Words and Music
Liverpool Music Symposium 3
Words and Music
edited by
John Williamson
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Words and Music
Liverpool Music Symposium 3
Words and Music
edited by
John Williamson
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
First published 2005 by LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS 4 Cambridge Street, Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © Liverpool University Press 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ISBN 0-85323-619-4 cased
Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and the publishers will be pleased to be informed of any errors or omissions for correction in future editions. Edited and typeset by Frances Hackeson Freelance Publishing Services, Brinscall, Lancs Printed in Great Britain by MPG Books, Bodmin, Cornwall
Contents
Notes on Contributors Introduction John Williamson
vii 1
1 Mimesis, Gesture, and Parody in Musical Word-Setting Derek B. Scott
10
2 Rhetoric and Music: The Influence of a Linguistic Art Jasmin Cameron
28
3 Eminem: Difficult Dialogics David Clarke
73
4 Artistry, Expediency or Irrelevance? English Choral Translators and their Work Judith Blezzard
103
5 Pyramids, Symbols, and Butterflies: ‘Nacht’ from Pierrot Lunaire John Williamson
125
6 Music and Text in Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw Bhesham Sharma
150
7 Rethinking the Relationship Between Words and Music for the Twentieth Century: The Strange Case of Erik Satie Robert Orledge
161
vi
8 ‘Breaking up is hard to do’: Issues of Coherence and Fragmentation in post-1950 Vocal Music James Wishart
190
9 Writing for Your Supper – Creative Work and the Contexts of Popular Songwriting Mike Jones
219
Index
251
Notes on Contributors
Derek Scott is Professor of Music at the University of Salford. His books include The Singing Bourgeois and From the Erotic to the Demonic, and he is the editor of Music, Culture and Society: A Reader. He is the General Editor of Ashgate’s Pop and Folk Series, and a member of the Editorial Boards of Popular Musicology and the internet Critical Musicology Journal. He is also a composer whose works include two symphonies for brass band. Jasmin Cameron is Lecturer in Music Education at the University of Aberdeen. Her research interests lie with sacred Italian and German music of the late Baroque and Classical periods, analysis (particularly of texted music and the issues that arise thereof), rhetoric and music, development and transmission of musical conventions, and editing. Her book The Crucifixion in Music: An Analytical Survey of Settings of the Crucifixus between 1680 and 1800 is being published by Scarecrow Press. David Clarke is Reader in Music at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He is the author of two major books on Tippett and editor of Tippett Studies for Cambridge University Press. His current research deals with issues of cultural pluralism and uses a variety of techniques from music analysis, psychology, semiotics, linguistics, and philosophy. Judith Blezzard is an Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Liverpool. She has numerous editions of choral music in print from various publishers, and has provided sung translations for many pieces from the French and German small-scale and unaccompanied choral repertories, both sacred and secular. Her books and editions include The Tudor Church Music of the Lumley Books, Borrowings in En-
viii
glish Church Music 1550–1950, and German Romantic Part-Songs. Bhesham Sharma is currently Professor of Music at the University of Western Ontario and author of Music And Culture In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction. Robert Orledge is Professor Emeritus and Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Liverpool. Well-known for his books on Fauré, Debussy, Koechlin, and Erik Satie, he has recently completed an edition of the orchestral full score of Satie’s additional music for Gounod’s opera Le médecin malgré lui from the surviving parts in the Library of Congress. James Wishart is a Lecturer in Music at the University of Liverpool. He is mainly a composer, whose recent works include pieces in a projected cycle of compositions based on the Orpheus legend, and a music-theatre work set amidst the mayhem of a mental hospital. He is currently engaged in writing a book on the history and practice of transcription and arrangement. Mike Jones is a Lecturer in Music at the University of Liverpool, specializing in the music industry. He was the lyricist for Latin Quarter who enjoyed a top twenty hit with ‘Radio Africa’ in 1986. Continuing success in Europe saw the act release seven albums – five for RCA and two for independent labels. His doctoral thesis explored the impact of major label signing and release policies on aspirant pop acts. John Williamson is Professor of Music at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of The Music of Hans Pfitzner and Richard Strauss: ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’, and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner.
Introduction
Word and Music’ studies today have a new stature in the Humanities. They have a home (the International Association for Word and Music Studies), with a web site (http://www.goshen.edu/wma/index.html), a new series of dedicated publications of which the first three volumes have already appeared, regular conferences, and, since 1989, a shiny new term, melopoetics, coined originally by Lawrence Kramer.1 The organizers and the moving spirits reflect the birth of the idea in departments of Comparative Literature but musicology has come to contribute its full share in the interdisciplinary movement. As one of the founders noted, ‘interdisciplinary’ was the magical buzz word that sanctioned the expansion of, and growth of confidence in, a movement that was initially more than a little apologetic.2 Worries about professional competence among the practitioners themselves all too often arose from a reluctance to engage with music theory, particularly at a time when the categories of Formenlehre, with which many non-musicians were reasonably familiar, were being rethought in the terms of Heinrich Schenker.3 As music theory became seized with post-
1. Lawrence Kramer, ‘Dangerous Liaisons: The Literary Text in Musical Criticism’, 19th Century Music 13 (1989/90), 159. 2. Steven Paul Scher, ‘Comparing Literature and Music: Current Trends and Prospects in Critical Theory and Methodology’, in Zoran Konstantinovic´ et al. (eds), Literature and the Other Arts: Proceedings of the Ninth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (Innsbruck: University of Innsbruck, 1981), p. 216. 3. Lawrence Kramer’s essay on ‘Music and Representation: The Instance of Haydn’s Creation’ is an interesting example of the inventor of the term melopoetics engaging with Schenker on ground prepared by that master of the colourful metaphor Tovey: see Steven Paul Scher (ed.), Music and Text: Critical Inquiries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 139–62, in particular pp. 143–8.
2
Words and Music
modern doubts in the 1990s, as musicologists ceased to read Schenker and instead agonized over Lacan, so the tracks of analysis and literary criticism began to converge. In this the explosion in Popular Music studies also played an obvious part, though initially melopoetics took the canon of ‘high’ European classical music as its inevitable territory. Steven Paul Scher defined the categories of melopoetics as: 1 music in literature (word music, formal parallels to music in literature, verbal music); 2 music and literature (vocal music); 3 literature in music (programme music).4
Partly because of the role of comparative literature, the first category was well represented in the early growth of the movement. Scher’s own monograph on Verbal Music in German Literature, Calvin S. Brown’s writings on De Quincey’s Dream-Fugue and Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés, and the same writer’s attempt to define what uses poetry could make of musical form were notable examples of a certain type of criticism that looked at music as metaphor for non-musical moments within literary works.5 This was certainly less interdisciplinary than it seems, for as Claudia Stanger pointed out, the arts of music and literature were still treated as separate in ‘simple opposition’; the talk was always of the influence of one art on the other. She proposed another axis, the metonymic, which read music as a signified without signifier, and literature as a Derridean ‘sliding signifier’ without a necessary referent.6 She did not proceed to cases, however, though she noted that the logic of her thinking led to a study of song (and opera). 4.
Steven Paul Scher, ‘Einleitung: Literatur und Musik—Entwicklung und Stand der Forschung’, in Steven Paul Scher (ed.), Literatur und Musik: Ein Handbuch zur Theorie und Praxis eines komparatistischen Grenzgebietes (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1984), pp. 9–12. 5. Steven Paul Scher, Verbal Music in German Literature (New Haven and London: Yale, 1968); Calvin S. Brown, ‘The Musical Structure of De Quincey’s Dream-Fugue’, ‘The Poetic Use of Musical Forms’, and ‘The Musical Analogies in Mallarmé’s “Un Coup de Dés”’, reprinted in Jean-Louis Cupers and Ulrich Weisstein (eds), Musico-Poetics in Perspective: Calvin S. Brown in Memoriam, Word and Music Studies 2 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 133–60 and 167– 89. More recent studies in this area include Hans Joachim Kreutzer, Obertöne: Literatur und Musik (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1994). 6. Claudia S. Stanger, ‘Literary and Musical Structuralism: An Approach to Interdisciplinary Criticism’, in Konstantinovic´ et al., Literature and the Other Arts, pp. 223–7.
Introduction
3
Later in my paper I shall refer briefly to a position that has been defined by Agawu and Lodato, in which song exists as an analyzable category distinct from word and music and requiring its own grammar.7 This position is already latent in Stanger’s ideas on the association and combination of music and literature. Have we not then been analyzing song for a long time? In 1970 Brown presented an impressive list of writers in the field whose work stands on the broad highway of musicology, including Thrasyboulos Georgiades, Joseph Kerman, Frederick Sternfeld, Jack Stein, Alfred Einstein, and quite a few others.8 Gradually it becomes apparent in reading Brown’s report that the literature on words and music of one kind or another was in reality already staggeringly large, and covers the second and third areas, music and literature and literature in music, remarkably fully. Admittedly many of the products dealing with them tended to interpret relentlessly according to readings of the literary text, pushing theoretical and analytical concerns in music to one side, but this was hardly the fault of literary scholars, since the trend was just as apparent amongst musicologists and remains so to this day. How the composer responded to the literary text was more often addressed than the terms in which words and music made their combined effect. There was a similar lack of generalized theory such as Stanger tried to provide on the foundations of Saussure and Derrida on the one hand, Susanne Langer and Leonard Meyer on the other.9 Here Lawrence Kramer had an important insight, that a body of literature had to evolve to a certain critical mass before a discipline might be theorized.10 This was reflected in a number of ways. The problematizing of specific works or issues was the most obvious and operated fully in the spirit of those demands so common in the 1960s and 1970s for specialized reports rather than grand projects and syntheses. Adjacent to these stood the outlines of work to be done, those hortatory essays that invariably prefaced conference reports. In the work of Scher and Brown there was always the feeling of pioneers aware of how much of the forest needed to be cut down before the full
7. 8.
See below, pp. 125–30. Calvin S. Brown, ‘Musico-Literary Research in the Last Two Decades [1950– 1970]’, reprinted in Cupers and Weisstein, Musico-Poetics in Perspective, pp. 201–33. 9. Stanger, ‘Literary and Musical Structuralism’, passim. 10. Kramer, ‘Dangerous Liaisons’, 159–67.
4
Words and Music
interdisciplinary vista became apparent. Scher’s list of desiderata in one essay included many of the practical results that I mentioned at the start but also called for scrutiny of terminology, compilation of a dictionary of ‘melopoetic’ terms, a ‘systematic overview’ of different forms of ‘music in literature’, and analysis of crossover areas including sound poetry, concrete poetry, and multimedia texts.11 Finally the term melopoetics had to be defined, since most of Scher’s essays defined the field, but not the discipline. It remains debatable whether such a process of definition has taken place, however often the call went out for clarity; word and music studies remains as protean in implication as ever. Scher’s three categories have been considerably refined since, notably by Werner Wolf, who objected to the term melopoetics and carried out an exercise in displacement.12 His use of the concepts of ‘medium’ and ‘intermedial’ have made a fairly convincing case for regarding the first of Scher’s categories as an overt activity, distinguishable from the ‘covert’ activities of the other two. Word and music studies accordingly moved from being a borderland between music and literature and entered the covert world of cultural studies, though this was still largely carried out from a literary standpoint. Following Brown’s review of the literature in 1970, three important publications helped to map the way forward. The proceedings of the congress on Literature and the Other Arts at Innsbruck in 1981 contained important theoretical statements by Scher, Peter Egri, and Claudia Stanger.13 Scher’s handbook on Literatur und Musik of 1984 enlarged upon some of these concerns, though there is a curious feeling to many such conferences and handbooks: the challenge to cultivate the garden is oddly unchanging and circles round many of the familiar suspects. Illumination tends to come in essays that approach specific repertories. Theory remains in a state of exhortation crossed
11.
Steven Paul Scher, ‘Melopoetics Revisited: Reflections on Theorizing Word and Music Studies’, in Walter Bernhart, Steven Paul Scher, and Werner Wolf, Defining the Field, Word and Music Studies 1 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 9–24, in particular pp. 20–1. 12. Werner Wolf, ‘Musicalized Fiction and Intermediality: Theoretical Aspects of Word and Music Studies’, in Bernhart, Scher, and Wolf, Defining the Field, Word and Music Studies 1 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 37–58. 13. Peter Egri, ‘On the Historic and Esthetic Relationship of Fiction, Music and Poetry’, in Konstantinovic´ et al., Literature and the Other Arts, pp. 229–34.
Introduction
5
with despair: where to start? And how much there remains to do before we can! The third publication in retrospect seems more substantial. Scher’s volume on Music and Text: Critical Inquiries (1992) ranged widely over institutions, issues of form and narrative, representation and semiotics, culture and convention.14 Issues of competence still surfaced from time to time; when Marshall Brown noted that the final chord of Das Lied von der Erde was dissonant and that the movement ‘refused to come to rest harmonically’, my instinct was to wonder if he had really been listening.15 The essay seemed symptomatic of the difficulties that arose when concepts such as consonance and dissonance were treated without refinement of analytical technique, a difficulty that particularly confronted literary scholars for whom ambiguity often seemed a literary attribute to be extended to music with tools of surprising brutality. But one of the chief values of interdisciplinary criticism is that it may force one to suspend confidence in instincts, even if only in the short term. All trends (and a few that looked rather tangential) were present in one landmark event, the conference on Musik als Text at Freiburg in 1993, which set out to provide a comprehensive picture of current thinking on the various ways that words and music might interact.16 Although it made little attempt to consider popular music as yet, it indicated most of the areas in which the study of words and music might operate.17 The title of an essay by Harold Powers, ‘Music as Text and Text as Music’ virtually ‘defined the field’ for the future of melopoetics and indicated something of the likely Catholicism of the undertaking by drawing on Viennese Classicism, Glarean, and Raga to do so.18 Interestingly Powers explicitly omitted such ‘familiar’ aspects as music as notated text and literature as text to be set in favour of ‘long and honourable traditions’ of personifying musical forces, 14. 15.
See above, n. 3. Marshall Brown, ‘Origins of Modernism: Musical Structures and Narrative’, in Scher (ed.), Music and Text, p. 86. 16. Hermann Danuser and Tobias Plebuch, Musik als Text: Bericht über den internationalen Kongreß der Gesellschaft für Musikforschung Freiburg im Breisgau 1993, 2 vols (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1998). 17. There is a short essay by Sabine Ketteler on ‘“I can hardly even call myself a singer …”: Manier und Manie im Werk Bob Dylans’, in Danuser & Plebuch, Musik als Text, 2, 570–3. 18. Harold Powers, ‘Music as Text and Text as Music’, in Danuser and Plebuch, Musik als Text, 1, pp. 16–37.
6
Words and Music
describing them in colourful metaphors, topical discourse, and fascinating examples of the reversal of music and text in renaissance music theory. Powers’ essay seems to settle the question, can musicology use the word ‘text’ in the spirit in which literary criticism employed it, on a positive note, though it ends with a warning against the danger of analogies between ‘other musical languages’ and ‘other languages about music’. Nonetheless there remained the problem (the substance of much of the present symposium) that Friedhelm Krummacher referred to as ‘Text im Text’.19 With few concessions to either traditional musicology or to postmodern thinkers, he summed up the double-sided nature of word and music studies: the gains of intertextuality and referentiality in clarifying expression, against the dangers of over-extended concepts of the artwork and decline in competence; in a familiar manner he called for tighter definitions against general analogies. From these fundamental questions investigation in the conference ranged out over intertextuality, the possibility of reading music theory as a text, the status of the author, the place of transcription and execution of musical texts, and the role of context. How justified is it to consider music as a kind of language? One writer asked again the ancient question as to which was the servant, music or the word.20 Musicologists deplored the chaos of current literary theory. Others wished to model musicology on linguistics. If the majority of cases took the perspective of the musical work and how it referred to texts in one way or another, there were also papers that considered how literature might behave ‘musically’. This served as a useful reminder of the origins of melopoetics in comparative literature, since one of the first serious studies of the discipline had been Scher’s monograph on Verbal Music in German Literature.21 In retrospect this approach seems as limited by the elementary categories of Formenlehre (literary ‘fugues’ and ‘sonatas’) as Scher’s work was circumscribed by the theories of German Romanticism. Both approaches were still threatened by what Brown had described as the ‘loosely metaphorical’ when he reviewed the situation in 1970.22 Most of the writers cited by Brown (Albert Lord, Bertrand Bronson, Joseph Müller-Blattau, Alfred Einstein, 19.
Friedhelm Krummacher, ‘Text im Text: Über Vokalmusik und Texttheorie’, in Danuser and Plebuch, Musik als Text, 1, pp. 45–9. 20. Gottfried Scholz, ‘Poesie–Musik: Wer ist die “padrona”, wer die “serva”’, in Danuser and Plebuch, Musik als Text, 2, pp. 205–8. 21. See above, n. 4. 22. Brown, ‘Musico-Literary Research in the Last Two Decades’, p. 203.
Introduction
7
Kerman, Sternfeld, Hinton Thomas, Jack Stein, and others) wrote as historical musicologists of a traditional kind and tended to eschew questions of general theory. Yet in the willingness to see the relationship of word and music as problematic lay the roots of later theory. With the Freiburg conference, the possible range of issues became plain to all. Beyond the Freiburg conference lay a steady stream of increasingly theoretical publications leading to the series issued by the International Association for Word and Music Studies. At least two of the series still included in their titles the words ‘defining the field’, though over a few years the problem of definition extended from the song to the cycle.23 The sensation was still of a discipline that wanted to know its ‘aims and objectives’ before the real revelations might begin. To say again that criticism, analysis, aesthetics, and history had been dealing with matters of words and music for a long time before an Association became desirable was to become aware that historical musicology (if not currently analysis) did not necessarily see a great need to change all of its working methods to meet interdisciplinary pressure. There is no greater testimony to this than the very small overlap in contributors (Anthony Newcombe and Thomas S. Grey) between the Freiburg proceedings and Scher’s Music and Text; the impression is of a body of musicologists set against a discrete interdisciplinary group, towards which music analysis, always conscious of its need for allies in the investigation of theory, made increasingly approving advances. To be set against Kramer’s view that a body of literature has to evolve before theory becomes possible is the mainstream argument that music theory had been inherently structural for a long time. Mainstream and group drifted into agreement as structuralism in other disciplines ‘caught up’ with musicology about twenty years ago; the sister disciplines then entered a postmodern, post-structuralist mode, leading to an ‘interdisciplinary breakdown of certainties’.24 The by-products of this are many and varied, and as yet subject to
23.
Bernhart, Scher, and Wolf, Defining the Field; Walter Berhhart and Werner Wolf (eds), Essays on the Song Cycle and Defining the Field, Word and Music Studies 3 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001). 24. Jonathan Dunsby, Music Analysis 1 (1981); Krummacher makes the same point in ‘Text im Text’.
8
Words and Music
many caveats. We have only started to look for what Kofi Agawu has called ‘a grammar of song’ as it became necessary to think through the ‘real’ relationship between word and music.25 That a song could be explained by drawing attention to the way in which the music underpinned the meaning of the text has been questioned in ways that Kramer has termed ‘right in principle but wrong in practice’. The very techniques by which song becomes meaningful utterance often lead to at least a partial loss of meaning; songfulness makes meaning extraneous, if not downright superfluous.26
In such a debate, new ways of looking at the word–music relationship will no doubt continue to arise. There is nothing to suggest, however, that more traditional ways of looking at the relationship are completely exhausted. The present symposium took place in the hope that new ways of viewing familiar problems and topics might arise, but also considers a number of concerns that impinge upon well-established bodies of theory. A number of topics that have been central to previous collections feature in these published proceedings: rhetoric (Cameron), mimesis (Scott), and cultural studies (Clarke). My own essay picks up themes that have been considered in the context of the lied but views them through the distorting mirror of Sprechgesang. It is one of several essays that consider changes in the word–music relationship in the course of the twentieth century (Orledge, Sharma, Wishart). The continuing influence of Kramer is perceived in Scott’s essay, while the importance of Mikhail Bakhtin is seen in his work but also in that of Clarke. Two essays that stand slightly at a tangent to the themes that have ruled in this field are those by Blezzard and Jones. The former considers aspects of translation, a subject that has tended to appear parenthetically if at all in previous collections. Jones presents the viewpoint of the lyricist and the problem of his motivation and is accordingly the most personal statement in the proceedings. The collection makes no attempt to theorize a common viewpoint, though most deal with Scher’s second category, the perennially fascinating area of ‘text within texts’ which constitutes vocal music. Analysis of music inevitably
25.
Kofi Agawu, ‘Theory and Practice in the Analysis of the Nineteenth-Century Lied’, Music Analysis 11 (1992), 3–36. 26. Lawrence Kramer, ‘Beyond Words and Music: An Essay on Songfulness’, in Bernhart, Scher, and Wolf, Defining the Field, p. 316.
Introduction
9
takes second place to socio-cultural issues in several essays, though Clarke makes the most explicit attempt to set them in a fruitful rivalry. Although his essay appears in a collection that deals with individual songs and issues of theory, it provides assurance that, for this collection at least, an author is still present in the most contemporary of musical texts.
1
Mimesis, Gesture, and Parody in Musical Word-setting Derek B. Scott
This chapter examines, compares, and contrasts three of the different ways in which words can be treated musically. I should remark at the outset that ‘gesture’ is the overarching term, since it covers anything that lends emphasis, intensity, or expression to a communicative act. Edward Cone explained that music might be considered a language of symbolic gestures, ‘of direct actions, of pauses, of startings and stoppings, of rises and falls, of tenseness and slackness, of accentuations’.1 The word ‘gesture’ usually refers to a bodily movement that either communicates or reinforces a message. Yet, there is always the possibility of using an unexpected gesture – for example, smiling when angry. Moreover, as Keith Thomas has pointed out, the body is not something that waits in a neutral state ‘until its owner makes an involuntary movement or decides to send out a signal’. He cites the stifling of symptoms of grief as evidence that ‘faces, hands, and limbs can be as significant in repose as in motion’.2 Thus, while gesture can often function mimetically, it can also be distinct from mimesis (offering different possibilities), and even at odds with mimesis. For this reason, I think it is useful to have a means of distinguishing mimesis from gesture, even though mimesis is, in fact, a particular kind of gesture. In theatre semiotics, for example, the mimetic (or mimic) sign may be restricted to facial expressions, while the gestural sign involves other bodily movement (such as waving a hand).3 1.
Edward T. Cone, The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1974), p. 164. 2. Keith Thomas, ‘Introduction’, in Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, A Cultural History of Gesture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 1– 14, n. 1. 3. See Erika Fischer-Lichte, The Semiotics of Theater, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992, originally published as Semiotik des Theaters [Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1983]), p. 14.
Mimesis, Gesture and Parody in Musical Word-setting
11
In this chapter I am using ‘mimetic’ to refer to a composer’s attempt to provide a sympathetic expression of the words and to reveal their emotional content, employing musical signifying devices that sometimes operate at the level of individual words. An example would be Schubert’s ‘Der Wanderer’. I am describing a song as ‘gestural’ where there is an attempt to provide an overall mood vehicle for the words. Of course, there are overlaps, and there are songs I would place in the gestural category, like Schubert’s ‘Die Forelle’ (‘The Trout’), that contain mimetic features. However, a gestural setting need not be directly expressive of the words – it may complement or even contradict their meaning. That thought leads me to the special case of parodic settings in which the coupling of music and words is designed to create an ironic or satirical effect. For example, the music may appear to add exaggerated expression to words, or it may deflate the content of the words, adopting a style that is perceived as oppositional to them in character. In drawing an initial contrast between mimetic and gestural interpretations of texts, we should bear in mind a distinction between the way words are combined with music and the way words are treated musically. Words may be combined with music by being sung, half sung, or spoken; but each of these combinations may then be subjected to differing kinds of treatment. To emphasize the point, we can consider briefly two examples of music involving spoken text. In Morning Heroes (1930), Arthur Bliss includes a setting of Homer’s account of Hector’s farewell to his wife Andromache from the Iliad, book 6, in which the fear of the couple’s young son and the heroic bravado of Hector himself are characterized by mimetic devices in the music accompanying the narration (Examples 1a and 1b). When employing mimesis in this way, instrumental expressive devices often anticipate vocal and verbal expression, as in Iphigenia’s narration of her dream in Act 1 of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride.4 This is a technique taken up by Mozart in certain dramatic scenes. Words succeeded by ‘word painting’ can be too predictable, even unintentionally amusing. For a contrasting example of narration against a musical background, we turn from little Astyanax, Hector’s son, to Red Sovine’s tale of little Rosa. Sovine was a star of the Louisiana Hayride radio show in the early 1950s and an accomplished exponent of storytelling
4.
‘Cette nuit j’ai revu le palais de mon père’, Act 1, scene 1.
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Words and Music
(a) "in dread at the bronze and horse-hair crest that he beheld nodding fiercely" 3 3
mf
(b) "O Zeus and all ye gods, vouchsafe ye that this my son may likewise prove even as I, pre-eminent amid the Trojans"
fp
fp
fp
fp
fp
p
Example 1: Bliss, ‘Hector’s Farewell’ from Morning Heroes. (Novello, copyright Music Sales Group.)
against a background of country-style music. That being so, one would expect to find differences between his ‘Little Rosa’ (written with Web Pierce in 1955) and the Morning Heroes example. Indeed, Sovine’s spoken monologue is accompanied by a musical gesture of the broad kind rather than a selection of mimetic devices. The accompaniment consists of a melody employing the falling chromatic semitones found in early Tin Pan Alley ballads, while the ensemble has a timbre suggesting Nashville. This combination conveys a mood to its expected audience of ‘honest sentiment’ (though listeners occupying other subject positions may find it anything but that). Sovine also uses a paralinguistic sign in ‘Little Rosa’ – that is, a sign located in the way words are delivered. Such signs often involve an emphasis or pitch given to them by the voice, but here it is a pseudo-Italian accent.5
5.
RCA LSA 3286; also to be found on Red Sovine, Greatest Hits, Vintage Vault Collection, DCD 7828.
Mimesis, Gesture, and Parody in Musical Word-setting
13
The effectiveness and affectiveness of a single broad musical gesture that envelopes the general mood of a poem (despite the variety of poetic sentiment that may be present) is illustrated by strophic song. The eighteenth-century music critic James Beattie noted that the repetition of the same air to every stanza of a long ballad required only that ‘the general tenor of the music should accord with the general nature of the sentiments’.6 Here he is close to Edward Cone, who declared that a strophic song suggests ‘that a piece of music allows a wide but not unrestricted range of possible expression’.7 One might compare, say, the reading of a lament by a performer wearing a tragic mask: the music, like such a mask, indicates an overall mood. It is true that the possibility exists of using a blank mask – such as Buster Keaton’s – into which a whole variety of emotions can be read. Satie’s scenic ‘backcloth music’, designed to suit any text, might be considered akin to the blank mask.8 Masks are especially effective in those poetic and dramatic works (usually of ancient provenance) that offer a loosely defined subject position, avoiding a ‘knowing’ form of audience address. For example, it is often difficult to tell whose side we are supposed to be on when watching the plays of Euripides – just as it is in some old British ballads, such as ‘Little Musgrave’. Masks are sometimes asked for by Berthold Brecht in his ‘epic theatre’. His characters are drawn so that they invite comparisons with archetypal persons of a particular society. Brecht distances the audience from the world of bourgeois illusionistic theatre and a psychological identification with characters by emphasizing theatrical artificiality. In the opening scene of the Die Dreigroschenoper, an attempt at ‘epic opera’, a street singer announces to the audience that they are going to hear a street ballad about the robber Macheath, known as Mackie Messer (Mack the Knife). Macheath’s archetype is the violent robber, and Brecht contrasts this
6.
James Beattie, Essay on Poetry and Music as They Affect the Mind (1776), excerpted in Edward A. Lippman (ed.), Musical Aesthetics: A Historical Reader, Vol. 1 From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (New York: Pendragon Press, 1986), pp. 215–42, n. 232 (italics as in the original). 7. Cone, The Composer’s Voice, p. 166. 8. Robert Orledge, ‘Rethinking the Relationship Between Words and Music for the Twentieth Century: The Strange Case of Erik Satie’, see below, Chapter 7, pp. 168 and 187.
14
Words and Music
socially and culturally produced type with one of nature’s killers, the shark – the shark has teeth and shows them; Macheath has a knife but nobody sees it.9 We find immediately in this well-known first song of the opera, ‘Die Moritat von Mackie Messer’ (‘The Ballad of Mack the Knife’), an example of what Brecht would call ‘gestic’ music. The opera’s composer, Kurt Weill, does not try to heighten Brecht’s text emotionally or to interpret it musically; instead he finds a style and form that increases the impact of the words by contrasting sharply in musical mood (Example 2). Neither Weill nor Brecht ever gave a systematic definition of gestische Musik (in his plays, Gestus meant for Brecht a stylized presentation of social behaviour).10 In general terms, both were agreed that, as in the last musical example, the music should function as a medium for communicating the text without trying to add psychological insight into the character singing the song or attempting the musical representation of emotions and deeds within the song. Weill’s task is to achieve a musical Verfremdungseffekt (a ‘making strange’ or distantiation effect) equal to those used by Brecht, such as masks, explanatory posters, or deliberate highlighting of theatrical artificiality by use of an on-stage narrator. An alienating effect can be achieved musically, for example, by accompanying harsh words with a sentimental tune. Instead of the song becoming a catalyst for melancholy self-indulgence, the jarring that results keeps the listener alert. In the Moritat, the music functions to some degree as a mask; the style of music contradicts what might be expected from verses about murder, robbery, arson, and rape. The accompaniment is marked to be played in the manner of a barrel-organ; the prominent added sixths in the harmony function as a sign of popular music vulgarity (note how often the sixth degree – the note A – is present),11 and the two9.
‘Und der Haifisch, der hat Zähne / Und die trägt er im Gesicht / Und Macheath, der hat ein Messer / Doch das Messer sieht man nicht.’ 10. See Michael Morley, ‘“Suiting the Action to the Word”: Some Observations on Gestus and gestische Musik’, in Kim H. Kowalke (ed.), A New Orpheus: Essays on Kurt Weill (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 183–201. 11. The prominence given to the sixth of the major scale in both melody and harmony had become a hallmark of the popular style in the nineteenth century, and raised the hackles of high-minded critics. The sixth was crucial to the development of what Peter Van der Merwe terms ‘parlour modes’, in Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 224–5.
15
Mimesis, Gesture, and Parody in Musical Word-setting (h = 66)
der
-
fisch,
mf
Und
Blues-Tempo
Hai
der
hat
Zäh
-
ne
Und
die
6
trägt
er
im
Ge - sicht
Example 2: Weill, ‘Moritat von Mackie Messer’. (© Universal Edition A.G. Vienna and European American Music Corporation, New York. Reproduced by permission, all rights reserved.)
bar melodic phrasing and tonic-dominant bass as a sign of banality. Weill varies the instrumental arrangement from verse to verse, and concludes by varying the accompaniment to include a parody of Tin Pan Alley sentimental descending chromatics. Weill’s music underlines Brecht’s satirical purpose, since it conceals the violent lyrical content just as Macheath conceals his knife and covers his bloodstained hands with gloves (‘Drauf man keine Unstat liest’ – on which no trace of his crimes is left). The real target of Brecht’s satire is, of course, capitalism, and in the larger social context Brecht has in mind the ‘out of sight’ tanks and guns of capitalist society. A sense of irony can also be conveyed by parodies of different styles. Brecht had experimented along these lines in the songs he created – usually with borrowed tunes – before collaborating with Weill.12 Parody and irony are cited by Mikhail Bakhtin as examples of ‘double-voiced’ discourse, which contains the intention of the character speaking as well as ‘the refracted intention of the author’.13 Bakhtin remarked
12. For example, ‘Erinnerung an die Marie A.’ (c. 1905). It can be heard in English on Robin Archer Sings Brecht, Vol. 2, EMI Records, EL 27 00491 (1984), track 9. 13. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’ (1934–5), in Michael Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 259–422, n. 324.
16
Words and Music
that in parodic stylization, ‘the intentions of the representing discourse are at odds with the intentions of the represented discourse; they fight against them’.14 A musical example would be the trio ‘So muss allein ich bleiben’ from Act 1 of Die Fledermaus. Johann Strauss’s music plays ironically with signs. This is evident when, at ‘O je, O je, wie rührt mich dies!’ (‘Oh dear, how this moves me!’), the musical signs associated with sorrow are suddenly exchanged for those of pleasure and excitement, thus revealing the continuing expressions of sadness to be hypocritical (Example 3). Allegro moderato
Moderato espressivo
O
Gott,
wie
rührt
mich
pp
dies!
O
5
pp
p
je,
o
je,
wie
rührt
mich
dies,
o
je,
o
je,
S
'S
i i
i
'
Example 3: Johan Strauss d.J., ‘So muss allein ich bleiben’
This irony is for the audience to perceive. However, it is something that only seems to work in comedy. If Saint-Saëns in his opera Samson et Dalila had given Delilah music with associations far removed from the words she was singing in her aria ‘Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix’ it
14.
Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, p. 364.
Mimesis, Gesture, and Parody in Musical Word-setting
17
would have struck us as absurd for Samson not to notice. In that context, we need to feel the strength of Delilah’s seductive power in order to sympathize with Samson’s plight. Yet, it does create problems in reception. If we are moved by this aria, how can we perceive it as false and dissembling?15 Here, we can call upon linguistic philosophy to assure us that no sign is available in language to guarantee the truth of an assertion, and it would therefore be vain to suppose it might exist in music. If, indeed, there were any kind of ‘assertion sign’, then, to paraphrase Donald Davidson, actors would use it when ‘only acting’.16 The ‘double-voiced’ effect can be produced by use of a mask at apparent odds with the content of the words. In music, this may be achieved by adopting a style with associations that differ from the sung words. The result may be syncretic rather than that of awkward hybridity. The rage suggested by the words of the song of Pirate Jenny in Die Dreigroschenoper, for example, was delivered with a childlike innocence and amoral equanimity by Lotte Lenja on her original recording of 1930.17 It was a reading fully compatible with Weill’s music, and allowed her to project a character of psychopathic instability rather than one twisted by a desire for vengeance. Weill can employ a musical gesture that depersonalizes in a manner akin to donning a mask, examples being the Moritat from Die Dreigroschenoper and the ‘Alabama Song’ from Mahagonny. It does not have to be the music that wears the mask. One might argue that in the aria ‘Le calme rentre dans mon cœur’, from Act 2 of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, Orestes’s words are an attempt on his part to mask his true feelings, whereas Gluck’s music unmasks his agitation with its anxious, syncopated viola part. Another kind of what might be thought of as a double-voiced effect – though perhaps not by Bakhtin – can be produced when words are interpreted by a composer in an unexpected yet complementary manner.
15.
See Ralph Locke, ‘Constructing the Oriental “other”: Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila’, Cambridge Opera Journal 3 (1991), 261–302. 16. Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), p. 270. 17. Aus der 3-Groschen-Oper, Lewis Ruth Band, dir. Theo Mackeben, Telefunken Gesellschaft, A752–755 (7 December 1930), re-released on CD by Teldec Classics International, 9031–72025–2 (1990).
18
Words and Music
In the song ‘D’amour l’ardente flamme’ from Part Four of La Damnation de Faust, the bright flame of love might be consuming Gretchen’s ‘beaux jours’, but it does not sound like that in Berlioz’s setting (Example 4). The slow tempo, the soft dynamic level, the instrumental colouring and the rhythmic sign of the heartbeat restrain the hyperbolic text with music that displays a power of understatement to equal that of Dante, who wrote in La Vita Nuova that his reaction on first encountering Beatrice was ‘frequenter impeditus ero deinceps’ (‘I shall often be troubled from now on’).18 This is not a means of expression favoured only by composers who have a predilection for classical restraint. Another example of the complementary musical gesture is found in the Parisian chansonnier Aristide Bruant’s ‘La Villette’. In that chanson, the jog-trot banality of the tune seems to run counter to the harshness and bitterness of Bruant’s verse on one level but, on another, it aptly suggests the banality of the life of the doomed ‘anti-hero’ of the song. Andante un poco lento
mour
l'ar - den
-
D'a
-
-
-
te
flam
-
me
me
mes
beaux
jours.
su
pizz.
-
Con
Strings
pp
-
Example 4: Berlioz, ‘D’amour L’ardente flamme’
18.
La Vita Nuova, Capitolo 2 (see http://www.crs4.it/Letteratura/VitaNuova/ Cap02.html).
Mimesis, Gesture, and Parody in Musical Word-setting
19
To conclude these remarks on the unexpected and untypical in musical word-setting, I want to introduce the concept of ‘markedness’, which Robert Hatten, drawing in particular upon the work of linguist Edwin Battistella, has reworked insightfully in his musical analyses.19 A marked term is one that asserts its difference or, at least, its untypicality. For instance, the term ‘dog’ is unmarked (it can refer to dogs or bitches), but the term ‘bitch’ is marked. There is often a quality of the unexpected about a marked term in music, as in an interrupted cadence, when a minor chord sounds where a major was anticipated. As examples of markedness in songs, we can look at Buddy Holly’s ‘Peggy Sue’ (Allison/Petty/Holly, 1957) and, in some ways, its parody by Blondie ‘Denis’ (Levenson, 1978).20 The drums in both are marked. Drums are not usually found to be a significant feature of a pop song unless they are marked. In ‘Peggy Sue’ markedness is achieved by the drummer playing paradiddles non-stop throughout the entire song. This certainly has an effect on the way the words are perceived – the excess of percussion casts an unusual light on them and, to the listener, may convey a feeling of body over mind, racing heartbeats, or the urgency of desire. In Blondie’s version of ‘Denis’, the drums come across as too rigid, too aggressive, too militaristic for the ingenuous confession of love found in the lyrics. The result is that it sounds like parody – a ‘jackboot’ kicking at romantic naïvety and encouraging a characteristic punk sneer. The intention, perhaps, was to make clear that the ‘blank generation’ of the punk years was not to be duped by, or find solace in, soppy love songs. This leads me to the final section of my chapter, as I ponder the words of ‘Denis’ and wonder if they are deliberately awful or accidentally awful. I do not know the answer to that, but the issue of the song with trite lyrics is worth our consideration. It is by no means a recent phenomenon: ‘For music any words are good enough’, wrote James Robinson Planché in his translation (1846) of Aristophanes’s The Birds. Yet, in certain genres (for example, French chanson) and in historical certain periods (Elizabethan England) words seem to matter more than
19.
See Robert S. Hatten, Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), especially pp. 34–50; Edwin L. Battistella, Markedness: The Evaluative Superstructure of Language (New York: State University of New York Press, 1990). 20. ‘Peggy Sue’, Coral Q 72293 (1957); ‘Denis’, Chrysalis CHS 2204 (1978).
20
Words and Music
in others. In the late nineteenth century, Andrew Lang announced, ‘every one admits that most of our popular songs, with the exception of Dibden’s [sic] and a few others, are, considered as poetry, worthless.’21 Beattie considered that good music set to bad poetry was inexpressive and absurd – though ‘bad’ words have often been found persuasive or, at least, non-jarring in certain musical settings.22 Offering a reason for this, Susanne Langer has argued that it is because words lose their individual identity in song.23 Lawrence Kramer, on the other hand, insists that a poem continues to retain its own life, since it is ‘never really assimilated into a composition; it is incorporated’.24 Yet, how far do the music and poem maintain an independent existence if you are familiar with a song combining the two, but have not first encountered the poem as a separate entity? Why is it that, if you know a song by heart, you can remember the poem only by going through the song mentally, and it is difficult to recite the words without that aid? As a personal illustration of this, I confess I can recite Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Mandalay’ only by ‘singing’ Oley Speaks’s song ‘On the Road to Mandalay’ silently in my head. Moreover, I have found that even the content of the words registers on my mind in an odd fashion. I was once introducing this song to an audience and forgot completely in which country Mandalay is located – even though Burma is mentioned in the third line of the first verse. Yet, when singing the song, I have always felt that the music is functioning as an emotional vehicle for the words, and that I am ‘serving’ the words dutifully, giving them full meaning and expression. This surely illustrates that the sung poem registers in the unconscious in a manner distinct from that of the spoken poem. It can, no doubt, be explained partly using Edward Cone’s idea that the composer appropriates a poem by turning it into music. However, the bulk of Cone’s argument is directed to showing that the composer provides one reading among many. In a well-known and admired critique along these lines, he discusses Schubert’s transformation of
21.
Andrew Lang, ‘Introduction’, in Edmund H. Garrett, collector and illustrator, Elizabethan Songs in Honour of Love and Beautie (London: Osgood, McIlvaine and Co., 1891), p. xxi. The reference to ‘Dibden’ is, recte, Charles Dibdin. 22. See Beattie, Essay on Poetry and Music, p. 233. 23. Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Scribner, 1953), pp. 149–68. 24. Lawrence Kramer, Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), p. 127 (italics as in the original).
Mimesis, Gesture, and Parody in Musical Word-setting
21
Goethe’s detached narrator in ‘Erlkönig’.25 My argument, here, is that the music of a song (whether the composer wishes it or not) exerts a kind of cognitive dominance over the poem, which appears strange because music acts upon the mind through perception rather than cognition. Somehow, the content and meaning of the words seem to register fully only in the course of the song’s performance if, and I repeat this point, the poem is unknown before an acquaintance with the song. When that is the case, then in order to appreciate the poem as a separate entity and to interpret it in a new way, considerable effort is needed to suppress the memory of the song. The commonality that Lawrence Kramer finds in both poems and compositions is the mediation of rhythm that turns time into form.26 Since songs mainly involve poetry, Bakhtin’s assertion that the majority of poetic genres require a unified language system from the poet and tend to be ‘single-styled’ lends persuasiveness to Kramer’s theory of structural rhythm in song.27 Kramer, himself, notes that poetry organizes time in a different way to the novel, mentioning the latter’s fondness for enigma-making, multiple narrators, and manipulation of time frames.28 Some singers are prepared to disrupt the structural rhythm of a melodic setting of words by breaking a phrase to take a breath. Elvis Costello sings ‘a hundred [breath] different ways’ on his recording of Charles Aznavour’s ‘She’, and Paul McCartney sings ‘mist rolling in from [breath] the sea’ on his recording of ‘Mull of Kintyre’.29 How can a singer do this, at the same time as appearing to pour considerable emotion into the delivery of the words? Is it that the words are merely a vehicle for musical-emotional display, rather than the music being a means of deepening the meaning of words? Put another way, does musical-emotional gesture override the need to communicate verbal meaning? After all, an actor could not treat words in this way without being considered incompetent. Neither could some singers in other cultural contexts. In the French chanson tradition, with its literary
25. Cone, The Composer’s Voice, pp. 24–6. 26. Kramer, Music and Poetry, p. 10. 27. See Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, pp. 264–6. 28. See Kramer, Music and Poetry, p. 10. 29. ‘She’, Mercury 562 2682 (1999); ‘Mull of Kintyre’, Parlophone 6563776.1 (1977).
22
Words and Music
emphasis, this treatment of lyrics is exceedingly rare. It is evident that words matter more in certain songs, and in some song traditions, than in others. It is well known that people react very differently to words in combination with music than to words alone. A plausible reason for the moral anxiety some feel about music accompanying ‘unwholesome’ words might be found in Kierkegaard’s argument that music, unlike words, is not part of a moral domain.30 It is a rarity, for example, to hear anyone complain that a play or a novel deals with the subject of gangsters, but not uncommon to hear complaints about the moral reprehensibility of ‘gangsta’ rap. Returning to the matter of poor lyrics, perhaps we need to ask if music can sometimes be held to blame on the grounds that the way music ‘turns time into form’ encourages lyrical banality and predictability. For all its flexibility, musical rhythm tends to favour regularity of stress, especially when tunefulness is required. In this connection, we may compare instructively two more or less identical songs by the nineteenth-century entertainer and songwriter Henry Russell: ‘We Have Been Friends Together’ (words by Caroline Norton) and ‘The Happy Days of Childhood’ (words by George Pendrill). Russell clearly became dissatisfied with his musical setting of Norton’s poem, and desired to replace her words with newly tailored verses by Pendrill. The reason for his discomfort is to be found, no doubt, in the conflict between the shifting stresses of the lines of Norton’s stanzas and the regular stresses of his melody. Here, for example, is the final stanza of Norton’s poem. We have been sad together, We have wept with bitter tears O’er the grass green graves where slumber’d The hopes of early years: The voices which are silent there Would bid thee clear thy brow; We have been sad together, Oh! What shall part us now.
To add to the stress problems he encountered in this verse, there is enjambment (‘with bitter tears’ in line two needs to run straight on to
30.
His best-known exposition of this idea is in his essay ‘The Immediate Stage of the Erotic, or The Musical Erotic’; see Either/Or, Vol. 1, trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian M. Swenson (London: Oxford University Press, 1944), pp. 35–110, especially p. 59.
Mimesis, Gesture, and Parody in Musical Word-setting
23
‘O’er the grass green graves’ in line three); it is a poetic technique that composers often find difficult to mould into convincing musical phrases. A poet is unlikely to wish to retain the same stress patterns from one line to another or from one stanza to another – variety of stress is, of course, a means of bring richness to verse. Yet, look now at the words Pendrill provides for his final stanza; these not only preserve the stresses intact of his first stanza, but also possess a rhythmic regularity that pervades almost every line. Then bless the steps of childhood, And let their sports be gay, That they, at least in memory, May live to bless the day When they were blithe and happy, In palace or in cot;– O! the happy days of childhood Can never be forgot.
Russell was so satisfied with the rhythmic fit of his replacement text that he did not mind it contradicting the mimetic devices he had composed to suit Norton’s words. The second half of each of Norton’s stanzas introduces a melancholy contrast between past and present, to which Russell responded by moving to the minor key. In the reworking, he retains that conventional device for expressing sadness even though it is inappropriate for some of his new words, such as ‘When they were blithe and happy’ in the verse quoted above (Example 5). To explain the ‘good song despite bad lyrics’ phenomenon, we need to investigate further the question of structural rhythm and explore some of the differences between the structural rhythm of a poem and that of a musical composition. No doubt, the awkward and irregular metrical feet of the poem ‘Baldovan’ by that archetypal purveyor of excruciating verse, William McGonagall, are found irrational and absurd to someone listening to its being spoken aloud. Yet, while irregular poetic stresses can create difficulty, music can iron out irregularities of scansion by taking action at the level of the bar, the phrase, or the musical metre. Let us take the first and final stanzas of ‘Baldovan’ as an illustration.31
31.
William McGonagall, Poetic Gems (1890; repub. London: Duckworth, 1989).
24
Words and Music Andante Affetuoso
Then
bless
6
the steps
they,
at least
10
they
were blithe
14
and
-
py days
of
hap
-
child -
And
let
memo - ry,
in
child - hood,
of
hap
May
py,
In
hood
their sports
live
to
Can
be
bless
the
day.
or
ne - ver
in
That
When
cot;
O!
be
for - got.
gay,
pa - lace
the
Example 5: Russell, ‘The Happy Days of Childhood’
The scenery of Baldovan Is most lovely to see, Near by Dighty Water, Not far from Dundee. Then there’s the little loch near by, Whereon can be seen every day Numerous wild ducks swimming And quacking in their innocent play.
It may seem as if McGonagall has decided wilfully that his verse must not scan, though every other line must rhyme. However, music does not face the same scanning problems as poetry. A melisma can be used to extend a poetic foot deficient in one or two syllables, and notes of short duration may be employed where excessive enthusiasm has swollen a foot with a rash of syllables. Thus, a melody can be devised that can accommodate both of these stanzas, although admittedly the fit may not be described as elegant (Example 6). A melisma may be used to give emphasis to the word ‘lovely’ in the first stanza, and then the notes of that melisma are available to absorb the extra syllables in the equivalent place in the final stanza. The single note for the word ‘Not’ in the last line of the first stanza, can be preceded in the final stanza by an anacrusis and then broken down into notes of
Mimesis, Gesture, and Parody in Musical Word-setting
25
shorter duration to accommodate the words ‘And quacking in’. In the setting I provide, a further attempt is made to mask the awkwardness of this line: bar 3 of the song’s introduction is revealed at this point to have been not just a gratuitous splash of local colour in the form of ‘Scotch snaps’, but also an anticipation of the quacking ducks for whom it now functions as ‘word-painting’. A musical device such as this, of course, only has implicative power with the benefit of hindsight. Not all is successfully accomplished, however. We return to problems created by stress. English poetry relies more on accent than quantity – on the way words are stressed rather than the length of their vowel sounds. In spite of the Russell song discussed earlier, it is fair to say that music is generally flexible in handling verbal stresses and can offer plausible solutions to awkward changes of stress in verse. All the same, there sometimes seems to be a musical need to stress the ‘wrong’ word or syllable, as I have done by placing a musical accent on ‘Not’ rather than the word ‘far’ in the first stanza. Here, my reason was that the exact repetition of the previous phrase seemed musically more pleasing. The importance given to verbal stress does vary from culture to culture. Quantity took precedence over stress in Latin and Greek prosody. Settings of the French language can be very fluid in the treatment of stress: one has only to think of Bizet’s melody for Carmen’s ‘L’amour est un oiseaux rebelle’. However, if the setting I have provided for ‘Baldovan’ is in any way persuasive, it is owing to the cohesive power of a musical gesture that provides associations appropriate to the poem as a whole – here a 6/8 metre joined to a pentatonic melody typifies a pastoral topic. Thus it is that verse of dubious quality may help reveal to us the compositional processes, techniques, and expressive devices involved in musical word-setting.
26
Example 6: Baldovan
Words and Music
Mimesis, Gesture, and Parody in Musical Word-setting
27
2
Rhetoric and Music: The Influence of a Linguistic Art Jasmin Cameron
Introduction Interrelationships between music and the spoken arts – artes dicendi (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) – are at once obvious and unclear.1 The idea of music as a rhetorical art rests on the metaphor of music as a language.2
The ‘conversion’ of a linguistic system, such as rhetoric, to a musical one would appear to be a logical step in theory: after all, music, too, is considered to be a kind of language. Working on this assumption, what could be more natural to apply a system originating in one kind of language to another? However, it is only when the consequences of such an adaptation process are reviewed that it becomes evident how many points of comparison arise: while some of them bring out the similarities between words and music, others highlight the differences. One aim of this paper will be to examine these issues by specific reference to the relationship between rhetoric and music. The paper will provide insight into the role of rhetoric in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury culture and suggest how it was absorbed into the musical theory and practice of the day. The second section will offer an evaluation of our modern attitude to, and understanding of, rhetoric. In the third and final section I will attempt a rhetorical critique on a short section of vocal music from this period in order to demonstrate how a rhetorical analysis of music from this time, if undertaken with care, can remain appropriate and relevant. 1.
George J. Buelow, ‘Rhetoric and Music’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1st edition, 20 vols (London: Macmillan, 1980), vol. 15, p. 793. 2. Mark Evan Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 61.
Rhetoric and Music: the influence of a linguistic art
I
29
Representation of the Text as Conceived by Theorists of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
The Relevance of Rhetoric to Musical Analysis Although some modern commentators are sceptical about the links between rhetoric and music, it is important not to underestimate the role played by rhetoric in Renaissance and Baroque culture and the influence that it had on many of its ‘sister’ arts.3 Rhetoric was originally a linguistic ‘art’, ‘the art of speaking or writing so as to persuade people’.4 It was a discipline that prescribed not only a structure but also a style for oratory in the public life of the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome. It is believed that the tradition of rhetoric was introduced to Greece by the sophist Gorgias in about 428 BCE. The development of this art was a gradual process and was aided by the contributions of several different philosophers, who included Protagoras, Antiphon, Lysias, Isocrates, and Plato. From the start, rhetoric was conceived, particularly by Gorgias himself, as a type of power: the power of persuasion. Already then, the art of persuading the listener no longer depended solely on the principles of argument, since it also encompassed any other method that would move the hearer, including forms of prose. Here we see the beginnings of elocutio: the careful use and arrangement of phrases and words for effect. However, Plato, in his books Gorgias and Phaedrus, voiced his concerns about the power that rhetoricians held over their audiences. He held back from classifying rhetoric as an Art, claiming that it was not centred on knowledge: the orator merely had to convince his audience through the powers of speech that he ‘knew more than the expert’.5 In a situation like this, he says, there is a danger that the illinformed or ignorant will be easily influenced, and as a result, justice or opinion may be corrupted. Of course, Plato’s belief that a rhetorician should not be able to exercise as much power as a philosopher probably contributed to his stance in this matter. 3.
Brian Vickers is among the more forceful sceptics: ‘… how far can the terms of rhetoric be applied directly to music? How far can one aesthetic system, a linguistic one, be adapted to another, non-linguistic?’ ‘Figures of Rhetoric/Figures of Music?’, Rhetorica 2 (1984), 2. 4. Paul Procter (ed.), Longman New Generation Dictionary (Harlow: Longman, 1981), p. 586. 5. M. L. Clarke, Rhetoric at Rome: A Historical Survey (London: Cohen & West, 1953), p. 3.
30
Words and Music
Aristotle, a pupil of Plato, formed a different opinion on the subject. His main work on the subject, The Art of Rhetoric, is regarded as one of the foundation stones of the discipline. In this treatise Aristotle identifies three distinct areas of persuasion: ethos (arising from the speaker’s own characteristics); pathos (arising from the audience’s emotions); and logical proof, which is dependent on the particular argument. The actual nature of the speech is dependent on the event in question. Speeches intended for the courts of law are termed forensic (judicial), those concerned with politics are deliberative; and those relating to occasional events are epideitic. Aristotle also recognizes the importance of the role of the listener: The kinds of Rhetoric are three in number, corresponding to the three kinds of hearers. For every speech is composed of three parts: the speaker, the subject of which he treats, and the person to whom it is addressed, I mean the hearer, to whom the end or object of the speech refers.6
The importance of oratory in ancient Greece must not be underestimated. In Athens, and in many other cities, both public speaking and activity in the law courts were part of everyday life. As a consequence, teachers of oratory were in great demand, and rhetoric became an essential part of the curriculum. What is notable about the eventual adoption of rhetoric in Rome is that most of the treatises there were practical rather than abstract: whereas Aristotle’s treatise is more abstract, those of Cicero (excepting his final two works) and Quintilian tend to be more prescriptive. Not only are an ideal form and layout suggested but, in addition, numerous figures calculated to add to the persuasive power of a speech are identified. In Rome both judicial and deliberative oratory had a more prominent role than epideitic oratory. The links between music and rhetoric have their roots already in Antiquity. Quintilian recognized the similarities: Music has two modes of expression in the voice and in the body (music includes dancing); for both voice and body require to be controlled by appropriate rules … Now I ask you whether it is not absolutely necessary for the orator to be acquainted with all these methods of expression which are concerned firstly with gesture, secondly with the arrangements of words and thirdly with the inflexions of the voice, of which a great variety are required in pleading … But eloquence does vary both tone
6. Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, trans. by John Henry Freese (London: Heinemann, 1926), p. 33.
Rhetoric and Music: the influence of a linguistic art
31
and rhythm, expressing sublime thoughts with elevation, pleasing thoughts with sweetness, and ordinary with gentle utterance, and in every expression of its art is in sympathy with the emotions of which it is the mouth-piece. It is by the raising, lowering or inflexion of the voice that the orator stirs the emotions of his hearers, and the measure, if I may repeat the term, of voice and phrase differs according as we wish to rouse the indignation or the pity of the judge. For, as we know, different emotions are roused even by the various musical instruments, which are incapable of reproducing speech … an orator will assuredly pay special attention to his voice, and what is so specially the concern of music as this?7
Following the revival of interest in Antiquity during the Renaissance and the rediscovery of the works of the Classical writers, rhetoric became such a fundamental part of education and cultural life during the Renaissance and Baroque that its influence permeated many different areas. Rhetoric may appear false and cumbersome to us today, but in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was so deeprooted that educated society found nothing strange in embodying it in all modes of life: ‘rhetoric as a model of composition, extemporising and evaluation was an ingrained habit of thought’.8 George J. Buelow comments: The humanistic basis of education aspiring to teach every student the art of rhetorical eloquence permeated musical thought for centuries. As early as the first decades of the sixteenth century Italian musicians sought a closer tie between rhetoric and music.9
These comments help us to understand why musicians and composers steeped in this cultural tradition would embed rhetorical concepts as a matter of course in their music. But while rhetoric provided a ready vocabulary for the composer, learning (and using) it merely by imitation must also have occurred. Composers as if instinctively employed rhetorical devices: they were apt to reproduce rhetorical effects without necessarily comprehending the potential of the tools they were using. Leopold Mozart comments on the instinctive use of rhetorical devices in his Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule:
7.
Quintilian, The ‘Institutione Oratoria’, trans. by H. E. Butler, 5 vols (London: Heinemann, 1920), vol. 1, pp. 171–3. 8. Elaine R. Sisman, Haydn and the Classical Variation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 19. 9. George J. Buelow, ‘The Loci Topici and Affect in Late Baroque Music: Heinichen’s Practical Demonstration’, Music Review 27 (1966), 16.
32
Words and Music The Appoggiature are little notes which stand between the ordinary notes and are not reckoned as part of the bar-time. They are demanded by Nature herself to bind the notes together, thereby making a melody more song-like. I say by Nature herself, for it is undeniable that even a peasant closes his peasant-song with grace notes … Nature herself forces him to do this. In the same way the simplest peasant often uses figures of speech and metaphors without knowing it.10
Vocal music, naturally, was a prime candidate for the application of rhetorical ideals and concepts. In its function as an oration it enjoyed the additional dimension of music, which could serve to underline and comment on the words and further persuade the listener. … in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries persuasive speech rooted in the instruction of Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian became synonymous with the Baroque composer’s purpose in writing vocal music. Just as all good oratory must stir the emotions, so too in Baroque vocal music, emotion – or affect – became a composer’s goal.11
Within a culture so steeped in rhetoric it was natural to apply the principles of this discipline to the other arts. Rhetoric, therefore, becomes an important, indeed inescapable, issue to consider when analysing music of this period. A musical-rhetorical analysis will ultimately help us to understand further the composer’s aims: which emotions was he trying to stimulate in the listener and how did he go about it? From this starting point further issues arise: how aware was the listener of the musical-rhetorical structure and devices, and how, exactly, were these perceived and understood? A second major influence on the thought process of musical theorists of the time (and one that had, in fact, a reinforcing effect on the use of rhetoric in music) was the work of the French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650): What characterizes the men of the generation of Descartes is above all the will to dominate, to control events, to eliminate chance and the irrational. This attitude was present in every field …12
10.
Leopold Mozart, A Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing, trans. by Editha Knocker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 166; quoted in Sisman, Haydn and the Classical Variation, p. 20. 11. Buelow, ‘The Loci Topici and Affect in Late Baroque Music’, 161–2. 12. René Descartes, Discourse on Method and the Meditations, trans. and with an Introduction by F. E. Sutcliffe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968); this citation is taken from the Introduction, p. 21.
Rhetoric and Music: the influence of a linguistic art
33
This description mirrors the aims of musical rhetoric and the intentions of composers of the day: to control the feelings of their audience. Descartes is credited with founding rationalism (knowledge acquisition through reasoning or rationale). His philosophical theory is concerned with ‘dualism’; he defined the differences between res extensa and res cogitans – physical space or ‘objects located outside the mind’ and mental space or ‘objects located within the mind’.13 One of his later works, Passions de l’âme (1646), attempts to explain some elements of human behaviour within this framework of dualism; this work was to have a profound influence on Baroque musical thought: … the soul may have pleasures of its own, but as to those which are common to it, and the body, they depend entirely on the passions, so that the men whom they can most move are capable of partaking most of enjoyment in this life.14
Thus: … perception is a ‘passion’ since it involves the soul’s taking in or ‘receiving’ some representation.15
Naturally, rhetoric was the ideal vehicle whereby to rouse the ‘passions’ and ‘affect’ the soul. Hence, whenever rhetorical devices were employed for affect in music, the listener became a co-participant via the act of perceiving these gestures. A double effect of ‘passions’ occurs here. Passions such as joy or sadness are invoked by musical affect in addition to perception, which Descartes classed as a passion in itself. This climate of philosophical thought, coupled with the educational environment, explains in part why there is such a profusion of musical literature referring to ‘affect’ in music. However, the effect of rhetorical devices would have been lost without an audience that had at least some understanding of such a system. As mentioned earlier, the listener needs to be able to perceive the meaning in order to have his emotions moved accordingly. There is, admittedly, a problem with carrying out rhetorical analysis on music from this period, since it is never possible to state conclusively what the composer ‘meant’ (it is impossible, in general, to state conclusively what a composer ‘meant’ 13. Thomas B. Sheridan, ‘Descartes, Heidegger, Gibson, and God: Toward an Eclectic Ontology of Presence’, Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 8 (1999), 552. 14. René Descartes, The Philosophical Works, trans. by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), vol. 2, p. 427. 15. John Cottingham, Descartes (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 153.
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Words and Music
by analysis alone – but even less so in this case), each individual listener having a different understanding of what he or she is hearing. In addition, within a culture so deeply permeated by rhetoric a form of classical conditioning (or conditioned response) would have operated. Classical conditioning is a form of associative learning that suggests that a particular response to this type of music will occur: through education or training, the listener is conditioned to understand rhetorical gesture and respond to the gestures in a certain way.16 To some extent, each Baroque listener would have perceived rhetorical gestures in a similar vein. However, our modern understanding of music of the era is bound to be very different from that of a contemporary listener because we are not conditioned to ‘respond’ to the music in rhetorical terms. Even with a new-found awareness of rhetoric and its relation to music of the time we must still be wary of our own rhetorical interpretation, since our rhetorical ‘conditioning’ will never be the same as that of a Baroque listener. Rhetoric and Music So far, only the general connections between rhetoric and music have been examined: that is, their common aim of attempting to persuade the listener of the contents of the oration or music. However, the links go much deeper. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century musical treatises testify to this: they show the musician absorbing and encompassing the theories of Classical rhetoric to produce a musical theory derived from this ancient discipline. The Art of Rhetoric is an ancient tradition, dating back beyond the fifth century BCE, and was associated with the judicial system. The system was concerned mainly with the presentation of an argument: that is, the persuasiveness of a speech. The Art of Rhetoric is still very much in evidence in our law courts today: the presentation of a case to gain the sympathy of the listener, in this case, the jury. The Phases of Composition: Classical writers laid down a process for composing an oration. Its components were commonly described as follows: inventio dispositio 16.
Invention Arrangement
Rita L. Atkinson et al., Introduction to Psychology (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993), pp. 254–5; what psychologists refer to as classical conditioning relates to the philosophers’ rationalism: associative learning.
Rhetoric and Music: the influence of a linguistic art
elocutio memoria pronuncio
35
Expression Memory Delivery
Quintilian gives a clear account of these five stages: The art of oratory, as taught by most authorities, and those the best, consists of five parts: – invention, arrangement, expression, memory, and delivery or action (the two latter terms being expressed synonymously). But all speech expressive of purpose involves also a subject and words. If such expression is brief and contained within the limits of one sentence, it may demand nothing more. For not only what we say and how we say it is of importance, but also the circumstances under which we say it. It is here that the need of arrangement comes in. But it will be impossible to say everything demanded by the subject, putting each thing in its proper place, without the aid of memory. It is for this reason that memory forms the fourth department. But a delivery, which is rendered unbecoming either by voice or gesture, spoils everything and almost entirely destroys the effect of what is said. Delivery therefore must be assigned the fifth place.17
This process of invention is frequently referred to by music theorists of the Renaissance and Baroque, immediately illustrating that musicians were profoundly influenced by rhetoric. Johannes Lippius (1585–1612) was one theorist who commented on the many parallels between rhetoric and music in his treatises, and who drew on rhetorical theory to support and construct his musical premises.18 Discussion of the compositional process using oratorical terminology occurs also in Mattheson’s Der vollkommene Kapellmeister (1739).19 What is interesting to observe is that Mattheson is in fact rather selective in his matching up of the rhetorical and musical equivalents. Memoria has no great significance for the musical ‘oration’ (at least, when the latter is not improvised), so it is silently omitted from the parallel. Structure: In Classical Rhetoric an oration was organized according to a structure (the dispositio phase of composition) that prescribed a pattern 17. 18.
Quintilian, The ‘Institutione Oratoria’, 1, 383–5 (italics as in the original). A detailed discussion of Lippius’s rhetorical and musical ideas is found in Benito V. Rivera, German Music in the Early Seventeenth Century: The Treatises of Johannes Lippius (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1974), pp. 167–85. 19. Ernest C. Harriss, Johann Mattheson’s Der vollkommene Capellmeister (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 1981).
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for presenting a case. An outline of Classical oratorical structure is given in Table 1.20 Again, for the musician, with his ingrained rhetorical training, it was a natural and logical progression to translate this structure into an ‘organised compositional plan based on rhetorical theory’.21 The quotations included in Table 2, originally used as guidelines for the translation of oratory to dance, reveal further the similarities between music and oratory.22 Table 1: The Structure of a Classical Oration Element
Description
exordium
An introduction where the speaker may attempt to ingratiate himself/herself with the audience: ‘The rhetorical manoeuvres this involved are still recognisable by connoisseurs of the after-dinner speech: flattering allusion to the eminence of the auditors (‘this distinguished company’), the speaker’s confession of his own inadequacy (‘ill qualified as I am’), the appeal for goodwill and a fair hearing (‘if I may ask you to bear with me’) …’
narratio
Where the speaker generalises about the case, provides an outline and perhaps background information.
confirmatio confutatio
Supporting arguments are introduced, together with evidence. The speaker takes this opportunity to anticipate any arguments against his case, thus further persuading his audience that he has a solid grasp of the case he is handling.
peroratio
Conclusion, summing up.
20.
The number of sections in an oration varies, depending on which treatise is being referred to. For example, Rhetorica ad Herennium cites six parts – divisio being included between narratio and confirmatio. The quotation in Table 1 referring to ‘connoisseurs of the after-dinner speech’ is taken from Walter Nash, Rhetoric: The Wit of Persuasion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), p. 9. 21. Peter Seymour, ‘Oratory and Performance’, in John Paynter et al. (eds), Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought, 2 vols (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), vol. 2, p. 916. 22. Patricia Ranum, ‘Audible Rhetoric and Mute Rhetoric: The 17th-Century French Sarabande’, Early Music 14 (1986), 28–30.
Rhetoric and Music: the influence of a linguistic art
37
Table 2: The Application of Oratorical Guidelines to Dance Element
Description
exordium
The orator should speak gently and peacefully on rather a low pitch. His face and gestures should be restrained, modest and slow. He should not gesture with his hands until he has uttered several sentences.
narratio
Any figure of rhetoric used in this section should be emphatic (e.g., an exclamation); increasing emotion should not lead to vehement speech or exaggerated gestures this early in the oration. Instead, the orator should add emphasis by introducing a new speech rhythm and tone of voice, at the same time moving his hands more expressively than before. Phrase lengths are more varied and the speed of words is increased. Here the orator employs his most powerful rhetorical figures, as he struggles to ‘unsettle the minds’ of his audience. To make his arguments ‘strong and invincible’, he employs exaggerated figures of speech. Abruptly varying the rhythms of his words he assumes the vehement tones of voice suitable for the figures and mimes them with his hands to increase their impact.
confirmatio
peroratio
The orator abruptly changes his voice. He usually cannot keep a note of triumph and pomposity from his voice, for he realises he has convinced his audience. His increasingly hasty words, interspersed with emphatic short units, are reinforced by the rapid and forceful motions of his entire body, as he ends his argument with an emotional statement of ‘his doubts, his thoughts about what may happen, and his hopes and fears’.23
German music theorists of the period based their recommended methods of organising a composition around rhetorical theory. Joachim Burmeister, in his Musica Poetica of 1606, refers to a compositional plan that is clearly derived from the structure of the oration:
23.
R. Bary, La rhétorique françoise, 2 vols. (Paris, 1665), i, 237.
38
Words and Music Sectioning the piece into affections means its division into periods for the purpose of studying its artfulness and using it as a model for imitation. A piece has three parts: (1) the exordium, (2) the body of the piece, (3) the ending.The exordium is the first period or affection of the piece. It is often adorned by fugue, so that the ears and mind of the listener are rendered attentive to the song, and his good will is won over. The exordium extends up to the point where the fugal subject ends with the introduction of a true cadence. This is seen to happen where a new subject definitely different from the fugal subject is introduced. However, examples do not confirm that all musical pieces should always begin with the ornament of fugue … The body of the musical piece is a series of affections or periods between the exordium and the ending. In this section, textual passages similar to the various arguments of the confirmation in rhetoric are instilled in the listener’s mind in order that the proposition (sententia) be more clearly grasped and considered. The body should not be protracted too much, lest that which is overextended arouse the listener’s displeasure. For everything that is excessive is odious and usually turns into a vice. The ending is the principal cadence where either or all the musical movement [modulatio] ceases or where one or two voices stop while others continue with a brief passage called supplementum. By means of this, the forthcoming close in the music is more clearly impressed on the listener’s awareness.24
Mattheson, similarly, has clear ideas about the structure of a composition: Our musical disposition is different from the theoretical arrangement of a mere speech only in theme, subject or object: hence it observes those six parts which are prescribed to an orator, namely the introduction, report, discourse, corroboration, confutation and conclusion. Exordium, Narratio, Propositio, Confirmatio, Confutatio, and Peroratio … The Exordium is the introduction and beginning of a melody, wherein the goal and the entire purpose must be revealed, so that the listeners are prepared and stimulated to attentiveness … The Narratio is so to speak a report, a narration, through which the meaning and character of the herein-contained discourse is pointed out. It occurs with the entrance or beginning of the vocal part or the most significant concerted part, and relates to the Exordium, which has preceded, by means of a skilled connection. The Propositio or the actual discourse contains briefly the content or goal of the musical oration, and is of two sorts: simple or compound, wherein also belongs the varied or embellished Propositio in music, of which nothing is mentioned in rhetoric …
24.
Joachim Burmeister, Musica Poetica, trans. by Benito V. Rivera (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 203–5.
Rhetoric and Music: the influence of a linguistic art
39
The Confirmatio is an artistic corroboration of the discourse and in melodies is commonly found in the well conceived repetitions which are used beyond expectations … The Confutatio is a dissolution of the exceptions and may be expressed in melody either through combining, or even through quotation and refutation of foreign appearing ideas: For through just such antitheses, if they are well stressed, the hearing is strengthened in its joy, and everything which might run against it in dissonances and syncopations is smoothed and resolved. Meanwhile one does not find this aspect of disposition in melodies as much as in other things: yet it is truly one of the most beautiful. The Peroratio finally is the end or conclusion of our musical oration, which must produce an especially emphatic impression, more so than all other parts. And this occurs not only in the course or progress of the melody, but especially in the epilogue, be it in thorough bass or in a stronger accompaniment; whether or not one has heard this ritornello previously. Custom has established that in arias we close with almost the very same passages and sounds with which we have begun: consistent with which then our peroration is replaced by our Exordium.25
So, as in an oration, the theorists’ ideas concerned the presentation and development of an idea – in this case a musical idea. Sonata ‘form’ reflects this layout: One can easily see how such a layout transfers to sonata form with the exordium, narratio and (perhaps) propositio becoming the exposition of the latter form, the confirmatio (and possibly the confutatio) the development, and the confutatio and peroratio the recapitulation.26
Figures: The area of rhetoric adopted by music which has been the subject of the closest appraisal is that of musical figures (Figurenlehre, literally ‘Doctrine of Figures’, is the name German scholars of the early 1900s gave to the general corpus of prescriptive and interpretative statements about musical figures found in theoretical sources of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). The problematic nature of Figurenlehre is examined later in this paper. Such musical figures were based on the concept of the ‘figures of speech’ used by the orators. The development and importance of these figures of speech can be traced back as far as Aristotle. Both Quintilian and Cicero refer to them, emphasising their use as decorati, as this extract from Quintilian’s De Institutione Oratoria demonstrates: 25. Harriss, Der Vollkommene Capellmeister, pp. 470–2. 26. Seymour, ‘Oratory and Performance’, p. 916.
40
Words and Music What the Greeks call frásin, we in Latin call elocutio or style. Style is revealed both in individual words and in groups of words. As regards the former, we must see that they are Latin, clear, elegant and well-adapted to produce the desired effect. As regards the latter, they must be correct, aptly placed and adorned with suitable figures.27
The anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium (which is thought to be contemporary with Cicero’s work) lists forty-five such figures, shown in Figure 1.28 These figures of speech were used for the embellishment of an oration, to ‘decorate’ the ideas and so further persuade and move the emotions of the listener. The ten so-called ‘Special Figures of Speech’ later became known as ‘tropes’. What sets them apart from the other figures of speech is the fact that the language ‘departs from the ordinary meaning of words and is with certain grace applied in another sense’.29 The following quotation gives definitions (Classical) and examples (sixteenth-century) of a specimen figure of speech and a specimen trope: Gradatio (climax): [figure] Quintilian: Schema: A more obvious and less natural application of art [than acervatio] and should therefore be more sparingly employed. It … repeats what has been already said and, before passing to a new point, dwells on those which precede. Puttenham: Peace makes plenty, plenty makes pride, Pride breeds quarrel, and quarrel brings war. Nominatio (Onomatopoeia) Quintilian: Trope: The creation of a word … scarcely permissible to a Roman. It is true that many words were created this way by the original founders of the language who adapted them to suit the sensation which they expressed. Peacham: 1. A hurliburly, creaking. 2. The roaring of lions, the bellowing of bulls. 3. Luds-town of Lud, now London. 4. Scholarlike, thickskin, pinchpenny, bellygod (glutton), pickthank (flatterer).30
27. Quintilian, The ‘Institutione Oratoria’, vol. 4, pp. 194–5. 28. Rhetorica ad Herennium, Book 4, quoted in James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California, 1974), p. 21. 29. [Ab usitata verborum potestate recedatur atque in aliam rationem cum quadem venustate oratio conferatur. ad Herennium IV xxxi.42.], quoted in Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, p. 20. 30. Lee A. Sonnino, A Handbook to Sixteenth-Century Rhetoric (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968): Gradatio, quoted at pp. 101–2, Nominatio, quoted at pp. 132–3.
Rhetoric and Music: the influence of a linguistic art
41
Figure 1: Devices for Achieving Dignitas in Style Figures of Speech 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
repetitio (epanaphora) conversio (antistrophe) conplexio (interlacement) traductio (transplacement) contentio (antithesis) exclamatio (apostrophe) interrogatio (interrogation) ratiocinatio (reasoning by question and answer) 9. sententia (maxim) 10. contrarium (reasoning by contraries) 11. membrum (colon) 12. articulus (phrase) 13. continuatio (period) 14. conpar (isocolon) 15. similiter cadens (homoeptoton) 16. similiter desinens (homoeteleuten) 17. adnominatio ( paronomasia) 18. subiectio (hypophora) 19. gradatio (climax) 20. definitio (definition) 21. transitio (transition) 22. correctio (correction) 23. occultatio (paralipsis) 24. disjunctum (disjunction) 25. coniunctio (conjunction) 26. adiunctio (adjunction) 27. conduplicatio (reduplication) 28. interpretatio (synonomy) 29. commutatio (reciprocal change) 30. permissio (surrender) 31. dubitatio (indecision) 32. expeditio (elimination) 33. dissolutum(asyndeton)
34. praecisio (aposiopesis) 35. conclusio (conclusion) Special Figures of Speech (‘tropes’) 36. nominatio (onomatopaeia) 37. pronominatio (antonomasia) 38. denominatio (metonymy) 39. circumitio (periphrasis) 40. transgressio (hyperbaton) 41. superlatio (hyperbole) 42. intellectio (synecdoche) 43. abusio (catechresis) 44. translatio (metaphor) 45. permutatio (allegory) Figures of Thought 1. distributio (distribution) 2. licentia (frankness of speech) 3. diminutio (understatement) 4. descriptio (vivid description) 5. divisio (division) 6. frequentatio (accumulation) 7. expolitio (refining) 8. commoratio (dwelling on the point) 9. contentio (antithesis) 10. similitudo (comparison) 11. exemplum (exemplification) 12. imago (simile) 13. effictio (portrayal) 14. notatio (character delineation) 15. sermocinatio (dialogue) 16. conformatio (personification) 17. significatio (emphasis) 18. brevitas (conciseness) 19. demonstratio (ocular demonstration)
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By the Renaissance, writers on rhetoric were admitting a further proliferation of figures.31 The emphasis had shifted from form to style, hence the greater importance of figures within rhetoric: The accretion of schemes was such as to suggest a trivial ingenuity, and indeed led to numerous overlaps not convincingly explained away; in many cases the distinctive value of the figure might elude all but the most exacting analyst. It was not simply that the emphasis in rhetorical studies had shifted from structure to style, or had relegated taxis to the domain of logic, in order to concentrate on lexis. That certainly happened; but what also followed was of consequence, observable in fields, of developing a metalanguage – a terminology – in excess of practical functions, so that the terminology itself displaces the proper concerns of the subject.32
By now there was a bewildering array of figures, writers defining each term as they wished. With our fondness for classification and grouping, this has proved a problem for modern writers on the subject. Figure 2 shows a selection of figures, together with definitions and the similarities between each term.33 Renaissance music (sacred and secular) abounds in musical decoration whose aim is to illustrate the text: a musical figure of speech. Sometimes referred to generically by the modern phrase ‘word-painting’, these are recognized as part of the family of musical-rhetorical devices. Burmeister, in his Musica Poetica of 1606, was the first theorist to include a detailed account of musical figures. He refers to these figures in rhetorical terms, using their Greek and Latin names, which can be misleading; often, one receives the distinct impression that Burmeister is hard pushed to find an exact musical parallel to a figure of speech bearing the same name.34 This certainly seems to have set a precedent for future theorists 31.
For example, Susenbrotus, Epitome Troporum ac Schematum (1541); J. C. Scaliger, Poetices Libri Septum (1561), Vives, De Ratione Dicendi (1533). 32. Nash, Rhetoric, p. 14. 33. Definitions taken from Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (Berkeley, CA and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991). 34. Burmeister’s definitions of terms such as anadiplosis bear scant resemblance to the original linguistic figures (compare the definitions in Figures 4 and 5). Dietrich Bartel suggests that Burmeister’s intention was to establish a rhetorical-musical system of terminology based on linguistic terminology rather than proposing musical figures that were exact musical replicas of linguistic figures. Dietrich Bartel, Musica Poetica: Musical-Rhetorical Figures in German Baroque Music (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), pp. 180–1. Similarly, Brian Vickers argues that ‘the formation of musical rhetoric takes the form of a theorist looking at a rhetorical textbook in order to find a figure in rhetoric that applied to, or could be adapted to, a musical effect or structure’ (‘Figures of Rhetoric/Figures of Music?’, 2).
Lat. ‘ascent, climb’
ASCENSUS
Gr. ‘going up from’
ANABASIS
AUXESIS Gr. ‘increase, amplification’ 1. Use of a heightened word in place of an ordinary one. 2. Words or clauses placed in climactic order [AVANCER, INCREMENTUEM]. 3. Building a point around a series of comparisons [PROGRESSIO, DIREMENS COPULATIO].
GRADATIO
Gr. Mounting by degrees through linked words or phrases, usually of increasing weight and parallel in construction.
CLIMAX
○
○
○
DUPLICATIO
Gr. ‘repetition, duplication’ The repetition of the last word of one line or clause to begin the next
ANADIPLOSIS
Gr. ‘recapitulation’ Repetition for vehemence or fullness.
PALILOGIA
○
REDUPLICATIO
Rhetoric and Music: the influence of a linguistic art 43
Figure 2: Figures of Speech
44
Words and Music
(for example, Scheibe, Lippius, Nucius, Walther, Bernhard, and Kircher), who all used the same Greek and Latin terminology in profusion, but to mean or represent quite different figures (see Figure 3; compare with Figure 2 for parallels between linguistic and musical figures).35 With Burmeister, there is an emphasis on structural musicalrhetorical devices (most notably fugal), which, according to Gregory G. Butler, was a legacy of the relationship between language and music: … music came to be viewed more and more as a highly effective form of artful expression imbued with all the learned artifice and persuasive qualities of its sister art, poetry … In the late sixteenth century … the trend toward the application of rhetorical precept to music manifests itself in a particular predilection on the part of theorists to refer to certain musical structures and compositional techniques in terms of specific musical figures. From the very beginning of this movement, fugue is conspicuous as the most frequently mentioned of these techniques … This whole movement was largely highly learned and intellectual, even academic, in nature, and of course fuga was looked upon as a highly learned element of composition. Secondly, the fuga was a structure of great artifice and at the same time a highly expressive and affective musical force, and therefore highly valued as a powerful musical-rhetorical device. Thirdly, poetry deals largely with verbal imagery, and there is growing evidence that the fuga was thought of in terms of a highly artificial image, and was therefore a prime ingredient of musica poetica.36
However, Vickers suggests that this attention to structural devices occurred because Burmeister was still working with the rhetorical system of the Middle Ages, where: questions of content were treated as questions of form, and where figures and tropes were mere verbal devices, unconnected with the feelings and passions. In [the] Renaissance rhetoric[al] form and feeling cohere again.37
Specific references to fugue tend to occur in the earlier treatises, but even with the demise of fuga, musical rhetoric still relied on structural devices, as well as textual imagery, for effect. Later in this paper, I will argue that the underlying structure of music is inseparable from the surface effects and that structural devices therefore form an intrinsic part of ‘effect’.
35. 36.
Definitions taken from Bartel, Musica Poetica, passim. Gregory G. Butler, ‘Fugue and Rhetoric’, Journal of Music Theory 21 (1977), 49–50. 37. Vickers, ‘Figures of Rhetoric/Figures of Music?’, 38.
Spiess: Anabasis or ascensus or ascent occurs when the voice also rises as directed by the text, for example: He ascended into heaven.
Kircher: The anabasis or ascensio is a musical passage through which we express exalted, rising, or elevated and eminent thoughts, exemplified in Marole’s Ascendens Christus in altum.
(Bartel): an ascending musical passage which expresses ascending or exalted images or affections.
ANABASIS, ASCENSUS
Walther: The auxesis occurs when a passage or melody is repeated twice or three times, while at the same time, however, always rising higher.
Burmeister: The auxesis occurs when the harmonia grows and increases with a single twofold, threefold, or further repetition only of combined consonances [noema] using one and the same text.
Walther: The climax or gradatio is (1) a word figure, for example, when the words are set as follows: Rejoice and sing, sing and glorify, glorify and praise; (2) a musical figure which occurs when two voices progress upwards and downwards by step in parallel thirds; (3) when a passage with or without a cadence is immediately repeated several times at progressively higher pitches; (4) this term can also be given to a fourpart canon in which, as the first two voices reenter, each time one note higher, the other two voices remain in the previous key and yet still harmonise.
Nucius: It occurs when two voices progress upwards or downwards in parallel motion, for example, when the soprano and bass proceed in parallel tenths or the bass and tenor in parallel thirds. The use of this figure is most frequent at the end of a composition, to which we strive to engage the listener who eagerly awaits the conclusion.
Burmeister: The climax repeats on similar notes but on pitches one step apart …
Walther: The palilogia refers to an all-toofrequent repetition of the same words.
Burmeister: The palilogia is a repetition of either the entire or only the beginning of the structure of the melos or theme on the same pitch in the same voice, occurring with or without intervening rests in all events in one voice.
(Bartel): a repetition of a theme either at different pitches in various voices or on the same pitch in the same voice.
PALILOGIA
Mattheson: The epanalepsis, epistrophe, anadiplosis, paronomasia, polyptoton, antanaclasis, ploce, etc., assume such natural positions that it almost seems as if the Greek orators borrowed these figures from the art of musical compostion. For they are purely repetitiones vocum, repetitions of words, which are applied to music in various different ways.
Vogt: The anadiaplosis occurs when we form a beginning out of the preceding ending.
Burmeister: An embellishment of the harmonia, and is constructed out of a double mimesis. This ornament is similar to the mimesis, for it repeats that which was first introduced through a mimesis.
(Bartel): (1) a repetition of a mimesis; (2) a repetition of the ending of one phrase at the beginning of the following one.
(Bartel): (1) a sequence of notes in one voice
(Bartel): Successive repetitions of a musical passage which rise by step. repeated either at higher or lower pitch; (2) two voices moving in ascending or descending parallel motion; (3) a gradual increase or rise in sound and pitch, creating a growth in intensity.
ANADIPLOSIS
CLIMAX, GRADATIO
AUXESIS
Rhetoric and Music: the influence of a linguistic art 45
Figure 3: Musicial Figures of Repetition
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It is interesting to note that almost without exception the treatises on musical rhetoric from this time are of German origin. The Italian tradition of musical rhetoric (whose existence is evident from Italian music) is largely undocumented. Irving Godt has proposed several key questions concerning this subject: How did rhetoric enter the education of composers who were not German? Did they favour particular musico-rhetorical theorists? Did they – as Unger humorously conjectured about the Italians – compose ‘with their rhetoric [texts] in their hands?’ Do national preferences bias the choice of figures? the mechanics of their musical realization? the dimensions of their application?38
Dietrich Bartel suggests that: The Italian rejection of music’s numerological and cosmological significance in favor of its direct affective and aesthetic effect led to a form of musical expression which focussed on a modern aesthetic principle of expressing and stirring the affections rather than explaining the text. Although the text was central to musical composition, it became the springboard for musical expression rather than the object of the composition. The expressive musical devices which characterize the Italian nuove musiche were developed with an aesthetic rather than exegetic principle in mind. Instead of introducing an intermediate level of linguistic and theological significance to the musical phenomena as was done in Lutheran Germany, the Italians sought to speak directly and immediately to the senses.39
Again, this comment indicates a culture steeped in rhetoric, the goal being to move the listener; however, judging by this comment and the lack of documented evidence, the Italians seem to have taken a more ‘direct’ approach to the expression of the text. With the modern revival of interest in this area of music, attempts were made to set up a ‘standardized’ Doctrine of the Affections – which had never been in historical existence:
38.
Irving Godt, ‘Italian Figurenlehre? Music and Rhetoric in a New York Source’, Studies in the History of Music 1 (1983), 179. 39. Bartel, Musica Poetica, p. 59. The pre-eminence of Germans in the application of rhetorical terminology and theory to music must also be connected with the presence, side by side, of grammar and music in the obligatory syllabus of the Lutheran Lateinschule. See Paul Mark Walker, Theories of Fugue from the Age of Josquin to the Age of Bach (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2000), pp. 130–6.
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Problems arise only when the theorists from Burmeister onwards are scanned today in order to erect a system of Affekten, a rhetoric supposedly followed by important composers of that period.40 Attempts by writers such as Brandes, Unger and Schmitz to organize the multitude of musical figures into a few categories have not proved successful.41
Therefore, if an analysis of music from this period is carried out, while it is important to consider the role of Figurenlehre, the whole area must be approached with a strong dose of caution. To achieve a successful result, some background knowledge is needed. The extent to which composers recognized and used these figures in their music generally must first be established. Some knowledge of the treatises in circulation at the same time must also be gathered. While there are certainly similarities between language and music, there are also differences that cannot be ignored. Music will never be able to express autonomously an ‘idea’ since it does not employ words as a vehicle: a musical ‘idea’ is going to be a very different concept from a linguistic idea – music cannot communicate a concrete statement in the same way as language. Notes cannot be strung together to create the equivalent of words. A musical sentence will not be understood in the manner of a linguistic sentence where the words have a natural hierarchy, are both referent and logical and ultimately have concrete meaning. While both music and language are temporal arts (that is, they exist in time), music is in effect two-dimensional in comparison with language. It depends on a different set of criteria for the creation of its meaning: The meaning of music can be specified – in a crude over-simplification that neglects the emotional characteristics – as inner coherence of the relations among the tones constituting a work … Musical meaning is intentional; it exists only in so far as a listener grasps it.42
40.
Peter Williams, ‘The Snares and Delusions of Musical Rhetoric: Some Examples from Recent Writings on J. S. Bach’, in Peter Reidemeister and Veronika Gutmann (eds), Alte Musik: Praxis und Reflektion (Winterthur: Amadeus, 1983), p. 231. 41. Buelow, ‘Rhetoric and Music’, p. 795. The works referred to are: Brandes, Studien zur musikalischen Figurenlehre im 16. Jahrhundert; Hans-Heinrich Unger, Die Beziehungen zwischen Musik und Rhetorik im 16.– 18. Jahrhundert (Würzburg: Triltsch, 1941); Arnold Schmitz, Die Bildlichkeit in der wortgebundenen Musik J. S. Bachs (Mainz: Schott, 1950). 42. Carl Dahlhaus, Esthetics of Music, trans. by William Austin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 12.
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translated literally in musical terms, others may express certain concepts in musical terms perhaps better than in linguistic ones. So, once again, an element of caution must be exercised when undertaking analysis in rhetorical terms, especially in relation to the parallels that exist between language and music. II A Comparison of Modern Views on Rhetoric with those of the Eighteenth Century The work of present-day theorists that is relevant to this study encompasses a variety of areas, from textual representation to linguistic theory and models. However, given the focus of this paper, I shall concentrate on the theorists who seek to present their own ‘updated’ views and interpretation of musical rhetoric as discussed in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century treatises. This subject has already been discussed to a limited extent in the preceding section; the present section will continue the investigation and will seek to offer an evaluation of the significance and worth of such present-day views. Towards a Modern Interpretation of Rhetoric Irving Godt makes the point, in an unpublished work on textual representation, that many modern theoretical works on rhetoric focus on the application of rhetoric to instrumental music, that ‘our training biases us in favor of abstract, non-verbal, non-interpretive – that is instrumental – schemes of analysis’.43 It is indeed evident that a number of modern works on rhetoric focus extensively on the instrumental application of the art. The current perception that instrumental music holds more interest for analysis than vocal music traces its origin back to the late eighteenth century: By 1799, an anonymous reviewer of four symphonies of Mozart could go so far as to proclaim that a composer displays the greatest genius only in instrumental music, ‘for there he is limited solely to the language of sounds. His thoughts have clarity in themselves, without being supported by poetry’.44
Leonard Ratner’s celebrated study of music of the Classical period 43.
Irving Godt, ‘Music about Words: Madrigalisms and other Text Influences in Music’ (manuscript, 1990), p. 19. 44. Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung 1 (1799), col. 494, cited in Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric, pp. 9–10.
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accordingly concentrates on instrumental music. As the previous quotation implies, the so-called Classical era was a period when the balance between vocal and instrumental music began to shift decisively in favour of instrumental music. Ratner’s aim is to establish how expression was created in music of this time by drawing on the arguments presented in eighteenth-century treatises and then analysing music of the period in accordance with them. In his book the emphasis remains very much on instrumental works. Vocal music is not completely ignored, but when Ratner ventures to discuss various vocal genres, he takes an ‘instrumentalist’ approach. True, he recognizes the historical reality that: Classic vocal music had a rich and extensive repertory. It was performed more often and by greater numbers of people than pure instrumental music … vocal music in classic times retained the superior position it had enjoyed in the earlier eighteenth century.45
But whereas he acknowledges the necessity of the text for vocal music, Ratner seems to be most interested in the general compositional style and the details of the accompaniment (both of obvious importance when setting a piece, but only two among many considerations). Any reference to narrativity or textual influences is usually non-specific. Ratner recognizes the occurrence of word-painting in vocal music and uses the same term as Koch (pictorialism) to describe its equivalent in instrumental music.46 Koch makes the following comment about pictorialism: When certain sounds and motions out of inanimate Nature, such as the rolling of thunder, the tumult of the sea, the rustle of the wind and such, are imitated in music, this is called tone painting. Some such similarities exist between natural phenomena and musical tones and one can transfer them to music; but music betrays its nature when it takes over such descriptions, since its one and only object is to depict the feelings of the heart, and not the picture of inanimate things. Most devices for tone painting are objectionable, even though they allow the imagination free play, since they divert the attention from the principal content to accessory things, and therefore deprive the feelings of that which will maintain
45.
Leonard G. Ratner, Classic Music: Expression, Form and Style (New York: Schirmer, 1980), p. 157. 46. Word-painting can be considered a part of the musical-rhetorical language of the time. It can be defined as a more literal representation of the content of the text, another strategy for ‘persuading’ the listener.
50
Words and Music them musically … However, occasionally there are instances in which tone paintings are immediately related to the state of the soul or where it can express the stirring of feelings.47
Koch’s stance is clear and in line with contemporary thought – his comments reflect the philosophy of Descartes in Passions d’âme (see section I). In our own day and age, an understanding of rhetoric easily becomes reduced to an exercise in simple labelling: it is thought possible to understand whatever we want to understand from the writings of the time without searching for any deeper meaning. And this is exactly what Ratner has done. His section entitled ‘Rhetoric’ draws in many components that belong specifically to the dispositio and elocutio divisions of the art subsumed under this non-specific heading.48 Thus rhetoric is made into an all-embracing term, used to describe the ‘whole’ Art of Eloquence. The word should not be used merely to refer to its constituent parts, such as Figurenlehre, since this is how many misconceptions about the subject have arisen. Ratner provides a list of terms used to describe melodic relationships without acknowledging any specific sources. He fails to categorize rhetorical terminology clearly, and as a result, his list contains a confusing mixture of musical figures, components of oratorical/musical structure and stages of composition.49 For example, he describes the musical-rhetorical figure anaphora merely as a ‘repetition’ without elaborating further or stating his source. In contrast, Bartel’s definition (condensed from a variety of sources that include Burmeister, Kircher, Walther, Mattheson and Forkel) runs as follows: ANAPHORA, REPETITIO: (1) a repeating bass line; ground bass; (2) a repetition of the opening phrase or motive in a number of successive passages; (3) a general repetition.50
Ratner also admits to the list melodic relationships that are not actual figures. For example, peroratio and narratio are components of the structure of an oration. If Ratner’s own analytical example is examined, one discovers how idiosyncratically he interprets rhetorical
47. Heinrich Koch, Musikalisches Lexikon (Frankfurt am Main: Hermann d.J, 1802), p. 924, quoted in Ratner, Classic Music, p. 25. 48. Ratner, Classic Music, pp. 31–206. 49. Ibid., pp. 91–2. 50. Bartel, Musica Poetica, pp. 184–90.
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terms.51 He labels one phrase-ending peroratio (conclusion), in effect turning what is treated as a structural term by Baroque theorists into a mere figure. He also includes dispositio in his list: dispositio was actually one of the phases of composition, a process of invention. To make matters worse, Ratner also refers to the ‘Doctrine of Affections’ as a concrete ‘existence’. In fact, this never existed as an accepted doctrine in the eighteenth century.52 A further shortcoming of Ratner’s book is the author’s confusing use of the terms ‘figures’ and ‘topics’: From its contacts with worship, poetry, drama, entertainment, dance, ceremony, the military, the hunt and life of the lower classes, music in the 18th century developed a thesaurus of characteristic figures, which formed a rich legacy for classic composers. Some of these figures were associated with various feelings and affections; others had a picturesque flavor. They are designated here as topics – subjects for musical discourse. Topics appear as fully worked-out pieces, i.e., types, or as figures and progressions within a piece, i.e., styles. The distinction between types and styles is flexible; minuets and marches represent complete types of composition, but they also furnish styles for other pieces.53
Ratner views ‘topics’ (and ‘styles’) as separate from ‘melodic’ rhetoric and segregates the latter from the former in his book. Word-painting is treated as a category of ‘styles and topics’, and is likewise discussed in isolation from melodic figures. Ratner would have done better to show that these same ‘topics’ and ‘styles’ were in fact a continuation or extension of musical-rhetorical figures. For nothing in music is ever static: the use of rhetorical figures, like everything else, has undergone constant development and transformation. If a selection of seventeenthand eighteenth-century works on the subject is examined, the application of rhetoric can be seen to evolve as time passes. It is fair to recognize, however, that Ratner is aware of this, even if he does not draw out its full implications: Classic Music inherited its expressive attitudes from the baroque era, but modified the formalized sustained unity of baroque expression by means of frequent contrasts …54
51. 52.
Ratner, Classic Music, p. 105. See George J. Buelow, ‘Affections, Doctrine of the’, in Sadie (ed.), New Grove, 1st edition, vol. 1, pp. 135–6. 53. Ratner, Classic Music, p. 9. 54. Ibid., p. 30.
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In general, there seems to be a divide between modern historians specializing in Baroque and Classical music respectively. While many recent writings on Classical music are admirably comprehensive and acknowledge its connections with rhetoric, they fail to grasp the true meaning of the discipline or to explain exactly what its relationship was to musical form and textual expression. Baroque specialists seem, on the whole, to have the greater understanding. Naturally, one would not expect a clear break between Baroque and Classical practice in respect of their dependence, or non-dependence, on rhetorical models and concepts. Music was, and is, a constantly evolving process; as with anything that evolves, elements of old and new are fused together. Despite this apparent neglect (and also misrepresentation) of rhetoric, the widespread recognition of so-called ‘topics’ in Classical music (pioneered in Ratner’s own work, and continued in studies by other present-day theorists) constitutes an acknowledgement by them that various musical devices recur significantly in music for expressive purposes. ‘Topics’ are, indeed, the modern equivalent of the rhetorical concept of Figurenlehre.55 Mark Evan Bonds’s Wordless Rhetoric: Musical Form and the Metaphor of the Oration is concerned largely with the relationship between musical form and rhetoric, or with how oratory relates to musical form. Bonds concentrates on sonata form, and his discussion concerns only instrumental music. While this area of study has in itself little relevance for the present paper, the background research on rhetoric that Bonds has undertaken is extensive and provides many valuable insights. The author himself comments on the fact that musical rhetoric has largely been ignored in writings on Classical Music: Another common objection to interpreting Classical form through the imagery of rhetoric is the notion that this approach represents an outmoded vestige of Baroque thought. In point of fact, the application of this image specifically to the idea of large-scale, movement-length form did not gain widespread acceptance until the second half of the eighteenth century. What little attention has been given to musical rhetoric in the Classical era has tended to focus on one rather specific element of the field, the device of musico-rhetorical figures.56 And while there can 55.
Kofi Agawu is another musicologist who refers to musical ‘topics’ in Classical music: Playing with Signs: A Semiotic Interpretation of Classical Music (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991). 56. Here Bonds cites Ratner’s Classic Music as one such example; others include Wye Jamison Allanbrook’s Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1983).
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be no question that the use of figures and topics survived well into the Classical era, it is clear that this practice, important as it may be, constitutes only one facet of the broader idea of music as a rhetorical art.57
This last statement is essentially the concept that section I attempts to communicate. I do not agree in full with Bonds’s claim that Ratner’s work focuses primarily on musical-rhetorical figures. Ratner’s section on rhetoric appears, rather, to encompass a range of subjects that conform to the broader concept of music as a rhetorical art, whereas his section on Figurenlehre is in fact very limited and limiting. True, there is a current obsession with Figurenlehre, and Bonds’s comment that modern theorists concerned with the Classical Era focus too narrowly on musical-rhetorical figures can be extended to modern writings on Baroque Music as well: Greater enthusiasm for the third part of rhetoric, style and expression, led to a wide-ranging application of figures and tropes to music by theorists of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries … a task taken up with equal enthusiasm by their musicological counterparts of the first half of the twentieth century – Schering, Brandes, Gurlitt, Unger and Bukofzer.58
As briefly discussed in section I and also earlier in the present section, the authors just mentioned attempted to categorize and sort figures into a fictive ‘Doctrine’ that had in reality never existed. These initial forays into the history of musical rhetoric have provoked a spate of later writings on (mainly) musical-rhetorical figures in an attempt to correct this line of thought or to play down the effect of rhetoric in the eighteenth century. Peter Williams and Brian Vickers are two representatives of what could be termed
57. 58.
Bonds, Wordless Rhetoric, p. 8. Sisman, Haydn and the Classical Variation, p. 21. Sisman refers to the following works: Arnold Schering, ‘Die Lehre von den musikalischen Figuren’, Kirchenmusikalisches Jahrbuch 21 (1908), 106–14; Heinz Brandes, Studien zur musikalischen Figurenlehre im 16. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Triltsch & Huther, 1935); Willibald Gurlitt, ‘Musik und Rhetorik’, Helicon 5 (1943), 67–86; Hans-Heinrich Unger, Die Beziehungen zwischen Musik und Rhetorik; Manfred Bukofzer, ‘Allegory in Baroque Music’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 3 (1939–40), 1–21.
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musical-rhetorical sceptics, the former’s message being similar to the point I attempted to make in the first section of this chapter. Contrary to Sisman’s understanding of Peter Williams’s article, ‘The Snares and Delusions of Musical Rhetoric’ (she writes, ‘Williams argues scathingly that unless one can document a composer’s intentions, labeling figures accomplishes virtually nothing’), I would claim that Williams is merely concerned to warn the reader that Figuren were not a set or established collection of musical figures, which once applied can give us the complete and absolute meaning of the piece:59 Of all musicians, young performers need to be warned away from easy answers or from a doctrinaire adoption of any oblique angle-of-attack. One such angle that is summed up by the term Rhetoric … A key, a tempo, a tessitura, a pattern of notes: such elements in a late Monteverdi madrigal or an early Bach cantata are examined as exempla of a theory formulated by such-and-such a writer, and the conclusions are presented as if they are actually saying something more about the music than labelling its parts … I hope to show that there are positive benefits from a study of figurae …60 Of course, no playwright or poet uses a dictionary in order to construct his piece from it; nor did a composer use a theory book from which to make his motet or his fugue. It is rather that the theorists list, insofar as they understand them, the devices already used. The better the theorist, the more he sees the implication of the figura he is discussing; and the better the composer, the more he extends the figura and its potential beyond the dreams of the most imaginative theorist.61
Williams obviously recognizes the significance of Figuren. His work in this field includes a set of articles on ‘Figurenlehre from Monteverdi to Wagner’ (quoted above) and a book, The Chromatic Fourth during Four Centuries of Music, that deals specifically with the descending chromatic fourth in music and recognizes it correctly as a musical figure.62 If, as Sisman infers from Williams’s work, labelling figures deemed by him is such a pointless exercise, why does he proceed to trace the use and development of this figure and others in his work?
59. 60. 61.
Sisman, Haydn and the Classical Variation, p. 22. Williams, ‘The Snares and Delusions of Musical Rhetoric’, 230. Peter Williams, ‘Figurenlehre from Monteverdi to Wagner’, The Musical Times 120 (1979), 476. 62. Peter Williams, The Chromatic Fourth During Four Centuries of Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
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What is becoming apparent during the course of this discussion is that modern historians and theorists not only hold very divergent opinions about rhetoric but also interpret each other’s writings in a markedly ‘personal’ way.63 Bonds’s reading of Ratner is not correct – the latter’s work does not reflect such a concentration on Figuren as he suggests. Similarly, Sisman’s interpretation of Williams’s work does not appear to be fair. Brian Vickers, too, is identified by her as a musical-rhetoric sceptic, when he writes: Rhetoric, like language, can never – and probably never wants to – escape from the constraints of significance, that interplay between the sign-system of the individual and that of society which constitutes our shared, negotiable but still ultimately agreed and exchanged meanings.64
But again, like that of Williams, Vickers’ message is intended partly as a caution: Vickers warns that musical-rhetorical devices are not necessarily indicative of expression, since the direct translation of a linguistic figure into a musical figure is a difficult thing to accomplish successfully. Vickers points out: If we examine in detail the music theorists’ account of the rhetorical figures we see that in all cases the literary effect has to be narrowed down, or fundamentally transposed. Where anaphora in rhetoric describes the repetition of a word at the beginning of clauses and sentences, in Burmeister it involves ‘the imitation of a musical subject in only some of the voice parts’.65
The application of rhetoric to music must ultimately be understood in the context of music alone. Literal ‘translations’ of Figuren do not work, and this was indeed not the aim of the composers of the eighteenth century: their aim was, rather, to create an overall affect that could be interpreted and understood by the listener – not a case of ‘the composer saying something specifically’. Interest in musical rhetoric has grown steadily over the past few decades. This becomes evident if the articles on ‘Rhetoric and Music’ from the first (1980) and second (2001) editions of the New Grove
63.
This is not unusual: all rhetoricians from the Rhetorica ad Herennium and Quintilian through to Koch disagree with each other and sometimes (it seems) with themselves. Modern writers, who have aims very different from those of the old rhetoricians, are not specialists in the art. They tend to select those sources of material that will best support their modern preoccupations. 64. Vickers, ‘Figures of Rhetoric/Figures of Music?’, 44. 65. Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric, p. 364.
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Dictionary of Music are compared.66 While the main body of the article, originally by Buelow, has been retained for the more recent edition, the sections on music and rhetoric pre- and post-Baroque have been extended. The bibliography to this updated version is much more comprehensive and testifies to the continuing research in this area during the past twenty years. The weakness of the recent version lies in its retention in unaltered form of the examples of musical-rhetorical figures: The author, George J. Buelow, rightly notes that ‘in this basically German theory of musical figures there are … numerous conflicts in terminology and definition among the various writers, and there is clearly no one systematic’ doctrine (p. 794). He also notes that attempts so far ‘to organize the multitude of musical figures into a few categories have not proved successful’ (p. 795). Having made these sensible caveats, he then proceeds to give the “most frequently cited musical figures in an equally arbitrary’ group. Yet his grouping is not just arbitrary, but also confused. He lists sixty one figures, with many musical examples, an impressivelooking detailed demonstration. However, it runs together definitions by seven or eight theorists between 1601 and 1788, including the eccentric Nucius, whose bizarre confusion of homoioteleuton and aposiopesis is now enshrined in this authority for the next century.67 What is any one who knows rhetoric to make of the following entry? Complexio (Nucius) = Symploce (Kircher) = Epanalepsis (Gottsched) = Epanadiplosis (Vogt). The repetition at the end of the melody or a whole musical section from the musical section from the beginning (p. 795). Here three different musical figures are identified with each other, and given a musical definition vague enough to apply to two of them, at least. What the user cannot know is whether the theorists from Nucius (1612) to Gottsched (1754) all refer to the same musical effect, even though using totally different rhetorical figures to describe it.68
The identification and categorization of musical-rhetorical figures in the New Grove is far too general and thus a cause for concern. The publisher promotes the dictionary as an authoritative source of information, yet this section of the article both misinforms the reader and
66.
George J. Buelow, ‘Rhetoric and Music’; George J. Buelow, Peter A. Hoyt, and Blake Wilson, ‘Rhetoric and Music’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, 29 vols (London: Macmillan, 2001), vol. 21, pp. 260–75. 67. This is literally now so, since this information has been re-used for the 2001 edition of the New Grove. 68. Vickers, ‘Figures of Rhetoric/Figures of Music?’, p. 39.
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omits critical information in its overly general descriptions of musical-rhetorical figures. The shortcomings of this article may be recognized only by those who have some knowledge of the field; since a reference work is there to assist those requiring knowledge, it should at least be accurate. There is a final irony in all this: Vickers’ ‘critical’ article (quoted above) is actually included in the updated bibliography in the second edition of the New Grove. Possibly the best reference work on the subject of musical rhetorical figures is Dietrich Bartel’s Musica Poetica, translated into English from his original Handbuch der Musikalischen Figurenlehre.69 A number of descriptions by various theorists are provided for each musical figure, making it possible to assess the difference between the various definitions. Several appendices are provided, allowing the cross-referencing of figures according to their varying definitions and association with different theorists. Interestingly, Bartel bases one of his appendices on Buelow’s categorization of figures. However, where Buelow fails, Bartel succeeds, mainly on account of his careful attention to detail, which results in a better system of classification.70 III A Rhetorical Analysis Zelenka: ‘Crucifixus’ from Missa Paschalis ZWV 7 The following case study constitutes an attempt to discover exactly how heavily steeped in rhetoric the music of the chosen period was. After just one analysis it is naturally impossible to draw any definitive conclusions, but nonetheless, this is a useful exercise since it highlights both the advantages and the pitfalls of an ‘immanent’ analysis of this type.71 At this point it is important that the distinction between word-painting and rhetorical figures should be reiterated. Musical
69.
Dietrich Bartel, Handbuch der musikalischen Figurenlehre (Laaber: LaaaberVerlag, 1985); see above, n. 33. 70. Bartel, Music Poetica, pp. xiv and 444–8. 71. While an ‘immanent critique’ (in Kantian terms, a critique conducted within a system recognised by the creator of the object studied) is always valuable, it is vital that when presented in a study such as Ratner’s, it should maintain its integrity. There is always a lurking danger of incoherence and confusion wherever old (in many versions!), semi-modernized and modern concepts and terms are allowed to mingle promiscuously without careful distinction.
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rhetoric is similar to ‘linguistic’ rhetoric in that it actually employs structural devices in order to create the desired effect. For example, in language rhetorical effect might be achieved by repetition of a particular word or phrase: maybe directly after the first statement, maybe at some later stage in the text (See Figure 2 for examples of these Figures of Speech). A similar effect can be attained in music by applying the same principles. Word-painting, however, is concerned with the more literal expression of the text. Structural rhetorical devices, as we shall see, may or may not contribute to word-painting in part, or as a whole. Analysis This short section of the Mass has been selected as subject for a rhetorical analysis for a number of reasons. First, because of constraints on length, it seemed sensible to select a section of music that was fairly compact (even though this created problems for some aspects of the analysis: see below, ‘Deep Level: Analysis of Rhetorical Structure’), and the chosen ‘Crucifixus’ setting met this criterion. The text, though short, offers relatively great potential for word-painting, thereby permitting an evaluation of this rhetorical feature. The final reason was that in its original context, this case-study formed only one of several comparable analyses of ‘Crucifixus’ settings, so there was background information on which I could draw in order to argue for the value of this method of analysis.72 Zelenka’s ‘Crucifixus’ from his Missa Paschalis ZWV 7 is typical of the genre in many ways (see Table 3). The mode selected is minor, as befits music that attempts to describe the tragedy of the Crucifixion (B minor moving to F sharp minor). The open tonality of this section arguably creates the impression of incompleteness: it implies that the Crucifixion, death and burial of Christ was not final, but that there was something more to happen – the death of Christ was a starting point for another event. The setting as a whole is chromatic
72.
The study entailed the collection and examination of over one hundred settings of the ‘Crucifixus’ produced by German and Italian composers during the period 1680–1800. The purpose of the study was to provide evidence to support the view that there was a tradition of ‘Crucifixus’ setting handed down from composer to composer; see Jasmin Cameron, ‘The Crucifixion in Music: An Analytical Survey of Settings of the “crucifixus” between 1680 and 1800’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Liverpool, 2001, publication forthcoming, Scarecrow Press).
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Table 3: Crucifixus Conventions Crucifixus etiam pro nobis sub Pontio Pilato, passus et sepultus est. He was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate, suffered and was buried. Category
Convention
‘CONTEXTUAL’ (conventions that help to provide a background to the setting itself or occur as part of the surrounding Credo)
• • • • •
Minor tonality Often tonally open Slower tempo marking* Reduced scoring* Often distinct section within the Credo
* within the context of the Credo
‘DIRECT’ Action Phrases (conventions associated with the words them‘Crucifixus’ selves) • the musical sign of the cross (zig-zag arrangement of pitches) • ‘excruciating’ intervals, such as diminished or augmented fourths and fifths • use of sharps (in original notation taking the form of a cross); the German word for sharp is ‘kreuz’, which means ‘cross’ ‘passus’ suffering is endured over time, therefore methods of musical depiction include: • longer, melismatic phrases, including longdrawn-out notes, syncopation, and suspensions • syllabic setting on two notes of exceptional length ‘et sepultus est’ • downward movement of lines to symbolize burial • the repetition for emphasis of ‘et sepultus est’: a similar device is to have a final a capella statement (in the context of settings employing instruments)
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Category
Convention
‘DIRECT’
Contextual Phrases ‘etiam pro nobis’ (harbours little potential for word-painting) ‘sub Pontio Pilato’ • narrative, speechlike setting • dactylic rhythms highlighting the rhythmic vitality of the words
‘INDIRECT’ (overall expression of text)
• chromatic harmony • chromatic harmony.lamento bass line (a descending, chromatic line spanning a fourth) • chromatic harmony.choral rather than solo scoring, in order to represent a collective commentary (by the community of Christians), as befits the subject of the text
‘STRUCTURAL’ (organizational strategies)
• a strong sense of beginning-middle-end, corresponding to the rhetorical exordium … peroratio • settings tend to begin with ‘Crucifixus’ and end with ‘et sepultus est’, even though the intervening text may be ‘jumbled’ • some form of climactic point • a structure driven by words
in nature, bordering at some points on the extremes of dissonance. The tempo is slow, and the vocal scoring for this setting is SATB, representing a collective (rather than individual) commentary, as one might expect for this section of text. The choice of many of the motives is, again, typical for a setting of the ‘Crucifixus’; these will be discussed in more detail at a later stage of this analysis. I have attempted to apply a rhetorical analysis to this setting. The analysis is not intended to be exhaustive, and there are reservations about this analytical method that will need to be expressed as an integral part of this case study. Some of these caveats have already been mentioned during the first section of this paper, while others have
Rhetoric and Music: the influence of a linguistic art
61
only come to light during the practical application of the analytical procedure. Deep Level: Analysis of Rhetorical Structure This proved very difficult to apply to a mere section of a whole Mass. Even given an understanding of the classical structure of an oration and a knowledge of how music theorists of the day based their methods of structure on it, it proved difficult to relate the discrete stages specifically to this (or other) settings of the ‘Crucifixus’. The exordium and peroratio stages were fairly straightforward to pinpoint within the setting: naturally, the beginning and the end (the peroratio is here most definitely the concluding statement following the rest in all parts in bar 11). However, any attempt to match the various structural middle stages to the content of this ‘Crucifixus’ proves very difficult indeed, especially if, for example, Burmeister’s guidelines (Section1) are employed. Here, Burmeister refers to the structure of a piece governed by fugal technique and proceeds to describe the various sections in this light. Mattheson’s schema (Section 1), which has six sections, is equally difficult to apply, but I think that this is largely because such a short section of music has been put under the microscope. Mattheson refers to six ‘sections’ of compositional structure: in a piece consisting of a mere thirteen bars, it will be difficult to accommodate all these sections. It is impossible to find all the traits that Mattheson describes, such as ‘the entrance or beginning of the vocal part’, which signifies the narratio, or the ‘well conceived repetitions’ that constitute the confirmatio. This setting is simply not on a large enough scale to accommodate either of these elements. It is interesting that of the two descriptions of rhetorical structure, Burmeister’s is the more straightforward, and, interestingly, matches the concept of tri-partite structure: the beginning–middle–end paradigm. Also, the fact that this is a vocal piece that is bound so closely to the word setting obviously has an effect on the musical-rhetorical structure of the movement, since the organization of the music is driven, to a large extent, by the words. Conversely, the rhetorical structure and organization of the words cannot dominate the setting completely, since the musical organization and structure also have a major role to play. A certain amount of common sense needs to be exercised when carrying out an analysis of this kind, and the analyst must be prepared to use his or her discretion and apply what is sensible, and also to ignore anything that would cause the entire analytical procedure to become distorted – by attempting to ‘see’ what does not actually exist.
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Surface Level: Analysis of Rhetorical Figures Again, this part of the analysis highlighted some interesting points. The analysis succeeded in proving that the music was steeped in rhetorical devices that would cumulatively ‘affect’ the listener. In the following text I have used the more general descriptions of various musical figures identified by Bartel in his Musica Poetica. The justification for this, together with other relevant discussion, will be presented after the analysis itself. See Example 1 for a labelled version of this setting.73 1
2
3 4
5
73. 74.
exclamatio/salto semplice: bar 1, bass notes 2–3, to the ‘-ci-fi-’ of ‘crucifixus’. The exclamatio was literally a musical exclamation, the salto semplice a consonant leap. Here the leap in the vocal line occurs in conjunction with ‘he was crucified’. syncope: for example, bar 2, soprano, notes 1–2; bar 3, tenor, notes 1–2; bar 4, alto, notes 2–3. The term syncope was used to describe an ordinary suspension. saltus duriusculus: bar 3, bass, notes 2–3, bar 3, notes 2–3. A dissonant leap: in this case, a leap of a diminished fourth. heterolepsis and hyperbaton/exclamatio/salto semplice, bar 2, notes 2–3, tenor. Here, Zelenka writes another musical exclamation underlining the word ‘crucifixus’. The leap of an octave can be described as the musicalrhetorical figure hyperbaton, which Bartel describes as ‘the transfer of notes or phrases from their normal placement to a different location’.74 It can also be described as the salto semplice. This leap also causes an overlap between the alto and tenor ranges; this is known as heterolepsis. palilogia/ mimesis: this occurs between the initial bass statement of ‘etiam pro nobis’ in bar 2, and the appearance of the same words in the tenor in bar 3. Palilogia is the reiteration of a phrase, either at the same pitch in the same voice, or a phrase that is passed to different voices, to appear at different pitches. Mimesis or imitatio is, literally, the imitation of a phrase, where that imitation is not exact, so both the bass and tenor statements of ‘etiam pro nobis’ on the third beat of bar 3 could be classed as this. Mimesis also occurs between the upper voices, the alto echoing the soprano on the second beat of the third bar. The first two syllables of this statement of ‘etiam pro nobis’ are an augmentation of the rhythm of this motive in the bass. The effect that Zelenka creates in this setting, by using these devices, is one of overlap. He makes a point of overlapping each of the motives, in different ways.
J. D. Zelenka, Missa Paschalis ZWV 7, GB-Ob Ms. Tenbury 749. Bartel, Musica Poetica, p. 441.
Rhetoric and Music: the influence of a linguistic art
63
6 epizeuzis: the general description for this is ‘an immediate and emphatic repetition of a word, note, motif or phrase’.75 Epizeuzis is evident throughout this setting, but more in the context of a literary-rhetorical device. There are many repetitions of various parts of the text; ‘etiam pro nobis’ is repeated, and so is ‘passus’. The concluding statement (bars 11– 13) of ‘passus et sepultus est’ is an evident epizeuzus. The quasi-responsorial setting of ‘sub Pontio Pilato’ (bars 4–6), the soprano leading the lower three voices, is another instance of emphatic repetition. 7 noema: a noema is described as a chordal passage that appears within the context of a contrapuntal section or piece of music. The responsorial imitation of the lower three voices in bar 5 might be described in this sense as a noema. However, this is not a strict noema, since not all the voices participate in the homophonic texture. 8 palilogia: this occurs exactly between the soprano and alto statements of ‘sub Pontio Pilato’ at bars 4 and 5. 9 passus duriusculus (pathopoeia): the passus duriusculus consists of a passage of stepwise chromatic movement (or contains some element of chromatic alteration). There are two examples of the rising passus duriusculus evident in Zelanka’s ‘Crucifixus’.76 The soprano begins this passage on a c2 on the third beat of bar 3, rising to an f2 in bar 7, beat 4. The bass begins on an f (bar 5, beat 2) and rises via a series of semitones to b in bar 8. The chromatically rising bass line offers many opportunities for colourful harmony, which Zelenka proceeds to exploit. The two lines overlap, the soprano beginning the passus duriusculus on the words ‘sub Pontio Pilato’, which, as already noted, acts as a ‘call’ to the lower voices, which then respond. The bass has exactly the same rhythm as the soprano, but with a delay of half a bar. The passage that makes up the passus duriusculus also fits the description of pathopoeia: a passage that uses chromaticism to express the words or, according to Burmeister, is ‘a figure suited for arousing the affections, which occurs when semitones that belong neither to the mode nor to the genus of the piece are employed and introduced in order to apply the resources of one class to another’.77 It is interesting to see that most of this passus duriusculus is used to set the word ‘passus’, and the chromatic harmonies that are a result of this figure likewise express the word ‘suffering’. Does Zelenka intend, perhaps, a subtle pun between the two meanings of ‘passus’: ‘suffered’ and ‘step’?
75. Ibid. 76. Janice B. Stockigt comments that the ‘passus duriusculus descending over the interval of a perfect fourth’ was ‘a figure that Zelenka usually attempted to incorporate into “crucifixus” settings’; see Jan Dismas Zelenka: A Bohemian Musician at the Court of Dresden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 255. 77. Burmeister, Musical Poetics, p. 175.
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Words and Music
10 synaeresis: the musical rhetorical term for syncopation. Although syncopation is abundant throughout this setting (as a result of the overlapping techniques that Zelenka uses) its most notable occurrence is in bars 6–8, mainly in the soprano line, where it is used to express the word ‘passus’. As we have already seen, syncopation has the effect of prolonging a line, which is eminently suitable for the musical depiction of a word that invites a representation of the passing of time. 11 syncope/prolongatio: a 4–3 suspension occurs between the soprano and bass at bar 10, beat 1. This suspension, in addition to being a syncope, is also a prolongatio. The latter term was used to describe a suspension in which the duration of the dissonance is longer than that of the resolution – here a ratio of two beats to one. 12 aposiopesis: this silence, considered to be representative of death, occurs in all parts on the first beat of bar 11. This musical-rhetorical figure appears in a number of ‘crucifixus’ settings, for example, Haydn employs it to good effect in his Missa Brevis in F. 13 epizeuzis and catabasis: Bars 11–13, all parts: an emphatic reiteration of the text that has just appeared before the aposiopesis forms the peroratio of this ‘crucifixus’ setting. Catabasis is evident in the soprano line – a descent from a b1 to an f1 over these two bars – to express the burial of the body. Another syncope/prolongatio occurs between the alto and bass, from bar 12, beat 4, to bar 13, beat 2. 14 cadentiae duriusculus: this figure was used to describe cadences in which dissonance occurred in the approach chord to the cadence. Here it occurs in the form of an unstable 64 chord on the fourth beat of the twelfth bar, and the addition of a dissonant passing note in the tenor line (note 5 in this bar). 15 paragogue or supplementum: these were terms used to describe some form of elaboration in the upper voices over a pedal point at the end of a piece of music. Zelenka introduces a pedal note, c, which is held for four beats, while the upper voices have changing harmonies over it.
For a setting of this length, an exceptionally large number of musical rhetorical figures are present. As stated at the outset, the figures identified here are not intended to form an exhaustive list. This analytical procedure has uncovered a number of interesting points. When I embarked on this analysis, I was all too aware of the profusion of rhetorical terms in existence. This proliferation of terminology proved problematical for the development of an analytical strategy for a rhetorical study. One salient problem was that a single term could easily be used to describe more than one figure. Figure 3 provides examples of this. The opposite problem, that of too many different terms being used to describe a single figure, also existed. One
65
Rhetoric and Music: the influence of a linguistic art
Adagio
syncope
le Voce e Stromenti con tutte S.
Cru
A.
-
B.
Cru
-
ci
-
ci - fi
3
S.
A.
T.
ti - am
Org.
e
-
xus
-
bis,
9
pro
no
xus
-
8
3
-
-
no
ti - am
pro
e - ti - am
pro
no
e - ti - am
pro
no
pro
bis
sub
-
6
6 5
palilogia (bass bar 2, tenor, bar 3)
7
-
-
-
palilogia (tenor,bar 3)
e - ti - am
-
4
saltus duriusculus
no
-xus
saltus duriusculus
palilogia (soprano and alto)
-
-
-
§5
-
B.
heterolepsis exclamtio/salto semplice hyperbaton
-
-
fi
exclamtio/salto semplice
e
6
-
xus
ci - fi
J. D. Zelenka (1679-1745)
-
Cru Org.
ci - fi
-
Cru
T.
-
-
bis,
bis,
-
bis,
4
#
Example 1: Crucifixus from Missa Paschalis (ZWV 7)
66
Words and Music
S.
epizuezis
T.
B.
-
to, pas
-
-
Pon - ti o Pi - la
sub
Pon - ti o Pi - la
-
sus,
Pon - ti o Pi - la
6
¾
-
to,
6
-
pas
to, pas
-
5
#
to, pas
-
noema (not strict)
#
-
palilogia (soprano and alto)
sub
sub
Org.
passus duriusculus (pathopoeia)
Pon - ti o Pi- la
A.
synaeresis
5
-
-
-
6 5
6 5
passus duriusculus (pathopoeia)
8
S.
pas
A.
T.
-
Org.
6
#
-
syncope/prolongatio
-
sus
- sus
B.
synaeresis
sus
et
et se - pul
se - pul
et
-
-
4
5 4
sus
#
§7
6
5
passus duriusculus
2
-
-
-
se
-
et
se
-
7
6 4
#
tus
est,
tus est,
pul - tus
est,
pul - tus est,
5 4
6
#
#6
5
67
Rhetoric and Music: the influence of a linguistic art
11
S.
pp
epizuezis, catabasis
pas - sus et
A.
epizuezis
T.
B.
aposiopseis
Org.
se - pul
pas - sus [pp]
et
pas - sus [pp]
et
pas - sus [pp]
et
6 5
-
tus est.
syncope/prolongatio
[pp]
6 4
6 5
se - pul
-
se
se - pul
¾ #
-
-
paragogue
tus
est.
pul - tus est.
tus
#5
4
est.
#
cadentiae duriusculus
example is the word hypotyposis, which Burmeister uses as a generic term for word-painting devices (in this case, I have drawn on a term that is used in connection with a group of devices). Other terms used to refer to the same family of figures are assimilatio and homoiosis: The homoiosis or assimilato is a musical passage through which the attributes of a certain thing are actually expressed, for example when individual voices in a passage depict different elements as in the text ‘Tympanizant, cytharizant, pulsant nobis fulgent stolis coram summa Trinitate.’ In such a composition the bass represents the mighty tympanum while the other voices represent all kinds of other instruments.78 Hypotyposis is that ornament whereby the sense of the text is so depicted that those matters contained in the text that are inanimate or lifeless are brought to life. (Burmeister, Musical Poetics)79
78.
Bartel, Musica Poetica, p. 208, citing Athanasius Kircher, Musurgia Universalis (Rome, 1650). 79. Burmeister, Musical Poetics, p. 175.
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Words and Music
Thus the most straightforward approach for this analysis was to adopt Bartel’s general descriptive overview of various terms and to analyze the music using this system. It must be emphasized that the resultant analysis is of necessity a general one. If one were to be more accurate in a rhetorical analysis, one would perhaps attempt to conform strictly to the rhetorical terminology or system of a single theorist contemporary with the composer examined. One might even establish which particular theoretical texts the composer in question knew and then proceed to carry out an analysis on that basis. Table 4 lists the relevant theorists of the period, together with their dates.80 Note that these overwhelmingly come from the German-speaking areas of Europe. There remains the issue of how musical conventions change over time. It is possible to witness the changing nature of rhetorical terminology if the different treatises are compared. Over the passage of time theorists observed that certain devices were widely used and would then attempt to document them. This shows that the musical vocabulary was never static but was constantly evolving. A case in point is Burmeister’s and Nucius’s descriptions of ‘fugal’ figures, which tend not to feature in later treatises: During the course of the eighteenth century, fuga is dropped from the lists of musical-rhetorical figures. Not only is the device increasingly understood as an independent musical genre, but it no longer fits into the affection-oriented emphasis of the late-Baroque concept of the figures. As the figures are increasingly understood and defined according to their text expressive and affective potential, fuga loses its place to more expressive, rhetorical devices. The class of figures which were minus principales and superficiales in the seventeenth century now become the more significant ones.81
This exercise has also illustrated some of the parallels between rhetorical and semiotic analysis. One striking similarity is the relation of surface musical figures to a deeper ‘whole’, which can be likened to the relation of extroversive (surface) to introversive (deep) semiotic analysis. In the case of semiotics the two are inter-dependent. With rhetoric and music, the surface devices are likewise inseparable from a deep underlying structure. Musical figures have a specific musical
80. 81.
Compiled from Bartel, Musica Poetica. Ibid., p. 283.
69
Rhetoric and Music: the influence of a linguistic art
Table 4: Musical-Rhetorical Theorists81 Name and Dates
Title of Treatise
Date of Treatise
Joachim Burmeister (1564–1629)
Hypomnematum musicae poeticae Music autoschediastike Musica Poetica Musices poeticae sive de compositione cantus Opusculum bipartitum
Rostock, 1599
Musurgia Universalis sive ars magna consoni et dissoni
Rome, 1650
Johannes Nucius (1556–1620) Joachim Thuringus (dates unknown) Athanasius Kircher (1601–1680) Christoph Bernhard (1628–1692)
Rostock, 1601 Rostock, 1606 Neisse, 1613 Berlin, 1624
Tractatus compositionis augmentus; Ausführlicher Bericht vom Gebrauche der Con- und Dissonantien Wolfgang Casper Phrynis Mytilanaeus oder Printz (1641–1717) Satyrische Componist Johann Georg Ahle Musicalisches Frühlings-, (1651–1706) Sommer-, Herbst-, und Winter-Gespräche Mauritius Johann Vogt Conclave thesauri magnae (1669–1730) artis musicae
Not printed in Bernhard’s lifetime
Johann Gottfried Walther (1684–1748)
Musicalisches Lexicon Praecepta der musicalischen Composition Critica Musica Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre Der vollkommene Kapellmeister
Leipzig, 1732 Ms. 1708
Tractatus musicus compositorio-practicus Compendium musices theoretico-practicum Der critische Musikus Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik
Augsburg, 1745
Johann Mattheson (1681–1764)
Meinrad Spiess (1683–1761) Johann Adolf Scheibe (1708–1776) Johann Nikolaus Forkel (1749–1818)
Dresden/Leipzig, 1696 Müllhausen, 1695–1701 Prague, 1719
Hamburg, 1713 Hamburg, 1739 Hamburg, 1722–25
c. 1730 Leipzig, 1745 Göttingen, 1788
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function and therefore play particular roles within the music: some devices are purely structural and therefore have a natural correspondence to the structure of the piece. Examples of this are the cadential figure paragogue, which theorists describe as appearing at the end of a composition, and the ‘fugal’ devices, which are employed at particular stages in a composition. There is also evidence in the writings of theorists that the Art of Rhetoric was applied to music as a ‘whole’ in this respect. The terminology that Burmeister and, more importantly, Mattheson use in their application of the structure of an oration to music confirms this (see section 1). Burmeister refers to ‘fugue’, which naturally relates to the fugal figures that he has already described. Mattheson uses terms such as ‘repetition’, ‘dissonance’, ‘syncopation’ and ‘emphatic impression’ to describe the characteristics of various sections of musical rhetorical structure. The figures that appear in Zelenka’s setting of the ‘Crucifixus’ can be classed as representatives of the various groupings of these figures.82 Palilogia and mimesis are examples of repetition. The humble syncope is a figure of dissonance. Synaeresis is an example of syncopation, while epizeuzis gives ‘emphatic impression’. The use of paragogue at the end of the setting certainly conforms to our expectations of a peroratio figure, as does the cadentiae duriusculus. Interestingly, Burmeister calls the paragogue ‘supplementum’ and classes it not as a figure as such but rather as part of the structure. Conclusion A number of questions are raised by this case study. First, it is clear from our analysis that rhetorical figures and structure came instinctively to a composer of the time. These features formed an inherent part of the musical language of the day. It is interesting to discover that our modern understanding of compositions of Zelenka’s time to a certain extent recognizes these rhetorical devices — maybe not in terms of the exact rhetorical description that composers of the day used, but in our preferred terms. For example, bars 4-5 provide us with an example of responsorial imitation, in which the soprano be82.
Both George. J. Buelow and Dietrich Bartel attempt to group musical rhetorical figures into various categories, such as ‘repetition’, ‘silence’ etc. See section II for an evaluation of both attempts at the classification of musical rhetorical figures.
Rhetoric and Music: the influence of a linguistic art
71
gins a phrase and is answered by the lower three voices. In rhetorical terminology the contrast of a chordal texture with mainly imitative technique is described as noema, and the repetition of this motive in different voices but at different pitches is known as palilogia. The use of a suspension, which occurs many times in this setting, is recognized by us as such, but was known in the eighteenth century by a different term, syncope. A comment that Hans-Heinrich Unger made about the Italians springs to mind here: Did they compose “with their rhetoric [texts] in their hands?”83 This same speculation applies equally to the German tradition. How mechanical and calculated was this compositional process? From the examples that I have collected, it really does seem that the inclusion of rhetorical devices was so innate that the seemingly rule-bound compositional process in no way hampered the spontaneous inspiration and musicality of these settings. An ‘immanent critique’ such as the analysis conducted here can prove a valuable contribution to our understanding of music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is true that rhetoric has been applied to this study as an analytical tool rather than being left in its more common passive role as a ‘theory’, but the act of analysing has provided us with a small insight into the extent of its application to music. It should also be remembered that the music of the period under discussion had a focus different from that of the present day: texted music. I would suggest that one major, if obvious, reason that it was such a natural step to apply rhetoric to music was because music with words possessed an extra dimension absent from instrumental music — a dimension shared with rhetoric itself. Thus the argument for the importance and worth of rhetorical analysis is strengthened: musical rhetoric inherited from a linguistic system is therefore closely akin to music with words. My final point deviates slightly from the prime focus of this paper, but nonetheless remains relevant. This analysis has established that rhetorical figures are clearly evident within Zelenka’s setting. But however prolific they are as individual figures, they rarely make up a complete set of topoi that together form the ‘Crucifixus’ tradition. So it is impossible to state that the word ‘‘crucifixus’’ would or should have been set exclusively as a pathopoeia, or an exclamatio or a saltus
83.
Unger, Die Beziehungen zwischen Musik und Rhetorik, p. 124; quoted in Godt, ‘Italian Figurenlehre?’, 179.
72
Words and Music
duriusculus. It is in practice most likely to be a combination of these. For instance, the ‘‘crucifixus’’ subject at the opening of the Caldara’s sixteen-voice setting is a ‘composite’ rhetorical figure consisting of an exclamatio between the first and second notes, a saltus duriusculus between the second and third notes, and use of pathopoeia between the third and fourth notes (See Example 2).84 A similar comment can be made about the word ‘passus’. The section of text ‘et sepultus est’, however, can be equated with one specific device, the catabasis, which appears to have been reserved specifically for passages of music expressing some element of downward movement. That figure would be classed as a word-painting rhetorical figure (hypotyposis). This finding highlights the fact that the use of rhetoric in music was very much a unified, integrated operation, the aim of which was to create an overall effect that would ‘move’ the listener in such a way that the whole became more significant than the mere sum of its parts.
1
S. I
S. III
exclamatio
Cru
-
ci
saltus duriusculus
pathopoeia
-
fi
-
xus
Cru
-
ci
-
fi
-
xus
Example 2
84.
Antonio Caldara, ‘Crucifixus’ a 16 Voci, ed. Charles H. Sherman (Stuttgart: Carus, n.d. [1987]).
3
Eminem: Difficult Dialogics David Clarke
Difficult Others and Cultural Pluralism Bitch I’ma kill you! Like a murder weapon, I’ma conceal you in a closet with mildew, sheets, pillows and film you My words are like a dagger with a jagged edge That’ll stab you in the head whether you’re a fag or lez Or the homosex, hermaph or a trans-a-vest Pants or dress – hate fags? The answer’s ‘yes’ Slim Shady does not give a fuck what you think.
The outpourings of white rapper Eminem (Marshall Mathers III) have not met with universal acclaim. Women’s groups, gay activists, and US politicians have been loudest within the refrain of unnumbered individuals deploring the degeneracy displayed by his malign lines. My epigraphs, quotations from The Marshall Mathers LP (2000),1 offer clear enough signs of what the trouble is: the usual intractable tropes of hardcore hip-hop: violence, misogyny, homophobia, and foul language. Such vernacular extremes might breach the decorum of an academic symposium, but, however sensationally, the incongruous juxtaposition performs precisely one of the principal points I plan to explore: the question of how we liberals are to deal with words and music (or for that matter any cultural form) that we identify as Other – especially when, as is likely in this case, that Otherness is radically problematical. My thanks are due to Philip Bohlman and Richard Middleton, who read and helpfully commented on earlier drafts of this paper. Music reproduced in this chapter is copyright Joel Martin, Eight Mile Style. 1. The quotations are taken respectively from the songs ‘Kill You’, ‘Criminal’, and the album’s opening ‘Public Service Announcement 2000’.
74
Words and Music
Of course these days the Other has almost become a platitude of the new historical, the new musicological attitude; and pluralism has found recognition as a facet of that condition called postmodernism. We’re waking up to a world where any set of truth claims, or aesthetic claims, has to be understood as relative to any other. But relative in what sense – and on whose terms? How are we to construe the relationship between the plural coordinates of the postmodern map? One starting point might be an idea advanced by Gary Tomlinson in his article ‘Cultural Dialogics and Jazz’, which he calls a ‘parallactic conception’: Parallax is a metaphor for … a way of knowing in which all vantage points yield a real knowledge, partial and different from that offered by any other vantage point, but in which no point yields insight more privileged than that gained by any other … [T]he deepest knowledge will result from the dialogue that involves the largest number of differing vantage points.2
It would be grudging not to want to join with Tomlinson in his epistemological generosity. Yet his picture suggests to me a peaceable kingdom of dialogic exchange that is somewhat utopian. While his ensuing analysis of Miles Davis uncovers a fusion of styles and cultural perspectives in support of his argument, other performers, other practices, at other historical junctures might suggest less congenial kinds of difference. Gangsta rap, with its violent imagery and ‘guerrilla raids’ on the language of the hegemonic Other which it resists, is one pertinent example of the enmity that can exist between cultural spaces. Such practices rightly remind us that the business of relativizing someone else’s cultural framework can be aggressive as well as creative, and that being relativized can be profoundly discomfiting as well as enlightening. However, I raise this point not to dismiss the idea of cultural pluralism. The very opposite in fact: I am right behind Tomlinson in seeking a ‘mode of thought that attempts … to theorize the space between itself and others – to keep sight, so to speak of other modes of thought around it by keeping them above its horizon’.3 But how are we to proceed when what rises above the horizon here is the thought – the words and music – of a Difficult Other who
2.
Gary Tomlinson, ‘Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: A White Historian Signifies’, Black Music Research Journal 11 (1991), 240. 3. Ibid., 231 (original emphasis).
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probably couldn’t give (to use his own vernacular) ‘two squirts of piss’ about being admitted into the space of liberal thought? Sometimes I wonder about my own fascination with Eminem. (It seems more than an ocean apart from, say, writing about the transcendental aesthetics of Michael Tippett.)4 As a gay-identifying classical musician, I maybe oughtn’t to be messing with him – except to join those who would critique the rap star into submission. Yet despite the political dubiousness of many of his songs and their at times coruscating anger, like many fans I can’t help also finding them funny, slick, artful, articulate, entertainingly satirical, and above all stunningly performed. I have to admit, then, that on some level I – what’s the right word? – like? enjoy? this stuff. (Is there a verb meaning to be simultaneously repelled and attracted?) Now, it would clearly be an outrageous indulgence to work through these private contradictions publicly – were it not for the fact that they could in some way be paradigmatic of the more general, and I would say urgent, politics of cultural pluralism just outlined. Like Tomlinson, then, I approach my subject here with both a strong sense of difference and a sense of ‘the potential dialogical richness of … interlocutions from outside’.5 And it may well be that, notwithstanding the more problematic Other in question, dialogism still holds a valuable model for negotiating cultural pluralism. Dialogics As is well known, dialogism’s principal exponents were the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin (1895–1975) and his circle.6 If this seems another incongruous juxtaposition alongside hip-
4.
See my The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett: Music, Modernity, Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Maybe the distance is only apparent: my oceanic metaphor alludes to Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 5. Tomlinson, ‘Cultural Dialogics’, 230. 6. Works by some members of the circle – Voloshinov’s Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, and Medvedev’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language – have subsequently been attributed to Bakhtin himself – though not without contention: see Simon Dentith’s outline of the issues, in his Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 8–10.
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hop, its pertinence lies in the fact that Bakhtin understood the Word – in contradistinction to the formalism of Saussure – as primarily a dynamic agent, located within actual utterances determined by their particular social and historical nexus, and voiced always in response to a prior word and in anticipation of a future one:7 The living utterance, having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of living dialogic threads, woven by socioideological consciousness around the given object of an utterance; it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue. After all, the utterance arises out of this dialogue as a continuation of it – it does not approach the object from the sidelines.8
And this seems to be of no small relevance to rappers such as Eminem, whose wor(l)d draws its very life from altercations with prevailing social standpoints and mentalities, and with what others have said and sung. As Elizabeth A. Wheeler points out: Like the hip-hop DJ, the Bakhtinian novelist brings ‘together ideas and worldviews, which in real life were absolutely estranged and deaf to one another, and force[s] them to quarrel’ … The DJ literally makes dialogue out of ‘preceding utterances – his own and others’ – with which his given utterance enters into one kind of relation or another’.9
Like other commentators, Wheeler negotiates the possibly yawning gap between the historical situation of Bakhtin and that of contemporary black performers by establishing a connection with the more idiosyncratically African-American trope of Signifyin(g) – as formulated by Henry Louis Gates Jr in his seminal book The Signifying Monkey:
7.
See V. N. Volshinov/Bakhtin, ‘Critique of Saussurian Linguistics’, in Pam Morris (ed.), The Bakhtin Reader: Selected Writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev, Voloshinov (London: Edward Arnold, 1994), pp. 25–37. 8. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in Michael Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 276–7. 9. Elizabeth A. Wheeler, ‘“Most of My Heroes Don’t Appear on No Stamps”: The Dialogics of Rap Music’, Black Music Research Journal 11 (1991), 196. Wheeler’s references are to Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 91; and idem, ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’, in Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (eds), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern McGee (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986), p. 69.
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A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism.10 Essential to the link between Bakhtinian dialogism and Signifyin(g) – indeed one made by Gates himself – is the idea of double-voiced discourse. This trope makes audible beneath the ostensible signification of an utterance a second voice, with a different semantic orientation that may actually run counter to the first, as in the case of parody or satire. This involves, then, the re-use of an existing word or utterance to give it a different take (sometimes comically so) – repetition with a difference. A case in point would be the use of the word ‘nigga’ by black hip-hop artists,11 or ‘queer’ by gay activists (though latterly mostly by academics), which Signify as a parodic, empowering inversion on an originally abusive term. Thus the voice of the subaltern might work from inside the language of a dominant social group in a politicized act of resistance.12 What all these facets of dialogism share, then, is the idea of registering the presence of Others within the horizon of a text, be it musical or verbal. In what follows I propose to apply and develop these terms of reference to consider how Eminem, and by implication rap music more generally, could be seen to do cultural work beyond merely providing material for alienated teenagers to exact revenge on their parents. This exploration relates to the theme of this symposium most obviously by engaging with a musical genre in which the word has a special place, but also by examining the usefulness of models of language to the study of musical practices. This kind of language model has a role to play not only in charting a social dimension to musical signification, but also, I argue, in helping us think through some of the more unsavoury aspects of Eminem’s (and other rappers’) vernacular. Not necessarily to vindicate them, though: rather to get beyond a monological reading and thereby to get a fuller sense of the complexity of the situation in which such utterances are made. 10.
Henry Louis Gater Jr, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); the concept of Signifyin(g) is also extensively deployed by Tomlinson in his ‘Cultural Dialogics’ article. 11. On the politics of this usage, see Robin D. G. Kelly, ‘Kickin’ Reality, Kickin’ Ballistics: Gangsta Rap and Postindustrial Los Angeles’, in William Eric Perkins (ed.), Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), pp. 136–40. 12. See for example Russell A. Potter’s account of ‘guerrilla Signifyin(g)’ by Da Lench Mob, in his Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), pp. 77–9.
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And what are some of those ‘living dialogic threads’ around Eminem’s words and music? That sublime vernacular medium, the internet (albeit self-selecting of those with the necessary material resources and inclination to use it) offers a valuable window onto the innumerable utterances his words and music have stimulated, and I have exploited it shamelessly in my intelligence-gathering.13 While putting the term ‘Eminem’ into a search engine generates hundreds of thousands of hits, making comprehensive and systematic analysis impossible, an initial foray suggests that reactions tend to fall into a rather smaller set of categories. The following sample constitutes the first of several passes in this essay at the discursive situation surrounding Eminem. On this occasion, taking my cue from Bakhtin, I ‘orchestrate’ this dissonant social polyphony, blending my voice with those sampled, but basically allowing these representatives to speak for themselves:14 1 Performers like Marshall Mathers pose a threat to the children of America. It’s astonishing that he could have received an MTV award for his hatefilled songs. Companies who produce and distribute such music are responsible for creating a debased and violent culture that has a real effect on children’s behaviour. 2 Eminem’s songs are a highly crafted kind of performance poetry that contain various kinds of irony. It’s true that his lyrics have caused controversy, but you have to remember that the narrative voice in a poem isn’t necessarily that of the poet himself. 3 Eminem is a misogynist and homophobe, and critics who ply subtle literary readings of his lyrics are misguidedly endorsing what is ultimately a reactionary politics. He’s not a rebel – just a bully and a thug. No point in trying to censor him (the First Amendment is cynically exploited anyway by the major corporations, for whom Eminem serves as a whore); but let’s at least try and distinguish the marketing of his hate from real political radicalism. 4 Eminem is brilliant. Just because we’re faggots doesn’t mean we have to hate him. His critics – including those from the gay community – are stuck in their predictably clichéd arguments. They miss the ambiguities in his lyrics. They ignore how he offers some kind of insight into disaffected
13.
I have drawn encouragement here from a recent project of Allan F. Moore, which explores the internet as a means of investigating popular music reception – as expounded in his paper ‘Reading Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”’, presented at the IASPM UK and Ireland Conference, University of Newcastle, July 2002. 14. For ‘orchestrate’ in this sense, see Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, p. 263.
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culture, how he puts himself on the line to reveal himself as a fucked-up straight man. (5) Eminem’s mega-popularity is a disaster for all women and those who care about them. To claim that there are more sophisticated ways to hear his songs is to endorse a whole swathe of questionable assumptions under which some men construct their masculinity. The way Eminem tells his life story perpetuates a damaging mythology about abusive men. (6) Gay and feminist protest groups who attack Eminem are evading the complacency of their own, largely white, middle-class situation. They’re scapegoating a figure who’s expressing the justified rage and anti-elitism of his own working-class culture. Let working-class people themselves deal with his misogyny and homophobia. Meanwhile, middle-class protesters ought to back off from criticising Eminem and get on with what should be for them the higher priority of fighting for economic and social justice.15
It would be bogus to seek to render these several positions with academic disinterest. A character like Eminem demands dialogue, forces 15.
These positions are abstracted from the following sources: (1) Lynne Cheney, testimony to US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, 13/9/1999, http://www.senate.gov/~commerce/hearings/0913che.pdf; (2) [Unsigned tutorial article], ‘The Music of Poetry’, http://www.worc.ac.uk/ englishonline/access/Poetry/languageofpoetry.html; (3) [Unsigned editorial], ‘Swift, Twain, Browning? Nah, it’s Eminem’, Counterpunch, ed. Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair, 20/2/2001, http://www.counterpunch.org/ eminem.html; (4) Gus Cairns, ‘Why Eminem is Brilliant’, Outcast Magazine, April/March 2001, http://www.outcastmagazine.co.uk/archive.htm; (5) Jackson Katz, ‘8 Reasons why Eminem’s Popularity is a Disaster for Women’, http:// www.fradical.com/Eight_reasons.htm; (6) Emi Koyama, ‘In defense of Eminem’, http://eminism.org/interchange/20010225-tfo.html. I should add that between first writing this paper in Summer 2002 for the Liverpool Words and Music Symposium and proofreading the revised version in 2005 there have been interesting shifts in Eminem’s self-representation. For example, Curtis Hanson’s quasi-biopic 8 Mile (2003) starred Eminem as rapper Jimmy ‘Rabbit’ Smith – a relatively sanitized version of himself whose gay-positive behaviour seems scripted as an overt dialogical response to earlier accusations of homophobia; and his first Anger Management tour was accompanied by commentary on his increasing maturity (no doubt only coincidental with his contemporaneous attainment of mainstream popstar status). Disappointingly, though, his 2004 album Encore shows little creative innovation, unless you count an everdeepening vehemence towards George Dubya. On the one hand, these various shifts situate the pattern of reception delineated in this essay at what now appears to be a particular micro-historical moment – the years immediately around 2000. On the other hand, the larger issues under discussion remain relevant to a rather longer, arguably still ongoing, historical, and cultural conjuncture.
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us – forces each one of us – to articulate a position in response to his word. Yet is it just liberal dithering to hesitate to side unequivocally with one of these standpoints? I would hope that this might instead be a symptom of something more strenuous: a resistance to monologism, a refusal to register only a single perspective. Rather than being an attitude of value neutrality that accepts all views as equally valid, dialogism demands that the individual discursive position we must necessarily formulate admit a moment of accountability, in the face of others who speak from different situations arising from different individual and social histories. As Michael Holquist points out, dialogism does more than note the co-presence of a subject’s utterances and those of his or her others; there is also a vital third term: the relation between them.16 To adapt another notion from Bakhtin, the complex dialogical relations here together constitute an architectonics.17 And if we are to understand how these often incommensurable utterances relate within a larger discursive situation, we shall need to sketch out some of the personal, social, and generic contexts from which they emanate. This will constitute a second – this time more interpretative – pass at our material. Situation Eminem’s situation is fundamentally that of being a white performer in a black genre. This is not to essentialize, but rather to point to hiphop’s historical emergence from substantially (though not exclusively) black traditions.18 Polarized against a dominant white culture, its tone is characterized by: attitude (which Russell A. Potter characterizes with the succinct words of female gangsta rapper Bo$$: ‘I don’t give a fuck, not a single fuck, not a single solitary fuck, motherfucka!’),19
16.
Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 38. 17. See, for example, Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, trans. Vadim Liapunov, ed. idem and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1993), p. 54ff. 18. The exclusion here of references to, among other things, Latino culture, another important strand in hip-hop and its origins, is a pragmatic abbreviation hopefully not detrimental to the present discussion. 19. Potter, Spectacular Vernaculars, p. 71.
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competitiveness (as in the practices of boasting, playing the dozens, or dissing), and polemic (in which misogyny and homophobia play a part, however questionable). All these aspects could be understood as being motivated by a resistant stance which is implicitly, or – in the work of black gangsta rappers such as Dr. Dre (Andre Young), Ice Cube (O’Shea Jackson) and Tupac Shakur – explicitly, political – revolutionary even. For white rappers like Eminem to display attitude, to boast, and to diss need not be considered cultural appropriation, as these behaviours can be seen as pretty much common property (although an ethnic outsider might feel the need for even greater overdetermination of these verbal practices in order to establish credibility – which would partly explain some of the more graphic images in Eminem’s songs.) The question of politics, however, is more delicate. While Eminem’s hip-hop style is in one sense highly individual and eclectic, its more definitively hard-core aspects draw at least elliptically on the genres of gangsta or reality rap. Yet how to do this with authenticity? To invoke the associated discourses of black cultural resistance would look dangerously disingenuous. His way of ‘keeping it real’ is to create his own narrative of the ’hood: to invoke his working-class, trailer-park origins (avoiding at all costs the embarrassing demise of forebear Vanilla Ice, rumbled as being a middle-class suburban boy [Robert Van Winkle] after all), and to foreground the autobiographical tales of his dysfunctional family relationships, which (rightly or not) are implicitly equated with social and economic disenfranchisement. These portrayals – of his father who walked out on him in his childhood; of his allegedly drug-taking mother and her litigation against him for publicly making the allegation; of his turbulent relationship with his girlfriend, then wife, then ex-wife Kim; of his adoring relationship with their daughter Hailey (almost redemptive amid this otherwise fractious picture) – all these tales represent a kind of inverse cultural capital used to underwrite the authenticity of the self he constructs through his performances. The cynicism and flagrancy of this tactic, and the dystopian representations themselves, seem almost deliberately calculated to inflame the sensibilities of middle Americans and politicians who (arguably no less cynically) have identified the family as the lynchpin of a conservative politics. Thus the family becomes the site of a political struggle in which Eminem is able to manoeuvre identification with an American underclass, and thereby suggest his alignment with the radical political aspirations
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of black hip-hoppers. His professional association with established black gangsta rap artists such as Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg (Calvin Broadus), and more recently his co-promotion with Dre of black rapper 50 Cent (Curtis Jackson), further authenticate these credentials. And authenticity sells; hard-core rap is closely and paradoxically intertwined with capitalism.20 Swiping at the establishment is simultaneously a way to pitch for a market, to appeal to a fan base with a range of anti-establishment feelings, from those who just like the frisson, to those with real desires for social change. And commercial success – to which Eminem meteorically rose after signing with Dre’s Aftermath imprint in 1998 – in turn gives empowerment of a potentially political kind. Through his high-profile and best-selling performances Eminem has occasioned the same kind of moral panic as gangsta rappers by daring to give the lie to the equation between white domination and civilized values.21 And as politicians’ wives add their voices of protest, so the dialogical screw turns again. Like other rappers, Eminem has fallen foul of Future Second Lady Syndrome. Just as in the 1980s Tipper Gore (wife of yet-to-be vice-president Al Gore) assailed black gangsta rap, so in September 1999 Lynne Cheney, wife of vice-president-to-be Dick Cheney, singled out Eminem for special mention in the US Senate’s Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation (a second indictment to the Committee by Senator Orrin G. Hatch followed a year later).22 But this only raised the rapper’s profile further, empowered him still more, provided more material for combative dialogue, and further helped along CD sales. This much has, I hope, given some indication of how the different stances towards Eminem initially outlined are closely intertwined. Even at their antagonistic extremes – the Eminem–Cheney polemic – these relations reveal how one subject needs its Other(s) in order to articulate its own position in an ongoing public contest of ideologies. This does
20.
See for example Nelson George, Hip Hop America (New York: Penguin, 1998), pp. 154–75. 21. On moral panic, see Potter, Spectacular Vernaculars, pp. 90–1. On domination and civilisation see bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 199–200. 22. See James Haskens, The Story of Hip-Hop: From Africa to America, Sugarhill to Eminem (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 78; also Potter, Spectacular Vernaculars, p. 89; Cheney’s testimony is referenced in n. 15, above; Hatch’s can be read at http://www.senate.gov/~commerce/hearings/0913hat.pdf.
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not of course resolve the differences between them: the positions are too extreme for any harmonious Hegelian synthesis to issue from their interaction. But it does show how, to adapt Bakhtin, ‘these distantly separated ideas [can be projected] by means of a dotted line to the point of their dialogic intersection’: a shared, albeit conflicted, social and historical space.23 ‘White America’ What is striking about Eminem’s song production is its acute dialogical attentiveness to its own reception – as if that reception were consciously orchestrated. His words are shot through with a knowingness of both prior and anticipated words of his highly heterogeneous Others. We need only turn to a song such as ‘White America’, which opens his 2002 album The Eminem Show, to see how the sociological situation analyzed above is written deeply into the musico-verbal utterance. Exploring the dialogical dynamics here offers a third descriptive pass at that situation, this time determined by the perspective of the artistic utterance itself. Although ‘White America’ constitutes The Eminem Show’s first song proper, it is not actually the first track, since the album, like its two precursors, begins with a short framing skit: not a public service announcement this time, but the imaginary curtain up to the show. Though radically different in tone, this track, ‘Curtains Up’, really cannot be considered separately from ‘White America’ – not least due to the segue between them; so I will consider them as a pair here.24 The conceit of songs presented in the context of a show sets up a double perspective: as if to say with one voice ‘don’t take any of this seriously, it’s just entertainment’, while with another voice fronting lyrics calculated to be politically polemical. While the performance-
23. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, cited in Morris, The Bakhtin Reader, p. 100. 24. Eminem exploits the segue in all his albums as a device for maximizing disorientation between subject and listener positions; consider, for example, the segue on The Marshall Mathers LP from the vicious misogynistic sentiments of ‘Kill You’ to the sympathetically contextualized sample of Dido’s ‘Thank You’ at the start of the next song, ‘Stan’, discussed later in this essay.
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within-a-performance idea could be a reference to The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the liner of The Eminem Show CD, which pictures a stage set with red curtains is more likely Signifyin(g) on the cover of ABC’s 1982 album Lexicon of Love.25 Eminem is depicted pensively seated behind the gaping curtain, as if oblivious to the waiting mic and spotlight; a second image (on the inside-rear CD liner) shows him on the same set, presumably a few seconds later, nervously tapping the mic, looking out at the audience. Whereas these visual images imply that the viewer is located in the auditorium, every sonic aspect of ‘Curtains Up’ – like a sound-track animating the sequence of visual stills – is designed to engineer the reverse perspective: a point-of-view shot which situates the listener in Eminem’s shoes.26 The opening sound of stage machinery, quite loud, places us clearly on stage; the applause, out there, dies down. The pedal note of the non-diegetic music (which connects this track with the next, incidentally) is expectant, but also ominous. The poignant, minor-mode celesta motif suggests a kind of childlike innocence, but, like the pedal, also hints at the uncanny, as if giving us information not available to the protagonist. This makes us seem powerful and him seem vulnerable – an unexpected reversal which is played on further as we hear his footsteps cautiously approaching the mic. Having botched his timing as the curtains went up, the performer seemingly lets his inexperience show again, first by getting feedback on the sound system, and then by loudly clearing his throat before drawing breath to perform – is he going to fluff his opening lines too? As ever, the timing is brilliantly calculated. With absolutely no transition we segue into ‘White America’ and a complete overturning of the previous situation. We are now firmly back in our seats and Eminem is in command on stage. Except that the imagined scene has changed unrecognizably. This is no longer some second-rate theatre, but a theatre of war, fighter planes flying overhead, Eminem delivering his opening lines through a megaphone. So in a dramatic embodiment of double voicing we get shown two versions of Eminem as subject, constructed through two different versions of his relationship with his audience. First the persona presented 25.
A point gleaned from the ramblings of reviewer ‘Ethan P.’ at http:// www.pitchforkmedia.com/record-reviews/e/eminem/eminem-show.shtml. 26. On the importance of point of view for dialogism see Voloshinov/Bakhtin, ‘Critique of Saussurian Linguistics’, p. 33.
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as a non-persona. Is this the real Marshall Mathers, as sold to us in the iconography on Eminem’s previous album, The Marshall Mathers LP? – the thoughtful, vulnerable working-class kid, a bit nerdy, just fooling around, but not really badly intentioned towards anyone, deserving our empathy rather than all that nasty criticism. Marshall functions as a kind of alibi for Eminem’s alter ego, the psychotic Slim Shady, the aggressive, bad-mouthed, arrogant rapper who doesn’t give a fuck what his audience thinks, just says what he has to say. What is disorientating in the jump-cut between the two tracks is that the two perspectives offered do not add up to a whole. They represent incompatible discursive spaces which closely mirror the stand-off between Eminem’s admirers and detractors. Double-voiced discourse also operates within ‘White America’ – not least in the ironic intent of its introduction: ‘America! (Hahaha!) We love you! How many people are proud to be citizens of this beautiful country of ours?’ The subdued manic laughter after the initial appellation betrays a second voice (as if we hadn’t guessed already) behind the ostensible content of the words. And multi-tracking makes possible a further dissenting Eminem-voice, well down in the mix, which gently exhorts ‘Yo, I want everybody to listen to the words of this song’. The casual ‘street’ salutation is a foil to the impersonation of the voice of state authority, and provides a good if fleeting example of what Bakhtin termed heteroglossia, in which the official language is dialogized by, and made to appear relative to, vernacular types of speech.27 But for most of the song, the dialogization is much more aggressive in tone – enacted by Eminem in Slim Shady persona. His vehement appellation ‘White America!’ at the beginning of each line of the chorus Signifies on the militaristic tone of the appellation – ‘America!’ – of the introduction. Through the additional epithet ‘white’ (repetition with a difference) the second voice parodically exposes what is hidden by the first: that the supposedly universal democratic principles embodied by the sign ‘America’ in practice obtain only for a limited subset of its people. And now Eminem flaunts the fact that through the agency of mass culture aimed at a youth market he is able to offer a nihilistic alternative to the official ideological state
27.
Cf. Morris: ‘Only a relativizing of one language against the outlines of another allows one to construct the image of a language and so break the bonds of any language’s absolute authority’; The Bakhtin Reader, p. 113.
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apparatus:28 ‘I could be one of your kids! … Little Eric looks just like this … Erica loves my shit!’ The three verses of the song add up to a self-aggrandizing autobiographical documentary – in the hip-hop tradition of boasting. Verse 1 tells of even Eminem’s surprise at the turnaround in his fortunes, his mass-cultural success now perceived as a threat to the established order: ‘And now they’re sayin I’m in trouble with the government – I’m lovin it! / I shoveled shit all my life, and now I’m dumpin it on / [chorus] White America!’ Verse 2 broaches questions of race, making the claim that his whiteness can now (unlike earlier in his career) be used to commercial advantage: ‘Let’s do the math – if I was black, I woulda sold half’. This should probably be read less as a claim to supremicism and more as a cynical critique of socio-economic actuality. Certainly Eminem is quick to pay his dues to Dr. Dre, with whom he also duets later in the album in the song ‘Say what you say’ which implicitly presents their collaboration as paradigmatic of racial solidarity. In the last verse Eminem analyzes what is at the root of his turbulent reception. His crime has been to bring rap into the safe havens of bourgeois suburbs (‘I speak to suburban kids who otherwise would of never knew these words exist’). He goes on to protest his scapegoating for using the politically incorrect conventions of hip-hop: ‘So now I’m catchin the flack from these activists when they raggin / Actin like I’m the first rapper to smack a bitch or say faggot …’ Finally (or nearly so), in the song’s outro Eminem/Shady works his rage up into a torrent of direct abuse at his establishment antagonists: ‘Fuck you Ms. Cheney! Fuck you Tipper Gore!’ (So perhaps a bit less in the way of double-voicing here.) Having spent some time discussing verbal content, I want now to consider some of the song’s musical features – a discussion that will necessarily bring us back to considering the text, since one of rap’s characteristics is to shift the balance and blur the distinction between verbal and musical poetics. As with many of Eminem’s songs, the music track here is simple yet effective – composed using the standard rap technique of layering. As Adam Krims puts it, this is ‘the practice of building textures by overlapping multiple looped tracks’, which is an aspect of the sequencing and sampling technologies so essential to the 28.
The terms ‘appellation’ and ‘ideological state apparatus’, of course, come from Louis Althusser; see his ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), pp. 121–73.
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genre.29 Example 1 diagrams the key elements of the mix and their distribution. These features signify in various ways, such as formally, emotively and connotatively. The lower three layers on the diagram indicate instrumental tracks that are constant (silenced only in the coda – still to be discussed) and that bear little internal differentiation. One of these is a pedal on the key-note C (a link with the preceding ‘Curtains Up’), whose only point of relief is an upbeat skip from the dominant, G, on the last beat of every fourth bar (played glissando, which foregrounds the bass guitar as the sound source). Superimposed onto this is a drum track which accumulates during the introduction to a subsequently constant alternation between bass drum downbeat and snare drum rimshot backbeat, connoting rock music and with it a certain kind of male power.30 This compounds the slightly ominous and, more to the point, intransigent quality of the pedal, reinforcing the belligerent stance of the lyrics. Adding to the cluster of signifiers of power that Eminem gathers round him, the third continuous track, labelled ‘pulsation’ in Example 1, mediates between the instrumental layers and the fighterplane sounds heard over the introduction. While its source could be instrumental, it sounds more like a manipulated sample of helicopter rotors, slowed down to articulate an uninterrupted quaver beat. So on the one hand, this signifies extrinsically, its militaristic connotations bolstering similar sentiments in the text and suggesting oppressive surveillance; on the other hand it signifies intrinsically, serving the immanent musical role of a rhythmic constant against which the salient rhythmic features of the text are brought into relief (more on this presently). The two layers which are intermittent rather than constant would seem to be intended to complement the pugilistic tone of the lyrics. One is a quiet string-synth chord on tonic and dominant, whose high register extends the phenomenal space of the song. The other comprises male vocals (actually Eminem’s voice multi-tracked) which gently sing a wordless, syncopated, mildly melancholic melody whose path basically descends from G to C via E. 29.
Adam Krims, Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 54. 30. The drum track here corresponds closely to what Allan F. Moore defines as the ‘standard rock beat’, in his Rock: The Primary Text: Developing a Musicology of Rock, 2nd edition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), p. 38.
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Example 1: ‘White America’ (The Eminem Show): Layering Structure
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Above the pedal, still in the lower register, is an arch-shaped ostinato in the minor mode, moving by step in repeated minims: ¦ C–C ¦ D– D ¦ E–E ¦ D–D ¦.31 As well as contributing to the minimal melodic content of the song, it also has a middleground rhythmic function, establishing a four-bar periodicity. These four-bar ‘hyperbars’ further aggregate into fours to yield a 16-bar ‘macrobar’ periodicity (indicated as the second layer down in Example 1). Whereas the hyperbars were embodied by an audible ostinato, the macrobars are less tangibly articulated, tending to be reflected in the formal organization of the text, as shown at the top of Example 1. (Note, however, that the eight-bar extension to Verse 3 temporarily moves the verse/chorus structure out of kilter with the macrobar structure, until rectified by a similar extension to the outro.) This essentially simple quadratic structure provides a framework against which to measure (or to feel) the work of the words, sometimes conformant with the musical metrics, sometimes artfully out of sync with them. In the middleground, for example, the hyperbars of the ostinato figure throw into relief the contractions and enjambments of lines of text. And in the foreground, which demands the most attentive listening, the periodic structure of individual bars makes evident the complex cross-accentuations of the lyrics. There is space here for just one example, which coincides with ostinato-hyperbars 35–6 (at 3’38” on the CD track). At this point (Verse 3) Eminem rants back at those who rant against him: All I hear is: lyrics, lyrics, constant controversy, sponsors working round the clock, to try to stop my concerts early surely hip hop was never a problem in Harlem only in Boston, after it bothered the fathers of daughters startin to blossom
The accumulation of rhymes and half rhymes is an obvious part of the artistry. The succession of ‘o’ and ‘œ’ sounds counterpointing the rhymes in the first line – ‘constant controversy, sponsors working … stop my concerts early’ – spills over into the second – ‘hip hop was never a problem’ – and overlaps a second scheme of rhymes and half rhymes based on the alternation of ‘o’ and ‘a’: ‘never a problem in Harlem only in Boston, after it bothered the fathers of d(au)ghters
31.
The same loop, speeded up, is used in the next track, ‘Business’, to Signify on the theme tune to the 1960s TV series Batman.
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Example 2
startin to blossom’. But also important is a further, rhythmic structure, which, to pick up on the preceding point, energetically counterpoints the underlying musical metre in a polyrhythmic tour de force. The ranting tone of these lines (from ‘lyrics, lyrics, constant controversy’ onwards) is captured by the unremitting delivery in quavers, one per syllable (what Krims would term ‘percussion effusive’ flow), and this locks into the unremitting quaver pulsation of the quasi-helicopter track, discussed above.32 But while we hear the latter as regular groups of four quavers nested within the minim beats of the underlying metrical structure, the vocal track – which I have transcribed and analyzed in Example 2 – sets up completely different patterns. To be sure, the first of the lines quoted above reads out as obsessively trochaic: pairs of quavers configured strong–weak. But these coalesce into irregular bar lengths: first 42 (‘lyrics, lyrics’), then 43 (‘con32.
Krims, Rap Music, pp. 50–3.
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stant controversy’), then 2 × 44 (‘sponsors working round the clock, to try to stop my concerts early’). The layering of this sequence over the unremitting 44 of the pulsation track adds one degree of complexity; matters are compounded by the fact that the whole superstructure is also a quaver out of sync against the underlying crotchet pulse. In other words, every stressed (on-beat) quaver of the lyrics is aligned against an unstressed (off-beat) quaver of the music track. Then a new rhythmic configuration obtains as we move to the second of the two lines quoted above (‘Surely hip hop …’). Whereas the previous line was set in divisive rhythm (where crotchet beats, even though grouped together irregularly, were always split into pairs of quavers), we now move to an additive structure: the combination of textual feet results in quavers grouped unpredictably in twos and threes – for example: ¦ ‘Surely hip hop was ¦ never a problem in Harlem’ ¦ = ¦² + 83 ¦ + ¦³ + 8³ + ² ¦ – all this still counterpointed against the regular 44 of the pulsation track. Sidenote: Aesthetics and Politics Readers may have detected a shift to another voice as we have moved from discussing the lyrics’ semantic content to what makes them poetically and musically engaging. This might be seen as a drift into formalist analysis at the price of a loss of grip on socio-cultural issues. But it could also be that the music forces this polyphonic response out of us. If we are to come up with the kind of utterances that represent an adequate dialogue with it – adequate in the sense of accounting for all those dimensions that imbue it with its cultural significance – we need to include an appreciation not only of its contextual discourses, but also of its immanent aesthetic qualities (what Krims terms rap’s poetics).33 Certainly there is plenty of mediation between these spheres. For example, the jump from one polyrhythmic structure to another in the passage just analyzed reflects a shift in intention: from describing a situation in the first line, to commenting critically upon it in the
33.
Cf. Krims, Rap Music, p. 40: ‘One must, at some point, work through [rap’s] musical poetics … not to aestheticize it or abstract it away from social life, but precisely to factor in that the people one is studying are taking the music seriously, as music – and that their cultural engagement is mediated by that “musical” level’ (original emphasis).
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second – a situation and a critique which are profoundly social. But in real-time listening, such homologies most likely remain entirely secondary (if noticed at all in the heat of the moment) compared to the nugget of pleasure drawn from the sheer artistry of the lines – honed and fixed as composed text maybe, but still stamped by traces of the spontaneous, the mark of one who can also cut it as a freestyler.34 This autonomous moment is essential to hip-hop’s social illocutionary force. Wit, skill, and ingenuity add up to a rhetoric designed to excite our admiration while simultaneously getting us to imbibe unpalatable sentiments that we might nonetheless be compelled to recognize as related to real social antagonisms in need of redress. And these opposed modes of feeling work in a negative-dialectical way: the often grizzly social attitudes that go with the poetic dimension put a bar on its consumption for mere culinary pleasure. (All of which begins to look something like an aesthetics of modernism, notwithstanding many persuasive accounts of hip-hop as a postmodern phenomenon.) This, however, is moving towards an idealized account which for the moment has suspended mention of Eminem, and may ultimately be more relevant to West Coast gangsta rap of the earlier 1990s. Does Eminem’s artistry relate to any genuine wider political purpose, or is he just out for financial return? Characteristically the messages are ambiguous. On the one hand he flaunts a cynical commercial strategy, as in the hit ‘Without Me’: ‘I am the worst thing since Elvis Presley, to do Black Music so selfishly / and use it to get myself wealthy.’35 On the other hand several other tracks on The Eminem Show (e.g. ‘When the Music Stops’) make a strong apologia for being ‘real’ (‘I’m see-saw battlin’ / but there’s way too much at stake for me to be fake’) in songs that often reflect on hip-hop as a kind of social work, offering an alternative cultural space to escape into. Similarly, while the ostensibly more explicit political content of his songs might amount to not much more than just ‘so much anger aimed in no particular direction’
34.
Jonathan Walker, in his review of Krims, Rap Music, makes a related point about real-time listening in his critique of Krims’s analysis of Ice Cube’s ‘The Nigga Ya Love to Hate’; Music Theory Online 7 (2001), http:// www.societymusictheory.org/mto/issues/mto.01.7.4/mto.01.7.4.walker.html (para. 13). 35. Though a more subtle, indeed dialogical, reading is possible here, in that Eminem’s voice could be heard to be indirectly quoting the voices of his critics – actual or anticipated.
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(‘White America’), they have the potential for being co-opted toward more focused ends. Witness for example the commissioning by the radical American website GNN (Guerrilla News Network) of a video to accompany ‘White America’ (subsequently used for Eminem live shows) with the expressed intention of ‘actively seeking to divert the emphasis from the cult celebrity of Eminem and … [to] be a platform for a broader and hyper-visual critique of America itself’.36 Here the extension of Eminem’s musical and verbal tactics might represent the effect of what Bakhtin called ‘internally persuasive discourse’, which is ‘tightly interwoven with “one’s own word”… [and] is further, that is freely, developed, applied to new material, new conditions’.37 The elusiveness of Eminem’s own intent is made vivid in the coda of ‘White America’, which disowns both the content and the serious tone of the song. Without warning, everything stops, and we get a parody in close-up of the syncopated male vocals that were previously discreetly embedded. Eminem sings the riff in the parallel major, but (almost) a semitone too low, and missing the final key-note (which at least brings him out somewhere near the tonic). Finally, with a (ridiculing?) laugh, he makes his retraction: ‘I’m just playin America, you know I love you.’38 Yeah, right. Authorship: ‘Stan’ Although we might raise a sceptical eyebrow at Eminem’s attempt to evacuate his authorial position (and hence to abrogate responsibility for
36.
For details see http://www.guerrillanews.com/white_america/; the most contentious aspect of this animated cartoon video appears to have been a reference to the Columbine High School shootings at Littleton, Colorado in April 1999. This could be seen as aesthetically congruent with Eminem’s own disregard for individual sensitivities, and/or as Signifyin(g) on the moral tone of Lynne Cheney’s 1999 testimony to Senate, mentioned above, which includes the imputation of a causal connection between popular music and social violence: she cites the fact that the two high school killers, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, were reportedly fans of Marilyn Manson. 37. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, p. 345. 38. This Signifies on the game he plays at the equivalent place in his previous album – the end of the track ‘Kill You’. After a song containing some of his most violently misogynist lyrics, he makes the same evasive verbal manoeuvre: ‘I’m just kiddin’ ladies, you know I love you.’
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the words emanating from it), his reminder not to read him monologically remains salutary. His dividing up of his self into three overlapping personas, Eminem, Slim Shady, and Marshall Mathers, could be seen as a convenient ruse (always at least one persona for the others to hide behind), but it also reflects an insight into the status of the author that surfaces in several of his songs. Perhaps the one that illustrates this best is his hit ‘Stan’, from The Marshall Mathers LP. Here he orchestrates several voices in a manner reminiscent of Bakhtin’s concept of the polyphonic novel, where each voice in the narrative retains independence from that of the narrator or author.39 (In this respect, the song is no less interesting than Schubert’s ‘Erlkönig’, which Edward T. Cone analyzed in his 1974 essay The Composer’s Voice, as a way of answering the seminal, perhaps unwittingly Bakhtinian question, ‘who is speaking?’)40 Psychosis only partly explains why Stan, the song’s protagonist, misconstrues his relationship with rap star Slim; it’s just a more extreme version of what fans – and for that matter detractors – do all the time. Eminem gives us a story with a moral: don’t mistake the persona you see and hear in performance for the real me. (If he were a Marxist he might say: beware of reification, the idea, literally sold to you, that the constructed image of the artist and the relation you have with them is natural or real.) The song presents both Stan and Slim/ Eminem as characters in an epistolary narrative. The medium of a letter means we already hear their voices as mediated; it nevertheless also allows those voices to speak independently both of each other and of the narrating presence (the author) that we construct out of the sequence of messages. The stylization of Stan’s speech evokes the social
39.
Other commentators have picked up on this aspect of the song too. For example, Giles Foden’s appreciative literary analysis of the lyrics, while not explicitly mentioning Bakhtin, nevertheless touches on similar questions of voice and authorship to those discussed here. See Foden, ‘Just How Good is He?’, The Guardian, 6 February 2001 (accessed at www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/ 0,4273,4131548,00.html). 40. Edward T. Cone, The Composer’s Voice (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1974). Carolyn Abbate’s critique of Cone famously rejects his concept of the ‘complete musical persona’, formulated in response to this question, as overly monological. With a more or less explicit nod to Bakhtin, Abbate favours a dialogical ‘vision of music animated by multiple, decentered voices’ over Cone’s ‘centering and hegemonic authorial image of “the Composer”’; see Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 11, 13, 252–3 (n. 7).
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world of blue-collar unemployment, and suggests why songs like Eminem’s have a compensatory role in it: I can relate to what you’re saying in your songs so when I have a shitty day, I drift away and put ’em on cause I don’t really got shit else so that shit helps when I’m depressed
The irony is that the dialogue Stan imagines himself having with Slim is entirely one-sided. He gets no reply, and his letters accordingly get more heated in each verse, rising to psychotic rage in his last message which he records onto cassette tape during his suicidal (and homicidal) car journey. When Slim finally gets round to replying (the song’s final verse) it’s too late – long after the deranged Stan drove the car over the bridge, his pregnant girlfriend tied up in the boot. The scenario is the climax of a series of misplaced identifications which Stan makes with Slim/Eminem’s dysfunctional family: the murdered girlfriend in the car boot recalls the song ‘’97 Bonny and Clyde’ (from Eminem’s previous album The Slim Shady LP), narrating the car journey to dump the body of his murdered wife, and the prequel ‘Kim’ (from The Marshall Mathers LP), dramatizing the murder itself (which song purportedly precipitated the divorce of real-life Marshall and real-life Kim). The letters from Stan and Slim are not read silently, of course, but performed by Eminem himself. That is to say, these voices – including that of his own character (for once calm and placatory) – are embedded into his performing voice. So from this perspective Eminemperformer could be conflated with Eminem-author, from whom the tale is heard to issue. There is also another voice in the song, however, which suggests Eminem-author at another possible site, outside the Eminem-performance. This site we might call Eminem-composer and is almost certainly a composite of not only Eminem-the-actual-person (Marshall Mathers?), but also his entire creative team of writers, producers, sound engineers, co-performers and so on. To this Eminem, the Eminem responsible for the final construction of the track as a whole, we can attribute the creative decision to add to the polyphony the voice of English pop singer Dido (Dido Armstrong), in a sample from her ballad ‘Thank You’ (2000). What this song has in common with Stan’s words to Slim is its appreciation of an Other who compensates for a grotty existence (‘but your picture on my wall / It reminds me, that it’s not so bad …’). In Dido’s case this falls recognizably into the genre of the love song; and interestingly this
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is not utterly distinct from Stan’s feelings for Slim, which shade into same-sex love (‘I love you Slim, we coulda been together’). The juxtaposition of two different genres – pop ballad and rap – has thoughtprovoking implications, which ultimately throw a spanner in the works of any monological judgement on Eminem. These genres invoke two different social and cultural spaces which are kept separate in the song (as discrete ‘voices’) but nevertheless cross over on some levels (like the one just described). Into the foul-mouthed, conflicted, male-dominated world of urban US reality rap Eminem-composer admits the song of a demure, classically trained English chanteuse which is the very opposite of edgy: it’s very nice, even – dare one say – a bit girly. What’s more, the sample is treated without irony; in fact its ambience suffuses the entire song. Not only does the first verse of ‘Thank you’ serve as the chorus of ‘Stan’, but everywhere else Eminemcomposer deploys its instrumental tracks as the background over which Eminem-performer raps the (would-be) dialogue between Stan and Slim. In one sense, then, this functions as more than a mere sample, and perhaps marks a departure – on this occasion at least – from the Signifyin(g) conventions of black hip-hop.41 Instead it comes close to a particular species of Bakhtinian novelistic double-voicing, the intentional hybrid: ‘an artistically organized system for bringing different languages in contact with one another, a system having as its goal the illumination of one language by means of another, the carving-out of a living image of another language’.42 So, by analogy, one kind of music here is no longer heard as being a unitary language, an unchallenged, normative medium of communication, but is instead turned into an image: made to be heard as relative, and thus be illuminated, by the co-presence of a second type of musical language. Hence the easy-going, lilting beat of the Dido track serves as a stable emotional reference point against which the rising emotional temperature of Stan’s missives is measured (as well as two different cultural spaces, then, we also have in effect two contrasting constructions of musical time).43
41.
This is not to essentialize, but to suggest that Eminem’s signifying practices may necessarily differ in order authentically to articulate a different, albeit related, cultural situation from that of black hip-hoppers. 42. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, p. 361 (original emphasis). 43. These constructions might be suggestive of Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope; see his ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 84–258.
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And as against the misogynistic mistreatment which Stan levels against his girlfriend in the diegetic structure of the song, Dido is not being represented as a ‘bitch’ or a ‘ho’ at the authorial level by Eminemcomposer. Rather her voice and the gendered connotations of the pop ballad are admitted into the song with equanimity, as a relativizing representation of the feminine.44 Unsurprisingly, there is one last dialogical twist. As the Eminem/ Slim character nears the end of writing his tragically belated reply to Stan, the truth dawns on him that the news story he heard a while back about ‘Some dude [who] was drunk and drove his car over a bridge’ was about Stan himself: ‘Come to think about it, his name was … it was you / Damn!’ To my ears tragedy turns to comedy in that last expletive. It is possible of course that Eminem-performer just messes up his timing,45 but the casual delivery and the uncharacteristically restrained nature of the word ‘Damn!’ could point to another instance of double voicing. There is, as it were, an unstated, second, much more dramatically delivered expletive, which is what we ought to have heard if Eminem-character had stayed in role. Instead he is upstaged at the very last moment by Eminem-author who insinuates his voice into the former’s word, undermining its illocutionary force. And the message smuggled in through the resulting laid-back tone seems, in classic dialogical fashion, to be already an answer to the anticipated attack from his critics for presenting such violent scenes: I’m just playin (again); it’s just a story; fiction. Off the Hook? Hip-hop is an edgy kind of music because it pushes the word into gritty relief, where it is prone to abrade social consciousnesses.
44.
Regrettably, this dialogical treatment is lost in the video of the song, which portrays Dido in the role of Stan’s girlfriend. In other words, her voice now becomes diegetical, a presence in the time-space of the narrative, as opposed to an alternative, external perspective on the musical sociolinguistics of the narrative. But to me, the self-apparent untruthfulness of the conception of the video to the conception of the song only testifies, albeit negatively, to the inherently dialogical nature of the latter. 45. A point made to me by Philip Charles.
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Dialogical analysis is unlikely to protect against injury (nor should it necessarily seek to), but it may encourage us to hear the word as knowingly as those who speak it. Consider the way Eminem cunningly preorchestrates his own defence by dialogizing his words and music so that alongside his crudely provocative self there is usually at least one other Eminem already primed to answer provocatees on the counterattack. For example, around Eminem/Slim, the character who voices homophobia towards Stan’s insinuations, he leaves the trace of Eminem-author who imaginatively allows Stan those feelings. Indeed the numerous gay references on Eminem’s albums (to which he places himself usually at only one degree of separation), more than merely refracting accusations of homophobia, even tease listeners with the possibility that …46 Here again, he is no doubt ‘just playin’ (let’s keep those marketing options open). Perhaps what really niggles his critics is his refusal to say straight out – i.e. monologically – what he really means and hence who he really is (‘Will the real Slim Shady please stand up?’). At this point poststructuralists might be subpoenaed. Eminem’s detractors, they would point out, have missed the news about The Death of the Author: they have naively mistaken the object of their revilement as an actual person, as opposed to a field of meaning – in Foucault’s words, ‘a projection, in more or less psychologizing terms, of the operations that we force texts to undergo’.47 Yet for Kim Mathers the person who authored the musico-dramatic representation of her murder may seem more than a textual projection. And Douglas Dail, on whom Eminem allegedly pulled a gun in real life, might be disinclined to read the gun-toting machismo in a song like ‘Soldier’ as just part of an extended literary metaphor. These particular individuals, profoundly material witnesses, together with victims of homophobic or misogynistic violence might justifiably insist that there is something and someone hors du texte.
46.
The rendition of ‘Thank You’ which Eminem performed with Elton John (Reginald Kenneth Dwight) in Dido role at the 2001 Grammy Awards ceremony is just such a case of psychological (or in Elton’s case, possibly actual!) flirtation – no doubt a mutually beneficial arrangement on various levels. 47. Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, in David Lodge (ed.), Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 1st edition (London and New York: Longman, 1988), p. 203.
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Dialogism arguably represents a more ethical episteme in that it calls us to answer for our word. While like poststructuralism it sees selfhood, or subjectivity, as a product of language (or, more broadly, of signifying systems), it does not draw the conclusion that the subject is thus deconstructable into a play of signifiers.48 Just the opposite: it sees the word, the utterance, as utterly enmeshed in the polyphony of discourses that constitutes human social life. As Holquist puts it, paraphrasing Bakhtin, ‘The world addresses us and we are alive and human to the degree that we are answerable, i.e. to the degree that we can respond to addressivity … The dialogue I have with existence begins to assume the form of a text, a kind of book.’49 In other words, our consciousness as subjects arises exactly to the extent to which we author utterances (not only verbal, but also, for example, musical ones) in signifying exchanges with Others. Aesthetic authorship, then, is only a more developed version of what we all must do in order to establish and maintain our existential and social position. Several corollaries follow from this realization – and constitute my final (and most theoretically toned) interpretative pass at the kind of dialogics which Eminem so vividly represents. (1) Aesthetic texts, while achieving a measure of autonomy from their authors, do not lose their authorial ‘shadow’ any more than do utterances authored in everyday communication. This is because (2) authorship, on whatever level, is not just a neutral condition, but an act of agency. Bakhtin reminds us that we make our utterances from a given social place at a given historical moment – which may not be a place or historical situation we are content to occupy, and which may therefore strongly inflect those utterances with a desire to make a difference. Clearly this is the case with reality rap, which of all musico-verbal types of utterance is least inclined to draw a clear borderline between aesthetic usage of the word and everyday vernacular types of utterance and attitude. No surprise perhaps, therefore, if unreconstructed attitudes of misogyny and homophobia get shipped along in the process. But this surely cannot mean
48.
David Lodge makes a salutary comparison: ‘Barthes says: because the author does not coincide with the language of the text, he does not exist. Bakhtin says, it is precisely because he does not so coincide that we must posit his existence.’ David Lodge, ‘After Bakhtin’, in After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 99. 49. Holquist, Dialogism, p. 30.
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that those attitudes should be endorsed or be immune to robust critique from other agents – a point that Ernest Allen Jr makes when he qualifies his generally positive analysis of message rap with criticism of ‘a moral relativism that repudiates responsibility for one’s own actions’.50 Hence (3) the agency of authorship – an aesthetic action – brings with it a call to ethics, and it may be that dialogism offers a path between the Scylla of moral universalism and the Charybdis of poststructuralist antifoundationalism: the possibility of working out an ethics in the interchange of particular dialogical encounters. A key Bakhtinian notion here would – again – be the answerability we are all mandated to find for our acts (which might well be verbal and/or musical) in the actual concrete situations in which we make them.51 But (4) dialogue is (at
50.
‘Making the strong survive: the contours and contradictions of message rap’, in Perkins, Droppin’ Science, p. 160. 51. Bakhtin’s earliest known work, Toward a Philosophy of the Act (c.1920–24), foregrounds an ethics that would underpin all his later, more linguistically orientated writing. Sceptical of the abstraction (the ‘theoreticism’) of universalizing philosophical systems, he argues for an understanding of an incarnated self ‘in unique and concrete, never-to-be-repeated actuality’ (p. 73). That ‘I occupy a place in once-occurrent Being that … cannot be taken by anyone else’ (p. 40) is what places me under an ethical obligation: ‘I [must] assume answerability for my own uniqueness, for my own being’ (p. 42). The notion of answerability also presupposes a relation – and obligation – to the Other that will feature more strongly in Bakhtin’s later works, but is adumbrated clearly enough here: ‘to live from within oneself does not mean to live for oneself, but means to be an answerable participant from within oneself’ (p. 49). ‘Answerable participation’ would seem to imply responsible interaction with an Other. Indeed Bakhtin states that my recognition of the Other from my own unique place in Being is partly what enables that Other to determine his uniqueness: ‘[t]hat I from my unique place in Being, simply see and know another … that for me, too, he exists – that is something only I can do for him at the given moment of Being: that is the deed which makes his being more complete … and which is possible only for me’ (p. 42). This relation of Self and Other through reciprocal answerability is clearly proto-dialogic. Making a tentative initial application of these ideas to the present argument, we might conjecture that to the extent that Eminem ‘owns’ his life story, to the extent that he seeks to be ‘real’, to the extent that his art seeks to articulate his own uniqueness in Being as a series of lived aesthetic acts, he meets the criterion of answerability. On the other hand, to the extent that his utterances affirm disregard for Others he has abdicated answerability. But equally, it could be argued – as in point (4), following – that some of his Others likewise fail in their answerability to their own Others.
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least) a two-way process, and if rappers, including Eminem (whoever he ‘really’ is), do not get off the hook under a dialogical analysis, then neither necessarily do their assailants. The breathtaking acts of rap artists at their most dazzling – the brilliance and spontaneity of their poetics, and even (let’s risk saying it) their sometimes objectionable social attitudes – fill the moment with an injunction that is not detached from ethics: their lived performances (rather than any abstract ethical system) forcibly remind us that, as Bakhtin would put it, we have ‘no alibi in Being’: we must act; in this case, we must find a response to them that is fully ours and for which we should likewise be fully answerable.52 Fully: perhaps part of the rhetoric behind those unsavoury attitudes is to remind white middle-class liberals that their word issues from a position of privilege and dominance which is in turn open to scrutiny. One of the scariest things about hardcore hiphop is its exposé of the non-universality of bourgeois humanist values. These dialogical dynamics contain a cautionary tale too for those who see the pluralist tendencies of postmodern culture as a cue for unproblematized celebration. There is a danger of co-opting Bakhtin into this tendency: of interpreting our relativistic contemporary culture as a carnival admixture of high and low, a hedonistic blurring of self and Other. But this would be not to take to heart Bakhtin’s understanding of heteroglot culture: ‘[t]he word, directed towards its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents’.53 Cultural pluralism means the convergence onto a shared social space of many utterances with often conflicting vectors of social agency. As Holquist reminds us, ‘dialogism is based on … the assumption that all meaning is achieved by struggle. It is thus a stern philosophy.’54 Simon Dentith takes a similar view: Bakhtin cannot … be co-opted as a simple advocate for relativism … If ‘polyphony’ points towards pluralism, it is not of a laissez-faire kind, but one which enjoins the double injunction both to engage others and to allow them their difference. In that difficult negotiation, finally unresolved by Bakhtin himself, can be traced the outline of the difficult,
52.
See ibid., p. 40ff. I am grateful to Anthony Gritten for drawing my attention to this concept in early Bakhtin. 53. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, p. 276 (emphasis added). 54. Holquist, Dialogism, p. 39.
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The practices of performers like Eminem foment precisely such a difficult and explosive dialogics, and present a real challenge to liberal constructions of cultural pluralism. There’s no denying the bleaker side of this situation: the sheer militancy of some of those Difficult Others (not in all respects unjustified) might break the frame of even dialogical models of cultural negotiation. And no less disheartening is the commoditization of those attitudes, their reification under mass marketing as non-specific alienation and emotional de-sensitization. On the other hand, if dialogical engagement with those Others, however difficult, could be kept alive and mutually open, this might foster new, not-yet-nameable structures of feeling – profoundly ambivalent structures that might in some perverse way be cognitively valuable in the unceasing, unsettling dialogue with our times.
55.
Dentith, Bakhtinian Thought, p. 102.
4
Artistry, Expediency or Irrelevance? English Choral Translators and their Work Judith Blezzard
Why Offer Translations? One result of the increase in choice and availability of vocal music to a widening cross-section of the nineteenth-century English-speaking public was the desire for English translations of vocal texts. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that publishers in England and elsewhere sought to capitalize on this, equipping vocal music composed with foreign-language texts (including Latin) with English singing texts or (less commonly) English prose or poetic paraphrases. The spate of activity in this field of publishing is remarkable, not only for its diversity, but for its ingenuity, resourcefulness, and sometimes even for its audacity in modifying, broadening, or subverting the intent or purpose of the music as it originally stood. The comparatively lowly status accorded to translated texts, and by extension to the music which has become their vehicle, is perhaps a symptom of an attitude entrenched in the approach of music historians: if a piece of music is a hybrid, for example of French origin but with an English text substituted for the French one, then it cannot be a complete musical entity. It is therefore perhaps worthy of notice, but hardly of detailed consideration. This raises questions about how concepts such as plagiarism, arrangement (in the musical sense), and authenticity have been viewed in the past, how these views have changed, and how they affect presentday judgements of musical value. The fact remains that translation of vocal texts, particularly when associated with increasing ease of access to relatively cheap printed music as the nineteenth century progressed, brought vocal music within the reach and relative understanding of several times the number of listeners and performers than would have been the case had the sung texts remained in their original languages only. Whether or not this was a good thing is a separate issue,
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though perhaps some of the examples to be cited may raise questions in the minds of those who take a particular stance on the concepts cited above. One of the first things to recognize about the nineteenth-century spate of translations is that it was not an isolated or unique phenomenon. Although some of the elements that stimulated it, and the results that came from it, were strongly associated with particular circumstances and individuals, there are important precedents in a tradition of translation that goes back in England to the sixteenth century at least, and forward to the present day. A few of the more significant examples will serve as reminders and illustrations of this, in addition showing how, even at an early stage, translators were aware of the issues involved, seeking different ways of addressing them in their work. Missionaries and Madrigalists In sacred music, translations of the psalms from Latin into the vernacular became a principal means of congregational participation in Protestant services in the sixteenth century. The provision, starting around 1520, of vernacular psalms in metrical multi-verse settings, rather than in prose, was the obvious next step. This facilitated the appropriation of well-known melodies to carry the verses, or the composition of new tunes in a similar style. Versification was an aid to the singer’s memory, and further developments included the addition of polyphony and the proliferation of numerous versions of metrical psalm texts and their settings, some of which were specially compiled for local or domestic use. Psalms were translated into German, Dutch, French and English, and migrations of European Protestants from one group to another helped to disseminate various translations and musical settings, chiefly of psalms. Protestant refugees fled to England from Roman Catholic countries during the reign of Edward VI (1547– 53), and were permitted to form congregations, of which the Dutch were among the more musically significant. French psalms were translated into English, partly because of the enforced exile abroad of many English Protestants, particularly during the Roman Catholic Queen Mary Tudor’s reign (1553–58). The exiles’ acquaintance with successive editions of the Genevan Psalter led to the incorporation of several Geneva tunes into the English repertory after the accession of Elizabeth
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I, modified for use with English texts, often in a way that regularized some of their characteristic irregular rhythms. A similar fate later befell many of the Lutheran tunes that were borrowed in the 1530s for English translation. Some of these German versions even came into the English repertory by way of the Genevan Psalters. In many cases, the origins of these tunes had been with secular words, and in many more, words to a different English psalm were substituted for the original German, French, or Dutch psalm. Was this deplorable plagiarism, artistry or expediency? Does treatment like this condemn music as unworthy of serious attention? If so, a large proportion of the Christian church’s musical repertory is condemned at a stroke.1 In secular music, there were similar developments in the sixteenth century, though under different circumstances. Many Italian-texted secular pieces with overlaid English texts, or with no texts at all and possibly for instrumental use, circulated in England, drawn predominantly from Flemish sources.2 Nicholas Yonge’s Musica Transalpina, published in London in 1588, consisted of six partbooks containing 57 madrigals ‘chosen out of divers excellent Authors, with the first and second part of La Verginella, made by Maister Byrd, upon two Stanz’s of Ariosto and brought to speake English with the rest’. The dedicatory letter to Gilbert, Lord Talbot, explains how Yonge obtained the pieces from ‘a Gentleman’ (unidentified, still) who had translated them ‘for his private delight’, seeing them as ‘an idle man’s exercise, of an idle subject, written only for private recreation’, and who thought it inappropriate that they should be printed. Evidently he considered it wrong to envisage financial or personal gain from this exercise (and perhaps some still see translation for singing as an idle pursuit), but Yonge had other ideas. Hearing that copies were circulating more widely and were likely sooner or later to be printed, Yonge seized the chance to do so himself. This was without the prior knowledge of ‘the Gentleman’, but Yonge’s stated excuse was that he was not near enough to be given rapid notice, and that in any case he would surely be pleased to have his work dedicated to a nobleman and published in 1.
Robin A. Leaver, ‘Goostly Psalmes and Spirituall Songes’: English and Dutch Metrical Psalms from Coverdale to Utenhove 1535–1566 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 272–80; Judith Blezzard, Borrowings in English Church Music 1550–1950 (London: Stainer & Bell, 1990), pp. 36–41. 2. Linda Hamessley, ‘The Tenbury and Ellesmere Partbooks: New Findings on Manuscript Compilation and Exchange, and the Reception of the Italian Madrigal in Elizabethan England’, Music and Letters 73 (1992), 177–221.
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‘correct’ copies by Yonge, rather than risk ‘false or incorrect’ publication by others! The music has English singing texts only, but the contents list gives English titles, Italian titles, and composers’ names: these include Luca Marenzio (the main composer represented), Alfonso Ferrabosco, Giovanni Ferretti, and others such as Orlande de Lassus and Giaches de Wert who were not native Italians. Some of the original texts were French, not Italian. In the English versions, rhyme and metre are maintained, and the verses seem no more contrived than many native English madrigal verses; indeed, several of the verses published by Yonge were later given different settings by English madrigalists who must have considered these translations worthy of their musical attention and labour. Yonge brought out a further volume in 1597.3 Thomas Watson’s Italian Madrigals Englished, published in London in 1590, which contains 28 pieces, adopts a different and apparently somewhat more thoughtful approach to the translation procedure than Yonge or his mysterious ‘Gentleman’ author seem to have done. Whereas Yonge was primarily a musician, Watson was primarily a classical scholar, poet, and playwright, well thought of in his day, who saw the role of translator not merely as functional but as didactic, a creative art rather than a recreative craft. This seems to be an early sign of recognition that a translator has to try to resolve a conflict: that between presenting contrived verse that reflects as closely as possible the meaning of the original text, and presenting a poem that is good in its own right but that may depart substantially from the meaning of the original text. Watson chose the latter, showing an awareness of the subtle correspondence between words and music developed by Marenzio (the main composer represented), though even Watson could not take account of the intricacies of ‘eye-music’ that graced many an Italian text-setting at this time. The full title of Watson’s publication makes his approach clear: ‘The first sett, Of Italian Madrigalls Englished, not to the sense of the originall dittie, but after the affection of the Noate’. Watson interpreted the idea of poetic ‘translation’ in an Elizabethan scholarly sense, which meant respecting the theme of the original spiritually rather than literally, treating the process as an exercise in creativity rather than literal accuracy. The outcome 3.
Nicholas Yonge, Musica Transalpina (London, 1588) facsimile published by Da Capo, New York, 1972; Richard Charteris, ‘Newly identified Italian Madrigals Englished’, Music and Letters 63 (1982), 276–80.
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is a series of verses that are not translations at all in the modern sense, but rather lyrics whose emotional and pictorial imagery is very accurately matched to that of the music. He apparently intended to provide a cross-section of the latest Italian madrigals so that English composers would be able to study Italian methods. Like Yonge, Watson did not reproduce the Italian underlay, but the modern edition provides parallel Italian and English texts, showing that Watson’s settings of syllabic and melismatic writing, like his poetic interpretations, are sometimes extremely divergent from their Italian originals.4 Translation or Recomposition? A similar approach to Watson’s, that of translation into English as a scholarly art, seems to have been pursued by Henry Aldrich in his recompositions of works chiefly by Palestrina and Carissimi in the late seventeenth century, though probably for personal edification rather than financial gain. Aldrich (1648–1710) was a distinguished classical scholar, theologian, collector, and composer who, as Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, was keen to promote a wider variety of worthwhile music for use in the English church, and who considered that Italian composers had much to offer in this respect. His tastes were largely conservative; even so, he held musical meetings weekly at the deanery to try out music he had discovered or collected, as well as his own numerous original church compositions. For his recompositions, Aldrich applied the principles of ‘translation’, in its early sense, not just to texts as Watson had done, but also to music, which Watson seems to have been content to leave intact except for variants in underlay. Aldrich espoused a threefold theory of ‘translation’ put forward by John Dryden in 1680: that the process consisted first of following (sometimes direct copying of material, as Aldrich frequently did, in order to assimilate it), then imitating (redolent, to many, of ‘harmony and counterpoint’ and studies of Latin and Greek), and lastly of emulating. (Whether or not this last goal could ever be accomplished is perhaps another matter for debate but not in the present context.) Aldrich’s application of this educative method to musical 4.
Albert Chatterley (ed.), Thomas Watson: Italian Madrigals Englished (1590), Musica Britannica, vol. 74 (London: Stainer & Bell, 1999), especially pp. xix, xxv, xxvi.
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composition was apparently unique in its time and context, and helps to explain the nature and extent of his recompositions which, with hindsight, risk being dismissed as no more than plagiarism and inauthentic misuse of better composers’ originals. Clearly Aldrich conceived many of his recompositions as new works, even to the extent of emulating their models, while in no way attempting to claim the original sources of these works as his own. The models were not widely known in England. Not only did Aldrich suppress the original Italian texts, he substituted English texts that bore little or no resemblance to the style or sentiment of the originals. The music was modified largely by means of cuts and insertions, sometimes combining several exemplars, as in the anthem ‘For Sion’s sake’ which is based on three separate Carissimi models. Where material is inserted, it is usually based on ideas reworked from elsewhere in the model, as in his second version of ‘Hold not thy tongue’ based on Palestrina’s ‘Nativitas tua’, where intercalated material renders the whole piece more like a conventional English full anthem in form and texture. Purposeful and skilled work like this goes far beyond mere editing or trifling interference, but it also serves to illustrate the concept of ‘translation’ as a more profound exercise than it might have been viewed as, say, a couple of centuries later. It also helps to explain the attitudes of some nineteenth-century translators, especially those who approached existing works from primarily a literary or devotional, rather than a musical, standpoint.5 The examples quoted so far illustrate another important feature of translation, in whatever sense, associated with vocal music and its texts: that in practice it is not easy to separate it from a group of other activities that are themselves often not mutually exclusive. These include editing, contrafactum, parody, recomposition, reworking, and even performance. The purpose of all these activities is to increase access to musical material and to widen its use. The motives may vary. They may be commercial (surely the most likely, whatever high-minded principles may ornament a prefatory declaration), moral or religious (to enhance devotion), or social (to provide novel material for convivial
5.
Robert Shay, ‘“Naturalizing” Palestrina and Carissimi in Late Seventeenth-century Oxford: Henry Aldrich and his Recompositions’, Music and Letters 77 (1996), 368–400; Robert Shay (ed.), Henry Aldrich: Selected Anthems and Motet Recompositions, Recent Researches in the Music of the Baroque Era 85 (Madison, WI: A-R Editions, 1998).
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music-making or listening). The problems and dilemmas facing practitioners of all these activities are manifold, for they all entail some degree of compromise. Even if translation (in the narrower, modern sense) is the focus, and even if the enormous areas of opera and solo song are for the moment set aside, the rendering into English of the sung texts in non-English choral pieces alone raises issues that will not go away, however expert the translator. These include treatment of text rhythm in English as it relates to rhythm in the original text and music. This entails regard for emphasis and melodic shape; the matching of syllables, as appropriate, in terms of number, metre, rhyme and alliteration in the original; word-painting and (probably more importantly) mood-painting; the meaning of each text, the poetic integrity of the translated text; as well as rather more specialized issues such as treatment of archaic and biblical text, onomatopoeia, and approach to texts (such as Russian ones) in unfamiliar alphabets. Another issue is the treatment of texts (such as those in the nineteenth century concerning, for example, the Devil) that have been acceptable in one age or culture, but possibly not in another. In choral music, amateurs rather than professionals have often been the predominant participants, and translators have had to reconcile their own approaches to the needs of users whose enthusiasm may well have outweighed the combination of their abilities and the limited rehearsal time at their disposal. Accessibility and Idealism Nineteenth-century translators faced these problems just as their forebears did, and their successors still do. Like them, their purpose was to increase access to musical material and to widen its use. Like them, their motives were commercial, moral, social, or a combination of all these. Translation was, and to a large extent still is, seen as hackwork to which little credit need be attached, a means purely of selling more music or perhaps of evading copyright on an earlier edition. Sometimes it is actually very difficult to find out the identity of a particular nineteenth-century translator, who may be not named in an edition, and still more difficult to construct an overview of his or her career in this field. But perhaps this was always the case, and it is only the more conspicuous translators of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries whose work marked them out as individuals: many more may have worked anonymously.
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One feature that tended to characterize nineteenth-century translators was also a significant aspect of the whole era: that of the cultured amateur, accomplished in more than one field, to whom music was a matter of broad cultural interest rather than specific training or expertise. Women, for whom literary pursuits may well have been viewed as safe and respectable, were conspicuous among nineteenth-century translators. Many cultured amateurs (the term has no derogatory connotations) were interested in literature and language, and some were, or became, distinguished poets whose distinction also enhanced their work as translators. There was widespread involvement with church music and in particular with hymns, one of the biggest growth areas in nineteenth-century choral music which brought with it concern in cultured quarters about the quality and literary propriety of texts, as well as the types of tunes that carried them. Although it would be hard, and perhaps foolhardy, to establish a direct link with Aldrich, it is not difficult to see how a similar approach influenced translators such as Catherine Winkworth, John Mason Neale and Robert Bridges, three from a large number of distinguished hymn translators whose works merit further investigation. Hymns as Poetry Catherine Winkworth (1827–78) was one of the best and most prolific of several female translators of German hymns at a time when there was growing interest in German language, literature, and theology, with links between factions in the Anglican and Lutheran churches. She lived in Germany for a time, and was encouraged in her translation work by Baron Karl Josias von Bunsen, Prussian Minister in London 1841–54, who provided her with many texts. Although primarily intended as a means of private devotion, Winkworth’s verses were soon brought into congregational use, set in many cases to the chorale tunes that had carried the German texts. Sometimes, in the light of this, Winkworth modified her own verses so that they could carry particular tunes which then entered the hymn repertory. But her approach was primarily that of a poet, recreating the verse rather than directly translating it. The transfer from German carried inherent problems. For example, the high proportion of ‘feminine endings’ and internal rhymes resulting from the numerous inflected forms present in German but not in English meant that these features often had to be
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jettisoned in translation. This occurs in one of Winkworth’s best-known hymns, ‘Christ the Lord is risen again’, where the metre is modified, reflecting the sense rather than the sound of the original, and where a selection of suitable tunes was available, any of which could appropriately have carried her translation. Some idea of the volume of activity in hymn translation can be gained from the observation that by the end of the nineteenth century no fewer than 65 English versions of the hymn ‘Ein’ feste Burg’ were available. However, unlike many others, Catherine Winkworth’s translations endured in the repertory, being subject to only minor modifications by the compilers of later collections of high quality, including The Yattendon Hymnal (1899) and Songs of Praise (first published 1926).6 John Mason Neale (1818–66) used his outstanding abilities as a scholar in antiquarian texts, combined with his personal dislike of subjective hymns that seemed to him to convey false or dilute doctrines, to enrich the hymn repertory with translations from preReformation Latin, and even from Eastern Orthodox Church Greek. His translations followed the original metre and rhyme wherever possible, but sometimes his gift for assonance and clarity of expression allowed him to transcend the original verse form and provide, without compromise of quality, a hymn of universal and enduring appeal to English-speaking congregations. ‘Blessed city, heavenly Salem’ (from ‘Urbs Beata Jerusalem’) is a good example, with rhymes that are actually closer than those of the Latin, and a heightening, in the English, of the sense of climax in the final verse of the Latin text. Neale’s moral text ‘Good King Wenceslas’, manufactured to fit a spring carol tune from the Piae Cantiones collection (1582) met with disapproval in some quarters because the lively tune was felt to be unsuitable to carry a godly text, yet it has survived all attempts to give it greater supposed propriety. But it serves as an illustration of Neale’s accurate and memorable (if not always elegant) way with words, as well as a reminder of the absence of any firm boundary between translation, adaptation, appropriation, arrangement, and possibly plagiarism.7 6.
Ronald W. Thomson, Who’s Who of Hymnwriters (London: Epworth Press, 1967), pp. 2, 15, 31, 100; John S. Andrews, A Study of German Hymns in Current English Hymnals (Bern and Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 1982), pp. 2– 3, 14–27; Ian Bradley, Abide with Me: The World of Victorian Hymns (London: SCM Press, 1997), pp. 92–3. 7. Thomson, Who’s Who of Hymnwriters, p. 72; Maurice Frost, Historical Companion to Hymns Ancient and Modern (London: William Clowes, 1962), p. 383; Judith Blezzard, ‘The Piae Cantiones Tunes’, Organists’ Review 84 (332) (1998), 294–9.
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Robert Bridges (1844–1930), who became Poet Laureate in 1913, was concerned to promote the highest literary and musical quality in hymns, even to the extent of including historical notes for the material he chose and edited for The Yattendon Hymnal (1899). This volume was important as a source of material for early twentieth-century hymnals that were widely used by congregations as well as choirs. The Yattendon Hymnal itself was not designed to facilitate congregational participation or even to promote an active role for an organist: it was intended as music for unaccompanied choir. The aims of its editors were based on the notion that what could be heard in church should be distinct and separate, not just in the sentiments it stated but in the means of transmission also, from what could be heard elsewhere. Accordingly, Bridges produced translations, adaptations and original hymn texts which were often good poetry in themselves, but which in some cases lacked the directness and appeal (to singers) of John Mason Neale’s work. A moral tone persists: the first line of Paul Gerhard’s hymn ‘Nun ruhen alle Wälder’, for example, is rendered as ‘The duteous day now closeth’, the esteemed nineteenth-century concept of duty, absent in Gerhard’s version, being emphasized by Bridges. The rest of the Bridges version is on the whole less subjective in tone and sentiment than the Gerhard original, though some of the same allusions are made to woodland, stars, and so forth. Archaic endings on words such as ‘closeth’, ‘reposeth’, and even ‘disesteemeth’ (to rhyme with ‘dreameth’) serve as useful substitutes for German inflected endings but are by no means exclusively used: many ingenious rhymes are utilized by Bridges with no lapses into bathos. His hymns ‘O sacred head sore wounded’ and ‘Ah, Holy Jesu, how hast thou offended’ were written to carry chorale melodies in The Yattendon Hymnal. The latter hymn, and the well-known ‘All my hope on God is founded’, illustrate great aptitude on the part of Bridges in incorporating lines of different lengths, and the rhymes they encapsulate, into a succinct but satisfying whole that makes overall sense but nevertheless gives each line its due weight.8
8.
Bernard Braley, Hymnwriters 3 (London: Stainer & Bell, 1991), pp. 100–3; Bradley, Abide with Me, pp. 204–6; Judith Blezzard, The Yattendon Hymnal: Hymns Ancient and Modernised?, Church Music Society Ninety-Third Report (1999), 9–12; Andrews, A Study of German Hymns, pp. 234–5; Frost, Historical Companion, p. 145.
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Biblical Texts Understandably, poets were less interested in translating the texts of oratorios and associated forms such as cantatas into English because the preponderance of recitatives and arias gave them less scope for their expertise in crafting the kind of individual, free-standing creations afforded by hymn translations. Furthermore, some publications demanded translations or adaptations that bore little relationship to the original text or usage. Examples of the latter included the enthusiastic plunder by Novello of snippets from the nineteenth-century continental choral repertory to supply ‘Responses to the Commandments: Beethoven in C; Gounod in D, G; Hummel in B flat, Mendelssohn in G, A; C. M. von Weber in E flat; F. Schubert in C, G, C, F, E flat, A flat’, all in inexpensive leaflets for church use.9 Translators, even of large-scale works established in the English choral repertory, are seldom well known. Among the better-known ones is William Hayman Cummings (1831–1915), a singer, choral conductor, author, scholar, and editor whose adaptation of ‘Hark, the Herald Angels Sing’ from a section of Mendelssohn’s secular Festgesang assured his fame.10 The younger Sabilla Novello (daughter of Vincent and Mary Sabilla Novello) achieved some prominence as a writer and translator. John Troutbeck (1832–99) was responsible for many opera as well as choral-music translations for Novello publications, and later on, Ivor Atkins (1869–1963) produced, with Edward Elgar, an English version of Bach’s St Matthew Passion that remained the standard edition for many years. William Bartholomew (1793–1867), scientist, musician and writer, was the translator and text author most strongly associated with Mendelssohn’s works in England. He also composed hymns and children’s songs, as well as translating texts from other composers’ works. Bartholomew was married to the composer, organist, and pianist Anna Sheppard Mounsey (1811–91), who gave a series of performances in London under the title of ‘Classical Sacred Concerts’. During the composition of Elijah for the 1846 Birmingham festival, Mendelssohn was in contact with Bartholomew, who was to provide the English translation. However, the primary text in the early stages 9. Judith Blezzard, Borrowings, pp. 56, 71. 10. James D. Brown and Stephen S. Stratton, British Musical Biography (Birmingham, 1897, reprinted New York: Da Capo, 1971), p. 111.
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was the German one, and this caused some problems in translation. Mendelssohn, who spoke and wrote fluent English, supervised Bartholomew’s translation activities meticulously, and it is clear from surviving correspondence that the composer was anxious to follow the Authorised Version of the English biblical text as closely as possible, even to the extent of altering the music to fit it. Whether this stance meant that the requirements of the German text were to be subordinated, or whether the composer was aiming at a compromise between English and German, is not clear: perhaps he even envisaged two parallel but separate versions. After the first performance in 1846, further revisions were made before London and regional performances in 1847.11 The converse was the case in Mendelssohn’s setting, in 1844, of William Bartholomew’s text ‘Hear my prayer’, an adaptation of the text of Psalm 55. This was composed especially for the Classical Sacred Concert on 8 January 1845, long before Bartholomew’s marriage to Anna Mounsey (1853), yet she is seldom remembered as its promoter.12 The German version, ‘Hör’ mein Bitten’, produced shortly afterwards, was dedicated to the conductor Wilhelm Taubert. I cannot help wondering if this dedication was a pun on Taubert’s name (‘Taube’ means ‘dove’ in German) in view of the best-known section of the piece beginning ‘O for the wings of a dove’. Bartholomew was also associated with other Mendelssohn works, editions of which were published in England chiefly by Novello, but also by other firms, and one particular point of interest is that he had personal and amicable contact with the composer whose works he translated, rather than working at some distance of time or location, as is often the case with translators. Not only native English speakers were involved: the German diplomat Karl Klingemann, one of Mendelssohn’s friends, translated some texts for music. It is also important to remember that German publishers such as Simrock produced editions with English translations, sometimes simultaneously with their German counterparts, or with parallel German and English texts.13 11.
F. G. Edwards, Preface to vocal score of Mendelssohn, Elijah (London: Novello, 1903), pp. iii–vi; F. G. Edwards, The History of Mendelssohn’s Oratorio ‘Elijah’ (London: Novello, 1896). 12. Brown and Stratton, Biography, p. 33. 13. Friedhelm Krummacher, ‘Composition as Accommodation? On Mendelssohn’s Music in Relation to England’, in R. Larry Todd (ed.), Mendelssohn Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 80–105, especially 95, 100; Peter Ward Jones, ‘Mendelssohn and his English Publishers’, op. cit., pp. 240–55.
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The composite volumes of Mendelssohn’s works edited by Julius Rietz and published between 1874 and 1880 provide examples of parallel underlaid German and English texts. This edition of St Paul, in full score, even includes an English translation of the contents page, but there is no preface, no note of which versions of the Bible (in either language) were used, no record of which verses of the Acts of the Apostles and other sections of the Bible supplied the texts, and no name of any translator. In general, the sung translation is clearly an attempt to reproduce the musical rhythms as closely as possible while approaching Authorised Version biblical language in spirit, if not reproducing it exactly. There has been some regard for musical practicalities, such as placing open syllables on long high notes, also for matching some syllables such as the first one in ‘Freudigkeit’, underlaid as ‘joyfulness’ in English. But there are some casualties. For example, the characteristic dotted-quaver-semiquaver rhythm on ‘wider’ in ‘Herr, wi-der dich und’ is smoothed out to a crotchet, one of four carrying ‘Lord! A-gainst thee’ in the translation, which takes much of the rhythmic ‘bite’ out of the passage.14 A Novello edition of St Paul, from which the German text is absent with the result that note-values for its underlay are suppressed, provides further interesting comparisons and highlights some of the problems of translation. On the basis of some trial sections it seems that the German text is near to the Lutheran version but expands and modifies it slightly. The English text is near to the Authorised Version but with elaborations, particularly in recitatives. In both cases, therefore, archaic language is retained. A sample passage follows from the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 5 verse 28, which Mendelssohn sets for chorus: Lutheran Bible: Haben wir euch nicht streng geboten, in diesem Namen nicht zu lehren? Mendelssohn: Haben wir euch nicht mit Ernst ge-[two quavers on first syllable]boten, dass ihr nicht solltet lehren in diesem Namen? Mendelssohn, English translation: Did we not enjoin and straitly command you, that ye should not__ teach in the name ye follow? Authorised Version: Did we not straitly command you that ye should not teach in this name?
14. Julius Rietz (ed.), Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s Werke: Kritisch durchgesehene Ausgabe (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1874–80), Paulus: Oratorium nach Worten der heiligen Schrift op. 36, series 13, vol. 85, example from p. 33.
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Both languages show elaboration of the biblical texts, but the English entails some slight modifications of rhythm. Sometimes the only way the English translator can cope with the German ‘feminine endings’ is to resort to almost self-conscious archaism, as (for example) in ‘[Blessed are they who have] endur-ed’ for ‘erduldet’ in Mendelssohn. (The next section of this chapter shows further examples of a similar practice.) Repetitions of English words sometimes fill out melismas in the German, and ‘infill’ words such as ‘yea’ abound, sometimes to ensure that the most significant English words coincide with their German counterparts at musical climaxes. Additional words can enhance a dramatic moment, as in the following example from Leviticus chapter 24 verse 16, where both German and English biblical versions use the passive voice: ‘He that blasphemeth … shall surely be put to death’, but Mendelssohn’s setting, for chorus, has the active imperative ‘Steiniget ihn’, amplified in English as ‘Stone him to death’. Not surprisingly, recitatives show the greatest rhythmic divergence between German and English, chorales the least. However, the latter show much greater divergence of meaning.15 Some Pitfalls of Archaism Attempts to use archaic language in English translations, perhaps to convey an air of supposed propriety or archaism, sometimes go wrong, textually or musically. An example of each will illustrate the problems. The text of Psalm 150 by Anton Bruckner in the Schirmer edition of 1969 is underlaid in both German and English. The English approximates to the Authorised Version without slavishly following it. There are several ‘infill’ words, dotted slurs and similar contrivances, giving the edition a confusing appearance overall. But the most conspicuous problem occurs at ‘All creatures that hath breath’, repeated several times. Undoubtedly this rendition has been used because the text ‘Let all things that have breath’ or ‘Let everything that hath breath’ would not fit the emphases in Bruckner’s setting. However, this hybrid solution attempts to fit a singular verb with a plural noun, with uncomfortable results. 15.
Saint Paul: An Oratorio in Vocal Score Composed by F Mendelssohn Bartholdy, the Pianoforte Accompaniment Arranged by the Composer (London: Novello, Ewer and Co, n.d. [c.1880]).
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The musical phrasing and emphasis in the 1714 setting by J. S. Bach of an anonymous chorale melody to a text (‘Es ist vollbracht!’) by Johann Eusebius Schmidt defies an attempt to supply it with an archaic English translation. This setting, until recently used on Passion Sunday in York Minster, is difficult to track down for reference because no publisher is given, the translator is anonymous and (as in many such choral leaflets) the German text is suppressed. However, the latter is available elsewhere, and shows the relative clumsiness of the contrived ‘archaic’ English, which is here followed by a more modern possibility which reflects the musical contours:
^
– ist finis
voll-ishful-
– -bracht! -ed! -filled!
^
^ Es__ It is It__
– – – Ver- -giss ja__ nicht, Ah! Grant, O Lord,
The ‘archaic’ setting places undue emphasis on ‘-shed’, reinforced in subsequent verses as ‘accomplish-ed’, ‘o’er my head’ and ‘Jesus said’, and by the repetition of the opening text line at the end of each of the three verses. Although this observation makes a musical point, it is important to remember that the German texts at Bach’s disposal were already archaic when he set them. Therefore, should translations reflect this archaism? Even so, the repeated emphasis on syllables such as ‘-shed’ seems unmusical here. Changes in Fashion, Form and Meaning What happened to Latin underlaid texts where the source material was not biblical? A Novello edition of Mendelssohn’s Lauda Sion, composed early in 1846 for a church festival at Liège, using the text of the Latin rhyming sequence to commemorate the 600th anniversary of the Feast of Corpus Christi, is one example. This piece shows how not only rhythm, assonance and shades of meaning, but also the match of musical and poetic form, can be compromised by translation. No translator is named, either in the edition or in The British Library Catalogue of Printed Music to 1980. The popularity of the piece in England is attested by the cluster of versions for different forces, all available from Novello. All texts are given at the front of the vocal score, and the music gives parallel English and Latin underlay, so direct comparison is possible. Throughout, the rhyme-scheme of the
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Latin is maintained in the English, which is a notable achievement considering the brevity of each line and the overall sense and unity of each version. The English is much more picturesque, with colourful imagery and allusions. Also, its ‘Praise Jehovah’ opening sets the tone for the remainder: an adulatory and supplicatory text that transcends the narrower focus of the Latin poem. But that is not all. For many sections, the English text is much longer than the Latin, so verbal repetitions in the Latin are filled out with additional text in the English. In the final chorus, which starts with ‘Bone pastor, panis vere’, a reprise of these words is given a degree of tonal and thematic recapitulation. This means that the form of the text in this movement is A B A, and that of the music is A A A (varied) B A (with coda). However, the English text form is A B C D E, so that the musical recapitulation is no longer matched by the text. The treble solo aria ‘Caro cibus, sanguis potus’ behaves similarly, with two Latin verses set musically as six sections: A A B A B A (minus its first line). The English also has six sections but each is different, so that the musical form above is carrying a text form of A B C D E F. The main musical recapitulation, exact only at the start, is at D in this scheme. There are internal repetitions in the lines of both Latin and English texts. Why did the translator or editor go to the trouble of contriving all this extra English text? Was it perhaps to make the poem more picturesque, subjective and moral in tone? Was it to make it more like a hymn with several verses, rather than a rounded musical aria? Was it to sustain interest in a beautiful but at times rather protracted solo? This approach must have been the result of a deliberate decision rather than merely a matter of expediency or compromise.16 The two Mendelssohn examples, in particular, show how translation can affect the interpretation and perception of music, perhaps to a greater extent than is sometimes realized, and not always in obvious ways or for obvious reasons. There must be hundreds of other works whose translations, often familiar and entrenched in use, would on investigation reveal similar and other ploys. No value-judgement on these ploys is offered here, perhaps only a raising of awareness of some of their implications. In certain cases, the reasons behind the changes brought about in translation are clear. Barbara Mohn has
16.
Felix Mendelssohn, Lauda Sion (London: Novello, n.d. [c. 1895]), especially numbers 8 and 6.
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shown how the problem of English distaste for allowing Jesus to be personified as a dramatic character was circumvented in successive editions of Beethoven’s Christus am Oelberge (The Mount of Olives), the first performance of which in England took place in 1814. The problem was that Jesus was given a singing role. In the 1842 Novello edition, entitled Engedi or David in the Wilderness, the setting was switched to the Old Testament, the central character was changed, and cuts and adaptations were made due to ‘the objectionable nature of the libretto’, as stated by Henry Hudson in the edition’s preface. In William Bartholomew’s adaptation of 1855, the disciple John assumed the central role, and some passages were turned into commentary on Jesus’ agony as if from a narrator’s point of view. Louis Spohr’s Des Heilands letze Stunden was given similar treatment for the English market, apparently with Spohr’s approval, and other works were similarly modified. It was not until the 1870s that oratorios with Jesus as a character (such as Sullivan’s The Light of the World) began to appear. The increasing popularity of Bach’s St Matthew Passion in England from around this time may have been a factor in this change of attitude. Certainly for a period in the late nineteenth century, vocal scores of Engedi and of The Mount of Olives were on sale concurrently, as the Novello catalogue demonstrates.17 Aspects of Secular Texts Secular choral music was not neglected, and many examples with English translations were published not only by Novello and other English publishers, but by German firms too. Mendelssohn’s partsongs were among the favourites, many translated by Sabilla Novello and William Bartholomew. The partsongs of Peter Cornelius, much underrated in my view, were translated for Breitkopf and Härtel by a Mrs B. Shapleigh, of whom I have yet to find further trace. The famous Cornelius ‘Three kings from Persian lands afar’ translation was later, by H. N. Bate (1871–1941) for The Oxford Book of Carols, first published in 1928. Several pieces by Brahms were translated by John Troutbeck and Paul England, in both cases with much adaptation 17.
Barbara Mohn, ‘Personifying the Saviour? English Oratorio and the Representation of the Words of Christ’, in Bennett Zon (ed.), Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), pp. 227–41.
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but no particular artistry. In some editions the German text was absent, along with any attribution to a translator or even to the German poet whose work Brahms used. The translations in a Simrock edition of Brahms’ Liebeslieder Walzer Op. 52 were what first drew my attention to the problems of this kind of work. Daumer’s text lines tend to be short, with a high frequency of rhymes. This must have entailed an enormous degree of difficulty and contrivance for the translator (anonymous in the edition). The result, though in many ways commendable, was so precious and ‘twee’ that none of us in a choir I ran could get far into the music without breaking into laughter. This was not conducive to efficient rehearsal, but nor would have been the prospect of singing the pieces in German: it was not what our potential audience wanted and it would have taken us too long to learn. This was a dilemma, replicated in English-speaking choirs whenever they are faced with ineffectual translations or no translations at all. Enormous latitude in translation is possible, greater even than in sacred music. There are two kinds of setting, however, that entail some elements of translation but which in the present context do not count as such. First, those where sacred texts are substituted for secular ones, and vice versa, are contrafacta rather than translations. Second, those in which a composer has set a pre-existent translation cannot really be reckoned alongside translations of underlaid texts. Examples include the Elgar ‘Serenade’ Op. 73 no 2 for unaccompanied mixed choir (Novello, 1914), the text ‘adapted from the Russian of Minsky by Rosa Newmarch’. Elgar is likely to have set the English translations without reference to their Russian originals. He adopted a similar approach in his Op. 27 partsongs Scenes from the Bavarian Highlands. But there are many translations of secular texts that raise problems of their own, particularly with respect to onomatopoeia in French texts. Examples include partsongs by Debussy (the Trois Chansons de Charles d’Orléans, published 1908) and Ravel (the Trois Chansons of 1914–15), in which the sounds of the words are as important as their meanings. In the third of the Ravel pieces, the English translator has had a hard time finding equivalents for all the monstrous, fantastic and threatening beings found in the dark woodlands, but the real thrust of the music lies in its portrayal of the writhing tumult of creatures rather than their individual identities. In the partsong Avril (1866), Delibes sets verses by the sixteenth-century poet Rémy Belleau in which six different nouns are used to convey the idea of fragrance. This
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subtlety in the underlaid text is extremely difficult to match, or even approximate to, in any other language. Sixteenth-century French programme chansons, such as those by Janequin, present similar problems with their characteristic repeated syllables imitating the sound of anything from a barnyard to a battlefield. Some element of humour is clearly intended, as is also the case in songs incorporating dialect, such as ‘Matona mia cara’ by the cosmopolitan Lassus. The text is in a dialect of Italian, and a German prose edition also to hand is in a form of German dialect. The idea is to convey fairly crude sentiments, perhaps as expressed by an uneducated peasant. The refrain ‘don don don, diri diri don don don don’ rounds off the lively verses. One English edition of the piece starts ‘Matona lovely maiden …’ and ends ‘… Dong derry dong’, far too genteel a substitute for the original. But what would happen if dialect such as Geordie, Scouse, or broad Yorkshire (the native speech of the present author) were used to convey the impression of peasant speech? Would it be regarded as offensive? There is a corpus of good poetry and prose in each of these dialects of English (as there is, for example, in Plattdeutsch), and it would be erroneous to suppose that they represent only rough or peasant speech. Originating from further back than the sixteenth century, the category of macaronic settings (in which vernacular texts alternate with Latin) presents particular problems in translation. The Latin is perhaps best left alone, and the vernacular texts translated into another vernacular language. But should this be a modern form of the language, or a contrived pastiche such as that discussed above for Bach’s setting of ‘Es ist vollbracht!’? Whatever approach is adopted, it is important to retain the macaronic element because it often serves to emphasize the difference between a personal sentiment or observation (in the vernacular) and a more formal or corporate expression (in Latin). Much of the interest behind the concept of text translation for music lies in the multiplicity of purpose, approach and outcome, and how these change, develop and diversify. But there seems to be no unanimity whatsoever, probably an entirely healthy state of affairs. This is illustrated by the completely divergent opinions expressed by two critics on adjacent pages of the Summer 2002 issue of Mastersinger, the journal of the Association of British Choral Directors. The first, reviewing a Schubert choral arrangement, commented that its editor had ‘resisted any temptation to further the distortion with an English
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translation’. The second, reviewing an edition of predominantly mainland-European madrigals and partsongs, said: The one down side is the lack of an English singing text, translations (and indeed very good ones) are included but no attempt has been made to make them fit the music. A case can be made … that the whole point of this repertoire is the communication of the text through the music, and some may feel that non-English words can be a barrier for audiences. The challenge then is, I suppose, to ensure that translations are available to the listeners (is it time for surtitles, do you think?) or alternatively for the singers to create their own, tailor-made versions in English.
From the observations made earlier in this chapter, it is perhaps clear that the latter process is not quite so straightforward as this critic suggests.18 The Search for Solutions How do people react to translations? Much depends on attitudes to sources of music. Some people would disapprove of the spate of translations of sung texts, especially that of the nineteenth century, believing that it created a false impression in the minds of performers and listeners, especially if original texts had been suppressed. Perhaps even the commercial aspect itself could be considered as a slur on the integrity of a publication. But was this spate really such a bad thing? Was it better for music to be performed in what might now be regarded as unscholarly and inadequate editions, or not to be performed at all? That is the dilemma, not whether scholarly editions should have been chosen rather than (possibly cheaper) workaday ones. Then there is the question of latitude: at what point does a translation turn into an adaptation? Is there a borderline? Are editions that might be regarded as adaptations by virtue of their translations of any interest in themselves, or are they an irrelevance? Is translation, by its nature, inadequate? (Please note the careful avoidance here of the word ‘authentic’!) As editorial scholarship has gained greater depth and breadth, bringing with it an increase in status for the editor, so the status of the translator has decreased. If the editor’s aim is to transmit music from chosen sources as faithfully as state-of-the-art scholarship allows, then a translator’s work on underlaid texts inevitably detracts from this. 18.
Jonathan Willcocks, ‘Schubert, arr Carlo Marenco: Die schöne Müllerin’, reviewed in Mastersinger 44 (Summer 2002), 6; Philip Redfern, ‘ed. [Clifford] Bartlett: Madrigals and Partsongs’, reviewed in ibid., 7.
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All kinds of compromise are possible, but the importance of clear purpose and procedure is paramount. There is huge divergence of practice, still, in choral editions, although some trends are detectable. The following ideas are tentative and based on fortuitous rather than premeditated observations, but there seems to have been a trend away from using or imitating the Bible’s Authorised Version language, also from trying to create self-sufficient English poetry for use in translating rhyming texts, and from deliberate archaism and preciousness. Sentiments or allusions are sometimes toned down, ostensibly to increase access and usage (such as modifying references to the Blessed Virgin Mary or to feasts specific to one denomination), but sometimes perhaps in the cause of political correctness. Statements of editorial policy are increasingly found, though sometimes tantalisingly scant. A policy on translation, used lately with some success, is to underlay a translated text that matches the parallel original as closely as possible in rhythm, metre, rhyme and so forth but perhaps diverging somewhat from its meaning, and also to provide a prose summary of the original text that gives its meaning more precisely. This prose summary can be used in programme notes where performers prefer to transmit the music in its original language. On reflection it seems a paradox that, when knowledge of modern European languages is presumed to be increasing and that of Latin decreasing, some publishers, performers and audiences are prepared to accept untranslated Latin sung texts but not those in, say, French or German. A brief survey of the editorial history of some Latin pieces by English composers revealed certain trends. In the early twentieth century, Latin-only editions were much in favour, whereas by the midtwentieth century Latin and English parallel underlay seemed to predominate. As the twenty-first century approached, Latin-only editions began to predominate again, sometimes with prose summaries. There could be many reasons for these changes in fashion, not necessarily connected with liturgical practice in various denominations, nor with the decline of Latin in schools, but perhaps with the increasing use of this music in concerts and recordings as well as in services. However, observations from a working cathedral music collection (that at Chester) in the late nineteenth century present a different picture, with a much more cavalier approach to composers and texts.19 19.
Further details in Judith Blezzard, The Music Collections at Chester Cathedral: A Handbook, (London: Church Music Society, forthcoming, 2007).
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There is no reason to believe that other cathedral collections from this period would portray a different state of affairs. It seems that not one single piece in a language other than English was performed at Chester Cathedral from c. 1860 to c. 1918. Moreover, foreign and Latin pieces in translation were indexed, catalogued and filed under the names of their editors and arrangers, not their composers. For example, the composer commonly referred to nowadays as Palestrina might have music filed under the name Henry Leslie (the editor) or John Hullah (the series editor). Extracts from pieces by Haydn or Handel might be filed under Gardiner (the arranger) or Judah, the composite oratorio Gardiner concocted from these extracts. This is the opposite situation from that sometimes also found in the collection, where foreign or Latin texts and titles were suppressed but no translator or editor was named. Thus, for example, ‘Palestrina’ might be recognized as the composer, but the user of the edition would be left with no clue as to which of Palestrina’s pieces had been utilized. Perhaps these issues did not matter to the musicians who performed this music on a routine basis with little time to think about its history or origins. As a choir trainer, programme planner, editor and translator I am often faced with these and similar issues, and have become increasingly aware of the influence translation can have — even, at the most basic level, on whether or not someone books tickets for a concert or buys a CD. This chapter can do little more than provide the start of what promises to be a fascinating investigation, perhaps with wider consideration of other vocal forms such as opera and solo song. There is always a risk that an investigation like this will degenerate into a series of anecdotes that are nevertheless valuable in showing the diversity and omnipresence of this subject. However, here is just one that shows how resilient music with a translated text can be, even in disguise. At Montserrat monastery near Barcelona recently I bought a choral CD containing 15 works in Latin and Catalan, including pieces (with Catalan titles) by Mendelssohn and Schubert. I could guess the origins of some of the pieces, but Mendelssohn’s ‘Cantar vol la Grandesa’ defeated me until my arrival home to play it. It turned out to be a wonderful Catalan version of the famous Lobgesang extract ‘I waited for the Lord’.
5
Pyramids, Symbols, and Butterflies: ‘Nacht’ from Pierrot Lunaire John Williamson
Theoretical Issues A central issue in ‘Words and Music’ studies is the complex of ideas related to analysis of lieder that have been categorized by Kofi Agawu and amplified by Suzanne M. Lodato. These have mostly been discussed in relation to the nineteenth-century repertory, though clearly they have the capacity for extension, since Lodato’s attempts to explain and refine Agawu’s taxonomy makes comparatively little reference to specific lieder (unless in the context of methodologies) and deals largely with general issues. This chapter will consider a ‘vocal’ work that has a notional resemblance to a lied in proportion, that is situated within a ‘cycle’, but which contains no singing voice (apart from one word) – ‘Nacht’ from Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire – with a view to considering what the Agawu-Lodato scheme might indicate about it as melodrama. Although Pierrot Lunaire as a whole is a dramatic work, the level of surface and structural integration exhibited is not strikingly greater than in certain nineteenth-century song cycles, and certainly less than in a post-Wagnerian opera; it tends to rest (according to current analysis) on associations rather than deeper patterns and correspondences. ‘Nacht’ on the other hand takes structural integration to an extreme point for Schoenberg in his atonal period. As a special case, it remains particularly open to investigation in its own right, in much the same way as a song from Winterreise. Theory is of particular importance to the historical repertory of which ‘Nacht’ is a part. It has the capacity to act as a kind of substitute for ‘meaning’ where the ‘sense’ of the verbal text is at least as much musical as literary, depending as it does to some degree on sound to transcend the semantic banalities and obscurities of the words; in thirteen lines the poem says the equivalent of ‘Night falls – man sleeps
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fitfully’, but dresses it in a variety of deliberately strained symbols; it is as much stage direction as lyric. Pierrot as a whole has been taken as a case study of ‘resistance to theory’, not so much in the area of pitch organization but in a broader sense that would make some sort of theory of melodrama useful in much the same way as Agawu’s theory of song.1 ‘Nacht’ in this context is an extreme case: copious theory about pitch, comparative reticence about the whole. In the theories of Agawu-Lodato, four models are proposed for the analysis of song: assimilation (the text loses its identity in music), incorporation (a meaning is generated from the interaction of text and music), pyramid (the verbal meaning is paramount and supported by the various levels of the music), and tripartite (an overlap of text, music, and song, which is granted an existence separate from, though related to, the constituent parts). Lodato is of the opinion that interesting analyses have tended to be written in recent times on the basis of the pyramidal approach, though she is aware that Agawu has proposed the tripartite approach as closer to an ideal. In this last, musical analysis itself generates metaphors, which combine with the composer’s reading of the poem (not the poem itself, which remains beyond reach) in order to explicate intrinsic relationships in the song that are then capable of combination with contextual (i.e. cultural or biographical) factors.2 Whether this is truly tripartite is questionable. Agawu himself distinguishes five stages, three based on analysis of the music (informal data gathering, use of an explicit method to refine data and generate more, and development of metaphors from the analysis); two on reading the text contextually and comparing it with the analysis of the music; and a final explicit interpretation that may involve ‘external’ factors (a ‘super-profile’).3 The broad outlines of this are present in Lodato’s interpretation of Agawu although she is noticeably more insistent on the nature of the reading of the text, but broadly speaking it is possibly to see this as a coherent position in ‘Words and Music’ studies.
1.
Jonathan Dunsby, ‘Pierrot Lunaire and the Resistance to Theory’, Musical Times 130 (1989), 732–36. 2. Kofi Agawu, ‘Theory and Practice in the Analysis of the Nineteenth-Century Lied’, Music Analysis 11 (1992), 3–36; Suzanne M. Lodato, ‘Recent Approaches to Text/Music Analysis in the Lied’, in Walter Bernhart, Steven Paul Scher, and Werner Wolf (eds), Word and Music Studies: Defining the Field (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 95–112, in particular 98–101. 3. Agawu, ‘Theory and Practice’, 11.
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In spite of the prevalence of the pyramid approach in practical analysis of song, this paper will tend towards the model in which consideration of the music precedes the explication of musico-literary relationships and cultural factors. This possibly instinctual preference is reinforced by certain aspects that stem from the composition history of ‘Nacht’, certain conclusions as to the status of the vocal part, and the degree to which the composer’s own theories of the relationship of literary texts to music display internal dissonance. It is possible that a certain analytical insight concerning pitch relationships that I feel has been overlooked in the literature has drawn me to ‘Nacht’ in the first place. If so, it has led to a desire to clarify why an abstract statement of musical relationships frames an exercise in the grotesque. There is an additional set of signifiers at work throughout Pierrot Lunaire that includes ‘melodrama as parody’, ‘melodrama as means of dramatic intensification’, and melodrama as historical echo.4 ‘Nacht’ subjects abstract symbolic presentation of musical material to a set of alienating shocks through the ancestry of the vocal medium. That is not to maintain that the abstract statement does not extend to embrace the smallest detail of the work’s musical processes, merely to note that the disparity between the precise organization of pitch and the garish poetic-visual spectacle eventually distorts the musical relationships in odd but predetermined ways. Abstraction plus parody and satire join together at the point where the pre-compositional arrangement of material seems to become part of the musical events themselves. A quasi-geometric pitch matrix is smuggled into a text-setting that has at least elements of mischievous intent. Later in Schoenberg’s twelvenote period, the presentation of abstract relationships is often accomplished at an initial stage, as in the Violin Concerto, where the combinatorial relationship is rendered explicit in the opening bars with didactic thoroughness. That is a simpler matter, however, than the pitch matrix with which Schoenberg begins ‘Nacht’. In Lodato’s essay, the pyramidal model is particularly characterized by the presumption ‘that the music in the lied translates semantic textual meaning and structure and that this poetic/musical
4.
See Monika Schwarz-Danuser, ‘Melodram und Sprechstimme bei Ferruccio Busoni’, in Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (eds), Musik-Konzepte 112/ 113: Schönberg und der Sprechgesang (Munich: Edition Text+Kritik, 2001), pp. 40–2.
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correspondence lends the song its essential meaning’. What happens when ‘semantic textual meaning’ may be a function of structure and sound is not discussed, although it is implicit in her discussion of Schoenberg’s George settings and Reinhold Brinkmann’s interpretation of them: ‘structure and sound constitute meaning’.5 This is an issue in ‘Nacht’, whose imagery is among the most famous or notorious in Pierrot Lunaire , painting in fairly crass symbolic terms a picture that owes as much to the images as to any conceivable narrative (see Table 1). In setting this poem as melodrama, Schoenberg seems to be presenting an extreme case of music’s capacity to extend the limit of verbal expression at the point where it tails off into meaninglessness, what one writer on melodrama refers to as the ‘“Unsagbarkeit”-topos’.6 This seems a crude measure of its effect, however, even if it is deeply embedded in the history and theory of melodrama. What the strained verbal images are saying is actually something rather simple. The contortions of the music have something of the same quality, but expressed so consistently in music’s own terms as to raise the eternal question as to which of the two, text or music, called forth the other. If the tripartite model is taken as a starting point, on the other hand, analysis begins with sound and structure in musical terms before addressing the verbal imagery; but genre too can become a factor in generating metaphors in ‘Nacht’, if only because of the description ‘Passacaglia’ that Schoenberg attached to it. This is a factor that is present at all stages, most obviously in the musical analysis. It may also generate tension with any reading that seeks to locate a referential literary meaning as an initial stage in interpreting the melodrama. The term ‘Passacaglia’ may itself be expressive in this context; the idea of a recurring ground is interpreted musically in such a way that the form generates its own sense of dissolution and decay that is not a response to precise details of the words, though the melodrama that immediately follows in the cycle turns to exactly that idea: Das Bild des Glanzes Zerfloss – Zerfloss! 5.
Lodato, ‘Recent Approaches’, p. 102; Reinhold Brinkmann, ‘Schönberg und George: Interpretation eines Liedes’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 26 (1969), 1–28. 6. Sjoerd van der Meulen, ‘Empfindsamkeit und Melodrama’, in Musik als Text: Bericht über den Internationalen Kongress der Gesellschaft für Musikforschung Freiburg im Breisgau 1993, 2 vols (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1998), vol. 1, p. 381.
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Table 1: Text and translation of ‘Nacht’ Finstre, schwarze Riesenfalter Töteten der Sonne Glanz. Ein geschlossnes Zauberbuch, ruht der Horizont – verschwiegen.
Dark, black giant butterflies have deadened the sun’s radiance. A closed magic book, the horizon sleeps – secluded.
Aus dem Qualm verlorner Tiefen Steigt ein Duft, Erinnrung mordend! Finstre, schwarze Riesenfalter Töteten der Sonne Glanz.
Out of the smoke of lost depths rises a scent, murdering memory! Dark, black giant butterflies have deadened the sun’s radiance.
Und vom Himmel erdenwärts Senken sich mit schweren Schwingen Unsichtbar die Ungetüme Auf die Menschenherzen nieder … Finstre, schwarze Riesenfalter.
And from heaven towards earth sink with heavy wings invisibly the monsters down on to the hearts of men … dark, black giant butterflies
The more general objections to referential ‘literal’ meanings provided by writers such as Lawrence Kramer also bear on this area, since the text concerned is so obviously resistant to a literal interpretation.7 The temptation to ‘ignore the problematic relationship between the literal and figurative levels of the verbal matter’ and ‘to treat the verbal text as a fairly easily discernible literalist statement’ is negated when the verbal text resists literalism by its choice of language, form, and imagery.8 Many commentators confronted with this problem here or in other works have sought to find meaning in the text’s relationship to a wider cycle. As a result, as Lodato has noted in a further paper, the pyramidal approach has been even more favoured in that the placing of a text in a wider narrative is a useful strategy to generate possibly allegorical meaning when much remains veiled in obscurity at the level of the individual poem or melodrama. Unfortunately all too often the broad narrative has proved more nourishing than the analysis: ‘It is when these two steps [establishing a narrative and tracing it in the music] fail to reveal a large-scale
7.
Lawrence Kramer, Music and Poetry: the Nineteenth Century and After (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 150–61. 8. Hayden White, ‘Commentary: Form, Reference, and Ideology in Musical Discourse’, in Steven Paul Scher (ed.), Music and Text: Critical Inquiries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 292.
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musical plan that would enable the group to be designated as a “song cycle” that they turn to a third step, that of invoking hermeneutic elements such as biographical or other contextual information in order to explain the musical inconsistencies …’9 Whether this is to be evaluated positively or negatively, it remains a potent factor in what follows. Hermeneutics seems inescapable in all approaches, and biographical interpretation is an almost inevitable part of the final contextualization. Analysis ‘Nacht’, the eighth movement of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire , is one of the most analysed pieces in the cycle and in Schoenberg’s atonal period in general. As is well-known, much of its pitch content arises from a handful of motivic ideas: the set 3-3 in the specific form E–G– E# (the ‘generating motive’, as Kathryn Bailey calls it), a descending chromatic scale-segment of variable length (that can be viewed as a downward extension of the semitone in 3-3), a whole-tone segment, and a diminished seventh.10 Strictly speaking, it is difficult to write with confidence about whole-tone segments when they are seldom of more than three pitches in duration: in the passacaglia theme the pitches are G#–F#–D, which is one way of filling in the ic4 of the generating motive. It amounts to a detail, however, that escapes from the nearuniversal obsession with the other elements. All are present in succession in the main passacaglia theme of the movement. Of these motives 3-3 is the most immediately apparent, being used as a melody and as chords (both in itself and in combination with transpositions of itself). Transposed, inverted, and used in retrograde and retrograde inversion, it resembles the future concept of the note-row but also employs forms that have been thought less characteristically Schoenbergian, such as permutation; the arrangement of 3-3 in linked chromatic succession and overlap (thus reinforcing the impression that the chromatic scale segment should be related to 3-3) anticipates 9.
Suzanne M. Lodato, ‘Problems in Song Cycle Analysis and the Case of Mädchenblume’, in Walter Bernhart and Werner Wolf (eds), Words and Music Studies: Essays on the Song Cycle and on Defining the Field (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2001), p. 104. 10. Kathryn Bailey, ‘Formal Organization and Structural Imagery in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire’, Studies in Music from the University of Western Ontario 2 (1977), 102.
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features of Webern, while certain procedures, such as using 3-3 to define the boundaries for chromatic segments, seem to go beyond standard expositions of later twelve-note technique in the Second Viennese School. The various analysts who have considered it have usually taken care to unravel the pyramid-like constructions that begin and (more elliptically) end the piece. All such analyses have tended to stay at the level of pointing out how the pyramid (as I shall call it, though it is obviously unfinished) is constructed from 3-3 presented in a rising succession of minor thirds: ‘In this way multiple, crystal-like reflections are created from the single basic form.’11 At this modest level, metaphors already flow from the musical construction. This compressed account of familiar features of ‘Nacht’ is a preliminary to analytical features that have been less discussed, since there is considerably more to the pyramid structure than the thirds and semitone of 3-3. Both ‘pyramids’ contain features that bear on aspects of apparently secondary importance. One is the right-hand piano writing that begins at the increase of speed in bar 11 (Example 1). Mark Delaere worries about this (it is largely ignored by Simms and Straus) and devotes some time to a misleading explanation.12 ‘The chords in the right hand in bars 11–13 are laid out in parallel, so that the passacaglia motif appears as though in triplicate.’13 The parallel motion is partly an illusion, however: 3-3 is certainly presented in parallel in the outer parts (b#1–d#2–a1 and c#1–d1–b#), but the inner part is f1–a#1–e#1 and clearly not a transposition of 3-3. The discrepancy prompts Kathryn Bailey to suspect a misprint but Reinhold Brinkmann describes the e#1 of bar 12 as ‘unambiguous’ in the manuscript.14 Delaere wants to consider the chords as deriving from the various statements of E, A, and E# that appear prominently at the start of each of bars 4–10, but this seems unnecessarily convoluted and distant from the compositional surface in the absence of clear 11.
Alan Philip Lessem, ‘Text and Music in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire’, Current Musicology 19 (1975), 111. 12. Bryan R. Simms, The Atonal Music of Arnold Schoenberg, 1908–1923 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 136–7; Joseph N. Straus, Introduction to Post-tonal Theory, 1st edition (London: Prentice Hall, 1990), p. 25. 13. Mark Delaere, Funktionale Atonalität: Analytische Strategien für die Frei-atonale Musik der Wiener Schule (Wilhelmshaven: F. Noetzel, 1993), p. 155. 14. Bailey, ‘Formal Organization’, 103; Arnold Schönberg, Sämtliche Werke, Part VI, Series B, vol. 24, Melodramen und Lieder mit Instrumenten, Part I, Pierrot Lunaire, Kritischer Bericht, ed. by Reinhold Brinkmann (Mainz and Vienna: Schott, 1995), p. 75.
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pp
Example 1: ‘Nacht’, bars 11–13, piano. (Copyright Universal Edition A.G. Vienna. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved.)
rules of prolongation. Nor does Kathryn Bailey’s idea that the chords constitute a linear version of the passacaglia motif in an expanded form seem to be in the spirit of Schoenberg’s procedures in this piece.15 Yet the composer’s laying out of the passage suggests that he wanted the listener to be aware of the chords in their own right, quite apart from possible relationships to 3-3. They are all either transpositions or inverted transpositions of 3-5. The set from which they derive is of further importance in the piano part of bars 17–18. Although the motif of bar 17 in the right hand is based on 6-Z44 generated by a combination of two different forms of the all-important 3-3, one in the characteristic form of the passacaglia motif, the other in a permutation that places the semitone before the third, it also contains two statements of the subordinate 3-5. This buried reference is then made explicit in the following bar, [6-Z44]
[3-3: 3 4 7; 9 10 0] [3-4: 3 4 8; 0 7 8] [3-5: 3 4 9; 3 8 9]
3-3
3-4
3-3
3-5
Example 2: Piano chords, bars 17–18. (Copyright Universal Edition A.G. Vienna. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved.) 15.
Bailey, ‘Formal Organization’, 105.
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where the four quaver chords are 3-3, 3-4, 3-3, and 3-5; 3-4 is also contained twice in 6-Z44. This intriguing exercise in derivation is held together by the presence of 3-3 in the outer parts of the first three chords as a means of determining their sequence as well as their content. There are also enough further references to 3-3 (indicated in Example 2 by the slurs and arrows) to enable the analyst to integrate the seemingly aberrant 3-4 within the nexus of references to 3-3. The final statement of 3-5 is less easily integrated into the chain of references to the ‘generating motive’ (the C does not belong in an immediately adjacent statement of 3-3). The analyst is left with the conclusion that 3-5 has a distinct role, however subordinate, in the melodrama as a whole, whereas it would be less easy to say the same for 3-4. Equally mysterious is the wonderful succession of fourths chords in bars 25–26. After a movement obsessed with thirds and semitones, the piano sinks to rest on two fourths chords that make up a cycle of fourths that can be extended into the cello part: F – B – E – A – D – G (– C). Here too Delaere is justifiably intrigued but has no real answer to their appearance, claiming that they do not derive from the Klangmaterial of ‘Nacht’.16 In this he is mistaken, however, as the initial pyramid demonstrates, with a little extension of its numerical succession. All commentators remain obsessed with the rising succession of ic3 that initiates each statement of the passacaglia motif and that contains the diminished seventh (the complementary ic9). They can be plotted against the falling semitones as in Chart 1, where the
Example 3: ‘Nacht’, bars 14–15, piano LH. (Copyright Universal Edition A.G. Vienna. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved.)
16.
Delaere, Funktionale Atonalität, p. 156
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Chart 1
logic of Schoenberg’s thinking is extended by the inclusion of a few additional (bracketed) notes not present in the music but clearly completing the abstract pattern from which the pyramid is derived. If the diagonals give the cycles of ic3 (and also of ic4), and if the rows give the chromatic steps, the columns supply the cycles of ic5/7, from which the fourths chords ultimately derive. The arrows illustrate the derivation of 3-5, the set of which all three of the right-hand chords of bars 11–13 are transpositions. It is also noteworthy that this version of the pyramid includes all of the pitches used in the right hand of bar 17; that they were arranged there to generate in succession ic5/7, ic1/11, and ic3/9 also accords with the use of these intervals in the pyramid. The abstract pattern is only pursued until it generates the complex five-note chord of bar 3 (5-Z38). Analysis already encourages metaphor. The ‘crystal’ structure is obscured: ‘Finstre, schwarze Riesenfalter töteten der Sonne Glanz’. When that line is repeated in bars 14–15, the left hand of the piano alludes to the basic idea of the pyramid, the stacked minor thirds and the falling semitones (Example 3). The suggestion is that the first line is to be associated at some level with the pyramid, possibly formally, possibly semantically. The closing pyramid is more complex, largely because the chromatic descents are allowed to continue for a little longer, thus removing the need to extend the cycles of semitones to complete the abstract pattern; thus there is a real, as opposed to a theoretical, moment when a chord of fifths is generated, between D, A, and E in piano and bass
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Chart 2
clarinet. The voice also insinuates itself into the texture while completing the poetic refrain. An additional complication is an underlying part (B – A) that does not substantially change the analysis, although it adds to the opacity of the sonority. (It is arguable that A’s importance is already established in bar 23, where it is the lowest note of a long chromatic descent.) In Chart 2, the heavily outlined area more or less reproduces the initial pyramid, although the apex (G) is delayed, the start of a process of compression that renders bars 25–26 more complex. The retention of pitches in the pyramid leads to a chord at the start of bar 25 that fuses G – C – F with E# – A# – D# (enharmonic C). This chord (6-Z26) expands to 7-35 when the theoretically possible B# is added, and this also contains 6-32. The latter (G – C – F – B# – E# – A#) is the fourths-cycle that the piano then reproduces transposed by a semitone downwards in the mysterious progression. Indeed when the cello’s C is added to the piano’s cycle, 7-35 is inevitably generated again. Only the E# that the bass clarinet sustains through
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Cycle of ic3
Cycles of ic5 (containing 7-35, 6-Z26, and 6-32) separated by ic1
E
l 4 'N ht' fi
l h d
Example 4: ‘Nacht’, final chords. (© Universal Edition A.G. Vienna. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved.
the whole progression and that theoretically completes a cycle of semitones otherwise in the piano is foreign to the second statement of 7-35, and even this fits into the overall ‘cadential’ effect, as cycles of ics1, 3, and 5 intersect (Example 4). It also fits into the background cycles of both thirds and fourths (see Chart 3), since the two cycles of fourths are obviously complementary, part of the greater circle of fifths that Schoenberg placed near the centre of his Harmonielehre. Once again the abstract perfection of the structure is rendered obscure in the music, in which the voice assists by shadowing the cello and piano on ‘Riesenfalter’. For Lessem, the opening and conclusion are a ‘magic structure’. They might equally be described in the words of Gilbert (‘a static musical symbol, weighted by the inclusion of tetrachords containing more than one perfect interval’), though he is talking about the chords that open and close ‘Die Kreuze’.17 Appropriately ‘Nacht’ and ‘Die Kreuze’ stand as sentinels around the central group of seven melodramas in Pierrot Lunaire. 17.
Lessem, ‘Text and Music in Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire’, 111; Jan Gilbert, ‘Schoenberg’s Harmonic Visions: A Study of Text Painting in “Die Kreuze”’, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 8 (1984), 120.
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Chart 3
Here in short is one of those ‘fascinating pitch relationships to be studied in Pierrot which, perceptually, one only wishes could be seized from the act of listening’, as Dunsby tendentiously put it. That the abstract underlying structure (the incomplete pyramid) gives importance to fourths as well as thirds and semitones only finally becomes apparent (in spite of the clues provided by the occasional presence of 3-5) at that moment when the piano wrests a seemingly foreign matter from the obscurity into which the pyramid breaks down in the act of performing and listening. For Dunsby, this is one of those ‘forlorn conflicts’ that stand in the way of acceptance of theory, an attitude that may explain why his handbook on Pierrot Lunaire took such a deliberately modest stance in relation to analysis of the music and dealt with the work from a ‘pyramidal’ point of view.18 18.
Dunsby, ‘Pierrot Lunaire and the Resistance to Theory’, 733.
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ff
ff
fff
Example 5: Webern, Movement, Op. 5 no. 1, climax. (Copyright Universal Edition A.G. Vienna. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved.
In contrast to the importance of cycles of ic1, ic3, and ic5 in ‘Nacht’, cycles of ic2 and ic4 are clearly less important and should be considered where they occur as the inevitable by-product of other processes. The whole-tone scale segments in the passacaglia theme play a less prominent part than the other cycles and the sets 3-3 and 3-5. This is hardly surprising since 3-3 and 3-5 are of far-reaching importance in the first atonal works of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. The latter’s Movement for String Quartet Op. 5 No. 1 is a good example of the prominence of these cells: its climax is a transposition of the generating motif from ‘Nacht’ (see Example 5), while Op. 5 No. 3 is also largely concerned with 3-3 in combination with 3-4. Stylistically, therefore, ‘Nacht’ is hardly an exceptional work. Its structural procedures are altogether more novel. Even the generic title ‘Passacaglia’ has provoked considerable discussion. Delaere’s comments remain at the level of technique and form: he sees the work as the triumph of the passacaglia’s technical level (ostinato repetition) rather than form (variations); this is also Bailey’s position when she notes that ‘definite structural expectations’ are not fulfilled but that ‘the incessancy so characteristic of the form is surely realized’.19 Watkins regards the description as another mystery and thus almost a metaphor, along with the unique use of singing at the all too suggestive word ‘verschwiegen’.20 Susan Youens produces the most interesting point when she notes that ‘Schoenberg, who told his students “Bach is the father of us all,”… set Nacht – the beginning of the nightfall of anarchy – as a passacaglia …’21 19. Delaere, Funktionale Atonalität, p. 158; Bailey, ‘Formal Organization’, 101. 20. Glenn Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Postmodernists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 283–4. 21. Susan Youens, ‘Excavating an Allegory: The Texts of Pierrot Lunaire’, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 8 (1984), 114.
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In this view ‘Nacht’ represents a dissonance between technique and expression that deserves closer scrutiny in the light of the fantastic overdetermination of its structure. Its technical procedures encourage metaphors of secrecy, mystery, muteness, and anarchy, as well as a discourse of historicism by virtue of its anticipation of features of twelve-note writing. These already look suggestively towards the reading of the text that Schoenberg provides. But at this point theory intervenes once more, since uncovering the ‘composer’s reading’ is problematic and tendentious. Not the least of the problems is that Schoenberg himself provided conflicting evidence as to his own views of reading texts in music. The Composer’s Reading Any consideration of words and music in Schoenberg starts from the well-known essay on ‘The Relationship to the Text’, first published in 1912 in Der Blaue Reiter and thus contemporary with the composition of Pierrot Lunaire . The distinction involving outward and inward correspondences between poem and music found there is, like the similar distinction between style and idea, of fundamental importance to Schoenberg’s view of the writing of vocal works. It is not designed to discourage investigation of word-painting, ‘declamation, tempo and dynamics’, merely to subordinate these to ‘parallelism on a higher level’; what such a parallelism might be is left deliberately vague, apart from the famous description of the impact of the ‘first direct contact with the sound of the beginning’ of the poem.22 Later Schoenberg was driven, possibly under the pressure of fashionable modernisms, to note that he had not meant to suggest in the preface to Pierrot Lunaire that ‘expression and illustration were out’; the composer could not ensure that ‘music does not express … something provoked by the text’, and music at the very least could ‘heighten the expression’ of the text of a song (or opera, or oratorio).23 The problems posed by the extreme position taken up in 1912 can be explained away, as Dahlhaus did, by noting that Schoenberg’s ‘aesthetic theory … is one-sidedly determined by instrumental music’ and by pointing to cases where the claims of ‘The Relationship to the Text’ can be 22. Arnold Schoenberg, ‘The Relationship to the Text’, in Leonard Stein (ed.), Style and Idea, trans. Leo Black, revised edition (London and Boston: 1984), pp. 144–5. 23. Schoenberg, ‘This is my Fault’, in Stein, Style and Idea, pp. 145–6.
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shown ‘to be blatantly untrue’.24 Yet there is a contrary position that not unreasonably points to vocal music as the driving force of his development at key moments.25 It has been plausibly maintained that the composers of the Second Viennese School, Schoenberg and Webern in particular, were placed in an aesthetic dilemma by their subscription to a view of absolute music derived from Schopenhauer on the one hand, and by their frequent insistence that music was a language, a problem that has been clearly set out by Elmar Budde; for a movement like ‘Nacht’, the situation that he describes has particular relevance, the problem of communicating through a music that is ‘structurally hermetic’.26 Schoenberg himself put forward the view that in Verklärte Nacht he had tried ‘to express the idea behind the poem’, and his picture of song-writing seems to encourage a similar defence.27 The idea behind the poem (what composers of Liszt’s and Schumann’s generation would have called the ‘poetic idea’) communicates itself as sound (rather than symbol) to the composer who reacts to this rather than to individual verbal felicities (in a similar spirit Liszt talked of the symbolic importance of characters rather than of events in a narrative). The example that Schoenberg provides, however, is not particularly helpful. The ‘idea behind the poem’ in the discussion of Verklärte Nacht turns out to be a tangible double motif, but it seems clear that this affects merely a section of the poem and that Schoenberg is talking about the composer’s solution of local difficulties in working-out rather than some global Einfall such as Schoenberg believed in with ‘monstrous optimism’ near the time of Pierrot.28 24. Carl Dahlhaus, Schoenberg and the New Music, trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 85. 25. Albrecht Dümling, ‘Public Loneliness: Atonality and the Crisis of Subjectivity in Schönberg’s Opus 15’, in Konrad Boehmer (ed.), Schönberg and Kandinsky: an Historic Encounter, ed. by (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1997), p. 112; a resolution of the two positions is attempted in Reinhold Brinkmann, ‘The Lyric as Paradigm: Poetry and the Foundation of Arnold Schoenberg’s New Music’, in Claus Reschke and Howard Pollack (eds), German Literature and Music — an Aesthetic Fusion: 1890–1989 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1992), pp. 95–129. 26. ‘Musik als Sprache und Musik als Kunstwerk: Über einige Widersprüche und deren Hintergründe im kompositorischen Denken Schönbergs und Weberns’, in Hermann Danuser, Helga de la Motte-Haber, Silke Leopold (eds), Das musikalische Kunstwerk: Geschichte — Ästhetik — Theorie (Festschrift Carl Dahlhaus zum 60. Geburtstag) (Laaber: Laaber, 1988), p. 661. 27. Schoenberg, ‘Heart and Brain in Music’, in Style and Idea, p. 55. 28. See Ullrich Scheideler, ‘Einfall — Material — Geschichte: Zur Bedeutung dieser Kategorien im Musikdenken Pfitzners und Schönbergs um 1910’, in Andreas Meyer and Ullrich Scheideler (eds), Autorschaft als historische Konstruktion: Arnold Schönberg — Vorgänger, Zeitgenossen, Nachfolger und Interpreten (Stuttgart and Weimar: J. B. Metzler, 2001), p. 183.
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There remains a further problem in evaluating Schoenberg’s relationship to his chosen poems, since his view of the ‘idea behind’ the text generates dissonance with what is known of the process of composition in relation to ‘Nacht’. An important secondary factor here is the sketch material for ‘Nacht’, which Brinkmann has described as ‘the melodrama in which, according to the appearance of the sketches, perhaps the most compositional effort must have been invested’.29 Nonetheless, the claim that something in the initial sound of the poem was often the starting-point for the musical work must be considered, especially when early sketches exist for the pyramid that is, to all intents and purposes, the compositional matrix for ‘Nacht’.30 Another difficulty associated with Dahlhaus’s remark that relates specifically to Pierrot Lunaire is the degree to which the voice is ‘part’ of the pitch content: is ‘Nacht’ in reality an instrumental work with a recitation at approximate pitch? There is no shortage of debate as to how the pitches of the voice part affect the totality, though there seems little reason to deny the general truth of Dunsby’s statement that the ‘singer’ cannot avoid noticing that ‘many of [her] pitches … are in a clear musical relationship to the instrumental material’.31 ‘Nacht’ bypasses any such difficulties, however, at least on paper. The voice part derives almost entirely from the various elements of the passacaglia theme or of the initial pyramid: chromatic scale segments of three to six semitones, semitones, the diminished seventh, sets 3-3 and 3-5, and a final descending fourth that one writer wants to relate to closure in Baroque recitative.32 There remains the possibility, however, that the voice part might have been created retrospectively from the highly organized instrumental parts, a feature that Brinkmann considers in discussing the great difficult experienced by Schoenberg in creating the last few bars: ‘All these writings out and corrections were made without the recitation 29. Brinkmann, Pierrot Lunaire, Kritischer Bericht, p. 195. 30. See, for example, Reinhold Brinkmann, ‘On Pierrot’s Trail’, Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 2 (1977), 42–8. 31. Dunsby, ‘Pierrot Lunaire and the Resistance to Theory’, 733; see also Friedrich Cerha, ‘Zur Interpretation der Sprechstimme in Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire’, in Musik-Konzepte 112/113, 70. 32. Anselm Gerhard, ‘Farben und Formen in einem “Totentanz des Prinzipien”: Arnold Schönbergs Pierrot Lunaire und das “Zerfliessen” der Tradition’, in Autorschaft als historische Konstruktion, p. 228. The fourth in question can also be explained as part of 3–5 (with the immediately preceding D#).
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having been notated. Does that mean a prior instrumental conception (at least for this piece)?’33 In ‘Nacht’, the impression is of a vocal work that in performance poses problems severe even by the standards of much of the rest of the work; that the initial conception may have been instrumental in character seems entirely plausible. In accordance with Youens’s ‘nightfall of anarchy’, the text itself has been generally described in terms of violence and the grotesque. This can be interpreted as part of its inheritance from the melodrama, its ‘topos of the frightful’, albeit ironically exaggerated.34 Yet in one sense it is comparatively restrained. Time has perhaps obscured the degree to which Hartleben’s translated verses seemed obscure and difficult in their day. To recapture this flavour it is useful to consult a German metrication primer of the period that notes: Recently a Berlin writer (O. E. Hartleben) has translated the moon rondels of Albert Giraud’s Pierrot Lunaire into five-foot, sadly unrhymed trochees. Thirteen lines break down into three small strophes (4+4+5 lines), of which the second ends with the first two lines, but the third with only the first of the entire poem … In this form the rondel resembles even more the Triolett with which Poggel had once confused it.35
The verse scheme of the German text, in short, was interpreted as a hybrid, lacking in the rhyme that is one of the distinctive features of the poetic form. Holding to the universal form of the poems chosen by Schoenberg, ‘Nacht’ combines its thirteen lines with a very austere approach to syllable-count: 8 7 7 8; 8 8 8 7; 7 8 8 8 8. The opening poems of the cycle have much greater disparity of line-length (e.g. the first stanza of ‘Mondestrunken’, which contains lines of nine and six syllables), but the expressionistic extravagance of the language of ‘Nacht’ is conveyed with the same metrical restraint that characterizes the whole group of melodramas from ‘Valse de Chopin’ onwards. Only after ‘Nacht’ do the shorter, jerkier line lengths of ‘Gebet an Pierrot’ break in with laughter. In choosing the idea of a passacaglia, Schoenberg may have had such constraints in mind.
33. 34.
Brinkmann, Pierrot Lunaire, Kritischer Bericht, p. 198. Andreas Meyer, Ensemblelieder in der frühen Nachfolge (1912–17) von Arnold Schönbergs ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ op. 21: Eine Studie über Einfluss und ‘misreading’ (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2000), p. 102. 35. Jakob Minor, Neuhochdeutsche Metrik: ein Handbuch, 2nd edition (Strassburg: K. J. Trübner, 1902), p. 503.
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The setting of the text is of a similar austerity. Much of the recitation takes place to chromatic stepwise descents into an ungrateful register. Even where the cell 3-3 is used, Schoenberg is often inclined to fill in the thirds by chromatic motion. This is clear at ‘Ein geschlossnes Zau –(berbuch)’, where the minor third is filled in, and at ‘Und vom Himmel erdenwärts’, where the minor third is partly, and the major third completely, filled in by chromatic scale segments. This is complemented by the unadorned thirds themselves and the occasional whole tone. Large leaps of the kind that come to mind when considering the rest of the cycle are presented very sparingly and associated with the diminished seventh and the major seventh. When they occur, the intention is obviously to heighten the extravagance of the images at the first ‘Riesen-(falter)’, at ‘Duft’, and at ‘Erinnrung mordend’. Having distorted ‘Riesen’ on its first appearance, however, Schoenberg later varies the procedure. On its second appearance, the leap is from the final syllable of ‘schwarze’ to the first of ‘Riesenfalter’. The final appearance of the first line integrates the word almost completely into the motivic context of the work, fashioning it entirely from 3-3, the chromatic descent, and the closing fourth. Facile word-painting is not Schoenberg’s intention, as is confirmed at ‘steigt ein Duft’, where the large upward leap is on the ‘scent’ (a rare melisma), rather than the rise. A final distorting leap takes place at ‘auf die Menschenherzen nieder’. The text is dominated here by the descent of the butterflies on the hearts of men, and sinking motion is encouraged twice: ‘erdenwärts senken sich’ and ‘nieder’. The first is the excuse for a chain of descending statements of 3-3, the second for the most explicit melodic statement of 3-5 in the entire movement at ‘Menschenherzen’. The leap to the first syllable of that word is necessary for one image of descent to be supplanted by another. The placing of the higher note of the leap on the first syllable of ‘Menschenherzen’ serves to emphasize this sudden introduction of humanity into the fantastic picture, though the rising major sevenths at ‘Erinnrung mordend’ already hint at man’s presence. ‘Nieder’ itself is set as a falling semitone, and the failure of this to descend further in accordance with the many chromatic scale segments corresponds to the manner in which the text tails off. From this setting, the conclusion would seem to be that the idea that gripped Schoenberg in this song was the notion of descent. Not the scent arising from the depths but its settling down, with the sightless butterflies, on humanity is what seems to have dictated the
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(generally downward) motion. Not ‘aus der Tiefe’ but back to the depths is the message of the voice part. At the lowest point, the sung ‘verschwiegen’ promises a mystery that can only be solved in a ‘closed magic book’. In this context, an early sketch for ‘Nacht’ is instructive. Reproduced by Brinkmann, it shows a musical setting of the opening two lines that exhibits little relationship to the final melodrama save for a (possibly sung) voice part that takes a downward course into a formidably deep register. There are serious arguments against references to a composer’s ‘first thoughts’ intruding into analysis of vocal music, but here they point to an idea that is pertinent to the melodrama’s basic motion, independent of the details of the material.36 Brinkmann’s comment that certain features also ‘anticipate’ the final version seems to me otherwise to be unsustainable. There is little to suggest explicit use of 3-3, which may weaken the case for considering Bailey’s ‘butterfly’ shape of the generating motif as the idea behind the whole that impelled Schoenberg to compose; it is surely a ‘trope’ on the descent of night, as the generating motif is sited decoratively on a longer descent. Only by making an equation between a musical descent, which in the final version became completely chromatic, and the sightless oppression of the text does one begin to grasp what Schoenberg’s ‘reading’, which presumably flows from that first impression, might be. Having established the basic insight, Schoenberg then distributed the musical material with a rising contour in such a way that verbal images are underpinned but in sometimes indirect ways. Thus the material of bars 17–18, particularly in bass clarinet and cello, seems to catch the essence of the miasma arising from the depths, but introduces it at the last possible minute before it sinks to earth, some five bars after the line that it seems to paint. Similarly the edgy leaps of a seventh with which memory is murdered already have been heard in cello and bass clarinet and will be heard again in bar 19 as the heavy wings bear the sightless monsters downwards. It may be that here is further evidence of a voice part added to an instrumentally conceived texture, but it is at least as likely to be an example of that ‘structural dissonance’ of which Kramer and Lodato speak.37 The idea of descent gathers together other motivic references into a complex that ties the verbal text together more closely than mere sense would dictate. A 36. 37.
See Agawu, ‘Theory and Practice’, 10. Lodato, ‘Recent Approaches’, pp. 102 and 107; Kramer, Music and Poetry, pp. 146 and 150–161.
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polyphonic mode of organisation reorders and renders musical the succession of verbal images. Something similar happened earlier at ‘Duft’, where the pre-echo of ‘Erinnrung mordend’ in the bass clarinet permits a moment of bizarre musical imitation, the rising major seventh of ‘mordend’ set against the rising diminished seventh of ‘Duft’. The juxtaposition of the two similar but different musical events helps to establish the relationship between the verbal images. As the images of the poem pile on bizarre detail to a single monotonous picture, so the music gathers them together into motivically organized contrapuntal complexes. In such a way, something resembling the composer’s reading, however tendentious, starts to appear. Contextualising Intrinsic Relationships If the analytical conclusions to be drawn from ‘Nacht’ are set alongside the reading of the poem presented above, it would appear appropriate that Schoenberg established his compositional matrix on a descending chromatic segment, to which the other interval cycles appear as complex tropes. The passacaglia ground bass is thus the chromatic scale rather than simply 3-3. It becomes easier to see the first statement of the ground and its canonic elaboration in bars 4–8 (with 9 and 10 as a link made out of fragments), and the second in bars 11–15
Chart 4
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as in Chart 4. These divisions correspond with what other writers call canons or strophes (for obvious musical and poetic reasons).38 The third poetic division, from ‘1.Tempo’ in bar 16, is less easy to explain. There is no shortage of chromatic descents nor of important pitches from which the ground might begin, and one is suggested in Chart 5 that preserves the quadruple canon, but the impression is of a notional ground that is so overgrown with imitation, elaboration, and diminutions that the passacaglia form dissolves into that poetic ‘mist’ that ‘murders memory’. Only by presenting something ‘like’ a formal passacaglia could its ironic negation, as described by Heinz-Klaus Metzger, be conveyed.39 Only the final A of the ground persists under the complex of bars 25–26. It is my contention that consideration of these and other intrinsic relationships make the use of the term ‘passacaglia’ less mysterious, even if the passacaglia itself is deeply imbued with poetic mystery. How it may be related to contextual factors is also slightly puzzling. That these should not be avoided is evident from the sung ‘verschwiegen’, a ‘clue’ planted at an important division that is capable of many interpretations, including Richard Kurth’s engagingly paradoxical fancy that ‘In relation to the surrounding Sprechstimme, singing here in effect becomes a trope for muteness.’40 It is hardly surprising that theories ‘explaining’ Pierrot Lunaire as a whole are frequently brought in at this point, in line with Lodato’s argument. In this context, the melodramas may become a near-ecological allegory with ‘Nacht’ as the onset of the pollution of a variously interpretable environment as in Kurth. At another extreme, meaning in Pierrot as a whole becomes a matter of elliptical hints and fantasy without a ‘quasioperatic structure’ apart from ‘an unsystematic but cumulative interplay of action and reflection’.41 In this context ‘Nacht’ becomes a moment of extreme disruption exceeded later only by ‘Rote Messe’. It is the key ‘black’ moment in Pierrot that is prefigured in ‘Der Dandy’ and stands apart from the pale ‘moonstruck’ pieces and the reddominated poems that speak of blood, rubies, and sacrilege. 38. E.g. Bailey, ‘Formal Organization’, 102–6. 39. Heinz-Klaus Metzger, ‘L’Art Contre l’Art’, in Musik-Konzepte 112/113, pp. 215–16. 40. Richard Kurth, ‘Pierrot’s Cave: Representation, Reverberation, Radiance’, in Charlotte M. Cross and Russell A. Berman (eds), Schoenberg and Words: The Modernist Years (New York and London: Garland, 2000), p. 213. 41. Jonathan Dunsby, Schoenberg: ‘Pierrot Lunaire’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 53–4.
Pyramids, Symbols, and Butterflies: ‘Nacht’ from Pierrot Lunaire
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Chart 5
Pierrot Lunaire as a play of colours rather than an allegorical narrative is thus one view that explains something of the atmosphere of ‘Nacht’, a view moreover with some support from Schoenberg himself.42 It also has the additional advantage of allowing the musician to escape from the embarrassment of talking about verses often disparaged for their mediocrity. Instead the figure of Schoenberg the painter moves towards the centre of the stage, and the commedia dell’ arte recedes, as in the interpretation of Anselm Gerhard. The need to insist on satire and parody gives way to a more avant-garde and expressionist viewpoint: ‘The clownish figure apparently only interests him in its identification with the isolated artist suffering from the world and his “spleen”’, a ‘French’ contextualization of Pierrot that owes much to the work of Susan Youens and also accords broadly with the interpretation of Brinkmann. Parody in such a view is more of a technical aspect (as in the borrowing of such figures as passus duriusculus and saltus duriusculus as well as the genre of passacaglia from the Baroque).43
Example 6: ‘Nacht’, cello, bars 17–19. (Copyright Universal Edition A.G. Vienna. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved.) 42.
Reinhold Brinkmann, ‘The Fool as Paradigm: Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and the Modern Artist’, in Schönberg and Kandinsky, pp. 140–1. 43. Gerhard, ‘‘Farben und Formen’, pp. 227–36, in particular 227; Brinkmann, ‘The Fool as Paradigm’, p. 146.
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Such a reading opens paths to both biography and to historicist discourse. The biographical element enters in the image of the alienated artist, and receives further confirmation from the similar themes in Die glückliche Hand, where colour and isolation draw together in the image of the light-storm. In this perspective, ‘Nacht’ broods on the aftermath of the Gerstl episode, setting it in a positive, forwardlooking aesthetic that has risen above ‘spleen’ and personal tragedy.44 At the same time, it sends out hints of traditions that have grown fat or are in a state of flux: the pyramids of ‘Nacht’ have been too unthinkingly set up as monuments to historicism and the progress towards a serial universe; they also turn towards visual perspectives that are linked again to Schoenberg the painter; they should be viewed as crystals rather than pitch matrices. Lurking at the heart of ‘Nacht’, however, is the ‘secluded’ image of the ‘closed magic book’ that Gerhard has also compared to Stefan George’s Der siebente Ring. From here perspectives open to the mysterious pyramid, to ‘the fate of men’, and to the theories of those writers who read the numbers as hermetic expression of Schoenberg’s life and ideas.45 It is a minor curiosity that the pyramid of Chart 1, if completed, can yield a version of the ‘Pythagorean’ pyramid that Sterne mentions in passing in his analysis of the first melodrama but does not relate to ‘Nacht’.46 That the opening gesture of ‘Nacht’ points to numerology at least as much as to musical structure is a further context that is not unfamiliar from other members of the Second Viennese School. In this, the pyramid itself becomes the ‘magic book’ whose unlocking would presumably open horizons. That the whole cycle of melodramas ends in such an unlocking of the horizon by a different scent, ‘aus Märchenzeit’, has been noted by, amongst others, Youens.47 If there is a symbolic dimension to that ending, however, it involves a different set of musical signifiers, to which equal-interval cycles are less important. There is an interpretative conundrum here, in that the
44.
See Manuel Gervink, ‘Einsamkeit und Isolation: Interpretationsansätze für die Innovationen im Werk Arnold Schönbergs’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 53 (1996), 171–3. 45. Meyer, Ensemblelieder, p. 179. 46. Colin C. Sterne, Arnold Schoenberg: The Composer as Numerologist (Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 1994), p. 109. 47. Youens, ‘Excavating an Allegory’, 109.
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historically ‘advanced’ passacaglia has been viewed as the embodiment of the excesses and breakdown of tradition, while the ‘regressive’ hints of tonality in the final melodrama reincarnate tradition in a never-never land. The latter seems to be achieved by a reordering of the relationship between third and semitone, both equally insistent, but breaking from pure cycles towards a freer, more improvised succession that turns into the tenuously related triads of the close. In such an interpretation, the pyramid of ‘Nacht’ seems analytically the key to musical procedures but more of a seal to meaning. It is the embodiment of the magic book, the keeper of the secrets that ‘Nacht’ obstinately refuses to disclose, save at the technical level. A final political context exists that hardly fits with Gerhard’s point of view. That Schoenberg himself at times saw anarchy as a virtue emerges from his background and from his letters.48 The combination of a dissolving form with a rigorous pitch structure expresses not despair over the breakdown of tradition (leading to the familiar cliché of the ‘conservative revolutionary’) but a sense of liberation. Of the traditional signifiers of melodrama, it is parody rather than ‘frightfulness’ that truly expresses the essence of ‘Nacht’. The bizarre in ‘Nacht’ is in this context part of that anarchic liberation from constraints. The murdering of memory is to be celebrated with all of the compositional exuberance that Schoenberg can muster. That theory should remain content with pitch structures is appropriate in the light of the subversive undercurrents that Pierrot represents as melodrama, but if the pyramid should itself be as much parody as compositional matrix, then the joke would be on theory and the seeker after meaning in words and music.
48.
Dümling, ‘Public Loneliness’, 132–3.
6
Music and Text in Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw Bhesham Sharma
A Survivor from Warsaw (Op. 46) ranks among Schoenberg’s most dramatic and controversial works. Completed in 1946 and scored for narrator, male chorus, and orchestra, the composition is based on a narrative Schoenberg heard directly and indirectly from survivors of a Nazi concentration camp. Schoenberg turns the narrative and the final section, a chorus, into the primary focus of the composition. He supports the narrative and voices through lucid dodecaphonic textures in the orchestra. At times, dodecaphonic conventions seem to be abandoned as whole-tone and chromatic passages appear in the score. Underlying Schoenberg’s musical accompaniment, however, is not an abrogation of self-imposed twelve-tone praxis but rather its expansion. This chapter highlights the ways in which Schoenberg expands serial technique to dramatize the narrative elements of A Survivor from Warsaw; it explores, sometimes through semiological discourse, the ways in which Schoenberg manipulates pitch, rhythm, and other parameters to complement the text. First, I highlight the key techniques in Schoenberg’s compositional approach, and then discuss the work from a semiological perspective. Towards the late 1940s, Schoenberg’s compositions began to exhibit a more liberal use of dodecaphony. In A Survivor from Warsaw, not only does one find certain techniques developed in previous works, but also what René Leibowitz calls ‘new principles of variation’. Schoenberg uses pitches from rows as constellations of sounds. He fragments and overlaps rows. He even selects pitchclasses from related hexachords to create whole-tone phrases. As in Schoenberg’s earlier works, A Survivor from Warsaw relies strongly on hexachordal combinations rather than sets. Although the composition is based on the following row, F, G, C, A#, E, E#, B#, C, A, D, F, B, rarely is it presented in its entirety. It is only in
Music and Text in Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw
Figure 1: Row matrix of A Survivor from Warsaw
Figure 2: Cyclic combinations 1.1 and 2.1
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the third and final section, the Š∂ma ( Yisro ´ )el ¯ (bars 80–99), that 1 one encounters definitive statements. Schoenberg organises the composition around primary rows and related inversions. The row is presented in Figure 1. The hexachords of P0 and I5 are combinatorial in the classic manner seen in other works by Schoenberg (e.g. the Violin Concerto), and Schoenberg exploits this particular combination throughout.2 The composer also uses ascending groups of primary rows in cycles of four semitones along with their related inversions: P0–I5, P4–I9, or P8–I1 (which I shall refer to as ‘1.1’) and P0–I8, P4–10, P8–I4 (which I shall term ‘2.1’: Figure 2).3 P0 (x): Fƒ G C Aß E Eß I5 (x): B Aƒ F A Cƒ D
3
3
P0 (x): Fƒ G C Aß E Eß I5 (x): B Aƒ F A Cƒ D
3
3
3
P0 (x): Aß E Eß I5 (x): A Cƒ D
3
Example 1*
*All music examples in this chapter are copyright 1949 by Bomart Music Publications, Inc.; assigned 1955 to Boelke-Bomart, Inc. Revised edition © copyright 1974 ´ ¯ by Boelke-Bomart, Inc. Used by permission. 1. For a discussion of the Š∂ma ‘Yisro’el see Charles Heller’s ‘Traditional Jewish Material in Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46’, The Journal of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute 13 (1979), 68–74. 2. Joel Lester rightly notes that most of Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic works rely on combinatorial series. The composer often employs the P0–I5 relationship. See his Analytic Approaches to Twentieth-Century Music (New York: Norton, 1989), p. 211. 3. For a complete listing of all possibilities available to Schoenberg under these parameters, see Jacques-Louis Monod’s Prefatory Notes in the Boelke-Bomart edition of A Survivor from Warsaw (New York, 1974), ii-iii.
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3
P0 (x): Fƒ G C I5 (x): B Aƒ F
3
3
kept you a - wake
the whole
night.
You
had
been
P0 (x): Aß E Eß 3
3
3
3
3
3
se - par - at - ed
I5 (x): A Cƒ D
Example 2
One reason that Schoenberg conceptualizes groups such as 1.1 and 2.1 is the resulting recurrence of the augmented triad C–E–A#. In other words, Schoenberg can move from one row to another within a group such as 1.1 or 2.1 and still achieve a certain degree of continuity.4 Such a conceptualization permits other combinations that are not explicit in the main matrix. The step-wise whole tone fragment, E#, F, G, A B, C becomes material as does the strip of dyads read in a similar manner. The augmented triad (with its emotional associations of uneasiness) surfaces significantly in the first two sections: bar 5 (harp); bar 10 (bassoons, xylophone); bars 16–17 (violas); bars 38–41 (xylophone); bars 44–46 (violas); bars 51 (trombones) etc. The triad acts as a unifying, even centralizing force against the sometimes fragmented presentations of related hexachords, sets, and set collections.
4.
This technique is common in Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic works. See René Leibowitz, Schoenberg and his School (New York: Da Capo, 1970), p. 130.
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Free use of related hexachords is evident at several points in A Survivor from Warsaw.5 In bar 27, for example, Schoenberg combines dyads, trichords and tetrachords of P0 (x) and I5 (x) to achieve a twelve-tone collage (Example 1).6 In bar 28, he combines single pitches
1.
ff
P0: I8: P4: I0: P8: I4:
C Aß E Gƒ C E E C Aß C E Gƒ Aß E C E Aß C
P0: I8: P4: I0: P8: I4:
Eß F G A B Cƒ
fp
pizz.
ff
P0: I8: P4: I0: P8: I4:
Fƒ G C Aß E Eß D Cƒ Gƒ C E F Aƒ B E C Aß G Fƒ F C E Gƒ A D Eß Aß E C B Bß A E Aß C Cƒ
P0: I8: P4: I0: P8: I4:
Fƒ G D Cƒ Aƒ B Fƒ F D Eß Bß A
Example 3 5.
In later works different ordering of a source hexachord as opposed to a complete row determines different sections of works. See Silvana Milstein, Arnold Schoenberg: Notes, Sets, Forms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 154–9. 6. One can also find this technique in Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte, Op. 41. Lester reconciles the dichotomy between technique and artistic conviction in the following manner: ‘These types of reorderings are not necessarily contradictory to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method because of those series’ properties that are determined by content and not by ordering’, Analytical Approaches, p. 237.
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from P0(x) and I5(x), and juxtaposes them with the trichordal formulation of bar 27 (Example 2). The composer’s unencumbered approach, however, goes beyond manipulation within related hexachords. In the following examples, Schoenberg draws notes ‘vertically’ from the row collection, 2.1. In bar 11, the order of the clarinet phrase is derived from the sixth (ordered) pitch of each set in 2.1. The order of the first and second violins’ phrase comes from the first dyad of each set. The augmented triad utilizes all the pitch-classes left in the first hexachords of the 2.1 collection (Example 3). At measure 51, he also uses the opening dyads of each set within the collection to create phrases in the strings (Example 4). Rather than starting with the first two pitches of P0, he begins with I8. In other words, instead of proceeding vertically F, G, D, C, A, B, F, F, D, E#, B#, A, he begins on D, C, and circles back to the F, G. Bar
P0: I8: P4: I0: P8: I4:
Fƒ G D Cƒ Aƒ B Fƒ F D Eß Bß A
P0: C Aß E ff
I8: P4: I0: P8: I4:
Gƒ C E E C Aß C E Gƒ Aß E C E Aß C
ff
Example 4
P0: I8: P4: I0: P8: I4:
fp
Eß F G A B Cƒ
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51 adopts a similar compositional approach to bar 11. The phrase in the violins (bar 51) is stepwise, drawn from the whole-tone fragment and comes from the sixth pitch in the first hexachord in each row of the collection. Such freedom in using pitch-classes, dyads, and trichords opens up new structural possibilities. More importantly, it allows the composer to develop the dramatic effects of the musical accompaniment. From a theoretical perspective, however, the results are phrases that seem quite unrelated to the initial row, and ironically, a return to a late nineteenth-century idiom.7 The last principle discussed emerges as the most innovative in A Survivor from Warsaw. No longer do pitch-classes obey their ordered
7.
Below is a list of the hexachords, rows and row collections Schoenberg uses in the composition.
Bars: Hexachords; Set(s); Collections 1–5: P0 (x); I5 (x) 5–10: P0 11: Collection 2.1 12–17: P0/I5 18–21: P4/ I9 (x) 22–24: P4/I9 25–33: P0/I5 34–37: P3; I8 38–43: P0(x) 44–47: P4(x); I9 48–49: P3(x); I9 50: P0/I5 51: Collection 2.1 52–54: P0/ I5 55: P3(x); P4(x); P5(x) 56–59: P4(x); I9(x) 60–61: P0(x); I5(x) 62: P4(x); I9(x) 63–64: P8 (x) 65–68: P0(x); I5 (x); P8 (x); Collection 1.1 70: P4 (y); I9 (y) 71–72: P0 (y); I5 (y) 73–74: P0/I5 75: I7 (x) – P2 (x) – I10 – (Sequence) P9 – I9 – P4 – I4 – P10 – I2 80–89: P4/I9 90: P0/I5 91–95: P8; I8; P1; I4; 96–99: P0/I5
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positions. Instead they are abstracted vertically from row collections to create more conventional sounding passages. Rene Leibowitz writes that in A Survivor from Warsaw, ‘twelve tone technique is … handled in a radical way, and it leads to [what] … I would be inclined to call ‘athematic’.’8 Tr. 1
3 ff
Tr. 2 ff
3
Mil. Dr.
fpp
sfp
Example 5
While such innovations are revealing in themselves, they seem to have been adopted not so much by an intent to expand technique as by a profound intention to marry music and text. Through the use of descriptive prose, I will suggest how Schoenberg’s creative impulses seem to dictate the concessions he makes. A Survivor from Warsaw is divided into three sections: an orchestral introduction (bars 1–11); the Sprechgesang narration (bars 12– 70); the ‘chorus’ (bars 80–99). Between and within these sections Schoenberg juxtaposes outward order (strict rhythmic figures) and internal chaos (woodwind: bars 26–27), dominance and subservience (bars 38–39), oppression and hopeful defiance (the ‘chorus’). Section I (bars 1–11) establishes musical and psychological motifs which become the basis for the remaining sections. The composition begins aggressively with martial rhythms played on the military drum and a brash fanfare in the trumpets (bar 1: Example 5). Later, other instruments prolong the aggression of the drum rolls through stagnant, pulsating repeated notes or tremolos and trills (e.g., xylophone, bars 9–10: Example 6). 8.
‘Arnold Schoenberg’s Survivor from Warsaw of the Possibility of “Committed Art”, Horizon 20 (1949), 122–3. While C. M. Schmidt does not discuss the techniques presented herein, his observations are worthy of perusal. See his article entitled, ‘Schoenbergs Kantate, “Ein Überlebender aus Warschau”, Op. 46’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 33 (1976), 261–77.
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Xyl.
Words and Music
pp
Example 6
This musical figure associated with military music is integrated into the orchestral texture. Against these forceful rhythms and brash textures we hear fleeting athematic fragments. These musical fragments are psychologically uneasy and aim to capture the victim’s pathology in response to the violent brutality. This is evident, for example, within bars 2–3 in the jagged contours and atonal pitch collection created by the bassoon, clarinets and flutes. Presented in their dismal low registers, the aggressiveness of the drums and trumpets in the opening is internalized in the woodwinds’ musical fragment (Example 7). Throughout Section I, displaced rhythms contribute to the feeling of time suspended (e.g. bars 9–10).
Cl. 1 & 2
Bsn. 1 & 2
f
Fl. 1 & 2
f
f
fp
sfp
f
Example 7
Overall, Section I exhibits the oppressive physical and emotional setting of the camp. This is suggested through the general lack of sense of uniformity in rhythm. In Section II (bars 12–79), the narrator is heard for the first time. In the dream-like, nightmarish screams and shouts of the Sprechgesang, rhythmical configurations take precedence over natural stresses of consonants and vowels. The sentences, ‘You had been separated from your children, from your wife, from your parents. You don’t know
Music and Text in Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw
159
what happened to them … How could you sleep?’ (bars 28–31) is presented in an abrupt fashion and in a rhythmical manner at times unnatural to conventional speech patterns. Similarly when the sergeant counts, ‘one, two, three, four’, it is unnatural, thereby adding to the surrealistic context (Example 8).
one,
two,
three,
four
Example 8
Throughout section II, the text images of the Sprechgesang are illustrated and contextualized by the orchestra. ‘They began again, first slowly; one, two, three, four, became faster and faster, so fast that it finally sounded like a stampede of horses’ (bars 71–2), is illustrated by the woodwind with duplet contour patterns crossing their triplets which gallop like horses. The narrator’s statement, ‘Much too much noise, much too much commotion; and not fast enough’ (bars 38–9) is contextualized by the indifference and rigidity of repetitive musical figures played on the military drum, bass drum, and xylophone. Unrelenting rhythmical patterns, and textual and pitch repetitions, afforded through Schoenberg’s more relaxed approach to dodecaphony, deepen the atmosphere and set off the callous attitude of the sergeant. Bars 38–9 are ultimately moving because of the irony created by the sergeant’s pettiness (enhanced by the low tessitura and his callous ambivalence to the developing tragedy). Unlike Section II which is morbid and hopeless, Section III is defiant and hopeful. The Š∂ma ( Yisro ´ )¯el theme on which Section III is based is first heard in Section II as a fragment in the horns in bars 18– 21 in conjunction with the words, ‘They all started to sing the old prayer … the forgotten creed’. This fragment, which seems out of place in its initial setting, later becomes the most significant phrase of the composition (Example 9). In the narrative, defiance is achieved by the overt assertion of the singing of the Hebrew prayer within the setting of the ghetto, but it is also achieved in the accompaniment. Isolated musical fragments which create uneasiness in Section II are replaced by the single cantus firmus (unison chorus and trombone) of the prayer (Example 10).
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Hn. 1
Example 9
Men
[text omitted]
3
3
etc.
Example 10
In the final half subsection of Section III, the martial trills and tremolos which dominate Sections I and II gradually cease and the orchestra ends in a triple forte. The ending is unified, hopeful, and strong. In the final section, timelessness is replaced by the metrical faithfulness of the men’s chorus. The focal point of power shifts from the military musical figures to the Jewish prayer. Angst and despair in the first two sections are overcome by the Š?ma ( Yisro )el, resonant in its own Jewish character and significance. To transform pitches to fit with the words of A Survivor from Warsaw, Schoenberg uses arpeggios, broken chords, trills, and tremolos. Schoenberg also uses drums and trumpets to create the atmosphere of a military setting. While such techniques draw on Romantic descriptive musical practices, in his adaptations of such techniques, Schoenberg provides fleeting segments. This helps to create a sense of dissociation so integral to the plight of the character in the first two sections. In this composition, the technique is not a means to an end but rather, a means to elicit a myriad of moods. At times, these ways of manipulation provide Schoenberg with possibilities to create whole-tone, triadic, atonal, and twelve-tone passages under the guise of dodecaphony, the better to capture the essence of the text.
7
Rethinking the Relationship Between Words and Music for the Twentieth Century: The Strange Case of Erik Satie Robert Orledge Few composers have been as fascinated by the relationship between the spoken or unspoken word and music as the iconoclastic Erik Satie (1866–1925). His literary production was almost as important as his forward-looking compositions, and at least as extensive. While most of Satie’s contemporaries, from Rimbaud to Joyce, were jealous of music’s advantages over words and tried to recreate its emotive powers and even its forms in their poetry, Satie’s main fear was that that printed music could ‘never achieve the same “published” qualities as literature’.1 His quest was to find new ways of linking words and music and his originality lay in his fundamental rejection of Romantic expressiveness and any concept of nineteenth-century thematic development or musical ‘direction’. The musical form in some of his Rose+Croix pieces of the 1890s was derived from literature, as we shall see, and on other occasions he adapted medieval models to the twentieth century in an effort to find solutions that would be entirely different in form and content to those of his contemporaries. On the relatively rare occasions when he set words to music, he went to extraordinary lengths to perfect his tiny settings of the most recent poetry available and his approach was completely at odds with composers of the bourgeois mélodie such as Gounod or Massenet, for whom the supremacy of the voice and the subsidiary role of the piano accompaniment were seldom challenged. At the same time, Satie was a composer of paradoxes. While he remained acutely concerned with the ‘exteriorisation’ of his musical thought, especially when words were involved, he invented a genre of incidental music in the 1890s that was completely at odds with the 1. In ‘Edition’, Catalogue, 3 (30 May 1922), 3; cited in Erik Satie, Écrits, ed. Ornella Volta (Paris: Editions Champ Libre, 1988), p. 55.
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theatrical texts it was supposed to accompany. While he introduced humorous texts into his piano music from the Gnossiennes of 1890 to the Sonatine bureaucratique of 1917, in 1914 he forbade them to be read aloud .2 And who else would have begun a literary career with an advert for an acrobat published under the pseudonym of Virginie Lebeau?3 Or created a letter from a provincial housewife to extol the virtues of his Ogives and Troisième Gymnopédie as cures for an eightyear-old nasal polyp!4 The Rose+Croix Compositions (1891–95) The strange case of Erik Satie begins with the guiding literary principles behind his so-called ‘Rosicrucian’ compositions. According to a close friend of Satie’s bohemian years, the Spanish poet Patrice Contamine de Latour: His musical education was decidedly incomplete, but he put together all the things he knew and devised a private formula, declaring everything else to be non-existent and even a barrier to worthwhile musical expression. He was in the position of a man who knows only thirteen letters of the alphabet and decides to create a new literature using only these, rather than admit his own inadequacy. For sheer bravado, it remained unsurpassed at the time, but he considered it a question of honour to succeed with his system. ‘I’m obliged to make tours de force to get down a single bar’, he confided to me.5
Satie’s system began with tiny musical cells, juxtaposed, transposed, or even overlapped and reversed in a piece like the Fête donnée par des Chevaliers Normandes (c. 1892).6 This short prelude is constructed, coincidentally, from 13 two-chord progressions, like letters making up words. As in everyday speech, letters and words are repeated, so 2.
3. 4.
5. 6.
Before its publication by Demets, Satie rejected the text about ‘an old Will-o’the-wisp’ created to accompany his Première Nocturne in August 1919; see Bibliothèque Nationale de France (hereafter BNF) MS 9609(2), pp. 2–6. ‘Hurrah! pour Smith’ in La Lanterne Japonaise 1 (4) (17 novembre 1888), 3; cited in Satie: Écrits, p. 111. Supposedly from Femme Langrenage, Journalière à Précigny-les-Balayettes to Satie on 20 février 1889; published in ‘Salade Japonaise’ in La Lanterne Japonaise 2 (15) (23 mars 1889), 3 and cited in Satie, Écrits, p. 113. From ‘Erik Satie intime, souvenirs de jeunesse’, Comoedia (3 août 1925), 2. See Robert Orledge, Satie the Composer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 186–8 for further details.
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Example 1a: Fête donnée par des Chevaliers Normandes. Compositional system with 13 harmonic cells divided into melodic categories in Houghton Library, Harvard University, b ms Mus 193 (64), f. 2r and v (c. 1892). The cell numbers are added by the author.
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Example 1b: Fête donnée par des Chevaliers Normandes, central section, constructed from the cells shown in Ex. 1a (Houghton Library, b ms Mus 193(64), f. 3v).
each cell overlaps the next: cells 1–2 repeat as 11–12 and cell 13 is a transposition of cell 5. But only cells 11–13 are called ‘terminations or points of repose’ (Example 1a), and they are hardly cadences in any conventional sense. An extract from the result can be seen in Example 1b, with the longer palindromic constructions marked ‘a’ to ‘f’. True to form, Satie makes palindrome ‘e’ overlap the melodic sub-structure A1 to A3 of this central section, in which each phrase begins with cell 11 (perhaps Satie’s equivalent of ‘The’ or ‘So’ to start a series of sentences). An even more fascinating case is what Patrick Gowers has christened musical ‘punctuation form’.7 This occurs most noticeably in the two Préludes du Nazaréen (1892) and the Prélude de ‘La Porte héroïque du ciel’ (1894). To bring order to his assembly of motifs, Satie took the ingenious step of turning to literature for a solution. The result can be seen in the first Nazarene prelude, where the musical ‘prose’ is constructed from four homophonic motifs in contrary motion (Example 2: A–D), which are articulated at irregular intervals by a distinctive and harmonically sensuous ‘punctuation’ phrase at three different pitches (Example 2: 1–3). The phrase and its two transpositions recur four times in strict rotation like commas, with a double 7.
Patrick Gowers, ‘Satie’s Rose Croix Music (1891–1895)’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association 92 (1965–66), 18.
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Example 2: First Prélude du Nazaréen (1892), showing motifs and punctuation phrases (BNF MS 10037).
statement of 1 as a full stop at the end. The prelude divides into four sections plus a brief coda, and what appears to be a repetitive, meandering piece proves to be a tightly organised and logical creation of restrained beauty. Just as punctuation phrases 2 and 3 are transpositions of 1 down a perfect fourth and up a tone, and 3 equals 2 up a perfect fifth, so the only transpositions of motifs B–D involve precisely the same intervals. In this way the punctuation is at one with the musical prose. To keep the musical sentences distinct from each
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other, B transposes only up a fourth, D transposes up a tone and up a fourth, while C adds transposition up a fifth to include all three pitches. Motif A alone remains untransposed, and only appears in the outermost sections. But all four belong together stylistically (as in good prose) by being undulating, hieratic and plainsong-derived. Continuity is assisted by the oscillating (and internally repetitive) figures marked by square brackets in Example 2. Palindromic sub-structures again appear: economy of means and restraint are everywhere apparent. It is possible that Satie derived his idea for literary music from Joséphin Péladan’s play Le Fils des étoiles the previous year. As Gowers says, Péladan was ‘a fanatical Wagnerian and used one genuine old text in various places and with cunningly altered interpretations as an attempt at a literary equivalent of the leit-motiv’.8 When Jules Claretie rejected the play for the Comédie-Française Theatre on 3 March 1892, he told Péladan that Le Fils des étoiles ‘is something like literary music’.9 Doubtless Péladan passed this information on to Satie, who was then the official composer and chapelmaster of his Ordre de la RoseCroix Catholique, du Temple et du Graal, and it is possible that this inspired the chain of thought that led to the two Nazarene preludes that June. Another example of Satie’s adaptation of literary principles comes in the Danses Gothiques of 1893, where a large chunk of musical prose is divided into nine unequal pieces, like chapters in a novel. But to add his own touch of originality, Satie begins Dances 4 and 7– 9 in mid-motif. An even more bizarre case is the hymn Salut Drapeau! (Hail to the Flag!), composed for Péladan’s play Le Prince de Byzance in November 1891. This is the first instance of incidental music that is completely detached from the text it is supposed to accompany. This weird historical drama set in Renaissance Italy centres on the fatal love of Giorgio Cavalcanti (an army captain of King Frederick of Sicily) for the fifteen-year-old Tonio — at first a Dominican novice, then the hereditary Prince of the title, then finally Princess Antonio Tarras! The explanations behind this androgynous self-indulgence on Péladan’s part are tenuous, to say the least. In Act 2 scene 9, Cavalcanti patriotically seizes the flag and proclaims Tonio to the assembled multitude as the Prince of Byzantium, in defiance of Frederick, and amidst general 8. 9.
Ibid., 15. From a letter printed on p. IV of the final section of Péladan’s play Le Prince de Byzance (Paris: Chamuel, 1896).
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rejoicing. Péladan adapted his three prose paragraphs into unequal verses for Satie to set, although all he did was to remove the repetition of ‘Salut!’ from the start of paragraphs two and three, and change the final line to ‘Symbole généreux, Idéal collectif’.10 In his haunting, disembodied hymn, however, Satie pursued a preordained musical plan, regardless of Péladan’s poetic effusions, and there can be no better example of what Constant Lambert describes as ‘formal logic which is independent of all dramatic and narrative element’.11 Using a transposition of the gapped scale known as the Greek chromatic mode for his melody, Satie spread Péladan’s three verses over four repeats of a rigid musical sequence of 44 slow, quiet crotchet chords (with some occasional decoration), which may have been intended for performance on the harmonium. The manuscript evidence suggests that he wanted the final ‘Salut Drapeau!’ to coincide with the fifth return of his sequence, and as verses two and three did not fit in with the pattern established in verse one, Satie almost certainly worked backwards from the end, adjusting the gaps between the verses accordingly. In any f
p
Harpes
Flûtes
p
Harpes
Example 3: A passage near the end of Act 1 of uspud (BNF MS 9631, p. 19). ‘He [uspud] takes up a larger stone which explodes with a bang; flames burst forth and from their midst the stars escape’.
10.
In BNF MS 10053. The final line originally read: ‘Symbole généreux de la noble Apulie’. 11. Constant Lambert, Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline (London: Faber, 1934), p. 120.
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event, his chain of chords was far more important to him than Péladan’s banal, tub-thumping text.12 There is every evidence too that his Greek mode was carefully researched for it recurs in the same transposition in uspud the following year. With uspud the concept of musico-theatrical detachment reached its height. Satie wrote the final text of this ‘ballet chrétien’ himself (with some assistance from Contamine de Latour) and its publication in 1893 marks the first use of lower case letters throughout, well before e.e. cummings. As such, it is a notable early example of Satie’s concern with the distinctive ‘exteriorisation’ of his ideas. Satie used only 12 motifs in his 35-page score, and according to Contamine de Latour he ‘carefully gathered together all the extravagances possible in his determination to amaze the public’.13 Undoubtedly his main motive was publicity, for he famously challenged the director of the Paris Opéra, Eugène Bertrand, to a duel to persuade him to even consider producing the ballet, and Satie’s various solo performances at the Auberge du Clou and the Monday soirées of Gustave Doret invariably provoked hilarity. And with the mismatch between text and music in Example 3 it is easy to see why. The ‘Grande convulsion de la nature’ which shortly afterwards ends Act 1 is scored for quiet harps and then flutes and is even more inappropriate. Yet there are harmonic sequences in uspud that look forward to Messiaen; Debussy perceptively recognised what was ‘serious, audacious and sensitive behind this extremist hoax’ when he first heard it;14 and in a 1911 article (almost certainly ghost-written by Satie himself), Jules Ecorcheville maintained that uspud was ‘written to assert certain strong harmonic convictions which, in any other context, would have seemed totally unfitting’.15 If the same music in uspud can be used to accompany different apocalyptic texts in the two different versions, and the legacy of Alphonse Allais can be found in the funny testimonials from luminaries such as Shakespeare and Rameau that accompany the first version, the underlying principle of music as an anonymous theatrical backcloth, ‘white and immobile’, is established here. As such it is a forerunner of the ‘furnishing music’ of the 1920s, and of the way that
12.
See Orledge, Satie the Composer, pp. 153–7 for the complete score and further details. 13. Contamine de Latour, ‘Erik Satie intime’, Comoedia (6 août 1925), 2. 14. Ibid. 15. Jules Ecorcheville, ‘Erik Satie’, Revue musicale SIM 7 (3) (March 1911), 30.
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Satie’s music has become the perfect fodder for advertisements in recent years, regardless of the product in question. In reality, this all began with the detached antiquity of the Sarabandes and Gymnopédies in 1887–88, and it is now known that both sets derived their inspiration from poems by Contamine de Latour. His poem Sylvie led to the first unbarred song in 1886, complete with consecutive sevenths, ninths and even thirteenths before Chabrier’s Le Roi malgré lui. In turn, this beautiful song marks the beginning of the concept of a recurring accompaniment pattern independent of the division of the poetry into stanzas.16 We can also see in uspud Satie’s Proustian fascination with lists of names, from saints and artistic luminaries to the strange-sounding names of the uspud lineage (like Ontrotance, Irnebizolle, and Tumisrudebude — all of whom were supposed to feature as the titles of follow-up ballets in 1, 2, and 3 Acts respectively). After beginning the process in 1890, Satie invariably added what were intended to be diverting literary additions to his music for the performer’s benefit. These range from passing interpretative advice like ‘Very shining’ and ‘Step by step’ in the first Gnossienne to the humorously diverting ‘Like a nightingale with toothache’ and ‘Don’t make me laugh, you bit of froth: you’re tickling me’ in ‘d’Holothurie’ from the Embryons desséchés (1913). Equally interesting is the dedicatory preface that Satie wrote for the publication of Le Fils des étoiles in 1896, where, in the guise of Parcener and Chapelmaster of his own Eglise Métropolitaine de l’Art de Jésus Conducteur, he blesses his companions and calls down ‘the just fire of God on the arrogant and immoral!’ In 1895 he produced two issues of his own ‘Cartulaire’ where his vengeance was directed at theatre directors like Aurélien Lugné-Poë and the critic Henry GauthierVillars (‘Willy’). The Eglise Métropolitaine also led to Satie’s only substantial work in a language other than French, the Latin Messe des pauvres of 1893–95. The pseudo-religious ambiance persists as far as the 1903 ‘Recommandations’ which preface (but were never published with) the delightful Trois Morceaux en forme de poire. Here they become mixed with serious statement (‘I am at a prestigious turningpoint in the History of My life’), humour (‘I cannot promise more, 16.
For further details on these early songs, see Robert Orledge, ‘The Musical Activities of Alfred Satie and Eugénie Satie-Barnetche and Their Effect on the Career of Erik Satie’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 117 (1992), 286–8.
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even though I have temporarily increased myself tenfold, against all precautions’), the occult and bizarre (‘Don’t play around with the unknown amulets of your ephemeral understanding’), to something verging on paranoia (‘The Determined One cannot freeze; the Passionate One obliterates himself; the Irascible One has no reason to exist’). Despite his confused state of mind as the God of his own small world, the concept of the part-revealing, part-obfuscating, and partridiculous preface persists as an important literary adjunct to Satie’s music, as we shall see. But again these introductions were never intended to be read aloud. The 1897–1913 Period: Cabarets, Pears and the Wordless Song In 1897, to help make ends meet, Satie wrote his first popular song, Je te veux, to words by his friend Henry Pacory, and in 1898 began accompanying the pince-sans-rire cabaret artist Vincent Hyspa in a partnership which lasted about ten years. As well as providing accompaniments to Hyspa’s parodies of popular songs, which were adapted to fit various contemporary political situations, Satie composed some of his own settings of Hyspa’s words, like L’Omnibus automobile and Chez le docteur in 1905. He also composed songs for ‘The Queen of the Slow Waltz’, Paulette Darty, even if she tried them out in the provinces first before risking them in Paris. It was Darty who popularised Je te veux in 1904, and Satie may well have had a hand in the watereddown version of Pacory’s rather risqué text. He may also have written the text for Darty’s Allons-y Chochotte, for its listed author, D. Durante, is otherwise unknown. In any event, these songs have an undeniable charm, especially La Diva de l’Empire, to a text by Dominique Bonnaud and Numa Blès, the proprietors of La Lune Rousse, for whom Satie also worked. In his cabaret songs, Satie proved he had a common touch, even if he always regarded this work as demeaning, and he always provided a memorable melodic ‘hook’ and some unexpected harmonies to keep them fresh. In many ways, they represent his most conventional matching of words and music, for the aim here was largely utilitarian. Of greater mystery are his last collaborations with Contamine de Latour, now known as the Anglicized ‘Lord Cheminot’, in the 1899– 1905 period. Although Contamine published numerous tales in Le Rire, the origins of the two for which Satie provided accompanying
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scores in 1901–02, notably The Dreamy Fish and The Angora Ox, have yet to be found. Equally problematic are the wordless songs Impérial-Oxford and Légende Californienne of 1904–05. Even though there are other songs like Rambouillet and Marienbad whose texts by Hyspa have now been identified (by Steven Moore Whiting), and even though Satie the slow worker did not always write words into his manuscripts, the two Latour songs were registered as ‘chansons sans paroles’ for copyright purposes on 18 August 1905, which puts one in mind of the ‘Danse sans musique’ in Satie’s final ballet, Relâche. The year 1900, besides seeing the completion of Satie’s little shadow theatre opera Geneviève de Brabant and a prelude for La Mort de Monsieur Mouche (both by Latour) with Ragtime syncopations, also saw Satie’s first piece of commissioned journalism. For the Guide de l’étranger à Montmartre he produced an article on ‘Les Musiciens de Montmartre’ which, setting a pattern for things to come, said nothing useful about its subjects.17 Satie’s career in music journalism, however, did not begin on a regular basis until 1912, with his Mémoirs d’un Amnésique and his famous piece in L’Oeil de Veau which put the ex-Conservatoire director Ambroise Thomas in second place to his search for a lost umbrella. Music critics remained his deadly enemies and he never really commented in serious detail on music or musicians before 1922. The most interesting pieces from this interregnum period, in which Satie moved to the distant Parisian suburb of Arcueil and contributed regularly to its Radical-Socialist journal L’Avenir de Arcueil-Cachan in 1909–10, are the Trois Morceaux en forme de poire for piano duet. Although, for once, the directions to amuse the performers disappear, Satie plays with words and music in other ways. There are three pieces listed in the title, but seven in the collection. The modern, disastrous implications of ‘pear-shaped’ were not known to Satie, though others were. According to the conductor Vladimir Golschmann, Satie told him that:
17.
Victor Meusy and Edmond Depas (eds), Guide de l’Étranger à Montmartre (Paris: J. Strauss, 1900), pp. 31–32; this was an offshoot from the 1900 Exposition Universelle and the map at the end shows every cabaret to have been in the Pigalle area, with only Les Assassins situated on the Butte Montmartre itself.
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For both friends, pear-shaped rather had associations with the lower end of the female anatomy, but ‘poire’ was also ‘current Paris slang for “head”, and was used in the sense of “stupid head”, i.e. fool’.19 Therefore Satie may have been suggesting that Debussy was a fool for trying to point him towards traditional forms in order to improve his structural skills and further his career. ‘Poire’ was also the name for a child’s spinning-top. So the three (originally two) ‘core’ pieces are expanded outwards by ‘A Way of Beginning’, ‘A Prolongation of the Same’, plus ‘An Addition’, and a ‘Restatement’ – all of which, typically, are quite separate pieces. Besides spinning around musically, they also spin around in date. Only Morceaux 1 and 3 (the original two) date from 1903, the rest re-use material from 1890–91 (including an oscillating and repetitive Gnossienne from Péladan’s Le Fils des étoiles to begin with), or cabaret songs from 1899–1901 (which originally revolved musically through their long chains of repeated verses). There is even an extract from The Angora Ox in the final piece, which is thus a ‘restatement’ of a different type, and which suggests that Satie was either making a compendium of his best music, or showing Debussy how his style had developed across the first decade of their friendship – or both. Morceaux 2, at the heart of the work, is in ternary form, appropriate to a cycle but nothing to do with a ‘pear’, one might think. Yet the lively outer sections spin around continuously like a top, and in turn revolve around a sensuous but repetitive cabaret song, which has a harmonic succulence akin to enjoying a perfect pear. As with Debussy’s titles, Satie’s tell the informed and inquisitive reader a great deal. He loved devising sets of titles, like Boring Globules or Monotonous Day’s Marches (both from 1914), but only the pieces he copied in black ink and gave titles to were intended for eventual publication. In contrast to Fauré, who wanted to call everything just ‘Pièce’, Satie revelled in his eccentric titles, especially in the period of the humorous piano pieces.
18.
Vladimir Golschmann, ‘Golschmann Remembers Erik Satie’, Musical America 22 (August 1972), 11; the italics are original. 19. Martin Howe, ‘Erik Satie and his Ballets’, Ballet 5 (8) (August–September 1948), 28.
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The Humorous Piano Sets (1913–15) and the Move Towards Surrealism In these pieces, the literary element assumes increasing importance. After the discovery of his early works by Ravel, who gave the prestigious première of Satie’s Deuxième Sarabande (and other pieces) at a Société Musicale Indépendante concert in January 1911, Satie was cast as the ‘precursor’ of modern harmony by the press. While he enjoyed the publicity, he really wanted his latest works appreciated, and for this to happen (which it slowly did), he still needed to intrigue and shock his growing public. In December 1912, Eugène Demets purchased his Real Flabby Preludes (for a dog) for the knock-down price of 50 francs in a limited edition of 300. Whilst the title must have seemed absurd at the time, there was, as always, a strict personal logic behind it. Satie loved animals, and the stray dogs he took pity on were the only living things to enter his dingy room in Arcueil between 1899 and 1925. The sub-titles ‘Alone in the House’ and ‘We Play’ probably reflect this. In addition, Satie had already written a set of Flabby Preludes (for a dog) earlier that summer – including a ‘Chanson canine’ – which remained unpublished, so the ones that did appear were to him the ‘Real’ Flabby Preludes. Then the opening ‘Severe Reprimand’, a genuine toccata or prelude, is directed at all dry pedagogic teaching, even perhaps that of Vincent d’Indy, for the first bass entry is marked ‘The voice of the master’.20 Satie had just finished his seven years of rigorous study with Roussel and d’Indy at the Schola Cantorum, and was glad to be free to compose exactly what he wanted to: he was even gladder that the preludes had been accepted by Demets after having been ignominiously rejected by Debussy’s publisher, Jacques Durand. Soon Satie was struggling to satisfy the demand for more such piano sets, producing over 60 pieces in all before he moved on to other things in 1915. Literary integration reaches its height with the 20 Sports et divertissements of 1914 which extend Satie’s commentaries to amuse the performer into miniature prose poems, and produce what amounts to a Gesamtkunstwerk in cameo through the addition of Cubist-inspired drawings by Charles Martin. While Marcel Duchamp, Picasso, or Picabia introduced words into their paintings, only Satie employed a
20.
In BNF MS 9618, p. 4.
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Example 4: ‘La Balançoire’ [The Swing] from Sports et divertissements (New York: Dover Publications Inc., 1982), p. 8.
simultaneous counterpoint of prose poems, music, and drawing within a single composition. In ‘La Balançoire’ (Example 4) each melodic line is matched by a line of distinctly modern poetry. The lines are clearly not meant to be sung because the number of syllables does not match the number of notes in any but the third line. The translation runs as follows: ‘It’s my heart that is swinging thus./ It isn’t dizzy./ What tiny feet it has./ Will it be willing to return to my breast?’ We can also see from Example 4 how Satie’s calligraphy (actually in black and red ink) is itself a camera-ready work of art, and how concerned he remained about the ‘exteriorisation’ of his musical thought. This can also be seen in the way his drafts for the pieces had barlines, which were removed in publication. Satie also added a ‘Préface’ to the ‘Unappetising Chorale’ that introduces his ‘album’. The chorale is designed for ‘the “Shrivelled Up” and the “Stupid”… a sort of austere and non-frivolous introduction. I have put into it all I know about Boredom. I dedicate this chorale to those who don’t like me. I withdraw.’ Here the words are an essential part of the music, its raison d’être.
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That summer Satie’s texts grew even more surrealistic in the Heures séculaires et instantanées, dedicated to ‘sir [sic] William Grant-Plumot’, who was surprising in ‘the strangeness of his good humour’ and ‘continual immobility’ (a recurring fascination with Satie). Whoever was behind the choice of dedicatee (Shakespeare and the critic ‘Willy’ have been suggested), he has nothing whatever to do with the pieces that follow. In the first, ‘Venomous Obstacles’, it is 9.17 a.m. This vast part of the world inhabited by a single black man: He’s so bored he could die laughing … The toads are calling each other by their family names. In order to concentrate, the black man grasps his cerebellum in his right hand, his fingers spread apart. From a distance he seems to resemble a distinguished physiologist. Four anonymous serpents enslave him, hanging from the shirt tails of his uniform which grief and solitude have rendered shapeless. On the banks of the river, an old mangrove slowly washes its roots, filthy with dirt. It is not a favourable hour for lovers.
The music, marked ‘darkly’, is equally strange and chromatic. Apart from counting the nine ‘hours’ and seventeen ‘minutes’, it seems to be another of Satie’s arbitrary juxtapositions of short ostinato-type cells in jigsaw puzzle manner. Like his poetry and prose, it has a sort of continuity, but always contains sudden tangential and logic-defeating surprises. One might almost say that, at times, the music was arbitrary because, as the black man’s ‘fingers spread apart’, the oscillating accompaniment centred on e and the lyrical melody centred on d are not dissimilar to Example 4. But perhaps this is because both belong to Satie’s 1914 style. But if we look more closely, the distinguished physiologist is characterised by pompous chords, each of the four serpents is introduced individually, the opening music returns more slowly at the end an even darker octave lower as the ‘old mangrove slowly washes its roots’, even suggesting that the text came first and the music was inspired by it. This hypothesis is, of course, supported by the projected Boring Globules from the same summer, where Satie wrote texts but no music. The first globule, ‘Regard’, begins with a parody of Verlaine (‘Son regard est une tiède parure’) and ends up talking about an umbrella made from ‘porcine silk which has the appearance of a tomato’! The disjunct images Satie probably picked up from Apollinaire, even if the two were never particularly friendly. As we have seen, Satie cared more about his umbrellas, which he apparently sheltered under his coat when it rained!
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Yet it was to the Heures séculaires et instantanées that Satie appended his famous warning in the first edition: To whom it may concern: ‘I forbid anyone to read the text aloud during the musical performance. Ignorance of my instructions will incur my righteous indignation against the presumptuous culprit. No exceptions will be allowed.’
Satie also wrote what has been claimed as the first surrealist play in Le Piège de Méduse in the spring of 1913. However, its concept dates back as far as Satie’s Montmartre period, and Ornella Volta has discovered that he sketched a first version in five acts in 1898, with the aid of the humourist/illustrator Jules Dépaquit, who later became the first Mayor of Montmartre.21 In the nine short scenes (separated by seven dances for Jonas the Monkey) of the final version, the anarchic world of the Baron Medusa is partly that of Satie himself, though he was furious with Pierre Bertin for mimicking him when the play reached the stage in 1921. Polycarpe, the butler, who initially dominates Medusa, and is anxious to be off to a billiards match (and later to be married) contains more than a passing reference to Debussy, their relationship here turned on its head. The ‘snare’ of the title involves Astolfo’s ability to dance with one eye (another recurring image in Satie’s writings and music), and he is only allowed to marry Medusa’s daughter, Frisette, when he honestly admits that he cannot. The play ends in confusion as Polycarpe announces the arrival of various military personnel who Medusa is convinced have come only to thrash him! Satie’s life from this point onwards revolved more and more around the theatre, and his other curious 1913 venture was Les Pantins dansent, a disembodied ‘poème dansé’ written for the Metachoric Festival devised by Valentine de Saint-Point, who had close links with the Futurist movement. From the Revue musicale SIM, we learn from Saint-Point that: … in my Métachorie, music and dance are equal partners, both uniquely and similarly dependent on the Idea, that is to say the idea evoked in the poem or drama … I interpret a poem and not the music, and the music is inspired by the poem and not conceived choreographically … Metachory is conceived in the modern spirit … it needs a creative musician … its direction is intellectual and not sentimental.22 21.
See Erik Satie, Correspondance presque complete, ed. Ornella Volta (Paris: Fayard, 2000), p. 83. 22. From a press controversy between Saint-Point and Paolo Litta published in the Revue musicale SIM 10 (1 ) (1 janvier 1914), 71; Valentine de Saint-Point was a great-niece of the poet Lamartine.
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All of which appealed to Satie. Saint-Point and he were to respond to the same poem independently, only putting the results together at the première on 18 December 1913 in the Salle Léon-Poirier, when her maudlin and distinctly sentimental poem (about a poet dying on a fête day while the puppets are dancing) was read aloud by none other than Édouard de Max.23 As the number of Satie’s four-bar phrases does not equal the number of lines in Saint-Point’s poem, there can have been no exact synchronisation between the two in performance. So Satie lived up to the spirit of the enterprise and again created a ‘theatrical backcloth’ to a text, though perhaps a slightly more appropriate one than had been the case in the 1890s. Being a perceptive literary critic, he probably kept his score short to force de Max to get through the self-indulgent poem as quickly as possible. In 1914 Satie wrote his own contemporary version of French thirteenth-century Troubadour poetry for his minuscule Trois Poèmes d’amour. But in the last of these, ‘Ta parure est secrète’, he made no fewer than thirteen versions of the tiny 8-bar song in his quest for perfection in simplicity. Following his predominant belief that the ‘melody is the Idea’ from which all else flows, every bar applies the same rhythm of six quavers and a crotchet to Satie’s ‘magic words’. In the process, Satie takes advantage of French as an unstressed language, and pokes fun at the vocalised mute ‘e’ in sung French at the end of each line (Example 5). For his poems, Satie took the verse-form of the medieval Chanson de geste, with its monorhyme stanzas (laisses), and adapted it to modern ends. But he never took anything literally from the past. So, just as the vocal lines look like modern plainsong in Example 5 but only preserve its spirit, so the verse-form of the trouvères is modified from the customary ten- or eight-syllable lines to seven, and Satie joins these by consonance rather than assonance. In the printed version, the mocking preface about the Romantic poet with ‘eyelids fluttering like leaves’ and all the humorous textural additions (like ‘Put back your clock an hour’ in the final bar) were deleted – even down to the dynamics and the marking ‘Avec tendresse’ – so that the song should appear as simple and dead-pan as possible. Yet paradoxically, the last things Satie added (at the final proof stage) were the curious chromatic flourishes before bars 3 and 7, which are at odds with the prevailing modality, the restrained style, but not the anachronistic poem about a young smoking tomboy. 23.
See Orledge, Satie the Composer, pp. 120–24 & 349–50 for the poem and further details. The version for small orchestra performed in December 1913 was Satie’s second response to Saint-Point’s poem. The first contains his only known writing for solo harp (see p. 124).
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Example 5: Trois Poèmes d’amour, No. 3: ‘Ta parure est secrète’ [‘Your attire is discreet’]. The textual additions come from BNF 9615(1), pp. 16–19.
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The 1916–19 period ‘Le Chapelier’, the third of Satie’s Trois Mélodies of 1916, remains one of the most curious alliances of words and music in existence: a sort of double parody or pastiche. Always an admirer of Lewis Carroll, Satie first took René Chalupt’s adaptation of an episode from the Mad Hatter’s tea-party in Alice in Wonderland and set it in the arpeggiobased melodic style found in late 1915 works like the Cinq Grimaces, no doubt with the Mad Hatter’s ticking watch in mind.24 He then had a flash of inspiration, and realised how shocking it would be to graft Carroll’s topsy-turvy world onto an operatic love-duet by that epitomy of bourgeois sentimentality, Charles Gounod. So he adapted the first stanza of the Provençal ‘Chanson de Magali’, as sung by Vincent in Act 2 scene 3 of Mireille (1864), wickedly introducing strings of parallel fifths in place of Gounod’s bass pedal points, and using Gounod’s operatic upper tonic climax in his second stanza. He also introduced a glorious slithering descent to a point two octaves below to end his first stanza, at the point where the Mad Hatter greases his watch with best butter because it is running three hours slow. With the Cocteau-Picasso-Massine-Diaghilev ballet Parade (1917), the literary links rather concern what was left out of the production. Cocteau originally wanted fairground barkers shouting through megaphones, a chorus intoning onomatopoeic nonsense syllables in Parts 2 and 3, and all manner of noises off in the then-fashionable Futuristic manner of Marinetti et al. There was also a song as the great Titanic ‘sinks blazing into the sea’ that survived without its text into Satie’s orchestral score.25 Satie even set some of Cocteau’s ‘trompe l’oreille’ effects in his sketches, but all these extraneous ‘noises’ were excised by Diaghilev before the 1917 première as he disliked the concept of words entering the sphere of ballet.26
24.
See Orledge, Satie the Composer, pp. 21–4 for an extract and further details about ‘Le Chapelier’. 25. In the flute and piccolo parts at fig. 32 bars 1–9, pp. 64–6 in the Salabert orchestral score, Paris, 1999. Cocteau’s text read: ‘Tic! Tic! Tic! Le Titanic s’enfonce, allumé dans la mer’. 26. Such as BNF 9603(1), pp. 16–17, with its settings of ‘a–é, o–a, é–u, a–é, o–é–i–é’. These survive in the oboe and cor anglais parts of Part 3: Acrobates in ibid., p. 88.
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With Socrate (1917–18), Satie’s ‘return to classical simplicity with a modern sensibility’, which he owed to his ‘“Cubist” friends’, he reverted to the nineteenth-century translation of the Dialogues de Platon by Victor Cousin.27 He preferred this to the more modern translation by Mario Meunier because of its clarity, simplicity, and beauty, and in the process he found Plato to be ‘a perfect collaborator, very quiet and never importunate’ (unlike the interfering Cocteau).28 In what is now recognised as his masterpiece of restraint, Satie made no additions or changes of order to the twenty paragraphs he selected, and produced a work that was ‘white and pure as Antiquity’ and ‘without the least idea of conflict’.29 Its title ‘symphonic drama in three parts’ would appear to be a misnomer, until one realises that it is symphonic insofar as its main motifs all appear in the orchestra, and dramatic insofar as it describes the events leading to Socrates’ death in its final part. In most places the recitative-like vocal line was grafted onto an already complete motivic musical argument. For the dramatic effects one might expect from the death itself, Satie substitutes seventeen bars of bare fifths on two shifting pitches with a virtually monotone vocal line, whose simple dignity transports the tragedy onto a higher plane. From the abruptly juxtaposed blocks of vertical sound in Parade, Satie’s subdued score placed the emphasis on horizontal continuity, with motifs carefully leading into each other and even occasional orchestral overlaps between them. Poulenc aptly compared Satie’s linear music to the limpidity of running water.30 The commission for Socrate had arrived in October 1916 from the wealthy Princesse Edmond de Polignac, who had studied ancient Greek. It was originally intended for one of her celebrated musical receptions,
27.
From a letter to Henry Prunières dated 3 April 1918, cited in Satie (ed. Volta), Correspondance, p. 325. 28. From a letter to Valentine Gross dated 18 January 1917, cited in Satie, Correspondance, p. 277. 29. See Orledge, Satie the Composer, p. 316 for the precise sources of these extracts; also a letter to Valentine Gross dated 6 January 1917, cited in Satie, Correspondance, p. 273; also a letter to Paul Collaer dated 16 May 1920, cited in ibid., p. 406. 30. Cited in Paul Collaer, ‘La Fin des Six et de Satie’, La Revue générale 6–7 (June– July 1974), 2; see Orledge, Satie the Composer, pp. 134–5 for an example of this from Part 1: ‘Portrait de Socrate’.
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with the Princess and one of her friends, Madame de Wendel, seated in luxurious armchairs, reading from Plato’s dialogues to a musical background. Satie soon decided to make it a self-contained work (with which he planned to score a great success on a projected American tour in 1919), but he retained the idea of female voices, even though the characters were all male.31 Thus, in the final version, we find four sopranos (two high and two mezzo) intoning the recitatives of Alcibiade, Socrate, Phèdre and Phédon in what amounts to a stereophonic context, even though it is nowadays usually performed by a single soprano. It was as close to pure literature with a musical backcloth as Satie could get, with melismas (as always) being virtually non-existent. Within what is essentially a minimalist concept, Satie uses small expressive gestures to telling effect within his transparent textures, and the way that he leaves the drama suspended in space on a second inversion chord on f#, the note on which Socrate began, is a masterstroke. Satie and the Early 1920s As well as expanding his musical journalism, Satie wrote more songs in the 1920s, including the Quatre Petites Mélodies of 1920 and the five Ludions (Fargue, 1923). Now working mostly to theatrical commissions, he also set substantial tracts of Molière’s dialogue from Le Médecin malgré lui (1666) to convert Gounod’s 1858 opéra-comique into an all-sung opera for Diaghilev’s Gounod revival in Monte Carlo in January 1924. Here Satie went to extraordinary lengths to get his settings of Molière perfect and he also wrote his only score using nineteenth-century chromatic harmonies in a directional manner to match Gounod’s arias and ensembles, with which his nine ‘scènes nouvelles’ were interspersed as recitatives.32 The process involved no less than nine stages between June and December 1923: first, Satie annotated the libretto Diaghilev sent him into nine scenes which he coordinated
31.
See Robert Orledge, ‘Satie & America’, American Music 18 (2000), 88–90 for further details; the reference to the two high and two mezzo-sopranos can only be found in Satie’s letter of 1 December 1918 to the novelist Henri-Pierre Roché relating to this tour (see pp. 89 and 101). 32. I have recently edited this last unknown Satie orchestral score, which is published by Aerial Kites Press, Liverpool, 2001.
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with Gounod’s vocal score; second, he copied out the dialogue to be set in the right-hand pages of a small blue notebook (BNF MS 9595(2)); thirdly, he added the natural speech-rhythms to be used for every word on the opposite left-hand pages; fourthly, he noted the vocal ranges of the eight singers involved; fifthly, he drafted the music for his nine numbers in four sketchbooks (BNF MSS 9595(3–6)); sixthly, he made neat vocal scores for rehearsals in eight further notebooks (now in a private collection in Paris); in stage seven, he incorporated the further cuts Diaghilev had made during his initial rehearsals; in stage eight, he planned the precise pagination of his orchestral score on three postcards (BNF MS 9595(3bis)); and finally he wrote out the full orchestral score (now in the Beinecke Library of Yale University). In this swift-moving and compact score, his only indulgence was a giant melisma on the final word ‘bel-le’, sung by the fake doctor Sganarelle.33 On the other hand, Satie got virtually nowhere with a contemporary opéra-comique of his own entitled Paul & Virginie, to a libretto by Cocteau and Radiguet based on the famous story of shipwreck on a desert island by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. Satie wanted Paul & Virginie to be light, sparkling and spontaneous, in the style of Rossini, but the only piece he seems to have completed between 1920 and 1923 was the opening ‘Sailors’ Chorus’.34 Far more to his taste were the little poems ‘Danseuse’ (Cocteau) and ‘Adieu’ – originally ‘Mouchoir’ from Les Joues en feu by the boy wonder Radiguet – which Satie set in October to December 1920. The latter song of just 16 bars about the ‘Admiral … waving his old handkerchief’ caused Satie almost as much trouble as anything in Socrate.35 In BNF MS 9574, pp. 1–7, he made two purely rhythmic drafts before he was satisfied with the prosody, accompanied by three drafts of a vocal line in B# major. In the third attempt, converting the vocal line for ‘Amiral’ from a falling scale to a palindrome gave him the idea for his strange, chromatic accompaniment, to which the introduction and coda were appended last. Thus the accompaniment derived from Satie’s melodic response to an individual word: what began as a café-concert
33. Ibid., p. 129; for fuller details of this unique project see Robert Orledge, ‘Gounod, Satie and Diaghilev (1923–24): Le Médecin [et le compositeur] malgré lui’, Muziek & Wetenschap 3 (1993), 91–116. 34. ‘Choeur des Marins’ for tenor solo, chorus and piano, ed. Robert Orledge (Paris: Salabert, 1995). 35. See Orledge, Satie the Composer, pp. 70–3 for fuller details.
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Example 6: Quatre Petites Mélodies, No. 1: ‘Élégie’ [for Claude Debussy], showing the formal sections and the two versions of the vocal line (BNF MS 9576, pp. 10–11).
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waltz ended up as a compact and carefully sculpted art-song from which the waltz elements were composed out, in a process Cocteau likened to ‘decomposition’. The most interesting of the four little songs is Satie’s ‘Élégie’ for his friend Debussy, a setting of stanza 7 of Lamartine’s ‘L’Isolement’, published in Premières Méditations in 1820. From Example 6 we can see how melody constitutes the ‘idea’ behind the work and conditions its outline, form and content. In the work that emerges ‘the harmony is an illumination, an exhibition of the object, its reflection’.36 In this case, there are two melodies, the vocal line and the upper accompaniment line, and in such cases it was usually the latter that emerged first. So Satie began by planning what became Example 6 with his rhythmic response to Lamartine’s desolate poem on a monotone e1 (which survives in bar 3 of the upper melodic line), but his first melodic thought was the undulating parallel fifths in the right-hand piano part in bars 1–3. Through transposition, this survived to condition the form and content of the whole ‘Élégie’. He then ‘illuminated’ his basic idea by harmonising it in different ways, numbering the cells as they were to appear in the final version in bars 1–3, 4–6 and 10–12. This produced the monothematic form marked A, A1, A, A2 in Example 6 (in which A2 uses chords 1 and 3 of A1, separated by what might be seen as a variant of chord 4 as the climax at the start of bar 11). A2 gave Satie the most trouble (three compositional stages) both because of the tonal ambiguity he wanted for the ending (the initial motif in bars 1–3 centres on a Phrygian e minor, but the song begins and ends on f, which is prepared by the cadence on its dominant c in bars 5–6). However, it can be observed that f major as such never occurs in this ambiguous song, and the only thing that looks like a tonic in root position is the c major at the start of bar 6, though this could well be a dominant in the overall scheme. Lastly, Satie composed the anguished vocal line itself, the object of the whole tribute to Debussy. As can be seen in Example 6, this went through two complete stages (with the preordained rhythm remaining constant), and Satie composed the angularity into it, in the process giving a better link between the melodic and harmonic tension in bar 5, and a stronger climax on the only g2 in bar 11, even if it came on 36.
From Satie’s compositional credo, ‘Subject Matter (Idea) and Craftsmanship (Construction)’ on the cover of BNF MS 9611 (1917); for the original French text see Satie, Écrits, pp. 48–9
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‘est’ instead of ‘tout’. While the parallel fifths and whole-tone chords may be reminiscent of Debussy, the bitonal approach, absolute economy, and the sonorous (almost Brahmsian) left-hand octaves identify Satie as the composer. Here Lamartine’s poetry served as an inspirational means to an end, in which the musical integrity was the most important factor for Satie — as we can see from the way he arrived at the final vocal line last. Yet the irrelevance of nature and material possessions after the loss of a single, cherished friend was exactly what Satie wanted to portray in September 1920, and for once Satie brings his inner emotions naked to the surface in an unusually wide-ranging vocal line of almost exaggerated expressiveness. Everything ends where it began, with the repeated fs extending into infinity through the implied continuation of motif A2 by whatever means. Debussy is also commemorated in a long, revealing, and completely serious article about their friendship that Satie wrote in August 1922 for the American journal Vanity Fair, at the request of Sybil Harris. But unlike his two articles on ‘the great Stravinsky’, this was sadly never published during Satie’s lifetime.37 Satie gathered together many of his views on music and literature in his articles for the bookseller Pierre Trémois’s journal Catalogue between March and November 1922 (a year in which Satie’s production was almost entirely in words). It should also be remembered that Satie was a frequent visitor to the Left Bank bookshops of Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier and that one of the first performances of Socrate took place in Monnier’s La Maison des Amis des Livres in the rue de l’Odéon in March 1919. Here Satie came into close contact with such luminaries as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Léon-Paul Fargue, and he also attended the first readings of Joyce’s Ulysses (in French translation by Valéry Larbaud) there in December 1921. For Trémois, Satie wrote short essays on such subjects as Bookishness, Reading, Publishing, and Writing in cafés (‘Painful Examples’). The most interesting is that on Publishing, which shows how important the well-printed book was to him. ‘A literary publication’, he says, … appears more brilliant, more logical, more ‘genuine’ than its cousin the musical publication…its value, very often, tends to rise highly, towards the ‘rare’ class. In a word, the book is a ‘genuine’ object – a kind of jewel, a type of work of art. It is complete.
37.
Published in Les Feuilles libres 4 (29) (October–November 1922), 347–52, and Vanity Fair 19 (6) (February 1923), 39 and 88.
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Words and Music A musical work … has none of these precious external features; it appears like a sort of brother to academic books – an ugly brother. Take Albéric Magnard, who published a great number of important works, dressing them up to look like an ‘atlas’ … His example – a very ‘deliberate’ one in this case – shows how little importance he attached to the notated ‘exteriorisation’ of his thought, and underlines the difference which exists between literary and musical publications.38
Satie, like Debussy (but unlike Magnard), played a positive role in designing editions of his works, and here he suggests that music ‘should be put in print in some quite different way’ as ‘engraving is so awkward physically’. The later twentieth century was, of course, to prove him right. Unfortunately, as is so often the case, he does not elaborate on his forward-looking ideas, but we can perhaps see why he deliberately removed conventional barlines and key signatures from his later music for single performers, for he considered that the ‘variable nature of musical notation spoils the “patina” of musical works. Times destroy the meaning of the “symbols”: clefs, accidentals etc.’ Therefore Satie sought to make his own publications as close as he could to the literary models he admired, hence the ‘historical background’ in the form of texts or stories. His ideal solution came in Sports et divertissements, but the opportunity for this sort of expensive collaboration between the arts was rare, and it took nine years for Sports to appear on general sale in the de luxe edition by Lucien Vogel. Satie’s concern for the eye as much as the ear appears in his later public lectures, which look like the literary equivalent to Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, though precedents for these can be found in the emblematic verses of Satie’s favourite author Lewis Carroll (such as the ‘Mouse’s Tale’ in the shape of a mouse’s tail in Chapter 3 of Alice in Wonderland). The rows of dots of varying lengths which characterise such pieces had a practical purpose too, for they told Satie when and for how long to pause when he read them aloud.39
38.
Satie (ed. Volta), Écrits, pp. 54–5, originally published in Catalogue 3 (30 May 1922), 3. 39. A good example can be seen in Satie’s ‘Préambule’ to a concert by Marcelle Meyer on 17 January 1922, illustrated in Orledge, Satie the Composer, p. 218.
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Conclusions As far as music and words are concerned on a broader level, the dominating figure in Satie’s life between 1915 and 1923 was Cocteau, who gave him more publicity than he had ever dreamed of in Le Coq et l’Arlequin (1918), projecting him as the personification of the new modern spirit of simplicity and French nationalism, with its roots in popular melody and its inspiration in the music-hall, cabaret and circus. Parade, minus Cocteau’s texts, established Satie as the godfather of the avant-garde, elevating him to a cult figure in a post-war high society hungry for sensation and chic diversion. In this period, Satie also created Musique d’ameublement, of which the best-known examples were his parodies of Ambroise Thomas (again) and Saint-Saëns in the ‘entr’actes’ performed between the acts of a Max Jacob play, Ruffian toujours, truand jamais (now lost) at the Galerie Barbazanges on 8 March 1920. Here the concept of music as a sonorous backcloth, endlessly repeating short fragments while everyday life continues oblivious around it, failed because of its very novelty. Satie’s shouts of ‘Go on talking! Walk about! Don’t listen!’ had the reverse effect to that intended. Words were involved here in the way that Satie incorporated a Romance from Act 1 of Thomas’s Mignon (‘Connais-tu le pays, où fleurit l’oranger?’); words in the form of a play went on around it; and words were what Satie wanted more than anything to hear as it was performed. But underneath, as always, the music proved the most important element, and this aspect can also be seen in the way Satie carefully balanced the scores of his later ballets Mercure and Relâche in 1924 so that they would stand up both to future analysis and the absurd theatrical paraphernalia that surrounded them in their provocative performances. We have already seen Satie writing self-contained music as a defence against indifferent theatrical texts from the 1890s onwards, and we can also see him creating music out of a text in a work like in ‘d’Holothurie’ from the Embryons desséchés, in which everything but the first idea derives from Loïsa Puget’s popular song ‘Mon Rocher de Saint-Malo’ (to words by her husband Gustave Lemoine) of c. 1840. Satie also borrowed and transformed melodies from operettas popular in the 1880s by Edmond Audran, Aimé Maillart, Robert Planquette, and even from Gounod’s Faust in his humorous piano pieces of 1913, as well as French folksongs, and the English nursery rhyme ‘Sing a Song of Sixpence’ in his furnishing music for Mrs Eugène Meyer
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(Junior) in 1923. With these went verbal associations that permeated the music in disguise, another good example being Irving Berlin’s 1911 hit ‘That Mysterious Rag’, which Satie used as a rhythmic model for the ‘Ragtime du Paquebot’ [the Titanic] in Parade. Thus Satie remained as responsive to words in his music as ‘literary’ composers like Schumann or Debussy, but for him the unspoken word was as important (if not more important) than the spoken one. On many occasions his aim was to shock and to turn accepted relationships between words and music on their heads, as in grafting the text of Socrate onto a preconceived motivic structure after the mood and start of each part had been decided with the words in mind. His approach in Socrate was both Wagnerian (with the main motifs in the orchestra) and totally un-Wagnerian in its compositional approach and aesthetic. At the same time, Satie wanted to create timeless, white, almost anonymous music that could fit any situation, and his initial conception of Socrate was as large-scale ‘furniture music’. Yet almost all his creations have strong literary associations, even when they appear to be absolute music. He invented all lower case writing with uspud in 1892, and the following year created deliberate boredom through hypnotic and endless repetition of the same musical text in the mantra-like Vexations, which is preceded by a period of silent meditation and is also one of the earliest known pieces of total chromaticism. Here the ambient sounds of the environment quickly became the most interesting part of the 14–24 hour performance, an innovation which had important ramifications for John Cage in the 1950s and 1960s. In the few songs that Satie set, the poetry is always contemporary, and in cases like Fargue’s ‘La Statue de bronze’, it came direct from the author. To complete his Trois Mélodies in May 1916, Satie asked Fargue to ‘Send me – immediately – something very short and terribly cynical’.40 In this case, the normally slow Satie completed the song in ten days and had it performed four days after this, all within the same month. Similarly the Ludions, although they date back to Fargue’s early childhood, come from the versions published in the journal
40.
From a letter of 16 May 1916 in the Archives Léon-Paul Fargue, kindly supplied to me by Laurent de Freitas; the complete postcard is published in Satie, Correspondance, p. 242.
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Intentions in May 1923, which also determined the order of Satie’s cycle. This he finished by 18 May, despite making no less than four different settings of the outer songs ‘Air du Rat’ and ‘Chanson du chat’ before he was satisfied.41 Strangely, he never set anything by Apollinaire, and in reality very little by Cocteau, and finding new poetry that was absolutely right for his needs at any particular time proved very difficult (as it did for Fauré). But Satie was regularly supplied with poems, as in the case of Suzanne Kra, the translator of Rilke, in July 1917, or Max Jacob in October 1919. But in neither case did he feel able to set the results: unfortunately he never explained why. Satie continued to prefer the company of poets and artists to that of musicians (as Debussy did), and purely musical pages in his notebooks are rare, for to Satie words and music were inseparable. If he will not go down for posterity as one of the great song-writers, his continuous rethinking of the Romantic approach to words and music led to new approaches to both, whose ramifications extended across the twentyfirst century to the creations of composers with similar aesthetics: John Cage and his disciples; British composers like Harrison Birtwistle, Howard Skempton, Christopher Hobbs and Gavin Bryars; minimalists such as Steve Reich and Terry Riley; and independents like Federico Mompou, Maurice Ohana and Virgil Thomson.
41.
In BNF MS 9594 and a notebook in the Fondation Satie, Paris; see Robert Orledge, ‘Genèse des Ludions d’Erik Satie (1916 and 1923)’, Bulletin de la Société des Lecteurs de Léon-Paul Fargue 8 (2002–3), 117–32 for fuller details.
8
‘Breaking up is hard to do’: Issues of Coherence and Fragmentation in post-1950 Vocal Music James Wishart Many writings by scholars and composers on the relationship between words and music are centred on issues of intelligibility or coherence. It would be relatively easy to become sidetracked into a long discussion of the diverse aspects which may increase or decrease the coherence of a text delivered in musical terms, whether spoken, sung, or involving hybrid modes. It would be tempting to consider questions of room acoustic, where clear understanding of text can easily be impeded while listening to music. Also pertinent is the role of clear diction in performance, not just where the lazy vocal performer might be berated for inhibiting clear perception, but perhaps raising the question whether singers who possess unusually good diction potentially wield this notional excellence to the detriment of other important aspects of collective musical expression. There are many occasions in musical performances where we might recognise imperfect balance – voices (and the accompanying words) being lost in a welter of orchestral colour. In another situation we might find a performance less than gripping, conceivably because we cannot fathom the language of the text or because we are beguiled (especially in the case of a high-lying soprano tessitura) by the vocal quality which seems to prevent clear textual perception. Finally, we might find the notion of florid contrapuntal vocal textures an inhibiting factor in terms of accurate and sympathetic perception of the words, in an echo of discussions which have permeated much of musical history. It might therefore sound odd to ask why we need to pose the question about the desirability of hearing the words when listening to vocal music. It might seem self-evidently desirable, even necessary. If we are in a theatre watching and listening to an operatic work, we wish to understand as much as possible of what is going on, not just the actions on stage, but also the words emanating from soloists and chorus.
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If the production is in our own language, our concentration might be somewhat relaxed, with the expectation – sometimes disappointed – that we will inevitably catch the majority of the words uttered. In the case of a poor auditory performance, we might find ourselves of necessity listening in frustration with perversely enhanced concentration. Much might depend on our familiarity with the work itself – we could be more forgiving about not being able to make out all the words if we knew what was going to happen. Even a reasonably full synopsis consulted in advance could conceivably present us with a situation where we were confident in terms of understanding what was going on at a particular time and of comprehending the main arguments or emotions which were present in specific sections of the score. Let us imagine, however, the first time a particular work comes to our attention – I instance here a fairly recent experience in attending Friedrich Cerha’s opera Der Riese von Steinfeld (2001) in a première production at the Vienna Staatsoper in June 2002. The programme synopsis was gnomic and unhelpful, the ‘surtitles’ were hard to read, and the voices were often covered by the loud Bergian orchestral textures, with virtually the entire line of the leading soprano character seeming to be one long vocalise, soaring ‘above the stave’ to stratospheric levels. My reaction to this work was definitely flawed – and yet it was nonetheless possible to perceive the work on one level without understanding (or indeed hearing) much of the text. Arguably, in a concert situation, we might be less concerned when presented with a text in an unfamiliar language or a performance where not every syllable was projected with total clarity. Clinging to our previous knowledge or informed by our programme note, we listen with differently focused ears. In Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex (1927), we are presented with a textual commentary in our own tongue (the original French text is by Cocteau), and we then hear the choral texture in Latin – this unusual hybrid-text piece allows us to vary our intensity of concentration on the words, should we wish to do so.1 In a typical Mozart operatic finale, despite the composer’s supreme skill in introducing different characters’ unique perspectives with distinctive music, there will be moments when the whole edifice becomes so complex that we may miss some of the words (although in using a good
1.
Igor Stravinsky, Oedipus Rex, opera-oratorio, ([1927, revised 1948] London: Boosey and Hawkes, 1949).
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deal of repetition, Mozart ensured that the texts for the most part were audible at one time or another). Perhaps we should put the question a little more tartly: does it really matter in the case of a familiar text (for instance, a religious example like the Stabat Mater or Magnificat) that we may not hear every syllable?2 Furthermore, if we know the predominant mood of the work – for example, sorrowing or lamenting – how much is our listening pleasure enhanced by hearing the text in its completeness? If these examples prove less than convincing in accepting the notion of imperfect verbal coherence, we should address ourselves to other occasions where less than total intelligibility could be regarded as a positive factor (and wholly intentional on behalf of the composer). Ever since the time of Charles Ives, we have become attuned to the concept of simultaneous sound-strata co-existing, but not necessarily at equal dynamic or perceptual levels. There are many places in Ives’s scores where ‘part-hearing’ is the required reality – for instance the repeated low-dynamic 10-bar string orchestra phrase set against the raucous second orchestra (wind-brass-percussion) in Central Park in the Dark.3 Although the string chords cannot be closely followed at the climactic point, this in no sense invalidates their place in the score – if you were to omit them, the result would be catastrophic. We must resist the temptation to make adverse remarks learnt from years of careful part-balancing – if the instance is well-judged in terms of the strength of the sound-colour and registral context, ‘part-hearing’ will be the eventual effective result. The most familiar and extensive example in more modern repertory of this concept of relative intelligibility is Berio’s Sinfonia for amplified voices and orchestra (1968) where so much musical and verbal information is provided (especially in the collage-style middle movement) that it is quite inevitable that some musical detail will be lost or partially hidden.4 Over a generation of performances which Berio attended himself (sometimes as conductor,
2.
These well-known religious texts are chosen as examples of very familiar texts, which, although they have inbuilt contrast, nonetheless project a very strong emotional ambience, which would be familiar to most audiences. 3. Charles Ives, Central Park in the Dark, ed. by J.-L. Monod (Hillsdale, NY: Boelke-Bomart, 1973). 4. Luciano Berio, Sinfonia for 8 amplified voices and orchestra (London: Universal Edition, 1972).
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other times as observer), there was a myriad of different ‘solutions’ to these complex textures – as exemplified perhaps by the recordings in the current commercial catalogue, all very different from one another. David Osmond-Smith’s revealing book on this work uncovers the whole principle of selective and relative occlusion, where musical or textual elements seemingly bubble up to the surface or drain away, like some sort of subterranean river.5 A further reason for eschewing total coherence might be one of illustration – I am reminded of a mostly intelligent newspaper review in The Times of a performance of my own soprano and orchestra work Òran Hiortach (St Kilda Song) (1990) which found effective the way that the soprano soloist sometimes had her text partially obliterated by waves of orchestral sonority as an analogue for the gigantic waves breaking on the massive cliffs and rocks around the island of St Kilda celebrated in my piece.6 Looking back on this metaphor, I wonder how much was intention on my part as composer and how much was in the control of the conductor, but I did definitively intend parts of the score to be experienced as overwhelming, in the same way that the islanders were overwhelmed by the brutal circumstances which surrounded their enforced emigration in 1930 – so the partial obliteration of the text can be seen as an element of this more complex musical metaphor. Having discussed some reasons why relative coherence is a matter of legitimate artistic consideration, I turn to the idea of fragmentation. Many choral textures in works from Handel to Berio use complex contrapuntal textures where the clarity of the words is subordinated to the expressiveness and dramatic logic of a heterogeneous texture. I am not aware however of any significant use of fragmented words or choral lines being broken up between the constituent parts until the 1950s or 1960s. Two early examples stand out in my musical memory – Stravinsky’s A Sermon, A Narrative and A Prayer (1961) and Penderecki’s St Luke Passion (1966).7 Example 1a shows the 5.
David Osmond-Smith, Playing on Words: A Guide to Luciano Berio’s ‘Sinfonia’ (London: Royal Musical Association, 1985). 6. The world première performance took place at Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool on Wednesday 16 May 1990 with Sarah Leonard (solo soprano) and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Barry Wordsworth. The newspaper review appeared in The Times on Friday 18 May 1990, and was written by David Fallows. 7. Igor Stravinsky, A Sermon, A Narrative and A Prayer (New York: Boosey and Hawkes, 1961); Krzyszstof Penderecki, St Luke Passion ([1965] Krakow: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1967).
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Example 1a: Stravinsky: A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer, movement 1 (Sermon), bars 68–71 [orchestra omitted]. (© Copyright 1961 by Boosey and Co. Ltd. US Copyright renewed. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.)
Example 1b: Stravinsky: A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer, movement 2 (Narrative), bars 179–85. (© Copyright 1961 by Boosey and Co. Ltd. US Copyright renewed. Reproduced by permission of Boosey & Hawkes Music Publishers Ltd.)
repeated refrain from the first movement of Stravinsky’s work, a very simple instance of how the text migrates from one voice to another, with the male parts dividing up the final phrase. In the Narrative section, the text is often shared between soloists and narrator, coming together and ‘swapping over’ at key points. This can prove surprising, even disconcerting, as Stephen Walsh comments:
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The ‘Narrative’ itself is … afflicted by mannerism. For instance, the muchremarked device of switching from speech (narrator) to singing (contralto soloist) at exalted or significant moments, and especially each time the name ‘Stephen’ is mentioned, is too self-conscious to work in any but the superficial sense that anyone can hear it happening … The trouble with … these procedures, as well as with the … occasional rhythmic declamation of the narrator, is that they imply an artificial world of ritual which is consistently denied by the matter-of-fact Sunday-school atmosphere of the work as a whole.8
Example 1b shows perhaps the most successful instance of fragmentation and word-swapping in this short movement – perhaps the more so for not involving the narrator at this point. Sometimes the sound is of a hybrid timbre contralto/tenor voice on a unison note, other moments present the exciting pitch diversity of a line which may move up or dip down at any time into a new solo vocal colour; this is thrillingly resolved in the final bar of the example (the last words in the movement, although the music continues with a contemplative instrumental coda). Penderecki’s St Luke Passion was a touchstone for a new kind of religious choral work, a Passion setting with a choir which gets to sound genuinely angry and determined, and a dry narrator speechpart which (in its surroundings of anguished textures and colours) is emotionally highly charged. Example 2 does not show flying consonants or phonemes to express crowd violence, but a static texture which uses chromatic saturation in setting a small portion of text, migrating from one voice to another (dotted lines on the example trace the progress of the text). Each voice keeps the same pitch, restating it with new syllables two or three times. The effect of this is to suspend the harmony – total perception of every syllable is probably neither possible nor desirable. Chorus as crowd – we are familiar with many musical works from Handel to Penderecki that seek (at least at some point) to conjure up a crowd. How much more realistic, one might argue, a musical depiction of a crowd scene would be if it were broken up into constituent voices, or the texture fragmented into differing groups, differing voicetypes, differing viewpoints. Any crowd might thus contain solo ‘hotheads’ as well as more normal citizens! How many voices do we need to signify a crowd? Giles Swayne’s Cry (1979) (assisted somewhat by 8 Stephen Walsh, The Music of Stravinsky (1st paperback edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 257.
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Example 2: Penderecki: St Luke Passion part 1, after figure 12. (Copyright Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne S.A.)
electronic manipulation) takes 28 individual singers; Berio’s Coro (1970) needs 40 individual parts to deliver monumental homophonic textures, alongside 40 instrumental parts; Berio’s The Cries of London (1974) has an exuberant crowd-like vitality with just 8 voices; the same composer’s A-Ronne (1974–75) uses crowd textures during the
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work, in two versions, one with 5, one with 8 voices.9 The teeming fury of the two large choirs employed in Ligeti’s Requiem (1963–65) must exceed 150 at least.10 And we sometimes sense a crowd of voices, produced by one solo singer in a number of tape pieces – Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (1956), Berio’s Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) (1958), and Nono’s La Fabbrica illuminata (1964).11 We can even suggest splitor multiple-personalities with solo voices – Judith Weir’s virtuoso (short) one-woman opera King Harald’s Saga (1979) is perhaps the best example, with the same singer bearing all the parts (including the role of the entire Norwegian army!)12 Birtwistle’s Nenia on the Death of Orpheus (1970) also fuses the roles of the two protagonists Orpheus and Euridice in the coda.13 If fragmentation is sometimes the expression of realism in a crowd, is this sufficient reason to explain the emergence of this musical technique in the 1950s to 1960s? Were there precursors of this idea which could be detected? My first thought was to look to an analogy with literature and the manner in which regular lines of literary text (especially in poetry) became fragmented. This led me to explore examples of unusual typographical layout in Guillaume Apollinaire, e. e. cummings, and John Hollander. Other practitioners of unusual verbal layouts and non-semantic texts do exist – the entire strand which begins 9.
10. 11.
12. 13.
Swayne, Giles, Cry for 28 amplified voices with electronic treatment, op. 27 ([1979] London: Novello Music Publishers, 1980); Luciano Berio, Coro per voci e strumenti (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1976); Luciano Berio, The Cries of London (1974–76, 8-voice version; London: Universal Edition, 1976); Luciano Berio, A-Ronne for 8 amplified voices, ([1974–75] London: Universal Edition, 1975); there is also a parallel edition for 5 voices. György Ligeti, Requiem for soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists, two choruses and orchestra ([1963–65]; study score Frankfurt: Edition Litolff/Peters, 1965). Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gesang der Jünglinge for four-track tape (revised version, no. 8, 1956; Cologne: WDR Studios, now available in CD recording format, CD3, from Stockhausen-Verlag, Kürten); Luciano Berio, Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) for tape (1958; Milan: Studio di Fonologia, now available in CD format, BVHAAST 9109 Acousmatrix 7): Berio/Maderna tape works – from BVHaast, Holland; listed as ESZ 5993 in the catalogue of Edizioni Suvini Zerboni, Milan); Luigi Nono, La Fabbrica illuminata for soprano solo and tape (performing score, Milan: Ricordi, 1964; original recording with Carla Henius, solo soprano available in CD format on Wergo WER 60382). Judith Weir, King Harald’s Saga for solo soprano, playing 8 roles ([1979]; vocal score, London: Novello Music, 1979). Harrison Birtwistle, Nenia on the Death of Orpheus (London: Universal Edition, 1970).
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with futurism, and takes in aspects of dada, Vorticism, surrealism and sound poetry. Although many of these are fundamentally intended for performance, relatively few are specifically organised for more than one voice, making the fragmentation/dislocation aspects less clear-cut. Apollinaire, in particular, had immense influence as a literary figure and his poetry was set by several French composers, most notably Poulenc, but I have not been able to find any examples where the calligraphy or typography of the original text has overtly affected the musical setting. The American poet e. e. cummings was published as early as the 1920s and there are a small number of settings of his poems as individual songs from the 1920s and 1930s, all by American composers, but it has taken significantly longer for his poems to be used for song-cycles or choral works. The one major example of the latter is Boulez’s e. e. cummings ist der dichter (1976), where certain elements of typographical layout have definitively affected Boulez’s structural response to the text.14 John Hollander has provided several texts for musical settings which encompass complex phonemic wordplay and the most successful fusion of his words and music is Babbitt’s Philomel for soprano and tape (1964).15 My possible theory of interconnectivity between innovation in typography and fragmentation on the musical page thus appears to be ‘not proven’, at least not until after the advent of this technique of fragmentation in the 1960s. Instead I would like to consider the influence of another musical genre which may prove significant – the world of electroacoustic music. I find it interesting that even the name of the studio founded at the RAI in Milan jointly by Berio and Maderna in the 1950s is divergent from practices elsewhere – the Studio di Fonologia lays out its primary concerns in its title. The strange polemics of elektronische Musik (in the hands of Stockhausen at WDR in Cologne), musique concrète (the province of Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer in Paris) and fonologia in Milan now seem to be so very much ancient history! But the common interest in phonetics (Stockhausen was a keen student of Meyer-Eppler in Cologne, and this interest informed much of his musical thinking at that time,
14.
Pierre Boulez, e.e. cummings ist der dichter ([1970, revised 1986]; London: Universal Edition, 1986). 15. Milton Babbitt, Philomel for solo soprano and tape ([1964] New York: Schirmer/ Associated Music Publishers, 1964; recent recording available on Neuma with Judith Bettina, soprano, CD 450–74).
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especially Gesang) perhaps provides a clue to how much common ground there suddenly seemed to be between these radically different centres of innovation in the later 1950s. When Stockhausen took the step of amalgamating a boy’s voice with electronically-generated sound in Gesang he created sound-complexes, constructed with use of serial procedures, which proved to be very similar in effect to those found in Berio’s tape montage Thema (Omaggio a Joyce), where the content was produced by the voice of Cathy Berberian, reading through the ‘Sirens’ chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses.16 David Osmond-Smith has written sympathetically about Berio’s procedures and their consequences in this work: The ‘overture’ to the ‘Sirens’ chapter consists entirely of dislocated phrases from the ensuing narration. These tell no story, so there is nothing to distract the reader from texture and rhythm – save that the mind, confronted with isolated images, begins to build hypothetical bridges between them, generating new meanings quite unrelated to those that each fragment is to adopt in the ensuing narrative. … Berio now extracted from [Joyce’s verbal] … mosaic purely musical elements, and used them to explore the borderline where sound as the bearer of linguistic sense dissolves into sound as the bearer of musical meaning … In part he did this by taking Joyce’s polyphonic imagery literally, and superposing texts upon themselves with slightly different rhythmic spacings: in effect, translating text into texture. Out of this ‘impossible’ vocalism, comprehensible speech (usually a single word) momentarily emerges, only to be engulfed: relative comprehensibility has become a compositional parameter to be handled in much the same way as textural density or, within a pitched context, harmonic density.17
Berio has written himself that: … the three languages were combined according to a procedure which is quite simple and ordinary: it is a matter of a series of exchanges between one language and another, which is applied to particular fixed points – on the basis of the results obtained with the preceding superimposed vocal aggregates – using criteria of similarity or contrast. The rhythm of the passage from one language to another is realised in a way which becomes faster or slower according to the length of textual segments chosen. The more rapid passages (with the shortest durations) serve as the fundamental basis for the last phase of the work … In considering the fusion of the three different languages the first priority has become the connections in terms of sonority, more important 16.
The ‘Sirens’ chapter (11) from Ulysses is commonly regarded as having an underlying musical structure and making prominent use of musical imagery 17. David Osmond-Smith, Berio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 60–3.
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These two explanations reveal the concern for different levels of musical significance, and an interest in questions of intelligibility and coherence, despite the inhibiting factors of linguistic pluralism and polyphonic complexity. One other tape piece of significance already referred to (Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge) also brings out evidence of the composer’s awareness of the issues of intelligibility. In an early article explaining constructional aspects of this work, he refers to phonetic principles in the same context as timbral issues – it has become axiomatic to his thinking at this time that significant aspects of the work would be rigorously organized, and the serial principle is used here for this purpose. In order to employ the most complex phonetic structure of speech in terms of serial composition, many different steps are necessary between the individual examples of a given phonetic system … so that regular timbre-scales can be chosen from a continuum (for instance, steps from one vowel to another, from vowel to half-consonants, to consonants etc.); this is only, if at all, possible with electronically-produced sounds … We only have a homogeneous sound-family if sung sounds sound at certain places like electronic sounds, electronic sounds like sung ones. … According to the ‘colour’-continuum, the composition was based on the idea of a ‘speech-continuum’: at certain points in the composition, sung groups of words become comprehensible speech-symbols, words; at others they remain pure sound-qualities, sound-symbols; between these extremes there are various degrees of comprehensibility of the word. These are brought about either by the degree of permutation of the words in the sentence, syllables in the word, phonemes in the syllable, or by blending one form of speech with speech- or sound-elements foreign to the context … Of course this leads to new word-connections not contained in the text … The context of the sounds therefore also influences to a particular degree the comprehensibility of the speech (for example, degrees
18.
Luciano Berio, ‘Poésie et Musique: une Experience’, Contrechamps 1 (1983), 29–30; the translation into English is my own.
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of spatial effects by means of artificial echo, degrees of intensity, of the density of simultaneous or successive events, etc.)19
The significance of these early electroacoustic works was profound – not only securing the future rapprochement between different musicotechnical aesthetic positions but also advancing enormously the reputation of this still ‘infant’ genre of post-war music. There are many examples of composers whose progress from studio to concert hall can be charted – consider the case of Ligeti, whose early experience of studio composition (after the Hungarian uprising which occasioned his flight to the West) led to a work initially planned for the studio being seamlessly transferred to the more colouristic world of the symphony orchestra (Atmosphères, 1960).20 Even if many composers found themselves (often by circumstances or type of apprenticeship) forced to choose between traditional compositional perspectives or working within an electronic studio, there was still a significant ‘crossover’ influence – concepts especially identified with studio praxis found their way into many non-electronic scores from the early 1960s onwards. One aspect of this ‘crossover’ traffic, I would suggest, was the enhanced interest in manipulation of vocal sounds, either bearing text or as non-semantic phonemes. It was comparatively easy after Berio’s Thema to suggest any density of voices, having only one singer as original sound-source – and the embryonic moves after Stockhausen’s Kontakte (1960) to involve spatial placement as a crucial new element within the genre of electroacoustic music could potentially only enhance this idea of ‘enlivening’ multiple voices and creating more ‘realistic’ ambiences and sound-complexes.21 This same preoccupation by mainstream electroacoustic composers with textures and panoramas produced by combinations of speaking and singing voices, now often with enhanced spatialization and signal processing, is very much still in evidence in electroacoustic pieces from the late 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century – such as the works of Trevor Wishart, Jonty Harrison, Francis Dhomont and Åke Parmerud.
19.
Karlheinz Stockhausen, ‘Music and Speech’, in Die Reihe vol. 6, Speech and Music (English edition, London: Universal, 1964), pp. 58–9. 20. György Ligeti, Atmosphères for large orchestra without percussion ([1960] Vienna: Universal Edition, 1971). 21. Karlheinz Stockhausen, Kontakte for piano, percussion and 4-track tape (1960; London: Universal Edition, 1966).
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Example 3a: Penderecki: Dies Irae, movement 2 (‘Apocalypsis’), figure 10. (Copyright Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne S.A.)
In choral music, the types of fragmentation which composers have used varied from highly systematic and rigorous organization (with evidence of mathematical contrivance) to seemingly random alternation of word-fragments. Evidence of both approaches (albeit in miniature terms) can be found in some of the many choral works composed
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Example 3b: Penderecki: Dies Irae, movement 3 (‘Apotheosis’), after figure 21. (Copyright Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne S.A.)
by Penderecki since the early 1960s – turning first to the Dies Irae (sometimes known as the Auschwitz oratorio) we find in Example 3a that the choral texture is of a wedge-type expansion moving from the registral middle outwards, at first seemingly strictly by chromatic progression alternately up/down but becoming less strict as the passage
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Example 3c: Penderecki: Dies Irae, movement 3 (‘Apotheosis’), beginning. (Copyright Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne S.A.)
continues.22 As the registral space ‘fills up’, the text (which appropriately refers to the assemblage of ‘a great multitude’) continues in syllabic fashion – each new entry advancing the text, with a predominant filling up of high and low register coming at the end. The first few notes almost seem like a ‘dry run’ with the first syllable of ‘Post’ abandoned before being restarted in earnest. Example 3b shows another highly chromatic texture (the fragmentation arises out of a 11-note choral cluster) with the orchestra (three entries) included in the randomised entry scheme. As in the previous example, the text is given in large print across the centre of the score, voices and instruments. Minor deviations from a left-to-right syllabic setting are in evidence – the word ‘vivere’ is not subject to fragmentation and is heard twice allocated to the same voice, and there is a repeat of the opening word ‘surgit’ which interrupts the rest of the verbal texture.
22. Krzysztof Penderecki, Dies Irae (Krakow: Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne, 1967).
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In Example 3c we see a texture where the fragmentation is confined to just 2 octaves on the note D; in a quiet context this is an effective way of keeping a held sonority going while enlivening it with words changing from one voice-type to another – it is partly systematic. To see an example of choral violence and indiscipline we turn to Example 3d, where the 8-part chorus spits out plosive consonants and chopped-up syllables in a proportional tempo section likely to lead to a forest of overlapping hard-edged choral sounds that cannot communicate any semantic context, as they are indeed isolated phonemic particles. Luigi Nono’s 1950s and 1960s were a period of high intensity, finding new and rigorously ordered ways of harnessing serial organizational principles to choral textures, often setting texts highly suggestive of left-wing socialist and revolutionary sentiment. His masterpiece Il Canto Sospeso (1956) for chorus and orchestra sets highly emotive texts but subjects them to complex and sometimes very
Example 3d: Penderecki: Dies Irae, movement 2 (‘Apocalypsis’), before figure 4. (Copyright Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne S.A.)
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recondite mathematical procedures.23 In the same article by Stockhausen cited above, he takes time to explain aspects of the serial structure and the motivation for the choral treatments found in the work. For his composition Il Canto Sospeso Luigi Nono chose extracts from farewell letters of political prisoners condemned to death: … these texts can be treated formally [and] freely … all the extracts do not contain isolated words, exclamations, images for the poetical effect; they contain calm, complete sentences, logical connections of sentences in colloquial language; they communicate whole trains of thought which can, when set, be either respected or effaced … In certain pieces in the Canto, Nono composed the text as if to withdraw it from the public eye where it has no place. The composer was deeply moved by these letters; musical reasons were not the only ones to lead him to set them to music. In sections II, VI, IX and in parts of III, he turns speech into sounds, noises. The texts are not delivered, but rather concealed in such a regardlessly strict and dense musical form that they are hardly comprehensible when performed.24
Stockhausen continues to ask the obvious question (and produces his own explanation): Why then, texts at all, and why these texts? Here is an explanation. When setting parts of the letters about which one should be particularly ashamed that they had to be written, the musician assumes the attitude only of the composer who had previously selected the letters; he does not interpret, he does not comment. He rather reduces speech to its sounds and makes music with them. Permutations of vowel-sounds, a, ä, e, i, o, u; serial structure. Should he not have chosen texts so rich in meaning in the first place, but rather sounds? At least for the sections where only the phonetic properties of speech are dealt with? … Some sections … go so far as to break up the sense; others … quote, even clarify the text … We can therefore keep to the idea … that the composer consciously ‘expelled’ the meaning from certain parts of the texts; only the vocal line remains. This is not possible with meaningless syllables. The sense of speech can only be banished to a vocal structure when the listener can know, or feel, or check that he is not supposed to understand some particular thing – in this context – and that this particular thing is apparently not so important at the moment of hearing this music. It is not for nothing that a few fragmentary syllables flash out of the heaving sounds here and there … The listener feels he has understood them without, however, their having resulted in larger coherent passages.25 23. 24. 25.
Luigi Nono, Il Canto Sospeso (Mainz: Schott, 1957). Stockhausen, ‘Music and Speech’, pp. 47–8. Ibid., pp. 48–9.
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In an unusual gesture, Stockhausen then (in a footnote) almost repudiates his own argument, quoting Nono’s own reaction to his previously stated comments: Soon after the publication of this interpretation, Nono informed me that it was incorrect and misleading, and that he had neither a phonetic treatment of the text nor more or less differentiated degrees of comprehensibility of the words in mind when setting the text – not even with respect to a possible repression of the sense of these farewell letters, and if I could interpret a quasi-serial vocal structure into [movement] II, it was a mere coincidence. The reader must therefore not take my reflections and analyses as being demonstrations of Nono’s composition, but rather of my own – demonstrated on the work of another composer.26
I have to confess that I do not wholly believe Nono’s protestations, nor Stockhausen’s acquiescence! My example from Nono’s work of this time is taken from the somewhat lesser-known piece ‘Ha Venido’:
Example 4: Nono: ‘Ha venido’, Canciones para Silvia, pp. 19–20. (Copyright Ars Viva Verlag, Schott Musik International.) 26.
Ibid., p. 49 (fn.).
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Canciones para Silvia (1960) for soprano solo and a choir of six other sopranos with no instrumental accompaniment.27 The text is taken from the mid-twentieth-century Spanish poet Antonio Machado. As became common in Nono’s choral writing, words and syllables are cut up, sometimes prolonged by new voices, sometimes contrasted with semi- or wholly closed mouth vocal production (in Example 4 the abbreviation b.c. denotes closed mouth and a.a. scarcely open mouth). It is noticeable that the syllabic content passes around the entire group of seven sopranos, and there are instances where the main vowels are prolonged, and textures where words or syllables grow out of or retreat into closed-mouth sonorities. This very supple text usage creates a lot of fascinating vocal colours, but questions of whether complete intelligibility is possible are inevitably raised, just as in the larger-scale work Il Canto Sospeso discussed above. The final two works which will be cited exhibit the widest variation in fragmentation techniques. Berio’s A-Ronne, originally written for five voices as a kind of radio montage, was revised for eight voices (always to be lightly amplified, singing into individual hand-held or closely-positioned microphones, and mixed by a sound engineer).28 Berio had asked his regular textual collaborator, Edoardo Sanguineti for a brief poetic text based on concepts of beginnings, middles and ends. The result (in several languages, complete with important references to Dante and biblical sources amongst others) is shown in Example 5a. In Example 5b, the two main protagonists (at opposite ends of the parabolic layout) play with the text concerning ‘middles’ using three languages (Italian, French and English) and artfully alternating syllables – the last section of the example showing a small instance of Berio’s preferred kind of ‘unconventional virtuosity’ (associated especially with his series of mostly instrumental solo Sequenze) as the bass ‘struggles’ to insert the appropriate suffix ‘-ning’ at the correct place in the triplets. More demanding and more peculiar demands are to come. In Example 5c the same two principals hold forth and turn an initial canonic-style imitation game into something more complex – separating out the consonants and vowels respectively from the phrase ‘Aleph is my end’; they challenge one another, ending with a furious 27.
Luigi Nono, ‘Ha Venido’: Canciones para Silvia per soprano solo e coro di 6 soprani ([1960] Mainz: Schott, 1960). 28. See n. 9.
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Example 5a: Berio: A-Ronne (text written/collated by Edoardo Sanguineti), preface. (Copyright Universal Editions, Vienna. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved.)
repeated accelerating sequence where the words are literally ‘split apart’ – consonants to the left (Tenor 1), vowels to the right (Bass 1) – and the twain must meet, Berio requiring the text to be ‘clearly reconstituted’. The virtuosity implicit here is considerable, demanding splitsecond timing and much careful rehearsal. Even so, an audience may still be bemused and bewildered about the intention behind the isolated
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Example 5b: Berio: A-Ronne p. 19. (Copyright Universal Editions, Vienna. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved.)
phonetic utterances, until they ‘get the joke’. The human brain is actually extremely well organized at speech recognition, and it will not take long for a listener to understand that the two quick-fire protagonists are meant to knit together their phonetics into a perceptible phrase, which they have even heard before. There is still an element of ‘not completely hearing’ of course, because the vocal sonorities and intonations of the individuals are unlikely to be (and should not be, even) a perfect match. Slightly later in the composition, Example 5d alternates a multilanguage word-stream between the two soloists, often changing language or swapping roles in unlikely and confusing places. Adding to the perceptual difficulty, Berio often (manneredly) asks for a crescendo from the beginning of the utterance towards the significant accented strong (sometimes final) syllable. This could lead to the listener only picking up on the text midway through (further frustration ‘inbuilt’). After this example ends, the exchange is repeated in vowels only, culminating with another accelerating challenge, trying to reconstitute the phrase ‘in the end is my music’. To some, A-Ronne seems a puzzling piece – it arises partly as a kind of extension to Sequenza III (1966) where a text by Mark Kutter is
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Example 5c: Berio: A-Ronne pp. 20–1. (Copyright Universal Editions, Vienna. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved.)
given radical treatment, somewhat akin to what happens with Joyce’s words in the tape piece Thema.29 But it is more than that, it has a possible theatrical dimension too: there are imaginary scenic descriptions (see Example 5e) for each section of the work, but left open to interpretation or indeed wholesale change by the performers.30 It is perhaps the connection between works involving phonetics (the lack of an overtly understandable text creating a perceived need to construct a viable alternative focus for an audience) that is interesting here. In the 1960s Ligeti had produced two extraordinary musical works, both scored for the same combination of three solo voices and an ensemble of seven instruments. Aventures (1963) and Nouvelles Aventures (1965) have no perceptible words at all – just reams of phonetic text, mostly notated according to agreed principles and
29. 30.
Luciano Berio, Sequenza III for solo voice (London: Universal Edition, 1966). Vic Hoyland, Sleevenote for LP recording of A-Ronne, Electric Phoenix, EMI EL 27 0542 1, 1986.
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Example 5d: Berio: A-Ronne pp. 23–4. (Copyright Universal Editions, Vienna. Reproduced by permission. All rights reserved.)
codifications set down by the International Phonetic Association.31 There are massive numbers of complex markings by Ligeti, which go a long way to explain just how these phonetic fragments should be presented (including some remarks about facial expressions). This could be seen as tipping over into theatrical presentation – and it was no surprise to find these works revised with an immensely complex dramatic scenario provided by Ligeti; this was, however just as quickly dispensed with, leading to most performances today being ‘concert performance only’, not least because of the extra (mute) actors required to fulfil the dramatic requirements and the radically increased length from 12 to 30 minutes or longer. These pieces, which have acquired classic status, are now often most effectively presented in the concert hall, with differing degrees of dramatic and visual gestures. Boulez, writing in Orientations has this to say about what Ligeti is doing (although he wrote this several years earlier): 31.
György Ligeti, Aventures for 3 singers and 7 instrumentalists (Frankfurt: Peters, 1965); Nouvelles Aventures for 3 singers and 7 instrumentalists, (Frankfurt: Peters, 1965).
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Example 5e: Berio: A-Ronne (possible scene-sequence).
Even a consistent use of a variety of phonemes, however, does not necessarily lead to a ‘language’, for this necessarily implies a system of semantics. Hence we sometimes find composers making use of an imaginary language, invented specially for their own reasons and designed to form part of some instrumental sonority or to create what are properly speaking orchestral effects in vocal ensembles. The method in which this meaningless ‘poetry’ is employed will depend on its purpose, and this may be either picturesque, esoteric or purely musical.32
Phonetics however are increasingly making up part of many texts: either found in choral works by Stockhausen from as long ago as Carré to recent choral components of the heptalogy Licht, or used as a type of ‘glossolalia’ in works which purport to introduce states of musical ecstasy (there are examples from Stockhausen again such as Stimmung (1969), but it is also found in John Tavener’s works and in some larger-scale Berio works).33 The final examples come from Ligeti’s powerful Requiem (1963– 65).34 The first two movements show Ligeti transferring his canonic and micropolyphonic experience to a large choral canvas – the final calm and supple ‘Lacrimosa’ is extraordinarily reserved, with both vocal soloists gently overlapping their text against a very static and ‘glowing’ texture (string harmonics to the fore). The third movement presents the Day of Judgement sequence, and a very violent and aurally 32.
Pierre Boulez, ‘Sound, Word, Synthesis’, in Jean-Jacques Nattiez (ed.), Orientations: Collected Writings, trans. Martin Cooper (London: Faber, 1986), p. 186. 33. Karlheinz Stockhausen, Carré for 4 orchestras and choirs (London: Universal Edition, 1971); Stimmung for 6 amplified voices (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1970). 34. György Ligeti, Requiem for soprano and mezzo-soprano soloists, 2 choruses, and orchestra ([1963–65] Frankfurt: Peters, 1965).
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extravagant vision it is that Ligeti delivers. Paul Griffiths aptly describes it: The ‘day of wrath’ has come, and Ligeti launches into it with a hectic energy and chopped violence in complete contrast with the music of continuity that has gone before. Voices and instruments sound together in mechanical staccato patterns that tumble over one another, triplets and quintuplets conflicting with the fast semiquaver pulse, the dynamic aggressively fortissimo. But no sooner have they started than they stop, as if startled by their own emphatic insistence, and then the deathcart is set rolling again.35
In Example 6a the hectic energy referred to can be seen and heard – 5part polyphony (with octave instrumental doublings) which is highly (almost impossibly) chromatic and rhythmically fervid – this kind of delivery cannot continue for long without pauses (often at unexpected moments in the middle of words) or an entirely new texture. This is Griffiths’ commenting again: It is as if Ligeti were admitting that no portrayal of death can possibly be adequate: faced with the unfathomable we hide our embarrassment and our anxiety in laughter. At the same time though, the music does not offer the release of forgetful hilarity. The matter is still deeply serious, as it is in those painters Ligeti much admires, Breughel and Bosch, where meditations on the vanity of human existence produce monsters of alarming comedy.36
So we can make an analogy between the brutally dissociated linguistic fragments flying across the page and the visual richness and grotesquerie evident in medieval religious art. The rest of the movement switches between this manic energetic texture and more drawnout, often single-note lines of expressive power and anguish. Example 6b shows the ‘Tuba Mirum’ section: note not only the violent dialogue between soloists and mocking, perhaps even judgemental brass, but also the way one phonemic fragment – ‘mi’ (first half of the word ‘mirum’) – is subject to four different textures, first introduced by the mezzo-soprano soloist at a furious fff dynamic with a rapidly growing and destabilising brass crescendo on the same pitch which eventually subjugates and drowns out the solo sonority altogether. At the very end of the brass crescendo (therefore fractionally hidden in terms of its ‘full attack’) every voice of the combined choirs enters in explosive
35. 36.
Paul Griffiths, György Ligeti (London: Robson Books, London, 1983), p. 52. Ibid., p. 53.
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Example 6a: Ligeti: Requiem movement 3 (‘De Dii Judicii Sequentia’), beginning. (Copyright C.F. Peters.)
Example 6b: Ligeti: Requiem movement 3 (‘De Dii Judicii Sequentia’), figure A. (Copyright C.F. Peters.)
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unison with the continuing vowel sound ‘i’, only to stop very abruptly in the next bar. This bar has provided the point where the mezzosoprano soloist can briefly drop out, take a large breath, re-enter imperceptibly and be ‘discovered’ on the vowel sound ‘i’ once more. Four stages of colour and density control, for one perhaps insignificant phoneme! This is indeed a supercharged and violently expressive setting of the supposedly terrifying text. After a general pause, at letter F, the chorus re-enters in what on paper looks like a monstrously complex dissonant harmonic texture which gradually rises, but since the markings are so carefully defined by Ligeti – accents, sotto voce, half-sung (with crosses on the stem of each note) comes out as a volcanic crowd sonority – Griffiths writes again: The actual mention of death at the beginning of the fourth stanza [Mors stupebit ] … brings another gargoyle: the whole choir together in low, almost spoken incantation, ticking over like some machine running out of steam.37
Example 6c: Ligeti: Requiem movement 3 (‘De Dii Judicii Sequentia’), figure A (continued). (Copyright C.F. Peters.) 37.
Ibid.
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There is real menace and a kind of primeval terror here – the rest of the movement continues in similar manner, with some text shared between soloists and chorus. Occasionally, the textual fragments get out of order with one another and intertwine. Fragmentation and phonetic explosions are not more literal or extreme than this in normally texted musical works – but perhaps the circumstances of setting words foretelling the Last Judgement should be indeed as exceptional as this! I have tried to show a range of usages of fragmentation techniques which illustrate this highly useful musical technique. Pierre Boulez formulated an overall position which separates off the role of the poem from the musical setting – he is not specifically discussing musical fragmentation here but inevitably is discussing issues of comprehension and intelligibility. The time taken to read a poem is a single, exact datum; but musically speaking there are two times, one for the poem as action and one for the poem as reflection. To aim at making the two simply coincide is to amount to renouncing a dialectic rich in potentialities on a huge scale. Furthermore the poem as action is directly ‘taken over’ by the music, in which its presence is essential to the resulting form: the concept of time hardly varies in reading music. The poem as reflection, on the other hand, may be submitted to a kind of fragmentation or distortion from its original form, may indeed even absent itself from the music, in which it persists in the form of appended commentary.38
So what price coherence? In the examples offered, can we be certain that what is lost in terms of full verbal perception is more than made up for in terms of heightened expressivity? Coherence is a complex quality to measure and assess – what may be entirely coherent for one individual may turn out to be confused and problematic for another. Even when composers used supposedly objective ideas about indices of intelligibility – the serially organised parameters referred to earlier in relation to Berio and Stockhausen’s early tape works – this is far from being universally recognised or understood in the manner intended by the composer. I must admit to liking the notion of ‘not quite hearing’. Doesn’t this reflect all too much of our day-to-day dealings – on the telephone, in personal conversations? Must our experience of music always be entirely fully comprehending?
38.
Pierre Boulez, ‘Poetry – Centre and Absence – Music’, in Orientations, p. 196.
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My own formal practices as a composer have often centred on what I call an incoherence-coherence model – in other words taking the notion of fragmented sounds, isolated gestures, brief disassociated musical or perhaps verbal elements, possibly surrounded by unexpected pauses, being changed over time into continuity and restatement/ongoing transformation. I therefore not only use the musical technique of vocal and textual fragmentation in my works, but have transferred its potential to the level of macrostructure, where an initial ‘incoherence’ can be seen (in the eventual context of the completed work) to have been a vital starting point for the rest of the work.39
39.
This is most clearly shown in my work Rodina (1987) for 22 solo voices and trumpet, which sets texts in English, Scots, and Russian. The opening compositional paragraph contains a mélange of isolated syllables taken from versions in three languages of the word ‘motherland’ (in English, French [matrie], and Russian [rodina]). These are fragmented amongst the voices and appear somewhat like a ‘false start’ – but the piece does eventually gain coherence!
9
Writing For Your Supper – Creative Work and the Contexts of Popular Songwriting Mike Jones In 1988 I wrote a song called ‘Model Son’. This song appeared eventually on an album for RCA Records – Swimming against the Stream by Latin Quarter (a group of which I was a non-playing member) released in the spring of 1989. By that point it was my one hundred and fortyseventh song and would make my fortieth recording. Oddly, no one save myself heard my version of ‘Model Son’. Instead I did with it what I did with all the songs I wrote in the years I spent as a full-time songwriter: I completed it on paper as a lyric where the melody and arrangement existed only in my imagination and in snatches of singing on a cassette recorder. I then posted the lyric (set out, conventionally, as verses, chorus, and ‘bridge’) together with several others, to my then songwriting partner, Steve Skaith (he lived in London, I in Liverpool). His contribution to the songwriting process was to set my words to music. In recounting this brief outline of songwriting practice, one that identifies me as a lyricist rather than songwriter as such, I am aware of how unusual and far-removed from the conventional portrayal of pop songwriting my experience might seem – at least since the rise of ‘rock’ music and the emergence of the writer-performer. Rather than argue for the contemporary re-emergence of the non-performing songwriter in the now narrower sub-genres of ‘pop’ and ‘R&B’, for the purposes of this discussion I intend to emphasize the similarities rather than the differences between my experience and the writerperformer rock ‘norm’. My reason for so choosing is because the contribution I wish to make to a symposium which reflects on the relationships between words and music is one that emphasizes, and explores the implications of, the work involved in bringing them together. I use the term ‘work’ advisedly because I mean it in the prosaic sense of paid employment, of effort for reward under prevailing economic conditions. My writing ‘Model Son’ is evidence of my being a
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worker in the popular music industry. As such a worker, for all the time I lasted as a professional songwriter, my experience was that there were scant explanatory resources available to me from which to make sense of that role and, consequently, to help me live with my (implicitly unstable and demanding) conditions of work. Instead, the general reaction of friends and family to my occupation (drawing as they will have done on embedded and media-appropriated populist discourses) was that I had ‘made it’ and that I now existed in some exotic, non-work place. This is not how I experienced popular songwriting: it is a job, if not like any other then it is still more like ‘other’ jobs than is ever grasped by those colloquial discourses and their continuous deployment and replenishment in ‘bio-pics’, and in the pulp biographies and ghosted autobiographies of popstars and pop songwriters. Of course, because I entered the role with my head full of the same ideas of ‘making it’ and the promise of exciting times it was a little while before I experienced this realization; but my outline of it here is not simply an account made in hindsight, once on the ‘inside’, the music industry can rapidly reveal itself as a work-place and demand to be treated as such. ‘Fame, I’m Going to Live Forever … ’ As I recall from my own early desire to be a ‘song-writer’, and as I have had confirmed to me constantly in over a decade of organizing and delivering songwriting and ‘music industry’ courses, large numbers of young people continue to aspire to the status of songwriter, but they aspire (as I aspired) in ignorance of how songwriting (and with it, record making) takes place under ‘industrial’ conditions. Consider the ‘reality’ television programmes Popstars, Pop Idol, and Fame Academy (in all their now globe-spanning incarnations) in these terms. The entire premise of these shows devolves onto three of the primary clichés of ‘show business’: that record and publishing companies are comprised of ‘talent spotters’; that, consequently, they ‘know talent when they see it’; and that their expertise ensures that ‘talent will always out’. This phenomenon deserves far more attention than I can give it here but my point is that the distance between how popular music is organized industrially and how it is represented to us, decade after decade, in talent shows and in films about talent, is described by the distance between Judy Garland in A Star is Born and Judy Garland
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in real life – put simply, making music for profit and celebrity is not how it appears to be! Clearly, my ‘revelation’ here is no revelation at all – we all ‘know’ that films are just ‘stories’ and most people recognize (or at least suspect) that television programmes are constructed to established conventions. Further, every other person we meet seems to have a similar story about how someone in school, or in a local band, or in the pub, sings, plays, looks, and performs better than the latest winner of the most recent talent show. In this way another slew of clichés is invoked – the music industry ‘doesn’t care about talent’, ‘record companies just rip you off’, ‘you have to be in the right place at the right time’, and so on. Yet, for all this ‘common knowledge’, we are no closer to understanding how matching words to musical notes can appear to be in two places at once – in the world of deserving talent and the world of mendacious companies; in the world of the ‘truth’ of emotional expression and in the ‘false’ world of emotional manipulation, and so on. And to dismiss these binaries simply because they are binaries does not seem to be quite enough. Rather we need to recognize that, because large numbers of young people are motivated continuously to seek out recording and publishing contracts, or ‘deals’ as they are more commonly referred to, the industrial organization of popular music is enabled and goes on being sustained. In turn, if we consider that this is not serendipity, that business cannot be managed in the hope that supply just keeps on appearing magically, then we are forced to consider that supply (and with it industry) must in some way be present in, and practised through, this process of aspiration. My exploration of how words are matched to musical notes in popular composition is, then, predicated on this recognition and pursued towards this end. ‘Model Son’ – the Finished Lyric: Verse One: I grew up with a scorpion behind me Sting in my rib-cage, the moment I drew air Within his means there was nothing he denied me But nothing was all we’d ever share Chorus (one) I couldn’t be a model son Models have no self-motivation They ride little trains on endless tracks I had my own route, my own destination
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Creators, Creativity and the ‘Creative Process’ Paul Zollo’s Songwriters on Songwriting is perhaps the definitive collection of its kind. 1 Taking the form of interviews (sometimes composited from several sessions, several years apart) with over fifty of the leading North American songwriters from, mainly but not exclusively, the ‘Rock’ era, Zollo seeks, in his own words to ‘allow these songwriters to talk seriously and in-depth about their great songs and about the creative process’. Most reviews of the work consider that he achieves this aim; as Michael Tearson of Sing Out! magazine puts it: Two pieces juxtaposed early in the book form a kind of core around which this collection revolves. These are lengthy interviews with first Bob Dylan and then Paul Simon. In each of these, Zollo shows how well he listens and responds in his questioning. The Dylan piece … rapidly
1.
Paul Zollo, Songwriters on Songwriting (New York: Da Capo, 1997).
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leads into a fascinating discussion about the instinctive, intuitive way Dylan creates his writing. With Simon, there is an in-depth retrospective of the whole arc of his career … This segues into an intense discussion about his creative process … Both interviews are tremendously revealing and rewarding.2
This sense of ineffability, in part constructed by Zollo in the types of questions he asks his respondents, is then summed up by Leonard Cohen when he observes that ‘if I knew where good songs come from I’d go there more often’.3 What concerns me here is not, or not just, that Songwriters on Songwriting is redolent of the canonizing practices of Rock journalism; it is more for the way in which Zollo presumes – along with his reviewers and, sometimes, his respondents – that ‘songwriting’ and ‘the creative process’ are synonymous with each other; or, more pertinently, that they exhaust each other. My point here is that if we too quickly consign the effort involved in songwriting to the ineffable we put that activity beyond analytical reach – into the realm of ‘art’ and, consequently, far beyond the prosaic world of writing for one’s supper. However, rather than venture too deeply into the more sterile reaches of the ‘art versus commerce’ debate, what I want to explore are the series of questions implied in the introduction to this discussion: what is the nature of the work involved in songwriting? What type of worker is a songwriter and why is it so difficult to find out? And why is songwriting not (or not always) the glamorous occupation it promises to be? Yet, to begin to answer these questions, we are forced to acknowledge the ongoing ideological role played by a perceived antipathy between ‘art’ and ‘commerce’. As comments in the introduction to this discussion argue, ‘Songwriter’ is too often viewed as a privileged freedom from work rather than as a form of employment – although this ‘freedom’ comes with a price. Since the rise of rock music, and in stark contrast to the predominantly triumphalist approach of Hollywood’s treatment of ‘Tin Pan Alley’ songwriters (think of Mickey Rooney as Larry Hart in Words and Music), whether we are dealing with ‘Daniel Weir’ in Iain Banks’s Espedair Street or David Essex as ‘Jim MacClaine’ in Stardust, the story is a familiar one, an over-familiar
2. 3.
Quoted from http://www.vermontgourmet.net/cgi-bin/vermontgourmetsearch_type-CustomerReviews-item_id–0306812657-locale-us.html#review_1 Zollo, Songwriter, p. 335.
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one: the music industry has no room for artists, it gobbles them up and spits them out once their commercial life is at an end; or else individual artists can be overwhelmed by the sheer venality offered by commercial success. Stratton and Negus both argue (although towards contrasting conclusions) how prevalent is this reading even within the music industry itself as certain key operatives (notably Artists and Repertoire – A&R – staff) attempt to organize the commodification of imaginative effort through a process of self-justification: that they are sympathetic with the artistry of the artists they sign but that the marketplace (or, in Negus’s study, the marketing department) are harsh places that need to be contended with and conquered if the artist’s work is to reach a wider public.4 And even though as Negus cautions (in a later work), Creative activity and commercial criteria do not always confront each other in … a Manichean fashion … there is not only conflict between commerce and creativity. But, conflicts about what is [sic] creative and conflicts about what is to be [sic] commercial.
he acknowledges that the force (rather than the detail or the accuracy) of the ‘debate’ continues to inflect how individuals – whether immediate musical originators or managerial staff in record companies (and, indeed, journalists and fans) – continue to perceive how creativity is organized for consumption.5 The problem with these ‘art versus commerce’ versions of the life of music-creators is that they deflect us from access to the actual activity of songwriting. Further, as songwriters are likely to buy into the associated myths of music-making (for the want of alternative representations of, or ‘explanatory resources’ for, a life in music) then the development of a level of self-reflexivity that would encompass the notion of songwriting as, at base, work, is discouraged. Consequently, the Paul Zollos of this world are on safe ground when they approach an already selected group of ‘great’ songwriters, with the appropriate degree of awe and subservience, because to represent these people as
4.
Keith Negus, Producing Pop: Culture and Conflict in the Popular Music Industry (London: Arnold, 1992); John Stratton, ‘Between Two Worlds: Art and Commercialism in the Record Industry’, The Sociological Review 30 (1982), 267–85. 5. Keith Negus, ‘Where the Mystical Meets the Market: Creativity and Commerce in the Production of Popular Music’, The Sociological Review 43 (1995), 317–39.
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‘artists’ is in the writer’s own interest: firstly as ‘fan’ who supports an ideological status quo in which ‘ordinary’ life is made bearable by associating oneself with an artist (and/or star or celebrity) who lives an ‘extraordinary’ life that might be enjoyed vicariously as long as enough effort is put into identifying with the artist and with what they appear to suffer for their art. Secondly as a would-be ‘expert’, the writer offers readers ‘access’ to exactly this extraordinary ‘art making’ through organizing his approach to his subject from firmly within the ideological parameters of the constructed ‘artist’. Permission for access is granted on these terms (because songwriters are flattered by such interest and record companies like to sell ‘catalogue’) and book publishers respond because they also recognize the hunger for this kind of tamed ‘insight’. Taken together, everyone goes home happy – except the researcher into the work involved in combining words and music! The reason that an approach such as Zollo’s does not take us closer to the idea that songwriting might be a ‘job’ like any other is because it is posited on the notion that creativity is sui generis: creativity is ineffable because it is ‘instinctive’, it is ‘intuitive’, it is the product of ‘inspiration’. None of these conditions is demonstrable and, therefore, they can never be accessed either from without or, seemingly, from within. Consequently, whether the creative effort is directed at writing Northanger Abbey, designing the Tay Bridge, or painting Guernica we cannot know that effort, only its results. Further, and also consequently, an entire, elaborate social and cultural apparatus has arisen to assess critically such results where this apparatus consists of connected institutions all with the aim of participating in the economic rewards of (implicitly commodified) creativity. In turn, these institutions and their practices – whether directly productive (publishing of various kinds) or associated with the business of disseminating works of creativity or commenting on them (the mass media) – have come to stand for a ‘knowing’ of creativity and the creative process in a way that goes on re-confirming that the process itself cannot be known by any means other than through some (culturally and socially validated) system of discernment. While I do not enjoy the opportunity here to explore the notion of taste and issues of value with regard to popular cultural production in any greater detail, what the social construction of taste can be argued to accomplish is a kind of forced congruence of discursive notions of ‘creativity’ with what we experience as cultural products
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– where the point is that products are the outcome of industry, not creativity alone.6 In this recognition I am trying not to reify creativity or to argue a romantic conception of it, only to suggest that accounts of, in this instance songwriting, rarely deal directly with creativity as a form of effort, not because it is ineffable but because the tendency is to settle with, or fail to see beyond, the terms in which creativity is socially constructed and debated. Electing to Reflect As a (former) songwriter the representation of creativity as unknowable seems wholly unsatisfactory to me. We have seen the words of ‘Model Son’ and I can report faithfully that I did indeed complete this song as a song through creative effort. I will explore this effort below but here I can also report that the effort required to complete this song obeyed an urgency that was the sum of a combination of imperatives: the song was not completed for its own sake with only the integral demands of its subject and structure to concentrate and drive that effort. It would be fair to comment that, had I been famous enough to be interviewed by Paul Zollo, I might not have articulated my effort in this way. One of the key characteristics of the canonizing act is to individuate the ‘artist’; Zollo seeks the artist’s collaboration in a (substantially unavoidable) partial, limited, and implicitly positive reconstruction of their own lives, and, more pertinently, work as ‘artists’. In this exercise, ‘record companies’ and ‘the music industry’ play shadowy and almost always negative ‘walk-on’ parts – as, perhaps, the price of entry to the ‘non-work place’, or to the status of ‘exceptionality’, referred to previously. But the point remains that what unites Zollo’s songwriters (rather than differentiates them from each other), and what, in turn, unites all songwriters whether ‘signed’ or ‘unsigned’, is that what they have in common are, to use Marx’s term, the social relations of production – in this case, of song production – characteristic to the music industry. As we know, the business of songwriting devolves onto an author’s ability to ‘assign’ his or her innate right to make copies of her or his work (so long as it is original) to an organization better-placed and far better-equipped to bring that work to the attention of potential purchasers. These organizations are able to manufacture copies of the 6.
Performing Rites (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
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original work and distribute them to shops (in the case of record companies) or to make the original available to other users (in the case of publishing) and both also (or are meant also) to advertise the existence of the original or of copies of the original for sale or use. In this activity, songwriters stand to earn considerable amounts of money because there are fixed rates for the mechanical reproduction as well as the live and broadcast performance of the songs they write to which non-writers are not entitled. Viewed in this way, the business of record companies is to select from a large pool of aspirant music-makers, reproduce the original work of those selected, and organize the circulation of copies of the original, for profit; and it is also the business of music publishers to select from the pool of aspirants with a view to buying the rights to the works of the aspirants in order to exploit those works in a myriad of commercial forms. Once the costs of the selection procedure, reproduction, and circulation have been met, the record company and the publisher returns a limited percentage of any profit to the creator of the original work in the form of a royalty payment. So, for ‘unsigned’ writers there is no income at all from songwriting while for ‘signed’ writers there is a much-delayed, proportional income which is normally off-set in the form of advance payments against that anticipated income – where the extent of the advance is a matter for negotiation during the creation of ‘the deal’ and the ability to eke out the advance is a matter for the prudence, or otherwise, of the individual songwriter. That my experience of songwriting was ‘unstable and demanding’ was in part (but only in part) because Latin Quarter had been, in the years leading up to ‘Model Son’, an eight-piece band with two managers. This, in turn, meant – quite unglamorously – that it could never earn enough to ensure that everyone lived comfortably and securely. What compounded this problem (which would affect morale) was that, despite a reduction in personnel on both fronts, Swimming Against the Stream was to be Latin Quarter’s third album for a major label. By the logic of the recording and publishing contract system (wherein acts and writers are tied to sequential ‘option’ clauses) any act reaching a third album will normally have expected, and have been expected, to have sold considerable quantities of previous records and made considerable amounts of money for record company and publisher alike – the only reason for those contracting companies to exercise their option to continue publishing songs and making records by their signees. This was not true of Latin Quarter. We had enjoyed substantial sales in some
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countries, but made little impact in others. While signed to Arista Records that label had been sold to Bertellsmans, a large German publishing company. Arista was then merged with another acquisition, RCA Records, to form Bertelsmann’s Music Group (BMG). Our first album had been made by an independent label but licensed to RCA in Germany. Success there prompted Arista to sign us. They insisted on a new album which was not a success. We then exploited the turmoil of the merger argue for an ‘internal’ transfer to British RCA. Swimming Against the Stream was, then, more a third ‘first’ album – but it left us, and in particular me, with much to prove. Despite selling in excess of 100,000 copies, Swimming Against the Stream was comparatively unsuccessful, predominantly because sales were insufficient to pay off our accumulated ‘debt’ (royalties could neither meet the costs of production of all three albums nor offset advance payments already made). The ‘failure’ of the album led to, or exemplified, the subsequent ‘failure’ of Latin Quarter, although a further three albums were made and there have been several subsequent re-releases. Several writers – among them Hirsch, Cohen, Garnham, Negus, Miège, and Caves – similarly observe that ‘many are called but few are chosen’ when it comes to success in the cultural marketplace, but what these accounts have in common is that they do not attempt to explain how, in individual cases, pop acts ‘fail so to be chosen’. As I learnt from my own experience, attempting to establish ‘what went wrong’ is an enormously difficult undertaking, and in the immediate wake of ‘losing a deal’ (after trying so hard and for so long to win one) it is far easier to turn the blame inwards: my response to Latin Quarter and RCA ‘parting company’ was to conclude that I was not a ‘good enough’ songwriter; only gradually did I begin to look at my experience in fresh light. After researching the experience in the context of an analysis of the music industry (which amounted to hacking away the ideological over-growth) I began to identify the commonalities sketched above – wherein songwriters and performers are not so much victims of the music industry as victims of their own lack of preparation for doing business and of a concomitant want of prudence in contracting with its companies. Establishing a new account of ‘failure’ helped to restore my selfesteem in such a way that, had I wanted to, I could have reverted to a comfortable notion of my own ‘artistry’ and blamed everything else on my lack of commercial acumen and on the commercial deficiencies of RCA Records as a marketing operation (which is substantially what
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I came to do). But this is to rehearse the familiar ‘art/commerce’ script in a slightly more informed or more complex way: I knew I was, or had been, creative, equally I knew I did not know enough about the commercial business that surrounded and allowed my creativity – and so failure was the result. But however much this works as an explanation of the fate of Latin Quarter, it is not truly an explanation of ‘Model Son’ – yet the two are inextricably linked. Consequently a closer reproduction of the episode of writing a song requires attention to its context of production, to the social relations of its production, but it requires, also, a more precise identification of the type of work engaged in by the songwriter and therefore the type of worker produced in and through such an engagement. It is not enough to declare that I was ‘a worker in the popular music industry’ as if this explains itself. My ‘paid employment’ was not a direct wage, I was ‘self-employed’; the condition of this employment was unstable because it was precarious, but this is not entirely why it was ‘demanding’. Further, I was aware that work needed to be undertaken in order to remain in what continued to seem like the waiting room of the ‘non-work place’. I was constantly aware that I was in a business, an ‘industry’ even, and I was glad to be part of it, but how, exactly, was I part of it, on what terms and conditions was my selfemployment established? I was ‘in the industry’ because I was doing something (performing work) that this industry required for its survival and prosperity. Ultimately, I was aware that being a songwriter was not how I had anticipated it: I was creative but, somehow the creative choices I made – the aesthetic choices in the completion of ‘Model Son’ – were driven by more considerations than the need to express myself on a particular subject, in this instance my relationship with my father. This recognition, in turn, convinces me that I cannot sustain an analysis of the music industry that argues for the precedence of its industrial routines without demonstrating them in action. On this basis, what is required is a closer examination of creative work as work. Symbolic Creativity and the Cultural Industries As David Hesmondhalgh puts it in The Cultural Industries: More than other types of production, the cultural industries are involved in the making and circulating of products – that is, texts – that have an influence on our understanding of the world … the cultural industries
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Words and Music have usually been thought of as those institutions … which are most directly involved in the production of social meaning [sic].7
In a stimulating and comprehensive study, Hesmondhalgh attempts to locate the originators of texts – songwriters among them – within the social relations of cultural production. In this exercise he makes this useful definition of the songwriter as a worker: The invention and/or performance of stories, songs, images, poems, jokes and so on, in no matter what technological form, involves a particular type of creativity – the manipulation of symbols for the purposes of entertainment, information and perhaps even enlightenment … I prefer the term symbol creators for those who make up, interpret or rework stories, songs, images, etc.8
What is so compelling about Hesmondhalgh’s introduction of the descriptive term ‘symbol creator’ into the debate on cultural production is that, through it, he retains the notion of creativity but strips it of the halo of positive connotations that characterize the romantic conception of the artist – ‘the man [sic] who is most likely to have experiences of value to record’ in I. A. Richards’s telling phrase; in so doing, he accomplishes much of relevance to this argument. In Hesmondhalgh’s own argument, his primary focus is on determining whether the immense quantitative changes in the organization of the cultural industries (mergers, acquisitions – the rise of BMG for instance – the increasing reach of globally organized conglomerates, the immense upheavals in communication technology) have encouraged corresponding changes in their qualitative organization; their social relations of production – because, if there has been such a seismic shift this will be of great relevance to ‘symbol creators’, to their working conditions, and to their prospects. Ultimately, his conclusion is that, though much changes, much remains the same where the location of power, and the ideological reproduction of capitalist social relations, is concerned, but this in no sense makes him an economic determinist; rather, he asserts at key points throughout his study, the belief that: … because original and distinctive symbolic creativity is at a premium, the cultural industries can never quite control it. Owners and executives are forced to make concessions to symbol creators by granting them far more autonomy (self-determination) than they would to most other workers.9
7. 8. 9.
David Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries (London: Sage, 2002), pp. 3–11. Ibid., pp. 4–5 (italics as in the original). Ibid., p. 6 (emphasis as in the original).
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And, again, This point about creative autonomy is absolutely crucial for an understanding of the cultural industries in the late twentieth century [sic]10
What is interesting is that Hesmondhalgh reiterates this point and draws attention to its centrality to his argument, but then, in his very last paragraph, makes this observation: One of the most important aspects of my approach, borrowed from the cultural industries approach, but also to some extent from empirical sociology of culture, has been to focus on symbol creators [sic]. I commented … on the surprising neglect of these cultural workers in studies of the cultural industries.11
One aspect of an answer to the earlier question, ‘why is it so difficult to find out … what type of worker a songwriter is’, would be because there has been so little dedicated work on identifying how music is made at the time of its making. This is why Hesmondhalgh cites Howard Saul Becker’s study Art Worlds which has been so influential in and on the literature, and why also Ruth Finnegan and, subsequently, Sara Cohen’s work have been equally influential – because they all, in related ways, demonstrate that creativity is collective and that creators face constraints of a range of kinds which derive from their reliance on, or their inability to avoid, the input of others in the realization of their artistic, creative work.12 I will return to this point later in the chapter. Hesmondhalgh can also answer why songwriting (as one form of symbolic creativity) is less glamorous than it appears – because there is a very large unpaid pool of aspirant symbol creators and a very, very small group of symbol creators who make an appreciable (and often extravagant) living from their efforts. What his work does less usefully, for all its insight into the working context of the symbol creator, is to deal with the contradiction that, for all its ostensible ‘autonomy’, the workplace of symbolic creativity is still, very definitely a workplace. Hesmondhalgh claims autonomy – and with it self-determination – for the songwriter but truly he demonstrates
10. 11. 12.
Ibid., p. 55. Ibid., p. 266. Ibid., pp. 35 and 172; see Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California, 1982).
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neither. To come closer, but not quite close enough, to the experience and practise of autonomy and self-determination in songwriting we need to consider the work of Jason Toynbee. ‘It Ain’t the Money …’ In Making Popular Music Toynbee rehearses an argument substantially similar to Hesmondhalgh’s but one that exceeds it by its concentration on the act of creativity itself. Towards this aim he draws on the work, predominantly but by no means solely, of Pierre Bourdieu and Bakhtin to present a stimulating and elaborate study which argues for the autonomous, self-determined creativity of musicians but only after the radical re-specification of such creativity as ‘social authorship’. As Toynbee puts it: Perhaps the biggest advantage of treating popular music authorship in such a way is that it enables one to be sceptical about grand claims to creative inspiration (sometimes made by musicians themselves) without discarding the notion of agency.13
Toynbee’s argument pivots on the belief that, despite the compelling exigencies of capitalist social relations, these are not determining in the last instance and particularly where the creation of popular music is concerned: ultimately so voracious is the marketplace for popular music that capitalists care less how popular music is created, all that counts is that a continuous stream of new music is made available to them so that they can commodify some of it for sale. Consequently, and exactly as with Hesmondhalgh, Toynbee argues the existence of an ‘institutional autonomy’ for, in this instance, popular musicians: … market organization is the most significant factor in explaining how a certain institutional autonomy has developed in popular music … The logic of the music industry’s own structure as a capitalist cultural industry has, paradoxically, pushed it into conceding a degree of creative control for musicians.14
From this point, Toynbee’s case amounts to a careful and intellectually demanding celebration of what he refers to as a ‘cautiously
13.
Jason Toynbee, Making Popular Music: Musicians, Creativity and Institutions (London: Arnold, 2000), p. 46. 14. Ibid., p. 1.
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optimistic thesis’: namely that … popular musicians show in a limited, but none the less substantive, fashion the transforming power of human agency, first as producers of desire for a better life, second as exemplars of autonomous action.15
If ‘autonomy’ is secured by the peculiarities of the music marketplace then ‘agency’ (Hesmondhalgh’s ‘self-determination’) is in part a consequence of the creative process (the working practice) of songwriters themselves. If we conceive ‘autonomy’ as both a state or condition and as a conceptual space (‘room for manoeuvre’ is a colloquial rendition of circumscribed personal autonomy) then Toynbee’s account of how this space ‘works’ would be that firstly it is never static, because technology, and with it musical adaptation to technology, never rests. He then goes on to make Bourdieu’s work the fulcrum of a detailed argument that each individual exhibits a ‘habitus’, ‘a constellation of dispositions … which inform subjectivity and therefore action’.16 Action (in this instance musical composition) takes place on or within a ‘field’ constituted for popular musicians out of the collective total of recorded popular music. Against this background, Toynbee urges us to see that the ‘strategy’ of each individual popular music creator is a consequent effect of what he or she perceives as ‘possible’ from the point of their unique intersection of habitus and field: The space of possibilities … is a crucial concept for the present argument … possibilities are the product of the relationship between the ‘push’ of subjective disposition and the ‘pull’ of objective positions … possibilities (or possibles) emerge in the … tension between habitus and field.17
This allows him to conclude that individual creators enjoy the opportunity to make unique music for the reason that no person ever accesses the whole of recorded music and no two people ever access the same limited proportion of music in the same measure at the same time. Further, no two people are alike and, consequently, what sensibility and receptivity each will bring to recorded music will be uniquely their own. As proportionately few individuals elect to become musicians, and fewer still elect to enter the public arena, who finally ‘makes’ music (in the sense of contributes to the pool of recordings) is determined by a process which of necessity will need to begin away from 15. 16. 17.
Ibid., p. xiii. Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., p. 38.
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the ‘organized’ market cited above. This removed area forms what Toynbee refers to as the ‘proto-market’, described by him as ‘relatively autonomous zones (that are) difficult for record companies to colonize’.18 Taken as a whole, Toynbee’s argument is a hugely suggestive one, especially when joined with that of Hesmondhalgh, for in it we have a clearer, more detailed and continuous connection of the individual’s will to create being practised comparatively freely, but always under determinate market conditions and always through accessing the accumulated experience of already existing recorded music. Much of this, in essence, is what I have hinted at throughout this piece: this is how a musician can be in ‘two worlds at once’ – because his or her work consists of consistently mediating, negotiating, and reconciling the shifting dimensions of ‘art-making’ and ‘commerce-satisfying’. Additionally, the industrially-demanded supply of musical ‘raw materials’ is shown to be present through the aspiration of musicians who desire to enter the market-place because those aspirant musicians create their new music (as in music reformulated under prevailing technological conditions) in a bid to reach the places where those who inspired them have already been. Finally, creativity is implicated with market-forces but only in the uncompromised sense that the degree of connective relevance of new music is tested in the relatively free spaces collected under the rubric of the proto-market. Seemingly, all of the loose ends are tied up and, as a songwriter (but only because I practised as one indissolubly through all of these contingencies), I deserve my place in Zollo’s book after all for, at the point where my habitus connected with my perception of the field, there was no-one there but me … Except? Except that, for all the comfort I might draw from these notions of ‘self-determination’, ‘creative autonomy’, institutional autonomy’, and ‘agency’, my experience tells me that, in Toynbee’s reading of the creative moment, the subjectivity practised in my working life as a songwriter was not a condition that could be distinguished from ‘the “pull” of objective positions’. Instead, my ‘subjective disposition’ was inflected, inscribed, and read through exactly those ‘objective positions’ because as a ‘worker in pop’ I needed constantly to internalize, and to respond to my internalization of, those ‘objective’ conditions. In the demanding activity of constant re-adjustment to
18.
Ibid., p. 29.
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fresh perceptions of a dynamic constellation of mutating, commodificationdriven considerations I remained an agent, certainly, but only in so far as I acted to produce what and how I determined required to be produced at any particular conjuncture. This does not mean that I had to write ‘Model Son’ but it does affect how I wrote the song (and why the song appeared on the album). In this, what I remember experiencing was not creative autonomy so much as creative isolation because, for all the camaraderie of being a member of a successful band, I was also the key originating force in a problematic economic entity, Latin Quarter. Of all the songs I wrote in this period, none exemplifies better how subjectivity is over-determined by the subjective perception of ‘objective conditions’ than does ‘Model Son’. Writing ‘Model Son’ – Urge to Expression An ‘album’ is a collection of recorded songs but it is also an industrial product and all I am truly asking is where does songwriting end and industrial production begin? ‘Model Son’ was one of more than forty songs that were considered for inclusion on Swimming Against the Stream. In total I had some forty-three lyrics available for my songwriting partner to compose around. Thirty-five of these resulted in songs, predominantly in ‘demo’ versions recorded on a Tascam portastudio. Twenty-one were rehearsed by the band (some had already been included in the live-set, Latin Quarter’s performance repertoire). Eventually this number was whittled down to the twelve songs that appeared on the album. Throughout this time I became increasingly uncomfortable that such a ‘personal’ song would be made available for public consumption. This discomfort had been present from the moment I began the composition but when you are your own audience it is easy to accommodate discomfort; the more public the lyric became, the more reluctant I felt to allow it to become a record: agency was alive in the immediate decision to write, but autonomy was never clear cut, even from the outset. As an approach to considering why the concepts of ‘creative’ or ‘institutional’ autonomy and of ‘self-determination’ and ‘agency’ might be less than the truth of songwriting as an occupational choice it is worth discussing the writing of ‘Model Son’ in some detail. In this I want to distinguish between a broad set of ‘motivations’ that drove the song (the place at which Zollo’s work tends to stop) and others
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more difficult to access – the critical factors that comprise the composition’s‘subjective disposition’ to elect for certain kinds of creative expression. I was motivated to write ‘Model Son’ for three main and interconnected reasons: firstly, as I have indicated, I was motivated in general to write songs as a matter of employment and self-identity. By the time of writing the song I had been self-supporting as a songwriter for four years. At this point in my life I felt satisfied and self-confident in and with my career as a songwriter (rather than self-satisfied and confident). I was satisfied because many of the songs which I initiated (and lyrics which I completed) seemed to be assured of release as records. This, in turn, encouraged a self-confident belief that I would continue as a songwriter into ‘the future’ – with or without Latin Quarter. I was not ‘self-satisfied’ because I had, by that time, become aware of how little control I enjoyed over my ‘art’ and neither was I ‘confident’ in my immediate relationship with RCA Records and RCA Music (my publishers) because I was also keenly aware of how strained and tenuous were the professional relations that structured my existence, whether those between the band and the record label, the band and its manager, or between individual members of the band itself. My second, parallel, source of motivation for writing songs, again in general, was driven by the need for Latin Quarter to fulfil its recording and publishing commitments. As the principal songwriter it was my responsibility to continue to furnish the material from which recordings were finished. It would be misleading to exaggerate the force of the legal obligation to produce songs; rather what needs to be recognized is how income for pop acts who are still seeking to establish themselves on a firm economic footing remains tied to recording and publishing advances – without my songs there would be no cash flow. I can report that this fact did indeed register with me, although whether it invoked any determining urgency in the aesthetic and creative choices I made remains to be identified and discussed. Finally, I was motivated to write the specific song/lyric ‘Model Son’ because I experienced an unquenchable need to explore and express my feelings about my relationship with my parents and, more pertinently, with my father. There is nothing distinctively ‘songwriterly’ in this need but that I had the means to create a public examination of a private issue, or bundle of issues, begins to connect with the latent power of the popular musical form, a power that seems to suggest that, in and by engaging with pop, and with popular creativity in
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general, we attain a ‘voice’. In turn, winning a voice implies gaining a ‘hearing’, a public hearing for whatever it is we have privately on our minds. Whether what we have on our minds is a source of pain or pleasure to us, being able to ‘speak’ more loudly than our peers amounts, for many in this position, to self-realization, or the achievement of self-hood. If entirely misconceived, this is still strong magic and we would be unwise to underestimate its spell: consider the huge numbers of aspirant pop acts, the queues of Pop Idol contestants, in these terms. But before I return to this ‘magic’, I need to counter the impression that I sat down one day and set-to to engage with my demons in song form simply because I could; rather my songwriting was habitually a piecemeal process. My practice was to work from a single (lyrical) line or phrase where the emphasis here must be placed simultaneously on the social (or political, cultural or emotional) relations suggested by the semantic content of the observation so encapsulated – in this instance ‘I grew up with a scorpion behind me’ – and the metrical and rhythmic structure of that line or phrase. The latter was as important as the former – if I could not sing the phrase then I could not develop the idea contained within it (or expressed through it) as a song. In short, and in the instance of ‘Model Son’, I did not search for a melody or for a line of text and neither did I do the preliminary work of electing to discuss my troubled relationship with my father in song form. The line ‘came’ to me, it was ‘singable’, and it acted as a conduit to a lifetime’s accumulation of the psychological end-products of the interactions between a father and his son. What needed then to take place was the work of locating that line in the musical (and semantic) place that its combination of musical and semantic content seemed to suggest might exist for it if an act of songwriting was undertaken from this starting point. On this basis, it was not guaranteed at the outset that the first line that occurred to me would be the first line of a new song – as it happened to be in this case – in fact on some (rare) occasions the originating observation might be discarded as the song suggested by it was worked on and worked out. Whatever the final place of the originating lyrical phrase, the writing process would be the same: the lyric would be developed through singing and rarely in a single session. Rather, I would return frequently to what would begin to emerge as verses or choruses and prosecute them to a finish as energy and inventiveness would allow. All of this activity would take place on a comparatively systematic basis wherein the subsequent process of co-writing took place in a
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context in which the need to sell records rather than attain self-expression was the over-arching goal. Songwriting and the Romantic Artist Before proceeding it is important to caution that I am aware of how at least two aspects of this (abbreviated) account of my songwriting might appear to chime with the romantic conception of the songwriter as ‘artist’. In the first instance, when I write that the initial, ‘stimulant’ line for ‘Model Son’, ‘came to me’, I intend this phrase to be understood in a material rather than an inspirational sense. The line derived from a conversation with my mother who, at one time, attempted to explain my father’s personality in terms of his astrological sign, Scorpio: he was a ‘scorpion’ and his (defensive) reaction was to be stinging. There is no sense, then, that the image emerged from my tortured soul after solitary reflection, instead it was collected from the discursive flux of daily life, as was everything else I wrote, whether from dialogue in films, television programmes, conversations overheard in public places, fragments of interior monologue provoked by responses to private or public events, advertising slogans, even graffiti. Even so, this was not, or not alone, a hypersensitivity to words as such. Rather it was a sensitivity to how words are deployed to explain relationships or sets of (social) relations. As an individual I was sensitized to the reasons people gave or invoked for conducting their lives in particular ways and for justifying the repercussions of their actions on others – where the latter groups, disempowered though they were likely to be, might also textualize their attempts to make sense of their pasts, presents, and futures in interesting and productive ways. The triangulation of my songwriting is then completed by my recognition of a felt need to establish, also through words, how and where I felt I stood in relationship to those (implicitly inequal) relationships and relations and to the justifications made for them. To me this now seems all to be the product of deep emotional insecurity and a practised petit-bourgeois need to exercise control through a fear of its absence but at the time it was rock and roll and I did it for a living. The second aspect of an implied Romanticism in the synopsis of my songwriting concerns the observation that my creative effort lay in ‘locating’ an originating lyrical line or phrase in some, as yet undiscovered, whole that its existence suggested might exist. As it stands,
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this summary of a complex procedure might be taken to imply that, somehow, I believed each nascent song to be a ‘David in the rock’ – to exist in toto in some etheric place only an artist, through artistic effort, could reach. This would be a misleading conclusion to draw; rather, to argue that a ‘stimulant’ lyric carried with it the implication that some wider or deeper concern was signalled by it – and that this ‘concern’ could be expressed as a song – is simply to observe that melodic lines can be ‘worked up’ into songs, that lyrical lines contain ideas that might be developed in interesting ways, and that both require effort to pursue to a conclusion. Viewed in this way I cannot conceive this ‘effort’ in any way other than ‘creative’ but what needs to be identified is the range of forces and relations that might be argued to have borne on the choices I made in fashioning the text; in manipulating its many symbols in ways that would make this song a ‘contender’ for a commodity (the one that came to be called Swimming against the Stream – which title now seems increasingly ironic!) Songwriting and Work It could be argued that I was motivated to write ‘Model Son’ for a combination of what might usefully be described as situational and (to echo Toynbee) dispositional reasons: firstly, I was a songwriter by occupation who needed to write songs to maintain this role and who was faced with an immediate objective (an album to complete). Secondly, I was a songwriter who was habitually sensitized to discursively mobilized projects of power (in personal life, in the social and political realms) who attempted to make sense of these projects through lyric-writing articulated and practised through imagined musical composition. This is an entirely autonomous – in the sense of individually distinct – expression of subjectivity (though whether it is a distinct practice of creativity remains to be discussed). Further, how I ‘imagined musical composition’ drew on what I enjoyed of the music I knew and liked – a particular assemblage of ‘hits’ from the mid-1950s onwards, leavened with the work of the more conventionally melodic rock writers and performers (predominantly but not exclusively the ‘singer-songwriters’). Consequently my imagined compositions obeyed fairly orthodox and obvious genre rules, clear evidence of congruence with Toynbee’s ‘social authorship’. Finally, the election of the precise subject matter, my relationship with my father, can only be agentic
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and self-determining; nobody put a gun to my head and demanded that I write on this particular topic in this particular way (the maritime references derive from his time as a merchant seaman, for example). It is difficult to see how my songwriting, held to the light at this angle, took place under industrial conditions at all, at least in the traditionally conceived sense of some form of supervised production towards a determinate end in which the employer attempts to ensure that the worker expends all the labour power the employer has purchased. Of course, there is more than one way to skin a cat. Not all production for profit is organized as an assembly line and one of the key areas for debate and research in management theory is the extent to which the classic, ‘Fordist’ model has been superseded historically, both within and beyond manufacturing industries. On this basis it would be more accurate to discuss whether and how my songwriting took place under the conditions of the specific industry within which it occurred – in this instance the music industry. Currently, though, the closest the study of popular music comes to an account of the music industry as an industry (as a workplace) is in the published work so far cited – in Hesmondhalgh, Toynbee, and Negus (where the latter has mounted quite different analyses in different publications). There are many other rich engagements with popular music that, perforce, must deal with its complex condition as an industrial, cultural and social product but there remains a dearth of studies which attempt to account for what happens in the making of music by musicians who, apparently while working solely to directions suggested by their respective muses, still contribute to commodity production as subordinates to capital. ‘Capital’ is not a force which, in the instance of musical activity, operates as some kind of cultural ‘beachcombing’ operation essentially after work has been done. Equally, though, it offends to consider capital in (exactly) its Fordist incarnation, wherein managers, on behalf of investors, design and enforce a rigid and ‘scientific’ work system in which the entire labour power of an almost infinitely substitutable workforce is commandeered by those managers to serve the aims of capital accumulation. This is why Adorno has made no appearance in this discussion: songs do not write themselves and even in an Adornian universe it would still be permissible, and methodologically possible, to examine how individual creativity and the logic of production mesh to produce a musical item which is simultaneously a
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piece of music and also a commodity. The ‘truth’, then, must fall somewhere between these two extremes, and, therefore, in some other rendition of the ‘logic of production’. As we have seen, in recent work on the ‘cultural industries’, the logic of musical production has been represented as one in which, to quote Hesmondhalgh, there exists ‘an unusual degree of autonomy, which is carried over from eras where artists, authors and composers worked independently of businesses’. Under these circumstances, capital’s response to its own inability to control production directly is to resort to a medley of risk-reduction measures as the setting for production; for example (after Bernard Miège), more products are commissioned than are actually released into the marketplace, new ways are found to sell old products whose costs of production have already been met, ‘workers’ are not retained on fixed salaries but must rely on royalty payments, capital is invested most heavily in strategies and practices for accessing and constituting markets (in physical and electronic distribution systems and in promotion and marketing).19 Again as Hesmondhalgh puts it, ‘This combination of loose control of creative input, and tighter control of reproduction and circulation constitutes the distinctive organisational form of cultural production during [this] era’.20 Writing ‘Model Son’ – the place and the fate of autonomy and self-determination The problem with the account of songwriting as work which devolves onto the notion of a ‘loose control of creative input’ is that, in attempting to open a distance between an account of the music industry as an industry and other, more rigid, accounts of industrial configurations of wage labour and capital, it tends to over-plead the case for creativity. This is not to make the counter-error (which is Adorno’s mistake) of arguing that, when it comes to popular music, creativity does not take place, rather it is to suggest that we pay closer attention to the contexts within which (musical) creative work exists. Throughout this account I have referred to how ‘demanding’ I found the role of a songwriter to be. In many ways this observation flies in the face 19.
Bernard Miège, The Capitalization of Cultural Production (New York: International General, 1989). 20. Hesmondhalgh, The Cultural Industries, p. 56 (emphasis as in the original).
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of the ‘glamour’ we associate with the role; further it tends to disturb the more complacent overtones of ‘creative autonomy’ and ‘selfdetermination’ – yet ‘demanding’ it remained. In my own research into the experience of music acts signed to major record labels I found a repeated pattern of transformation from aspirant pop act outside the music industry to ‘signed’ recordmaking act at its heart. What this devolved onto was the unavoidable necessity of aspirant pop acts connecting with, and accumulating, relationships with, intermediary figures (managers, advisers of various kinds, record company personnel, and so on), who, together with the act, formed, in each case, what I came to call a ‘supraorganization’: roughly an uneasy and uneven working coalition of differently motivated individuals (some of them representatives of large and powerful organizations enjoying different and contrasting access to resources) all combined to realize an often divergent conception of the musical work initiated by the act, or, more accurately, by its songwriters. The pressure I experienced then derived from the need to consider (poorly informed) perceptions of the priorities of the working coalition as a whole – as well as of each of its parts. Under these conditions, my ‘subjective disposition’ (Toynbee) and, within and through it, my ‘self-determination’ (Hesmondhalgh), was constantly driven to check my creative decisions against a complex of considerations. ‘Model Son’ needed to respond to a complex of considerations because it was created through a complex of relations: Latin Quarter’s ‘deal’ with RCA was predicated on its belief that we were a potentially lucrative investment; in the fateful words of the A&R representative charged with making a record with us, ‘you are a first division band but you haven’t made a first division album yet’. This was good motivational psychology and great politics – we were flattered and encouraged to aspire to ‘greatness’ but simultaneously neutralized as a ‘judging’ force – attainment of the ‘feel good’ but imprecise goal of a ‘first division album’ was to be determined by the company alone, embodied and actualized as it was by the A&R man. Consequently, in writing ‘Model Son’, one consideration I needed to make was how ‘the company’ would react to what I wrote. When I chose the subject matter and the words and music which articulated it, I needed to anticipate whether any resultant song would emerge as a ‘contender’ for the album that the company was prepared to pay for; whether, ultimately, I wanted the song to be a ‘contender’ is another matter still.
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Further, that the company would be the eventual arbiter of my work was but the ‘outer ring’ of an ‘orbiting’ constellation of audiences for my work. This constellation consisted, in the immediate sense, of the intricate and intractable relationships with intermediary figures within the ‘supra-organization’ whether separately or in some almost infinite number of combinations. In turn, the entire raison d’être of this collection of people was that together it could produce the commodity which would usher into being a paying audience for the music of Latin Quarter. In writing ‘Model Son’, some, but certainly not all, of the considerations crowding my subjectivity would be the following: 1 Although this is comparatively exceptional, I needed to anticipate how my co-writer would react to what he received from me. In the instance of ‘Model Son’ would he be motivated to compose, and then to perform, a song about my father? Further, did what I had written live up to, or conform to, his expectations of my contribution to our joint work? 2 I needed to consider how the band and the manager would react to new compositions. By the time of writing ‘Model Son’ we had all lived through promising times that had failed somehow to live up to their promise, yet we were still ‘in the game’. Would they be pleased or would they react negatively? Would ‘Model Son’ be perceived as a ‘bad’ song or as a (too) risky departure from the norm? 3 I needed to consider the integrity of any resultant album in terms of subject matter and tempos. Although I could not control my co-writers’ compositional reactions, was the subject too sombre for the needs of the album? 4 I needed to anticipate how Latin Quarter record buyers would react to the new songs. Would they be disappointed? Would they consider the new material even better than previous work and so express enthusiasm to family and friends and encourage them to buy the record and attend the planned promotional tours? 5 I needed to consider how non-Latin Quarter record buyers would react. Would new, large-scale, sales of Swimming Against the Stream eradicate our mounting debt to the record company and allow us to continue to make records? My ‘career’ depended on the song! 6 I felt the need to anticipate reviews of the new album. I had already been castigated as a ‘worthy but dull’ writer. Would ‘Model Son’ reverse this negativity or confirm it? Would I need to absorb more pain and embarrassment or would I achieve my ambition of being recognized as a ‘good’ songwriter? (I had much to prove.) 7 Finally, was the song up to my own standards? Did it pass the test of what I considered and imagined ‘good’ writing to be? Here is a significant test of subjectivity – or at least in its incarnations as self-image and
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the requirements of the self-esteem referred to previously – where both are fragile and can be affected positively or negatively by the reactions of any or all of the preceding individuals or groups; where, in turn, all of this makes ‘self-determination’ something of a hostage to fortune.
Taken together, these considerations should, at a minimum, demonstrate how cluttered and clamorous is the songwriter’s ‘space of the possibilities’ (Toynbee). Further, all of this agonizing about unpredictable and uncontrollable reactions to creative choices takes place under considerable pressure. When writers write, when they work, they do so ‘against the clock’: not only do record albums take time to write and record (as well as promote, market and sell), they exist in a tacitly agreed (and often quite paranoid) ‘cultural’ time-frame. By the time of the album’s release it would have been three years since Latin Quarter’s hit single. Would we have been forgotten? Was the time now past for the specific ‘scene’ (replete with its distinct generic identity) we were perceived to be part of? Additionally, writing and recording is hemmed in by budgetary limits and limitations. This is not to argue that all records, indeed songs, could be improved if just a little more time and a lot more money had been made available. More it is to concede that some aesthetic choices are made simply because a decision demands to be made, there and then: songwriters and band members need to live while writing, but, as we have seen, recording costs incurred need to be recouped from sales before any income from the record or, much more pertinently, any further funds against anticipated royalties will be advanced by the record company and by the publishers. Songwriting is ‘Work’ – So What? My anxiety to reach the heart of an understanding of songwriting as ‘work’ is because my own experience of ‘writing for my supper’ seems to linger as a harsh and dispiriting memory, dwarfing the pleasure I took in the activity (together with the reminiscences of all the ‘good times’); but it is more than simply pique. What causes me more anxiety still is the dual recognition that, while combining words and music for a living or for any other reason is indeed a pleasure, this activity is encouraged in our culture almost entirely for the end of profitmaking: ‘many are called’ – to the thrill and love of songwriting – so that the work of a very few can ensure that the owners of, and investors
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in, vast corporate conglomerates might grow ever richer. To put this slightly less biblically, ‘making it’ is what the corporations (and I would collect the ‘independent’ record sector under this heading) offer to all young and idealistic people. Part of the thrill of consuming music is to identify with its performers, its stars. But what is the ‘it’ that is ‘made’? Is it a place reached or a state attained? Toynbee is decisive here when he argues that music-making offers ‘the promise of transformation … the possibility of possibility. It is a resource of hope’.21 We make popular music in hope, in the hope of escaping work, in the hope of overcoming a lived and palpable alienation and achieving the agency or the self-determination that Toynbee and Hesmondhalgh argue is achieved through popular cultural production. But, again, songwriting is, precisely, production – not just an economic activity but an industrial one. Literally thousands of young people, all of the time, aspire to be ‘pop stars’ and to be identified, listened to, admired, valued, and respected as individuals, for who they are and how they express themselves; for what they have to ‘say’ and how they ‘say’ it. That ‘ordinary life’ seems to deny us these opportunities, this interest, care and empathy, is eloquent in itself, but what really counts, for the purposes of this argument, is that this denial propels those of us who are aspirant music makers into the path of a set of people who argue that they can see the ‘good’ in us, so long as it is expressed in forms that they recognize as musical talent. As such we are far beyond Becker’s ‘art worlds’ at this point. To connect with intermediaries is not to extend some beneficent ‘network’ of which the music-maker remains the centre, it is to hope (and to have confirmed) that you are doing something ‘right’ from the perspective of the market and the commodity-process. As we have seen, Toynbee presents the area of those who aspire (through music) to leave behind the ordinary world as the ‘protomarket’, a place or conceptual space in which the ‘promise of transformation’ is sought in and through acts of ‘agency’ – making up and performing songs for an audience. But in my reading of the experience of aspirant pop acts (proto-pop acts), the alchemy of the proto-market can only occur through the addition of the ingredient embodied by the intermediary figure, with the result that transformation can take place (a ‘deal’ might be forthcoming) but this is not
21.
Toynbee, Making Popular Music, p. 32.
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the same as the transmutation courted and longed for by the aspirant musician. Instead, when musicians achieve deals they go to work, ostensibly for themselves and on their own behalf (self-employment) but more accurately for a ‘joint’ end over which they have no final control (self-employment does not presuppose ‘creative autonomy’). The ‘deal’ they make (that they have dreamt of making) is to make a record, a record paid for by an investor (a record company) and organized, by the investor’s direct employees, as a commodity. More than this, the aspirant has already been working – in the sense of internalizing the ‘rules of the game’, of directing and disciplining their labour towards the deal, towards marketability – from the moment they began to aspire to ‘making it’, because this ‘making it’ has been represented to them not just as a chance to gain a ‘voice’, not just as a ticket to somewhere else, but as (life-affirming) creativity, itself. Again, what is this ‘it’ that is so determinedly sought to be ‘made’? In essence it is both place and state, a place of individual affirmation, a place to be more than is allowed elsewhere. One of the reasons that songwriting is a difficult occupation to access and interrogate is because the music industry is organized to put us out of touch with prosaic reality (or to put us differently in touch with the everyday); its products are escapist rather than utilitarian. Whether we read this negatively (Adorno) or positively (most Popular Music Studies theorists) is an entirely separate debate; the point is that music acts on subjectivity; we dream other selves through it, imagine other lives, dance either to submerge ourselves into crowds or to transcend the moment with those we love, or hope to love. Wherever music takes us it is always away from here. Music’s power derives from how intimate we can choose to be with some aspect or example of it, on how we allow, and sometimes cannot resist, its impact on our subjectivity. Makers of musical products make fortunes from this recognition and they are at pains to minimize the disruption of this potent and therefore lucrative intimacy, where the result is that traces of industry tend to be erased from the product-making process; whether in the aftermath of physical production (in promotion and marketing campaigns which emphasize the ‘artistry’ of the ‘artist’) or, what is more important for these purposes, in the construction of the product itself. Consequently, when some music moves us to make music ourselves it does not present us with a map for how to reach that ‘other place’, because ‘transformation’ is not what
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is really on offer. The actual practice of intermediary figures (notably but not solely, managers and A&R personnel) is, exactly as Hesmondhalgh has it, to ‘manage’ the creative process. This project is accomplished, can only be accomplished, discursively, and the discourses drawn on, and into which musicians are drawn (hardly unwillingly – they themselves are already fluent in them!) emphasize the mysteries, the ineffability of the work at hand. In record-making we deal directly with commodity fetishism as the album appears to take on a life of its own. All of the talk which surrounded the making of Swimming Against the Stream – whether a producer was necessary and if so who it should be, where the recording should take place, what songs should be included, the sequencing of tracks, whether additional musicians would be required – devolved onto ‘the needs of the album’. In this way also, the intermediary figures absolved themselves of their controlling and intrusive management, their impacts on ‘creativity’. In this way, popular music ‘creativity’ is concealed as the composite activity it is, one driven by the over-arching need to achieve sales in the marketplace, to which end creative management, as any management, is directed. Similarly, where the ‘consumption’ (or active use) of music is concerned, listeners buy into the belief that the musical ‘work’ is freestanding, self-explanatory, and self-sufficient. This follows for the reason that (as I have argued) a significant dimension of the effectiveness of music is that it appears to come from somewhere other (and better) than the ‘world’ in which we encounter it. Choosing to engage with music on these terms entails the collaboration of listeners with producers in the concealment of pop’s commodity-nature, where the contradictory clichés of the ‘common sense’ of pop add value to its capacity to excite. No one wants to know the reality, it is too mundane (although still fascinating to be part of) and, crucially, it would break the spell that promises the magical transformation that drove the music’s creation. Listen to the Words Songwriters create with the market in mind; perhaps not in the forefront of their minds but, in seeking popularity and all that they imagine comes with it, songwriters (signed or unsigned) seek to create music that will sell. This is not an Adornian criticism of the worthlessness of
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pop, but it is a caution against the representation of the work that songwriters, symbol creators, do as ‘autonomous’. If I worked on ‘Model Son’ in my imagination then this was self-determining, I was an ‘agent’ thus far, but, while I worked, my imagination worked on me; would this be the song that made our fortunes? How could I make it the song that would change our fortunes? Similarly, if my agentic, self-determining subjective disposition was to write about my father, then ‘objective conditions’ insisted that I wrote about him within certain forms of expression – or this is, at least, how I apprehended the circumstances of my creativity. Those circumstances drove a songwriting practice that, in some measure, consisted of a combination of my own understanding of what was required of me to be a symbol creator; a diligent self-organization to serve my need to remain a symbol creator; together with responses to the perceived imperatives of the immediate (and constantly changing) environment of record making. I had a will and a need to express myself but my creativity was tailored to fit making a record I hoped, we all hoped, would sell. To satisfy these turbulent demands, I ensured that I demolished my father, for public consumption, in three verses, a bridge and a chorus – in just over four minutes. This is a little longer than the standard pop ‘single’ but well within the boundaries of the pop singersongwriter genre of which Latin Quarter fought, unsuccessfully, to be recognized as a significant force within. What type of worker is a songwriter? A songwriter is someone who works at bringing words and music together, a text-maker who manipulates common and also very specialized ‘symbols’. But a songwriter is still a worker, someone who engages in effort for reward. What differentiates this kind of worker from any other, though, is not that the reward is deferred, nor even that it might not come at all, it is that the ‘reward’ is an intangible one and an improbable one; a song-writer’s reward is not money (though this is welcome), not even fame (or not entirely): a songwriter is someone who believes that, through writing, he or she will be heard and therefore transformed in some way. In this belief, they misread ‘creativity’ as being identical with obeying (with sometimes substantial individual inflection and modification) a pursuit of music that allows them to do what is required to ‘get a deal’ (or keep a deal) and ‘make it’. But there is no ‘it’ to be made: no ‘non work-place’ to arrive at, while ‘selfhood’ is not within the gift of EMI, Sony, and the rest. There is only money and celebrity and that incredibly
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rarely. This conclusion is not to argue against aspiring, creating, having fun, or any of the other associated, positive dimensions of making popular music, only to caution that, if we believe that in writing for our supper we write to a refrain of our own, we miss the point entirely.
Index
50 Cent, 82 Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, 240– 41, 246 Agawu, V. Kofi, 3, 8, 125–6 Ahle, Johann Georg Musicalisches Gespräche, 69 Aldrich, Henry, 107 Allais, Alphonse, 168 Allanbrook, Wye Jamison, 53 Allen Jr, Ernest, 100 Antiphon, 29 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 175, 189, 197–8 Calligrammes, 186 Ariosto, Ludovico, 105 Aristophanes The Birds, 19 Aristotle, 32, 39 The Art of Rhetoric, 30 Atkins, Ivor, 113 Audran, Edmond, 187 Austen, Jane Northanger Abbey, 225 Aznavour, Charles ‘She’, 21 Babbitt, Milton Philomel, 198 Bach, J. S., 54, 138 St Matthew Passion, 113 ‘Es ist vollbracht!’, 117, 121 Bailey, Kathryn, 130–2, 138, 144 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 8, 15, 17, 21, 75–6, 83, 85, 99, 101, 232
Banks, Iain, 223 Bartel, Dietrich, 46, 50 Musica Poetica, 57, 62 Bartholomew, William, 113–4, 119 Bate, H. N., 119 Battistella, Edwin, 19 Beach, Sylvia, 185 Beattie, James, 13, 20 Beatles, The Sergeant Pepper, 84 Becker, Howard Saul, 231, 245 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 113 Christus am Oelberge, 119 Belleau, Rémy, 120 Berberian, Cathy, 199 Berg, Alban, 138 Berio, Luciano, 193, 217 A-Ronne, 196, 208–11 Coro, 196 Sequenze, 208; Sequenza III, 210 Sinfonia, 192 Thema, 197, 199, 201, 211 The Cries of London, 196 Berlin, Irving ‘That Mysterious Rag’, 188 Berlioz, Hector La Damnation de Faust, 18 Bernhard, Christoph, 44 Tractatus compositionis augmentus, 69 Bertin, Pierre, 177 Bertrand, Eugène, 168 Birtwistle, Harrison, 189 Nenia, 197
252 Bizet, George Carmen, 25 Blès, Numa, 170 Bliss, Arthur Morning Heroes, 11–2 Blondie ‘Denis’, 19 Bonds, Mark Evan, 52–3, 55 Bonnaud, Dominique, 170 Bosch, Hieronymus, 214 Boulez, Pierre, 217 e.e.cummings ist der dichter, 198 Orientations, 212–13 Bourdieu, Pierre, 232–3 Bo$$, 80 Brahms, Johannes, 119, 185 Liebeslieder Walzer, 120 Brandes, Heinz, 47, 53 Brecht, Berthold, 14–5 Die Dreigroschenoper, 13, 17 Breughel, Pieter, 214 Bridges, Robert, 110 Yattendon Hymnal, The, 111, 112 ‘Ah, Holy Jesu, how hast thou offended’, 112 ‘O sacred head sore wounded’, 112 Brinkmann, Reinhold, 128, 131, 141, 144, 147 Bronson, Bertrand, 6 Brown, Calvin S., 2–4, 6 Brown, Marshall, 5 Bruant, Aristide ‘La Villette’, 18 Bruckner, Anton Psalm 150, 116 Bryars, Gavin, 189 Budde, Elmar, 140 Buelow, George J., 31, 56–7 Bukofzer, Manfred, 53 Bunsen, Karl Josias von, 110 Burmeister, Joachim, 44, 47, 50, 55, 61, 62, 67–8, 70 Musica Poetica, 37, 42, 69 Butler, Gregory G., 44 Byrd, William, 105
Index Cage, John, 188–9 Caldara, Antonio Crucifixus, 72 Carissimi, 108 Carroll, Lewis Alice in Wonderland, 179, 186 Caves, Richard E., 228 Cerha, Friedrich Der Riese von Steinfeld, 191 Chabrier, Emmanuel Le Roi malgré lui, 169 Chalupt, René, 179 Cheney, Dick, 82 Cheney, Lynne, 82, 86 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 30, 32, 39–40 Claretie, Jules, 166 Cocteau, Jean, 179–80, 182, 185, 189, 191 Le Coq et l’Arlequin, 187 Cohen, Leonard, 223 Cohen, Sara, 228, 231 Cone, Edward, 10, 13, 20, 94 Cornelius, Peter ‘Three kings from Persian lands afar’, 119 Costello, Elvis, 21 Cousin, Victor, 180 cummings, e. e., 197–8 Cummings, William Hayman, 113 Dahlhaus, Carl, 139, 141 Dail, Douglas, 98 Dante, 208 La Vita Nuova, 18 Darty, Paulette Allons-y Chochotte, 170 Daumer, Georg Friedrich, 120 Davidson, Donald, 17 Davies, Miles, 74 De Quincey, Thomas Dream-Fugue, 2 Debussy, Claude, 168, 172–3, 177, 184–6, 188 Trois Chansons de Charles d’Orléans, 120 Delaere, Mark, 131, 133, 138
253
Index Delibes, Léo Avril, 120 Dentith, Simon, 101 Dépaquit, Jules, 177 Derrida, Jacques, 2–3 Descartes, René, 32 Passions de l’âme, 33, 50 Desmets, 173 Dhomont, Francis, 201 Diaghilev, Serge, 179, 181–2 Dido, 95–97 d’Indy, Vincent, 173 Doret, Gustave, 168 Dr. Dre, 81–2, 86 Dryden, John, 107 Dunsby, Jonathan, 137, 141 Dylan, Bob, 222–3 Ecorcheville, Jules, 168 Edward VI, 104 Egri, Peter 4 Einstein, Alfred, 3, 6 Elgar, Edward, 113 Scenes from the Bavarian Highlands, 120 ‘Serenade’, 120 Eminem, Chapter 3 passim Lexicon of Love, 84 The Eminem Show, 83–4 The Marshall Mathers LP, 73, 85, 94–5 The Slim Shady LP, 95 ‘Curtains Up’, 83–4, 87 ‘Soldier’, 98 ‘White America’, 83–8, 93 England, Paul, 119 Essex, David, 223 Euripides, 13 Fargue, Léon-Paul, 181, 185 ‘Le Statue de bronze’, 188 Fauré, Gabriel, 172, 189 Ferrabosco, Alfonso, 106 Ferretti, Giovanni, 106 Finnegan, Ruth, 231 Forkel, Johann Nikolaus, 50 Allgemeine Geschichte, 69
Foucault, Michel, 98 Gardiner, William Judah, 124 Garland, Judy, 220 Garnham, Nicholas, 228 Gates Jr, Hanry Louis, 76 Gauthier-Villars, Henry, 169 George, Stefan, 128 Der siebente Ring, 148 Georgiades, Thrasyboulos, 3 Gerhard, Anselm, 147–8 Gerhard, Paul, ‘Nun ruhen alle Wälder’, 112 Gerstl, Richard, 148 Gilbert, 136 Giraud, Albert, 142 Glarean, Heinrich, 5 Gluck, Christoph Willibald von Iphigénie en Tauride, 11, 17 Goethe, J. W. Von, 20 Godt, Irving, 48 Golschmann, Vladimir, 171 Gore, Al, 82 Gore, Tipper, 82, 86 Gorgias, 29 Gounod, Charles-François, 113, 161, 182 Faust, 187 Le Médecin malgré lui, 181 Mireille, 179 Gowers, Patrick, 164, 166 Grey, Thomas S., 7 Griffiths, Paul, 214, 216 Gurlitt, Willibald, 53 Handel, George Frideric, 124, 193, 195 Harris, Sybil, 185 Harrison, Jonty, 201 Hartleben, Otto Erich, 142 Hatch, Orrin G., 82 Hatten, Robert, 19 Haydn, Joseph, 124 Henry, Pierre, 197 Hesmondhalgh, David, 229–34, 240– 42, 245, 247 Hirsch, Eric, 228
254 Hinton Thomas, Richard, 7 Hobbs, Christopher, 189 Hollander, John, 197–8 Holly, Buddy ‘Peggy Sue’, 18 Holquist, Michael, 80, 99, 101 Homer Iliad, 11 Hudson, Henry, 119 Hullah, John, 124 Hummel, 113 Hyspa, Vincent Chez le docteur, 170 L’Omnibus automobile, 170 Ice Cube, 81 Isocrates, 29 Ives, Charles Central Park in the Dark, 192 Jacob, Max, 189 Ruffian toujours, truand jamais, 187 Janequin, Clément, 121 Joyce, James, 161 Ulysses, 185, 199 Keaton, Buster, 13 Kerman, Joseph, 3, 7 Kierkegaard, Søren, 22 Kipling, Rudyard ‘Mandalay’, 20 Kircher, Athanasius, 44, 50, 56 Musurgia Universalis, 69 Klingemann, Karl, 114 Koch, Heinrich, 49, 50 Kra, Suzanne, 189 Kramer, Lawrence, 1, 3, 7–8, 20, 129, 144 Krims, Adam, 86, 90–1 Krummacher, Friedhelm, 6 Kurth, Richard, 146 Kutter, Mark, 210 Lacan, Jacques, 2 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 185 Premières Méditations, 184 Lambert, Constant, 167 Lang, Andrew, 19
Index Langer, Susanne, 3, 20 Larbaud, Valéry, 185 Lassus, Orlandus, 106 ‘Matona mia cara’, 121 Latin Quarter, 227 Swimming against the Stream, 219, 228 ‘Model Son’, Chapter 9 passim Latour, Patrice Contamine de, 162, 168–70 La Mort de Monsieur Mouche, 171 Sylvie, 169 Leibowitz, René, 150 Lemoine, Gustave, 187 Lenja, Lotte, 17 Leslie, Henry, 124 Lessem, Alan Philip, 136 Ligeti, György, 212 Atmosphères, 201 Aventures, 211 Nouvelles Aventures, 211 Requiem, 197, 213–16 Lippius, Johannes, 35, 44 Liszt, Franz, 140 ‘Little Musgrave’, 13 Lodato, Suzanne M., 3, 125–7, 129, 144, 146 Lord, Albert, 6 Lugné-Poë, Aurélien, 169 Lysias, 29 Machado, Antonio, 208 Maderna, Bruno, 198 Magnard, Albéric, 186 Mahler, Gustav Das Lied von der Erde, 5 Maillart, Aimé, 186 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 2 Un Coup de dès, 2 Marenzio, Luca, 106 Marinetti, Filippo, 179 Martin, Charles, 173 Mary Tudor, 104 Marx, Karl, 226 Massenet, Jules, 161 Massine, Leonid, 179 Mathers, Hailey, 81
255
Index Mathers, Kim, 81, 98 Mattheson, Johann, 38, 50, 61, 70 Critica Musica, 69 Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre, 69 Der vollkommene Kapellmeister, 35 Max, Edouard de, 177 McCartney, Paul ‘Mull of Kintyre’, 21 McGonagall, William, 24 ‘Baldovan’, 23, 25 Mendelssohn, Felix, 113–8 Elijah, 113 Lauda Sion, 117–8 Lobgesang, 124 St Paul, 115 ‘Festgesang’, 113 ‘Hear my prayer’, 114 Messiaen, Olivier, 168 Metzger, Heinz-Klaus, 146 Meunier, Mario, 180 Meyer, Leonard, 3 Meyer, Mrs Eugène, 187 Meyer-Eppler, Werner, 198 Miège, Bernard, 228, 241 Mohn, Barbara, 118 Molière, 181 Mompou, Federico, 189 Monnier, Adrienne, 185 Monteverdi, Claudio, 54 Mounsey, Anna Sheppard, 113 Mozart, Leopold Versuch einer gründlichen Violinschule, 31 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 12, 191–2 Müller-Blattau, Joseph, 6 Neale, John Mason, 110 ‘Blessed city, heavenly Salem’, 111 ‘Good King Wenceslas’, 111 Negus, Keith, 224, 228, 240 Newcombe, Anthony, 7 Newmarch, Rosa, 120 Nono, Luigi ‘Ha Venido’, 207–8 Il Canto sospeso, 205–6 La Fabbrica illuminata, 197 Norton, Caroline, 22–3
Novello, Sabilla, 113, 119 Nucius, Johannes, 44, 56, 68 Musices poeticae, 69 Ohana, Maurice, 189 Osmond-Smith, David, 193 Pacory, Henry, 170 Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da, 124 ‘Nativitas tua’, 108 Parmerud, Åke, 201 Péladan, Joséphin, 166–8, 172 Penderecki, Krzysztof Dies Irae, 202–5 St Luke Passion, 193, 195 Pendrill, George, 22, 23 Piae Cantiones, 111 Picabia, Francis, 173 Picasso, Pablo, 173, 179 Guernica, 225 Pierce, Web, 12 Planché, J. R., 19 Planquette, Robert, 187 Plato, 180–81 Gorgias, 29 Phaedrus, 29 Polignac, Princesse Edmond de, 180 Potter, Russell A., 80 Poulenc, Francis, 198 Pound, Ezra, 185 Powers, Harold, 5 Printz, Wolfgang Casper Phrynis Mytilanaeus, 69 Protagoras, 29 Puget, Loïsa ‘Mon Rocher de Saint–Malo’, 187 Quintilianus, Marcus Fabius (Quintilian), 30, 32, 35, 39–40 Radiguet, Raymond Les Joues en feu, 182 Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 168 Ratner, Leonard G., 48–53, 55 Ravel, Maurice, 173 Trois Chansons, 120 Reich, Steve, 189
256 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 40 Richards, I. A., 230 Rietz, Julius, 115 Riley, Terry, 189 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 189 Rimbaud, Arthur, 161 Rooney, Micky, 223 Rossini, Gioacchino, 182 Roussel, Albert, 173 Russell, Henry, 22–5 Saint-Pierre, Bernardin de, 182 Saint-Point, Valentine de, 177 Saint-Saëns, Camille, 187 Samson et Dalila, 16 Sanguineti, Edoardo, 208 Satie, Erik, 13, Chapter 7 passim Boring Globules, 172, 175 Cinq Grimaces, 179 Dance Gothiques, 166 Embryons desséchés, 169, 187 Fête donnée par des Chevaliers Normandes, 162–4 Geneviève de Brabant, 171 Gnossiennes, 162, 169 Gymnopédies, 162, 169 Heures séculaires et instantanées, 175–7 Impérial-Oxford, 171 Je te veux, 170 La Diva de l’Empire, 170 Le Fils des étoiles, 166, 169, 172 Le Piège de Méduse, 176 Le Prince de Byzance, 166–7 Légende Californienne, 171 Les Pantins dansent, 177 Ludions, 181, 188 Marienbad, 171 Mercure, 187 Messe des pauvres, 169 Monotonous Day’s Marches, 172 Musique d’ameublement, 187 Ogives, 162 Parade, 178, 186–7 Paul & Virginie, 182 Prélude de ‘La Porte héroïque du ciel’, 164
Index Préludes du Nazaréen, 164–5 Quatre Petites Mélodies, 181, 183–4 Rambouillet, 171 Real Flabby Preludes, 173 Relâche, 171, 187 Sarabandes, 169, 173 Socrate, 180, 188 Sonatine bureaucratique, 162 Sports et divertissements, 173, 186 The Angora Ox, 171–2 The Dreamy Fish, 171 Trois Mélodies, 178, 188 Trois Morceaux en forme de poire, 169, 171 Trois poèmes d’amour, 178 uspud, 167–9, 188 Vexations, 188 ‘Adieu’, 182 ‘Air du Rat’, 189 ‘Chanson du Chat’, 189 ‘Danseuse’, 182 ‘d’Holothurie’, 169, 187 ‘Élégie’, 183–4 ‘La Balançoire’, 174 ‘Le Chapelier’, 179 ‘La Statue de bronze’, 188 ‘Les Musiciens de Montmartre’, 171 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 3, 76 Schaeffer, Pierre, 198 Scheibe, Johann Adolf, 44 Compendium, 69 Schenker, Heinrich, 1–2 Scher, Steven Paul, 2–8 Schering, Arnold, 53 Schmidt, Johann Eusebius, 117 Schmitz, 47 Schoenberg, Arnold, Chapter 5 passim A Survivor from Warsaw, Chapter 6 passim Die glückliche Hand, 148 Pierrot Lunaire, Chapter 5 passim Violin Concerto, 127, 152 Verklärte Nacht, 140 ‘Der Dandy’, 146 ‘Die Kreuze’, 136 ‘Gebet an Pierrot’, 142 ‘Mondestrunken’, 142
257
Index ‘Nacht’, Chapter 5 passim ‘Rote Messe’, 146 ‘The Relationship to the Text’, 139 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 140 Schubert, Franz, 20, 113, 121, 124 Winterreise, 125 ‘Der Wanderer’, 11 ‘Der Erlkönig’, 21, 94 ‘Die Forelle’, 11 Schumann, Robert, 140, 188 Shakespeare, William, 168 Shakur, Tupac, 81 Shapleigh, B., 119 Simon, Paul, 222–3 Simms, Bryan R., 131 Sisman, Elaine, 54 Skaith, Steve, 219 Skempton, Howard, 189 Snoop Dogg, 82 Songs of Praise, 111 Sovine, Red, 26 ‘Little Rosa’, 11–12 Spiess, Mainrad Tractatus, 69 Spohr, Louis Des Heilands letzte Stunden, 119 Stanger, Claudia S., 2–4 Stein, Gertrude, 185 Stein, Jack, 3, 7 Sternfeld, Frederick W., 3, 7 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 198, 207, 217 Carré, 213 Gesang der Jünglinge, 197, 199–200 Kontakte, 201 Licht, 213 Stimmung, 213 Stratton, John, 224 Strauss, Johann Die Fledermaus, 16 Stravinsky, Igor, 185 A Sermon, a Narrative and a Prayer, 193–5 Oedipus Rex, 191 Sullivan, Arthur, The Light of the World Swayne, Giles Cry, 195
Taubert, Wilhelm, 114 Tavener, John, 213 Tearson, Michael, 222 Thomas, Ambroise, 171 Mignon, 187 Thomas, Keith, 10, 26 Thomson, Virgil, 189 Thuringus, Joachim Opusculum bipartitum, 69 Tippett, Michael, 75 Tomlinson, Gary, 74–5 Toynbee, Jason, 232–4, 239–40, 242, 244–5 Trémois, Pierre, 185 Troutbeck, John, 113, 119 Unger, Hans-Heinrich, 47, 53, 71 Vanilla Ice, 81 Verlaine, Paul, 175 Vickers, Brian, 44, 53, 55, 57 Vogel, Lucien, 186 Vogt, Mauritius Johann, 56 Conclave thesauri magnae artis musicae, 69 Volta, Ornella, 177 Walsh, Stephen, 194–5 Walther, Johann Gottfried, 44, 50 Musicalisches Lexicon, 69 Praecepta, 69 Watkins, Glenn, 138 Watson, Thomas, 107 Italian Madrigals Englished, 106 Weber, Carl Maria von, 113 Webern, Anton, 131, 140 Five Movements for String Quartet, 138 Weill, Kurt, 14, 15 Mahagonny, 17 Weir, Judith King Harald’s Saga, 197 Wendel, Madame de, 181 Wert, Giaches de, 106 Wheeler, Elizabeth A., 76 Williams, Peter, 53–5 Winkworth, Catherine, 110–1
258 ‘Christ the Lord is risen again’, 111 Wishart, James Òran Hiortach, 193 Wishart, Trevor, 201 Wolff, Werner, 4 Yonge, Nicholas, 106–7 Musica Transalpina, 105
Index Youens, Susan, 138, 143, 148–9 Zelenka, J. D. Missa Paschalis, 57–67, 70–2 Zollo, Paul, 222–6, 234
