Resumen de Sound on the Page: Sung Music in Cervantes’ Narrative

Mercedes Alcalá Galán

• This essay explores how Cervantes endeavours to make inaudible music sound in the text. In sung music, the characters hear a melody and, in some inexplicable way, we readers read a nonexistent melody. It is not a matter of imagining a melody, but of imagining that we have imagined one whose void and nonexistence we don’t perceive. This process is possible owing to the reader’s musical memory that is activated by enunciation in the text. The emotion of the characters is an important means by which the reader connects with sung music that is neither described nor heard.