Text/Sound/Music

I have to step out of this hypothetical genealogy of poetry and music in order to avoid a fallacy. I'm going to end up saying that poetry and music were these seminal activities which aided in the very development of the human species, but then I'm also going to want to ask when "poetry" and "music" developed and when they themselves speciated. That's nonsense. Want to avoid choosing either horn of a dilemma stated thusly: either you think that there were behaviors or full-blown practices of the human creature going way back (and we mean 200,000 years or more) that constitute what we now call "poetry" and "music", or, in the course of developing modes of communication, expression and entertainment, we developed a concept of artful language and concerted sound-making that became "poetry" and "music". That is, we have another version of the found-vs-made distinction which underlies almost all arguments about post-modernism. With a twist really, because one might argue that the first horn of the dilemma says that we make "poetry" and "music" out of our prehistory by naming its imagined practices such.

Dilemmas are rarely that helpful, but in this case I feel like cataloguing whatever I might be in danger of glossing over along the way, so if I end up in the wrong place I at least have a chance of finding why I got there. As I mentioned a long time ago, there are certainly musicians and theoreticians who would grab the first horn and say that music is found and not "made" in our prehistory, and what's more in the nonhuman world as well. As evidence, you might get handed the perfectly patterned light of star pulses, or the physics of sound, or song birds. With the first two examples, however, one would have to be made to agree that music consists in these things in the first place. And as for the song bird, wouldn't it be material to know if they think of their "songs" as "music".

What of a found-not-made theory of poetry? Or, to be more precise, what to make of a history that finds poetry happening before there is a conception of Poetry with a 'P'? Jeremy James Thompson brings up the tantalizing point that language (trying to avoid confusion with Language as code for L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E) might just as well be a subset of poetry when considering the development of the two. Certainly that suggestion could be found in the version sketched last post- language is the codification of some of the things tried out in early experiments of the human voice and body (and note that all the experiments probably left vestiges in the body too), whereas poetry may have been, and continues to be, the totality.

But we're so very used to maintaining the fight for poetry's valor by a kind of elitism about what constitutes poetry (whether we like to admit this or not), it might be hard to sign on for this sort of expansion. Few of us are ready to embrace a totality even the size of recognizable language, let alone what falls outside of it.

We can see here how much easier the second horn of the dilemma seems. But that puts us in the unenviable position of saying, or at least affirming, just what "Poetry" and "Music" mean or meant. Next time, some concrete explorations of practices that might illuminate that question. It will be a while...