Saintsbury on Shakespeare

 

"The lines rise, fall, sweep, wave, dart straight forward, are arrested in mid-air, insinuate themselves in serpentine fashion as if in sword-play against an invisible adversary."

History of English prosody, vol 2, p. 52. 

Dream of a family

 We were connected somehow to a family with many members. The main father figure had had three wives, and adult offspring of all them were around in a large house where the family gathering took place. These are not people known to me in real life, though a few real life people were in attendance as well.  My knowledge of the family and their relationships was detailed in a way that seems improbable upon waking from the dream. At one point, the patriarch, "John," was wearing a blindfold as I spoke to him.  

My mother was at the party too. I had brought her from afar, and wanted to introduce her, but this did not happen. Later, I learned that she had made plans with others, new found friends from the party.  

Two dreams or one?

Two interconnected dreams. Thomas was explaining to me a book he was writing, debunking several theorists. He was going to do Foucault, but not Derrida, because Derrida was "self-refuting" anyway.  

A woman was teaching me various intricate rhythms.  One was called  be-thalymidian or something and was played using an instrument of the same name of the size and shape of a pencil. I struggled to remember the spelling of the word as I was waking, so I could look it up and see if it was real.  

Somehow, the instruction I was receiving from these two people was mutually complementary. I needed to learn both things at once.  

Orwell's defense of Shakespeare (against Tolstoy)

 Tolstoy says that Shakespeare is a bad writer.  You can't really prove that Shakespeare is good; it would be a waste of time. But Tolstoy cannot prove he is bad either. What you have to say is that readers experience Shakespeare as being excellent, and have for some time.  Withstanding the test of time is evidence of his worth as a writer, according to Orwell.  That seems more substantial than any one person's judgment.  So Orwell takes as the question, not whether Shakespeare is good or not, but why Tolstoy is motivated to argue in this way in the first place.  

The canon can change. Orwell says there could be time when Shakespeare no longer seems like a good writer. I would argue, though, that it will not change by argument or by fiat. Tolstoy's judgment has had absolutely no impact on Shakespeare's reputation, despite Tolstoy's own place in the canon. Even if a few people happen to be convinced by the argument, it still would still be wrong, simply because it flies in the face of the facts of literary history. 

Upper middle bogan

 I was watching this Australian show (title in the title of this post). The idea is two families connected by adoption. The upper middle class people (doctor and architect; doctor is a woman whose birth mother is a drag racer).  One episode in particular is a great lesson on Bourdieux's cultural capital.  

The birth mother gives the doctor a knock-off designer purse. The real one would cost thousands, and this one is 25 or so. The doctor can't be seen with the knock off, so she goes and buys the real one. But she ends up not being able to tell them apart.  Meanwhile, the snooty adoptive mother defends the artistic integrity of one of the sons in the drag racing family, who is being exploited by a shop keeper. She arranges a gallery show for him, even though she despises his cartoonish art. 

Meanwhile, the husband, the architect married to the doctor, finds out that his favorite shirt has become the uniform at the local coffee shop. He gives away all his shirts because he wants a more unique look, opting for a black t-shirt look. The men from the drag racing family rescues his shirts from the donation bin and starts wearing them. The architect notices that all the people at the gallery opening are wearing black t-shirts. The children make fun of their architect father.   

These three plots are woven together in something like 26 minutes.  The tone is comic and good natured. Everyone is allowed to be themselves, with the foibles typical of their class position. The humor comes with the endless friction between two cultures, and doesn't end up mean-spirited.  

Reversal

 Vigilantism is kind of a right-wing trope, as I remember.  It really has nothing to do with sympathy for the victim. After all, a lot of murder victims I'm sure are bad people, like gang members being killed by other criminals. Maybe people Gotti had killed deserved it on some level, because they were brutal mafiosi like him. It is equally against the law to kill a bad person, except in self-defense.  

Why? Because it would be too easy to draw up a list of people to be killed, if the criterion were having sympathy for the victim. I saw an article today about school run the clergy in Ireland, where young boys were abused. Surely, as a gut instinct, we would be in favor of gunning down people who enabled that to happen. If it were a movie, we would be cheering for revenge, and in fact that is the plot of many movies. 

But I think vigilante justice remains a right-wing trope. I know that even when I am participating in it by watching a movie that relies on this trope for its entire plot, its entire emotional appeal.  

Dream of exploding legs

 There was a family we were vaguely associated with who like practical jokes. One was an effect of having their legs seem to explode and startle everyone. No physical harm was associated with this. It was just noise and commotion.  We protested but the explosions continued.  

Dream of Wallace Stevens Convention

 I was at a Wallace Stevens Convention, though Wallace Stevens didn't come up very much. I was in bed with a woman, but it wasn't sexual at all; those were just the sleeping arrangements. We were back to back. She told me about a citation to my book, in a book called Discourses of Modernity or something like that. 

A dream

 I was taking a dog for a walk but without a leash. When another dog approached us, I lifted up ours in my arms and crossed a street. The dog berated me, saying "bad dog, bad dog" and "bad Prince of Hearts!" Apparently "Prince of Hearts" was my name as far at the dog was concerned.  I told someone about this, but was more surprised by my new name than by the fact that the dog could talk.  

Paradox?

 I got an email from someone who's done a project of setting Spanish poetry to music.  It should be exciting to have them come here. But they want to invite themselves here, have us pay $2000 and hotel / flights, and they feature versions of LGM and Fernando Valverde.  We pay our keynote speaker every year $600, someone we invite, not someone inviting themselves.  

So my own prejudice against LGM wins out? It would be an event my students might enjoy, since I am teaching a course on the topic.  But I listened to the singer and I didn't like him, either.  Do I dislike a lot of the cantautores, or a lot of what they do? Indeed.  

Nutcracker

 We went to a concert this evening featuring Ellington / Srayhorn version of the Nutcracker.  I was thinking of Johnny Hodges and Russell Procope, etc...  as the students were reproducing their parts. The young woman playing the clarinet (Procope's parts) was particularly adept. 

I don't like the original Nutcracker that much, because it is overplayed.  Obviously, though, it had to exist first for the jazz version to come about, much later.  

Typos

 Perloff would spell Harry Mathews name as "Matthews" in more than one book of hers.  In one book I referred to A.R. Ammons as "A.A. Ammons." The pattern might be that a writer one has read a little of, but not devoted attention to, might slip through with a mismemorized name. Perloff mentioned Harry's work, but didn't devote a chapter to him ever. Same with me and Ammons. I once wrote "Zukovsky," but not in print. If people told you they didn't like "Ashberry" or "Alan Ginzburg" you knew they hadn't given them a chance. 

We were taught that people who referred to The Wasteland or Finnegan's Wake were unreliable. Those are classic shibboleths, and a little unfair.  

A normal amount of error, then, is to be expected. Most Matthews are Matthews, not Mathews. There are more Matthews than Mayhews, and I've gotten Mathew / Matthews as misspelling or mispronunciation of my name as well. 

Don't say "but..."

I'm sure there are many people who deserve to be murdered, if we wanted to be a society like that. People say, "I disapprove of murder, but ..." [some justification of the murder]. The but takes away the initial statement. It's like saying, "I'm not sexist, but those women, you know..."  

Once you say it's fine to murder the CEO of a health insurance company, then you could murder archbishops who have covered up child sexual abuse. They are also evil. Then you could draw up lists of other names, and categories of people. 

I've been against the death penalty for many years, because the state sanctioning of killing is pernicious in multiple ways, which you probably know about if you have thought about and researched this issue. Random vigilante killing is something that is thankfully quite rare. It is also pernicious. 

Politicians preserve a badly organized health care insurance system. Those who vote for those politicians are to blame for that. So we are collectively to blame. I'm sure I am the part owner of corrupt corporations, as well. 

What if

 What if the course itself were the destination, and not a step toward some published research, indefinitely deferred? There is more that I can do by teaching the material than by publishing small fragments of it here or there, where maybe nobody will pay it much heed. 

Messiah

I'm singing Messiah tonight as part of the fact/staff choir.  It should be a nice concert.  We have a chamber orchestra and soloists from the voice faculty. Yesterday I went to Vespers, an almost 2 hour concert of holiday music.  

Anyway, at rehearsal I was taking conscious note of the fact that strong metrical beats in the text fall on the 1 or the 3 of the musical measures. This is a banal fact of text setting, so well known that few people even take the time to articulate it. I would say this: everyone would notice an instance in which this rule was not followed. It would sound wrong and jarring.  It would, in fact, be like accenting the wrong syllables while speaking.  

"O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion"  That one's in 3/4 time.  The emboldened syllables fall on the 1.   A lot of the libretto is from Isaiah, with a bit of Luke and Malachi thrown in.  The language doesn't have to be metrical: you can just squeeze the unstressed syllables between the strong beat however you want.   Another kind of obvious thing: you don't need a lot of words. The entire libretto is a few pages long, though the piece would last 3 hours (?). (We are only doing part 1). Mostly, we just repeat the lines over and over again.  Vocal music doesn't have to be wordy. **** I was also listening to some social poetry sung by Paco Ibáñez.  "La poesía es un arma cargada de futuro."  Some of it is super awkward to sing.  "Maldigo la poesía concebida como un lujo cultural por los neutrales."  Ouch.  It's bad poetry in the first place, and it also isn't "cantabile."  The songwriter hasn't constructed a very tuneful melody for it, but uses a kind of lilting, up and down, recitative style.  You can sing prose (Isaiah) but not prosaic poetry of this sort. It's the tone, the string of 3 or 4 unaccented syllables that are difficult to cram in between the beats, the passive voice, the crudity of the sentiment, the Marxist jargon.  "I curse poetry conceived of as a cultural luxury by the neutral ones."   *** So the rules of vocal setting so far:  alignment of beats / no enjambment / wordiness is awkward: a little text goes a long way.  Now I realize why I am a bad lyricist:  I was trying to write words to melodies with a lot of notes.

Converging interests / Jeepers creepers

My two main interests are in prosody and in the musical setting of texts.  Actually, these are the same interest, but stretching out with two diverging paths.  

***

Jeeper creepers where'd you get those peepers / jeepers creepers where'd you get those eyes

If you listen to that song you will find beat one of the eight-measure phrase like this:

Jeepers 

creepers 

where'd you get those 

peepers 

Jeepers 

creepers 

where'd you get those 

eyes

But the one can be displaced by a half beat, coming on the AND of ONE.  That's what happens in the third and seven measures here. The singer might also phrase it so that the accent doesn't fall exactly on the one, in the second measure, for example.  

The poetic meter is trochaic: you can see that if you find the secondary stress on the word get.  

Jeepers Creepers (Remastered 1998)

There is no enjambment in song

 I  had a significant idea last night: there is no enjambment in song. 

With the necessary qualifications. In other words, the syntactic phrase does not continue into another musical phrase (in the normal course of events). When it does, I perceive it as a mistake, or as something jarring, at the very least.  See this version of Claudio poems "Siempre será mi amigo..."  He just stops at the end of a line and awkwardly starts again, with no sense of the continuity of the syntax.  "verdadera ... amistad."  True / friendship. In spoken recitation, this would require a very brief pause, if anything.  

So instead of saying "there is no enjambment" you might say, "there shouldn't be enjambment" in song. Of  course, that is assuming one wants a decently defensible prosody in text setting. 

***

On of the most insightful things I've read on musical prosody (the pairing of music and words) is by Sondheim, in the introduction to his collected lyrics. Not because I share his opinions, or even like, particularly, his songs, but because he has worked out a philosophy of what he wants to do, what works and doesn't, with admirable clarity. You can see his perspective immediately, and he speaks authoritatively. It provides a jumping off point for any other ideas one might have. 

Hemingway died when he was 61, I am 64.

 

The song course

 What do I need to do to get ready for this new song course?

First I should write this blog post. This post will show how much work I've done already, even though I feel I'm at the very beginning of the planning process. One thing I did was to make the poster.   

See how many students are enrolled (18!). Some have studied with me in the past.  

Subscribe to Spotify premium.  Create a playlist for the course (empty so far!). I want to make sure the playlist is not too intimidating. Figure out how to search for profiles.  

Check academic calendar:  classes begin Jan. 21. End, May 8.  (Spring break week of March 17.)

Think about guest speakers?  

The overall shape of the course is in my mind, but vaguely.  

Think about musical survey for students:

                      Do you play / sing / read music? (Instruments).  

                       Favorite genres, composers, songwriters, performers. 

                        What else should I ask them?  Open ended question.  

I should create a folder on my desktop of laptop to include everything in the course.  (Done!)  

Found a document I had started a month ago, called "song course plan."

 Background

 

Antecedents:  

French Song  

Folk music movements. 

 

Falla [classical lieder] 

 

Theoretical

Layers of interpretation

Adaptation studies 

Elements of music 

Prosody!  

 

Rubrics

 

             How to listen to a song.  

Rúbrica para escuchar una “canción de autor”

 

La canción es “the sole example of one preexisting art form being imposed upon another. The words of the poem are not adapted, like film scenarios from plays; they remain unaltered while being tampered with” (Ned Rorem, Settling the Score 293). [Not entirely true… you could make a comic book of a poem and keep all the words of the original poem, or use a piece of music as a score for a ballet, without changing anything]. 

 

I. El texto original. ¿De quién es? Analizar el texto como poema. 

 

El poeta / la poeta: resonancia cultural del texto 

Ritmo y versificación / elementos musicales implícitos / explícitos en el texto

 

II. La música. 

 

Estilo y género. Época. Instrumentación. Elementos musicales (rítmicos, melódicos…). Características afectivas (emociones). 

 

III. La relación entre texto y música. 

 

La canción es una interpretación del poema, es decir: nos lleva a percibir el mensaje del poema de un modo determinado. ¿Cuáles son las preguntas que tenemos que formular para juzgar esta interpretación?  

 

1. Emociones de la melodía / instrumentación / ritmo 

 

2. Preeminencia [relativa] de la música y la letra 

 

3. Comparación con otras canciones con letras del mismo poeta. Conexiones reales con el autor original  

 

4. El énfasis en ciertos versos…  

 

5. El contexto de la recepción. El público. 

 

6. Reacciones personales… [me gusta porque /no me gusta porque ]

 

*7. El propósito de la canción. [canción de amor / canción política / homenaje al poeta] 

 

Poets

 

Góngora

Rosalía de Castro

Machado

Lorca

Hernandez

Goytisolo

Valente?

[Neruda?] 

 

Singer-songwriters 

G. Montero

Serrat

Prada

Ibáñez

 

Flamenco 

Camarón

Linares  

Morente

Poveda

Rosalía

 

Projects

 

Songs

Critical essays

Visual projects for those who don't like to write about music.  

Podcast / playlist 

***

What are the basic elements of creating a song from a text? Probably I would say things like this:

An accented syllable will fall on a strong beat in the music (typically).  The song I am listening to at this exact moment has this line:  "I can ONly give you COUNtry walks in SPRINGtime." The capitalized syllables all fall on beat 1.  I bet you can see where the 3 is?  What happens when the metrical accent is displaced?  

This is an obvious example of something everyone knows already even if they don't know they know it. 

What else? Musical phrases are equivalent to lines or stanzas of poetry. There is a general alignment principle.   

  

Dialect coach

Theories of the vernacular won't be written in the vernacular, typically (Dante.) Vernacular and demotic are not words that belong to that category. That is is not even a paradox, however.  To even recognize the vernacular you have to stand outside of that category. I think of The Sopranos and how Gandolfini had a dialect coach, even though he himself was from NJ.