Jacqueline WAEBER
Jacqueline Waeber is Associate Professor of Music at Duke University.
Her research focuses on the interactions of text, music, and language, with emphasis on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's musical-linguistic thought, the French and German Enlightenment and its legacies.
She recently edited The Cambridge Companion to Seventeenth-Century Opera (2023) and is the author of two monographs: En Musique dans le texte. Le mélodrame, de Rousseau à Schoenberg (2005) and Speaking German Musically: Poetic Recitation in Central Europe, 1760–1820 (2025).
Her current research explores the career of the diseuse Yvette Guilbert and the poetics of chanson française from Third Republic France to the 1960s.
Jacqueline Waeber at Duke University, NC, USA
May 21, 2026, 16:00–16:30
From Crooning to “Talk-over”:
Jazzing Language in Serge Gainsbourg’s songs
This paper examines how jazz shaped Serge Gainsbourg’s approach to song writing, an approach driven by his playful exploration of the materiality of French language: how it sounds, resounds, and can be rhythmicized, de-rhythmicized, or re-rhythmicized against its prosody. I trace how Gainsbourg’s evolution from his 1950s jazz-inflected crooning style to his highly idiosyncratic quasi-spoken delivery developed from the 1960s enabled him to elevate the chanson yéyé (which Gainsbourg originally despised) through sophisticated linguistic play. Three interconnected developments made this transformation possible. First, his integration of “franglais,” a phenomenon theorized by René Etiemble in 1964, strategically corrupted French prosodic norms. Second, Gainsbourg’s adoption of a whispered delivery instead of full song—what he termed “talk over”—expanded the sonic spectrum of voice by incorporating peripheral or parasitical sounds such as moans, sighs, breaths. Third, this “talk over” enabled an emphasis on rhythm over melody: a shift from singing to speaking that Gainsbourg attributed to the growing complexity of his prosody, which demanded rhythmic structures rather than melodic lines as its foundation.
Building on Olivier Bourderionnet’s argument (Swing Troubadours, 2012) that post-Trenet French songwriters sought to “make French language swing” [faire swinguer la langue française], I argue that Gainsbourg’s poetry privileges the sonic and rhythmic possibilities of language over conventional semantic clarity through phonetic associations, syncopated phrasing that disrupts expected metrical patterns, and corruption of French through English words, expressions, and anglophone onomatopoeia. Through close textual analysis, my paper demonstrates how Gainsbourg’s jazz-inflected approach made French language itself the primary site of creative subversion.