Reviewed Elsewhere: Nicola Gess and Alexander Honold, eds. Handbuch Literatur & Musik.
Nicola Gess and Alexander Honold, eds. Handbuch Literatur & Musik. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017. vii + 681 pp. €139,95 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-11-030121-2.
The Handbuch Literatur & Musik is in fact a handbook of European literature and music; a majority of the articles approach their topics from German (or German-language) literature, art music, and music history, with frequent forays into French, Italian, and Anglo-American works and occasional gestures in the direction of Spain and Russia. The addition of the word “European” to the title would have avoided implying the negligibility of Asia, Africa, Australia, and South America; and as a handbook of European music and literature, it is on the whole a useful and successful volume whose strengths outweigh its drawbacks. In particular, the volume updates canonical works on inter-art or intermedial topics and keeps questions of social practice and performance more firmly in view than literary studies is wont to do. The variety of topics covered and the diversity of approaches are likewise a virtue. On the negative side, the bibliographic material leaves much to be desired: the “Auswahlbibliographie” includes only secondary scholarship, and even then does not list all the works cited by the individual entries. ...
The bibliography’s emphasis on secondary scholarship is somewhat symptomatic of the volume as a whole: it often analyzes writing about writing about music ... The introduction updates the terminology of Steven Paul Scher’s canonical approach to literature and music in literary studies with the terminology of intermediality (4–5) and notes shared interests with several other disciplines ...
Arne Stollberg’s contribution .. unites a particularly strong historical sense with systematicity in analyzing ways in which music and literature can be put together, which he sees as located on a continuum between the poles of complete independence and complete merging. ...
Monika Schmitz-Emans ... offers a welcome critique of the notion of “intermediality” taken as gospel by much of the volume: as she points out, there is a vagueness in the term “medium” that deprives it of aesthetic specificity, and she suggests attention to “form transfers” instead of “intermediality” (145ff.). ...
The third section yields some intriguing but unexplained asymmetries: some of the essays consider an individual author, others movements or epochs, others transhistorical genres or concepts. ... neither the introduction nor the articles themselves reflect upon the varying types of exemplarity operative in the volume. Nonetheless, all of the articles will make excellent points of entry into the topics addressed, either for beginning researchers seeking to outline a field or for more experienced scholars interested in filling in knowledge gaps. ... The editors have made a clear effort in this section to expand the volume’s horizons beyond that of European art music ... But because these articles exist outside the theoretical and historical horizons of the rest of the volume, they come off as somewhat isolated and perfunctory, particularly as they are amongst the section’s shorter contributions. They too, however, successfully open up the topics and provide resources for further research.
A handbook cannot do everything; the things this one does best—theoretical sophistication, historical scope, up-to-date scholarship—it does very well, and if it perhaps tries to do too much, then this is a testament to the richness of the field of study in music and literature that it opens up for its readers.
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