Week 1 Song As Incantation: the Roots of Poetry
EN992Poetry and Music
Week 1 — Song as incantation: the roots of poetry
(Peter Blegvad)
[POWERPOINT: Lyre with course title:
Poetry and Music / Song as Incantation: the Roots of Poetry]
Welcome to ‘Poetry and Music’, Week One. Let’s begin at the beginning. We can’t be sure how poetry and music began, there’s no fossil record, but that leaves us free to conjecture. So, today’s topic will be ‘Song as incantation: the roots of poetry’. (The conjectural consensus being that poetry, maybe all language, began as song, and that song, like all music, was originally a form of magic).
OK. Any questions so far?
[POWERPOINT: Lyre with Rushdie quote:
“Why do we care about singers? Wherein lies the power of songs?
Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation,... song shows
us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us ourselves as
they might be, if we were worthy of the world.”
— Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999)]
Here’s a question: “Why do we care about singers? Wherein lies the power of songs?”
The question was asked by Salman Rushdiein connection with his 1999 novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet.
Here’s the answer he proposes: “maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation,... song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us ourselves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.”
What do you say? Can you relate that to your own experience?
I assume you’ve probably all experienced the power songs have to exalt, to excite, to relax, to unite, to console, to transport — whether listening alone to an iPod or as part of a concert audience or abandoning yourself to collective Dionysian frenzy at a rave or in a mosh pit — you might also be familiar with the power of people singing patriotic anthems or songs of worship — a power that can be benign but is also, as we well know, potentially daemonic.
So how would you answer the question ‘Wherein lies the power of songs?’
Someone might say ‘songs make us feel connected to something larger than ourselves, and we’re temporarily exalted thereby’ — or ‘songs give us strength’ or ‘courage’ — or they might quote the lyricist E. Y. Harburg:
[POWERPOINT: “Words make you think thoughts. Music makes you feel a feeling. But a song makes you feel a thought.”]
(Harburg wrote the words for such classicsas “Over the Rainbow” and “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?”)
And here he is, in his prime…
[POWERPOINT: photo of E. Y. ‘Yip’ Harburg (1896 – 1981)]
But these answers merely raise another question, namely how? How does song have these effects on us?
Here’s an answer: it’s magic. A bit vague? Let’s try to clarify.
The ‘cant’ in incantation, like the ‘chant’ in enchantment means ‘song’, and songs have been used in charms, spells and rituals by all cultures since culture began.
Victor Zuckerkandl in Man the Musician(1973) writes:“...music [is] the form in which magic survives down to our day.” “...the affinity between music and magic is rooted in their very nature. ...in both, man’s sense of being at one with the world outweighs his sense of being distinct from it: what links man to man, man to thing, and thing to thing outweighs what separates them.”
(Which could be said of poetry also. But we’ll get to that.)
As for what motivated our ancestors to invent, to give vent, to song, a crucial factor was probably fear.
French musicologist, Jules Combarieu, in his book Music and Magic (1909) put it thus: “the origins of music can be traced to man’s anxiety in the face of the hostility of Nature which he interprets as being due to savage spirits who have to be appeased with incantations, which can be used both as an offensive and a defensive weapon.”
Like Orpheus, who could tame wild beasts with his song.
[POWERPOINT: ORPHEUS TAMES THE WILD BEASTS – Roman mosaic]
According to Ralph Waldo Emerson “every word was once a poem” — the best poem about a fish, for instance, was once the word ‘fish’.
[BOOK FISH –ghoti – (G.B.S. enough, women, action].
Every word was once a poem, OK. Similarly, it’s not hard to imagine that all human language (not just poetry) might have begun as some kind of song — influenced by the vocal cries of beasts and birds, perhaps, as some linguists have proposed (this is the so-called bow-wow theory).
Or perhaps song was adopted as a technique to help synchronize collective rhythmic labour — like on a chain-gang, or slaves rowing on a galley (the yo-he-ho theory).
Then there’s the la-la theory which proposes that language may have developed from “sounds associated with love, play, and (especially) song.”[1]
Theories are all we have. Experiments have so far proved inconclusive.
[POWERPOINT: Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor]
(A famous example being Frederick II’s C12th ‘language deprivation’ experiment — raising infants without human interaction in hopes that when they began to speak of their own accord it would reveal the original tongue as taught by God to Adam and Eve. Would it be Hebrew, Greek, Arabic or something altogether alien, something not so much human as divine? Maybe their first utterances would be song not speech. The monk Salimbene di Adam reported in his Chronicles that the experiment was “in vain, for the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments.”) Poor kids.
[PPOINT: Cover of The Songlines, by Bruce Chatwin, Penguin Classic, US edition]
Are you familiar with Bruce Chatwin’s idea, expounded in his book The Songlines, that culture — in the form of songs and stories — was invented by our early ancestors around the fire and served an analogous purpose?
[PPOINT: Joseph Lycett (ca.1775 – 1828), Aborigines Resting by a Camp Fire
near the Mouth of the Hunter River, Newcastle, NSW]
That is, just as fire kept the savage nocturnal predators ‘out there’ at bay, so the stories and songs that were told and sung around it were effective against the dangers that threatened from within. By giving their worst fears imaginative form, by consciously performing and refining their dreams, as it were, people were able to order and control what might otherwise overwhelm them.
[Wanatjalnga, 1974, Charlie Tjaruru (Tarawa Tjungurrayi)]
Chatwin’s book focuses on Australian Aboriginal culture, exploring the idea of song as the first language, and of song as magic. The songlines are“the invisible (to non-Aborigines) tracks which represent the Dreaming, the way in which the land was sung into being by the ancestors. Part map, part history, part geography, part genealogy, part culture, the songlines are a complex weave of origin mythology, the link between man and landscape, between inner and outer worlds, between body and spirit, between present and past.”[2]
The songlines are used as an instrument of navigation across both space and time. You’ll find an excerpt from Chatwin’s book in your course packs:
There were people who argued for telepathy. Aboriginals themselves told stories of their song men whizzing up and the down the line in trance. But there was another, more astonishing possibility. Regardless of the words, it seems the melodic contour of the song described the nature of the land over which the song passes. So, if the Lizard Man were dragging his heels across the salt-pans of Lake Eyre, you could expect a suggestion of long flats, like Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’. If he were skipping up and down the MacDonnel escarpments, you’d have a series of arpeggios and glissandos, like Liszt’s ‘Hungarian Rhapsodies’.
Certain phrases, certain combinations of musical notes, are thought to describe the action of the Ancestor’s feet. One phrase would say, ‘Salt-pan’; another ‘Creek-bed’, ‘Spinifex’, ‘Sand-hill’, ‘Mulga-scrub’, ‘Rock-face’, and so forth. An expert song-man, by listening to their order of succession, would count how many times his hero crossed a river, or scaled a ridge - and be able to calculate where, and how far along, a Songline he was.
‘He’d be able’, said Arkady ‘to hear a few bars and say, “This is Middle Bore” or “That is Oodnadatta” - where the Ancestor did X or Y or Z.’ ‘So a musical phrase,’ I said, ‘is a map of reference?’ ‘Music’, said Arkady, ‘is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world’.[3]
‘Music is a memory bank.’ In the early days that must have been a crucial part of song’s power. In the T. S. Eliot Lecture, 2004, entitled “The Dark Art of Poetry”, Don Paterson said: “what you remember changes how you think” and therefore “poetry is a form of magic, because it tries to change the way we perceive the world.” The same goes for song. Songs enabled oral cultures to store and retrieve information long-term. Because they endured, songs established a continuity that connected young and old, living and dead, and defended tribal and cultural identity against attrition and alien influence.
What makes a song memorable? It’s ‘magic’, sure, but magic has rules. What are some of the rules of song?
(Are these rules also shared with poetry?)
Consider:
The information in a song is usually organized into forms and patterns, rhythms that repeat.
[Woven blanket, West Africa]
This woven blanket from West Africa could be a map of such a song. (It even looks a bit like the sound wave patterns in a digital multi-track recording).
A nice coincidence. They rhyme.
[Digital recording tracks (Audacity)]
The formal ‘rules’ that songs and poems follow probably evolved as mnemonic devices. Repetition, melody, rhythm and rhyme all help to effect the transfer of data from short to long-term memory. As I’m sure you know from experience, songs are adhesive, they stick. We speak of the ‘hook’ in a song. Germans refer to the ‘earworm,’ the part of a song that keeps going round and round in your head. In oral cultures this ability of song to insinuate itself into the synapses was precious. Myths, rituals and other traditions could be preserved and passed on in this way. Song was the social glue which bound communities together.
David Byrne (the singer and principle songwriter from the band Talking Heads) in his book How Music Works notes that songs feature “… in most religious and social ceremonies around the world… —birth songs, lullabies, naming songs, toilet training songs (I want to hear those!), puberty songs, greeting songs, marriage songs, clan songs, funeral songs. A Sia Indian who lives in a pueblo in northern New Mexico said, ‘My friend, without songs you cannot do anything.’ Without music, the social fabric itself would be rent, and the links between us would crumble.”
Another part of song’s magic was (and still is) physical rather than mental or psychological. Song combines emotion with motion, it moves the mind, but it also makes the body move. It addresses both the body and the spirit or soul.
[LARYNX]
Singing involves the breath, identified with the soul — anima — in the West, and known as prajna in Sanskrit. Regulating the breath is an essential part of yoga and other ancient meditation techniques. Traditionally, breath exercises are combined with chanting. Chanting a mantra — a verbal formula, sometimes long and convoluted, sometimes just a single syllable like the cosmic ‘Om’ — is hypnotic, entrancing — literally, a form of enchantment.
Breath pushed by the diaphragm through the larynx produces the vibration of voice. Voice is the vehicle for song, for poetry, for magic.
[Gaston Maspero, New Light on Ancient Egypt (1908):
“The human voice is the instrument par excellence of the priest and of
the enchanter. It is the voice that seeks afar the Invisibles summoned, and it makes the necessary objects into reality. Every one of the sounds it emits has a peculiar power which escapes the notice of the common run of mortals, but which is known to and made use of by the adepts. One note irritates, appeases, or summons the spirits; another acts on the bodies. By combining the two are formed those melodies which the magicians intone in the course of their evocations. But as every one has its peculiar force, great care must be taken
not to change their order or substitute one for the other. One would thus expose oneself to the greatest misfortunes."]
(As I said before, magic has rules. Strictly enforced. A kind of fundamentalism…)
James Fenton, in his Introduction to English Poetry, writes, “Poetry… begins in those situations where the voice has to be raised . . .”
In his book Fenton includes a street vendor’s song. As he said in an interview: some people “…thought it was ridiculous for someone seriously interested in poetry to consider a street vendor’s song. But to me, the idea that you need to do something to produce your voice, that you need to do something to heighten your language, to distinguish the activity that you’re taking part in from daily conversation—that’s basic to poetry.” (In your course pack you’ll find an excerpt from Fenton’s book...
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[Read this – [CHAIN GANG image]
group performs the HUNH as you read the text of the chain gang chant? –
[MICHAUX photo by Claude Cahun]
THEN read Michaux blessing/curse and notes??? Is there enough time??
estimate it will take abt 15 mins]
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Here’s Jorge Luis Borges. He says “Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song. ”[4]
Or, as Ezra Pound put it: “Poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.”
Despite which these days, in our own culture, many connoisseurs would argue that poetry suffers when it gets too close to music — i.e. when it’s sung. They’d point out that the original rhythm — the meter — will be distorted when a poem is set, and the words garbled when sung. (Surtitles in opera were introduced to help audiences follow what was happening onstage for this reason). So the poetry will be lost.
On the other hand, the words to many excellent songs — from classical arias, to folk or pop — are lousy poetry. In the introduction to An Elizabethan Song Book which he edited in the 1950s, W. H. Auden conceded that song lyrics are often “trivial and silly” and a listener might reasonably suppose that “all a composer requires from a poet are so and so many syllables of such and such a quality, and that their meaning is irrelevant. They quote Rossini’s remark, ‘Give me a laundry-list and I will set it,’ unaware, apparently, that a laundry-list, or any list for that matter, has a poetic value, and one which is exceptionally translatable into musical terms.”[5]
Part of the appeal modern lyrics usually have (there are exceptions, of course) is that they’re not demanding in the way poetry often is. Lyrics tend to be less occult, more overt than poetry. Less oblique, more direct. Less elitist, more democratic. Less Apollonian, more Dionysian. Less work, more play.
[Lady Gaga]
Lady Gaga tells her paramour “I got nothing on but the radio,” for instance. It’s not hard to decipher. Everybody gets what she means.
(I was interested to learn that Lady Gaga also goes in for “nonsense syllablizing” leading a resurgence of interest in the vocal technique known as ‘scat’.)
You all know what ‘scat’ is?
To do is to be. (Schopenhauer)
To be is to do. (Sartre)
Doobeedoobeedoo (Sinatra)
[Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald]
It’s a language which rejects meaning altogether and therefore never lies.
Scat is a jazz term and mainly associated with legendary musicians/singers like Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, but — here’s a fact for you trivia fans — centuries ago, when the church banned pipes and fiddles, Gaelic musicians responded by making “mouth music”, a kind of scat still performed today...
The dictionary defines ‘lyric’ as a form: ‘suitable for singing to the lyre or for being set to music and sung.’ But, everyone has to decide what ‘suitable’ means in different contexts for themselves. What ratio of sound to sense is required?
Song teaches us that sometimes understanding is overrated.
Here’s Combarieu again, from Music and Magic:“…in certain tribes the most celebrated songs are sung by people who do not understand the words. For the poet, the words of the song may very well have an independent signification; for others they only have a value when joined to a melody. Often, in fact, the sense of a song is sacrificed, without hesitation, to its form."
[STILL FROM COCTEAU’S ORPHÉE]
Like a lot of people, I’ve always been attracted to language which seems to be in some kind of code, not opaque, but resistant, mysterious. Like the messages Orphée (Orpheus transplanted into the modern world) receives over the radio in Death’s Rolls Royce in Jean Cocteau’s fabulous film Orphée —strange phrases like“birds sing with their fingers”, or “a single glass of water lights the world.” Corny? Maybe. To me there’s a whiff of the ineffable about them.