Song as Paraphrase

“Song” is an umbrella term covering a vast variety of practices, many with little in common. This essay asks what it would take to theorize song as a phenomenon rather than to theorize specific genres of song. How can we think about song—if we can—as a relationship of language and music in a purely potential mode, independent of the relationships between words and music typical of those genres? How can we understand the role of media in this framing this potentiality? Can we bring such theorizing back to specific genres in a revealing way? What about particular songs? What, for example, about Franz Schubert’s “Auf dem Wasser to Singen”?