Songs without words

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:31 PM -0700 4/25/10, David Wake wrote:
>The use of "Song Without Words" as a title for a short composition for
>solo piano seems to have been Mendelssohn's invention.  The fact that
>Mendelssohn felt compelled to add the qualification "Without Words" is
>an admission that, by default, a "Song" in classical music is "With
>Words" -- i.e. it features the human voice.
>
>David
>

Just as when Strauss titled his opera "Die Frau ohne Schatten" he was
admitting, by default, that other women have shadows.  Of course,
this isn't quite algorithmic; Woody Allen's book _Without Feathers_
was not intended to imply that everything else has feathers (but was
a more specific rebuttal to a line of Dickinson's.  ('How wrong Emily
Dickinson was! Hope is not "the thing with feathers". The thing with
feathers has turned to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist
in Zurich.').

LH

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