Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p.

277-301, 2017

From Orpheus to Bob Dylan: the Story of “Words and Music”

De Orfeu a Bob Dylan: a história “das palavras e da música”

Walter Bernhart
University of Graz, Graz / Austria
walter.bernhart@uni-graz.at

Abstract: This paper tells a story of the relationship between “words and music” from
the viewpoint of changing tendencies to either convergence or distance between the
two forms of communication, depending on whether aesthetic dispositions and cultural
conditions favour the merging or the drifting apart of both media. Thus, “fusionist” and
“separatist” tendencies in the development of the arts are identified as manifested, in
Western cultural history, by the impressive span of intermedial interaction extending
from early mythical origins (Orpheus) to most recent manifestations (Bob Dylan). The
focus is on the history of European musical theatre and the European song tradition. In
the latter case, “interpretive” and “non-interpretive” songs are distinguished depending
on whether the link between “words and music” is on the semantic or on the prosodic
level. Contemporary pop songs, as represented by Dylan, are finally discussed in the
context of the terminological framework presented and in view of the age-old tradition
of singer-poets.
Keywords: word-image relations; contemporary pop songs; European tradition.

Resumo: O texto trata da história da relação entre “as palavras e a música” do ponto
de vista das duas tendências: a convergência das duas formas de comunicação ou o
distanciamento entre elas, segundo as disposições estéticas e condições culturais que
favoreceram seja a fusão, seja o distanciamento dessas mídias. Assim, na história da
cultura ocidental, as tendências “fusionistas” ou “separatistas” no desenvolvimento
das artes são identificadas na extensão da interação intermidiática desde as origens
míticas (Orfeu) até as manifestações mais recentes (Bob Dylan). O foco recai sobre a
história do teatro musical europeu e a tradição da canção europeia. Nesta, as canções
“interpretativas” e as “não interpretativas” se distinguem conforme o nível, semântico

eISSN: 2317-2096
DOI: 10.17851/2317-2096.27.2.277-301
278 Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017

ou prosódico, da ligação entre “palavra e música”. Por fim, as canções populares

contemporâneas, representadas por Dylan, são discutidas no contexto da estrutura
terminológica apresentada e em vista da antiga tradição dos poetas-cantores.
Palavras-chave: relação palavra-imagem; canção popular contemporânea; tradição
europeia.

Introduction
The title chosen for this text promises to tell the story of “words
and music”, a subject most suitable for a conference that is devoted to the
study of intermediality. Intermediality is a field that is not only fascinating
in itself but one that has recently seen a dramatic development as a subject
in the world of academic studies. Not that a discussion of the various ways
in which the different media and art forms can relate to one another is in
any way a new thing under the sun. Yet their serious scholarly study with
a strong methodological and terminological awareness is a fairly recent
achievement. Particularly the discussion of the relations between words
and music has a venerable tradition, and one can observe something like
a friendly competition going on, a paragone, over priority and superiority
between the study of “words and music” on the one side and the study of
“words and images” on the other. The relationship of words and images
is a concern equally noble and long-standing in intellectual history, at
least so since Horace and his famous verdict, “ut pictura poesis” (“as in
painting so in poetry”: poetry is like painting). Yet “words and music” can
be seen as having an even longer tradition – as will be demonstrated –, and
what this text will do is sketch the history of “words and music” and their
relationships by telling its fascinating story from the early beginnings in
the nebulous times of pre-history all the way up to our very own days –
which is what the names given in the title point to.
In fact, I should not say the story of “words and music”, but rather
a story, or – even more correctly – my story, of “words and music”,
because – as is clearly evident – all stories are focused and adopt an
individual perspective by highlighting certain aspects at the expense
of others. Yet it is my claim that the chosen focus is of high relevance
as it links up the development of “words and music” with the overall
development of European intellectual history and thereby offers a
meaningful frame of reference. What my specialized focus is will come
out as I go along.
Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017 279

Orpheus
Let me start my story –necessarily sketchy in character, as
indicated – “ab ovo”, as Horace had it, and go “back to the roots”, in more
modern usage. The root I have chosen is the myth of Orpheus. Orpheus
– setting aside whether he was a historical person or only a mythological
figure – is no doubt the most highly-praised musician and poet of classical
antiquity. He had the legendary gifts of charming fish, tigers and lions,
of making trees and rocks move on the ground, of overpowering even
the sirens and their enticing songs, and – most famously – of bewitching
the gods of the underworld to let his beloved wife Eurydice return to the
world of the living (although this last-mentioned incident of Orpheus’s
life is only the very latest addition to the myth, but now its most popular
part). Pindar, the most venerable master of Greek poetry, called Orpheus
the “father of songs” and claimed him to be the son of the muse Calliope,
the “beautiful-voiced”, who is the oldest of the nine Parnassian muses
and represents the qualities of music, song, dance, and eloquence. Apollo
loved Orpheus and taught him to play the lyre while Calliope taught
him to make verses for singing. Thus, for the ancient Greeks, he was the
inventor of song and music, of singing words to the lyre. He was both a
poet and a musician. In the long tradition of the reception of the Orpheus
myth in Western culture he is mainly seen as a musician whose music
had the many magical effects already mentioned. Yet, interestingly, in
antiquity he was more respected as a poet, and it is telling that Socrates,
in his apologia, the famous defense speech delivered before drinking the
deadly potion, mentions Orpheus in line with Musaios, Hesiod and Homer
as one of the four oldest Greek poets; and Aristophanes, in his satirical
comedy The Frogs, refers to Orpheus’s “holy words” which he uttered as
the founder of mysterious initiation rites (known as the Orphic mysteries).
One ancient source credits Orpheus even with having invented writing,
which is a far more advanced and much later form of verbal expression
and one far removed from the art of music. For the church-father St.
Augustine he was the supreme “poeta theologus” – nota bene: a poet.1
What all this tells us about the beginning of the story of “words
and music” is that it takes us back to the earliest conceptions about the

1
For factual information on Orpheus see: ORPHEUS. In: WIKIPEDIA: The Free
Encyclopedia; ORPHEUS. In: WIKIPEDIA: die freie Enzyklopädie.
280 Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017

interaction of media in Greek antiquity, in particular to their conception

of music, of that quality which they called mousiké. This term “covered
not only music but also dance, lyrics, and the performance of poetry”.2
Mousiké was an integral part of life in ancient Greece, as theoretical
works about Greek music tell us. (In fact, we know far more about the
theory than about the practice of ancient Greek music.) Mousiké had a
central place in the social life, above all in education, as an essential
influence on the development of young people. Apollo was seen as having
introduced the lyre as an instrument that represented order and discipline,
which reflects the views of the early master theoretician Pythagoras and
his numerical conception of music. “Measure” was a central concept
for them: “measured” music was considered to be an ethical force, one
that is instrumental in shaping a “measured” life. As a consequence,
it is not surprising that even the great heroes of physical strength and
ultimate superiority, like Hercules or Achilles, in contemporary images
were at times depicted with a lyre. (That there was an awareness of other
musical effects than those ethical ones of shaping an “ordered” life is
demonstrated by the presence of the counterpart of the lyre as a musical
instrument, namely the aulos, which was a pipe of Phrygian, i.e., non-
Greek origin and represented the wild and passionate, the Dionysian side
of music. This recalls the famous distinction made by Friedrich Nietzsche
between the Apollinian and the Dionysian sides of music.)
Thus, mousiké was more than only music, it also comprised words
as an important means of enhancing ethical effects, and dance was a
further part of mousiké as a disciplining factor in the act of performance.
Similarly, the old term melos referred not only to “melody” or “music”,
but to “a composition of words, tune, and rhythm”,3 and the melopoioi,
the “makers of songs”, were composers and lyricists at the same time
who performed their compositions in public.
These “makers of songs” had a prominent social position in ancient
Greece and were epitomized in the common mind by the legendary singer-
poet Orpheus, who was to become a powerful element in the cultural
memory of our Western civilization. The Orpheus myth permeates our
whole cultural tradition, and anyone who takes the trouble of checking
the internet for works in the various media that reflect the myth will be

2
CARTWRIGHT. Ancient Greek Music.
3
CARTWRIGHT. Ancient Greek Music.
Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017 281

surprised:4 almost 50 entries for music, mainly operas – among them

Monteverdi’s Orfeo of 1607, to be mentioned again later –, more than 20
major literary works (from Calderón through Goethe and Rilke to Elfriede
Jelinek, the Austrian Nobel Prize winner of 2004), famous paintings, e.g.,
by Breughel or Corot, and many popular films. Orfeu Negro of 1959, a
French film based on the Brazilian play Orfeu da Conceição by Vinícius
de Moraes, set in a Rio de Janeiro favela during the carnival season, is a
most impressive example. (It was so successful that it was later turned
into a musical both in Brazil [2010] and on Broadway [2014].)
It should be mentioned, however, that Orpheus is not the only
figure from antiquity that represents the typical merging of music and
poetry in a social performative context. The earliest Greek form of
singer-poets from pre-Homeric times were the so-called aoedes, who
were oral – mostly blind – story-tellers and divinely inspired preservers
of the cultural memory. They took their name from Aoede, one of the
three ancient original muses (before Apollo’s nine Parnassian muses
entered the stage). Aoede, the daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the
goddess of memory, was also, like Calliope, the muse of voice and
song. The rhapsodes of a later period replaced the aoedes when writing
came up and the performing singer-poets became artists that had more
reproductive rather than originally creative abilities. Functions similar to
those of the rhapsodes were performed in other cultural traditions as well;
one can think of the Celtic bards, who were also soloists accompanying
themselves on the harp or lyre. “Bards” is a term still used today and
generally refers to singer-songwriters who appear in a public role. Similar
roles were played by the medieval minnesingers, minstrels, troubadours,
and trouvères.

Attic Tragedy
Returning to ancient Greek mousiké, it can be said by way of
summary that Orpheus, as the prototype of a singer and lyre player
performing in front of an audience, represented a fundamental fusion of
the involved art forms. These art forms, in fact, could not be separated
or distinguished from one another in the act of performance. This
situation, in fact, was most characteristically also found in the dramatic

4
Cf. RPHEUS. In: WIKIPEDIA: die freie Enzyklopädie.
282 Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017

performances of ancient Greek theatre as manifested in the Attic tragedy

of the 5th century BC. Such a fusion of the art forms was the most
important element of Attic theatre performances, and it is interesting to
note that not only the chorus, who stood for the reflective, lyric side of
the drama, sang and danced, but also the protagonists did, representing
the – in the narrower sense – dramatic, the plot side of the performance.
This was true at least for the two earlier great dramatists, Aeschylus and
Sophocles, who – which is essential for our discussion – as artists were
responsible for both the words and the music of the performances.
It was a most significant and decisive change in the theatre practice
of the time, however, when Euripides, the later, third giant of ancient
Greek tragedy, hired specialized musicians to perform in his tragedies.
This was made necessary by far-reaching developments in the arts at
the time. On the one hand, music had become more elaborate and more
virtuosic, which asked for refined technical skills that only specialized
performers were in command of. Naturally this more highly developed
and complex form of music emancipated itself from the poetry and
became an independent artistic activity. And the poetry as well became
more elaborate and more rarified; it was more “sophisticated” – quite
so in the etymological sense: poetry began to show the influence of the
sophists, a then newly arising school of philosophy which represented a
far more intellectual way of thinking and a more self-conscious, complex
approach to verbal expression.

“Fusionist” vs. “Separatist”

What had happened? For the first time in European mental history
a vital change could be observed in the relationship between the art
forms, as a consequence of a change in the degree of refinement in the
use of the elements shaping the individual art forms. The change implied
a move from simplicity to intricacy, a move that goes hand in hand with
a move in the relationship of the art forms from a state of closeness
to a state of divergence. This is a truly absorbing observation, and it
is the one that sends us on our way to start telling our story of “words
and music”. This, indeed, is the focus I feel is relevant for telling the
story of the changing relationship between “words and music” over the
centuries. In this story I plan to investigate how conjoining, associative,
conjunctive phases between “words and music” took turns, or contrasted
Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017 283

with, disjoining, dissociative, disjunctive phases. To adopt a handy

usage, I propose to discuss “fusionist” and “separatist” tendencies in the
relationship of “words and music”, with the idea behind that they usually
show a correlation with parallel tendencies to simplicity, or complexity,
respectively. (Yet there will be exceptions, as will be shown.) The first
such change, to come back, took place between the earlier and the later
forms of ancient Greek tragedy.

European Musical Theatre

It stands to reason taking a first further step in telling our story
by focusing on that particular phase in the history of European theatre
which expressed for the first time as its supreme aim the revival of
ancient Greek drama, that is, the birth of opera around 1600 in Italy.
Above all, at the courtly academies of Florence the idea came up that
– by following the ancient model, as it was understood – performances
should combine drama, dance, song, and instrumental music; and tellingly
so, the first known operas that followed this genre design were based
on the Orpheus myth (the operas Euridice by Jacopo Peri and Giulio
Caccini and Claudio Monteverdi’s early masterpiece, L’Orfeo). It is
true, as more recent research has brought to light: there had been earlier
forms of theatre combining various media and performance techniques,
which interestingly were called intermedi. Many of them, incidentally,
“featured the idea of music’s power as an important element of the plot”,5
which also reflects the Orpheus myth. In fact, there had been a great
variety of earlier experimental forms of theatre that combined drama and
music, among them – once again – a (now lost) work called Orpheus of
as early as 1480. They had a great variety of genre designations other
than “opera”: attione in musica, tragedia musicale, dramma musicale,
and others.6 But of course the breakthrough of the new, extremely long-
living genre of opera came with the Florentine revival of Greek antiquity,
and this can be seen as a major example of the “fusionist” tendency of
word/music relations, which found its characteristic expression in the
delivery style of recitar cantando, a kind of “speak-singing”, for which
Monteverdi is most well-known.

5
ABBATE; PARKER. History of Opera, p. 41.
6
Cf. ABBATE; PARKER. History of Opera, p. 39.
284 Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017

Yet this phase, as a reflection of aristocratic humanist attitudes,

did not last very long. Opera entered a new stage when it expanded to
Venice where by the 1650s it became a major entertainment spectacle
at the famous carnival season, which was no longer restricted to
circumscribed courtly circles but was open to the general public. Thus,
opera in Venice became a very successful and highly popular genre which
used sensational plots that appealed to the senses and the lower social
instincts rather than reflected higher ethical and educational aspirations.
The major attractions in these performances were the elaborate stage
spectacles and, above all, the great virtuosity of the singing. Audiences
were quite inattentive at performances and carried on their social lives of
flirting and feasting in the theatre while the recitatives – thought boring
– unraveled the complicated plots of scheming and intrigue; people paid
attention only to the arias that were sung by the singers – particularly
with their strained high coloratura voices – while standing up at the
proscenium facing the audience. This setup of an opera performance is
a typical example of the “separatist” tendencies in word/music relations,
and – for better or worse – it remained basically in practice far into the
eighteenth century and even later. It is true, there were reform tendencies
around 1700 to reduce this anarchic side of Italian opera practices by
introducing the opera seria, which produced works that are largely
unknown today, although they culminated in some very effective works
by George Frederic Handel. Opere serie showed a somewhat reduced
vocal extravagance and had more earnest libretti which, however, were
still artificial, formulaic and mannered in the typical baroque verbal style
of the period: they remained representative of a “separatist” word/music
relationship. And even the far more refined and disciplined neo-classical
libretti written later in the eighteenth century by the highly esteemed
Pietro Metastasio kept conspicuously independent and disconnected
from the music, which was so prolifically written to them in the Handel
tradition;7 dozens of works of this sort were using Metastasio’s libretti
but had little to do with the texts.
It should not be forgotten that the neo-classical period of the
eighteenth century was generally a “separatist” age, in the sense here
used, most famously represented by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and his

7
E.g., Leonardo Da Vinci or Johann Adolf Hasse. Cf. ABBATE/PARKER. History of
Opera, p. 99.
Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017 285

seminal essay called Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and

Poetry,8 of 1766. There Lessing claims the arts to be incomparable, and
any transgression of the limits of the individual arts is seen by him as a
violation of taste. This is the opposite of Horace’s “fusionist” view of “ut
pictura poesis”, as already mentioned. In the world of letters, the then
fashionable form of the domestic tragedy was considered worlds apart
from music, as was the newly developed form of the bourgeois novel,
which, however, was readily accepted as a newcomer to the territory of
“poetry”, while on the other hand the cantata, the oratorio, and even the
opera, which formerly had been seen as a literary genre, were excluded
from “poetry” and assigned to “music”. This was, after all, the “age of
reason” and, from a rational point of view, poetry and music were clearly
distinguished and dissociated.
The decisive opera reform that took place in the eighteenth
century, however, is connected with the name of Christoph Willibald
Gluck, whose influence reached far into the nineteenth century. Gluck
had started out writing operas in the Metastasio mould, but in 1762 he
brought out an opera which had the effect of an earthquake, and the
title of the opera was – Orfeo ed Euridice. This work and later ones that
followed were based on principles thought to be breaking new ground at
the time but, in fact, were very old ones. The preface to the opera Alceste,
written by Ranieri de ’Calzabigi, Gluck’s favourite librettist, expresses
them very clearly, speaking in Gluck’s name: “I thought I would restrict
the music to its true function of serving the poetry in the expression and
situations of the story, without chilling it with useless and superfluous
ornaments”, stopping a singer for “a tedious instrumental introduction”
or “a favourable vowel” “to display the agility of his fine voice”.9 With
these aims the formerly disjoined words and music were re-united, which
finds its formal expression in the reclaimed style of declamation, the
recitar cantando as formerly introduced by Monteverdi. Gluck’s goals
were naturalness and clarity in the service of expressive drama that is
able to move the hearts and passions – goals that were reached to an even
higher degree by Gluck’s greatest follower, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

8
Cf. LESSING. Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie. English
translation: LESSING, Gotthold Ephrai. Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting
and Poetry. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.
9
ABBATE; PARKER. History of Opera, p. 105, apud WEISS. Opera, p. 119.
286 Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017

Yet Gluck’s reform was not effective all over Europe and it should
be kept in mind that particularly in Italy the established practice of a
concentration on virtuosic singing at the expense of a deeper concern
with text and drama continued to be in use, as is exemplified by the
extremely popular works of Gioachino Rossini, who famously had the
habit of using the same pieces of music for different operas – a clear
case of a “separatist” attitude.
The heaviest attack against the practice of Italian and French opera
in the nineteenth century then came from Richard Wagner.10 His influence
on the development of the musical theatre was overwhelming, but what
needs to interest us here is his radical move to a “fusionist” position of
the relationship of words and music, in fact of all the arts, as expressed
by the term Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of art”), which he did not
invent but made popular.11 That, for Wagner, music and drama became
most closely linked is reflected, above all, in the fact that he was the first
composer who wrote his own libretti, obviously in order to guarantee
their intimate association. He was also the one who rejected the term
“opera” and replaced it by the term Musiktheater (“musical theatre”),
again to indicate the fusion of the two elements of music and theatre. He
envisioned the “artwork of the future” as one created by a Tondichter, a
“tone poet”,12 who is versed in both words and music. The profoundest
statements about his radical reform ideas can be found in his essay
Oper und Drama of 1852, where he expressed his view “that the Greek
tragedies of Aeschylus had been the finest (though still flawed) examples
so far of total artistic synthesis, but that this synthesis had subsequently
been corrupted by Euripides”.13 This is a story already referred to, and

10
Wagner was impressed by Vincenzo Bellini’s operas of the 1830s, particularly Norma,
because of Bellini’s ability to match his music very carefully with the words to be sung.
Ulrich Schreiber calls Bellini’s innovation a “clandestine revolution” in the history of
Italian opera (“eine [...] klammheimliche [...] Revolution”) (SCHREIBER. Opernführer
für Fortgeschrittene, p. 254, my translation) with significant consequences for Verdi
and the development of later Italian opera.
11
The term was first used by the German writer and philosopher K. F. E. Trahndorff
in an essay in 1827, Ästhetik oder Lehre von Weltanschauung und Kunst (Cf.
GESAMTKUNSTWERK).
12
He also talks about “einen tonvermählten Dichter” (“a poet wedded to the tone”)
(WAGNER. Oper und Drama, ch. 22, my translation).
13
WAGNER. Oper und Drama, ch. 22, apud GESAMTKUNSTWERK.
Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017 287

Oper und Drama culminates in the following fine statement: “[...] if

Voltaire said about opera: “Words too silly to be spoken are left to be
sung”, we to the contrary say about the drama lying before us: Words
not worth to be sung are not worth for poetry”.14 This statement by
Wagner clearly contrasts a disjunctive and a conjunctive attitude to the
relationship of poetry and music and naturally favours the latter.
What distinguishes Wagner’s reorientation towards ancient models
of a fusion of the arts from earlier attempts at such a reorientation is that
earlier reform tendencies saw their aim in an increased simplicity of style
and a return to subdued and more restricted forms of presentation and
performance. This is certainly not true for Wagner, whose works, quite
to the contrary, reach notoriously complex and sprawling dimensions.
This was made possible by radical innovations in the form and the texture
of the music, above all by doing away with the distinction of recitatives
and arias, which led to the exclusive use of “through-composition” and
to what Wagner called “endless melody”, and he also introduced his
well-known technique of leitmotifs. Both these innovations allowed for
a high degree of musical flexibility which enabled the music to follow
all the ramified turns of the evolving drama and reflect even the subtlest
nuances of the text.
Taking a look at the later developments of musical theatre, in the
twentieth century one can observe a strong impact of Wagner’s style on
such great composers as Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, or Alban
Berg. But “separatist” tendencies equally continued to be active, of which
a fine example is Paul Hindemith’s opera Cardillac. This is an interesting
case as the opera exists in two versions, one of 1926 and one of 1952,
where it is a striking fact that Hindemith heavily revised the text of the
opera for the later version, following a decisive change in his political and
ideological views. Yet he left the music of the opera basically unchanged
so that one and the same music is heard for widely different words in
the two versions.15 As in the eighteenth century, the neo-classical phases
of twentieth-century arts as well, of which Cardillac is representative,
clearly favoured such a strong independence of the media.

14
“[...] wenn Voltaire von der Oper sagte: “Was zu albern ist, um gesprochen zu werden,
das läßt man singen”, so sagen wir von dem vor uns liegenden Drama dagegen: Was
nicht wert ist, gesungen zu werden, ist auch nicht der Dichtung wert.” (WAGNER.
Oper und Drama, ch. 26, my translation).
15
Cf. BERNHART. Cardillac, the Criminal Artist, p. 176.
288 Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017

European Art Song

Opera was the field in which throughout its history ideas of what
ancient Greek drama was like were shining through, and we have seen
that Orpheus usually was the myth to go back to, although that myth
itself never associated Orpheus with drama and the theatre. Nearer to
Orpheus, the exceptional singer-poet as the legends know him, is the
later European tradition of non-dramatic singing, to which our story
now turns for a while. The earliest form of such singing in the middle
ages is the Gregorian chant, or plainsong/plainchant, which showed a
characteristic monophonic melodic form of choral recitation of a sacred
text, a form that features a particularly close association, a true fusion,
even identity, of text and music on the rhythmical level. It is a very simple,
monodic style of delivery, to which the term “plainchant” points, and it
is an interesting phenomenon that it has found its quite unexpected place
on recent pop charts.
There are later phases of Gregorian chant that indeed introduced
a kind of polyphonic singing. Yet full-fledged polyphony became
the overwhelmingly dominant form in the later middle ages and had
its culmination in the Franco-Flemish School (formerly called the
Netherlandish School) of music, but also in Venice, with such outstanding
musicians as Du Fay, Ockeghem, Orlando di Lasso, or Giovanni Gabrieli.
In the sacred motets of these composers the vocal writing occasionally
ran up to even 32 voices and became so elaborate that the underlying text
turned out to be essentially irrelevant. A telling example of the mismatch
of words and music in such works is in a motet by John Dunstable, a
contemporary English composer, where at a certain point in the music we
find a lengthy musical pause in the very middle of a single word: ange –
lorum. This is an extreme case, which once again can demonstrate that
when music turns to complex virtuosity the frequent result is a drastic
disjunction of words and music.
The Dunstable example is very critically quoted in 1597 by
Thomas Morley,16 a well-recognised English musician who was one
of the influential writers of songs at the Elizabethan time and who,
together with John Dowland and Thomas Campion, started a radically

16
MORLEY. A Plaine and Easie Introdvction to Practicall Mvsicke, p. 177 (“Rules to
be obserued in dittying”).
Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017 289

new kind of songwriting at the time, called ayres. It is significant that

this innovation came up again around 1600, like the invention of opera,
both, of course, inspired by a similar set of old ideas. Dowland – recently
popularized by the singer Sting – defended his innovations by quoting as
his main ancient authority Plato, who spoke of song as a superior form
of “expressing some worthy sentence or excellent Poeme” where words
and music are united by a common rhythm; and Dowland – once again
unsurprisingly – also mentions Orpheus as a model for his new kind of
song.17 Similarly Thomas Campion, who wrote both the verse and the
music for his ayres, explained in one of his prefaces that in his English
ayres he has “chiefely aymed to couple my Words and Notes lovingly
together”.18 We can see that after the disjoining of words and music in
the lavish Franco-Flemish and Venetian polyphonic style a simple form
of monody came back with an intimate association of the two media.19

“Interpretive” vs. “Non-interpretive” Song

What a closer look at the practice of songwriting by Morley,
Campion and Dowland can teach us, however, is that although they share
the view that words and music ought to be closely linked, nonetheless the
character and degree of that linkage can be quite different. In some kind
of ayres the link lies mainly in a match on the rhythmical level. In this
case the prosody of the words, the accents and lengths of the syllables,
are accurately mirrored in the music; this is very much what Plato had
in mind in the quotation just given, and it is what also Campion actually
referred to when he talked about his words and notes “lovingly coupled
together”. In such cases we no doubt have a close tie of the media, the
tie, however, does not exist on the level of the meaning of the words.
The music does not attempt to mirror in any way what the text is saying;
it only carefully follows the text on the level of the signifier.

17
DOWLAND. The First Book of Ayres, p. iv.
18
CAMPION. The Works of Thomas Campion, p. 55 (Preface to Two Books of Ayres,
1613).
19
For a more detailed discussion of text-setting in Elizabethan ayres, see BERNHART.
Theorie und Praxis der Vertonung in den elisabethanischen Airs. (Reprinted in:
BERNHART. Essays on Literature and Music (1985–2013) by Walter Bernhart, p. 1-18.)
290 Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017

However, there is, of course, music which very well tries to

reflect what the text is saying and suggest in musical terms aspects of the
meaning on the level of the signified. In what has been labelled “word
painting”, or “word illustration”, music can easily mirror, for instance, the
rising sun talked about in the text by having the voice sing a rising melody,
or suggest a girl running away by running scales in the accompanying
lute; and also in “word expression”, i.e., in passages where feelings
and emotional states are addressed, such psychological conditions can
be mirrored in the music: slow minor keys expressing sadness, falling
seconds reflecting sighs, quick dance rhythms suggesting happiness, and
so on – all these forms can be found in Dowland or Morley, who in this
respect, however, differ significantly from Campion, who took a clearly
opposite position and sneered at what he called “such childish observing
of words”;20 he restricted himself to a prosodic fusion of words and music
and avoided content matching.
Following this, it is possible to distinguish between two distinct
forms of fusion of words and music in song writing, forms which
elsewhere I have called “interpretive” as in contrast to “non-interpretive”
songs.21 In the one case, the music enters into a dialogue with the text
on the level of the signified and thus “interprets” it, concerns itself with
the meaning of the text; this is the hermeneutic approach of text-setting;
in the other case, the music shows no intention of interpreting what the
text is saying and restricts itself to re-enforcing and strengthening the
material basis of the text by affirmative identification with it; this can be
called the enhancement approach of text-setting.
It is interesting to survey the history of song writing in the
light of this distinction, and it can be observed, for instance, that in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which was generally a tenuous
period of art song, the most common form of monodic singing, the
church hymns and anthems, were basically “non-interpretive”, which is
also true for the elegant and gallant style of art song as it appeared later
in the eighteenth century in the so-called Berlin school of song writing
of Carl Friedrich Zelter, Johann Friedrich Reichardt and others, highly

20
CAMPION. The Works of Thomas Campion, p. 15 (Preface to Rosseter’s Book of
Ayres, 1601).
21
See BERNHART. Setting a Poem. (Reprinted in: BERNHART. Essays on Literature
and Music (1985–2013) by Walter Bernhart, p. 53-73.)
Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017 291

appreciated by Geheimrat Goethe. It took the advent of romanticism

to encourage “interpretive” song writing, in the sense described, and
the great tradition of the German lied from Franz Schubert onwards
showed an ever-increasing sensitivity to nuances of meaning in the text
as reflected in the ever more delicate nuances of the music, culminating,
let’s say, in Hugo Wolf or Benjamin Britten.22

European Poetry as “Vehicle of Opinion”

The modern European art song tradition, as it started during the
Renaissance period, basically represents “fusionist” tendencies of “words
and music”, in the terminology here used, whichever form and degree of
fusion the various song types developed in the tradition may have taken.
It is, however, worth taking a brief look at the general development
of modern European poetry from this perspective, and there we can
observe a strong tendency to a “separatist” position after the flourishing
of humanist-inspired Renaissance poetry with its tendency towards an
association with music, as manifested, among others, in sonnets. Literary
writing from the seventeenth century onwards, however, turned to more
realistic approaches and to didactic aims in poetry, which also meant a
turn away from musical associations. One need not go as far as Ezra
Pound, who said: “From the Elizabethans to Swinburne, throughout all
that vast hiatus English poetry has been the beargarden of doctrinaires.
It has been the vehicle of opinion. For Swinburne it was at least the
art of musical wording.”23 This implies that only with the symbolists a
renewed conjunction of “words and music” took place in the history of
European poetry. This radical position neglects the musical leanings of
romantic poets like Burns, or Eichendorff, to name but two, but basically
it holds true that music and poetry essentially lived separate lives for a
very long time.

22
For an example of a detailed analysis of refined musical text interpretation, see
BERNHART. An Exegetic Composer. (Reprinted in: BERNHART. Essays on Literature
and Music (1985–2013) by Walter Bernhart, p. 115-128.)
23
POUND. Literary Essays, p. 363.
292 Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017

20th-Century Song
To return to song writing and take a look at the twentieth century,
what can be observed is a gradual decline of art song; as far as it did
remain active it basically followed the romantic tradition – which is
true even for such forward-looking composers as Schoenberg, Berg, or
Britten. The alternative was taking up the neo-classical attitude already
mentioned. Thus, Hindemith, once again used as an example, wrote
songs such as the cycle Marienleben (“The Life of Mary”) where the
music relates very little to Rainer Maria Rilke’s underlying complex
modernist text.

Pop Song
What obviously gained more weight in the twentieth century were
popular forms of song writing, of which, in the earlier phase, the songs
of Bert Brecht and Kurt Weill have meanwhile become part of the canon.
And surely what happened later was the explosion of pop songs, which
now dominate the media scene and have become an ever-present feature
of our contemporary cultural life. From the viewpoint of the relationship
between words and music, this pop song scene is basically in the “fusion”
camp because in principle the songs are monodic and make it a point
that the music should not distract attention from the text and should
follow the lyrics’ prosodic pattern. They tend to be “non-interpretive”
and only rarely the music also relates directly to the meaning of the text
as it unfolds in the text-setting.
However, it is interesting to observe that, although these songs
are “non-interpretive” and avoid hermeneutic text-setting, the music of
pop songs nonetheless is linked to the text and to “meaning” on a more
fundamental, deeper level of congruence. How can that be explained?
Pop songs are basically a social activity and centrally perform a social
function by expressing attitudes that reflect the prevailing values of the
surrounding cultural life. Thus, the music does not “interpret” – as it were,
internally, i.e. within the text-music combination – what the text is saying;
yet, the music, by being performed in a social situation in conjunction
with the text, assists the text in communicating – externally, as it were –
a cultural “message”; the song essentially functions as a socio-cultural
act. Thus, in pop songs we usually have a “non-interpretive” practice
Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017 293

which generally avoids internal text-setting; yet music shares with the
text a strong impulse to communicate cultural values, expressed by the
text, in a social act of performance.24

Bob Dylan
This finally leads into talking about the most prominent Orpheus
figure of today, named in the title, Bob Dylan, brought to renewed universal
fame as the most recent – and partly controversial – recipient of the Nobel
Prize in Literature. Before coming back to the issue of the Nobel Prize,
what is first in place is a discussion of his song practice and his position in
the critical framework here developed. This is best done by looking at one
of his most famous songs, “The Times They Are A-Changin’”, which has
been called a “textbook example” of the way he is able to merge poetry and
music.25 It is a song firmly rooted in the bardic tradition of ballad singing
to people gathered round the poet-singer, which comes out even in the very
first line of the text, where it says, “Come gather ’round people”.26 Dylan
sings his words to the harp (i.e., the mouthorgan) and the guitar, the song
is musically simple, following the (slightly disguised) standard four-bar
model and a standard harmonic structure, only with some ambivalence
between major and minor keys, and a heavy three-fourth measure.27 Also
the language is simple and colloquial, yet typically enriched by vivid
images (the flood, the spinning wheel, the blocked doorway) and some
biblical allusions (e.g., the deluge). We indeed have a high congruence of
“words and music” on the prosodic level, the words can easily be followed,
yet the music does not concern itself directly with the meaning of the text
– which is typical for strophic settings like this one; thus, in terms here
used, the song is “fusionist” “non-interpretive”.
The question, however, is whether the music is nonetheless
concerned with “meaning” in another way, in the sense described before,
namely, whether it carries – as a combined concern of both the words
24
A more extensive description of the varieties of relationship found between “words and
music” in songs, see BERNHART. Words and Music as Partners in Song; BERNHART.
What Can Music Do to a Poem? (Both reprinted in: BERNHART. Essays on Literature
and Music (1985–2013) by Walter Bernhart, p. 369-379; 405-412, respectively.)
25
Cf. BERGERT. Symbiose von Text und Musik.
26
DYLAN. The Times They Are A-Changin’.
27
Cf. WICKE. The Times They Are A-Changin’.
294 Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017

and the music – some “cultural message”. This, of course, is clearly

the case: “The Times They Are A-Changin’” has been called the most
influential document of the 1960s protest movement, the Civil Rights
Movement, which established Dylan’s reputation as the spokesman
of his generation.28 It is a plea for cultural change with an optimistic
outlook in the last lines, saying that “the first one now will later be
last”.29 It is interesting to note that Dylan, in 1985, affirmed that “[t]his
was definitely a song with a purpose. It was influenced of course by the
Irish and Scottish ballads”.30 Yet Dylan also left the words rather general
and did not see them as a means of direct political intervention, in fact
he did not at all think of himself as a genuine “protest singer” of “finger-
pointing songs”.31 Instead he said: “I didn’t mean ‘The Times They
Are a-Changin’’ as a statement ... It’s a feeling”.32 This is an interesting
comment and shows Dylan’s awareness that songs reach their desired
effects – their “purpose” – not through an act of mental persuasion but
through emotional involvement and a change of attitude towards the
desired goal. This of course reminds us of the old rhetorical principle
of movere, of “moving the passions”, and the age-old ethical wisdom
that the combination of words and music, delivered in a social act of
communication, is a supreme means for achieving changes of attitude.
That Bob Dylan is firmly rooted in the ancient tradition of song
poetry is clearly acknowledged in the justification given by the Swedish
Academy for awarding him the Nobel Prize. Horace Engdahl, in his
Stockholm presentation speech, sees him as “a singer worthy of a place
beside the Greek ἀοιδόι”,33 and Sara Danius, the Academy’s permanent
secretary, compared Dylan to Homer and Sappho, who also accompanied
their poems with music.34 The following statement from the Süddeutsche
Zeitung makes a similar point suitable in the context of this text: “And
is it not that the singer-songwriter and performer Bob Dylan, from a
long-term perspective, can be seen as a modern revenant of Orpheus,

28
Cf. WICKE. The Times They Are A-Changin’.
29
DYLAN. The Times They Are A-Changin’.
30
DYLAN apud BOB Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’”.
31
Cf. DETERING. Bob Dylan, p. 37.
32
DYLAN apud BOB Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’”.
33
ENGDAHL. Award Ceremony Speech.
34
Cf. DANIUS. Interview.
Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017 295

who has replaced his lyre with an electric guitar?”35 Similarly, it has been
stressed that Dylan is aware of “the oral-magical origins of art under
the conditions of a globalized technological modernity”,36 a merging of
untaught popular and avantgarde intellectual culture. Dylan himself, in
his banquet acceptance speech, made it clear: what interests him most –
like Shakespeare before him, as he says – is the performance situation,
the conditions under which the delivery of his songs can take place.37
He said so in response to the delicate question of whether he deserved a
Nobel Prize for literature and brushing aside the hairy issue of “Are my
songs literature?”. This is not his concern.38
The recent so-called “performative turn” in cultural studies opens
a door for understanding such a position, not the least because it makes
accessible a deepened understanding of the long story of “words and
music” which I have been sketching. The Swedish Academy was very
well aware of what was happening when Engdahl began his presentation
speech with the following words: “What brings about the great shifts in
the world of literature? Often it is when someone seizes upon a simple,
overlooked form, discounted as art in the higher sense, and makes it
mutate.”39 It is the “performative turn” that can be made accountable for

35
“Und lässt sich nicht der Singer-Songwriter und Performer Bob Dylan in der
Langzeitperspektive als ein moderner Wiedergänger des Orpheus begreifen, der die Lyra
durch die elektrische Gitarre ersetzt hat?” (MÜLLER. Literaturnobelpreis, my translation).
36
DETERING. Bob Dylan, p. 12, my translation.
37
Cf. DYLAN. Bob Dylan ‒ Banquet Speech.
38
Meanwhile, on June 5th, 2017 (in time to collect the Nobel funds), Dylan has delivered
his Nobel Lecture. It does not centrally address the issues here raised, yet it confirms
some points already made, when it says, e.g.: “I got to wondering exactly how my songs
related to literature” (this is the opening statement); and (in the final passage): “[...] songs
are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read. The words in Shakespeare’s
plays were meant to be acted on the stage”; or: “If a song moves you, that’s all that’s
important. I don’t have to know what a song means” (DYLAN. Nobel Lecture). The
lecture’s last sentence refers to Homer and his invocation of the Muse. A fine commentary
in the Frankfurter Allgemeine makes the good point that this lecture only on the surface
appears to be like a joke; it is certainly a provocation yet it makes a profound statement
albeit in pronouncedly anti-academic terms as its apparent artlessness gives illuminating
insight into Dylan’s views of poetry and the function of a poet as a mere vessel through
which the “Muse” speaks (cf. WIELE. Bob Dylans Nobelpreisrede).
39
ENGDAHL. Award Ceremony Speech.
296 Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017

a revived interest in fused medial forms of presentation, a presentation

mode that goes back to very early beginnings and has seen many different
formations as history evolved.
I need to stress, however, that while I thus share the Swedish
Academy’s view of the historical appropriateness of nowadays awarding
a literature prize to a song-writer, I am at the same time in sympathy with
those critics who regret this situation and take up the position that at a
time when around the world reading and writing as cultural skills are
in defense, if not already in decline, book-based “traditional” – in our
terminology “separatist” – literature ought to be strongly supported. As
one critic aptly phrased it in the New York Times: “Bob Dylan does not
need a Nobel Prize in Literature, but literature needs a Nobel Prize.”40

Conclusion
To briefly summarize the findings of this text:
For one it can be asserted that the concern with issues of
intermediality, which prove to be so virulent today, has a venerable
tradition and goes back to antiquity where the combined use of medial
forms of expression was a common, indeed the dominant practice.
It was then demonstrated that the earliest combination forms
showed an intimate fusion of media, put to basically ethical purposes;
yet that in later developments the alternative of a separation of the
media arose, caused by the increased refinement and elaboration of the
individual media which asked for highly specialized skills in execution.
As a consequence, “fusionist” and “separatist” tendencies could be
distinguished, with a general inclination that this distinction also implies
one between simpler and more virtuosic forms of medial presentation.
Yet the example of Richard Wagner and his followers has shown that
this is not necessarily the case.
It was a further finding that in the “fusionist” cases the degree
of fusion can vary and that the congruence between the media either
works mainly on the prosodic level alone – in “non-interpretive” songs –,
which generally guarantees high verbal intelligibility; or, otherwise – in
“interpretive” songs – the music additionally concerns itself with the
meaning of the text and reflects its semantic side.

40
NORTH. Why Bob Dylan Shouldn’t Have Gotten a Nobel.
Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017 297

As a further observation it was shown that in “non-interpretive”

cases, where the music does not try to illustrate the verbal meaning of the
text on the surface, nonetheless both the words and the music together
may communicate a deeper-level “meaning” in the form of a cultural
message transmitted in a social act; this is particularly true for pop songs.
It was further demonstrated that at certain points in history
deliberate moves were made to cause historical changes, mainly in the
form of declared reforms leading from “separation” to “fusion” with
an impulse towards increased simplicity and naturalness. Yet it could
also be demonstrated that both “separatist” and “fusionist” tendencies
can likewise exist side by side and represent distinct contrastive options
of artistic activity at the same time. This should lead to the important
observation that, in principle, the distinction between the two tendencies
implies no value judgment, no matter what inflamed reformers historically
may have thought and propagated. The different forms merely reflect
different social and artistic demands and expectations.
From a methodological viewpoint, it needs to be added and
emphasised that the categories here used – “fusionist”/”separatist”,
“interpretive”/”non-interpretive” – are only heuristic tools and have been
devised for mainly practical purposes; they are expected to be helpful
in meaningfully describing distinctions between phenomena in order to
identify and thereby possibly better understand characteristic features
of the phenomena under scrutiny. These categories should in no way
function as dry formal labels for putting things neatly into pigeonholes,
and of course there are gradations and unclear cases. Rather the categories
are meant to assist us in sharpening our minds and encourage us to look
more closely at what is going on when “words and music” start their
fascinating flirt with one another. Filling in the many blanks left in the
sketchy story here told could, and should, test the strength and validity
of the story, and the richness of the field of “words and music” clearly
asks for a great number of other stories as well than the one told here to
be brought to light.
298 Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017

References
ABBATE, Carolyn; PARKER, Roger. A History of Opera. New York,
London: W.W. Norton, 2012.
BERGERT, Matthias. Symbiose von Text und Musik: Zu Bob Dylans
“The Times They Are A-Changin’”. Literatur Kritik: Rezensionsforum,
2016. Available at: <http://literaturkritik.de/id/22148>. Accessed on: 21
Mar. 2017.
BERNHART, Walter (1995). An Exegetic Composer: Benjamin Britten’s
Journey of the Magi. Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Tübingen,
v. 20, p. 123-134, 1995.
BERNHART, Walter. Cardillac, the Criminal Artist: A Challenge to
Opera as a Musico-Literary Form. In: ______. Essays on Literature
and Music (1985–2013) by Walter Bernhart. Ed. Werner Wolf. Leiden,
Boston, MA: Brill, Rodopi, 2015. p. 171-179. DOI: https://doi.org/
10.1163/9789004302747_012.
BERNHART, Walter. Essays on Literature and Music (1985–2013) by
Walter Bernhart. Ed. Werner Wolf. Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, Rodopi,
2015.
BERNHART, Walter. Setting a Poem: The Composer’s Choice For or
Against Interpretation. Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature,
Bloomington, IN, v. 37, p. 32-46, 1988.
BERNHART, Walter. Theorie und Praxis der Vertonung in den
elisabethanischen Airs. In: PFISTER, Manfred (Ed.). Anglistentag 1984
Passau. Giessen: Vorträge, 1985. p. 245-260.
BERNHART, Walter. What Can Music Do to a Poem? New Intermedial
Perspectives of Literary Studies. ZACH, Wolfgang; KENNEALLY,
Michael (Ed.). Literatures in English: Priorities of Research. Tübingen:
Stauffenberg, 2008. p. 41-46. (Studies in English and Comparative
Literature, 21.)
BERNHART, Walter. Words and Music as Partners in Song: “Perfect
Marriage” – “Uneasy Flirtation” – “Coercive Tension” – “Shared
Indifference” – “Total Destruction”. ARVIDSON, Jens et al. (Ed.).
Changing Borders: Contemporary Positions in Intermediality. Lund:
Intermedia Studies Press, 2007. p. 85-94.
Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017 299

BOB Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’”. Jeremy Norman’s

History of Information. [between 2004 and 2017]. Available at: <http://
www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=3164>. Accesses on:
21 Mar. 2017.
CAMPION, Thomas. The Works of Thomas Campion: Complete Songs,
Masques, and Treatises with a Selection of the Latin Verse. Ed. Walter R.
Davis. London, New York: W.W. Norton, 1969.
CARTWRIGHT, Mark. Ancient Greek Music. In: ANCIENT History
Enyclopedia. Horsham: Ancient History Enyclopedia, 2013. Available
at: <http://www.ancient.eu/Greek_Music/>. Accessed on: 22 Mar. 2017.
DANIUS, Sara. Interview about the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Nobelprize.org, Nobel Media AB, 2016. Video. 2 min. Available at:
<http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=2631>. Accessed
on: 30 Mar. 2017.
DETERING, Heinrich. Bob Dylan. Stuttgart: Philip Reclam, 2007.
(Reclams Universal-Bibliothek).
DOWLAND, John. The First Book of Ayres: The English Lute-Songs.
Ed. Edmund H. Fellowes, Thurston Dart. London, New York: Stainer &
Bell, 1965. Series I, 1-2.
DYLAN, Bob. Bob Dylan ‒ Banquet Speech. Nobelprize.org, Nobel
Media AB, 10 Dec. 2016. Video. 8 min. Available at: <https://www.
nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2016/dylan-speech.
html>. Accessed on: 20 Feb. 2017.
DYLAN, Bob. Nobel Lecture. Nobelprize.org, Nobel Media AB, 5
une 2017. Available at: <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/
literature/laureates/2016/dylan-lecture.html?utm_source=twitter&utm_
medium=social&utm_campaign=twitter_tweet#.WTVp3Raw5QM.
twitter>. Accessed on: 9 June 2017.
DYLAN, Bob. The Times They Are A-Changin’. Bob Dylan. c1963.
Available at: <https://bobdylan.com/songs/times-they-are-changin/>.
Accessed on: 21 Mar. 2017.
300 Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017

ENGDAHL, Horace. Award Ceremony Speech. Nobelprize.org, Nobel

Media AB, Dec. 2016. Available at: <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_
prizes/literature/laureates/2016/presentation-speech.html>. Accessed
on: 21 Mar. 2017.
GESAMTKUNSTWERK. In: WIKIPEDIA: The Free Encyclopedia.
[s.n.t]. Available at: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesamtkunstwerk>.
Accessed on: 5 Apr. 2017.
LESSING, Gotthold Ephrai. Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei
und Poesie. Ed. Karl Eibl et al. München: Carl Hanser, 1974. Bd. 6.
MORLEY, Thomas. A Plaine and Easie Introdvction to Practicall
Mvsicke: The English Experience 207. Amsterdam, New York: Theatrum
Orbis, 1597/1969.
MÜLLER, Lothar. Literaturnobelpreis: Warum Dylan bei seiner
Nobelpreisrede singen müsste. Süddeutsche Zeitung, München, 13 Oct.
2016. Available at: <http://www.sueddeutsche.de/thema/Bob_Dylan>.
Accessed on: 17 Oct. 2016.
NORTH, Anna. Why Bob Dylan Shouldn’t Have Gotten a Nobel. The
New York Times, New York, 13 Oct. 2016. Available at: <http://www.
nytimes.com/2016/10/13/opinion/why-bob-dylan-shouldnt-have-gotten-
a-nobel.html?_r=0>. Accessed on: 17 Oct. 2016.
ORPHEUS. In: WIKIPEDIA: die freie Enzyklopädie. [s.n.t.]. Available
at: <https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orpheus>. Accessed on: 23 Feb. 2017.
ORPHEUS. In: WIKIPEDIA: The Free Encyclopedia. [s.n.t.]. Available
at: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orpheus>. Accessed on: 23 Feb. 2017.
POUND, Ezra. Literary Essays. Ed. T.S. Eliot. London: Faber, 1974.
SCHREIBER, Ulrich. Opernführer für Fortgeschrittene: Die Geschichte
des Musiktheaters. Das 19. Jahrhundert. Kassel, Basel: Bärenreiter, 1991.
WAGNER, Richard (1852, online). Oper und Drama. Leipzig: [s.n.],
1852. Available at: <http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/buch/oper-und-
drama-843/>. Accessed on. 12 June 2017.
WEISS, Piero. Opera: A History in Documents. Oxford, New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002.
Aletria, Belo Horizonte, v. 27, n. 2, p. 277-301, 2017 301

WICKE, Peter. The Times They Are A-Changin’ (Bob Dylan). In:
SONGLEXIKON: Encyclopedia of songs. Ed. Michael Fischer, Fernand
Hörner, Christofer Jost. [S.l.: s.n.], 2014. Available at: <http://www.
songlexikon.de/songs/timestheyaredylan>. Accessed on: 21 Mar. 2017.
WIELE, Jan. Bob Dylans Nobelpreisrede: Im Kreisverkehr. Frankfurter
Allgemeine, Frankfurt, 7 Juni 2017. Feuilleton. Available at: <http://www.
faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/pop/bob-dylans-nobelpreisrede-15049551.
html>. Accessed on: 9 June 2017.

Recebido em: 30 de junho de 2017.

Aprovado em: 19 de setembro de 2017.