ABSTRACT
This chapter brings in music (crucial human art, so closely connected – and so often overlooked – with the verbal) and concludes that the issues are more complex than just ending up in a satisfied way with ‘performance’. All three are commonly necessary aspects of song (and, in a way, of all art-ful speech) that are seldom confronted together. Their respective weight varies not only between cultures, languages and genres, but also among individual artists and occasions, as exemplified in the chapter where the author's interest in music as well as literature has proved very relevant. In a way it should be obvious that to analyse sung words, chanted words, we must understand them as performed, staged through the voice – after all, singing is itself often taken as a marker of ‘performance’. A song has its true existence not in some enduring text but in being performed: realized in a particular place and time.
