âPer metamorfosiâ: Ezra Pound and Early Music

Adrian Paterson

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Chapter 4 âPer metamorfosiâ: Ezra Pound and Early Music

In: 'Make It Old': Retro Forms and Styles in Literature and Music

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Adrian Paterson

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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 60â89

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004516472_005

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Abstract

This essay discovers many of the roots, nature, and effects of Ezra Poundâs radically retrospective aesthetics in his creative collisions with early music. Attention to early music scholarship (there for the first time called âmusicologyâ) and revival of its performance practices enabled Pound to engage with musicâs notation, performance, and curation, resulting in a brand of modernism for which âall ages are contemporaneousâ (1910/2005: vi), and leaving distinctive marks on the centuryâs totemic poem The Cantos. Examples of retrospective aesthetics might be found throughout Poundâs work, by no means all directly involving music, but much of Poundâs poetry and criticism is energized by the intermedial assumptions that early music makes manifest. The essay explores Poundâs insightful re-use of research into troubadour music to evolve his work, examining also his reaction to performance practice as critic, his own efforts at adaptation, his curation of concert programmes in the Italian town of Rapallo, and climaxing with a new contextual examination of the markings of âCanto LXXVâ. In so doing the essay traces a more general progression from nineteenth-century nostalgic retrospection (something Pound inherited and to an extent replayed in archaicized early verses), through early twentieth centuryâs emphasis on restoration and reconstruction, towards modernist recreation and what I term ârejoinderingâ, a craftlike repurposing and reframing of old matter with new purpose, to a degree anticipating postmodernismâs splicing of styles. This was possible at no other time, although early musicâs revival and neoclassical compositions left Pound no purist advocate for authenticity. Instead the words âper metamorfosiâ in the hand of the composer and arranger Gerhart MÃ¼nch on music manuscript paper (reproduced in âCanto LXXVâ) might stand for cultural survival through change even at the height of a European political crisis in which Pound played none too wise a part.

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'Make It Old': Retro Forms and Styles in Literature and Music

Series:Â Word and Music Studies, Volume: 19Â andÂ Word and Music Studies Online, Volume: 19

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004516472

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 15 Jun 2022

Subjects
- Literature and Cultural Studies
  - Literary Relations

Front Matter

Part 1 âMake It Oldâ

Section 1 Historical Retro Forms and Styles

Section 2 Retro in Contemporary Opera

Section 3 Retro in Contemporary Popular Music

Part 2 Word and Music Studies: Surveying the Field

Back Matter

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Chapter 4 âPer metamorfosiâ: Ezra Pound and Early Music

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'Make It Old': Retro Forms and Styles in Literature and Music

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Chapter 4 âPer metamorfosiâ: Ezra Pound and Early Music