This chapter examines, compares, and contrasts three of the different ways in which words can be treated musically. I should remark at the outset that ‘gesture’ is the overarching term, since it covers anything that lends emphasis, intensity, or expression to a communicative act. Edward Cone explained that music might be considered a language of symbolic gestures, ‘of direct actions, of pauses, of startings and stoppings, of rises and falls, of tenseness and slackness, of accentuations’. The word ‘gesture’ usually refers to a bodily movement that either communicates or reinforces a message. Yet, there is always the possibility of using an unexpected gesture – for example, smiling when angry. Moreover, as Keith Thomas has pointed out, the body is not something that waits in a neutral state ‘until its owner makes an involuntary movement or decides to send out a signal’. He cites the stifling of symptoms of grief as evidence that ‘faces, hands, and limbs can be as significant in repose as in motion’. Thus, while gesture can often function mimetically, it can also be distinct from mimesis (offering different possibilities), and even at odds with mimesis. For this reason, I think it is useful to have a means of distinguishing mimesis from gesture, even though mimesis is, in fact, a particular kind of gesture. In theatre semiotics, for example, the mimetic (or mimic) sign may be restricted to facial expressions, while the gestural sign involves other bodily movement (such as waving a hand).

In this chapter I am using ‘mimetic’ to refer to a composer's attempt to provide a sympathetic expression of the words and to reveal their emotional content, employing musical signifying devices that sometimes operate at the level of individual words. An example would be Schubert's ‘Der Wanderer’. I am describing a song as ‘gestural’ where there is an attempt to provide an overall mood vehicle for the words. Of course, there are overlaps, and there are songs I would place in the gestural category, like Schubert's ‘Die Forelle’ (‘The Trout’), that contain mimetic features. However, a gestural setting need not be directly expressive of the words – it may complement or even contradict their meaning.