[Dixielandjazz] Ezra Pound's Music

[Stephen Barbone]

Hi List Mates:

NOT OKOM, HOWEVER, a very good read for those whose musical tastes are a
little broader than Dixieland. One can draw several, analogies here
relating to Art & Music, Creativity & Madness, Poetry & Jazz, Avant
Garde music etc.

Cheers,
Steve

July 27, 2003 - New York Times

Ezra Pound, Musical Crackpot

By RICHARD TARUSKIN

       According to an old and highly unreliable story, Pablo Picasso
gave a few poems he had written to Gertrude Stein for comment. In the
middle
       of the night, he was roused violently from sleep. It was Miss
Stein, shaking him furiously and shouting: "Pablo! Pablo! Get up and
paint!"

There are times when — listening to "Ego Scriptor Cantilenae: The Music
of Ezra Pound," a comprehensive sampling of the poet's little-known
musical output — one wants to shout: "Pound! Pound! Write a poem!" More
often, though, one listens quite fascinated. Much of it is strangely
compelling, if eccentric, stuff.

The career of no other artist, perhaps, so nakedly exposes the fineness
of the line dividing crackpot from genius. Pound's crackpot theories of
social,
racial and economic justice famously landed him in a mental hospital
(the only alternative to prison) after World War II. He loved playing
the fool,
describing his aesthetic theories, the authentic fruit of his genius, in
a semiliterate patois familiar to anyone who has read his letters or
scanned the
titles of his essays (gathered, for example, in a volume called "Guide
to Kulchur"). And those theories drove him to compose music despite a
confessed inability — vouched for by his fellow poets William Carlos
Williams and W. B. Yeats, among others — to carry a tune.

His best music clothed poetry: never his own, but that of the ancient
models on whom he based his revolutionary methods. Pound sought the
means
to "Make It New" (as the title of his testamentary work of theory would
have it) by studying the very old. His main "teachers" included
classical
Greeks and Latins, but especially the early European vernacular poets in
the Romance languages: 11th- and 12th-century troubadours like Arnaut
Daniel and Gaucelm Faidit, who wrote in Provençal; 13th-century French
trouvères like Guillaume le Vinier; and their 14th- and 15th-century
heirs
like Dante, Cavalcanti and Villon. From them he drew the convictions
with which he challenged the romantic (or realist) assumption that
emotion
and form had become virtual opposites. The inevitable results, Pound
insisted, had been amateurism and incompetence and a misguided
directness
of expression that only hindered the cause of poetry.

Pound's musical experiments were a byproduct of his studies in poetic
versification. "The grand bogies for young men who want really to learn
strophe writing" — that is, composition in strict forms — "are Catullus
and Villon," he wrote. "I personally have been reduced to setting them
to
music, as I cannot translate them."

The reason form was so important was that in it lay the "music" of all
poetry, whether actually set to music or not, and in the music lay the
magic (or
as Pound put it, " `the sublime' in the old sense"). "Don't ask me to
explain it," Pound has Cavalcanti imaginarily exclaim about one of the
poems
Pound chose to set. "You've not got to understand it, you've got to
learn the damn thing." The poetry is in the sound aura, not the
semantics. And for
the same reason, Pound insisted that poetry was not "literature" but a
performance art.

"The idea that music and poetry can be separated," he wrote, "is an idea
current in ages of degradation and decadence when both arts are in the
hands of lazy imbeciles." Move over, Mr. Wagner, your successor (in
theory, anyway) has arrived.

Pound's musicking, like Wagner's, mainly took the form of idiosyncratic
operas. The first, after Villon, was finished in 1923 and performed both
in
public and over the radio during Pound's lifetime. Two others, after
Cavalcanti and Catullus, were planned and partly realized. But calling
them
operas was as idiosyncratic as everything else about them. They are
medleys of poems tenuously connected by action, or by mere narration,
based
on events in the lives of the poets. As Margaret Fisher points out in
her notes for the new CD (produced by the San Francisco company Other
Minds, www.otherminds.org), Pound surely got the idea from the song
books, or "chansonniers," in which the troubadour melodies are
inscribed.
The collected works of each poet are accompanied there by his "vida," or
much-embroidered life story.

The situation that motivates "Le Testament de François Villon" of 1923,
Pound's magnum opus, is the poem in which the great poet-highwayman
— penniless, under sentence of death, taking refuge on the lam in the
courtyard of a brothel — sardonically wills his poems to various friends
and
relations, who then appear to sing them. As preface to the medley, Pound
set "Dictes Moy" ("Tell Me"), the most famous lyric of Villon (yes,
"Where are the snows of yesteryear?"), and it can serve here as a
prototype.

The tune is a fairly creditable (if anachronistic) imitation of a
troubadour melody, worked out on a bassoon. It was a genre Pound knew
well enough
both from studying actual chansonniers and from making singing
translations of troubadour verse for a publication by his friend the
pianist
William Morse Rummel, who equipped the tunes with ornate and
conventional accompaniments that turned them into parlor art songs. (A
tune by
Guillaume le Vinier from this collection, shorn of both its
accompaniment and its translation, found its way into the Villon opera,
surrounded by
Pound's imitations, from which it hardly seems to differ in any
significant way.) Pound's own musical project was a revolt against the
kind of
genteel arrangement he had helped Rummel produce.

Instead, he left his tune unharmonized, merely doubling it with
instruments according to theories then rife, now discredited, about
troubadour
practices. But Pound was after far more than historical verisimilitude;
and here the crackpot took over. The accompanying instruments were
deployed almost at random, changing colors phrase by phrase, or even in
midphrase, and sometimes departing unpredictably from the solo line to
make rather senseless harmonies. This much sounds like the kind of
dubious decoration university collegiums and early-music groups used to
apply ad lib. In fact the whole production (replete, when performed in
full, with a plummy-voiced actor to recite the connective tissue) sounds
like
something the Hell Pro Musica might have put on, directed by the shade
of Arnold Dolmetsch, a Pound friend and adviser.

At once more serious and zanier were the rhythms in which Pound cast his
pseudomedieval sung lines. The troubadour originals used a notation
that showed only pitch, not rhythm. That left Pound free to follow his
own dogmatic theories, meticulously setting the poem not as a strophic
song
(the way the troubadours themselves had, as Pound knew perfectly well)
but as a fanatically worked-out, through-composed replica of his own
spoken performance, notated with impossibly finicky meter sequences
(7/16, 25/32, 9/8, 1/4) that his composer friend George Antheil helped
him
capture on paper. This gave his score a forbidding modern-music look
that long kept it from being performed — a modernist triumph. It was
only
after Pound was persuaded to simplify the notation that anyone attempted
it.

But of course the aim of the whole painstakingly artificial enterprise
was to achieve an exact simulacrum of an effortless, "natural" spoken
delivery.
If Thomas Edison was right that genius is 2 percent inspiration and 98
percent perspiration, the line dividing Pound the perspiring genius from

Pound the contented crackpot looks blurrier than ever.

And yet, performed by singers who are knowing enough to know the effect
at which the quixotic rhythms were aiming, Pound's settings can be
somehow superb. Much as I tried to follow the translation of "Dictes
Moy" that came with the CD, my eye kept straying back to the old French
original, which I understood far from perfectly but which nevertheless
spoke to me through Pound with uncanny force.

That went for all the other poems in the Villon "opera" as well: the
80-year-old whore Hëaulmiere's frantic lament over her withered charms
(the
opera's mad scene, if you will, or as Pound called it, "the fireworks");
the poet's mother's appeal to the Virgin Mary for salvation (set
exquisitely by
Debussy, infernally by Pound in a manner that conveys a believer's
fear); the drunkards' prayer ("Père Noé," performed by a raucous chorus
with
amazing turn-on-a-dime precision); and finally, "Frères Humains," the
bone-freezing plea, in weird Martian-medieval barbershop harmony, of a
line
of hanged corpses, Villon among them, for fellow feeling. No doubt about
it: as George Szell once said of Glenn Gould, that nut was a genius.

"Le Testament de Villon" was recorded complete, in 1971, by a cast from
the touring and educational wing of the San Francisco Opera under
Robert Hughes, a Bay Area composer and conductor who has devoted himself
in a major way to unearthing and promoting Pound's musical legacy
and who is the driving force behind the CD as well. That older recording
was issued in 1972 by Fantasy Records, and I wish the performance it
preserved had been reissued in its entirety.

The set of Villon excerpts included here, four drawn from the Fantasy
recording and two from more recent stagings, do not come near to
recreating
its effect. Hëaulmiere's aria, in particular, suffers by comparison. The
performance on the CD comes from a live recording at the York Festival
in
England in 1992. The singer, Anna Myatt, gives a messy, screechy
rendition in miserable French. It may have been exciting to witness, but
it sounds
better suited to agitprop theater — say, Eisler or Brecht — than to the
kind of dignified if harrowing enterprise Pound was trying to foster.
Dorothy
Barnhouse's version in the complete recording had fireworks to spare but
also precision. It's worth seeking out.

The rest of the CD offers seven items from "Cavalcanti," Pound's second
opera, and the one number — an epithalamium or appeal to Hymen, the
wedding god, reconstructed by Mr. Hughes from a sketch — that remains
from the third, "Collis o Heliconii" ("You Who Abide on Mount
Helicon"), after Catullus. They are interesting to hear, and well
performed under Mr. Hughes (mostly from their belated premieres, in 1983
and
2001), but far less affecting than the Villon opera. Pound's inspiration
was running thin. The music was becoming more derivative, even
commonplace — to the point, in one song, of inadvertently cribbing "Joy
to the World," the sort of hackneyed bric-a-brac that clutters
everybody's
musical memory, crackpot and genius alike.

Then there is a raft of unaccompanied items for violin, some of them
collected into a suite called "Fiddle Music," which Pound composed,
mostly in
the 1920's, for the American expatriate violinist Olga Rudge, his
devoted companion. (Rudge was also one of the movers, along with Pound,
of the
Italian Vivaldi revival.) Sounding at times like the violin part from
Stravinsky's "Histoire du Soldat," at other times like ersatz medieval
dances and at
most times like nothing in particular, it is negligible stuff.

Including it is a fine testimonial to the devotion of Mr. Hughes, who
searched for it high and low, and to that of Charles Amirkhanian, the
equally
indefatigable director of Other Minds. It is played with heartfelt
reverence by Nathan Rubin, a beloved Bay Area musician. But if including
it was
the reason the rest of "Le Testament de Villon" got squeezed out, it was
a crime. The Villon opera, and it alone, constitutes Ezra Pound's slim
sound
claim to musical immortality.  

Richard Taruskin teaches music history at the University of California
at Berkeley.