It is traditional, in books like this, for the author to be presented in the third person. But that would make no sense here. I have been so closely and personally involved in Word and Music Studies, almost since the inception of the discipline, that it is really not possible for me to speak of it for long without using the first person. It would not be honest.
I have been a member of the International Association for Word and Music Studies for almost its entire existence. I have given papers at all but two of its conferences. There are essays by me in most of its collective volumes, and I have also contributed to many other collaborative enterprises in the field. So it is hardly surprising that I know (and like) personally most of the scholars who populate the following pages.
I should also confess that for fifteen years, people often saw me as having a rather special place in the microcosm of Word and Music Studies because I was the only person in the world whose job title contained those words. I was, until I retired, early, in 2021, Professor of Word and Music Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Thanks to that job title, I represented (rather to my amusement) a precious marker of institutional recognition, in an academic field that has never really had a disciplinary home. Since my retirement, no one, as far as I know, has had such a job title.
I do not think this is a pity. Word and Music Studies thrives on the freedom arising from the very instability of its position, its lack of centredness, in the university world as a whole. At the same time, it has also thrived on the truly remarkable stability, the powerful centredness, that was given to it over a quarter of a century by the dedicated team of people who founded and ran the Word and Music Association, with, at its heart, Walter Bernhart and Werner Wolf. Without them, the field as we know it, the subject of this book, would not exist. They gave it the name it has today. To them, and to their intrepid successors who have recently taken over the running of the Association, we owe everything.
Like all Word and Music scholars, I came to the field from elsewhere. My original background was in French literature, especially of the 19th and 20th centuries. I never really felt at home in the academic world of French studies. But I did feel at home in the world of Word and Music Studies. This is not because there were no rivalries, no enmities, no interpersonal tensions or heated debates in Word and Music Studies. There certainly were, and still are. The purpose of this book is, for the first time, to set out and to contextualise those debates; to give due space to all the currents of opinion that tangle with each other in the field. As I do so, inevitably my own perspectives will gradually
Word and Music Studies will always be contentious. After all, no one can really say what music is. In fact, there is not even any real consensus on what a word is. As for what passes between words and music, that escapes all of us. But what Word and Music Studies can do is to assist us to see how and why it escapes; what we gain as we lose our certainties. And there is everything to gain, I can assure you. It has been, for me, a source of endless fascination, wonder, delight, entertainment, and enlightenment. The world of Word and Music Studies is populated by people who have brightened my life.
Whenever, in this book, a quotation is given in a language other than English and followed by an English translation, that translation is mine. All italics and bold in quotations are original.