Modern Language Review

In late 2015, as my colleague Isabelle Marc and I finalized our edited volume The Singer-Songwriter in Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), we decided not to mention that betting companies had for some years been touting Bob Dylan as a potential winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Instead, we opted to mention his award in 1990 of the title of Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture to exemplify the cultural prestige of the singer-songwriter figure. Six months after our book appeared in print the following March, the Nobel Committee announced its decision to give him the prize, triggering a heated public debate about the validity of Dylan’s award.

The lines of argument employed in this debate are outlined usefully in Alba Agraz Ortiz and Sheila Pastor’s chapter here on responses to the news in the Spanish media. Besides protestations that it was a publicity stunt, that others deserved it more, or that it should celebrate the achievements of someone not already a world-famous figure, two other questions sit at the core of the volume edited by Francisca Noguerol and Javier San José Lera: can song be considered literature and can popular song achieve the status of good literature? Answering both in the affirmative, this collection looks exclusively at the canción de autor as that musical form deemed to possess a ‘calidad literaria, que explica la posibilidad de estudiar las letras desde el costado filológico’, as Noguerol explains in her Introduction (p. 5). This facet of the canción de autor, and the figure of the singer-songwriter more generally, is explored in the first two chapters, open-endedly in the case of Javier García Rodríguez’s reflections on its place in contemporary Spanish letters, more categorically in Emilio de Miguel’s first chapter (‘Es lenguaje elaborado con voluntad de estilo y con mérito objetivo. Es literatura’, p. 35).

The literary analysis of song lyrics dominates many of the chapters that follow. Most interesting among them are chapters by Rocío Rodríguez Ferrer and Sabrina Riva on the musical adaptations of the poems of Miguel Hernández by artists such as Víctor Jara and Joan Manuel Serrat. Here, the authors provide detailed studies of the transformations undergone by Hernández’s verse and the often subtle meanings to which such changes give rise, highlighting the crucial significance of transnational dialogues facilitated by this process. Little recognition is given to the musical settings of these poems, however. Likewise, Lorena Peña Jiménez and Carmen Rodríguez Martín’s examination of how Cecilia challenged dominant models of femininity in late Francoism pays virtually no attention to how the power of her words might be strengthened—and even carried—by other unique aspects of her [End Page 409] artistry, such as her voice and orchestral instrumentation. Even a chapter as illuminating and rigorous as de Miguel’s second chapter—a typology of what he calls the metacanción (metasong)—centres exclusively on the various ways this is done through lyrics—songs about songwriting, intertextual references—and does not discuss how this might also be achieved by other means.

The question of musical performance is one which those of us working in language disciplines ought to embrace for a fuller comprehension of song, ideally in collaboration with those approaching popular music from other disciplinary perspectives, most obviously music studies and musicology. Such an approach might be used, for example, to challenge the foundations of this volume on the canción de autor and its characteristic literary quality in order to nuance some of its arguments. Meta-love songs abound in genres other than the canción de autor. Take That’s ‘A Million Love Songs’ quickly comes to mind...