Steven P. Scher’s Response to Essays published in his honor: WMA4
Response to Sydney Conference and WMS Vol. 4.
When David Mosley, the secretary of the Word and Music Association (WMA), asked me to submit a “short response” for the WMA Newsletter to the ten essays published in volume 4 of Word and Music Studies (WMS, 2002) dealing specifically with some aspect of my work in musico-literary relations, I gladly complied. I am grateful to each and every one of the authors for participating in this project. I was particularly pleased to see Larry Kramer, who could not come to Sydney, among the contributors. My response will be brief, for I will not engage here in exhaustive scholarly exchange with the individual contributors. Rather than more scholarship, I shall offer some personal reflections on my long-time involvement with nurturing our developing field.
First of all, let me tell you how honored and deeply touched I am by this tribute: a collection of seminal essays, all ground-breaking and innovative. My first bouquet of thanks goes to Walter Bernhart, whose idea it was to devote the first part of the papers read at the 2001 Sydney conference to critically assessing the usefulness or irrelevance of my efforts over the years. Needless to say, I am permanently blushing when I read Professor Bernhart’s surely too positive assessment of my scholarly achievement and personal mannerisms, including his noble claim that I “masterminded” Word and Music Studies. I owe special thanks to Suzanne M. Lodato and Suzanne Aspden who, along with Walter Bernhart, did a superb editing job. And thanks also to Suzanne Lodato for her beautifully crafted introduction to the volume.
I must confess that it is rather gratifying to see—while one is still alive—that thirty-odd years of work did not go entirely unnoticed. But it did take a long while until my musico-literary efforts began to be noticed. When as a graduate student at Yale in the late 60s I decided to write my dissertation on what was later published in book form as Verbal Music in German Literature, my professors warned me not to continue working on such a topic because it would inevitably lead to academic suicide. In those days, to be sure, there was no talk of interdisciplinarity, interart studies, or comparative arts, let alone intermediality. In fact, studying the interrelation of the arts was regarded with suspicion as not a legitimate comparative activity. We have come a long way since then! My obstinate perseverance eventually paid off and became even contagious. More and more literary scholars and musicologists, young and old, started working and publishing on various aspects of the field Lawrence Kramer named ‘melopoetics’. I still like the term ‘melopoetics’ when it is meant as a broader, all-encompassing designation of our discipline, especially accessible and attractive for the outside world of scholars not actively engaged in musico-literary research. But I can see why—when used in a narrow sense—Walter Bernhart, Werner Wolf and others object to the term ‘melopoetics’ as “unsuitable” and “misleading.”
It is in this context that the fundamental questions raised by Eric Prieto in his essay on “Metaphor and Methodology in Word and Music Studies” are more and more pressing: “what is it about word and music studies that makes the very definition of the field such a problem? [...] and what are the questions of greatest significance for us? Are there any [questions] that would be of interest to scholars and readers outside of our field, those with no particular interest in ‘defining’ the relations between music and literature?”
I better stop here, otherwise my response will no longer be short. I shall not recount, among other things, the spectacular rise in recent years of musico-literary study on an international scale. Today the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA), founded in 1997, has an active membership of some 75; and over 70 abstracts were submitted from 24 countries for the upcoming fourth conference to be held June 18-22 in Berlin, Germany.
May the discipline of Word and Music Studies continue to flourish!
Steven Paul Scher
Hanover, New Hampshire