-
11. The Instrumental Nightingale: Some Counter-Musical Inflections in Poetry from Gray to Celan
- The University of Alabama Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
11 The Instrumental Nightingale some Counter-Musical inflections in Poetry from Gray to Celan For me music isn’t a superior expression of the individual. I prefer poetry. —Otto Han Mine are songs for people who cannot sing to sing. —Robert Duncan, Notebook 31 When the mode of the music changes the walls of the city shake. —Plato Man speaks by being silent. —Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? My argument in this chapter presupposes the validity of a crucial distinction between the semiotics and the acoustics of poetic music; the former is evident in the discovery by English poetry (largely via Swinburne and Tennyson) of an accumulative continuity through symphonic syntax, which is found residually in much subsequent procedural and normative poetry (in Zukofsky’s deployment of fugal structures, for instance, and in Basil Bunting’s attempt to incorporate the violent contrasts of the sonata form). However, the acoustics of this verbal music require a different tracking from pre-romantic proclivities through English Romanticism, to the twentieth-century avant-garde; it is left to the reader to decide whether or not this chapter constitutes a transhistoric perlustration or a germinal genealogy of poetic counter-musicality that transects current arguments around periodicity. Paul H. Fry observes that “sound supercedes music as the poetic occasion” in several Romantic texts, texts in which “[i]t is not music that poetry hears . . . but rather sound, with its emphasis on resonance, pitch, and timbre, and an impli- 186 Chapter 11 cation even of monotony: ‘The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves’” (Fry 45). Rather than valorize and elevate the musical like their German counterparts , certain British Romantic and pre-romantic poets adopted a hostile, even negative attitude toward it. For example, this attitude is noticeable in the shift in natural musical acoustics from birdsong to insect noise in some of Thomas Gray’s and William Collins’s poems, and in a consciously ambiguous relation to the musical in some of Keats’s and Wordsworth’s odes. A consistently negative disposition to music can be detected that might be best described as an apophatic turn in the acoustic paradigm. This turn clarifies Gray’s, Collins’s, and Keats’s genealogical position as the vaunt-couriers, if not the prophets, of such avantgarde manifestations as the Dada sound poem, the Italian Futurist parole in libertà, and the Russian Futurist zaum. Not surprisingly, this acoustic apophatic drift becomes politicized in music after Auschwitz, so I finish this chapter with a discussion of a concrete poem by Eugen Gomringer and a poem of Paul Celan to conclude with a reflection on the ethical burden of any post–1945 music. It is precisely music’s intransigent refusal to yield conceptual profit that leads both Lessing and Kant to its disavowal.1 However, the fate of music changes with the advent of German Romanticism when an essential link is established between music and a general expressionist theory of art. “The aim of music,” claims Johann Georg Sulzer, “is to arouse the emotions; this it does by means of sequences of sounds that are appropriate to the natural expression of the emotion ; and its application must suitably conform to the intentions of nature in emotional matters” (quoted in Hermand and Gilbert 33). Sulzer, Herder, E. T. Hoffman, Tieck, Novalis, A. W. Schlegel, and Wackenroder alike praise the nonrepresentational character of music as offering the paradigm of a minimally mediated expression of feeling. By contrast, in England there emerges, from the mid-1740s onward, a discernible disposition to the counter-musical that is not evident in its German affiliate . Starting with the new genre of the allegorical ode in Collins’s 1747 Odes on Several Descriptive and Allegorical Subjects—whose revolutionary rhythmic variations and unrhymed cadences inaugurated a new order in poetic listening— there is a noticeable shift in emphasis from birdsong to insect noise in the targeted referential zones of sonority. The “Ode to Evening” opens with a magisterial interlacing of lyric audition and physical respiration that effectively blends the human and nonhuman: If aught of oaten stop, or pastoral song, May hope, chaste eve, to soothe thy modest ear, [44.220.245.254] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 08:09 GMT) The instrumental nightingale 187 Like thy own solemn springs, Thy springs, and dying gales, O nymph reserved, while now the bright-haired sun Sits in yon western tent, whose cloudy skirts, With brede ethereal wove, O’erhang his wavy bed Now air is hushed, save where the weak...