Negotiating Grammars: Encounters Between Music and Text

This is a dissertation about how songs, their listeners, and their performers relate to lyrics. My starting point is the literal overlap between language and music in both production and perception, and how that overlap makes itself audible—how linguistic and musical grammars interact with one another. In particular, I examine instances of interference between musical and lyrical signals, cases in which music induces lyrics to deviate from ordinary norms of spoken or written language. My three main categories exemplify how music interferes with the semantics, morphophonology, and phonology of lyrics: I dedicate a chapter each to nonreferential lyrics, filler words, and stress shift. In each case, I show how specific interference patterns are essential elements of a given musical style, and are more broadly linked to particular social registers of language and music. Thus, I propose that musicians deploy non-normative usages, syntax, and pronunciations as ways to project personae. Nonreferential lyrics, filler, and stress shifts all signal forms of linguistic, musical, and social identification.

As a corollary, I claim that more traditional ways of reading lyrics have been ill-equipped to make sense of these forms of interference. Drawing on examples from music criticism, music analysis, and the quhua tradition of theorizing Chinese opera, I show that preconceptions about how music and lyrics should relate to one another—preconceptions often derived from the conventions of high-prestige elite musics—can lead listeners to seek out the same kinds of lyrical meaning throughout all texts, and then to chastise musicians and lyricists who do not meet their aesthetic criteria. Yet I argue that these criteria are a poor fit for the many situations and genres in which it is common or even expected for listeners not to parse or interpret lyrics. As a way to bypass this dynamic, I advocate for a study of lyrics that emphasizes their use at least as much as their content, exploring the social meaning of their patterning at least as much as the semantic meaning privileged by close reading.