Language prosody as a resource in musical composition

Thesis

This dissertation explores the notion of prosody and its relationship to musical composition. The linguistic study of prosody is concerned with the energy, rhythms and intonations of speech patterns and how these impact on the meaning of utterances. It is clear that there are considerable correspondences between the prosodic elements of language (its rhythms, stresses and intonations) and music; it is by far the closest element of language to musical sound (as opposed to semantic or even pragmatic meaning). The study of prosody reveals many of the features of any speaker's emotional or expressive state, in the same way that we infer emotional content in music from the performance of a work. But what of the relationship between prosody and composition? The link between prosody and musical composition has been very significant at particular moments in history yet there is a lack of any thorough scholarship on this connection. This dissertation aims to address this lack of research.

With these ideas in mind, over the four chapters of the thesis, I provide an overview of the connections between prosody and music composition, and examine some current psycho-linguistic work on the subject (Chapter 1). I then turn to the way in which prosody has provided compositional resources by attending to a number of case studies, which reflect a changing but persistent role for prosody in composition (Chapter 2). In Chapter 3, I reflect on my own compositional approach using prosody as a resource, before a final discussion chapter.

Authors: Martinez Burgos, M

• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: prosody; spectralism; composition techniques; music; inspiration; orchestration; music analysis; composition
• Subjects: Composition Technique; Prosody; Spectralism; Music; Composition (Music); Composition teachers (Music)