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In the interest of transparency, I should note that I write this from the position of someone who sits quite firmly in the “context camp” of popular music studies, and therefore I read this from the perspective of someone only passingly familiar with much of the material discussed here. In that sense, I am the ideal audience for this book. As a scholar who is decidedly sociological in my approach to popular music (I teach popular music in a media studies department), I admit to not being as au fait with current debates in musicology or linguistics as I should be, thus part of the exercise of putting this Foreword together was for me to be reminded of the ongoing value of an interdisciplinarily disposed musicology for my own thinking about popular music, as well as music in general. This is a daunting project De Surmont has endeavoured to marshal together, and I suspect it will provoke much and debate and discussion among a number of scholars of music and across a range of disciplines. This is not least because of its revelatory nature, dedicated to producing a new lexical and metalingual framework to analyse the song in all its ambiguously yet richly signifying objecthood. I am indebted to Jean Nicolas for approaching me to contribute to this important volume and I thank him for producing a book on popular music that challenged my own thinking as it will no doubt challenge that of others.
Works Cited:
Born, Georgina. “Music and the Materialization of Identities,” Journal of Material Culture, 16.4 (2011): 376-388.
De Surmont, Jean Nicolas. “Some Reflections on Song Theory, Signed Song and Traditional Song,” International Review of Sociology, 19.3 (November 2009): 447-454.
Fish, Stanley Eugene. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.
Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music, London: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Tagg, Philip. “Musicology and the Semiotics of Popular Music.” Semiotica 66.1-3 (1987): 279-298.
Williams, Raymond. Keywords. London: Fontana, 1983.
Note to the reader
In order to distinguish between different aspects of a lexical unit, we have used the following typographic conventions:
A word or group of words is placed between dashes (/ /) when we speak of a semantic feature or sense of a word.
A word or group of words is italicised when we refer to the signifier itself (e.g. song), meaning the notion itself rather than a particular occurrence, what Rudolf Carnap terms an autonym: a self-referential term evoked through citing it. Sometimes italics are used when a name has been created, so that typographic representation becomes subordinate to linguistic information, highlighting the meaning and determining a lexical unit (for instance, lexical engineering, lexical coexistence, etc.).
The phrase sub voce frequently employed in lexicographic analysis means ‘under the word’. It refers to an article in a dictionary and is abbreviated s.v.
Combien il est regrettable que ce mot [chanson] ne soit pas le seul employé, chez nous, pour désigner les œuvres vocales, classées sous les épithètes de lied, mélodie, etc. Fauré et Debussy n’ont pas craint de conserver les titres de Bonne chanson de Verlaine, et Chansons de Bilitis de Pierre Louÿs. Ils renouaient ainsi avec tout l’art merveilleux de nos trouvères et de nos troubadours, de nos maîtres des XVe et XVIe siècles.
La variété des formes de la chanson est la preuve de la variété du génie musical français; alors que le lied est restreint dans sa forme.
Le mot chanson, c’est tout le génie lyrique français, puissant ou tendre, passionné ou gai, protéiforme.
Georges Migot 1946, see s. v. ‘chanson’
[How deplorable it is that this word (chanson) is not the only one we employ to indicate vocal works, which are classified using denominators such as lied, melody, etc. Fauré and Debussy were not afraid to preserve the title of Verlaine’s Good Song and Pierre Louÿs’s Songs of Bilitis. Thus, they provided a link to the marvellous art of our trouvers and troubadours, the masters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
The diversity of song forms is the proof of the versatility of the French musical genius, while the lied is restricted by its form.
The word song refers to all the French lyrical genius, powerful or tender, passionate or joyous, it is the prototype]
Introduction
Theoretical approaches
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
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