Abstract
The article explores cross-modal iconic relations in nine diverse Western-music songs ranging from 1600 to 2015, all of them thematizing dysphoric weeping. Initial input comes from five recurrent features observed in ancient Greek texts associated with performative events, including the prominence of sound, interjections and strong self-referentiality, repetitions and refrains, the motif of endlessness, and tears associated with streams of water, dew, and libation liquids. The analysis adopts Peirce’s conceptual distinction between image, diagram, and metaphor iconicity, although the continuum reading proposed by several scholars is ultimately favored. The sample turns out to offer plenty of evidence of iconic relations. Interjections, falsetto, verbal repetitions, musical repetitions, musical rendering of sighs and endlessness, ostinato patterns, downward notes, and water images (rain and rivers), all of this is shown to substantiate cross-modal iconicity encompassing weeping, lyrics, music (including musical notation), and images, in different combinations. Quantitative investigations confirming/disconfirming and adding iconicity patterns, and comparative analyses linking Western and non-Western lament traditions constitute desiderata for future work.
Sunt lachrimae rerum
– Virgil (Aeneid 1.462)
1 Introduction
The study presented in this article originates in data and thoughts about the representation of weeping in Ancient Greek poetry. After initial input from Nagy (2009) about the mythological figure of Niobe – a mother whose tears of grief continue even after she is turned into stone – in Bonifazi (2012) I explore the deep connection between weeping and performing through similes and metaphoric expressions associating the delivery of poetry with water and tears. The idea of a fluid medium derives from the oral character of the performance (as opposed to the rigidity of writing). Towards the end of that piece, I posit that the centrality of tears in the poetics of sorrow by the Renaissance lutenist and composer John Dowland (whose motto was Semper Dowland semper dolens) rests on the same association, which actually goes beyond melancholy. Dowland’s most emblematic song “Flow my tears, fall from your springs” in fact blends the act of delivering music and the act of weeping.
More recent inquiries of mine focused on the lexical and figurative strategies by means of which ancient Greek epic, lyric, and tragic poetry talk about weeping – with and without references to the longstanding Greek tradition of lament, certainly pre-existing Homeric poetry, and still alive now (see, e.g., Alexiou 1974; Burke 2008; Fögen 2009; Lutz 1999; Palmisciano 2017; Pollock Lynch 2005). A rich inventory of sound-words, similes, and metaphors is complemented by self-referentiality and patterns in the arrangement of words, which index the performative level of those poetic genres.
For the purposes of the present article, the list below summarizes the core elements of weeping representations that I see in the genres mentioned above. They regard a mix of semantic and pragmatic aspects inferable from the texts – the actual musical components being unfortunately lost, and currently only conjectural.
Prominence of sound – e.g., ‘The mother embraced her dear son with both her arms and performed the mournful nightingales’ lament, wailing heavily’ (goerân oîton aēdonídōn/áge barù klaíoisa; Callimachus Hymn 5. 93–95).
Interjections and strong self-referentiality – ‘Such piteous strains of woe I utter in my pain, /now shrill, now deep, blended with falling tears/Alas, alas [iḗ iḗ]! Groans appropriate to funeral wails;/though I live, I chant my own dirge’ (Aeschylus Suppliant Women 113–116)
Repeated phrases/refrains – e.g., ‘Let a high-pitched funeral song ring out …/Let a high-pitched funeral song ring out’ (órthion ialḗmon keladḗsat’; Pindar thrēnos fragment 128e: a, 2–3 and b, 6–7).
The motif of endlessness – ‘Ah [iō], all-suffering Niobe, you I count divine,/since you [+ aiaî] weep forever/in your rocky tomb!’ (Sophocles Electra 150–152).
Tears associated with streams of water, dew, and libation liquids – e.g., ‘… shedding tears [dákru khéōn] like a spring [krḗnē] dark-running that down the face of a rock impassable drips [khéei] its dim water [húdōr]’ (Homeric poetry, Iliad 9.13–15 + Iliad 16.2–4).[1]
The increasing awareness about the multimodal nature of these five elements, and in particular about the singing of these texts, prompted a semiotic turn of this research. Partly because of the difficulty in talking about tangible (instead of conjectural) acoustic representations of weeping in that poetry, partly in order to collect disparate materials – that is, possibly with no underlying common context or genre, I decided to look at modern Western-music songs thematizing weeping or crying.[2] The goal was to inspect if there are semiotic aspects connecting ancient and modern representations of weeping independently of who is weeping, for whom and/or why.
Resemblance cues encompassing the different modes characterizing the pieces under examination – ranging from mere audio recordings to live performances and song videos – stood out quickly. This is how the study of cross-modal iconicity started. The term “cross-modal iconicity” is originally used in an article by Ahler and Zlatev (2010) about sound symbolism. Elleström (2017: 167) defines it as “iconicity that crosses the borders of different kinds of material, spatiotemporal, and sensorial modes – and between sensory structures and cognitive configurations.”
What follows reflects the outcome of an exploration carried out on a small-scale corpus, to see how the recognition and interpretation of cross-modal iconicity works, and which recurrent patterns can be noticed. Section 2 highlights the cross-modal-iconicity concepts that are relevant to the study. Section 3 illustrates the corpus and the main methodological aspects of the analysis. Section 4 details the results, while Section 5 draws the conclusion.
2 Cross-modal iconicity
In a piece on iconicity in gestures, Mittelberg stresses: “The term icon rests on a multimodal understanding of similarity, including sensations in the interpreter’s mind that to her/him make something look, feel, taste, smell, sound, or move like something else” (Mittelberg 2014: 1717).[3] A multimodal understanding of similarity resides in structure-mapping (Taub 2001) and on the preservation of aspects of correspondences between form and meaning (Gentner 1983) across different semiotic systems.[4]
The understander is the interpreter who, through their sensations and embodied cognition, perceives and makes sense of similarity cross-modally. Iconic relations, then, exist to the extent that someone sees them. In Tabakowska’s words (2005: 376), “iconic signs refer not to things as they are but to things as they are perceived, by someone, and in some context.”[5]
This article embraces Peirce’s notion of iconicity in terms of semiotic relations between signans, the sign carrier, and signatum, what the sign represents.[6] Peirce’s tripartite subdivision of these semiotic relations addresses the kinds of resemblance to be found in icons: “Those [icons] which partake of simple qualities … are images; those which represent the relations, mainly dyadic, or so regarded, of the parts of one thing by analogous relations in their parts, are diagrams; those which represent the representative character of a representamen by representing a parallelism in something else, are metaphors” (CP 2.277).
Several scholars propose to consider a continuum encompassing imagic, diagrammmatic, and metaphoric resemblance: the relation of resemblance between signans and signatum may simply range from a smaller to a greater distance in representation. Iconicity then is seen as a graded quality (Elleström 2017; Nöth 2001; Perniss and Vigliocco 2014; Perry et al. 2015).
Elleström (2017: 180) underscores that, unlike for imagic or diagrammatic iconicity, the interpretation and understanding of metaphor iconicity requires a higher level of conceptual abstraction: “The representamen of a metaphor is at a greater distance from its object, which means that the interpretation of a metaphor includes cognitive leaps.” In this sense, Peirce’s idea of “parallelism with something else” is fully compatible with classical Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), where structure-mapping prototypically involves two different conceptual domains (source and target domains).
As far as music is concerned, Wolf (2008: 209–211) offers a few observations about iconicity within his larger discussion about description in music and about text painting (in German Tonmalerei [‘sound-painting’]). He exemplifies sensory iconicity with the musical rendering of bird songs, diagrammatic iconicity with soft-to-loud melodies resembling sunrise, and metaphoric iconicity with rising and falling melodies representing running water. Iconicity in music is also seen in madrigalisms, which denote largely codified musical imitations of word meaning in Italian or English madrigals of the fifteenth to the early seventeenth century (see in particular Georis 2005). The present study, however, does not delve into text painting or madrigalisms, because in the disparate music pieces in question weeping iconicity seems not to partake of any explicitly programmatic nature, and conventional coding is limited to the descending tetrachord.[7]
With regard to what Giraldo (2019) calls “referential iconicity” in music and in speech (in her terms, “the ability of musical themes to refer to objects and events in the world on the basis of resemblance,” 2019: 41), the present investigation does not establish a priori that only musical themes can refer to objects and events in the world; any musical feature, whether rhythmical or melodic, chords or instrumental accompaniment, may participate in the iconic relationship with what is represented. Moreover, an iconic relationship may go beyond the referential level of resemblance with objects or events. On the one hand, the “what” of weeping (corresponding to objects and events in the world) is mediated by the lyrics about it, which may display iconic meanings themselves; on the other hand, the “how” of weeping may be as relevant to iconicity as the “what.” To exemplify, the semantics and the musical repetition of the adverb “forever” is considered as iconically relevant as the semantics of the verb “weep.”
More relevant for us is Zbikowski’s notion of “sonic analogs” (originally proposed in Zbikowski 2002), which is primarily meant to cover Peirce’s diagrammatic and metaphoric iconic relations along a cline. Figure 1 reports the author’s illustration of his reading of the iconicity continuum.
From Zbikowski (2015: 152, ex. 6, partial).
In line with this view (and in line with Conceptual Metaphor Theory, again), in metaphor iconic relations dealing with weeping only some analogies are preserved when two different domains are mapped onto each other. To exemplify (with reference to results presented in Section 4): while the multiple “oh”s performed in the latest part of The Beatles’ “While my guitar gently weeps” preserve all essential aspects of oh-interjections in natural weeping, the descending minor ground bass in Purcell’s “O let me weep” preserves only the aspect of continuation/repetition in natural weeping. My upcoming analysis will follow Peirce’s discrete subdivision of image, diagram, and metaphor iconicity; however, in Section 5, I will stress that clear-cut distinctions seem questionable, which makes me support the continuum paradigm.
A further general point by Zbikowski is relevant to this study, namely, the musically dynamic character of what in Peirce’s semiotics are “objects.” “[T]he ‘object’ of an icon may be a dynamic process” (Zbikowski 2015: 152). In music, what is represented tends to be a dynamic event, for instance a twitting bird or a chased person, a chariot coming nearer and nearer or a cloudy sky becoming clearer and clearer. Section 4 will confirm that what seems to be represented is someone who keeps crying rather than a snapshot of someone in tears. This is not surprising if we think of what Kress, with regard to speech, calls the “logic of sequence” (Kress and Jewitt 2003: 15). Just like speech, music unfolds in time.
Two further points are to be premised to the corpus analysis. The first is that according to Forceville (2009b: 395–396) in multimodal metaphors music and sound in general tend to cue the source rather than the target domain. This prompts the research question of whether musical features manifesting metaphor iconic relations in our corpus behave in a similar way or not.
The second point is the importance of metonymies in multimodal communicative strategies, at least as far as co-speech gestures are concerned (Mittelberg 2014: 1722): “iconic gestural portrayals tend to be inherently metonymic.” We may make meaning through gestural outlines and profiles that suggest cognitive completion via contiguous associations. The research question in this case is if cross-modal iconicity in songs about weeping deploys metonymic constructions, and if so, which ones.
Finally, my upcoming notes on verbal repetition bearing iconic meanings are inspired by Hiraga’s (2005: 46–50) observations about linguistic repetition in her monograph Metaphor and Iconicity. Hiraga assigns iconic meanings to basic patterns of repetition; the list below reports a selection of Hiraga’s patterns that are relevant to the present investigation. Section 4.2 will discuss them with respect to our data.
| – Repetition in quantity | -> dominance, abundance, continuation, monotone |
| – Repetition in similar intervals | -> regularity, unity, coherence |
| – Repetition at the beginning and the end | -> framing, cycle |
| … | |
| – Repetition in sequence | -> emphasis, echo |
| (Hiraga 2005: 50) | |
3 Corpus and methodology
For my exploratory study, I chose 21 pieces organized in three groups (see Tables 1–3). Fundamentally in line with the thematization of weeping in the ancient Greek poetry that I have analyzed (see above, Section 1), these pieces talk about dysphoric rather than euphoric weeping: beyond their stylistic and contextual variance, the shedding of tears is consistently due to states of unease or dissatisfaction with life, for different reasons.[8]
Songs encompassing music, weeping, and lyrics (audio files + musical scores).
| Song | Composer/date |
|---|---|
| Planctus de obitu Caroli | (Frank music [reconstructed], 814) |
| “Go, crystal tears” | (J. Dowland, 1597) |
| “Flow my tears”* | (J. Dowland, 1600) |
| “Let me weep” from The Fairy-Queen* | (H. Purcell, 1692) |
| “Lascia ch’io pianga (O Let me weep),”* aria from Rinaldo | (G. F. Handel, 1711) |
| “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen,”* chorus from BWV 12 | (J. S. Bach, 1714) |
| “Crying in the rain” | (The Everly Brothers, 1962) |
| “While my guitar gently weeps”* | (The Beatles, 1968) |
| “Tränen lügen nicht” | (M. Holm, 1974) |
| Stabat mater* | (A. Pärt, 1985/2008) |
-
see the asterisks: the respective essential data are reported in Table 4 in Section 5, and the full lyrics are reported in Supplementary Materials online.
Songs encompassing music, weeping, lyrics, and body language (video-recordings of songs being performed).
| Song | Composer/date |
|---|---|
| Stabat mater | (G. B. Pergolesi, 1711) |
| “Erbarme dich, mein Gott,” aria from Matthäuspassion | (J. S. Bach, 1736) |
| “Una furtiva lagrima” from L’elisir d’amore | (G. Donizetti, 1832) |
| “Lacrimosa” from Requiem | (G. Verdi, 1874) |
| “Rudolf, wo bist du?” from the musical Elisabeth | (M. Kunze/S. Levay, 1992) |
| “Set fire to the rain” | (Adele, 2011) |
Songs encompassing music, weeping, lyrics, body language, and visuals (song videos).
| Song | Composer/date |
|---|---|
| “Una lacrima sul viso (A tear on your face)” | (B. Solo, 1964; movie clip) |
| “Dancing with tears in my Eyes” | (Ultravox, 1984) |
| “Cry me a river”* | (J. Timberlake, 2002) |
| “Let her cry”* | (Hootie and the Blowfish, 2005) |
| “River of tears”* | (A. Cara, 2015) |
-
see the asterisks: the respective essential data are reported in Table 4 in Section 5, and the full lyrics are reported in Supplementary Materials online.
For the sake of argumentative space, this article analyzes only a sample of nine pieces taken from this list (see the asterisks; the respective essential data are reported in Table 4 in Section 5, and the full lyrics are reported in Supplementary Materials online). They encompass sufficiently differentiated ages, genres, weeping-contexts, and emotional atmospheres.
A basic methodological note concerns the use of term “mode” and my identification of modes in the corpus. By adopting the socio-semiotic approach of Kress and Van Leeuwen (2001), I take modes not as predefined and absolute (let alone universal) categories, but as sets of resources whose communicative power is determined by their materiality and by their social history. As Bezemer and Jewitt point out (2009: 8): “The identification of a community of users suggests that in order for a form of meaning to be treated as a mode there needs to be a shared understanding of those forms of meaning making.”
Beside lyrics (verbal mode), co-singing bodily communication (body-language mode),[9] vocal melodies + instrumental accompaniment (music mode), and images (visual mode), I consider weeping as a mode in itself, conceptually distinct from the other modes. Natural weeping is absent in the sample under consideration in the sense that it is not materialized as such; however, it is cognitively and semiotically present because it is evoked through words, music, and images. The materiality of natural weeping is presupposed by the embodied knowledge of listeners: they are unmistakably able to recall their own or others’ natural shedding of tears. Moreover, the affordances of weeping somehow reflect its social histories: let us think about spontaneous versus stylized ways of weeping, wailing versus soft weeping, public versus private, and “secular” versus religious crying. All in all, shedding tears is a distinct form of communication from communication in music, in word grammar, and in visuals.
While focusing on iconic relations across modes, I have not considered the contexts of lyric contents, even though I have consulted literature on the individual pieces where available (for information about the compositions, and sometimes remarks about the music). Section 4 will present my own recognition and interpretation of iconicity cues (see Section 2 about the crucial role of interpreters). The only point to be found in literature is the association between the minor descending tetrachord and laments; however, I add an explicitly Peircian-iconic reading of it.
In general, the iconic meanings that I illustrate are never derived from the assumption that a certain feature is iconic in itself. To exemplify, I do not see rain as a general icon for tears, or refrains as a general icon for repeated wails. Iconic relations are prompted only because two (or more) features occur simultaneously. In this sense, my analysis harmonizes with Forceville’s principle of “simultaneous cueing” in the detection of metaphors:
If two things are signaled in different modes, metaphorical identification is achieved by saliently representing target and source at the same time. For instance, a kiss could be accompanied by the sound of a car crash, of a vacuum cleaner, or of the clunking of chains, to cue metaphorical mapping of, say, disaster, domestic routine, and imprisonment, respectively. (Forceville 2009a: 31–32)
I posit that it is not only in cross-modal metaphors but also in cross-modal iconicity that meaning is constructed on the basis of simultaneous cueing.
The results of my investigation, detailed in the next section, are summarized and visualized in Table 4 at the beginning of Section 5, where letters refer to each of the cross-modal iconic relations that I have recognized. For the sake of consistency, the analysis keeps those letters near each of the numbered pieces.
4 Results
4.1 Cross-modal image-iconic relations: perceptual sound similarity (“a”)
In this section, I group evidence regarding imagic iconic relations, where cross-modal similarity involves just sound: specific music phenomena (music mode) perceptually resemble the natural act of weeping/crying (weeping mode). This is the only kind of imagic relation that I see in the sample under consideration. I label it with “a.” near the related piece, here and in Table 4.
[2a] In “O let me weep,” the interjection “o” along with its various corresponding music notes resembles lamenting interjections and moans, in line with several ancient poetic Greek texts (see Introduction). I consider this kind of iconic relation imagic, as it stems on direct perceptual similarity. I let the reader notice that in spite of semantic equivalence, the title “O let me weep” turns out to be more iconic than “Let me weep.”
[5a] Towards the end of “While my guitar gently weeps,” the way in which The Beatles perform the last word of the lyrics, i.e., “weeps,” features an exceptional vocal extension and elaboration of the syllable “wee” sung on progressively higher and higher notes (from 3:35 onward, in the audio available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rp7dMLeSTT0). Moreover, this moment coincides with the beginning of Eric Clapton’s rendering of pseudo-natural weeping by the guitar (that is, several heavy, long-winded vibratos), followed by the four voices in turn imitating the moaning of the guitar (the final “oh, oh, oh, oh” being almost spoken, albeit in a rhythmically regular way).
[7a] Towards the end of “Cry me a river” (see 3:39–4:06 in the video), Timberlake uses falsetto to sing “don’t it make you sad about it?” (line 30) as well as the following supplementary words around “cry me a river” (see lines 31–34) such as “go on and just,” “baby, go on and just,” “you can go on and just,” “baby, go on and just,” “go on and just,” “come on baby, cry,” and “I don’t wanna cry no more, yeah yeah” (remarkably, in this last clause the singer declares he does not want to cry any more). The sound effect of falsetto directly resembles high pitches of wailing and crying.
In sum, imagic similarity encompasses the three acoustic modes of weeping, music, and words, and it manifests itself through interjections (sung as well as almost spoken), instrumental moaning, and the use of falsetto.
4.2 Cross-modal diagrammatic iconic relations: verbal repetitions, musical repetitions, and musical rendering of sighs and endlessness (“b,” “c” and “d”)
Diagram iconicity emerges from resemblance through the arrangement of elements. The first kind of cross-modal diagrammatic iconic relation to be pointed out (“b”) encompasses the weeping mode and the verbal mode (music is not yet involved), and it emerges from verbal repetitions.
The text of “The Plaint”[10] in the libretto of The Fairy Queen (see n. 2 in Supplementary Materials online), includes the verbal repetitions “ever, ever” (line 1), “and sigh, and sigh” (line 4), and “he’s gone, he’s gone” (line 5). This suggests that the text might imitate what happens in laments, that is, the same lament is repeated (see Section 1). The lyrics in Purcell’s aria stemming from the libretto turn out to amplify verbal repetitions in a significant way. To my knowledge, no lyrics of this piece available on the Internet report all the verbal repetitions being sung (perhaps in line with the modern idea that written texts should avoid repetitions).[11] [2b] reports my transcription of the actual text being sung– where each “O” is separated from the next one by melodic pauses.
[2b] [A] O O let me O O let me let me weep
O O let me O O let me let me weep
O O O let me forever, ever weep
Forever forever forever forever weep
[B] My eyes no more no more
no more no more no more shall welcome sleep
I’ll hide me I’ll hide me from the sight of day
And sigh sigh sigh my soul away
[A] O O let me O O let me let me weep
O O let me O O let me let me weep
O O O let me O let me forever weep
Forever forever forever forever weep
[C] He’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone, his loss deplore
He’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone, his loss deplore
And I shall never, never, never, never, never see him more
And I shall never, never, never see him more
Shall never, never, never see him more
I shall never, shall never, shall never, shall never, never see him more
Our processing of these lyrics as readers, and most of all as listeners, is different from what we read in the libretto. The fragmentary nature of the short and repeated segments, the abundance of verbal repetitions, the semantically-derived iconicity between the word “forever” and its multiple verbal repetitions in different lines, all this strongly evokes natural sobbing and lamenting, that is, repeated loud sounds and repeated shedding of tears. The abundant repetitions in part C echo part B in content in that the lyrics are not directly thematizing weeping, but they echo part A in form, as they resemble repeated bits of lament.
The case of Bach’s chorus “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen” from his homonymous cantata (see n. 4 in Supplementary Materials online) is not different: against the “official” lyrics, the text being sung offers plenty of verbal repetitions, within and across voices. For the sake of space, [4b] reports just those of the soprano voice.[12]
[4b] Weinen, Klagen, Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, Weinen, Klagen, Weinen, Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, Angst und Not, Angst und Not sind der Christen Tränenbrot, Angst und Not, Angst und Not, Angst und Not, Angst und Not sind der Christen Tränenbrot, sind der Christen Tränenbrot, die das Zeichen Jesu tragen, die das Zeichen Jesu tragen, das Zeichen Jesu tragen, die das Zeichen Jesu tragen, das Zeichen Jesu tragen, die das Zeichen Jesu tragen.
Repetitions actually occur even on a sub-word level: let us pay attention to the uncountable “-en” word-endings, not only in the multiple infinitive forms, but also in “Christen” (‘Christians’), “Tränen” (‘tears’), and “Zeichen” (‘sign’).
Verbal repetitions in “While my guitar gently weeps” (see n. 5 in Supplementary Materials online) occur in a different lyrics schema. Within verses 1–4, 9–12, and 17–20, we find the words “while my guitar gently weeps” – inspiring the song title – each time echoed, two lines later, by “still my guitar gently weeps” (lines 2, 10, 18, and 4, 12, 20, respectively). They do not constitute refrains, yet they stand out because the lines preceding and following them are about very different topics (love, floor, world, mistake, love, you), the only further noticeable repetition being “I look” (1, 3, 9, 17, 19); see [5b].
[5b] I look …
While my guitar gently weeps
I look …
Still my guitar gently weeps
Beside the six-time almost exact verbal repetition “while my guitar gently weeps”/“still my guitar gently weeps,” I let the reader note another kind of iconicity, semantically and morphologically derived: “while,” “still,” and the present tense “weeps” suggest continuity and reiteration.
Verbal repetitions in connection with weeping coincide with easy-to-recognize verbal refrains (more below about the musical side of refrains) in the lyrics of numbers 6, 7, and 9. Not by chance, in all three cases the weeping-related words of the refrain give the title to the respective songs. The refrain of “Let her cry” – occurring at lines 9–13, 18–22, 27–31, and 32–35 – mentions crying and tears only in the first line (while the remainder of the refrain echoes the construction “let her” four more times). See [6b].
[6b] [And just] let her cry if the tears fall down like rain
Let her sing if it eases all her pain
Let her go, let her walk right out on me
And if the sun comes up tomorrow let her be
Let her be
In “Cry me a river” (n. 7), several parts of the text are repeated (lines 5–6 = 17–18 = 29–30; 7–10 = 19–22; 25 = 26 = 27 = 28). However, the refrain stands out as it consists of no less than four repetitions of the same short clause “cry me a river” (lines 11–12, 23–24, 31–32).[13] Moreover, the song closes with exponentially augmented repetitions (lines 33–40). See [7b].
[7b] [Refrain] Cry me a river, cry me a river
Cry me a river, cry me a river (yeah, yeah)
[Closure] Cry me a river (baby, go on and just), cry me a river (go on and just)
Cry me a river (come on baby, cry), cry me a river (I don’t wanna cry no more, yeah yeah)
Cry me a river, cry me a river, oh
Cry me a river, oh, cry me a river, oh
Cry me a river (cry me, cry me) oh, cry me a river (cry me, cry me) oh
Cry me a river (cry me, cry me) oh, cry me a river (cry me, cry me) oh
Cry me a river (cry me, cry me) oh, cry me a river (cry me, cry me) oh
Cry me a river (cry me, cry me)
Repetitions within the refrain appear also in “River of tears” (n. 9; audio available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4b2M5K7sbc0). Please note the four repetitions of the phrase “river of tears” in [9b], which reports a macro-refrain occurring in the song three times (lines 15–26, 38–49, and 56–67).
[9b] I’m going down, and you have watched me drown
In a river of tears, lost beneath the stream
Under the waves, I’ve found the strength to say
The river of tears has washed me clean
(Hoo-waa) Go ‘head and wish me well
(Haaa) I’ll cry a wishing well
(Haaa) I’ll fly before I fail
(Haaa) I’ll set sail and drift away
So I won’t need you here
Love sinks and hope floats
In a river of tears
In a river of tears
One more element in common to songs 6, 7, and 9 on the verbal level is the figurative language expressions blending tears with water (rain or rivers). I will discuss this aspect in Section 4.3.
With regard to some of Hiraga’s iconic meanings for verbal repetition patterns in Section 2, and in light of the Ancient Greek material summarized in Section 1, I assign to repetition in quantity (see, e.g., [7b]) the iconic meaning of continuation and abundance, similar in structure to continued and abundant shedding of tears. Analogously, I assign to repetition in similar intervals – repetition in refrains in the current sample – the iconic meaning of regularity and coherence: weeping is what gives coherence to the communicative contents of the lyrics. To repetition at the beginning and the end, I associate the iconic meaning of cyclic weeping re-starting over and over again. While Hiraga classifies the iconic meanings of verbal repetition as a manifestation of metaphor iconicity, I regard them as diagrammatic iconicity: the central aspect of similarity concerns the perception of the arrangement of elements being repeated – the arrangement of individual verbal items just as the arrangement of individual sobs, teardrops, and lamenting sounds.
Letter “c” concerns musical repetitions, whether in melodies or chords. In most cases, verbal repetitions coincide with melodic repetitions; for example, in “Let her cry” [6c], “Cry me a river” [7c], and “River of tears” [9c], repeated words coincide with the same melodic segments. With minimal variations (in the words “while” versus “still,” and in the notes at the end of the respective lines) this holds also for “While my guitar gently weeps” [5c]. In “Flow my tears” [1c], conversely, lyrics change, but the melodic structure of verses is preserved. The melodies of lines 1–4 are the same as in lines 5–8, while the melodies of 9–12 are the same as in 13–16. In “O let me weep” [2c], on the contrary, verbal repetitions of short segments, such as “O” and “O let me” correspond to different melodic segments of larger phrases. Nonetheless, Purcell articulates his song in an ABAC structure, verbally and musically. The words of the two A parts are almost the same, and the music is the same, while part B (“My eyes no more … my soul away”) and part C are set to different melodies and chords. The repetition of part A and the internal repetitions within part A iconically suggest recurrence and continuation – they work like a refrain. As for number 3, “Lascia ch’io pianga” is arranged by Handel according to the classical aria structure ABA, both verbally and musically, whereas the libretto includes A and B just once (lines 1–4 and 5–8, respectively). Moreover, some words within part A are repeated in the sung version. [3c] reports the transcription of the lyrics sung to the ABA musical structure.
[3c] Lascia ch’io pianga
Mia cruda sorte
E che sospiri
La libertà
E che sospiri
E che sospiri
La libertà
Lascia ch’io pianga
Mia cruda sorte
E che sospiri
La libertà
The divergence between written lyrics (with no repetitions) and verbal repetitions in Bach’s chorus (n. 4) has already been mentioned. In addition to verbal repetitions, musical repetitions are achieved through the four voice-polyphonic structure of the piece, including multiple imitations of melodic fragments across voices. Figure 2 exemplifies this by showing the imitative repetitions of “weinen, klagen” across voices in a visual excerpt of the score (corresponding to 3:13–3:22 in the Leonhardt-Consort audio available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZjVP6y71yg).
The final group of diagrammatic relations (“d”) concerns the musical rendering of sighs and endlessness. The three occurrences of “sigh” in the final line of part B in “O let me weep” (“and sigh sigh sigh my soul away”) in music correspond to a descending progression of three brief melodic segments separated by a pause, each made of a relatively large descending interval between two notes. See Figure 3, and the audio featuring Sylvia McNair singing with the Vienna Concentus Musicus conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt, 1994 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32NjIl6fH8s.
Screenshot from page 127 in http://en.opera-scores.com/D/VocalScore/7388/154934.html.
In this example I see diagrammatic iconicity in the cross-modal resemblance between natural sighs in weeping, and the paused descending intervals in a descending progression.
Analogously, and perhaps even more sophisticatedly, the beginning of “Lascia ch’io pianga” features musical pauses evoking the sobbing mode of the singing/weeping “I” (see Figure 4, and Cecilia Bartoli’s audio version at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vhpD5JbChPQ), where these pauses are particularly audible. The third pause is particularly remarkable, as it breaks the two-syllable Italian word cruda (‘cruel’), which adds to the meaningfulness of iconicity.
Detail from Handel’s 1711 autograph score, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascia_ch%27io_pianga.
Moreover, pieces 5 and 8 feature a fade-out and a polyphonic configuration suggesting endlessness, respectively. Regarding the end of “While my guitar gently weeps” [5d], Pollack (2001) comments: “ … we are given an unusually long outro consisting of almost two full iterations of the verse section; close to 32 measures of instrumental music into a fade-out that is accompanied by moaning, both vocal and Claptonesque.” Not only is the instrumental outro disproportionately long, but the fade-out technique conveys the idea that the song is potentially endless.
Endlessness is also conveyed by the arrangement and the sequence of melodic segments in the instrumental introduction of Arvo Pärt’s Stabat mater [8d]. This will be commented upon in the next subsection, where the music metaphors and metonymies of the piece are discussed as well.
4.3 Cross-modal metaphoric iconic relations: ostinato patterns, downward notes, and water (“e,” “f,” and “g”)
The next three groups deal with metaphoric iconic relations. Resemblance is mostly mediated by parallelism with something else. Let us start with the “e” group, that is, ostinato patterns resembling continuity and recurrence. Rosand (1979) associates the pattern of “the descending tetrachord” (after the article’s title) to the genre of lament. The descending tetrachord is an ostinato repeated throughout the song; it consists in a bass line gradually descending and connected to four chords.[14] The author stresses the prominence of laments in operas of the seventeenth century, and mentions its employment by several composers, including late Baroque composers such as Purcell, Handel, and Bach. However, the musicologist describes the “nonverbal impact of reiterated descent in the minor mode” as “a fitting expressions of endless suffering” (1979: 356) without explaining what makes the ostinato a good fit. The sentence concluding the article adds a bit more: “the pattern itself declares its precise iconographic significance, an emblem of lament,” but neither the iconographic quality nor the emblematic character are further explored.
Zbikowski (2018) quotes Rosand (1979) as he applies Conceptual Blending Theory to the lament sung by Dido at the end of Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas (1689), known as the aria “When I am laid in Earth.” In this piece, the minor-mode descending tetrachord corresponds to four descending long notes in the bass line, sometimes slightly varied, and followed by a cadential sequence. Zbikowski considers this “cyclicity of the ground” (2018: 15) a key element of the interaction between words and music. The author interprets the aria as an overall blended space (“enactment of a futile struggle against oblivion”) emerging from a text space conveying “acceptance of death” and “plea for remembrance,” and a music space showing contrast between the second part of the melody and the “relentless lament ground bass” (2018: 19). Thus, in this blend the sad fate is the relentless lamento ground bass, and the wish to escape oblivion is the melodic “resistance” to the ground bass.
The ground bass, Zbikowski notes (2018: 18), is first presented alone: “Purcell clearly means the ground to be heard as a distinct element within the aria: a statement of the ground precedes the entrance of the voice.” The same happens in Purcell’s “O let me weep.” See Figure 5.
This eight bar-ostinato includes the tonic starting and ending an overall downward trend in the progress of notes, and a complete chord progression. With slight variations (described in detail in Schönlau 2019: 188) the ostinato is repeated six times during part A of the aria, and five times during the later repetition of part A (see Section 4.2). Zbikowski’s reading of the “relentless lament ground bass” indirectly supports my proposal concerning iconicity in “O let me weep.” I see two cross-modal iconic meanings of descending tetrachords and gradually descending notes in the bass line: 1) the repetition of the ostinato pattern resembles continual weeping; 2) the gradually descending notes resemble the downward motion of tears. Both iconic relations are metaphorical, as the mapping between form and content requires more conceptual abstraction than the mapping on the diagrammatic level. Via the image schema Cycle underlying the metaphoric mapping, the potential endlessness of a segment repeated over and over resembles the endlessness of laments repeated over and over.[15] The element “three” of the time beat in both Purcell’s arias (as well as in pieces 3 and 4) may play a further role in the iconic rendering of cyclicity, in line with Nänny’s (2005) considerations about iconicity in rhymes. I stress that ground bass forms (or obstinate bass) and cyclicity are not a sign of weeping per se. The iconic relation is suggested by the simultaneity of cues generated by the co-occurrence of the wish or necessity to weep forever and a “relentless” bass line.
A bass with a straight descending line (descending notes[16]), and a three-beat rhythm are found also in the sacred piece “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen” from Bach’s homonymous cantata (n. 4); see Figure 6.
An important variant here is that the bass line does not entail the same chords; in other words, it is not exactly a ground bass. Bach uses the same bass line to support different harmonies at different moments of the choral piece. Overall, the ostinato is repeated fourteen times, and it changes to a different bass (with no repetitions) with line 5: “Die das Zeichen Jesu tragen.”
Within our sample, “While my guitar gently weeps” [5e] interestingly shows an analogous choice, although it is applied only partially. In his analysis of the song’s harmony, Pollack writes:
The first and third phrases [i.e., “I look at you all, see the love there that’s sleeping,” line 1; “I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping,” line 3; “I look at the world and I notice it’s turning,” line 9; “With every mistake we must surely be learning,” line 11; “I look at you all, see the love there that’s sleeping,” line 17; “(Look) look at you all,” line 19] prominently feature a descending bass line whose downward gesture permeates the song by virtue of its constant repetition. This is nicely balanced out by the symmetrical arch shape of the vocal melody. (Pollack 2001)
The tetrachord is A-G-F#-F, and the bass guitar plays the four respective tonics in a sequence of gradually descending notes.
Finally, the musical structure of “Cry me a river” (n. 7) is based on the same chord progression from beginning to end, covering all the melodies being used, including the refrain – an exception, given that in prototypical pop songs chords of refrains and chords of verses are different. This is not enough to link the music to the weeping patterns that we have observed up to now. However, a curious detail emerges, that is, a melodic ostinato realized by a synthesizer throughout the song (see Figure 7).
Synthesizer ostinato from “Cry me a river.”
Such a melodic element is given prominence by the fact that the choir sings it in unison to the words: “You don’t have to say, what you did, I already know, I found out from him/Now there’s just no chance for you and me, there’ll never be” (lines 5–6, 17–18, 29–30). Even though this is not a ground bass, the ostinato pattern is there, and the chord sequence underlying even refrains is always the same.
Musical notation represents a sub-mode of music where the two-dimensional spatial arrangement of musical elements may contribute to iconicity in terms of visual resemblance. Pitch height in Western music notation is visually established by means of the conceptual metaphor pitch is vertical elevation (e.g., Cox 2016; Górska 2014; Julich-Warpakowski 2019; Zbikowski 2002). In light of this, further metaphoric level enriched by the visual diagrammatic level, descending musical notes on the musical staff resemble tears. Figure 8 shows this visual iconic feature in the first two melodic segments of our earliest piece, John Dowland’s famous song “Flow my tears” (n. 1): the notes corresponding to the lyrics “Flow my tears” and “fall from your springs” are gradually descending notes.
Original publication’s incipit of “Flow my tears” (Rooley 1983: 6).
Likewise, the initial part of the refrain of “Let her cry” features a few gradually descending notes, and the same notes are repeated over the two further “let her” constructions (“let her sing” and “let her go”). See Figure 9 and the official song video available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aVHLL5egRY.
Excerpt from the score of “Let her cry” from Music Store Download (https://music-store-download.com).
In the performance of pieces 1 and 6, those notes are slow, and they are individually identified on the musical staff. Yet, in their metaphoric iconicity they resemble individual tears flowing from someone’s eyes.
The pattern of gradually descending notes is used also in the instrumental introduction of the 2008 version for chorus and orchestra of Arvo Pärt’s Stabat Mater [8f] (for the lyrics, see n. 8 in Supplementary Materials online; an audio version is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFbnC_2OOJE). The strings perform a remarkable series of subsequent melodic segments slowly and gradually descending from very high to lower and lower pitches. Each segment is short, made of two or three notes gradually descending. They “flow” in an imitative way across the string sections, and none of the segments seem to reach harmonic conclusion (0:00–2:34). I advance that these melodic segments represent a metaphorical iconic representation of Mary’s tears being shed while she stands at the cross staring at her own crucified son – in accordance with the lyrics of Pärt’s piece, that is, the medieval Latin hymn Stabat Mater.[17] In the first verse Mary is said to be lacrimosa (‘in tears’), and in verse 13 the anonymous singing “I” wishes to mingle his own tears with Mary’s (Fac me tecum pie flere,/crucifíxo condolére,/donec ego víxero [‘Let me mingle tears with thee,/Mourning Him who mourn’d for me,/All the days that I may live’] in Caswall’s [1849: 141] translation). The wish to blend Mary’s and the worshipper’s tears favors the interpretation according to which the instrumental introduction leaves open whose tears are iconically represented. I should add that this argument relies on the account of two fundamental frame metonymies here at work:[18] 1) Individual tears stand for someone shedding tears; 2) The instrumental introduction stands for the whole composition, whose main part is sung.
The final metaphoric iconic relation under examination (“g”) relates to the image mode. The source domain that is visually represented is suggested by verbal metaphors and similes contained in the lyrics. In “Flow my tears, fall from your springs” (piece number 1), for example, tears are mapped onto falling water, and the eyes of the weeper are mapped onto water springs (see Section 1 about Dowland’s blend of weeping and performing). In the phrase “river of tears” (piece n. 9), abundant weeping is mapped onto a river, and the expression in fact represents the explicit version of the metaphoric expression “river” in “cry me a river.”
The association of tears and water is instantiated in song videos about weeping where water is copious and overwhelmingly present. Figure 10 illustrates representative screenshots of the following water forms included in the video of the song “Cry me a river”: rain, a swimming pool, a shower, and (metaphor in the metaphor), falling broken glass. Overall, water is present in 2:37 of the video’s total duration of 4:50.
Screenshots at 0:09, 0:49, 4:16, and 1:12 in the video “Cry me a river,” available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DksSPZTZES0.
Another video (“Let her cry,” number 6) features rainy weather as the frame of all scenes representing the content of the song, in alternation with images portraying the band performing the piece. Figure 11 illustrates representative screenshots of the main rain scenes: a female protagonist being wet (occurring seventeen times), rain on a car driving in a street (nine times), other people in the street while it rains (four times), the protagonist watching water bubbles (four times), and the protagonist in a car under the rain (three times).
Screenshots at 3:45, 1:02, 1:34, 2:19, 1:41 in the video “Let her cry,” available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aVHLL5egRY.
The visualization of rain is inspired by the simile expressed in the if-clause of the first line of the refrain: “let her cry if the tears fall down like rain.” The cross-modal metaphoric iconic relation common to the two videos is between rain and tears. Rain is not a sign of weeping in itself (although Urios-Aparisi 2016, for instance, argues that rain in movies is generally connected to emotional states such as sadness or doubt), but it becomes such a sign in combination with lyrics talking about weeping. The mention of crying works as a simultaneous cue prompting the iconic relation with rain.
I conclude by pointing out that the different forms of water in “Cry me a river” are a manifestation not only of iconicity but also of cognitive compression.[19] In the lyrics, tears are only wished for; they are just potential tears. However, in the video the crying is made real by means of rain, falsetto, and multiple repetitions of the same elements. In other words, the multimodal communicative package of the song video makes the crying present by compressing two vital relations: the relation of time and the relation of role. The wish that someone cries in the future becomes the crying during the song (time); in addition to that, the cry of the person who should cry becomes, through the image of rain, the cry of unspecified people including the singing “I” (role).
5 Conclusions
This article focuses on cross-modal iconic relations in nine diverse Western-music songs about dysphoric weeping. Initial input comes from recurrent features observed in ancient Greek texts associated with performative events: the prominence of sound; repetitions and refrains; interjections and strong self-referentiality; the motif of endless weeping; tears associated with streams of water, dew, and libation liquids (see Section 1).
Synopsis of results.
| a | b | c | d | e | f | g | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. “Flow my tears” (1600) | Repeated melodies (1–4 = 5–8; 9–12 = 13–16) | Descending notes at start | (Water in lyrics) | ||||
| 2. “O let me weep” (1692) | “O” interjections | Several words repeated | Part A repeated | Progression “Sigh, sigh sigh” | Ground bass eleven times | ||
| 3. “Lascia ch’io pianga” (1711) | Part A repeated | Sobbing through pauses | |||||
| 4. “Weinen, klagen, sorgen, zagen” (1714) | Several words repeated within and across voices | Contrapuntal imitations across voices | Ground bass fourteen times | ||||
| 5. “While my guitar gently weeps” (1968) | “Oh Oh” + moaning of guitar and voices | “While/still my guitar gently weeps” repeated | Repetition several melodic segments | Song fades out | Descending bass line (six non-consecutive occurrences) | ||
| 6. “Let her cry” (1994) | Refrain + “let her” repeated | Refrain + repeated segment within the refrain | Descending notes in the refrain | Rain images | |||
| 7. Cry me a river (2002) | Falsetto | Refrain + repeated segments within the refrain, and other repeated lyrics | Refrain + repeated segments within the refrain, and other repeated melodies | Melodic ostinato + same chords throughout song | (River in lyrics) + water images | ||
| 8. Introduction to Stabat mater (2008) | Harmonically non-conclusive segments | Multiple descending notes | |||||
| 9. “River of tears” (2015) | Refrain + repeated segments within the refrain, and other repeated lyrics | Refrain and other parts | (River in lyrics) |
Table 4 offers a synopsis of the results showing the multiple and co-occurring cross-modal iconic relations that I – as understander – have perceived and identified (see Section 2). The letters in the horizontal axis refer to the iconic relations: “a” stands for perceptual sound similarity – image iconicity. “b,” “c,” and “d” stand for resemblance through verbal repetitions (“b”), musical repetitions (“c”), and the musical rendering of sighs and endlessness (“d”) – diagrammatic iconicity. Finally, “e,” “f,” and “g” stand for resemblance through ostinato patterns (“e”), downward notes (“f”), and water (“g”) – metaphor iconicity. Within the “g” column, parentheses mark monomodal metaphors (expressed just in words).
Even though Table 4 distinguishes between imagic and diagrammatic relations, and between diagrammatic and metaphoric relations, some of these distinctions are questionable. For instance, singing in falsetto can be said to be perceptually similar to crying; however, the interpreter assimilates the two partially on the basis of an image-schematic association between consistently high melodic pitches and natural wails, thus by combining imagic and diagrammatic meaning. Furthermore, understanding tears in terms of descending notes not only expresses metaphoric comprehension but also diagrammatic comprehension, due to the downward and gradual arrangement of dots. All this leads me to support the continuum reading I have mentioned in Section 2. Furthermore, the view of sub-iconic relations encompassing a continuum from more perceptual to more conceptual similarity is compatible with Antović’s (2016, 2022 proposal about a multilevel construction of musical meaning encompassing a continuum from physiological reactions to conceptual, cultural, and personal associations.
As for metaphor iconicity, the source elements tend to be represented by music and by images, no differently from what Forceville suggests for multimodal metaphors (see Section 2). Moreover, frame metonymies seem to play an important role. For example, more than once iconic relations regard tears being shed with no reference to who is weeping, therefore relying on a metonymic component of the frame representation. Mittelberg’s (2014) claim about the substantial role of metonymies in cross-modal communication involving gestures (Section 2) may thus potentially be extended to other cross-modal forms of communication.
The present investigation shows also that a constant element of iconic meanings is the “how” of weeping rather than the “what” (i.e., for whom tears are shed or in which circumstance). The highly frequent occurrence of repetitions (both verbal and musical) across the sample is an instance of that, together with the sense of abundance iconically rendered by rain (and in rivers on the verbal level).
With reference to gestural meaning Sweetser (2023: 167) asserts: “we need iconicity, to account for depiction and enactment.” I submit that semiotic research on songs thematizing weeping needs iconicity as well, to account for the same, i.e., depiction and enactment. Depiction resides in all the nonverbal expressions used to convey how weeping manifests itself – the expression of continuation and abundance, for example.[20] Enactment directly materializes through the musical performance: by unfolding in time, performed music embodies all iconic meanings at once; notes are played just as tears are shed. This point is further confirmed on the metaphoric level. “Flow my tears,” “O let me weep,” and “Lascia ch’io pianga” instantiate the metaphor weeping is singing, where weeping is the target, and singing the source. Target and source are blended, and emerging meanings include slow motion and the esthetic beauty of shedding tears. Core features enhancing the blend are self-referentiality (the singing “I” coincides with the weeping “I”), the verb forms of titles (suggesting the immediate enactment of weeping), and the fact that the singing of the lyrics is enacted simultaneously. In “Let her cry,” “Cry me a river,” and Stabat mater the singing “I” does not coincide with the weeping person; yet, the various cross-modal simultaneous cues make the blend work. “While my guitar gently weeps” is the only piece where weeping is the source and playing is the target, but the blend is no less forceful, judging from what the voices and Clapton’s guitar achieve in the last part of the song.
Future qualitative and most of all quantitative research is a desideratum, as it could confirm or disconfirm the patterns presented here, and add more. Equally wished for are analyses focusing on iconic relations in weeping songs and laments in non-Western traditions. Feld’s (1981, 1982 work on Kaluli people’s waterfall metaphors, Tolbert’s (1990) work on Karelian laments, and Sipos’ (2007) work on Anatolian laments, just to name a few, would provide invaluable material for cross-cultural and cross-semiotic investigations. Finally, it would be interesting to explore cross-modal iconicity in songs thematizing euphoric instead of dysphoric weeping/crying, and to see how the emerging semiotic patterns differ.
Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of these contents have been presented on different occasions in Osnabrück, Tartu, Cologne, Paris, Niš, and virtually Bologna and Aachen. The author warmly thanks the respective audiences for their helpful feedback, as well as the anonymous reviewers of Semiotica for their valuable insights.
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