The book you have in your hands or on your screen, dear reader, is the first book ever published that calls itself a handbook of Word and Music Studies. However, it is not the first book suited to serve as a guide, or an introduction, to the academic field as it has developed over recent years; nor, being concise, is it the most wide-ranging. Those honours both belong to The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music, edited by Delia da Sousa Correa, and published in 2020.
One might object that, being restricted to literature and music, the Edinburgh Companion leaves out a significant proportion of the traditional corpus of Word and Music Studies, which includes “ / verbal texts”, such as, most notably, film. This is true. Still, as we saw in Chapter 2, in practice, the relationship specifically between literature and music has always been at the heart of the work of the Word and Music Association. So we may say that the Edinburgh Companion can, and does, illuminate the discipline’s most central concern.
In one particularly interesting way, the Edinburgh Companion goes further than the WMA itself has generally gone, in investigating that relationship between literature and music. As we have seen, the work of the Word and Music Association has tended to revolve around the relationship between literature and music particularly in the 19th century and after. Parts 4 and 5 of the Edinburgh Companion do indeed cover this field. The first three parts of the Companion, however, concern earlier periods, from the Middle Ages to the 18th century. This is truly ground-breaking. No previous volume, or series, had ever tried to provide such a rich historical survey of literature-music relations in that period, before Romanticism.
Obviously, no one person could have carried out this task. The Companion, over seven hundred pages long, has 62 contributors. At first glance, those contributors generally appear to fit quite naturally into the world of Word and Music Studies as it had been evolving since the founding of the WMA twenty-three years earlier. Many of them, including the book’s editor, Delia da Sousa Correa, have been members of the WMA, attending its conferences and contributing essays to its publications. Indeed, we have already met several of those contributors to the Companion in the present handbook, including, for example, Suzanne Aspden and Stephen Benson, Eric Prieto and Lawrence Kramer, not to mention myself. We find among them a preponderance of professors and lecturers in music and in English literature. The “literature” and the
As a one-volume resource, the volume has a dominant focus on Western music and British literature because it would be impossible, within the space of a single book, adequately to account for the breadth of current work in world literature and international music. (6)
Certainly; choices must be made. Still, it is legitimate to look for the motives behind them. Notably, as such choices are made, a strategic decision has always to be taken: should the survey, the Companion, aim to replicate the balance of the academic field as it generally considers itself at present, or should it be looking to push at the field’s implicit boundaries, in selected locations? As I have pointed out, in one respect the Companion does push at the implicit previous boundaries of Word and Music Studies, in that it places at least as much emphasis on the period before 1800, as on the period after. It does not, on the other hand, contest those boundaries geographically. And nor does it contest them very forcefully in the gender of the writers, but above all of the composers, that we find surveyed.
That is apparent at the outset from the table of contents. The chapter titles name about forty male writers and composers, but only five female. Of those five, four are writers, all from the late 18th century or after (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys). Only one is a musician: Emily Tennyson; and even she is not actually named as a female individual, but rather evoked as part of a married couple, in the essay title “The Princess and the Tennysons’ Performance of Childhood”. (The essay is by Ewan Jones and Phyllis Weliver.) This (im)balance is reflected in the volume as a whole. Women composers are rarely mentioned, and even more rarely central to an academic argument; and when they do make an appearance, it is not infrequently in the company of their husbands, as the poet Alfred Tennyson accompanies the composer Emily. Women writers have more of a presence, at least since the 18th century, but still form quite a small minority.
Before I go any further, I must plead guilty in this regard. Four of the forty names of men in those chapter titles (and none of the names of women) are in the titles of pieces written by me.
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Delia da Sousa Correa’s Edinburgh Companion is a splendidly decentralised enterprise, more so than anything the WMA has ever published. Having had the privilege of working with her, I saw at first hand how she proceeded, and how her method was different from that of the editors of WMA volumes. For each part of the field of study, she set out to find people who were experts; then she gave them free rein to write as they thought best, within the stylistic and editorial parameters adopted, from the outset, for the volume. The tight thematic editorial control that the WMA has always exercised over contributions to its volumes of conference proceedings was largely absent. And that can be sensed in the extraordinary diversity of perspectives which gives the volume its richness.
The last dozen years of the 20th century, when Gender and Genius was published and the forefathers of the WMA laid the foundations of our discipline, were also years in which, in Europe as in North America, the presence and influence of women as lecturers and professors in the humanities were expanding decisively. At the same time, not coincidentally, there was a steady decline in the ability of any single idea or theory of literature to control the
Pretty well exactly half of the contributors to the Edinburgh Companion are, like its editor, women. This had never been the case in any of the WMA’s collective volumes up to that date. And while it is true that a solid majority of the writers and composers discussed in the Edinburgh Companion are white males, even in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, nonetheless one may also observe a decisive shift taking place in the framing of those discussions.
From following the sources back and forth, to considering the ideology that makes interpretation and makes it anew, to confronting the alien history that surrounded literature and music as it took flight and migrated to us, the destination of this endlessly engaging discipline is one that asks us to historicise as we confront the peculiar heritage of our thought. (689)
The implications of this sentence, though it seems utterly uncontroversial in the context of the volume, are immense in the context of the history of the discipline. They place the Companion squarely in line of succession from the postmodern current of thinking in Word and Music Studies, which, in Chapter 2, I opposed to the terminological. The destination of the discipline, says Klein, asks us to historicise. He echoes here Ulla-Britta Lagerroth: “Let us historicize” (Lagerroth: 208), she had written in Word and Music Studies: Defining the Field. To historicise, in this sense, is not to write a history. It requires us to consider, to respect, to recognise and to show, always, that every view of the cultural past (however ancient or recent) is conditioned by the ideology of the viewer; “the ideology that makes interpretation and makes it anew”. The primary duty of the academic writer becomes, here, to “confront the peculiar heritage of our
This is not how the terminologically-oriented majority among the forefathers and founding fathers of Word and Music Studies approached such matters. For them, our primary duty was to proceed more as scientists are generally (albeit perhaps incorrectly) thought to proceed: by supposing from the outset that an object of study exists, and that the scientist’s duty is to study it objectively; so that we should not, ideally, need to spend too much time worrying about the ideological bent of the scientist. We should aim, to the extent that we shoulder this duty, to provide steadily greater knowledge of the field, increasing enlightenment, correct terminology, and shared understanding. In Chapter 2, I set out two great enterprises which Word and Music Studies took over from its senior forefathers, Calvin S. Brown and Steven Paul Scher. They were: surveying the field; and arriving at a “clearly defined set of critical terms” which could be shared between all scholars working in the field, terms which would be, not confused or confusing, not vague, not metaphorical and not impressionistic, but rather “terminologically sound and responsibly formulated” (Scher 2004c: 167). These enterprises presuppose that the field itself, the object of study, may be considered to have an existence of its own, outside our peculiar individual minds, thus allowing itself to be surveyed, and the survey shared with others; and that methods of interpretation have a similar objective, impersonal existence, so that they may, indeed should, be shared between scholars in a “clearly defined” way. That valorisation of clear shared definitions, with its concomitant affirmation of the objective clarity of the surveying eye, is precisely what Michael L. Klein’s call will not allow. For him, what is needed first and foremost is a sense of the sheer instability of the apparent object of study. We can never be entirely sure whether it is there to be apprehended, or constituted, really, by us in our act of apprehension.
But, it may be objected, is the Edinburgh Companion not precisely an attempt to survey the field, hence to accomplish that which the WMA had set out to do from the beginning? No, it is not. To begin with, “the field”, as it was defined by the WMA itself when it spoke of “surveying the field” in so many of its conferences and proceedings, was never the relationship between words and music; it was always academic literature concerning that relationship. The Edinburgh Companion has no interest in surveying the academic literature. Its field is literature and music themselves. Furthermore, a survey, as the WMA conceived it, would have comprehensiveness as its utopian aim, and scientific rigour as its ideal. But the Edinburgh Companion has no pretension to either. It knows that it has limits that could perfectly well be construed as biases; and that it is
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“Music and literature have an ancient affinity, indeed a common origin”, writes Delia da Sousa Correa on the first page of the Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music (1). This sounds both familiar and persuasive. However, if one stops to think about it, there is a chronological problem with it. One would not be courting controversy if one asserted that humans alone have literature. No animal species produces anything we might call literary. But music is less exclusively human. Animals have music too, do they not? As we saw in Chapter 1, birds are often said to sing, and other species also produce sounds that have been recognised as musical. So should we not say that music has a different origin from literature? an older, pre-human one?
Hylobates agilis, an ape allied to man. This gibbon has an extremely loud but musical voice. Mr Waterhouse states, “It appeared to me that in ascending and descending the scale, the intervals were always exactly half-tones; and I am sure that the highest note was the exact octave to the lowest. The quality of the notes is very musical; and I do not doubt that a good violinist would be able to give a correct idea of the gibbon’s composition, excepting as regards its loudness.” Mr Waterhouse then gives the notes. (Darwin 2004: 633)
In one of the two chief songs, “the last bar would frequently be prolonged to two or three; and she would sometimes change from C sharp to D, to C natural and D, then warble on these two notes awhile, and wind up with
a quick chirp on C sharp and D. The distinctness between the semitones was very marked, and easily appreciable to a good ear.” Mr Lockwood gives both songs in musical notation; and adds that though this little mouse “had no ear for time, yet she would keep to the key of B (two flats) and strictly in a major key” … “Her clear soft voice falls an octave with all the precision possible; then at the wind up, it rises up again into a very quick trill on C sharp and D.” (634)
What is it that leads Darwin to accept that the sounds made by the gibbon and the mouse are musical? It is pitch intervals. Both can produce octaves, and both structure their vocalising by semitones, exact and distinct. Now, we, from our 21st-century perspective, might consider this ethnocentric. The concept of the semitone as the fundamental building block for music has certainly been dominant in Western music for a few centuries now, but it has also been much contested. There are many musical traditions, many ideas of music, that work with different ways of distinguishing pitch. However, if I have allowed myself to quote Darwin at such length, it is not in order to engage in such a critique. It is because his way of thinking will allow us, now, to understand better a question that I left hanging in Chapter 1.
For Darwin, plainly, music existed long before humanity, whereas poetry did not. Does this render problematic Delia da Sousa Correa’s assertion that music and literature “have […] a common origin”? Before we answer that question, let us reflect on the origin of Darwin’s implicit definition of music. We may discern two fundamental principles behind it. First principle: in music we may perceive sound structured according to arithmetical rules that can be reasonably easily formulated. Second principle: those rules and formulae must be enshrined in a tradition that seems to us immemorial; a tradition that we can inhabit without questioning it, as Darwin does not question the role, in music, of the semitone. What we call poetry depends on rules and conventions that operate in the same way. It would certainly be beyond the scope of this book (though it is a fascinating pursuit) to examine precisely the analogies between the conventions of music, and those that structure traditional poetry. But it is equally certainly within the scope of this book to point out how, thanks to those analogies, the two become entangled as soon as we begin to think back to their origins in human history.
Human song is generally admitted to be the basis or origin of instrumental music. (636)
Charles Darwin, the author of On the Origin of Species, never uses the word “origin” lightly. And he is surely right to say that this is “generally admitted”:
Of course, there is and will always be no historic evidence of the first human singing. Ironically, the oldest evidence of human music that Darwin cites concerns, not song, but instrumental music: the discovery of ancient musical instruments, “flutes […] found in caves together with flint tools and the remains of extinct animals” (Darwin 2004: 636). But if one tries to imagine our remote humanoid ancestors singing as gibbons do, it is difficult not to suppose, somehow, that as they became what we would be happy to call human, their singing developed together with their speech; as they began to speak, their singing began to involve words; and those words, being structured like music, would have resembled what we call poetry. In that sense, human music, human song, and human poetry are necessarily, in our imaginations, coeval.
Poetry, says Darwin, arose “during the earliest ages of which we have any record” (636). And yet he also writes that poetry “may be considered as the offspring of song” (636). It follows that we have no record, Darwin can have had no record, of the time in which poetry was born, as the offspring of song; of the time when song became “human song”. That time is, in fact, our origin. It precedes what we can know in our words, what we can record, what we can think. We cannot imagine it as a moment in our history. If we reach back as far as we can think into the history, the past, the origins of human culture, we come to a point where words and music are tied together in ways that our reasoning cannot untangle. We are constituted by that entanglement as much as it is by us. We are too much part of it to be able to survey it, or to understand it as such. All we can do, if understanding is what we seek, is to examine how, at different times, in different cultural settings, it has appeared to operate.
Word and Music Studies has been evolving, over the past decade, I think, towards this recognition that what it studies is not so much an object, or a field to be surveyed, but rather, an aboriginal, foundational human experience which will always be perceived in different ways as our cultural situations alter. I am here venturing to suggest that this evolution has recently been occurring in solidarity, or at least in tandem, with an increasing involvement of women in the academic field, and an increasing openness to what has become known, of late, in the academy, as “decolonisation”, which implies respect for the
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In 2022, just two years after the Edinburgh Companion, another Companion appeared: The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature. Its principal editor was Rachael Durkin. Working with her on the editorial team were Axel Englund, Katharina Clausius, and myself. On the back cover are endorsements from Michael Halliwell and Delia da Sousa Correa. What a small world, one might well be tempted to exclaim! Michael Halliwell was President of the WMA when the Routledge Companion was published. Axel Englund has since succeeded him in that role. I had been a WMA stalwart for decades. Delia da Sousa Correa, also a WMA stalwart, was, of course, the editor of the Edinburgh Companion. The title of the Routledge Companion itself might seem to make it a mere subset of what that Edinburgh Companion had been working towards. Indeed, the Routledge Companion might be seen as limiting itself to something more like the WMA’s traditional corpus, by focusing on the modern period, to the exclusion of older literature. And yet on closer inspection, The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature reveals many signs that the increasing openness of which I have been writing, the decolonising impulse, was exercising its influence even on the corpus studied; that a different way of envisaging Word and Music Studies was gaining in maturity and confidence.
The topics covered provide immediately obvious signs of decolonisation. There is an essay entitled “Music in Postcolonial Literature”, by Christin Hoene; one on “Black Music and Literature, from Langston Hughes to Morgan Parker”, by Christopher Lloyd, and an enlightening parallel piece by Alexandra Reznik also citing Morgan Parker: “Re-Writing Music Lyrics as Resistant Poetry in Tyehimba Jess’s Olio and Morgan Parker’s There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé”. This shift away from the “white male canon” perspective pairs naturally with a loosening of the focus on “high culture” West European literature and music. Jazz and blues, Brazilian concrete poetry and Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate, Chinese poetry and Hungarian gypsy music all make their distinctive presences felt. One of the book’s four parts is entirely dedicated to “Popular Music and Literature”. We may see this as beginning the correction of an imbalance which might be observed in the Edinburgh Companion as in the publications of the WMA. Heteronormativity is another frequently dominant character trait of the traditional Word and Music Studies canon which is here subject to a correction of the imbalance. Zsolt Bojti’s essay “‘This is the Music Which Makes
And what of the gender balance? Exactly half of the contributors (and half of the editors) are women. Of the subjects of study, most continue to be men, especially in the earlier part of the period studied (which extends from the early 19th century to the present day). But there is a new focus on gender relations and how they relate to aesthetic values. Nina Rolland’s essay “Music and Gender Roles in Hector Berlioz’s Euphonia and George Sand’s Le Dernier Amour” exposes troubling complicities between gender-based violence and control of artistic form. An eye-opening parallel perspective is provided by Ryan Weber’s “Music, Literature, and the Aesthetics of Eugenics”. Weber tells the tale of how in the USA, in the early part of the 20th century, high art music in the European tradition was effectively branded both as distinctively white and as essentially superior, consigning the music of other “races” to perpetual and natural inferiority, along with the peoples responsible for that music. As we read Weber’s essay alongside Rolland’s, we sense how gender politics and racial politics can work in similar ways, to affirm the naturally dominant position of the white male genius; and also, how that sense of natural dominance can be effectively challenged. As Reznik reminds us, intersectionality (the term was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw half a dozen years before the founding of the WMA) “frames interlocking forces of oppression, particularly sexism and racism to bring in to focus paths for empowerment” (Reznik: 55).
There is a well-known sense in which the art of modernity seems to turn its back on life, as it heads into abstraction; and yet, at the same time, we find music and literature together snagging the societal issues most pertinent today, ranging from misogyny to queerness, from racial inequality to the claimed universality of whiteness. What many of our authors have identified is that the intermedial Voice amplifies issues of discrimination, and in the wake of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, this is how it deserves to be heard. Not as the fading sound of an elite pursuit, but as the cry of the other. (3)
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I have spent much of this chapter on The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Music and The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature because they provide enlightening evidence of the ways in which Word and Music Studies is evolving: more openness to perspectives from previously marginalised voices, a different editorial approach, and a new kind of teamwork, with a noticeably higher proportion of women taking leading roles. There are several other books I could have cited which show these tendencies in action. Perhaps the earliest is Phrase and Subject: Studies in Literature and Music, published in 2004, and edited by Delia da Sousa Correa. (It should be said that together with Robert Samuels, her colleague at the Open University, who worked with her on the project that led to Phrase and Subject, Delia da Sousa Correa has been for more than two decades the prime mover in encouraging the development of Word and Music Studies in England, with taught courses as well as conferences and study days.) Nine years later, Phyllis Weliver and Katharine Ellis co-edited Words and Notes in the Long Nineteenth Century. As its title suggests, it can be seen in many ways as a predecessor of the Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature. Two thirds of its contributors are women; a solid majority of the authors and composers studied are men. It begins with an essay on “Approaches to Word-Music Studies of the Long Nineteenth Century” which gives an excellent brief history of the discipline to about 2010, citing Scher and Prieto much as my own account has done, and giving a more precise musicological context for that history than I have provided. Each of these books (and there are more comparable volumes on the way) has its own distinctive centre of gravity; but all contribute to that opening out of the discipline that I have been observing.
It is worth noting that all these books continue to acknowledge the central place of the 19th-century white male canon in understanding how words and music work together, for us, today. I note, as a symptom of this, that every single one of the books on Word and Music Studies that I have discussed in this chapter, from Phrase and Subject to the Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature, cites the French poet Charles Baudelaire. Why this omnipresence? The answer is provided with some clarity, and with
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The Baudelaire Song Project was created, and has been led throughout, by Helen Abbott, who at the time of writing is Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Birmingham. It was funded from 2015 to 2019 by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council. Its core aim, from the outset, was to produce not academic books (though they were also planned, and have been published, notably by Helen Abbott and by her team-mate Caroline Ardrey), but rather, a web site with a dataset, and to provide a lasting on-line resource. It centred on a brilliantly simple concrete objective: to bring together, in a form that would allow academic scrutiny, all the songs that have been composed setting to music the poetry of Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867).
What fundamentally distinguishes the Baudelaire Song Project, in its most basic research aim, from anything that has ever been organised by the WMA, is this. Its primary ambition is to create a resource for others to work with. It makes no claim to survey or prescribe any academic approach to its material. The collaborators on the project suggest approaches, certainly, and try them out in their books and articles; but the project database is a magnificently open-ended and decentralised invitation to try any and every approach to the question of what links music and poetry.
Of course, any such project encounters limits, and difficulties in defining and policing its own borders. It can never be complete. The Baudelaire Song Project does not claim, for example, to cover all the languages into which Baudelaire’s poetry has been set to song in translation. Translation remains a complex issue, as does adaptation. But let us not be put off by the fuzzy margins, troubling though they may be. The project has succeeded magnificently in putting together, and making accessible, a vast corpus of songs in an equally vast range of musical styles. Of course, European art song is there; Baudelaire’s verse was set, rarely during his lifetime but often in the following decades of the 19th century as in the 20th century, by many composers who have remained famous, including Duparc and Debussy. From the beginning, too, there were settings created for more popular audiences. Helen Abbott provides particularly intriguing analyses of the context and reception of the settings by Maurice Rollinat, which he performed in the Chat Noir cabaret in Montmartre. But that was only the beginning of an astonishing proliferation.
You will easily find the Baudelaire Song Project dataset on line by googling. At the time of writing, it includes 1,762 songs setting Baudelaire’s poems. Of
Baudelaire was a white male author born into a privileged and cultured social class. His writing takes its starting point from within the high-art culture proper to that class. But his poetry does not simply give voice to the privilege of those origins. It is, to some extent from the outset and ever increasingly, a poetry of disposession, of loss, of the need to be elsewhere, out of the world in which one finds oneself imprisoned. It is also a unique and obsessive assertion of the lessons of dispossession.
His poem “Le Cygne” (“The Swan”) is a hymn to the dispossessed. It begins with the poet thinking of the Trojan princess Andromache; not in her days of princely glory, but long after her homeland and family have been utterly destroyed by war. Her beloved husband has been slain. She has been forced to wed his slayer. She has to live in exile. Baudelaire then evokes a swan (the poem’s title character) lost in urban streets, desperate for water, after escaping from a menagerie. We meet a Black woman removed from her magnificent native country and made to live in servitude, in dank muddy Paris. As the poem progresses, more and more disposessed characters appear, and they become steadily vaguer and more universal. Skinny orphans pass before our eyes; then the poem ends thus:
Baudelaire had started with a famous figure from the great literary tradition, the widow of Hector of Troy. By the end of the poem, the list of the exiled, after having taken us through the most unliterary of the dispossessed, trails off into anonymity. Who are these “many others”? What is the content of the old Memory that sounds, in the forest of his exile?
Baudelaire’s French hints at a constant characteristic of the source of that music. The French word for horn, “cor”, sounds exactly like the word for “body”, “corps”; and the word used here for its sounding, “souffle”, refers not only to the sound of the horn, but also to breath, to breathing. So if one hears the line of poetry, rather than reading it from the page, one might perfectly well hear, not “An old Memory sounds with all the breath of the horn!”, but rather: “An old Memory sounds with all the breath of the body!” – and the French would suggest: “all the breath of my body”. Let us not forget the lesson we learned from Miss Honey and Matilda: great Romantic poetry has a special force, it is music, when spoken aloud and heard as sound. Poetry as music reaches us as sound, as something pre-verbal, pre-nominal, in and from our very bodies.
Let us remember, too, what Lawrence Kramer wrote, in Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge: “Music, like woman, is the bearer of a lack that threatens and articulates the identity of the normative masculine subject” (Kramer 1995: 52). Baudelaire, in this swan song (it was one of his last verse poems), is opening his ears to that lack, but not to defend his masculine identity against the threat it poses. On the contrary. He hears articulated in the wordless voices of the exiled Andromache, of the transported Black woman, and of the horn, the lack that both founds and threatens the normative masculine subject; and he embraces the threat with all the force of his poetry, as he embraces, in thought, all those whom masculine normative subjectivity, or, to be more blunt, patriarchal power, has cast out.
Baudelaire’s poem, beautifully versified, is as powerful as any within its tradition. And yet it invites us to lose faith with the traditional source of that power, which is in the meaningful words of the patriarchy, as they might be written down and read, disembodied, from the page. Powerful men, in Baudelaire’s poetry, are cruel speaking oppressors. The oppressed, the unvoiced, those who hear without speaking, who weep, sing, or are silent, are those who invite our sympathy. The most powerful masculine figure of all, the Christian
In 2015, just as the Baudelaire Song Project was getting under way, Helen Abbott published an article entitled “Baudelaire and Electronica: Strange Voices and Ruth White’s 1960s Experimentations”. Its main focus is on the American composer Ruth White, who had issued in 1969 a vinyl record entitled Flowers of Evil; that title being White’s translation of the title of Baudelaire’s volume of verse, Les Fleurs du Mal.
Helen Abbott also writes, in her article, about two other female composers who issued LP s of musical works using poems by Baudelaire: Miriam Gideon in 1963, Diamanda Galás in 1982. The “Strange Voices” that Abbott invites us to hear are, all three, women’s voices. Their three LP s are very different from each other. However, there is one poem that figures in all three LP s. It is “Les litanies de Satan” (“The Litanies of Satan”). It is a prayer addressed to the Devil. It is particularly interesting and intriguing that all three women use this text because it is, Abbott tells us, one that had almost never been previously set to music. What might explain this apparent attraction of these 20th-century women composers to the Baudelairean satanic?
Abbott describes Ruth White’s Flowers of Evil carefully and evocatively. As she does so, she avoids characterising its genre. She never calls it song, though she did include it in the Baudelaire Song Project database; and one can see why. In a song, we expect to hear the words of the poem. We also, generally, expect there to be some kind of matching of the poem to the music. Neither applies in Ruth White’s work.
White gives us, not Baudelaire’s French, but her own prose translations, spoken rather than sung. Not infrequently, the voice (White’s own) is artfully distorted to the point where one cannot distinguish the words at all, or at best one struggles to hear them. The voice track is accompanied by a startling variety of sounds, some traditionally musical (including a macabre waltz), some definitely not musical in any traditional sense, all produced, unmistakeably, by a synthesizer – in fact, a Moog – and by more or less distorted recordings of non-musical sounds, such as rain and wind. The borderline between the two is not always obvious; is that a real cat’s miaow we hear in “The Cat”, or a synthesizer’s version of one? Sometimes it is voiceless sounds that dominate, sometimes it is the voice pronouncing the words. But the two never work together as in traditional songs. We never hear music accompanying words, or words set to music.
Certainly, there is plenty of avant-garde music from the middle of the 20th century, in many styles, by composers from Stravinsky to Boulez and
White appropriates Baudelaire and re-voices him. And yet there is no sense that White is in any way working against Baudelaire. Rather, she is subjecting his poetry to a process that it itself seems to invite. Never trust a man who sets himself up in a position of authority, it seems to say. We are better advised to listen to an owl (in the poem “Owls”), a cat (“The Cat”), or the wind and rain (“Mists and Rains”); they may tell us the truth, or comfort us; but no man with a comfortable situation in the patriarchy will do either. What of Baudelaire’s own voice, we might ask? Is it not that of a patriarchal man? No; at least, not simply, not as Ruth White hears and transmits it. To begin with, we never hear his voice. At no point in any of the poems chosen by Ruth White is there any direct speech which we can take as in the voice of Charles Baudelaire. It is Ruth White’s voice that we hear, clearly in control. She determines what we hear of Baudelaire, and how.
The conclusion of her Flowers of Evil is very different from that of his Fleurs du Mal. The last poem on White’s CD, and the longest track, is “Litanies of Satan”. After the whole poem has been performed, we hear repeated, with absolute clarity, seven words, taken from the beginning of the poem’s final part: “praise to you, Satan; praise to you”. These are the last words we hear. They are followed by a rather terrifying musical play-out which sounds like fairground music from a horror movie synthesized by a crazy genius isolated in an underground bunker full of weird 1960s music machines.
Why does White end her words with praise of Satan? Doubtless, we may think, because of the way they echo the title of the album, and of Baudelaire’s book: Flowers of Evil. But we can be more specific. This is not evil conceived of as the opposite of good. Rather, it is evil as the rejection of the patriarchal world order. Baudelaire’s Satan is the “adoptive father of those whom, in his black rage, God the Father drove from the earthly paradise” (White’s translation). Satan is not our natural father. But we adopt him because he, like us, has been driven out of paradise by our original father. It is our choice.
Clearly, it is not a comfortable choice. Amongst those (relatively few) who have listened to White’s music, there is a consensus that it is quite terrifying, as well as obsessive. It is also, undeniably, highly original and equally highly eccentric. It belongs to no one tradition. When the words of the poet are heard as an invitation, from within the patriarchy, to revolt against the patriarchy, that invites a challenge to our ideas of what constitutes music. Ruth White
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Towards the beginning of the first chapter of this book, I offered a scene of “great romantic poetry”, originally by a man, being performed in the voice of a woman: Miss Honey reciting to Matilda verse by Dylan Thomas. I have been concluding its penultimate chapter with another scene of great romantic poetry, originally by a man, being performed in the voice of a woman: Ruth White’s Flowers of Evil. There are many instructive similarities between the two scenes, which resonate with points of central interest in Word and Music Studies. But there is also a contrast between them; a difference that I am taking as emblematic of two different impulses in Word and Music Studies.
Miss Honey’s deference to the genius of Dylan Thomas is unquestioning. His poetry is music, to her; it needs nothing added to it. Ruth White, on the contrary, treats Baudelaire with a total absence of such deference. She does what she likes with his poetry. She translates and re-orders it according to her own taste, for her own voice. If the LP Flowers of Evil is music, it is her music, not his. Perhaps Baudelaire would have received Ruth White’s music as crass noise, not music at all; who can tell? Even today, its status baffles the listener. It does not conform to any traditional formal canon (though it makes use of several). Nor does Baudelaire’s poetry, as transmitted to us by White. It is certainly impossible to say that the poetry by Baudelaire we hear on her LP is music. What her voice conveys to us is a collaboration between the two of them, between Baudelaire and White, but on her terms; a collaboration dedicated to Satan, he who first revolted against the authority of God the Father, and whom we are asked to praise, doubtless, for that revolt, not for his genius, authority, or creations. White, we might say, has followed Satan’s example to revolt similarly against the authority of Baudelaire. And she has found in the poetry of Baudelaire itself the inspiration for her revolt.
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Back in the 1990s, it was, perhaps, still generally the norm to conceive of academic endeavour as the search for an impersonal truth. There was a field to be surveyed, whose contours could be mapped for us by well-informed scholars. There was a terminology to be constructed, which we would all be able to share. It is no coincidence that as a certain kind of initiative in Word and
Like Charles Baudelaire and Ruth White, words and music do not simply agree with or support each other, still less become each other. There are tensions and struggles at work, intersectional ones, across times, across genders, across languages, across cultures, across personal belief systems, across artistic traditions and personal tastes, and most obviously, between media. But it is precisely by listening to and feeling those tensions and struggles that we can sense what remains in common, what lies between them, whether or not it is, as Vaughan Williams would have it, “beyond sense and knowledge”. We have only just begin to realise what truths and what beauties arise from that intermedial point. The interart project, launched two centuries ago, has a 21st century avatar which is just as vital as its Romantic predecessor.
The people who become involved in Word and Music Studies – this is easy enough to observe if one goes to their conferences – all love music passionately. As far as I can tell, every single Word and Music scholar I have quoted in this book plays a musical instrument, or sings. They all, also, love literature, and/or other art forms that work with words. What draws them to our field is no mere scientific curiosity or search for knowledge. It is in the first place their love for the arts involved, and in the second, their desire to understand where that love comes from, and what it is actually for. Whatever the differences between them, and between their academic approaches, they all have this in common: they know that to seek that understanding, they must look, not directly at words, nor directly at music, but at what passes between them. That much has been known, really, for two centuries. What our age, the age of Word and Music Studies, has added is this: what we will hear passing between words and music, we now know, will not be the voice of any established power or principle. It will be, it has to be, the voice of an other.