Word Painting: Using a Musical Technique to Enhance Vocabulary

2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (6) ◽  
pp. 750-754
Author(s):  
Pamela Beach ◽  
Benjamin Bolden
Keyword(s):  
Word Painting

Ekphrasis

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Altman
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Usual Sense ◽  
Early Modern Theatre ◽  
Early Modern English ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Word Painting ◽  
English Stage ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Flexible Capacity

This chapter examines the use of ekphrasis in early modern theatre, with particular emphasis on its effect on the stage and the relationship of ekphrastic speech to the ongoing action in which it is enunciated. It maps the parameters of ekphrasis on the early modern English stage by considering a few examples of the ways in which ekphrasis instantiates early modern theatricality. It also discusses the expressive potential of ekphrastic speech and its transmission to the listener as well as the ironic uses of ekphrasis as a mode of persuasion, whether directed to oneself, an on-stage auditor, off-stage auditors, or all three. It argues that ekphrasis creates nothing less than what it calls ‘the psyche of the play’ and explains how the unusually flexible capacity of the staged word allows it to be used for a wide range of theatrical techniques, including the usual sense of ‘word-painting’. Finally, it looks at William Shakespeare’s deployment of ekphrasis in his work such asHamlet.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 261-270
Author(s):  
Sean M. Parr
Keyword(s):  
Technical Skill ◽  
Singing Voice ◽  
Word Painting ◽  
General Sign

This brief closing section of the book explores how three recent examples of coloratura singing by the rising generation of singers reflects the relevance, importance, and power of the melismatic female singer. Rather than serving as a general sign of technical skill, decoration, or word painting, coloratura now also signals particular intensities, emotions, inflections, madness, and even death, depending on the performer and composer involved. And current coloraturas such as Natalie Dessay, Diana Damrau, Lisette Oropesa, Erin Morley, and so many more continue to revivify the power of the singing voice.

scholarly journals Silence as Sound: Handel's Sublime Pauses

2005 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 521-558 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELLEN T. HARRIS
Keyword(s):  
Vocal Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Text Setting ◽  
Word Painting

ABSTRACT The notated absence of sound creates some of the most dramatic and compelling moments in Handel's mature music. Handel's practice can be traced to the word-based silences of the madrigal on one hand, and the rhetorical silences found in Corelli's trio sonatas on the other. By transferring Corelli's systematic use of silence to vocal music, Handel moved beyond word-painting to expressive text-setting. Some critics condemned these silences, which prove strikingly similar to the emotional pauses introduced later by Garrick into his theatrical roles, as incorrect. Others considered them sublime.

Some Poetical Forests

1950 ◽  
Vol 19 (55) ◽  
pp. 29-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. W. Lamb
Keyword(s):  
Epic Poetry ◽  
Good Care ◽  
Strenuous Activity ◽  
Word Painting ◽  
Latin Verse ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Employment Needs

‘Perhaps you can draw a cypress’, says Horace (A.P. 19), a remark which many Latin poets seem to have interpreted as a challenge. Not that the poets, with the exception of Ovid, wasted many words on the cypress itself, although all are very careful to mention it. Usually it is accompanied by some gloomy epithet, feralis (Ovid, Trist. 3. 13. 21; Virg. Aen. 6. 216) or funebris, or has some remote allusion to the funeral pyre (e.g. Lucan 3. 442; Stat. Theb. 4. 464). Homer, on the contrary, preferred a more cheerful epithet ε??ώ??ης.But the cypress is by no means the only tree in the forest, and the poets take good care to let the reader know it. The Romans thought that there were some parts of poetry, and particularly epic poetry, in which they could improve on the Greeks, and word-painting was one of these. Where the Greeks usually contented themselves with a terse epithet, the Romans loved to dip their brush in bright colours and lay them on thick. Such descriptive passages have their place in poetry, but their employment needs to be regulated carefully in accordance with the requirements of the subject. In epic particularly they should not delay the course of the action, but, as it were, provide a pleasant oasis wherein the reader can rest after perusing the account of some more strenuous activity. The forests we find in Latin verse usually contain far more trees than are generally found on an oasis, but they do provide a convenient resting-point in the action, and at the same time give the poet an opportunity of displaying his powers of word-painting.

Congruence between Poetry and Music in Schumann's Dichterliebe

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-52
Author(s):  
Don Michael Randel
Keyword(s):  
Vocal Music ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Narrow Sense ◽  
Tonal Music ◽  
Semantic Domain ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Word Painting ◽  
History Of ◽  
Roman Jakobson ◽  
Poetry And Music

Abstract Poetry and music have in common various ways of structuring sound. In both, one can speak of rhythm, meter, loudness (e.g., accent), and pitch. Beyond sound in the narrow sense, one can also speak of syntax in that both language and Western tonal music create expectations that are satisfied or not in a variety of ways. These material aspects of poetry and music can be the basis for exploring how poetry and music fit together in vocal music in general and in individual works. The study of poetry in these terms came to prominence in the work of Roman Jakobson and others beginning in 1960 and has more recently been taken up by Marjorie Perloff and colleagues. The study of music with words has in general not considered the materiality that they share, especially not in the analysis of individual works. Writers on music have generally placed emphasis on expression of the semantic content of texts instead, privileging texts that can be read in relation to Romantic lyric theory. This has led to the search for word painting of one kind or another that has shaped the understanding of whole periods in the history of music and that is very much with us still, though this semantic domain cannot ultimately be separated from the material aspect of language. This article analyzes Songs 1, 2, 4, and 6 of Schumann's Dichterliebe in terms of this materiality with a view to showing how closely congruent poetry and music can be in their own terms in individual works without dwelling first on what they might be thought to express. This is to speak not at first about meaning but rather about the means by which meaning is created. Analysis of this kind in no way precludes hermeneutics. It is but one starting point and one that bears directly on the act of listening and perhaps performance.

"Word-painting," "Word-painters"

1921 ◽  
Vol s12-IX (174) ◽  
pp. 127-128
Author(s):  
Penry Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Word Painting
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