Abstract
The musicality of poetry and the poetics of music appeal to the boundaries of language to describe affective phenomena, as well as the interdependence between linguistic and musical systems in the mind. This chapter explores the implications of these interdependences, through the case study of the Norwegian composer Martin Myhre Olsen. The methodology combines poetic representations from an in-depth interview with the musician with the analysis of the musical scores he wrote to Emily Dickinson’s poems “Lost” and “Hope”. Both his biography and his compositions give account of notions such as tension and polyphony, key terms in contemporary cultural psychology, which are explored further from a theoretical perspective as well, in order to contribute to the understanding of feelings and emotions.
Verse from Dickinson’s poem Hope, written in, and on public domain.
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Notes
- 1.
This is a verse of Dickinson’s (1891) poem, “Hope”.
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Acknowledgments
We want to especially thank Martin Myhre Olsen for his generous and open attitude toward our interest in his artistic work. We are also grateful to Vlad Glăveanu for his thoughtful comments on previous versions of this manuscript. We further thank Sandra Schweizer for helping us out with the transcription of the interview.
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Lehmann, O.V., Klempe, S.H. (2017). “The Tune Without the Words”: Dickinson’s Verses in a Jazz Ensemble—A Case Study on the Poetics of Music and the Musicality of Poetry. In: Lehmann, O., Chaudhary, N., Bastos, A., Abbey, E. (eds) Poetry And Imagined Worlds. Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64858-3_10
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