Prieto

 So how do I put together these two things:

a] Lorca is the modern poet (and the Spanish) most often set to music. 

b] Lorca was a poet/musician who formed part, or was associated with, a musical "generation" that renovated and modernized Spanish music. 

First I thought of these as essentially separate things. As researched deepened, I saw b more as more as the cause of a.  

Now I want to look at how many composers of Lorca's own group set his work to music. That is a missing link. At first, I didn't know of much, but more is emerging into view, for example, María Teresa Prieto, a Spanish composer who wrote all her music in Mexico. She is never mentioned as part of the "Generation of 27," but she was part of it later by one degree of separation. 

The thing that comes to play here: Spanish music is not known. Falla overshadows everyone else. Even people who work on Falla hardly mention his disciples.  Orringer, in his book on Lorca and Falla, doesn't bother to mention the musicians of Lorca's own generation. I hardly know them myself. Scores and recorded performances are hard to find. 

A second factor, related to this. The civil war and exile had a disastrous effect on these composers.  

 

New Book Outline

 I've decided to go after short chapters rather than two mega chapters. 

The Musical Afterlife of Federico García Lorca

1. Words and Music

2. Why Lorca?

3. Ancient Songs

4. The French Connection: Germaine Montero

5. Singer-songwriters: The Literary Turn in Popular Music

6. Flamenco Variations

7. Orchestral Elegies

8. Lorca in Miniature: Art Songs

9. The Fortunes of Don Perlimplín 

10, Blood Wedding 

11. Coda: Postmodern Lorca

The Paradox of Narrative Music

 I'm coming across this paradox: works of narrative music, say, that follow the story of a Lorca play, but do so mostly wordlessly. The paradox (if you want to call it that) is that the music itself (often) lacks narrative. In other words, you could play it for someone and they wouldn't be able to tell you what is happening. 

I'm coming across more and more instrumental music, and it is difficult to talk about because you don't have the anchor of the text, as you do with a song setting. Or rather, you do have that anchor, but the listener is not seeing the text.  

It's a bit like Bodas de sangre of Saura, where the only words performed are some of the "arias," if you like; none of the dialogue. Dance, or pantomime, takes the place of dialogue. 

Split

 The classical chapter split into three, one on elegies, another on art songs, and a third on version of Perlimplín. I guess the vernacular section could also split: one on singer-song writers, a second on flamenco, a third on peripheral versions, merging into conclusion on postmodernism? 

Transition

 I can pivot from discussion of Lorca art songs to vernacular Lorca music, because they are all songs with a folkloric bent. A classical singer like María José Montiel can sing Lorca's folksongs along with Montsalvatge, whereas a pop singer can sing those same songs along with settings of other poems. 

Ohana

 Maurice Ohana is interesting. His father was a Sephardic Jew, his mother Spanish. He was born in Casablanca, but gained British citizenship through his father, whose family was from Gibraltar. He knew everyone from Alejo Carpentier and Octavio Paz to La Argentinita and André Gide. He lived mostly in France, and later became a French citizen. He was interested African music (both North African and the Subsaharan).  Like Mompou, he didn't care much for Beethoven, or, in general the Germans. He liked French music, Ravel, Debussy, and Spanish (Falla, Albéniz). You couldn't even make up someone with this background and biographical trajectory. His existence alone justifies my project. 

So there is a musical modernism that stems from everyone except Schoenberg and his school. Debussy, Stravinksy, Falla, Poulenc. It's the French, Russians, and Spanish against the German hegemony in music. Pierre Boulez then imposes that German orthodoxy on French music, with Ohana off to one side with his group, the zodiaque.  {This info comes from the work of Caroline Rae, the main expert on Ohana who is in Wales.  

My rule

 I can't just listen to a piece based on Lorca: I have to listen to several other things by the same composer that aren't related. Otherwise I miss out on who the composer is independently, and also I miss out on my own musical education. 

***

I don't even like other people's work on "words and music."  In my view, most people who write on literature and music are doing it wrong. But 'you're doing it wrong" could be my motto. I have to watch myself because that's my main approach. 

How do I know I'm doing it right? I think about it and come with the best approach. I see what the material I am studying is telling me, and I change course when I realize I am doing it wrong. I discard assumptions that become obstacles to progress. 

***

Listening to "Long Night for 3 Pianos" by Kyle Gann. I discovered this composer through his blog several years ago. It sounds postminimalist and a little new-agey in flavor.  

Schlock

 I still don't like Amancio Prada. The smooth-jazz like sax, the arpeggiation on the piano, the cheesy modulations, the pop drum beats that seem to be out of a box. To me it drags down Lorca to his level, but without really elevating the music itself. It's a kind of middle-brow, conservative approach that makes my skin crawl. I don't have problems with avant-garde music, or late modernist styles.  

%%%%

I listened to some Cristóbal Halffter works yesterday. He cites part of the melody of "Anda Jaleo" in the midst of an otherwise atonal piece.  He is the nephew of Rodolfo and Ernesto, Spanish composers of the group of 8. I have a hard time getting excited about any of them. Just think if Lorca had stayed with music, he'd be a minor student of Manuel de Falla. 

&&&&

Looks like there is a book on Encarnación López, "La Argentinita," out. (published in Sept.). Looking forward to that. She was mainly a dancer, but sung on the record with Lorca playing the piano. Now if someone would just do a bio on Germaine Montero. 

Art songs vs. Orchestral works

Since my goal is to finish the chapter on vernacular styles in January, I have been trying to get a leg up on the previous chapter, on classical versions, in December. Anyway, I have created a little dichotomy in my head. Heavier, works, with more instrumentation, vs. art songs with only piano and voice. These shorter art songs tend to focus on Lorca's childlike sensibility, with a predilection for certain types of poems (the songs for children). Longer orchestral works are more weighty and tend to emphasize death rather than childhood. 

I've discovered who the main expert on Ohana is, and on Nono. This makes it obvious that I could never match the insight of a specialist on these composers. My role is to bring everything together, ranging over wide areas.   

Ohana

 Maurice Ohana was a Sephardic Jew born in Morocco, but considered a French composer. Influenced by cante jondo and writing works based on Lorca and La Celestina, among many other things. He was quite prolific. At one point he was going to be a minor footnote, but he is just too interesting. I've discovered that he wrote an oratorio on Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías in 1950s. I don't know that it is a transcendent work of music, but its very existence moves me greatly. It also makes a good contrast / comparison with Luigi Nono and George Crumb. Also, helps me with my mine thesis that the approach to Lorca most often found is defamiliarization. 

Lorca Cantabile

 Here's my most recent brilliant idea. (or maybe not, just a pipe-dream] A book-length translation, not of a book of Lorca's, but of the words of *all* the Lorca songs I refer to in the book. It could be a companion book, a translation to accompany all the musical analyses. I would include the 13 canciones populares not by Lorca that are always done in conjunction with him, and which don't have good translations into English. And I would translate them in cantabile style, in other words, so that they could be set to music themselves. 

Musical Meaning

I think musical meaning is contextual.  It is meaning for someone particular at a particular time. The meaning of a piece of music is whatever the listener says it is, simplistically speaking. [This is true even if we have an internationalist view of meaning: we still have to posit a listener reconstructing an intention. It still has to be a meaning for someone.] It is pointless to invest too much in one's own interpretations, or to argue that others' interpretations are not valid ones.

The meaning of music directly tied to a literary text will be an extension of the meaning of the text. In other words, since literary meanings are much more directly semantic, they will strongly condition the reception of the musical meaning, providing a set of cues. We can talk about this musical meaning in tension with the meaning of the words of the text, but in that case we will talk about the setting as being inappropriate to the text, not vice-versa.

Bowles

Altogether, Bowles created 150 original musical compositions. In 1943 his zarzuela The Wind Remains, based on a surrealist tragicomedy by Lorca, received its premiere at MOMA in New York, with choreography by Merce Cunningham and Leonard Bernstein conducting. Bowles also composed the music for a ballet based on Verlaine's poem Colloque Sentimental with sets by Salvador Dali. Commented Newsweek: "Paul Bowles's beautiful score was wrecked by Dali's usual outlandish weirdness."

The Untuning of the Sky (1961)

This book by John Hollander, who was also a well-regarded poet back in the day, was one I read and then didn't look at for several decades. It was a dissertation at the U of Indiana. The thesis of the book is this:

"From the canonical Medieval Christian view that all actual human music bears a definite relation to the eternal, abstract (and inaudible) 'music' of universal order, to the completely de-Christianized, use of such notions in late seventeenth-century as decorative metaphor and mere turns of wit, a gradual process of disconnection between abstract musical terminology and concrete practical considerations of actual vocal and instrumental music occurs." (19).

Note the richness and specificity of the thesis. This is something that needs a book to document, not the kind of thesis one would expect in a 6,000 word article. The historical scope is broad, and requires knowledge of intellectual history, British poetry of the periods involved, and music, both in its actual forms and in what Hollander calls the "musical thought" or "ideology."

I recommend, too, another book by JH on The Figure of Echo.


I had remembered this idea in vague terms. What interests me here specifically is the transition from musicality as a profound trope to a weaker one, described as "decorative metaphor and mere turns of wit." Yet with romanticism and symbolism music becomes, again, a deep metaphor, not a decorative one. A retuning of the skies, but without the medieval belief in the literal "music of the spheres"?

Three Musicalities

Three meanings of musicality in relation to poetry:

1) Music is a privileged metaphor for poetry itself. This metaphorical function exists in weak and strong forms. The weak form is mere conventional usage, as in references to singing and song that aren't really meant to suggest anything deeper. The strong form sees more profound connections based on the inner kinship between poetry and music. These connections take varying forms depending on the period, so the Renaissance has the music of the spheres, and the symbolists their synesthesia.  

2) Aside from this metaphorical usage, we find musicality in prosody. All the sound of poetry and its rhythmic structures. This kind of musicality justifies the strong version of the music metaphor. 

3) Finally, musicality refers to the actual connection between music in poetry in their common origins: song itself. Vocal music is the primordial form of music, and sung poetry is the primordial form of poetry. In this conception, song is not a hybrid art at all.  

Which of these aspects is most interesting? I think the merely conventional metaphorical sense is easy to dispense with, if seen as a kind of dead metaphor. Is song in Whitman's "Song of myself" a dead metaphor? We would have to see. I think the strong version of the metaphor is interesting, along with the historical argument from the primacy of song itself. Prosody is interesting too, for some people like me, but it's more interesting to me, right no, to the extent that it connect with musicality (1) and (3).  

[The fourth sense would be what happens when poetry, already existing as such, is set to music, giving rise to a hybrid form... Now we are seeing poetry and music as separate things and seeing what happens when we put them together....].  

Surprise

Lorca's main impact on Flamenco before the late 1970s is attributed to a work that

1) is not by Lorca, in the conventional sense, and

2) has nothing at all to do with flamenco.

I think that is what I love about scholarship. Finding something anomalous and then having to explain it. Of course, once you investigate it, it makes perfect sense. The popularity of the folk songs that Lorca collected, arranged, and recorded persists to this day. They are not flamenco music in their origins, and Lorca is not the composer or author of the verbal texts. But you can simply make them "aflamencadas" by singing them in that style. They are folkloric; they have that existential connection to Lorca; you don't have to write new tunes for them, or approach the dense symbolism of Lorca's own poetry. This is Apocryphal Lorca all over again and I'm loving it.

Poulenc

In keeping with my new habit of going to the music department faculty recitals, I heard the Poulenc violin and piano sonata dedicated to Lorca just now.  I had no idea of the pieces they would be playing, I was just going to a random concert.

I am filled with emotion. although the piece does not enjoy a great reputation, I found it incredibly moving.

I also introduced myself to the violinists and to a few sopranos on the faculty who were in the audience.  Normally, I wouldn't talk to anyone, but I figured what the hell.

Romancero gitano by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco

There's an Italian composer who did a lot of Hollywood movies too. Anyway, he has a work called "Romancero gitano," some choral settings of songs by Lorca, with guitar accompaniment.  You would think that he would have used this title for settings of poems from Lorca's book of the same name. But no.

They are from a different Lorca book, Poema del cante condo. It's a little odd. It would be like setting Frost's poems from North of Boston and calling your work A Boy's Will. Why would you do that?  It's not explicable as a mistake, even. If you're working a long time on some poems, you know what they are, what book they are from. I'll let you know if I find out why he decided to give it that title.

I'm not crazy about the work anyway, and it probably won't make it into my book, except as a brief mention.

7 reasons why

I identified about 7 reasons why Lorca is set to music a lot. Then I write them down, and started to work on paragraphs for each of these reasons. I wrote a lot that day. The material almost organized itself. All of a sudden I have 2000 words in that chapter instead of 800.

If you can write a good list of things, that is always good. But the thing to do is to make an argument out of that list.

The Turns

We have the cultural turn, the pictorial (visual) turn, the linguistic turn, the spatial turn, the temporal turn, the historical turn, what else?

I am not the first to use the term "literary turn," I see, though I use it differently than others have.  

This is apparently an attractive notion, an attractive "snow clone." :"the x turn in y," where x is an adjective and y is the name of a field or set of fields. The idea that a field or discipline or a huge cross section of disciplines [all the social sciences or humanities] experiences a shift by turning in a particular direction. Hey, everything is language now!  We should historicize everything. Let's look at things culturally, or spatially, or visually, now. In some sense, all the turns cancel one another out, or somewhat duplicate one another at times. We could argue that a lot of them have been hugely productive. Without turns, we would be stuck in the the same paradigms.  

There could be a poetic turn, and I just found something on jstor with that title. There hasn't been a musical turn yet, as far as I can tell. In other words, music is never the paradigm that we can apply to other disciplines.  What about an "aural turn" or "sonic turn"?