On 8/31, e-mail from fellow shapenote singer Peter Ross, asking
whether onomatopoeia might apply to songs like the City of New Orleans, Bill Staines’s song River, the Carter family song Winding Stream, etc., where the music fits the meaning of the lyrics
These are wonderful, incredibly moving songs, and I’ll write about them below, but what Peter’s talking about is a relationship between the form of pieces of music (including their lyrics) and the images or stories the music might evoke — while onomatopoeia is a specifically linguistic relationship, having to do with an association between linguistic elements — lexical items — and their referents, turning on the phonetics of the lexical items and perceptible characteristics of the referents.
So they’re clearly related concepts, but not the same thing.
