Music at Narrative

Anthony Burgess, in the 1983 essay “Meaning Means Language,” argues, “Music might have pretended, with Berlioz and Strauss, to absorb literature, but in fact it had turned itself into an adjunct to literature.” Consider Richard Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony (1915), for example. The nearly hour-long composition is meant to represent a day spent climbing in the mountains, pre-dawn to post-dusk. Though specific passages are titled—in the written score—things like “At the Waterfall” and “The Sun Becomes Gradually Obscured,” not a single spoken or sung word indicates the signified scene. And yet, the music presents a narrative built on familiar images and sensations. This breed of music, “program music” as it is sometimes called, requires a realignment of musical meaning; it strays from the non-referential or “absolute” music of the classical composers. In spite of his belief in the inferiority of program music, Burgess, a composer and author, nevertheless ends his essay on an optimistic note: “If literature has done so much for music, it may well be that music can do things for literature which only the musically trained literateur is capable of envisaging.”

Maybe it isn’t surprising, then, that in realizing such a vision, Charles Wyatt, an author and musician, reaches back beyond the Romantics, beyond the champions of program music, to the classical diction of J. S. Bach. Wyatt is the author of two collections of short fiction, Listening to Mozart (1995) and Swan of Tuonela (2006); a novella, Falling Stones: the Spirit Autobiography of S. M. Jones; and three poetry chapbooks. He was also the principal flutist of the Nashville Symphony for twenty-five years. Wyatt’s first full-length poetry collection, Goldberg-Variations, was selected for the Carolina Wren Press Poetry Series by Ravi Shankar and published in 2015. Nearly half of the pages of Goldberg-Variations are allotted to a poem (the book’s title poem) that—according to Wyatt’s endnotes—is “based on the structure of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.”

To get an idea of the extent to which Wyatt’s title poem is “based on” Bach’s Variations (1741), allow me to list a few similarities. Wyatt’s title poem, like Bach’s piece, comprises thirty “variations” bookended by two “arias;” we know this because Wyatt titles the poem’s sections “Aria,” “Variation 1,” and so forth. Wyatt’s poem also includes many of the instructions that indicate form and tempo for individual variations (such as “Canone alla Seconda” and “al tempo di Giga”), as in Bach’s score. There are also, scattered throughout the poem, references to performance aspects of Bach’s piece, like “12/8 in the key of G, twice eight measures” and “hands crossing.” Bach’s Variations were written for harpsichord, and are commonly played on piano; thus Wyatt’s “hands crossing” indicates the left and right hands literally crossing as they traverse the keys.

The parallels between Bach’s piece and Wyatt’s title poem go far beyond those surface gestures. Beyond Wyatt’s direct references to Bach’s piece, however, the relation between poem and musical source is difficult at first glance for musical amateurs (like me) to identify. How, after all, can words—since sound is but one of their secondary qualities—be made to reflect, mimic, or represent the “absolute” musical language of classical composers, for which sound is the only quality? This, I believe, gets at the heart of Charles Wyatt’s self-imposed challenge.

In Goldberg-Variations, Wyatt’s wide-ranging voraciousness of style may be the best evidence of Bach’s influence. Formal innovation allows Wyatt to explore the similarities between musical meaning and lexical meaning. Wyatt does not just describe Bach’s Variations. He also does not just describe or playact the effect of listening to Bach’s Variations; he doesn’t transcribe the pathos of Bach’s music. For the most part, Wyatt’s poetry does not lend itself to rhetorical analysis, is not conventionally narrative, confessional, or lyrical. Nor is Wyatt’s style of lyricism...