POETRY AND MUSIC

by Dr. Roger Miller, Professor Emeritus, University of Utah

This concert focuses on the “marriage” of text and music. For composers to integrate the words of great poets and musical sounds is often a tricky business, but the skilled composer allows poetry to mold musical thought and the creations of both the writer and the musician become one.  — Becky Durham

POETRY & MUSIC – ONE AND THE SAME?

By definition, poetry is music.  In former times all poetry was sung. Our word “lyric” (which can refer either to “words for a song” or to any verbal or musical expression that is essentially melodic) comes from the Greek word “lyre”– the small, harp-like instrument used by ancient poets to accompany their songs. The notion of reading a poem silently to oneself would have been totally foreign to the Greek (or any other ancient) mind. Sound, itself, was an essential component.  And without musical  sound, mere words would have had no effect.  Consider young David, singing and playing his harp to console Israel’s distraught King Saul.

The artificial separation of these two ancient art forms is a fairly recent phenomenon. Even as late as the Renaissance, the bards would have sung their poems, although by the time of Dante (13th century) the modern concept of poetry had emerged.  The great French poet of the late 19th century, Stéphane Mallarmé, likened intellect and feeling to the complementary facets of a crystal, each sparkling with scintillating light, reflecting and magnifying the light of the other.  He, like many other poets, lamented what poetry had lost when its customary connection with music was severed.  By clever spacing of the words on the written page, he tried to regain for poetry what is so wonderfully easy in music: the simultaneous presentation of different ideas — what musicians call polyphony.  And he also sought to imbue each carefully chosen word with multiple meanings that would resonate across the entire poem, like the themes of a symphony.

Many composers have pondered the philosophical dilemma presented in trying to set poetry to music.  Pierre Boulez, one of the most important voices in contemporary music, put it this way:  Every setting of a poem to music is–let us admit it–a destruction of the poem.  A poem has its own music, its own meter and rhythm, pitch and inflection, word sounds, consonance and dissonance, and formal structure. And music, as such, has its own ways, which are often in conflict with those of the poem.

EMERGENCE OF A COMMON ESSENCE

Why, then, do composers insist on setting poetry to music? According to Boulez, the composer has two choices: He can either “interpret” the poem by imbedding it in a covering of (usually) beautiful sound, seeking in some way to extend or color the poem’s “meaning” with his own emotional and/or intellectual garb.  Or, he can in effect “mine” the poem for its structural elements, sonorities, arithmetic properties, letter shapes, and similar esoteric elements, leaving the poem’s “meaning” for the most part unexamined. In either case, the poem will not survive, except as a source of “irrigation” for the composer’s musical idea. “Let’s be candid,” Boulez suggests: “If you want to enjoy the poem as a poem, the best solution is to read it.”

But another case can be made.  Often, a musical idea will cry out for words to give it fuller expression, or, from the opposite direction, a poem will inspire a musical idea in the composer’s mind.  Many a composition has found its poetic interpretation as an afterthought, when the composer or critic tries to explain in verbal terms what the music was “about.”  The need to do so grows out of our need to understand or explain that marvelous, ineffable quality that makes music unique.  As an unknown poet aptly said, “Music is the soul’s own speech.”

To return to Mallarmé’s thought, the combining of intellect with feeling is what poetry is all about.  Henry David Thoreau put it this way:  “A perfectly healthy sentence, it is true, is extremely rare. For the most part we miss the hue and fragrance of the thought; as if we could be satisfied with the dews of the morning or evening without their colors, or the heavens without their azure.”  Music provides the “hue and fragrance,” the dew-like sparkle, the infinite azure palate — whether it be the intellectually-colored word music of a poem or the ineffable sonorities of speechless music.

Art, as the philosopher Suzanne Langer discovered, is the direct physical analog of human emotion, regardless of the medium.  That, more than anything, explains what makes the marriage of word and music possible.  It is not individual essences in the two forms that the composer seeks to unite, but the common essence that emerges when the marriage forms an inseparable amalgam of the two.

Watch for Part 2 in a few days…