Presentation

In 1994 the late Lucien Poirier (to whom this essay is dedicated) held a postgraduate musicology seminar at Université Laval (Québec) entitled La Musique au second degré. The seminar's title referred to Gérard Genette's book Palimpsestes: la littérature au second degré. In this study Genette develops a theory of ‘hypertextuality’, which studies and characterises particular relationships that occur between different works of literature. The goal of Poirier's seminar was, therefore, to explore the possibility of applying this theory to music. The present essay is an attempt to apply the process, in part, to recorded popular music, which means that I will be considering the recording as the main object of my inquiry. By no means, however, is the process intended to be exhaustive; it aims simply to provide some new ways of looking at recorded popular songs, especially when one is considering the relationships occurring between a number of them.

Gérard Genette'sPalimpsests

Genette's ‘hypertextuality’ should be regarded as a subcategory of what a large number of theorists, following Kristeva's definition, have come to know as ‘intertextuality’. In his introduction Genette uses the term ‘transtextuality’ when referring to the ensemble of any type of relation, explicit or not, that may link a text with others – which is how most theorists seem to use and understand the term ‘intertextuality’. Actually, Genette considers intertextuality as a sub-category of transtextuality along with four others: paratextuality, metatextuality, architextuality and, of course, hypertextuality. ‘Inter-textuality’ is defined by Genette in a more restrictive sense, and is used to identify ‘a relationship of copresence between two texts or among several texts: that is to say, eidetically and typically as the actual presence of one text within another’ (quoting, allusion and plagiarism being its most important, if not only, manifestations). It is in reference to these definitions that I will be using the terms ‘intertextuality’ and ‘transtextuality’ in the pages that follow.

Again according to Genette's nomenclature, ‘paratextuality’ refers to the ensemble of relationships between a particular text and some of its accompanying features, such as the general title, chapter titles, foreword, illustrations and cover. Similarly, Genette defines ‘metatextuality’ as a commentarial relation which links one text with another, the most important examples being reviews and critiques.