Roaming Melodies
Keywords:
literature and music, folk songs, adaptations, Tappert, Wilhelm, Wandernde Melodien, Scottish songs, Hebrew Melodies, intertextuality, intermedialityAbstract
Digitizing and the new media have generated new interactions between the arts and a keen scholarly interest in adaptations and translations. However, adaptation has been a key concept for a long time in Darwinian theories of evolution. Using Wilhelm Tappert’s early Darwinian concept of wandernde Melodien (“roaming melodies”), this article looks at the way in which some early-nineteenth-century folk songs underwent mutations and translations. These melodies have no fixed identities; they are, as Tappert says, roaming tourists ceaselessly changing and adapting to new circumstances. Such adaptation histories of songs show affinities with adaptations in biocultural evolution.References
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