Word and Music’ studies today have a new stature in the Humanities. They have a home (the International Association for Word and Music Studies), with a web site (http://www.goshen.edu/wma/index.html), a new series of dedicated publications of which the first three volumes have already appeared, regular conferences, and, since 1989, a shiny new term, melopoetics, coined originally by Lawrence Kramer. The organizers and the moving spirits reflect the birth of the idea in departments of Comparative Literature but musicology has come to contribute its full share in the interdisciplinary movement. As one of the founders noted, ‘interdisciplinary’ was the magical buzz word that sanctioned the expansion of, and growth of confidence in, a movement that was initially more than a little apologetic. Worries about professional competence among the practitioners themselves all too often arose from a reluctance to engage with music theory, particularly at a time when the categories of Formenlehre, with which many non-musicians were reasonably familiar, were being rethought in the terms of Heinrich Schenker. As music theory became seized with post-modern doubts in the 1990s, as musicologists ceased to read Schenker and instead agonized over Lacan, so the tracks of analysis and literary criticism began to converge. In this the explosion in Popular Music studies also played an obvious part, though initially melopoetics took the canon of ‘high’ European classical music as its inevitable territory.

Steven Paul Scher defined the categories of melopoetics as:

1. 1 music in literature (word music, formal parallels to music in literature, verbal music);

2. 2 music and literature (vocal music);

3. 3 literature in music (programme music).

Partly because of the role of comparative literature, the first category was well represented in the early growth of the movement. Scher's own monograph on Verbal Music in German Literature, Calvin S. Brown's writings on De Quincey's Dream-Fugue and Mallarmé's Un Coup de dés, and the same writer's attempt to define what uses poetry could make of musical form were notable examples of a certain type of criticism that looked at music as metaphor for non-musical moments within literary works.