Cultural Considerations: Essays on Readers, Writers, and Musicians in Postwar America

4. The Composer as a Reader: Poetry, Music, and the Politics of a Neglected Genre

87 4 The Composer as a Reader Poetry, Music, and the Politics of a Neglected Genre What happens when a composer transforms a poem into a piece of music? From the musicologist’s usual angle of vision, the answer is that composers “set texts” by endowing words with notes, rhythm, and phrasing appropriate to (although arguably in tension with) the poet’s language . But what if we applied to the practice of text-setting the concepts that scholars of print culture have made familiar? In that light, composers appear, first, as readers, appropriating and remaking texts in the act of reading; they are also mediators, bridging the gap, as the American musician Ned Rorem has observed, between “private conception and public reception”; as such, they foster the dissemination of texts to new audiences on new terms. Positioning the composer as a reader and a mediator offers additional insight into the way poetry acquires multiple meanings; it illuminates as well how individual poets attain their status within the genre. Especially because it is tied to performance, the practice of turning a poem into a work for solo voice or chorus is also an especially salient example of the social dimension of reading, and a reminder that the politics of culture are always in play.1 Before I demonstrate those propositions, it is worth reviewing two bodies of literature that speak in different ways to the relationship between poetry and music. One is the considerable scholarship on the ancient, fundamental connection between spoken verse and singing. Classicists, literary critics, musicologists, and anthropologists have traced in great detail the interdependent evolution of the two forms of expression, which had been unitary among primitive peoples. The Greeks separated musical and 88 Composers, Conductors & Their Audiences poetic notation after the spread of the alphabet in the fourth and fifth centuries BC. Early Christian hymns and chants displayed new understandings about the power of words to enhance melody by incorporating features such as antiphony and the repetition of parallel phrases. In the late Middle Ages, medievalists have shown, the secular troubadours created rhyme schemes that outstripped in complexity the music that conveyed them; as Alfred Einstein argued, however, the invention of polyphony in the same period subordinated the meaning of the text to distinctively musical sound. The balance in the reciprocal contributions of word and music to the development of both forms continued to shift back and forth. Renaissance composers deepened the imitative technique that has come to be known as “word-painting,” for example, the use of dissonant chords to echo painful emotions, the insertion of cascading notes to represent falling or descent, or the inclusion of a staccato rhythm to signify jumping. (The terms “word-painting” as well as “tone poem” are fascinating insofar as such metaphorical language suggests the need to rely on analogies to arts other than music in order adequately to capture musical effects.) Refinements in “word-painting,” James Anderson Winn has explained, nevertheless depended on rhetorical innovations by poets themselves, such as the use of conflicting images and overlapping voices. Furthermore, the device was controversial: the so-called musical humanists of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries sought—unsuccessfully—to rein in its dramatic potential so as to return music to a subordinate role vis-à-vis speech.2 By the eighteenth century, composers had begun to “paint” moods and emotions more extensively; because of their perception that music permitted greater freedom from fixed meanings and syntactical restrictions, some poets sought to emulate the “passionate self-expression” they associated with musical creation. But, as Winn has observed, the Romantic composers who made the communication of inward feeling their central ambition aspired to achieve the ability of writers to transfix their audiences. Reciprocal influences remained strong in various currents of modernism: the preoccupation of Symbolist poets with sound and simultaneity, the continuation of word-painting alongside atonality in Stravinsky and Schoenberg. The twentieth-century perspectives of cultural critics and philosophers have kept the debates about the entanglement or autonomy of speech and song lively if abstruse. For instance, Roland Barthes’s 1977 lecture on the baritone Charles Panzéra credited music with supplying the erotic dimension that language by itself could not convey.3 A second body of scholarship, mainly produced since the 1980s, consists of attempts to specify the relationship between words and music through 89 The Composer as a Reader the analysis of particular texts and compositions. Literary critics...