Music Is Research: Lyrical Inquiry Through Song

• In Event: Roundtable Session 29
  In Roundtable Session: Education and the Creative Spirit

Abstract

Songs are a form of music practice in which words are artfully married with melody, pitch, rhythm, beat, and other expressive elements (e.g., dynamic, articulation, timbre) of music. Songs cannot be reduced to spoken exposition—to do so denies the song its musical meaning. Lyrics evoke symbolic resonance through language, story, narrative, rhythm, and rhyme. Songs form semiotic sound-signs that carry meanings across airy chasms to the sensing ears and minds of others. Songs extend notions of poesis and the poetic into the embodied action of musicing. The purpose of this performative inquiry will be to reveal—through music, story, and conversation—how songs can be understood as a unique and distinctly musical form of interdisciplinary, multi-modal, lived artistic research.

Authors

• Danny Bakan, University of British Columbia

• Peter J. Gouzouasis, The University of British Columbia