ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates Gotthold Lessing's temporal classification of music and literature, in order to explore the particular transmedial affinity that both arts share. It offers a historical survey of music and literature interaction that outlines various types of combination. The chapter traces the historical trajectory that the idea of music took following the Enlightenment: a journey from sound to metaphor. The intermedial or transmedial possibilities of music and literature owe much to the philosophical journey that the idea of music has undergone in the last few centuries. Despite the aesthetic purism of Adorno, the twentieth century witnessed a huge escalation in music–text interaction. Music and literature have interacted in many ways, particularly in view of the supremacy that music held during nineteenth-century Romanticism. The influence of musical technique and form in literature was obvious, but more significantly the non-referential, intangible qualities of music were also being utilised by the Modernists.
