What came to mind watching
and listening to the rehearsals, the workshops and then the performances of
art-songs created this past week was a tensile interdependence of cantus and poesis. The poems, as song-text, were written first for the most
part, although during the week some alterations and revisions happened, as words
were adapted for and inclined toward the music. In some cases, the same poem
developed into two distinct versions; in my own case, the words didn’t change,
but one of the two composers working from it, David
Betz, used an earlier draft (which I had sent him by e-mail, to let him see
the progress I hoped I was making coming up with suitable text) as the basis
for his composition, so a few words and phrases don’t appear in the finished
poem. (For instance, the title of his art-song, “Torn Daisies,” uses an
adjective I changed [to “shredded”] in the final copy.) But I am very happy to
let these slippages stand, partly because they work in his setting, and partly
because I think that such misprisions, whether deliberate or inadvertent, cut
to the heart of collaborative interdependence: the words take hold in the
music, but also have to be let go, partially and partly, by the poem from which
they originate. In David’s case, his setting deliberately mines the original
poem for phrases and word-clusters that he seems to have felt resonated with
his own textural sound-palette, but he almost wholly disregards the narrative
or even syntactical order of the poem itself (although he does end his song,
for example, with the last line of the poem, so some structural imperatives
could still be translated, for him). In this instance, the poem has to be
released from its formal bands, as speech, to adapt to the melodic contours of
song.
This
tug between cantus and poesis, between song and speech, can be
read as a species of translation, but it can also be set apart from translation
in its mundane sense, as derivative or secondary language, if by working
between media we want to pursue a more primordial pathos. In À cor et à cri (Hue and Cry, 1988) the poet, ethnographer and surrealist Michel Leiris attempts, in a
book-length collation of notes and lyric fragments, to map an alchemical
genesis, a passage (cri-parole-chant) from visceral cry winnowed
through words toward a condition of song: chanter
for Leiris means not merely to put words to music, not melopoeia, but also to
materialize a perceptual intensity, gathered by and diffused through poetic
language. He juxtaposes this heightened, conceptually genetic (that is to say,
phenomenologically vital) modality to the servility of translation:
Peut-être est-ce quand les mots, au lieu
d’être en position servile des traducteurs, deviennent générateurs d’idées
qu’on passe de la parole au chant?
In practical terms – that is,
in terms of the realization of an art-song and not merely its conceptualizing
as an idealized poetic state of language – I think one element that might enact
this tension performatively, audibly, is the technique of Sprechstimme
or song-speech (literally, speech-voice). In Alex
Mah’s setting of the middle section of my poem “First Person Shooter,”
which he titled “Drift” after an early version of the text, the vocal
literalizes (as a kind of active reading, a lettering) this tension in phonemic
stutter and repetition at the outset of the song (“st . . . st . . . stalled .
. . stalled”), as if the grieving singer were unable to find her words, as if
singing itself, as keening, were an act of verbal grief, stalling on itself.
This stutter suggests both semantic shortfall – not having the words – and
creative agon, a voice contesting its
existential impediments to find an expressive diction. The words of the poem
initiate and thematize this agon, but
it can only fully realize itself in musical performance, becoming song rather
than recitation. A little further along in the setting, Alex introduces Sprechstimme, and even produces a
performative version of what Paul de Man named an “allegory of reading” or what
J. Hillis Miller might call a “linguistic moment,” as the vocalist falls back
into her speech register to utter the word “unspeakable.” It’s a dramatic
effect, certainly, but also a semantic paradox, in as much as she says that she
cannot say, as song diminishes or frays back into utterance, retreating from
the agon in the initial stutter,
rendering it all but pyrrhic: a version, or perhaps an inversion, of what
Martin Heidegger meant when he claimed, in poetry, that “Die Sprache spricht.” In the performance last Friday evening, Phoebe MacRae did a tremendous job
conveying not simply the feeling of grief over the events to which the poem
responds – the Sandy Hook shootings – but also the essential pathos of the
shortfall of language itself, of our inability to make sense of the senseless.
I want to try to frame this tension, which I think operates
at the core of art-song as a genre, by looking to the last lines of another
poem written for use by the Art Song Lab, Leah
Falk’s “Directions to My House”:
I
am also a door, remember,
hinged to wind
swinging between
a list and lost
It’s a fine poem, which both
investigates and resists the teleology of directions, of the map, to
interrogate lyrically the concept of home-coming, of nostos. But our sense of home at the poem’s formal close has been
unmoored, even rendered abyssal. The speaker-singer herself becomes a
transitory and contingent site, permeable and unfinished. (Notice the absence,
for instance, of closed punctuation – these sentences begin, but refuse to
conclude.) The poem as descriptive list, as a catalogue of traits or a
repository of images, hinges on a vowel shift – from the typographical
(door-like?) rectangle of the i to the open oval of the o – between empirical
certainty and placeless vacancy. Leah
Falk’s spare melopoeia, a muted vowel-music, draws her words close to song,
while also refusing the semantic surety of bel
canto. Pathos emerges for me, as listener and as reader, in negotiating the
fissure, the persistent and lyric gap between sound and meaning, not in wanting
to try to suture it shut.
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