The Medieval Beast in a Modern Musical Setting

THE COMPAKATIST THE MEDIEVAL BEAST IN A MODERN MUSICAL SETTING Judith Barban The currents of influence and inspiration among the creative domains of music, literature, and art have been a focus of debate not only among art, literary, and music critics, but to an even greater degree among the artists themselves. These aesthetic arguments were especially prominent in the nineteenth century: Hugo's prefaces to his dramas, Baudelaire 's Salons, Zola's articles on Edouard Manet, Wagner's Oper und Drama, and Kandinsky's theory of Monumentalkunst serve as wellknown examples. In the late twentieth century, theorists specializing in the interrelations of the arts provided a more comprehensive view and a more precise language for the analysis of ekphrastic works: Claus Clüver, Calvin Brown, Jean-Pierre Barricelli, Thomas Jensen Hines, and Siglind Bruhn, among others, have done much to concretize the field of interart comparatist studies. Art has inspired poetry (for example, Jorge de Sena's "Fragonard's Swing," Baudelaire's "Les Phares" and his sonnet "Sur le Tasse en prison ," Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Um," Blake's poetry on his own graphic art works, Mallarmé's poem "Sainte" from Raphael's painting of Saint Cecilia) and vice-versa. For example, Biblical stories from both the Old and New Testament are the subjects of innumerable works of art in all media, as are episodes from the Iliad and the Odyssey; contemporary examples include X. J. Kennedy's Nude Descending a Staircase based on Marcel Duchamp's painting, Elder Olson's "Mobile by Calder," or Paul Engle's poem about Titian's Venus and the Lute Player. In the conjoining of music and literature, the musical setting of an existing poem has the longest history of expression in collaborative form. Combining the language of music with a written text produces an art form which many artists and theorists consider more elevated than either of its components , as was Wagner's concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the creation of his music dramas. Simply stated, the two arts in tandem produce a higher level of creation. Since the language of music is universal and therefore not limited in impact to an audience conversant with one particular verbal language, it can serve to illustrate and illuminate the essential character of the limited verbal text, a process that Jon D. Green calls "ut musica poesis" (Barricelli 9). The opposite perspective is typical of certain Romantic composers, such as Liszt, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms, who revered the literary text above their own art and sought to create a musical vehicle worthy of bearing the Sacred Word. It is not uncommon for twentieth-century composers to turn to the medieval period for fresh texts to interpret musically. Debussy, for VoV. 26 (2002): 53 MEDIEVAL BEASTS IN A MODERN MUSICAL SETTING example, set several poems by the fifteenth-century French poet Fran- çois Villon to music, and Ned Rorem composed a set of Poems for Peace based on late medieval and early Renaissance French poetry. Debussy, Poulenc, and Jean Françaix all set several of the fifteenth-century poems of Charles d'Orleans. Perhaps the best known of modern settings of a medieval Latin text is Carl Orffs Carmina Burana.1 Among the most novel and engaging modern musical renditions of medieval literature is a set offive pieces for brass quintet entitled A Bestiary for Brass composed by James Sochinski, director of Virginia Polytechnic University's Center for Digital Music. Each piece is designed to represent one of the medieval beasts described in a twelfth-century Latin bestiary as translated by T. H. White in The Book ofBeasts.2 While Sochinski's approach to the verbal text may not reflect the lofty purposes of Wagner or the other Romantics, the work evidences solid musicianship and highly developed compositional skills. The composer is amused by the description ofthese fabulous beasts and seeks to communicate his pleasure through a set of pieces that form a kind of divertimento. Since the media for performance is the brass quintet, the text is neither seen nor heard. The musical bestiary is, then, a transcription into the language of music through an English translation of the medieval Latin.3 Though much...