Words for Music, Perhaps
Angus Fletcher · The Hopkins review/Hopkins review · 2008
Words for Music, Perhaps Angus Fletcher (bio) For John Hollander Over the millenia since ancient Pythagoreans imagined the music of the spheres—these being the greatest of all instruments —aesthetic philosophers and acoustic scientists have debated the idea of raw musical power, while music critics in our day still encounter this mystery when they write about concerts and styles of performance. If music means something, perhaps only figurally through the sonic metaphors described by John Hollander in his classic study, The Untuning of the Sky, then one wonders whether words have the power to define the essence of musical meaning, since on a strictly literal view music has no meaning at all, unless we were to say that it has too much meaning, an excess that requires interpretation through performance. This skepticism is at first sight compelling, but it assumes that, understood “in depth,” music utters the preliterate Voice of Nature. Leo Tolstoy, we shall see, seems to have thought so, and as a result he blamed musical art for exploiting a primordial, contagious emotion. For him music was a threatening, even immoral, song of the earth. Melody indeed works an irresistible natural magic upon the listener, and percussion likewise, building musical shapes from within the human body or within the body of an instrument; originating from such embodiment, sounds move outwards into a surrounding space, creating an auditory surround. As perhaps the essential instrument, the vocal cords initiate a process of projection, from inner to outer, to be followed in due course by a rebound as our ears draw these sounds back into our bodies, to live a second time. [End Page 559] Music is, in many respects, the archetypal model for the surrounding human environment, whose order too often fatefully reduces to noise. As many have thought, music may issue from sublimated desire, a dynamic so strong that the highly formalized unreason of song makes verification and contradiction an irrelevant exercise. When the beat propels dancing, although dance has appeared a model of social order, we yet discover a primitive energy in that dynamism of embodied movement. Music may possess mathematical order in its harmonies, but physically it leaves its own system behind in the rush of an exceptionally strong emotional force, with its alternation of inward and outward flow. An alliance with ordinary language might seem basic to this power. In his Essays on Music Alfred Einstein, the eminent musicologist not to be confused with another musician, the rather more eminent Albert, found nevertheless that word and musical tone comprise a somewhat troubled pair. Einstein thought that word and music together make an “impure” combination. “While the starkest expression of pure emotion is found in the wails of mourning of primitive peoples, the meaningful word weakens rather than strengthens such pure expression, since convention tends to attenuate it.” Certain basic musical inflections seem, however, to be linked to speech itself. Einstein continued: “On the other hand, the most abstract speech is unthinkable without the concrete utterance, the tone of voice, the various inflections—in short, without a rhythmic and melodic flow.” The writer writing about musicians and music joins in a rather complicated history, and we do well to remember its alliances, the alliances Hollander early and late has discussed in his critical writings on poetic “resonance” and imaginatively in poems like Powers of Thirteen, where each sonnet in the sequence plays on its musico-mathematical numerology of form. My essay is not primarily about such a blending or merging of word and tone, so much as it concerns the use of words to describe any particular music; nevertheless, this discursive issue is closely related to the nature of song in the usual sense, on which a few preliminary comments are [End Page 560] needed. Down through the ages poets have exploited an easy lyric mixture of song and speech, and it would be a long time before this traditional fusion gave way to a more purified separation of word and tone. The invention of polyphony in the Middle Ages undermined any clear and distinct semantic line of verbal meaning, and this obscuration of clear sentences and phrases reached a high point only in the late Renaissance...