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Bach's silence, Mattheson's words: Professional and humanist ways of speaking of music

Chapin’s chapter appears in a volume he co-edited with Andrew Clark. It is devoted to the issue of how scholars discuss music in different disciplines. The contributors, selected by the co-editors so as to ensure methodological variety, approached the subject from a variety of standpoints: historical, institutional, literary-critical, semiotic, philosophical, and cognitive-scientific. The volume is distinctive for its specific attention to the proclivities of different disciplines and the issues that bridge them.

To ensure that the collection amounts to more than the sum of its parts, the two co-editors provide a substantial synthesizing introduction (‘Speaking of Music: A View across Disciplines and a Lexicon of Topoi’) that identifies central issues and topoi in the relationship between music and language. While other writers have addressed issues of music and language, this introduction is one of the few accounts that identifies the points of tension between scholars and disciplines. Chapin’s contribution to the introduction and to the editorial process was 50%.