the rain,” and “the rain it raineth every day.”^7 Lyrics to show
tunes do not often become so intricate. Hollander would call
them the “tra-la-la” variety of refrain, which means that we
can stop thinking about meaning for the length of the repeat. I
am not so sure. “Always true to you, darlin’ in my fashion” is in
fact an allusion to a poem by Ernest Dowson, which itself goes
back to an ode by Horace.^8 Perhaps this is not a typical exam-
ple. Cole Porter may have been showing off, although the mu-
sical in question, Kiss Me Kate, makes substantial allusions to a
play by Shakespeare, which itself goes back to other plays. Al-
lusion in popular song formats may be more substantial than
“tra-la-la” suggests, but even “tra-la-la” does the basic work of
refrain, which is to repeat a line or phrase until it turns into it-
self. One could say that the line signifies itself, if such a thing
were possible, but it does signify itself-in-repetition, which is
slightly different. A sign must signify something other than it-
self to be a sign, but the close call is exciting, and the refrain in
poetry or a song is a close call. The repeated line threatens to
abandon semiosis by standing for itself, and by actually stand-
ing for itself-in-repetition, it gives a lift to the poem. Song and
dance thrive on this lift.^9 The reason Ella Fitzgerald does not
need a book reason to sing a show tune on a recording is that
THE DRAMA OF NUMBERS 111
(^7) Hollander chooses a fine wind-and-rain poem by Trumbull Stickney,
“Mnemosyne,” and Hardy’s “During Wind and Rain.” See “Breaking into
Song,” pp. 79–87.
(^8) See Dowson’s “Cynara” (“I have been faithful to thee, Cynara, in my fash-
ion”), which refers to Horace, Odes, I, 4.
(^9) We are touching on a lively debate among music and dance theoreticians
at this point, for it is sometimes said that music and dance are altogether free
from extrinsic referentiality and are self-contained in the signifier. This for-
malist position seems impossible to maintain without some yielding on the
side of extrinsic referentiality, for the formal elements that might seem to cre-
ate an intrinsic self-sufficiency are themselves part of extrinsic awareness. The
scale in Western music is a condition of experience in the listener, for example.
For a full discussion of this issue, see Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a
Semiology of Music, pp. 118–26, along with the adjustments offered in Rosario
Mirigliano, “The sign and music: A reflection on the theoretical bases of musi-
cal semiotics,” pp. 43–61. Similar conditions of experience allow dance to be
understood, too.