Page 205 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

180 Bel et al.

for the requirements of that ‘act of speech’; as a discourse, finally,
it aims at optimizing the effect of its destination by fixing its own
modes of text arrangement. (Vecehione 1997: 102)
1
The discursive dimension of a musical work rarely lends itself to
a straightforward deciphering—not even in cases, such as Western
opera, when the lyrics are narrative. In other words, whereas the
languages of science, literature, theatre or cinema lend themselves to
specific rhetoric types such as reasoning, narration and drama, music
might call for a more sophisticated analysis yielding insights into
that sort of ‘multi-vocal discursivity’ in which its argumentation is
embedded (ibid.).
After collecting and classifying more than 50,000 ovī (dystichs)
that constitute the textual content of these songs, we became aware
that the analysis of this corpus requires an analysis of semantic and
discursive contents, difficult to trace (to some extent, overlooked) in
ordinary situations of speech communication (Poitevin 2000). For it
would undoubtedly be short-sighted to reduce the syntactic/semantic
effects of performed ovī to sub-forms of ordinary speech. Similarly,
the fact that their musical content resists melodic and stylistic classi-
fications does not imply that it only needs to be ‘straightened’ to fit
into a pre-defined musical model, notwithstanding the versatility and
proclaimed universality of the model.
Our hypothesis is that the discursive structure may emerge from
looking at ‘text’ and ‘melody’ as inseparable dimensions of the per-
formance. Words might contain clues to the study of intonation and
vice versa.

The Pre-recording Period

Before we started audio recordings, the collection of data limited itself
to the written transcription of song texts (ovī) and information about
performers and their villages. This information is the major part of the
computer database that is being used for various queries. Texts were
written down by social animators, both women and men belonging
to the same communities as our informants, who quickly became
experts in transcription and analytical works. This expertise had an