Читать книгу From Vocal Poetry to Song - Jean Nicolas De Surmont - Страница 7

The lexical unit song (chanson) and the objects it designates have undergone changes over time as the definition of the song object, its literary status, its legitimacy, its literariness and its linguistic base change according to historical contexts, types of discourse (learned as opposed to popular) and standards current in the cultural industry and artistic environment. Linguistic and literary fund of song activities is determined by the status accorded to a corpus of data by an institution. In this case, the literary status of the French song is more prominent than that of any other francophone song because the French song has a long tradition. However, critical discourse on the works and the literary value it is accorded are subject to change. Thus, we can speak of modifications in the referential concept, in this case, the song object (defined below) and even of conceptual mobility which occurs despite its denominational stability, to use the terms refined by semanticist Leo Spitzer.1 We will discuss song phenomena on the basis of this conceptual movement, this opera in movimento (Eco 1962), on the elements of meaning making rather than on fixed description of a signified.2

Ideally, if we wished to trace back the discourse on song, we would be obliged to make an overview of the history of theoretical developments (sociology, semiology, textual analysis, etc.) and the history of its components (texts and/or music) (Calvet 1995, 256). To adopt critical perspective in relation to current or previous terms that designate song objects, it would be necessary to have encyclopedic knowledge of all sung genres, from the genres employed by troubadours and trouvères to the modern commercial song described as