The Sounds of Poetry Viewed as Music
by Fred Lerdahl

Poets, literary critics, and lovers of poetry often speak of the “music of poetry.” The Sounds of Poetry Viewed as Music gives substance to the metaphor by building on recent research in linguistics and music theory to propose a theory of the sounds of poetry conceived in musical terms. It develops a rule-based methodology for assigning normative readings to the rhythms and contours of poetic lines. Each component of the theory is compared to earlier treatments both in traditional prosody and in generative metrics and intonational phonology. The theory’s predictions correspond well to recorded readings by poets and actors. The book also advances an original hierarchical treatment of syllabic rhyme, alliteration, and assonance.

The Sounds of Poetry Viewed as Music is an interdisciplinary project. In reconceiving prosody in musical terms, it offers a detailed treatment of the cognitive organization of poetic sounds, and by implication it supports the claim that music and language have a common ancestry in expressive vocalization. This book will engage readers of poetry, literary scholars, musicians, philosophers, and cognitive scientists interested in the intersection of the musical and linguistic capacities.

About the Author

Fred Lerdahl is Fritz Reiner Professor Emeritus of Musical Composition at Columbia University. An acclaimed composer and music theorist, he has written numerous orchestral and chamber pieces, three of which have been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in music. His books include A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, with linguist Ray Jackendoff (1983); Tonal Pitch Space (2001); and Composition and Cognition: Reflections on Contemporary Music and the Musical Mind (2020).

About the Speakers

Marcos Balter is the Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition, in the Department of Music at Columbia University. He’s the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Music Award, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship, Tanglewood Music Center Leonard Bernstein Fellowship, and two Chamber Music America Awards. He has been commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Orquestra do Estado de São Paulo, Geneva Camerata, Fromm Foundation, The MacArthur Foundation, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.

Susan Boynton is Professor of Music and Director of the University Seminars at Columbia University. Her research interests include liturgy, medieval Western monasticism, music in the Iberian peninsula; the history of childhood; troubadour song; and intersections of music with the visual arts. Boynton is the author of Shaping a Monastic Identity: Liturgy and History at the Imperial Abbey of Farfa, 1000-1125 (2006); Silent Music: Medieval Song and the Construction of History in Eighteenth-Century Spain (2011), and Liturgy of Empire: Reading the Mozarabic Rite in Early Modern Europe (2025) She has coedited seven volumes on subjects such as the medieval Bible, sound and image, child musicians, the abbey of Cluny, and the cultural history of religion.

Elizabeth Margulis is Professor and Acting Chair in the Department of Music, with affiliations in Psychology and Neuroscience. She studies the perception and cognition of music. She directs Princeton’s Music Cognition Lab, which brings together students and researchers to ask questions that lie at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. In particular, she’s interested in the aspects of musical experience that seem most powerful, but hardest to talk about. The lab uses experimental data as a provocative, illuminating way in to some of the most complex, subjective, culturally situated aspects of music, which in turn reveals neglected, broader aspects of human cognition and behavior.

Robert Remez, Professor of Psychology, joined the faculty of Barnard in 1980. His teaching focuses on the relationships among perception, cognition and language. Support for research by Professor Remez and his students has been granted by the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, and, presently from the National Science Foundation. One line of his research examines the perceptual organization of speech and seeks to explain how listeners can follow speech amid the sounds that strike the ear. A second line of research examines the perceptible differences between individual talkers and the phonetic and qualitative aspects of these indexical properties.