SOURCE: "Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol," in Callaloo, Vol. 10, No. 1, Winter, 1987, pp. 29-54.

In the following essay, Mackey analyzes writings by Jean Toomer, William Carlos Williams, Ralph Ellison, and Wilson Harris—in whose work music is an important element—largely basing his analysis on the ideas about music expressed in Steven Feld's Sound and Sentiment, in which music is associated with loss and social dislocation, and Victor Zuckerkandl's Sound and Symbol, in which music is accorded mystical significance.

Senses of music in a number of texts is what I'd like to address—ways of regarding and responding to music in a few instances of writings which bear on the subject. This essay owes its title to two such texts, Steven Feld's Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics and Song in Kaluli Expression and Victor Zuckerkandl's Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World. These two contribute to...