Noticing how everyone wants to comment on the Goldsmith post, while no one could be bothered with all this blather about text and music. Here's a foil for both.
Someone, maybe my brother, was remarking to me recently that, up until 100 years ago or so, the idea of a musician, especially a performing musician, who exclusively played his or her own compositions was utterly foreign. Now, this is the norm in pop music, reified in the "singer-songwriter", to where many of us put our noses up at the classical interpretor who has never written even a scrap of melody. Before this era, there was a recognized value in someone whose art consisted of making public the composition of another hand. One would still call this person a musician.
Would we still call a "poet" someone who limits himself to making public the textual works of others, whether it is the staff writers and editors of the New York Times or the novels of Laurence Sterne? If the answer is no, I think this points to a lasting difference in our notions of text and music, and what it means to perform each. Again, I'll have to find the occasion to ask Mr. G if it was his "intent" to lay this disparity bare.
3 comments:
You may have shed some light on Goldsmith's penchant for singing the work of other writers. He is the crooning publisher.
I'm in over my head in regard to the histories and practices of music performance and composition, but I'll venture a primitive response: Wasn't the historically "recognized value" in performing another's composition largely dependent, if not entirely qualified, upon the caliber of said performance?
If so, can the quality of Goldsmith's 'deliveries,' by way of text or voice, be measured and thus evaluated?
Or would you measure the value of said historical musical performances upon accuracy alone? Would there have been other, more abstract qualifiers such finesse or intensity? As I said, I'm in a bit over my head, but perhaps you can make sense of my suggesting some apparent discrepancy.
I think I'd spin the question right back to your area of expertise: what if the text is the performance? Is there any sense in which creating the manuscript for a book like Day could be analogous to giving a recital of the Brandenberg Concerto?
Kenny, of course, does turn out to be a riveting performer, but even in that context, it is the text which he invests with all the cultural power, evidenced even more by the broadsides he and Ms. Durback created (settings of short passages from "The Life and Times of Tristam Shandy"). If, as is actually the case, I like those broadsides (though I couldn't afford to take any home), would it matter to this evaluation if I didn't (in the way I might not like a particular interpretation of the Brandenberg's). Could there be a version of Day that failed, and one that succeeded, based on characteristics unique to each manuscript or printed book?
With regard to musicians v. singer-songwriters... I was in Eastport, Maine, over the holidays. (Incidentally, Eastport is the kind of small arts town that we should all aspire to living in for a while at some point. It's pretty far up the coast, so it doesn't get a lot of tourists. The population -- about 1000 in winter, two or three times that in summer -- is a mix of blue-collar Mainers and artists relocating for the natural beauty and cheap housing. You could buy a house -- a house! -- for $35,000, even before the housing crisis began.) There's a small cafe/restaurant that has live music every Friday and Saturday night, mostly local musicians. One night while we were there, two men with guitars worked their way through a repertoire of rock and folk songs from the past 40 years. They were skilled performers, and it was better than a lot of music you'll hear in clubs in big cities. But one source of pleasure was the familiarity of the songs -- even the more "obscure" ones. Bringing that back to poetry, think of celebratory readings of Howl or other familiar poems. Something else to pursue: in the 18th and 19th centuries, a whole class of performing works by famous writers existed -- called "elocution," and performers were evaluated on their diction, vocal modulation, and interpretation of the text -- the performance of the text.
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