All,
Just to pulverise further the few remaining smithereens of certitude and
conviction surrounding this fascinating debate, I think this thing about
'susceptibility to being sung' is arguably a bit tense.
I don't want to make the obvious point about cultural relativity, because it's
not quite the *right* point. But there is something here about idiom (or, in a
particular sense, idiolect), and the relationships between affectivity and
competence. It's a rather complex set of interdependencies that makes a line,
or a unit, 'susceptible' to being sung - it doesn't exclude social and class
issues, it's inflected very much by expectation, and above all it's not
diachronically stable. By -- any -- means.
I won't unfold this too extravagantly, because it's apt to take us off topic.
But it's worth thinking, perhaps, about the earlier, less depressing, parts of
Mike Nyman's oeuvre. He sets - for example - Mark Rylance's exceedingly
complicated libretto to his chamber opera 'The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A
Hat' in a way that liberates the rhythmic cross-patternings of that text (at a
quite minute level) without imposing or projecting onto it or finding a
through-pushing denominative cipher for it. So a line like:
'And there's no need to do the rest
I'll get the icosahedron as well'
is realised as if it were a natural, yielding lyric, which I'd say it doesn't
look much like on paper.
Compare that with his settings of the Ariel lyrics for 'Prospero's Books',
which makes them sound like the instructions for assembling a Japanese home
barbecue, mostly.
I'm prepared (with no more than a nod towards being convincing) to suppose
that, on both counts, this is tactical on Nyman's part.
Of course in both these cases the texts were *written* to be sung - but I'd
guess that that would probably imply a close engagement with the idea of
susceptibility even if Rylance, perhaps, was aiming to be antagonistic and
this was something that he and Nyman cooked up between them, the imps.
I find it hard to close off 'susceptibility to being sung' from the impulse to
sing, which is again very various - but perhaps others would more happily work
with a breach.
Does this help? It's more or less intended to, honest.
:Cx
--------------------------------------
Chris Goode
Director, _signal to noise_
24 Newport Road
London E10 6PJ
UK
+44 181 556 4492
[log in to unmask]
____________________________________________________________________
Get free email and a permanent address at http://www.netaddress.com/?N=1
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|