Eavesdropping with a Master: Leoš Janáček and the Music of Speech

The composer LeoJana ek (1854-1928) has been noted for his interest in speech melodies. Little discussion has focused however on the field methods that he used in gathering them, nor on the products themselves. Jana ek spent more than three decades, transcribing thousands of what he termed napvky mluvy (tunelets of speech) in standard musical notation. The record that remains of these efforts is impressive both for its volume and its quality, as well as for its potential to reveal aspects of the perceptual overlap between music and language. Heretofore his pioneering efforts in the study of speech prosody and music perception have neither been recognized nor acknowledged. The present study provides a background for and an overview of the transcriptions, along with comparative musicological and linguistic analyses of the materials presented. With this analysis as a starting point, I indicate promising avenues for further collaborations between linguists and musicologists, seeking an integrated theory of music and language cognition. PRELIMINARIES THE composer LeoJana ek had a special relationship with the melodies and rhythms of speech. Numerous attempts have sought to sustain or refute the use of speech melodies in his musical output. (2) Yet, the most tangible evidence of this relationship, the thousands of notated examples of often clandestinely overheard language, captured and preserved in his notebooks, have largely been neglected. Little presentation and discussion of these transcriptions have been made in the literature on Jana ek. In the midst of current preparations in the Czech Republic to publish a complete edition of his speech melodies, and a concurrent project to digitize them, this article seeks to set a stage for their long-awaited coming out. The number of examples presented here amount to less than one percent of his output. The great majority of his notations deal with Czech prosody but also include Russian, Slovak, Croatian, English, Italian, and other languages. The group under consideration here, although limited to the various dialects of Czech, were selected to represent a broad cross-section of the materials he dealt with. Jana ek wrote mystically of the individualist force of speech melodies, their uniqueness as the public voice of a single soul, but also how that voice was irretrievably entwined with its context, an aspect which he acknowledged was somewhat lost in transcription. In one of his earliest articles regarding speech, Melodies of Children's Speech (Napvky dtske mluvy) (Jana ek, 1904), he described his observations of a neighbor's child, whom he had known virtually from birth: Lidka grows up with me in notes, but she also grows up in beautiful and fine surroundings. In score, no one would understand; who would not recognize that little house beneath Hukvaldy and its pleasant folks within, who would not recognize the pretty garden nearby that little house. (3)