Words, Music and Meaning: A Conversation Piece About Music

Paul Alan Barker

Strauss’s last opera, Capriccio, personifies an old

argument: will the Countess choose to favour Olivier, a poet,

or the composer Flamand? The dilemma of the relationship

between words and music has exercised composers, writers and

their patrons for many centuries: from the early Christian

church with medieval Léonin and Pérotin; through the invention

of opera at court with Monteverdi; in the Renaissance and the

reforming Gluck in the Classic era, at the dawn of mass public

entertainment, to Strauss himself. The radical composer of

Salome (1905) and Electra (1909) - which may be said to have

redefined opera, musical language and theatrical norms in the

early twentieth century - premiered his final opera,

Capriccio, in the depths of the Second World War, in Munich,

1942. In contrast to his earlier extremism, for two and a half

hours (without an interval), the main protagonists discuss and

demonstrate the relative virtues of singing, acting and

dancing. In contemporary parlance, their conversation might

be termed intermedial, cross-disciplinary and self-aware. At

one point, the Count exclaims in a distinctly post-modern

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fashion that ‘Opera is an absurd thing’; towards the end of

the opera, the Countess debates into a mirror which man she

will love: ‘In choosing the one you will lose the other! Does

one not always lose, when one wins?’ Her final words to the

same mirror (before her butler calls for supper and ends the

opera) are: ‘Can you advise me, can you help me to find the

ending... the ending for their opera? Is there one that is not

trivial?’ But for the war, the context in which the opera was

first performed, these words might also seem trivial.

My purpose is not to reassess Strauss’s last opera,

neither to offer insight into his motivation, but to continue

the conversation developed in his work; the subtitle to

Capriccio is ‘A conversation piece about music’.

As both a composer and a teacher across music and

theatre, aspects of this conversation form a daily occurrence

with those with whom I collaborate and provide a continuous

source of internal monologue. Different versions of this

conversation are rehearsed, reinforced and performed every day

all over the world, from opera, through music theatre to

musicals. What is of value, and what is not, in respect of any

work performed, beyond commercial considerations? The answers

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to this question exposes bias and schism at the heart of

allegedly interdisciplinary art forms. Expressed in its

simplest form, opera values the communication of voice and

music over words whilst musical theatre proposes that the

meaning of words drives the music, whilst other genres adopt

intermediary positions. The hierarchical work-structures

demonstrate this: the conductor presides over opera while the

director presides over musical theatre. The conductor uses

movement and gesture to transmit meaning from music to the

performers, and thereby to the audience, whereas the director

tends to depends upon words and is physically absent from

performance. In its international incarnation, opera

rehearsals tend to be unpaid, often without the star singers,

who are paid per performance. In musicals, the fee usually

includes rehearsals and the run of performances by contract;

absences are rarely allowed. In opera, it would seem that

meaning is reflected by the presence of the artist who may

simply fly in at the last moment, whilst in a musical, meaning

is etched through the intensity of daily rehearsal. These

practices reflect opposing value systems in terms of artistic

and aesthetic content and expectation. From my perspective,

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working across these art-forms seems akin to serving two

faiths with radically opposed belief systems. Serving those

who work in one area, I am made constantly aware of the

disservice to those in the other; feelings akin perhaps to

heresy sometimes surface. For both, mutually shared concepts

such as dramatic truth, commitment, flow, awareness, emotional

objectives and meaning remain at best partial, biased, and

even contradictory.

These different perspectives appear to reflect

contrasting attitudes to the vexed or disputed relationship

between words and music. I propose that these differences may

be artificial, a result of habit or ignorance rather than a

reflection of any natural order. Choices may be made where

they are not perceived and the objective of my writing, which

is the result of many conversations, is to offer a new

perspective and provoke more conversation.

Words are a discipline, but they are not the only vehicle

of thought. I can think in music or, indeed, in other systems

such as images, colours or numbers. For those who advocate the

primacy of words, I commend Mendelssohn who described music as

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a more precise way of communicating than words: ‘The thoughts

which are expressed to me by music that I love are not too

indefinite to be put into words, but too definite.’

(Mendelssohn, Letter, 1842)

We think, we learn and we communicate through words -

indeed we explicitly place our reasoning and belief structures

in words - and yet the greatest writers demonstrate repeatedly

that language is at best ambiguous and may be thoroughly

unreliable. If we ever agreed about the meaning of

Shakespeare, he would surely no longer interest us. Alice

expressed this inherent ambiguity of language explicitly

through the looking-glass (a title which conveniently

anticipates the Countess’s mirror): “‘The question is,' said

Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different

things.’” (Carroll.)

Politicians and legal professionals understand the

benefit of the ambiguity of language and apply it to their own

pecuniary advantage. From Descartes to Chomsky, words have

been ruthlessly scrutinized as harbingers of knowledge, and

the development of philosophy in the twentieth century became

for many, including Wittgenstein and Chomsky, an enquiry into

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the philosophy of language: ‘…meaning is a very complicated

thing. A dictionary doesn't come close to defining any word.

It only gives hints that you can use as an intelligent human.’

(Chomsky, Interview, 1992). Chomsky goes on to demonstrate that

even at the level of ostensibly the simplest definition,

language is always elusive or ambiguous: ‘If you really try to

give a precise characterization of a word like "house" or

"chase," you'll find it's remarkably intricate.’ (Chomsky,

Interview, 1992).

If meaning is complicated, language is in reality a

mystery. To approach meaning may demand knowledge of context,

subtext, semantics and subtleties and other reverberations

which reflect the customs and practices of the society and

even of the individual concerned. And then there are the

different registers and modes of spoken and written language:

actors know how a spoken inflection may alter or even reverse

a meaning seen on the page.

Poets might be assumed to be more precise, yet poetry may

be said to have more in common with music than with words; a

quality consciously made primary by poets such as Basil

Bunting: ‘Poetry, like music, is to be heard. It deals in

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sound – long sounds and short sounds, heavy beats and light

beats, the tone relationships of vowels, the relations of

consonants to one another which are like instrumental colour

in music.’ (Bunting, Briggflats, 42). Bunting represents a

position where poets and composers are all but

indistinguishable. Beckett consciously chose to be a

playwright, not a composer, and Joyce was said to have a fine

tenor voice. Bunting’s assertion might come from more common

ground than first appears.

There is also significant evidence that words are

unnecessary for voices to communicate successfully, even

without singing. Take, for instance, the famous experiment of

Peter Brook and Ted Hughes, who invented a new international

language in Orghast. This occurred in the 1960’s almost in

parallel with Dario Fo's resurrection of an apparently

nonsense language he called Grammelot, a tradition rescued

from the street-wise Commedia del'Arte Italian oral theatre

tradition. Conceived at the time of a repressive social

structure and of censorial and deadly Inquisition, bent on the

discovery and prosecution of heresy, the Commedia players

found they might communicate anything safely by avoiding real

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words. The Catholic lawyers could not prosecute without verbal

evidence, and being based purely in the world of words the

lawyers could not deem nonsense to be heretical, even though

contemporary audiences may have understood precisely the

underlying intentions. Dario Fo delivered his Nobel Prize

acceptance speech in Grammelot1.

The twentieth century also formalised many non-verbal

theatrical forms including physical theatre, dance theatre and

music theatre, which now may be said to inhabit the centre

ground rather than littering the periphery as they did a

generation ago. Samuel Beckett wrote plays which completely

avoided the spoken word, such as Quad. Here, music and theatre

here may be seen to share a foreground. In John Cage's roughly

contemporary Theatre Piece, the performers devise their own

text. In more commercial areas, Cirque de Soleil perform

globally with an invented nonsense language designed to echo

and resonate with international audiences, and the web-based

SimCity2 internet game employed a male and female actor to

1 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1997/fo-lecture.html2 http://www.simcity.com/en_GB

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invent baby talk, or gobbledegook, with which all the

inhabitants of SimCity speak, and their audience understands.

For Bunting, in his epic poem, Briggflats, the sound was

the meaning, not merely its harbinger or context. Moreover,

Bunting reminds us that language was sound, long before it was

written: ‘Poetry lies dead on the page, until some voice

brings it to life, just as music, on the stave, is no more

than instructions to the player.’ (Bunting, Briggflats, 42) Patsy

Rodenburg similarly articulates our growing identification

with written language and decreasing cognisance with oral

forms: ‘I think it is fair to say that in our schools the

written word has triumphed over the spoken word. Literacy has

had a far greater impact than oracy.’ (Rodenburg, The Need for

Words, 23).

The schism between oral and literary language is arguably

the result of the invention of printing in the fifteenth

century. This era is also important from a musical

perspective, since the Renaissance may be said to have given

rise to instrumental music, as well as opera. For composers

before the Renaissance, music was largely if not exclusively

concerned with singing, and thus the composition of music to

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words. Indeed, up till then and for many centuries after, all

composers were de facto singers. The subsequent division of

musicians into singers, instrumentalists, composers and later

conductors, mirror the division of poets into oral or

literary. In order to understand the root of any conversation

about music, it is important to understand that music and

words were not always separated. However, specialisation,

separation and exclusion might seem to represent the

trajectory of education in Europe, since the Renaissance.

‘In my country, and in Swaziland, my country of adoption,

the fusion of art forms, to be a poet, painter, sculptor,

musician, actor, all in one, can be just a matter of

course. Ceremonies, rituals, fuse all art forms, to allow

for...cross-fertilization... Arriving in Britain I found

myself living, or half-living, in different compartments

simultaneously. Each compartment seemed hermetically

sealed. Each so stiflingly private.’

Professor Pitika Ntuli articulated this disturbing view

of western cultural ring-fencing or partitioning, after his

arrival in Britain in the 1970's. There is no evidence to

suppose his view would be more favourable today, many decades

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later. His passage is a cris de coeur: it combines academic and

cultural observation while articulating a critical, emotional

context. Ntuli’s perception of compartmentalism is a commonly

documented experience of contemporary life. A similar view is

alluded to frequently by Mary Midgley who proposes that the

acceptance of Cartesian binary divisions, such as thought and

reason, resulted in a bigger schism:

‘What is new in this century... is the contribution of

academic specialization to the splitting process… Each is

supposed to be discussed in its own appropriate terms,

and any area so far neglected is suspect; since there is

no proper way of discussing it, it tends to look like

unsuitable ground for academic consideration

altogether... The only remedy for this fragmentation is

to stand back and take a wider view of the key concepts

as parts of a whole.’ (Midgley, Heart and Mind, 10)

Midgley describes the atomization of knowledge which

drives over-specialization and results in petty

competitiveness. The compartmentalized world which Ntuli

encounters is the very same which Midgley analyses. In her

insightful text lies a description of a deeply neurotic,

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Orwellian landscape, inward looking, xenophobic and feudal.

The concept of cross-fertilization which results from the

convergence of related entities remains a foreign and

beguiling image of Ntuli’s, where creativity might still

thrive. When we glimpse through the eyes of a philosopher of

Midgley’s stature we must stand back, as she asks, to better

understand the encroaching isolation within our own culture.

Unlike Orwell she remains optimistic and empowering. Both

Ntuli and Midgley clearly articulate our limited creativity

which manifests itself in apparent choices of fragmentation

over synthesis, and competition over collaboration.

McGilchrist offers us a more recent scientific explanation of

how we have created this situation, and how we have been led,

or led ourselves, to make those choices. In The Master and His

Emissary he argues powerfully about the dual nature of our

divided brain to receive and process information. In the

chapter called Integration and Division he writes of the

superiority of the right cerebral hemisphere to integrate:

‘In plain English, this means bringing together in

consciousness different elements, including information

from the ears, eyes and other sensory organs, and from

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memory, so as to generate the richly complex, but

coherent, world we experience. By contrast, the left

hemisphere would be inadequate for the more rapid complex

syntheses achieved by the [right] hemisphere’.

(McGilchrist The Master and His Emissary, 42)

McGilchrist forensically analyses the imbalance of power

between the left and right hemispheres, both in relation to

our growth as individuals and as a species. He evinces how we

have relinquished the more creative right side of our brain to

the increasingly dominant left side. It may be that we choose

whether or not to integrate or separate our multi-modal

experiences, and thus to limit our creativity. But whether

this choice is conscious or unconscious might be more

revealing. McGilchrist offers copious evidence to demonstrate

our capacity to be led in one direction by our bifurcated

mind; his book offers at least a partial solution by providing

a potential awareness to challenge the dullness of habit.

Just as information between neurons must be transmitted

electronically or chemically across a gap, known as a synapse,

creativity is a means by which we can make links between

aspects of the world otherwise separated by a gap in our

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understanding. This synaptic gap of creativity now boasts

three bridges: Ntuli supplies us with a wake-up call through a

visceral reaction to discovering our limited creativity from

outside our culture; Midgley offers a philosophical

underpinning of the theory of creativity from within and how

it is threatened by academia, and McGilchrist offers evidence

of how we choose, or not, to limit our creative impulse

through integration or division in our response to the world,

our experience, our imagination or through our thought

processes.

Perhaps a simpler and more resilient bridge may be found

outside of the European academy. A much-quoted proverb from

Zimbabwe summarises a more practical view of the relationship

between words and music and indicates a continuum: ‘If you can

walk you can dance. If you can talk you can sing.’ The

simplicity of this statement is challenged by the

institutionalised Western predilection for competition over

collaboration:

‘For two centuries [writes psychologist Elliot

Aronson] our educational system has been based on

competitiveness....if you are a student who knows the

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correct answer and the teacher calls on one of the other

kids, it is likely that you will sit there hoping and

praying that the kid will come up with the wrong answer

so that you will have a chance to show the teacher how

smart you are....Indeed, [children’s] peers are their

enemies – to be beaten.’ (Kohn, No Contest, 25)

These factors may indicate not only why poets may no

longer be musicians, but why some musicians might believe they

are better than poets. Such thoughts might not be possible if

we questioned the value of specialisation on which our culture

is predicated.

Steven Mithen suggests that, from an evolutionary

perspective, language and music come from a common ground,

that language itself developed through a refinement of

communication of vocal sound, of primal musical expression. In

relation to John Blacking, Mithen writes: ‘In one of his last

essays, written ten years after How Musical is Man?, he

proposed there had been a ‘non-verbal, pre-linguistic,

“musical” mode of thought and action.... It is that proposal

that I wish to explore and vindicate in this book.’ (Mithen,

The Singing Neanderthals, 5) Mithen also mentions Rousseau,

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Jespersen and Dunbar for evidence to support his view. Herder

also notably contributes through his ‘Treatise on the Origin

of Language3’ from 1772 : ‘Even when language later became more

regular, monotonous, and regimented..., it still remained a

species of song, as the accents of so many savages bear witness;

and that the oldest poetry and music arose from this song...’

There is evidence that language and music retain aspects

of interdependence in their relationship through tonal

languages such as Classical Greek and modern Cantonese. Their

interdependence is also evident in the inherited musicality of

lyric forms, both traditional poetry such as the sonnet and

contemporary, urban or street-forms such as rap. The

segregation of music from language may be seen to be to their

mutual detriment; Midgley speaks tellingly of atomism (Heart and

Mind, 9). Her background in moral philosophy reminds us of

Wittgenstein’s conclusion concerning meaning in language, when

he declared the inexpressibility of ethics. Steiner (Language

and Silence, 41) summarises one discussion of the Tractatus with

‘Language can only deal meaningfully with a special,

restricted segment of reality.’ The circularity of language

is also noted by Steiner: ‘Wittgenstein compels us to wonder

3 https://www.marxists.org/archive/herder/1772/origins-language.htm)

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whether reality can be spoken of, when speech is merely a kind

of infinite regression, words being spoken of other words.’

(Language and Silence, 41). Perhaps this closed circularity that

Steiner identifies may be broken if language is seen as

conjoined with music. They are deliberately conjoined by

composers, and this process requires some analysis.

The setting of words to music – which is rarely called

the composing of music to words - is often taught as a

traditional discipline; I can still remember being taught

about mirroring adjectives, colouring words and the importance

of speech rhythms at various times in my education. On the

other hand, there are many obvious examples of music which

perhaps deliberately challenges or even obscures semantic

meaning. From repeated religious chanting which disguises

semantic meaning, to the extended vowels of Gregorian chant

and medieval monody; from Ockeghem’s complexity to

Palestrina’s sophisticated polyphony; from Mozart’s Aleluya to

Berio’s Sequenza III, words have frequently been deliberately

stretched, disguised and distorted semantically in their

collaboration with music. There is also a more extreme form of

songs without words, where nonsense syllables are set, such as

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the fa-la-la of many Elizabethan composers, and the nonsense

sounds of many Italian madrigals. In the twentieth century

this tradition was significantly reinvented within the genres

of jazz and barbershop, which gave rise to the improvised

syllables of be-bop and doo-wop. In these forms, the singer

does not necessarily sing without semantic meaning, but, as

Cook might note, the meaning arises from the performance:

‘Drawing on interdisciplinary performance theory (particularly

theatre studies, poetry reading, and ethnomusicology), I set

out issues and outline approaches for the study of music as

performance; by thinking of scores as “scripts” rather than

"texts," I argue, we can understand performance as a generator

of social meaning.’ And he ends his article by the assertion

that the meaning of music lies in its performance: ‘To call

music a performing art, then, is not just to say that we

perform it; it is to say that music performs meaning.’

The performative theory to which Nick Cook alludes, was

developed during the last three decades of the last century,

from J. L. Austin (How to Do Things with Words) to Butler’s

contention (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity) that

the meaning of such words as “male” and “female” are performed

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by those who speak them: for Butler, gender is defined by

performance, not genes. If Nick Cook’s observation that music

performs meaning is reapplied to Homer, Milton, Joyce and

Eliot, mentioned above, we would do well to pay less attention

to the page on which these writers worked, and more to their

performance to discover meaning. The very opposite of this

position was proposed by Rossini in a letter of 1851: “The

good singer should be nothing but an able interpreter of the

ideas of the master, the composer…in short, the composer and

the poet are the only true creators.”

In Rossini’s time composers (often as their own

directors) routinely worked with singers. Rossini surely could

not have imagined the demise of the live composer in favour of

the dead that characterises classical music today, any more

than the demise of the composer’s authority itself. His

comment describes a greater structural simplicity in creator-

performer hierarchy than exists today, whereas in fact his

scores allow enormous freedom of taste and expression for a

solo singer knowledgeable of the style.

Performative theory began to redress the balance of

authority and meaning, acknowledging what most blues and jazz

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musicians always knew, that you can't be a performer without

being a creator: “I can't stand to sing the same song the same

way two nights in succession, let alone two years or ten

years. If you can, then it ain't music, it's close order drill

or exercise or yodelling or something, not music.” (Billie

Holiday, widely attributed).

This suggests that the performance of songs without

semantic meaning – for example with nonsense-syllables – may

help define the relationship of words to music in song, rather

than remain an exception. It might also seem to reflect the

very essence of Bunting on the nature of his poetry.

Our earliest primary evidence of non-verbal song is

unfortunately lost in the mists of antiquity and oral folk

tradition. Mithen uses the acronym ‘Hmmmmm’ to denote this

proto-language: ‘Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical

and mimetic’ (Mithen, The Singing Neanderthals, 172). More recently

recorded examples include such syllables as fa-la-la and fol-de-rol

supplanted words and in madrigal-balletts these syllables were

sung, to accompany dance - possibly by the same performers. In

the early days of publishing, vocal music was frequently not

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ascribed to any text as in Example 1 by 1559 by Tasso, where a

modern editor has suggested rudimentary scat singing syllables

appropriate for the era:

Example 1: Giovanni Maria Tasso, Untitled, 1559 (originally without

words)

Of course, even within textual song, there have always

been moments when the musical content supplants the linguistic

meaning. For instance, in the extended melismas first notated

a thousand years ago by Léonin and Pérotin, later on by such

as Handel, Bellini and Mozart; Example 2 is from Haydn’s last

opera, written in 1791: L’anima del filosofo, ossia Orfeo ed Euridice. The

Italian word crudeltá is extended through eight bars on the last

syllable, momentarily at least quite beyond any semantic

context for the listener, although the repetition allows

cognisance.

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Example 2: Haydn L’anima del filosofo, ossia Orfeo ed Euridice.

The extension of melisma into the form of vocalise was

made famous by Gounod, Rachmaninov and Ravel, amongst others.

However, the abandonment of phonemes in vocalise seems less

important to our argument than the invention of them in the

twentieth century scat-singing and its descendant forms of be-

bop, doo-wop, rap and hip hop, through such as Ella

Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Cleo Laine and Bobby McFerrin.

There are many other notable contemporary examples, such as

the use of the word ‘Galileo’ by Queen in Bohemian Rhapsody

(surely chosen for its singability in the absence of

semantics), and Lady Gaga’s Bad Romance:

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Rah rah ah-ah-ah!

Ro mah ro-mah-mah

Gaga oh-la-la!

Want your bad romance.

Many twentieth century classical composers explored new

relationships between word and music. Cage’s uniquely

philosophical and theatrical language is apparent in his song

A Flower. It makes meaning audible and visual, by the absence of

text for the singer and absence of access to a keyboard for

the pianist, who is instructed to play with the piano lid

closed. It remains one of his most lyrical and wistful

compositions, and reverberates with a unique folk-like quality

in the mind and eyes of the audience.

Cathy Berberian’s Stripsody is a light-hearted

entertainment – rare enough qualities for twentieth century

monodrama. Taking as a starting point all the notated

onomatopoeia of the Marvel and Superman comics, it presents a

visual and aural feast, a cornucopia of meaning in the hands

of a performer: either serious trivia or trivial seriousness,

in the tradition of Cocteau and Satie.

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Berio’s spare and post-modern ur-text (self-aware) for

Sequenza III was written by Markus Kutter and composed for his

then wife, the same Cathy Berberian:

give me a few words for a woman

to sing a truth allowing us

to build a house without worrying

before night comes...

In his introduction to the score the composer describes

how he deconstructed his text variously for compositional and

structural purposes into:

sounds or groups of sounds phonetically notated

sounds or groups of sounds as pronounced in context:

/gi/as in give,

/wo/ as in woman,

/tho/ as in without,

/co/ as in comes, etc

words conventionally written and uttered: give me a

few words, etc

A listener to the work would note that the parameters of

these three compositions share a continuum: text and sound

become woven together through the emotional roller-coaster of

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the fully notated emotional drama - the performers implicit

inner journey - the direction for which is notated both as a

physical as well as vocal instruction. Berio notates 137

different adjectives into a duration of approximately eight

minutes (e.g. wistful, serene, urgent etc); the opening

walking on stage is accompanied by a notated muttering

repeating the following vowels rapidly in random order (to,

/co/, us, for, be); and finger-clicking is notated as a part

of the score.

The effect is of entering the mind of the performer, at

the point before language becomes possible, anticipating

Mithen’s conjectured Hmmmmm, before the filters which permit

thought, understanding and communication to function. This is

perhaps the same stream of consciousness that James Joyce

tried to articulate in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake a generation

before. The listener is made privy to the noise which fills

the human mind which we politely try to avoid mentioning or

demonstrating in public. Or perhaps we only became aware of

it, made conscious of this incessant neurotic presence, since

Freud and his elucidation of the unconscious.

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Sequenza III makes an illuminating comparison to Beckett’s

Not I. It was written just six years before, for Billie Whitelaw

- for many years the actress most associated with his work, as

was Cathy Berberian with Berio at the same time. Not I is a

monologue for a character known only as mouth, and later

television productions showed only that part of her anatomy in

close-up for the works duration. Beckett’s instructions are

simpler than the notes that explain the sophisticated and

original notation system which adorns Berio’s score. The only

additions to the words in Beckett’s text are the ubiquitous

dots replacing full stops and commas, along with question

marks and dashes. There are no complete sentences but neither

are words reduced into Berio’s phonemes. However, the shear

intensity of compressing these 4,477 words into a duration of

about 13 minutes reduces both the grammatical and semantic

functions of language in the same way that Berio’s fragmention

never allows us to hear his own comparatively coherent text.

Both works are landmarks of their time, infused with layers of

meaning, but through textual ascendancy by the performer.

Beckett (The Complete Dramatic Works, 375) explains that ‘a

gesture of helpless compassion... lessens with each recurrence

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till scarcely perceptible…There is just enough pause to

contain it as MOUTH recovers from vehement refusal to

relinquish third person.’ Despite the simpler notation Beckett

uses, this work demands similar vocal resources from an

actress singer as does Sequenza III, and the effect is remarkably

and mesmerizingly similar:

. something she had to–. . . what? . . the buzzing? . .

yes . . . all the time the buzzing . . . dull roar . . .

in the skull . . . and the beam . . . ferreting

around . . . painless . . . so far . . . ha! . . so far .

. . then thinking . . . oh long after . . . sudden

flash . . .[Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Work: Not I, 381]

Those who saw and heard Billie Whitelaw’s extraordinary

first performances acknowledge the power of the work owed much

to her discovery of both the music and the dramaturgy implicit

in the text. Berio’s more sophisticated score seems at first

sight to offer less creative freedom of interpretation, but

the reality is the opposite: the score was only completed after

Cathy recorded it. The score is performative, echoing and

annotating one specific and important performance not merely

an abstract representation of an idealised performance, which

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is the formal tradition of a score. Berio could not have

written the fragmented, vocal tour-de-force without the full

creative compliance of Cathy, just as Beckett’s unfinished,

black and white phrases were given life and blood (and I

propose meaning) by Billie Whitelaw. Both are musical scores,

both are dramatic texts, both are dramaturgically complete

monologues, with equal emphasis on musical and dramatic

content. One was written by a composer, the other by an

author, but the difference is inconsequential. Neither would

have been possible without the specific original performer,

but nevertheless hundreds of vastly different performers and

interpretations have followed. In both cases, authority and

the residence of meaning lie within the hands of the

performers, and the score may be seen as a tribute to the

original performers, not the vessel of truth bestowed by an

all-powerful genius, or Rossini. Collaboration and the sharing

of a creative process may replace competition and iconography.

It would seem that jazz, contemporary music and theatre

have struggled in various ways to create a new relationship

between music and text, and at least challenged assumptions

about authority and the residence of meaning. And yet, despite

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their siblings greatest efforts, opera and musical theatre

have remained for the most part stubbornly traditional in

their textual alliance with writers and poets, seeking meaning

primarily through language adorned, intensified or at best

illuminated by music. Opera audiences may even expect to read

the sung text in surtitles whilst they simultaneously hear it

- even if it is in their own language. This practice reflects

a distrust of non-semantic meaning and Rodenburg’s observation

of the growing distrust of oracy, mentioned above. The

practice is widespread even despite researchers such as

McGilchrist demonstrating that different sides of the brain

are utilised in following verbal meaning and music, and the

consequences of that internal competition. Opera audiences

would seem to be complicit in the belief that they are

themselves enslaved to meaning through text. Perhaps in

retaliation, some more modern opera composers have created

libretti in dead languages - Philip Glass in Ancient Egyptian

(Akhnaten), Stravinsky (Oedipus Rex) and John Buller (The Bacchae)

in Latin - purposefully to avoid such literary enslavement.

Other composers have risked more fundamental structural breaks

with tradition, such as Ligeti in whose Le Grand Macabre a

29

Bacchanalian simultaneity, spectacle and surrealism replace

lucidity, and Berio whose Un Re en Ascolto is an assemblage of

texts by Italo Calvino, W. H. Auden, Friedrich Einsiedel and

Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter based on Shakespeare’s Tempest. Such

practices indicate alternative attitudes to the residence of

meaning in opera, a form which potentially fuses and confuses

word and music, but their rarity reflects the established,

conservative preference to familiar, known practices, which is

perhaps even more orthodox in musical theatre.

One view of this orthodoxy suggests that the combination

of two disciplines, music and words, creates an autonomous

third, called song. Transdisciplinarity is a concept clarified

by Nicolescu:4 The combination of two disciplines results in

something greater than the sum of its parts. Song is

quintessentially a transdisciplinary form.

Further evidence for transdisciplinarity pervades

literature. According to Le Compte, Milton’s Paradise Lost

contains 913 references to the Old Testament and 490 to the

New, as well as modelling itself structurally and thematically

on Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeniad. Contemporary literature

4 http://nicol.club.fr/ciret/bulletin/b12/b12c8.htm#note

30

abounds with other referential players such as T. S. Eliot and

James Joyce. Their work, alongside that of many others’,

provides evidence that certain texts were not designed to be

read, but to be performed:

Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc'd by fate,

And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate,

Expell'd and exil'd, left the Trojan shore.

(Virgil, tr. Dryden, opening)

… Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top

Of OREB, or of SINAI, didst inspire

That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed,

In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth

Rose out of CHAOS:

(Milton, line 6)

There are more than 40 references to sing or singing on

Butler’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey5. Joyce and Eliot, even

as they represent distant positions in the lyric heritage, are

both commonly represented as writers who emphasised the

musical, auditory nature of language. Language lives in the

medium of sound and the dimension of time and works on a

5 http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/iliad.html

31

richer, deeper plain of interaction with human understanding.

It combines the embodied or visceral with the emotional and

the intellectual. Knowledge, as Midgley notes, is derived from

understanding that which connects, rather than that which

separates.

However transdisciplinarity demands that we understand

music and words to be discrete disciplines and the conjunction

in this way to be somehow special. I propose that historical,

psychological and cultural evidence suggests their separation

is a recent invention, propelled by our hunger for over-

specialisation.

In performance of non-semantic song the sound of the

utterance, in terms of syllable and musical phrase, is

entirely created by the performer who acts to some degree as

both writer and composer. Author and authority, meaning and

value are embodied and reinvented in the ephemera of each

performance. This reflects the earlier age which Mithen refers

to when such divisions were uncommon. Most parents will also

notice that singing predates the advent of language in a baby:

it is our first act, typically, after birth. It is arguable

whether expression or communication is the baby’s objective,

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and whether the difference is discernible. In either case,

meaning is communicated and understood clearly by those

involved.

I propose a new word which signifies the inherent

conjunction of music and words: Wordhenge reverberates with

Stonehenge, one of the world’s most remarkable and enigmatic

sites, prompting unanswerable questions about our pre-history.

I have simply exchanged the timeless block of Stone with the

elusive Word. Wordhenge creates an image that suggests an

ancient, monolithic structure which seems to represent

knowledge, culture and endurance, worthy of study but also

perhaps unknowable. Language also retains aspects of this

image: it has been greater than may be currently visible, and

its foundations may be crumbling or invisible. Language cannot

live in isolation from its culture, any more than those

stones. However, it fails to avoid Steiner’s observation of

the inherent circularity of language: Wordhenge replaces a

circle of stones with a circle of words around us. Both stones

and words have become relics, no doubt a source of wonder and

inspiration, but also a source of profoundly unfathomable

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knowledge. They are in some way as dead as the language of

Kul!khasi, whose only relic may be found now on the internet6.

To listen to the recording of Kabara, the last speaker of

Kul!khasi, singing what may be a lullaby to her child, whom

she also perhaps chides, is to experience the thing I have

called Wordhenge: the power of unknowable ancient words, where

singing and speaking may not easily be differentiated. The

recording is an audible relic in the tradition of Stonehenge.

The sound recording, originally from 1937, communicates

language and music to us as a single element, or an

indissoluble aggregate. I transcribed the recording and

evolved some additional material to compose Kabara’s Lullaby: in

part, a vain attempt to resist the constant loss of languages

and cultures which are eroded perhaps even faster than the

monoliths of Stonehenge.

Kabara’s Lullaby represents a major theme in my work as a

composer. Collaboration with singers and directors, meaning

being performed rather than dictated, and inventing sounds and

meanings have lead to many adventures and advantages. For

instance, Songs Between Words is a collection of 48 a cappella

songs for one or more voices which are entirely free from

6 http://www.yourdictionary.com/elr/extinct.html

34

semantic text, but have invented sounds and syllables composed

for the music, often notated with the phonetic alphabet. The

songs are not abstract in the sense that an instrumental work

might be: each has a name which may suggest a genre of song

such as Lullaby or Blues, or a dramatic situation such as Argument

or Echo, or an invented word such as DoTraKwa which forms the

basis for the “text”. Those are the words in between which I

compose the music. But the important challenge for me as

composer is the relationship I have, through my music, with

the performer. The absence of semantics lends a greater degree

of creativity to the performer than might be seen as

traditional in notated music. As Cone has discussed (The

Composer’s Voice, 1974), any song is a micro-drama, an opera

in miniature, and has a narrative. In this case the narrative

structure may be suggested by me but the essence or meaning

lies in the singer’s ability to imagine and create. Each

singer, or individual performance, becomes the author and

director, and so the process allows a far more diverse range

of meaning than different readings of the same text.

I found that these songs had the additional benefit of

being performed internationally without translation, directly

35

to the audience, whatever the nationality of the performer,

without programme notes or translation. The lack of cultural

or linguistic barriers further emphasised the role and

creative responsibility of the performer, affirming their

creative as opposed to interpretative status. Audiences

clearly responded to the performer without need for cultural

or linguistic interface.

Lament, in common with all the songs in the set, has an

inferred drama, and was intended for dramatic presentation,

individually and authoritatively devised by the singer. The

impulse to write came from talking to many singers I have

worked with, who often feel there is only room to precisely

serve the complex demands of many contemporary virtuoso

scores. The series was conceived as a way of reasserting the

appropriation of ownership of material for the singer. The

original singers were involved in decisions about the sounds

they made and the actions they chose in performance, in

relation to their dramatic character and circumstance. A

second impulse grew from the experience of living abroad in

Mexico and how language localises a song, creating another

layer of communication problems for singers and public in

36

other countries. The response from the subsequent singers who

have worked on them is that there is a sense of liberation

both for singer and audience: the music is far from abstract,

as the names of each song imply, but the variety of ways in

which the music may be interpreted or endowed with meaning

allows each singer to invest their own creative energy to the

full. The work becomes theirs as they assimilate it, and

although the same material is sung in each performance, each

performer creates a journey and a meaning which is personal

and unique.

The score of Lament has a clear dramaturgical shape and

content, but the act of contextualisation by the singer

renders a unique meaning.

Example 3: Paul Barker Lament (Songs Between Words)

A selection of Songs Between Words was made to create a

drama called Before the Beginning, or Antes del Prinicpio when premiered

37

at the Festival of Historic Centre of Mexico City in 2004. A

cast of three singers were joined by an actor who also had no

text, but made up his spoken sounds. That work was a precursor

to a full-length opera, again without text, which became El

Gallo; an opera without text for six actors and two string quartets. This work

was commissioned by Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes, based in

Mexico, who since 2009 have performed it across the Americas

and Europe over 100 times, recorded it for CD and filmed it

for television. It attempts to redefine a new relationship

between words, meaning and music. In common with operatic

tradition the work has defined characters and a narrative, but

there is almost not a word articulated for its duration.

Despite this, most audiences and critics have commented

positively on how the strength of the narrative and

characters, which is achieve through a synthesis of music,

acting and movement.

The title notes El Gallo as an opera for actors, as only one

of the company members had an operatically trained voice, and

their vocal training became a vital part of their physical

regime of preparation for the work that lasted for a year,

during which time I collaborated with them regularly. It is

38

important to note the unusual amount of time the work was

given to develop reflecting the very specialist and intensive

training the company took on. And contemporary opera, like

much contemporary theatre, is a collaborative art form, where

the composer’s work reflects the specific abilities and

strengths of the performers, whose ideas themselves become

embedded into the structure. These changes of working

practices allow aesthetical and philosophical considerations

to play a part in development.

El Gallo became self-referentially post-modern: it tells the

story of the rehearsals and performance of a composition by a

fictitious composer confronted by a cast he had no choice but

to use. To that extent, there is some parallel between the

real events that led to El Gallo in that some aspects of my early

workshops became, through the director’s imagination, the very

material of the narrative.

El Gallo means, literally, The Cockerel in Spanish, which

serves both as a symbol of Mexico and is used as a Spanish

equivalent to the English phrase a “frog in the throat”. Each

of the five “singers” undergoes a specific epiphany over the

39

rehearsal period, whereas the composer’s epiphany is saved for

the performance, when one of the singers – his least

favourite, whom he has consistently bullied and victimised –

apparently causes the performance of his masterpiece to ground

to a halt, because of the aforementioned “frog”. The excerpt

below is from the opening of the final scene before the staged

performance which fails; it looks into the psyche of Jogbos,

accompanied by a whispering ensemble. The instruments have

been removed from this excerpt.

The syllables chosen for Jogbos to sing reflected her own

personal, complex cultural background, and this was an

instruction to all the cast from the director, Claudio Valdez-

Kuri, with whom I devised the opera, alongside the company.

They were each to invest a large proportion of their actual

character into the fictitious character of the opera. This

might appear to suggest that the opera could not be performed

by another cast, but that proved not to be the case, when for

a series of European performances a substitute had to be

found. I worked with him to make small alterations to

pronunciation and some musical details, to reflect his own

character rather than that of his predecessor.

40

It was ever my intention in this work to realise

something which has yet to be proven, that another group of

performers might come across this textless opera and create an

entirely new set of characters and narrative which would

nevertheless convince audiences of its authenticity, just as

the original company did. It was part of my intention to

develop, from a musical point of view, a free use of meaning

and interpretation akin to the more experimental plays by

Martin Crimp, where words are not assigned to characters in

the text.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was by profession a

mathematician who used a pseudonym, Lewis Carroll, to write

his famously surreal books, full of linguistic play with

nonsense. Perhaps his pseudonym was a literary equivalent of

the Countess’s mirror in Capriccio: another self, or alter-

ego. In her songs, and in her much documented life, Billie

Holiday acts as a mirror to those who still listen to her

performances, which is a traditional role often ascribed to

art and artists. A mirror allows us to see ourselves perhaps

as others see us, and was a magical and expensive luxury item

41

when first invented. The Countess’s mirror and Alice’s Looking

Glass may represent something unique about the relationship

between music and words, to the extent that a deeper

understanding, a different perspective may be discerned.

In Through the Looking Glass, Alice's question, which began

this chapter, is not offered an answer, but is followed by

another question. Humpty Dumpty’s sentiments, if not his

words, continue to resonate with all those who seek to

investigate the complex relationship between words and music:

“`When I use a word', Humpty Dumpty said in rather a

scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean -

neither more nor less.'

`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make

words mean so many different things.'

`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be

master - that's all.'”

However, I propose that Humpty Dumpty was wrong; that his

question assumes that separation and domination is crucial.

But two things which are conjoined, music and words, like the

two parts of Humpty Dumpty’s name, Cartesian mind and body, or

McGilchrist’s bifurcated brain, are, in fact, inseparable.

42

Example 4: Excerpt from El Gallo by Paul Barker

43

44

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commissioned by Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes, 2009; CD

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