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The case for speech melodies, reopened.

Article Excerpt
Janacek and language

Leos Janacek was a musician, trained in the practice of his era, and entrenched in the traditions of his time and locale. Like most of us, he exhibited both conservative and radical tendencies, and these found form in his music. He was a proud Moravian Czech, a subgroup of a minority. His was a language disdained by many, even his wife's relatives, as suitable only for use with servants. (Zemanova 2002: 42) Yet to Janacek there was more to the difference between languages than their words and grammar.syntax. The sounds themselves of them contained subtle yet powerful information. And though he was fluent in German, he vehemently preferred the melodies and rhythms of his native tongue.

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In the 1880s, the linguist and ethnographer Frantisek Bartos recruited Janacek to assist him in the field. While compiling a description of regional dialects, Bartos sought also to preserve the flavor of local culture, in particular folk music and dance. For this he sought the expertise of a musician who could better record the melodies and rhythms they found.encountered. But Janacek was not satisfied to merely notate down the music. He became fascinated by the variations he heard in speech. Thus began a love affair, much less controversial than his others, with speech melodies, that lasted a lifetime.

In 1906, Janacek published an article in the magazine Hlidka, entitled "The Borderline of Speech and Song," (Stedron 1955: 91; Strakova & Drlikova 2003: 346) in which he proposed a dictionary of these melodies of speech, to "preserve the sound of the Czech language for future generations," suggesting that it might contain "melodic phrases for everything which the Czech language is able to express". His focus seemed therefore to be the ability of these speech melodies to carry meaning, beyond the meaning contained in the words themselves. For nearly forty years, Janacek gathered speech melodies from everyday events. He was the consummate eavesdropper.

At times this took the form of an obsession. In 1924, he noticed Smetana's daughter at a fruit stand in the spa town of Luhacovice, and proceeded to sketch her as she spoke to the shopkeeper then to the composer himself, hoping to...

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