theater experience.
Outlook
Powers’s Orfeo and both Miranda’s musical Hamilton and its companion
book publication offer points of departure for further debating the ‘popu-
lar’ as a constantly shifting analytical category and of word-music relations
as markers of meaning-making. The novel, as a literary text that relies on
the verbal medium and that does not overtly include other media formats,14
quotes the lyrics of songs, refers to verbal paratexts and responses to music
14
Regarding the contrastive pair of “overt” versus “covert” musico-literary intermediality,
see Wolf (1999, 37–44).
30 N. W. BALESTRINI
in the storyworld, and—of course—itself consists largely of verbal dis-

course about music-related issues as central themes. In doing so, the nar-
rator frequently marvels at the expressiveness of words set to music (both
as intended by the composer and as unexpectedly created by changing
performance and listening contexts). All in all, the main concern resides in
Els’s grappling with his conceptualization of music’s ontology as pre-
verbal and pre-meaning. Ultimately, Els realizes that his hope to overcome
the strictures of time through music and his hard-won appreciation of his
nuclear family relations ascribe meaning even to the wordless, silent, and
potentially time-defying genetic patterns into which he encodes his com-
position—even though this meaning remains undetected by other listen-
ers’ subjectivities. In its depiction of Els’s own development as a listener,
the novel discards the evaluative dichotomy of classical versus popular
music. It does retain a positively connoted idea of music’s ability to tran-
scend not only words but also earthly existence.
In Hamilton, listeners can aurally identify historical time periods and
cultural contexts through a broad range of sonic allusions to anything
from eighteenth-century harpsichord sounds and nineteenth-century
musical theater to twentieth-century and current popular music. In strate-
gic terms, such musical intertextuality bolsters the libretto’s theme of
thinking about the past and its historiographic representations in and
through the present. The rap battles in Hamilton most obviously fore-
ground the political salience of intertwining words and music. Moreover,
hearing the founding fathers’ verbal sparring over a beat stresses the ora-
torical quality of spitting rhymes and raises questions regarding the rela-
tive importance or words and music in rap.
Outside the case study discussed here, possible consequences of a hier-
archical perception of musical above verbal components in rap abound.
For instance, Kendrick Lamar received the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for his
album Damn in the category of music, not poetry, even though—as one
of the jurors said in an interview—“[i]t’s so poetic. I felt like if you took
his lyrics and put them in a book, it would be great literature” (Graham
2018). Also privileging the musical component, psychologist Elizabeth
Hellmuth Margulis argues that “[r]ap artists virtuosically exploit the
rhyme and rhythm latent within everyday speech to spin compelling
musical performances” (2019, 46). She subsequently suggests that the
repetitive, chorus-like features of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a
Dream” speech “can be thought of as adopting musical strategies to
encourage a sense of participation and shared intent” (48). While this
may be true, reading repetition as primarily musical and not as related to

King’s training as a minister and an orator is a choice of focus rather than
a given.
Claims regarding the superior importance of musical qualities over ver-
bal ones, not only in a rap number (which is obviously intermedial in the
sense of a popular song) but also in the case of a public speech (which is
not necessarily perceived as intermedial, although it does combine literary
and sonic components), are primarily evaluative and do not address pos-
sible implications of the hierarchy they establish. If the music in the
Hamilton rap battles were more crucial than the lyrics, could we then not
pay attention to how the musical grapples with ideological conflicts that
began in the Early Republic and extend into the twenty-first century? An
intermedial approach to the relation between words and music in these
musical numbers which merely contemplates the relation between two
media cannot suffice. Instead, the perceived border between words and
music needs to be considered from a cultural-historical perspective. By
assessing evaluative practices related to the verbal and musical components
of a song, for instance, we can think about borders as “enabling struc-
tures” (Rajewsky 2010, 65). When listeners privilege musical features over
verbal ones in the above-mentioned examples, then they diert attention
from the meaning-making potential and importance of verbal expression.
From a cultural-historical perspective, an interpretative emphasis on music
at the expense of poetry and oratory in Lamar’s and King’s cases is not
unproblematic. It might participate in what Paul Gilroy describes as a fre-
quently unnoticed or ignored legacy of slavery: slaveholders tried to pre-
vent Black literacy; whites wielded language as an instrument of power
(Gilroy 1993, 74); and Black culture’s forced orality resulted in depictions
of African American culture as body-focused and ephemeral self-expression
in dramatic and other performance-based formats that were regarded as
“pre- and anti-discursive constituents of black metacommunication” (75).
Importantly, a race-focused perspective on the musical or verbal/poetic/
rhetorical strengths of a bi-medial work also links up with concerns of
popular music studies, which have been promoting contextual approaches
that examine how sonic cultures are part of sociopolitical relations and
predicaments (Shank 2006, 2014; Middleton 2006).
To return to Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis’s reference to findings in
music psychology, it is crucial to consider that “[m]any kinds of evidence
point to the active role of the human mind in generating metric experi-
ence” (2019, 50). Thus, intermedial analyses of word-music relations,
32 N. W. BALESTRINI
especially in the realm of what is regarded as popular music, can contribute

greatly by elucidating cultural traditions of hearing both words and music
and by inquiring into mechanisms of signification in contexts that bring
words/lyrics/literary texts into a close, even merged relation with musical
sounds. A double perspective on word-music relations that comprises tra-
ditional intermedial foci on semiotics and representation as well as scrutiny
of the subjectivity of an “aesthetics of experience” (Hurley and Warner
2012, 100)15 could facilitate two-pronged readings that keep artistic con-
structs of signification and their desired sensory impacts in mind.
Works Cited
Balestrini, Nassim Winnie. 2018. Intermedial on/offstage auto/biography: Lin-
Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, hip hop, and historiography. In Intermediality
and life writing, ed. Nassim W. Balestrini and Ina Bergmann, 210–231. Berlin:
DeGruyter.
———. 2019. The intermedial poetry of rap: Words, sounds, and music videos. In
Poem unlimited: New perspectives on poetry and genre, ed. David Kerler and
Timo Müller, 240–253. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Bennett, Andy, Barry Shank, and Jason Toynbee. 2006. Introduction. In The pop-
ular music studies reader, ed. Andy Bennett, Barry Shank, and Jason Toynbee,
1–7. London/New York: Routledge.
Bradley, Adam. 2009. Book of rhymes: The poetics of hip hop. New York: Basic
Civitas/Perseus/Hachette.
Chapin, Keith, and Andrew H. Clark. 2013. Speaking of music: A view across
disciplines and a lexicon of topoi. In Speaking of music: Addressing the sonorous,
ed. Keith Chapin and Andrew H. Clark, 1–18. New York: Fordham UP.
Chasar, Mike. 2012. Everyday reading: Poetry and popular culture in modern
America. New York: Columbia UP.
Frith, Simon. 1996. Performing rites: On the value of popular music. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard UP.
Garrett, Charles Hiroshi, ed. 2018. Hamilton forum. American Music 36
(4): 407–506.
Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
Graham, David, A. 2018. How the Pulitzers chose Kendrick Lamar, accord-
ing to a juror. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/
archive/2018/04/regina-carter-kendrick-lamar-pulitzer/558509. Accessed 14
Sept 2020.
15
Taking this concept from affect studies, Hurley and Warner discuss its usefulness in the-
atre studies. I would not be surprised if the concept were to become more prominent in
intermedial research and, thus, in various media and genre contexts.
Harbert, Elissa. 2018. Hamilton and history musicals. American Music 36

(4): 412–426.
Horner, Bruce, and Thomas Swiss. 2000. Putting it into words: Key terms for
studying popular music. In Key terms in popular music and culture, ed. Bruce
Horner and Thomas Swiss, 1–2. Malden: Blackwell.
Hurley, Erin, and Sara Warner. 2012. Special section: Affect/performance/poli-
tics. Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 26 (2): 99–107.
Jackson, Virginia. 2015. Longfellow in his time. In The Cambridge history of
American poetry, ed. Alfred Bendixen and Stephen Burt, 238–258. Cambridge:
Cambridge UP.
Jameson, Fredric. 1979. Reification and utopia in mass culture. Social Text
1: 130–148.
Kajikawa, Loren. 2018. ‘Young, scrappy, and hungry’: Hamilton, hip hop, and
race. American Music 36 (4): 467–486.
Kramer, Lawrence. 1993. Music as cultural practice, 1800–1900. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
———. 2002. Musical meaning: Toward a critical history. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Manovich, Lev. 2001. Post-media aesthetics. http://manovich.net/index.php/
projects/post-media-aesthetics. Accessed 13 Mar 2020.
Margulis, Elizabeth H. 2019. The psychology of music: A very short introduction.
Oxford: Oxford UP.
McLuhan, Marshall. 1994 [1964]. Understanding media: The extensions of man.
Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press.
Middleton, Richard. 1990. Studying popular music. Buckingham/Philadelphia:
Open University Press.
———. 2000. Introduction: Locating the popular music text. In Reading pop:
Approaches to textual analysis in popular music, ed. Richard Middleton, 1–19.
Oxford: Oxford UP.
———. 2006. In the groove or blowing your mind? The pleasures of musical rep-
etition. In The popular music studies reader, ed. Andy Bennett, Barry Shank,
and Jason Toynbee, 15–20. London/New York: Routledge.
Miranda, Lin-Manuel, and Jeremy McCarter. 2016. Hamilton: The revolution:
Being the complete libretto of the Broadway musical, with a true account of its
creation, and concise remarks on hip-hop, the power of stories, and the new
America. London: Little, Brown.
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Konflikte. In Intermediale Inszenierungen im Zeitalter der Digitalisierung:
Medientheoretische Analysen und ästhetische Konzepte, ed. Andy Blättler et al.,
17–40. Bielefeld: transcript.
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nearly the whole ocean assumed the appearance and agitation of boiling
water.
Throughout our passage, we remarked, that whenever the wind hauled to

the southward of southeast, it increased in force. It occurred so frequently as
to be a subject of general remark.
On the 20th of September, in latitude seven degrees fifty minutes south,

and longitude one hundred and twenty degrees thirty minutes west, we saw a
comet for the first time, thirty or forty degrees above the horizon, and
bearing from us east by north. At day-light, on the morning of September
26th, several of the southernmost of the Marqueses were in sight. They were
all mountainous, but covered with vegetation, and as we drew near presented
a pleasing contrast to the sterile and gloomy Gallapagos. We stood along the
shore of La Dominica, admiring the beautiful little valleys that were
presented to our view in quick succession, where villages of palm-thatched
huts, surrounded by clumps of tall cocoa-nut and wide-spreading bread fruit
trees, formed scenes of rural quiet calculated to fill the imagination with the
most agreeable conceptions of the happy condition of their inhabitants. At
length we came to a small bay where the valley was more populous than any
we had seen before, and the captain, to our great satisfaction, hauled up for it
and stood close in towards the island. We lowered a boat, and providing
ourselves with a few trifles for presents, pulled into the bay within a few
yards of the shore. The beach was already thronged with people of all ages,
male and female, who invited us to land by the most significant gestures,
whilst many of them were singing and dancing to express their joy. The
surrounding rocks and hills were covered with groups of females, gaily
decked off with their neat head-dresses of the white Tapa cloth and many-
coloured robes, which were floating in the wind, half concealing and half
exposing their fantastically painted limbs. When they saw that we would not
land, the men and boys dashed into the water with whatever they had to offer
us, and swam off to the boat. A chief, who had a dry wreath of cocoa-nut
around his brows, came off with them; and, upon being invited, got into the
boat, where he remained until our departure, apparently giving orders from
time to time to those who were passing and repassing from the shore to the
boat. In a few minutes, they had presented us with a considerable quantity of
cocoa-nuts, bananas, and papayas, for which we gave them in return a few
trifling articles, the most valuable of which were glass beads. The chief had
his eyes constantly fixed upon our fire-arms, and finally gave us to
understand, by motions, that a pistol would be acceptable to him. With this
intimation we could not comply; but he bore the refusal with great good
nature, and for some time after our store of little presents was exhausted, his
people continued to bring us off fruit without the expectation of any return.
When they found that we were serious in our refusal to land, the women
came from the hills and assembled on the rocks close to us, where, in a
nearer view, they could display their persons to more advantage, and charm
us with the melody of their voices. There they all joined in songs, keeping
time by clapping their hands, stopping occasionally to receive the applause
of the men and to invite us on shore. Several of them, male and female,
swam off to the boat; and when we were about to depart, insisted so strongly
upon going on board with us that we had to use some violence to get clear of
them.
We continued on in the afternoon, soon passing La Dominica, and at

sundown made Rooahooga ahead. The weather being squally and the island
only fifteen miles from us, we lay by for the night. At daylight, we found
ourselves a few miles distant from the middle of the south side of the island,
where a bay presented itself, which, at a distance, promised to afford
anchorage. On a nearer approach, however, its appearance changed, and as
there were but few signs of inhabitants, we ran along toward the west end of
the island. This part of it had not much appearance of fertility, although we
saw a few large trees. It is high, broken, and indented with a number of small
bays, none of which are large enough to form a harbour. In rounding the
southwest point of the island we had sudden and violent gusts of wind.
Invisible Bay is situated a little to the westward of this point, and although it
has somewhat the appearance of a harbour, and presents to view a beautiful
sand beach, we saw no indications of inhabitants. About ten miles to the
north, we anchored in twenty fathoms water, having rocky bottom, and an
inaccessible rocky shore where the surf breaks violently. The captain and
several officers went back to Invisible Bay in one of the boats, and in a cave
close to the shore they found five or six natives, who at their approach, fled
to the hills, making signs for our people to depart. In the cave, they found a
few fishing-nets. They tried to prevail upon the natives to come near, but
their demonstrations of friendship were answered only by motions
expressive of hostility. The landing was difficult, as the shore was rocky, and
a considerable surf broke upon it, although the bay was tolerably protected
by a projecting point. Soon after meridian, we got under way and shaped our
course for Nooaheeva, which was plainly in sight from Rooahooga. We
stood along, with a fine breeze and clear weather, and at three, P.M., rounded
the north-eastern extremity of Nooaheeva, when a spacious harbour, called
Comptroller's Bay, opened to our view. It is about three miles deep, and at its
inner extremity are two projecting points that extend out for more than a
mile, and form three small harbours. We were no sooner observed by the
natives on shore, than they put off in a number of large canoes and pulled
with great rapidity towards us. The wind was light and baffling, and we
advanced slowly into the harbour. In a few minutes, we were surrounded by
canoes, containing from six to eight men each. They belonged to different
tribes, which they attempted to explain to us with great earnestness of speech
and gesture, but as we had no one on board who knew much of the language,
we were greatly at a loss to comprehend their meaning. They had not
followed us long when two of the canoes came along side, one on each
quarter, and the men crawled up the side and perched themselves upon the
hammocks, like so many monkeys, where they called out in a loud voice,
addressing themselves alternately to us and to the natives on the side of the
vessel opposite to them,—one party exclaiming "Mattee, mattee, Typee!"
and the other "Mattee, mattee,[4] Happah!" and occasionally using angry
gestures with the exclamation. This was too expressive for us not to
understand. They belonged to different tribes, the Typee, and Happah; and
were mutually trying to prejudice us against the tribe to which they did not
belong, in order to induce us to anchor in their own bay. Both the bays were
beautiful, but as the Happahs' was the most populous and nearest to us, we
gave it the preference; and a little before sunset anchored in twenty fathoms
water within a cable's length of the shore. The Typees no sooner saw that we
were standing in for the Happah Bay, than they hurried into their canoe and
paddled off for their village as fast as they could. The Happah valley was a
romantic spot. A plain, a league or two in circumference, stretched back to
the mountains in a semicircular form, presenting in front a clear white sand
beach about a mile long. The plain was covered with cocoa-nuts, with bread-
fruit interspersed, and near enough to form a continued shade without
presenting the appearance of a dense forest. Scattered about every where
through these trees were the palm-thatched habitations of the natives. In the
rear of the plain, the mountains rose precipitously, forming an insuperable
barrier against the incursions of other tribes. The land rose gently to the left,
but it was almost barren and added nothing to the beauty of the landscape.
On the extreme right, a considerable mountain and a point projecting far out
into the bay, separated the Happahs from the tribes that lived beyond them in
that direction. Nothing could equal the apparent joy of the natives when they
saw us anchored in front of their village. The whole tribe, which probably
did not exceed five hundred, flocked down to the beach, expressing their
satisfaction by dancing and singing. Hundreds of them dashed into the water
and swam off to us, so that we had not time to furl sails and clear the deck
before the vessel was crowded with people. To show them that we had the
means of making successful resistance against any hostile intention they
might adopt, we paraded our musketeers upon the deck and practised them, a
ceremony that appeared to afford the natives very great amusement. We
allowed them to remain on board until the dusk of evening, when the number
being so great as to make the vessel uncomfortable, and apprehending that in
the course of the night they might appropriate to themselves many things
that they would find about the deck, and which could not conveniently be
spared, we sent most of them on shore. The chiefs and a few others who
expressed a great desire to remain, were permitted to pass the night with us.
On the following day, I took a few presents with me and went over to the
Typee valley, to visit that tribe, celebrated as the most warlike of Nooaheeva.
As soon as the boat was perceived, the people came running towards the
beach in every direction, and before she reached the shore we were
surrounded by great numbers, who plunged into the water and swam off to
us. As many as we could conveniently accommodate were permitted to get
into the boat, where they treated me so unceremoniously that I did not think
it prudent to land. Amongst those who paid me a visit was a chief of the
tribe. He was a man about thirty years of age, well-featured and of fine
proportions. His deportment was grave and dignified, but like the rest of our
new acquaintances, who swam off to us, he was quite naked except a slight
covering about his loins. The common people treated him with great
deference, and never intruded upon that part of the boat where he was
seated. He made us understand that he wished to obtain muskets and powder,
for the purchase of which he had caused five or six large hogs to be brought
down, that were tied and laying on the shore. I offered him whatever else I
had that I thought would induce him to part with them; but he obstinately
refused any other consideration than muskets and powder. Large quantities
of cocoa-nuts, bananas, and papayas were thrown into the boat by the people
who were swimming around us, and when we had been lying there an hour,
we had as many in the boat as we could conveniently carry. I had a variety of
presents, such as beads, buttons, &c., all of which the common people were
very anxious to obtain; but the chief would take nothing from me of less
consequence than fire-arms or gunpowder. I offered him flints and musket
balls, which, although of great value amongst the natives, he would not
receive. He invited me frequently, with great earnestness of manner, to land,
until he found, by my repeated refusals, that I was determined to remain in
my boat.
The bay of the Typees was rather smaller than that of the Happah tribe.
They live principally upon the side of a mountain that rises gently from the
shore. The number of the tribe appeared to be about the same as that of the
Happahs. Their houses are situated in circular chains of villages, rising one
above the other, from the base to near the top of the mountain, where it
terminates in rude and uninhabitable cliffs. Groves and clumps of cocoa-nut,
and bread-fruit trees are every where interspersed with the dwellings, and the
mind of the observer being impressed with the idea of their usefulness to the
natives, gives a double effect to the beautiful landscape adorned by their
waving tops and broad green leaves. We had several occasions to remark the
inveterate dislike that the Typees and Happahs entertained towards each
other.
On the morning after our arrival, the sailing-master went on shore in the
Happah valley to obtain an altitude of the sun by the artificial horizon He
was shy of the natives, as we all were at first, and apprehending that some of
them might approach him with a hostile intention, while his back was turned
towards them, and having heard that they held in great reverence a place said
to be Tabooed, or consecrated, he made a circle round his place observation,
and told the natives, who had followed him in great numbers, that the space
within the circle was Tabooed. They stared at him in silence and stood back
from it; but by and by, when he was intently engaged in getting his altitude,
one of the natives, supposing that he was employed in some plan (to him
incomprehensible) to destroy the Typees, as he turned the face of his sextant
in that direction, crawled up gently behind the sailing-master, without being
perceived by him, and suddenly tapping him two or three times on the
shoulder, exclaimed with great energy, "Mattee, mattee, Typee!" It may
readily be supposed that his imagination, which was very much excited
before, was not soothed by this salutation. He turned upon the native,
expressing in look and manner his consternation and displeasure, which was
only met by the delighted Indian with a repetition of "Mattee, mattee,
Typee!"
On the morning of the 25th, I went on shore, in company with several of

the officers, to indulge our curiosity and ramble about the valley. We were
soon surrounded by a group of natives, who followed us wherever we went.
Our first object was to visit the chief of the valley, whose residence we
found at the distance of two or three hundred yards from the shore. It was a
plain, oblong hut, thirty by twenty feet. Its simple structure was such as is
first suggested to the untutored mind—a few poles laid over crotches, upon
which was framed a triangular roof, and the whole thatched with palm or
cocoa-nut leaves. When we entered this regal hut we found the chief seated
near one end of it, who barely condescended to notice us as we approached
to make our salutations. We were not prepared for so rude a reception and
felt somewhat mortified to find a chief of his distinguished rank so totally
destitute of courtesy. We thought at least that he would have risen from his
sitting posture, and expected more from him than our after experience taught
us we had a right to look for from people in a state of nature. The only
furniture in the hut was a few coarse mats. At one side of it five muskets,
highly polished, were arranged one above the other, over which hung two
kegs of powder sewed up in canvass, and near them a few long spears and a
war conch, ornamented with human hair. We made ourselves as much at
home as if we had received a more cordial welcome, and indulged our
curiosity in examining whatever we saw, when suddenly the chief rose and
his silence and gravity were at once explained. We had remarked that he had
an uncommonly large black robe thrown over him, but without the least
suspicion that it covered any one else than himself. He suddenly threw it
aside as we came near him and there stood his wife, a girl about eighteen
years of age, who had just finished making her toilet. He pointed to her with
a look of satisfaction, and uttered "Motake," a word we afterwards learned,
signified very good, or very well. Although she was naturally a pretty girl,
she had made herself a hideous looking object. She had smeared her face all
over with a coarse yellow paint, upon which was drawn streaks of black and
green, than which nothing could have appeared more disgusting. She
assumed a manner and look of affectation, such as may often have been
observed in some self-approving beauty, who, conscious of her charms, feels
that she is an object of admiration to all around her. When I expressed my
disapprobation of her style of ornament, she stared at me with a look of
surprise, which seemed to ask what I was saying. I soon gave both her and
the chief to understand, by signs; after which they seemed not so well
pleased with themselves or each other; and when I saw her again in the
evening she was without any ornament, and looked all the better for it.
While here, two grotesque figures came in and walked up to me with an
austere look. They had a profusion of cock's feathers bound circularly round
their brows, broad gorgets of wood ornamented with red berries round their
necks, shell bracelets and ornaments of polished shell or bone tied above
their ancles. Each held in his hand a fan of palmetto. After standing a few
moments, keeping their eyes fixed upon me, they began jumping up and
down and fanning themselves, applying both hands to the fan. My first
feeling was surprise, mingled with curiosity, to know the cause of their
strange appearance; but when they had several times repeated their exercise,
the scene was altogether so ridiculous that I could not refrain from laughing.
They soon afterwards, without even noticing the chief, turned and walked
off. After leaving the hut of the chief, I visited a number of others, all of
which were nearly alike. In one of them I saw two drums, the only
instruments of music that I met with. The largest of them was a hollow log,
from three to four feet long, and about a foot and a half in diameter, covered
at both ends with shark skin. I asked the owner to play upon it, to which he
readily consented, seeming highly flattered with the invitation. He
accompanied his voice by thumping his hands and elbows on the drum-head;
but the music that he made was intolerable. He beat, however, in very good
time, and had evidently a high opinion of his performance.
In the course of our ramble, one of the officers told an Indian, who had
joined us, by signs, that he wanted some cocoa-nuts. The good-natured
fellow acquiesced without the least hesitation, and to our great astonishment,
ran up a tree standing near us, with the activity of a squirrel. The tree was
forty or fifty feet high, having but a slight inclination, yet the climbing
seemed to occasion him scarcely any exertion. They do not press their
bodies against the tree and hitch themselves up as is customary with us,
which, in their naked condition, they could not do without injury. They press
the bottoms of their feet against the tree, and clinging to it with their hands
one above the other, ascend upon all-fours. It did not strike us with less
surprise when he had thrown the cocoa-nuts down, to see with what facility
he stripped off the hard husks without the aid of any thing but his teeth. For
such a thing to have been accomplished by one of us would be found
impossible. We afterwards remarked the same practise in other places, and at
other islands. It was general except with the old men, who, unless they were
very robust, used a sharp-pointed stick of hard wood to remove the husk.
They could not understand our practice of shaking hands. When we

extended a hand to one of them as a mark of friendly salutation, they looked
as though they would question what was meant by it; and from their manner
seemed to think that our object was to feel their skin, which they would
always reciprocate by raising up our sleeves and examining very minutely.
On the morning of the 29th of September, which was the last of our
remaining in Comptroller's Bay, I made another excursion to the Typee Bay,
taking with me the chief of the Happahs, who was very anxious to go. I
wondered at this, as the tribes evinced so much dislike to each other; but
afterwards saw, in my intercourse with the natives of the South Sea Islands,
that uncivilized men are capable of as much duplicity towards each other as
the educated and refined. When we had arrived within a hundred yards of the
shore we were met by the chief with whom I had formed an acquaintance on
the preceding day. He saluted the chief of the Happahs in a way that
indicated a former acquaintance, but with a look and manner somewhat
formal. The Typee chief immediately spoke to some one near him, who ran
off and in a few minutes returned with a calabash filled with a preparation of
the bread-fruit, upon which was poured a quantity of milk expressed from a
cocoa-nut. This was offered by the Typee to the Happah chief, and I was also
invited to partake of it. I tasted and found it very palatable. The two chiefs
seated themselves in the stern of the boat, and made a hearty breakfast, using
their fingers instead of spoons. Neither of them seemed very communicative,
as only a few words passed between them at this interview. There was also
in the boat a young woman belonging to the chief's family, for whom
breakfast was brought in the shell of a cocoa-nut, and which was a
preparation of the cocoa-nut and bread-fruit, sour and disagreeable to the
taste. This, I was informed, is the food upon which the women almost
entirely subsist, they being Tabooed from eating whatever is held in high
estimation by the men. When the chiefs had finished their repast, the Typee
pointed to his hogs, which he had again caused to be brought down upon the
beach, saying that he wanted powder or guns for them, but unfortunately I
had neither of these valuable articles with which to make an exchange with
him, and he would consider nothing else as an equivalent. He sent for
several old muskets that were very much out of order, and proposed to go on
board with me and have them repaired, making me understand by signs, that
he would in return present me with hogs. His anxiety was so great upon this
subject, that I found it difficult to put a stop to his solicitations. In the mean
time, however, I saw the schooner underway, and dismissing my Typee
friends, pulled away for the Happah Bay. When I had approached within half
a mile of the Happah village, the schooner was almost out of the harbour,
and the chief observing that I was anxious to get on board, proposed jumping
into the water and swimming home, to which I readily consented. He then
stripped himself of his neck and ear ornaments, which consisted of two
white pieces of polished shell and a carved image of bone, and presenting
them to me as a token of his regard, plunged into the water, leaving me free
to pursue my way to the vessel without the trouble of landing him. Most of
the ornaments worn by these people, are of bone or shells, finely polished or
rudely carved. They attach a number of them to a piece of cocoa-nut twine,
and wear them around their necks, or wrists, or ancles, as may be most
agreeable to the taste and fancy of the individuals. A more expensive and
difficult ornament to obtain is a gorget. It is a piece of wood, semi-circular,
about three inches wide, carved to fit the neck, covered with a beautiful red
and black berry, and stuck on with a gum that oozes from the tree of the
bread-fruit. On the hill that rises to the left of the valley, we planted a variety
of seeds of fruit, vegetables and grain, but the natives of the valley are so
totally ignorant of every thing that relates to agriculture, that it is not
probable they will ever derive any advantage from them. Whilst we were in
Happah Bay, the weather was clear and delightful. The temperature so
regular that no change was felt in the transition from day to night.
On the 30th of September, we stood out of Comptroller's Bay, and ran

down for Massachusetts' Bay, a place made familiar to our countrymen by
Commodore Porter's long and interesting visit. The two points that form the
harbours of Comptroller's and Massachusetts' Bays, are about seven miles
distant from each other. At one, P.M., we were clear of the projecting
southern point of Comptroller's Bay, and at three, P.M., anchored in eight
fathoms water, within half a mile of the hill at the bottom of the bay, called
Porter's Monument. Before we came to anchor, the water was covered with
canoes, and people of both sexes and all ages swimming towards us, and as
soon as the vessel lost her head way, they were crawling up on all sides like
so many rats. They were not less delighted with our arrival than were the
Happahs. Hundreds were collected on the shore, and all expressing their
satisfaction by songs and dances. Amongst our first visitors, were two
English sailors who had deserted from whale ships, and been long enough
resident on the island to converse in the language of the natives. With them
came also a native of Nooaheeva, and a native of Otaheite, both of whom
had served a considerable time in whale ships, and could converse in broken
English. We were therefore in no want of interpreters, and it seemed at once
to introduce us to the confidence and friendship of our new acquaintances.
The harbour of Massachusetts' Bay is spacious and affords good

anchorage for ships of the largest class. The only part of it, however, where
landing is not attended with difficulty and some danger, is the east side,
where there is a fine sand beach from a quarter to half a mile long, at one
extremity of which empties a small rivulet of pure and excellent water into
the bay. Landing may be effected at the watering-place beyond Porter's
Monument, where there is a more considerable stream of fresh water, but it
is always difficult, and when the surf is high, cannot fail to be dangerous. At
this place we watered the Dolphin; but had to swim the casks to and from the
shore, and altogether, it was a laborious undertaking. Along the east and
north part of the bay there is a long reef that makes at a short distance from
the shore, upon which a heavy surf is always breaking. In entering the bay,
the whole habitable part of this section of the island is presented at one view,
and forms a most grand and beautiful landscape. It is nearly semi-circular,
and rises like an amphitheatre, in fruitful and populous circular ranges of
hills, until at the distance of several miles, it terminates in a circumference of
high and gloomy mountains, the tops of which resemble a massive wall. This
rude and barren circle of mountain contrasts finely with the fertile ranges
below, covered with their forests of cocoa-nut and bread-fruit trees, and huts
and villages every where scattered about through hill and dale. Nor is the
extreme elevation without its interest and beauty. A number of little cataracts
reflecting the rays of the sun and looking like sheets of liquid silver, break in
upon the gloom of the sterile rock, adding brilliancy as they descend to the
lively prospect below. After a shower, not less than fifty of these splendid
falls of water may be seen, some of which are but just perceptible through
the intervening space between hills and trees, producing an effect peculiarly
agreeable. What is called Porter's Monument, is a round hill from fifty to an
hundred feet high, situated at the east extremity of the bay. It was here that
Commodore Porter had his Fort, not a vestige of which is now remaining. It
is overrun with a wild luxuriant growth of vines and grass, and no trace of a
footstep can be found. On one side of the hill, near its base, was stretched a
bark line, which was attended by a man who calls himself Opotee, and who
declares the hill beyond it to be tabooed. Upon one occasion, as I was
approaching it, some natives called out "Taboo, Taboo!" but Opotee
immediately expressed his willingness that I should pass, as I was a
countryman of his namesake, Opotee. To the north of Porter's Monument,
and back from the sand beach, where was the navy-yard, all is now
overgrown with bushes and trees, some of which have attained to a
considerable size. Like the monument, there is no indication of its ever
having been occupied for any human purpose,
On the first of October, the day after our arrival, I went on shore, taking
with me a great variety of seeds, for the purpose of planting them where it
was most probable they would be taken care of and come to maturity. The
natives flocked round me in great numbers. There was not less than a
hundred boys with the crowd of men and women that followed me. They
were highly delighted when they discovered my object, which was explained
to them by John Luxon, the native of Nooaheeva, who spoke English.
Whenever we came to a rough or muddy place, which was frequently the
case, the boys and men, notwithstanding my remonstrances, would mount
me on their shoulders and carry me over, with loud shouting. I could easily
perceive that this was a frolic with those who engaged in it, and done out of
levity and the caprice of the moment; but I could not but feel that they had
been first stimulated to it by the favourable impression they had conceived
of my design. I planted some things in unfrequented places where I found a
clear spot, but most of the seeds and fruit-pits, in the enclosures of the
natives. John Luxon was a man of some rank as a chief, and possessed
considerable property. To one of his enclosures that was large and seemed to
have been attended with unusual care, I devoted most of my attention. There,
aided by several of the natives, who laboured with great assiduity, I prepared
the ground and made quite an extensive plantation of orange, lemon,
cheromaya, peach, apricot, water-melons, pumpkins, potatoes, onions,
beans, corn, and a variety of other fruits and grain, from Peru. He expressed
himself in terms of the warmest gratitude, and I have no doubt that the
natives have already experienced the most important benefits from the
memento I left them of the Dolphin's visit to their Island.
In the course of my days' occupation, I was several times driven into

Luxon's house by the frequent showers that came over. I no sooner entered,
than the natives flocked after me, and in a few minutes the hut would be
crowded. The little boys and girls here shewed me the same officious
attention that I received in making my way to the village, but expressed in a
different manner. As many as could approach would surround me with their
fans, keeping them going until the rain ceased, and I was again enabled to
resume my work. This was a kind of civility, peculiarly agreeable, as the
weather was oppressively warm; but I could not fail to discover that my little
attendants were all candidates for my friendly notice and bestowed their
civility with the expectation of some reward. I had a few trifles about me,
but not enough to give to all, and felt at a loss in what way I should make my
presents, fearing that the least favoured would be mortified and displeased. It
seemed however to make no difference. It was all "motake"[5] with them.
All seemed satisfied. On my return to the beach, I found it thronged with
men, women, and children. All the beauty and fashion of Massachusetts' Bay
had assembled in honour of our arrival, decked out in their finest tappas, and
gayest colours. The females were dressed in the best style of their island,
with neat turbans of tappa-cloth, white, or ornamented with colours, a white
robe of the same material thrown loosely over them, tastefully knotted on
one shoulder, concealing half the bosom, and a wrapper round the waist that
reached below the knee. They were arranged in groups of a dozen each,
singing merrily and clapping their hands in time to the music of their voices.
A little way from them the men were seated in the same manner and
similarly occupied. The ladies, to improve their charms, had used an
abundant quantity of cocoa-nut oil, which filled the air with its nauseous
perfumes for an hundred yards round. Many of them had more highly
anointed themselves with yellow paint, which, with the cocoa-nut oil, was
running from them in streams. Some had decorated themselves with
necklaces of a golden yellow fruit which bears a strong resemblance to a
pine-apple, and emits a powerful offensive smell. At a distance, with their
variegated robes flying in the wind, their appearance was altogether
agreeable, and upon a near approach the scene was animated beyond
description. The dusk of evening was the signal for their dispersion, when
some went one way and some another. On the second of October, I wandered
back upon the hills, and had all the boys with me that followed me on the
preceding day.
They renewed their frolic of carrying me, and whenever I seated myself,
came round me as many as could approach, each with a green leaf for a fan.
I entered unceremoniously a number of the huts, where I almost always
found one or more men, in nearly every instance, extended on their backs,
their heads resting on a log laid along on one side of the hut, and their heels
on another, about four feet from the first. They would never rise to receive
me, but utter "motake," when I was perceived by them, and make motions
for me to do as they did, offering me at the same time a fan, one of which
they were using almost constantly. In the course of my ramble, I met with a
little girl, twelve or fourteen years old, who was very pretty, attended by a
servant, the only instance in which I remarked such a thing on the island.
She was evidently walking out to make a visit, and had just arrived at the
house of her destination when I met her. I put some beads round her neck,
which seemed to delight her very much; but an old man present, whose hut
she was about to visit, assumed an angry look, and seemed to threaten by his
manner. He changed his conduct, however, when I made him a trifling
present, and the little girl, taking my hand, led me to her father's hut. He was
a chief of some consequence, as was indicated by the possession of two or
three casks of powder, and six muskets. These he took down, and displayed
very ostentatiously, and wanted to know if I had not others to dispose of. His
conduct was altogether kind and hospitable, in acknowledgment for which I
made him a present at my departure. Whenever I wanted cocoa-nuts to
quench my thirst, I had only to signify it to one of the men that was
following me about, and he would supply me from the nearest tree. With one
fellow I was very much amused. He carried his arms full of cocoa-nuts
following me about nearly all day, and when I returned to the vessel I
presented him with a musket ball, with which he was perfectly satisfied, said
it was "motake," and went away. When I returned to the beach in the
evening, I found the natives, male and female, assembled in as great
numbers as on the day previous, and amusing themselves in the same way.
The females were again in their finest attire, and at a distance might any
where else have been mistaken for an assemblage of fashionable belles. We
were apprehensive that our men, a number of whom were at work on shore,
would have been very much annoyed by the intrusion of the natives. This,
however, was not the case. When they commenced their work in the
morning a circle was made, comprehending the whole space we wished them
to occupy, which we told the natives was tabooed, and there was not an
instance of their passing it. The next day they held quite a fair on the beach.
Amongst other things, they had for trade large quantities of cocoa-nuts and
bread-fruit. The former they exchanged for small pieces of tobacco; but a
piece of iron hoop, fashioned into a tool or instrument of husbandry, was
demanded for the latter. They were all day on the beach, cooking and eating
their bread-fruit and cocoa-nuts. In the evening, the boys and men amused us
with playing soldiers, by ranging themselves in a line with sticks for
muskets. One of our officers took a particular pleasure in making grimaces,
and talking a gibberish to the natives in imitation of their manner of
speaking. It was very offensive to them; but they respected us too much to
betray their displeasure. Upon one occasion, however, he amused himself in
this way with the boys, about a hundred of whom were assembled, when I
encouraged them to retaliate on him, by clucking like a hen. They soon
discovered that it was disagreeable to him, and assembled round him like so
many little furies, clucking with all their might. It seemed to delight them to
have an opportunity of revenging themselves upon him, which they did most
amply, for they did not let him rest a moment until he went on board, which
was soon afterwards, highly displeased with me for conspiring with the
Indians against him. We were often amused with the strange and ridiculous
taste of the natives in the article of dress.
They were all desirous of obtaining clothes, and a number of old

garments were given them, or exchanged for curiosities by the officers and
crew. When obtained, whether they fitted or not, the Indians immediately put
them on, and scarcely ever more than one garment at a time. Thus, half
naked and half attired, a native would walk about with exceeding gravity,
admiring himself, and believing that every one else was equally pleased with
his genteel appearance.
Whenever they seated themselves to sing, a person was selected to

occupy a conspicuous station, and perform a dance round the circle, slowly,
and in the most graceful native style, striking at the same time the hollow of
his left arm with his right hand, in time with the music of their voices. This
distinction was always conferred upon some one who had obtained an old
jacket or tattered shirt. If he had on a jacket, it was sure to be buttoned
closely round him, with the two or three remaining buttons, and the sleeves,
if not torn off, would probably not reach more than half the length of his
arms. Thus attired, he would perform his evolutions round the circle slowly,
and with a most serious air, stopping occasionally to receive the applause of
the singers, who bestowed it upon him with great enthusiasm. Soon after
daylight, one morning I was on the beach, and my curiosity led me to a
place, where a number of females were busily employed in collecting
something from the rocks. When I approached them they discontinued their
occupation, and would have fled, but I called them back, and prevailed upon
them to renew their occupation. Each of them was provided with a green
leaf, in which she was gathering from the rocks a species of fine green sea
moss and small snails. What they preserved in the leaf was intended for their
families at home. They ate freely of them, and said it was "motake." The
moss was tender, but to me had no other taste than that of salt water, with
which it was covered at high tide. The snails were not larger than a pea,
covered with a hard shell, and when broken, heated the tongue like pepper.
The moss, when gathered, had a most disgusting appearance. I was told by
the Englishmen, residing here, that the natives esteem it a very great
delicacy. One of the females had an infant with her a few months old, which
she was teaching to swim by holding it in a pool of water, and occasionally
letting it go. The infant would make a slight effort, when let go by the
mother, and, no doubt, was taught to swim almost as soon as it could walk.
On the third of October, in walking through the habitable part of the valley, I
was every where met by females, who addressed me with a smile, and finely
modulated tone of voice, "Coare ta whyhene?"[6] The father of one of these,
good naturedly conducted me to the hut of a chief, highest in blood of any in
the valley. He was a man upwards of fifty, and apparently more civilized
than any of the natives I had seen before. He told the interpreter to say, that
he felt pleasure in seeing me at his hut. It was about forty by twenty feet, and
constructed in the same way as that occupied by the Happah chief, differing
in no respect from those of the common people, except in dimensions. His
rank and importance was displayed in the possession of six muskets, and two
casks of powder that hung directly fronting the door, and which the chief
took occasion to point out to me soon after I entered. To him they were a
treasure, and, in fact, the wealth and consequence of every individual
seemed to be estimated by this standard alone. The powder was covered over
with canvass, and the muskets highly polished. On one side of the hut were
two logs, about three feet apart, and between them a coarse mat, for the
convenience of laying down on, one log being intended for the head, and the
other for the feet. Whilst I was here, a number of visitors came in, and,
walking directly to the logs, without noticing any one, threw themselves
down between them, their heads on one, and feet on the other, where they
lay, fanning themselves, and looking at us, without saying a word, except
once or twice, when they saw me looking at them, I was saluted with
"motake." In the middle of the hut was the coffin of the chief's father, who
had died about six months previous. It was the trunk of a large bread-fruit
tree, six or eight feet long, highly polished, and the lid so ingeniously fitted,
that the place of contact could not be seen but by the closest examination. He
told me that his father had been a great warrior, and the friend of Opotee.[7]
Before his door was a swivel, and a number of shot, that he said he had
obtained from Opotee. He prized them very highly, although they could not
be of the least use to him, except as they served to gratify his vanity. When I
expressed a desire to know the manner in which they prepared the paint,
used by the females, he directed his son to get some of the root, and grind it
between two stones, mixing a little water with it, the only process required. I
gave the chief's wife (who was an old woman) some beads, and a cotton
handkerchief, with which she was so delighted, that she threw both her arms
around my neck, and embraced me most affectionately. She was painted all
over, quite yellow, and so thoroughly smeared my clothes, that I paid dearly
for this expression of her regard. At parting, the chief presented me with a
hog (the only one we obtained at the Marquesas), some sticks of the tappa
tree, and offered whatever was acceptable to me, about his house. We also
exchanged names, and I promised again to visit him, but had no opportunity
afterwards. His son accompanied me on board, carrying the presents his
father had made me, and all the way calling me "Kappe," the name of his
father, and himself, by my name.
In the evening, when I returned to the vessel, she was crowded with
natives, the work of the day being completed. The men and women were in
different circles, singing their songs. That of the women, resembled the
croaking of a great many frogs. The quick and lively motion of their hands,
accompanying the various modulations of the voice, exhibited a great
activity, and command of muscle, and was far more pleasing than their
music. There was one amongst the females, who possessed great powers of
voice, in the utterance of strange sounds, in which none of the rest could
accompany her. The performance seemed to distress her very much, and was
certainly very disagreeable; yet the natives would all stop occasionally, to
listen to her, and, when she was done, exclaimed, with seeming surprise,
"motake!"
On the 4th of October, I took a boat, prepared with arms, and providing
myself with a few presents, ran down for Lewis' Bay, to ascertain the depth
of water at the entrance of the harbour, what difficulties might probably
attend our running in with the schooner, and whether it afforded any better
prospect than the other places we had visited, of obtaining a supply of hogs.
The distance was only six miles, and, with a fine breeze, we were at the
entrance of the harbour in little more than an hour. It was very narrow,
formed by two high points of land, and the depth of water abundantly
sufficient for ships of the largest class. A heavy and broken swell made the
entrance appear difficult: and, without a fair wind, it is so confined, that it
would be hazardous to attempt it; but the gorge being once passed, you enter
a large smooth basin, where there is scarcely a ripple, the land rising high all
around it, and the points locking with each other. In the basin we found good
anchorage, in from four to nine fathoms water, and a clay bottom. Lewis'
Bay is divided into two parts by a projecting point of rocks. I first landed in
that which fronts the entrance, or rather went into the edge of the surf. A
great many people, of all ages, came swimming off through the surf, and in a
few moments the boat was full of them, and of fruit of various kinds. They
were anxious for me to land, but I saw there would be great difficulty in my
getting off again, in the event of any misunderstanding with them, which
was not altogether impossible. I did not remain long, but, dismissing the
natives who had crawled into the boat, or were hanging on the gunwale,
pulled round the point of rocks to the other landing. When first I went into
this part of the harbour, I could perceive only two or three persons, who
were afraid to come near us. They gradually relaxed in their timidity,
however, and kept nearing us a little, until we at last prevailed upon them to
get into the boat. As soon as they saw our muskets, which they thought were
intended for trade; but which were only for our protection, they ran away,
saying, they would bring us hogs directly. In the mean time the news of our
arrival spread, far and wide, over the valley, and the people came running
from every direction, with whatever they could most readily possess
themselves of, for trade. Every body wanted muskets, and a chief had seven
or eight hogs brought to the beach, all of which he offered for one gun. After
spending an hour or two here, on the most friendly terms with the natives, I
prepared to depart, and missed one of my shoes, that I had thrown off wet.
Search was made in the boat, without finding it, when it was remarked, that
a native had been seen crawling in the water for a considerable distance to a
rock near the shore, where he deposited something, and returned. Upon
examination, we found the shoe wrapped up in a piece of tappa cloth, the
Indian having stolen it, without reflecting that the possession of one shoe,
without the other, was of no value to him, or perhaps not caring whether it
was or not, so that he gratified his propensity to steal. When I returned a
short distance, and held the shoe up to show the natives that I had recovered
it, they set up a loud laugh, which I interpreted into applause, of the
ingenious exploit of their countryman. The valley of Lewis' Bay is not to be
compared to either of the other places we visited on the island, for beauty or
fertility. It is, however, quite populous, and the scenery is grand and
picturesque. The land gradually rises from a small plain below, like the
valley occupied by the Typees, in a succession of hills, and terminates in a
perpendicular high ledge of rocks. In returning from Lewis' to
Massachusetts' Bay, the wind was ahead, and we pulled close in with the
shore, which, for nearly the whole distance, rises abruptly, from the ocean, to
the height of six or seven hundred feet. Numerous falls, which were only
perceptible in heavy mist, before they reached the water, were leaping from
the top, whilst the sea beat the sides with unceasing fury, throwing its spray
to the height of more than a hundred feet. Whilst we were tugging at our
oars, contemplating this magnificent scene, the sea suddenly became
unusually agitated, and threatened, at every instant, to swallow up the boat.
We pulled directly from the shore, and for half an hour our situation was
very critical, after which the sea became regular. A phenomenon, so
remarkable, baffled all our speculation, and we were entirely at a loss to
determine respecting its cause. On our arrival on board, we learned that the
vessel had narrowly escaped being driven on shore in a squall It was not the
fault of the anchorage, but in consequence of the baffling winds which had
several times driven the vessel over her anchor, whereby it was fouled by the
cable, and tripped with the violence of the squall.
The natives, as usual, were assembled on the shore near us, amusing
themselves in their customary way, by singing and dancing. The females,
having learned from some of the Dolphin's crew, that it was not in good taste
to use cocoa-nut oil, and paint, in such profusion, left it off, as well as the
golden yellow fruit, which had also been highly disapproved of. It improved
their appearance, and they seemed to be sensible of the superior estimation
in which they were held. These wild ladies, in truth, who, on our first arrival,
came swimming round, like so many mermaids, grew very fastidious in the
short time we remained at their island. After the first day or two, they
requested to be allowed to go on board, in our boats, and then, seeing some
of the officers carried through the surf by the seamen, nothing less would
please them, when they did us the honour of a visit, but to be gallanted on
board with the same ceremony. Our sailors gallantly condescended to gratify
two or three of them; but, instead of taking them to the boat, they most
uncourteously let them fall into the first heavy roller they encountered,
leaving them to the choice of swimming to the boat, or back to the shore
again, after which none ever asked to be carried. With regard to their
superstitions or worship, we could learn but little. John Luxon told me, that
he was tabooed by his father, who was a chief, and that no common man
dared to pass over his head. He was usually dressed in a sailor's shirt and
trowsers, and an old hat. He came off regularly every morning, and ate with
us three time a day, taking his seat at the table, without the least ceremony,
and never waiting to be asked.
One day, some one had, designedly or accidentally, thrown some bread
in John's hat, which he did not perceive when he took it up, and put it on.
When he felt the bread upon his head, he threw his hat off instantly, and,
with a look of the utmost horror, exclaimed, "who put dat dare? Me Taboo
here!" (putting his hand on his head) "To-morrow me sick, me die!" This, he
repeated over a number of times, and with great earnestness of manner tried
to find out who had put the bread in his hat, insisting upon it, that, on the
morrow, he should sicken and die. The morrow, however, came, and John
was alive and well, and was heartily laughed at for his foolish superstition,
when he came on board as usual to spend the day with us. I do not believe
that John had the same implicit faith in taboo afterwards. I tried to find out
from him what was meant by his being tabooed, but he spoke English so
badly, and seemed to understand so little of the matter himself, that I was not
much the wiser for his explanation. We were told here, that, a few years
since, the missionaries at the Society Islands, moved by the benevolent
purpose of converting the Marquesas islanders to Christianity, sent one of
their number to reside at Massachusetts' Bay. The missionary landed
amongst his charge, by whom he was received with characteristic kindness
and hospitality. No other notice was taken of him, however, than would have
been bestowed upon the most poor and ignorant mariner, seeking an asylum
amongst them. He was permitted to fix upon his place of residence, and live
in such way as pleased him best. He soon commenced preaching the
doctrines of his faith. The natives listened to him, wondering at all he said,
but not less at his singular manner of life,—to them unexampled, in all their
acquaintance with the whites,—and, certainly, unparalleled amongst
themselves. They had always seen the white men, who visited their islands,
take liberties with their females, and mingle with them in all their pleasures,
whilst this man, who called himself a messenger from the Great Spirit, lived
a life of celibacy, retired from all that, to them, was amusing or agreeable.
When a free interchange of opinion had taken place amongst them,
respecting him, they came to the conclusion, that he was differently made
and constituted from all other men they had ever seen, and curiosity being
raised to the highest pitch, they, with a levity peculiar to savages, determined
to subject him to a scrutiny. The missionary, alarmed at a disposition that
evinced so little respect for his character and personal rights, took his
departure by the first opportunity, since which no attempt has been made to
convert the natives of the Marquesas to Christianity.
The men of the Marquesas, were, in general, quite naked. But few
ornaments were worn by either sex. The women frequently had no other
ornament than a small flower, stuck through a slit in their ears. Some of the
men wore polished whale's teeth round their necks, and some shell bracelets,
but they were not in common use. A few were tattooed all over, and others
but slightly. The mode of their tattooing seemed to be altogether a matter of
fancy. Some had indulged the most whimsical taste, in having indelibly
pricked into their flesh, fish, birds, and beasts, of all kinds known to them.
Others were tattooed black, even to the inner part of their lips. It is an art in
high estimation amongst them. There are men, who pursue it as a regular
business, and are in great favour with their countrymen, for their skilful
performance. The women tattoo more tastefully than the men. Their feet and
legs, half-way to the knee, are usually covered with figures, wrought with
great neatness, and the right hand and arm, half-way to the elbow, is often
similarly ornamented. Both men and women commonly wear their hair
short, and when instances to the contrary are met with, the persons
invariably have a disgusting appearance, their hair hanging in long and
disagreeable looking matted locks.

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Words, Music, and the Popular : Global

Perspectives on Intermedial Relations

Marco Katz Montiel

Editorial Advisory Board:

More information about this series at

Words, Music, and the

Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature

1 Words, Music, and the Popular 1

2 Of Silent Notation and Historiographic Relationality:

Section I Popular Form and Pop-Aesthetics 37

3 Experiencing Dylan: The Effect of Formal Structure and

5 Which Side Is This Ex-Beatle on? A Reassessment of the

Section II The Geopolitics of the Popular 109

6 PJ Harvey as a Modern War Poet: How Let England Shake

7 Transmedia Performance in Scandinavian Singalong

8 A Melopoetic Struggle between East and West:

9 Post-Sovietness of the Popular: The West, the Post-Soviet

Section III Popular Classics? 201

10 Café-Concert Parodies of Lohengrin (Wagner) and Othello

11 “The World Wanted to Bleed All the Sass Out My Name”:

12 William H. Gass and the (Un)popularity of Words as Music237

Nassim Winnie Balestrini is Professor of American Studies and

completed her BA in History and Political Science at Texas State University.

Thomas Gurke is Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at the

position of sung texts in education, health care, and literature. He is also a

Table 3.1 URLs of the YouTube registrations of “Ballad of a Thin Man”

Words, Music, and the Popular

Thomas Gurke and Susan Winnett

Songs can be described as intermedial combinations of words and music1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

5) then the complicated relations between the seemingly innocuous

imagined a return to an originary poetic and musical oneness. In the later

Benjamin foresees participatory culture and the impact it may have on

opens this collection with a strong theoretical argument that considers

Singalong TV-shows Allsång på Skansen and Live fra Højskolesangbogen

We wish to thank all contributors for their outstanding work during a

Rajewsky, Irina O. 2002. Intermedialität. Tübingen/Basel: A. Francke Verlag.

Of Silent Notation and Historiographic

Nassim Winnie Balestrini

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 11

In the two theory-focused sections of this chapter, I will briefly intro-

Heuristic Functions of Media Borders

European thinkers debated whether music was primarily mimetic (taking

Claims regarding the inseparability of words and music in songs poten-

movement, and visual elements in the performance space/audiovisual

Notions of the ‘Popular’ in Poetry and Music

Proponents of popular music studies have been applying such an approach

categories of value and validity in academic disciplines, canonization pro-

Such a suggestion coheres with the fact that “scholars—guided by Daphne

Time, Taste, and Tunes in Richard Powers’s Orfeo:

wanted something more purged of familiar harmonic gestures. Hiller

words in the contexts of teaching composition, of responses to performed

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Paratextual Education

Within polymedial hip-hop culture, rap most prominently links verbal

of Aaron Burr is underscored with the constant movement of dancing. As

transatlantic political turmoil and a thwarted love relationship remains a

Figuring out the “sound” of Thomas Jefferson was a fun challenge. My

in the storyworld, and—of course—itself consists largely of verbal dis-

may be true, reading repetition as primarily musical and not as related to

especially in the realm of what is regarded as popular music, can contribute

Harbert, Elissa. 2018. Hamilton and history musicals. American Music 36

Throughout our passage, we remarked, that whenever the wind hauled to

On the 20th of September, in latitude seven degrees fifty minutes south,

1 Words, Music, and the Popular 1

2 Of Silent Notation and Historiographic Relationality:

Section I Popular Form and Pop-Aesthetics 37

3 Experiencing Dylan: The Effect of Formal Structure and

5 Which Side Is This Ex-Beatle on? A Reassessment of the

Section II The Geopolitics of the Popular 109

6 PJ Harvey as a Modern War Poet: How Let England Shake

7 Transmedia Performance in Scandinavian Singalong

8 A Melopoetic Struggle between East and West:

9 Post-Sovietness of the Popular: The West, the Post-Soviet

Section III Popular Classics? 201

10 Café-Concert Parodies of Lohengrin (Wagner) and Othello

11 “The World Wanted to Bleed All the Sass Out My Name”:

12 William H. Gass and the (Un)popularity of Words as Music237