Abstract
Conference paper presented by Andy Ward and Briony Luttrell at the IASPM Australia-Aotearoa/New Zealand 2024 Branch Conference "Musical Translations and Transformations" on 4th December 2024.
ABSTRACT
All songwriting choices are storytelling choices. This paper, following on from a recent book publication and makes the case for a new theorisation of Song as a multimodal storytelling sonic act. One that has implications for songwriters, scholars, and the way in which we think about music and song in general. In this paper, we synthesise elements of narrative theory (Genette 1981), social semiotics (van Leuween 2005) and multimodal analysis (Machin 2010) to argue the case for song as a distinct storytelling device associated with a mnemonic history as old and humanity. A system that is so pervasive in our everyday lives as to no longer explicitly function in the context of its intended purpose. We suggest music is a non-semiotic non-linguistic system and as such build a critique of common contemporary models for music analysis that are built on linguistic frameworks. In doing so, we seek to disrupt the gatekeeping of traditional musical education systems and to provide both scholars and songwriting practitioners a new method for exploring musical text in general, and song texts specifically. We position listening and songwriting as an interdirectional process of recognition and creation of aural resources situated in their social context rather than as a set of discrete musical modes based on Continental-centric ideations of music theory.