The elusive problem of meaning and interpretation in the study of lyric songs forms the focus of Thomas A. DuBois’ latest book. The author’s point of departure in elucidating this complex issue is an interpretive model centered on the notion of the knowing audience familiar from John Miles Foley’s influential works on traditional referentiality, which DuBois cites as significant sources of inspiration. Consequently, DuBois commits himself to reconstructing the knowledge and expectations of traditional audiences in interpreting lyric songs from a wide variety of northern European traditions, ranging from medieval Iceland and England to nineteenth-century Finland and contemporary Ireland.
In the Introduction, “Lyrics and the Issue of Meaning,” DuBois presents the typology of interpretive strategies that constitutes the backbone of the book. He argues that northern European lyric traditions share a common set of interpretive strategies consisting of three interpretive axes. The first, the generic axis, covers the familiarity of the audience with the typical content and context of lyric songs. The second, the associative axis, might be used by the performer and the audience to link a song to their own lives (personalization), to interpret it as directed to a fictitious addressee (invocation), or to relate it to the composer or performer of the song or to a character appearing in the song (attribution). The third, the situational axis, involves interpreting the song as an account of the experience of a particular individual (narrativization) or as representative of a whole class of people (proverbialization). These three axes are important in all acts of lyric interpretation across northern Europe, but each tradition possesses its own norms regarding the relative weight of each axis and the exact strategies employed.
In Chapter Two, “Pausing in a Narrative’s March: The Interpretation of Lyrics within Epics,” the author discusses the ways in which the associative and situational axes interact in formal laments inserted into medieval epics in Old Norse, Old English, and Irish. The epic texts are read as representations of the norms guiding the interpretation of lyric songs within the community in question, and these norms are quite different in the three traditions. In the Old Norse texts, the laments are highly narrativized: they are so strongly tied to the deceased individual and to the occasion for which they were composed that they can hardly be used for any other referent. The Old English lament, however, tends toward proverbialization; the lament is viewed as descriptive of a more general situation, not as a record of a particular historical event. In the Irish tradition, the lament acquires its meanings through reference to the narrative connected with it, even when the two are not performed in conjunction; the audience is assumed to be acquainted with the story, and to interpret the lyric in this light.
In Chapter Three, “In Ritual and Wit: The Hermeneutics of the Invocational Lyric,” DuBois compares the Sámi joik as invocational lyric, addressed to an inscribed recipient that it makes present in the performance situation, with other genres employing second-person address in order to identify the differences that audiences were likely to perceive between them and lyric songs proper. Shepherds’ calls, for example, differ from joik in that they are more narrowly confined to their specific situations of use, outside of which they should not be performed. The latter is also true for charms, which differ further from joik in their explicit aim to control the environment rather than to describe and contemplate it. Wedding and funerary laments combine this focus on a restricted function with an appeal to tradition: the use of traditional images and formulas links the grief of the present moment with that experienced by previous generations, thereby making for a proverbialized interpretation of the songs. The Scottish piobaireachd, finally, works in similar ways, shaping the emotional response of the audience through traditional musical techniques, but it is accompanied by narrativization, attributing pieces to putative composers or associating them with particular historical events.
Chapter Four, “Conversing with God: Medieval Religious Lyric and Its Interpretation,” explores the relationship between religious and secular lyric and the ways in which they have influenced each other in northern European traditions. Early Christian hymns were largely narrativizing, based as they were on the stories of the Bible and attributed to particular individuals, and when the tradition of composing religious lyric developed in northern Europe, this narrativizing tendency continued to be predominant, as it was also reinforced by native traditions. However, the emphasis gradually shifted to a proverbializing interpretation stressing common emotions and experiences, as in the religious lyric (in Latin and in the vernacular) of the twelveth and thirteenth centuries, in which the singer and the audience were expected to identify with the poetic ego. DuBois argues that this practice of identifying with the lyric speaker in hymns was transferred to secular lyric, and that we owe this fundamental prerequisite for lyric interpretation to the medieval religious lyric.
Chapter Five, “Confronting Convention: Reading Reception in Shakespeare’s Use of Lyric Song,” appraises the role of the generic axis in Elizabethan lyric as exemplified in Shakespeare’s dramas. DuBois demonstrates how conventional themes and formulas, employed with a pretended show of sincerity, could aid the lyric singer in connecting with the audience and evoking its empathy. The members of the audience, in their turn, were obliged to empathize with the poetic ego of the lyric while recalling its status as fiction.
Chapter Six, “Attribution and the Imagined Performer,” broaches the subject of interpreting lyric songs through reference to the lives of their composers or performers. DuBois has selected a number of Celtic and Scandinavian singers and composers, from the seventh-century Irish poet Mad Sweeney to the Finnish nineteenth-century kantele player and singer Kreeta Haapasalo. All crafted personae for themselves through the medium of their songs, and their audiences interpreted the songs in relation to the singers’ biographies.
Based on fieldwork in Ireland, Chapter Seven, “Personal Meanings in the Performance of One Man’s Repertoire,” discusses the importance of personalization as a strategy of self-representation. The songs of the performer studied were consistently associated with his life history, both by himself and by his audience. The songs were used to articulate his identity as a resettled Kerryman in Meath, and were usually presented as songs typical of County Kerry. Traditional emigrants’ songs, though dealing with international migration, were also interpreted as accounts of the singer’s personal experiences of resettlement within Ireland.
Thomas DuBois has produced a highly readable, engaging volume on the traditional hermeneutics of lyric songs. It marries attention to individual texts and traditions with an unusually broad scope in temporal, geographic, and linguistic terms; the comparative evidence marshalled is quite astounding. Arguments and findings are persuasive and clearly presented; each chapter concludes with a brief summary of major points. Among the many assets of this book--this brief review cannot do them justice--the notion of the three interpretive axes is perhaps the most important, promising to enter other fields of scholarship than those expressly devoted to northern Europe. Therefore, the book would grace any list of required reading for courses on folk music and folk song.
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[Review length: 1185 words • Review posted on May 17, 2007]