Essays on Word/Music Adaptation and on Surveying the Field

Book excerpt: The twelve essays presented in this volume are drawn from the Fifth International Conference on Word and Music Studies held at Santa Barbara, CA, in 2005. The conference was organized and sponsored by The International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA) and in its central section explored the theme of “Word/Music Adaptation”. In these wide-ranging papers, a great variety of cases of intermedial transposition between music, literature, drama and film are examined. The music of Berlioz, Biber, Chopin, Carlisle Floyd, Robert Franz, Bernard Herrmann, Liszt, Richard Strauss, Verdi, and pop singer Kate Bush confronts and commingles with the writings of Emily Brontë, Goethe, Nancy Huston, George Sand, and Shakespeare in these cutting-edge adaptation studies. In addition, four films are discussed: Wuthering Heights, Fedora, Otello, and The Notebook. The articles collected will be of interest not only to music and literary scholars, but also to those engaged in the study of adaptation theory, semiotics, literary criticism, narrative theory, art history, feminism or postmodernism.