ABSTRACT
Musicology—any writing about music—is an attempt at making analogies between language itself and what happens within the world of sound. Composer and writer Ned Rorem succinctly sums up this paradox: "If music could be translated into human speech, it would no longer need to exist." Nevertheless, those writing about music continue not only to pen new words but also to borrow methods from language theory and from literary criticism in order to do so. One of the earliest impulses for drawing connections between music and text—the nineteenth-century critic's application of narrative to instrumental music—gives way to hermeneutics, New Criticism, structuralism, post-structuralism, semiotics, the New Historicism, and so forth. Much less attention has been paid to the inverse vision of the connection between music and text: the music within the text. Poetry is concerned with the surface elements of music as a matter of course. Writing poetry is not writing words about music; it is a form of musical writing itself.
