Sound or sense - Sound as sense? Walther’s Vokalspiel between sound art and hermeneutic challenge; Klang oder Sinn – Klang als Sinn? Walthers Vokalspiel zwischen Klangkunst und hermeneutischer Herausforderung

Sonic experiments in lyrics are more than just nonsense. The sound has its own poetical meaning which supports the semantics of the words, opposes them or works independently of them. This applies to both pre-modern and modern texts, but it seems to be a particular challenge for medieval songs, which have mostly survived without melody (dôn), making the sound a kind of rudimentary substitute for the lost music. In this article, Walther’s von der Vogelweide ‘Vokalspiel’ (L 75,25), consisting of five monovocally rhymed stanzas, is claimed as a test case for a dense reading attuned to the sense of the text as/and sound. Further questions arise from this case, such as the evidence for a genuinely pre-modern sound poetics and -theory, the limits to the translatability of sound, and the effects of Walther’s impulse on further medieval and even (post-)modern poetry.