Ezra Pound's Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931-1933 (review)

Ezra Pound is well known as one of the most important 20th-century poets, but is less well known as a composer or media experimenter. As a critic and writer, his cultural breadth was immense, so it is no surprise to find that his work crossed boundaries so fluidly. This admirably researched and very detailed book, by Margaret Fisher—choreographer, theater and video director, and scholar—provides an absorbing introduction to Pound's work in media and sound, as well as providing a fascinating look at the early days of radio. Can a book of cross-disciplinary scholarship such as this be of interest to readers of Computer Music Journal? The answer is emphatically yes. Not being a literary scholar, I found starting the book a bit difficult, but once I had gotten into the rhythm of Ms. Fisher's writing and inquiry, I found that I couldn't put it down.

Pound, in collaboration with BBC producer Archie Harding, produced a radio version of his 1922 opera, The Testament of François Villon, for BBC radio broadcast in 1931. This was an opera in which, as Pound stated, the function of the music he composed was to act as a form of literary criticism on the writings of medieval French poet, Franç ois Villon. As a composer, Pound mainly set the texts of others, and he said that his work as a composer was to make clear the rhythms inherent in the poems he set. In this, he paralleled the similar interest (with extremely different results) of others in the 1920s and 1930s who were trying to establish a connection between language and music. Such people as Kurt Schwitters and Harry Partch immediately spring to mind.

In Harding, one of the pioneers of radio drama and techniques of broadcasting, Pound found an incredibly talented collaborator. Even though their production of Pound's bilingual (old formal French and modern gangster English) opera was not without difficulties, they were both sufficiently enthusiastic to plan a second, multi-lingual opera, Cavalcanti, based on the life and work of the Italian poet who was Dante's teacher. Pound had finished the music and script, and Harding had scheduled production for 1933, when politics intervened, and the work suffered postponement after postponement until sometime between 1948 and 1950, when it was finally dropped. It wasn't until 1962 that R. Murray Schafer and the BBC remounted Villon, and it was not until 1983 that Cavalcanti was finally produced under the direction of San Francisco composer and conductor Robert Hughes.

One of Ms. Fisher's most valuable contributions in this book is to put Pound's work in radio into the context of other work that was happening at that time. Perhaps the best known of early radio theorists is Filippo Marinetti, whose radio "sintesi" have been available for many years now. But there were many others working in the field, and from several different points of view. Ms. Fisher's discussion of the radio works of Germans such as Bertolt Brecht and Walter Ruttman, and the work of such British producers as Lance Sieveking and Archie Harding, shows the breadth of experimentation taking place at the time.

Of special interest to those interested in the history of technology is her description of the BBC's handmade Dramatic Control Panel (DCP), an early audio mixer that allowed a producer to mix signals from several studios simultaneously, and also to send those signals to special rooms used as echo chambers. For the 1931 production of Villon, for example, Harding had up to seven separate studios available to him, including one called the "tin bath," which had an echo similar to a church!

Of particular interest in this history is the discussion of the works of fascist radio...