That curiously surreptitious I has been glancing sideways of late at this
musical thread, which seems not only interesting but potentially, nay,
better still, if not as well as, totally engaging, and he's discovered that
someone has to mention that curiously more than short and very compact text
'neither' by one Samuel Beckett, apparently set to music as an opera by one
Morton Feldman! No? My own experience re writing for music is mostly limited
to incidental theatre and tv, but the only time I wrote a libretto for
opera, the libretto came very much first and more or less the only truck I
had with the composer during her time of creating the music was responding
to the odd email asking if I could add or delete a syllable here or there!
Best
Árni
--
Árni Ibsen
Stekkjarkinn 19,
220 Hafnarfjördur,
Iceland
tel.: +354-555-3991
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://www.centrum.is/~aibsen/
on 12/6/03 10:54 PM, Alison Croggon at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Mark, I think we're actually talking about two very different things,
> and rather confusedly: firstly the question of what happens when a
> composer sets a text to music, and secondly, what is the difference
> and possible crossover between the processes of composing music or
> writing a poem. Setting words to music is one thing, and an
> interesting question, but in what I was attempting, however murkily,
> to explore it's an issue which fudges the question really. The
> question was whether it is possible to use musical structures in
> poetry with any real degree of accuracy, and my doubt whether it is.
>
> I was saying the similarities always end up being metaphorical,
> because to my mind music and poetry are crucially different
> processes. Composers never have to think about, or reject, the
> "meanings" of the notes they use; musical notes or sounds do not have
> semantic meanings. Poets always do, even if they decide to emphasise
> the sonic qualities of the language to the extent that the meanings
> and syntax begin to disintegrate. I think this makes a great deal
> of difference in approaching the different arts, it is for example
> why there is that truism that all arts aspire to the state of music,
> because it can attain a kind of purity, unlike words, which are
> always embedded in the tangles of their every day meanings, the mess
> and murk of their usages. And then there's that whole debate - can
> music truly be moral? or is it just a fantasy in the ear of the
> listener? (all those debates about Schostakovitch, for instance).
> Can you assign an ideology to a musical structure, if there are no
> words in it?
>
> Best
>
> A
>
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