Poetry of Skins, Wood and Metal

What is the relationship between poetry and musical compositions? The fragments of Sappho, the rhythms of verse, and a beat you can dance to.

Photo by Coppa Cover on Unsplash

First, a time-sensitive announcement for local folks:

Tomorrow my friend Orlando Cela, the founder of the Lowell Chamber Orchestra, will be conducting a special performance called Fantastic Landscapes which will feature music that evokes the sensations of places, real and imaginaries. They will feature works by Julia Perry, Béla Bartók, Emmanuel Séjourné, and Martin Schreiner, one of the winners of the 2023 LCO Call-for-Scores. Featuring Nikki Huang, marimba - winner of the 2023 LCO Concerto Competition.

Sunday, February 18, 3:00 pm
Richard and Nancy Donahue Academic Arts Center
240 Central Street, Lowell, MA

Nikki Huang is one of the reasons I was particularly interested in seeing this show. (I cannot attend due to a conflict but I hope to catch at least part of the live stream that viewers can access at 3pm tomorrow.)

You can watch Huang perform Psappha, a very complex multi-percussion piece by the Franco-Greek modernist composer Iannis Xenakis.

Inspired by Sappho, Psappha is inspired by the small rhythmic cells characteristic of her poetry. Xenakis wrote the score in a unique graph notation, for three groups of wood and/or skins and three groups of metal instrumentation. The piece consists of 2,396 segments.¹ You can take a look at a sample of the notation here. Sappho’s poetry was meant to be put to music, but this piece simply evokes the rhythm of it.

Last year, I had read Anne Carson’s excellent translation of Sappho’s fragments, If Not, Winter. The poet wrote in different meters, but she is most known for the Sapphic stanza. Sappho 31 is her best known poem in this form. It is an unrhymed, quantitative verse which looks a bit like this:

– u – x – u u – u – –
– u – x – u u – u – –
– u – x – u u – u – x
– u u – –

Ode to Aphrodite is the most complete of all of her fragments and consists of 7 Sapphic stanzas. You can watch it being performed in this video. And this video is what the Barbiton lyre of Sappho probably sounded like.

Psappha seems to be offering something of more intense passion and fragmentation.The performance was compelling and beautiful, and I felt drawn the musician’s speed, choreography, and power.

Let’s set Sappho to the side for a moment…

Don’t look so gloomy… we won’t forget you. (Charles Mengin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

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Over at

Personal Canon Formation

,

John Halbrooks

wrote about Prince and his recent series on Beowulf. (On a tangential note, John and I posed a joint writing question about time shifting in narratives that

Eleanor Anstruther

and

<Mary L. Tabor>

kindly answered recently here and here.)

What Can Prince Teach Us about the Icelandic Sagas?

John’s amusing personal recollection of his teenaged years is followed by this connection between Prince and Icelandic sagas:

My brain was clearly putting these two works of art together, but I couldn’t figure out why. Since my best ideas often come from these accidental juxtapositions, from these odd bits of synchronicity, I set out to write this essay in search of an answer.

And I think that I have found one, though it is not simple, nor is it definitive. To understand what Prince can teach us about the Icelandic sagas, we will have to follow the wild ride through both sides of Purple Rain—from the erotic, apocalyptic abyss of side one to the self-sacrificing enlightenment of side two—and the equally wide ride through Egil’s extraordinarily violent poetic career, from his devastatingly ironic praise poem for King Eric Bloodaxe, to his love-poems to Asgerd, to his mourning the deaths of his sons.

It seems that the unifying qualities between the modern songs and the ancient sagas are raw emotion and lyricism.

In his essay, Poetry as Enchantment, Dana Gioia writes,

[Poetry] began as a performative and auditory medium, linked to music and dance and associated with civic ceremony, religious ritual, and magic. (The earliest poetry almost certainly served a shamanistic function.) Most aboriginal cultures did not distinguish poetry from song because the arts were so interrelated as to be porous. Nor did the classical Greek or Chinese cultures two or three millennia ago differentiate poetry from song. Verse was not spoken in a conversational manner, which was an early twentieth century development. Poetic speech was always stylized—usually either chanted rhythmically or sung, sometimes even sung and danced in chorus.

Both Plato and Aristotle realized that music had the ability to imitate emotional states. Take this bit from Aristotle’s Politics:

When men hear imitations, even apart from the rhythms and tunes themselves, their feelings move in sympathy. Since then music is a pleasure, and excellence consists in rejoicing and loving and hating rightly, there is clearly nothing which we are so much concerned to acquire and to cultivate as the power of forming right judgments, and of taking delight in good dispositions and noble actions. (1340a)

Aristotle understood music’s ability to help individuals who are in extreme states of emotion return to a more balanced state (Politics, 1342a). Likewise, one could use music to bring a balanced individual to an extreme emotional state.

Well, in the words of Prince, “Let’s go crazy!”

With or without lyrics, music has the power to take us out of structured thinking and into a realm of intuition and association. It may have influenced Halbrook’s connection between Egil and Prince.

It makes me play songs on repeat or find different versions of a song.

Here’s another version of Psappha.

When I listen to this I don’t hear poetry, but I hear something else encoded. Footsteps, running, marching, heartbeats. It is a 10 minute piece which is a very different listening experience than what most people are used to listening to.

Ted Gioia

wrote that our brains are wired to seek euphoria and ecstasy through musical rhythm² and mentioned the research of Andrew Neher who discovered that if you listen to music long enough, your brainwaves begin to match the rhythms of the music.³ Three minutes won’t do it, but 10 minutes might.

Rhythm has been an important aspect of poetry until the rebellious modern era. However, there is a reason why the earliest verse relied on a system of stressed and unstressed lines. It is how rhapsodes could keep the words in their memory. (The invention of rhyme came much later.)

With the rise of free verse, I wonder if we are depriving our poetry of the benefits of rhythm. I wonder if the lack of meter is making it extremely difficult to memorize poetry—and perform it for that matter. When we have poetry easily held in our minds we allow it to be a part of us, to shape the way we think. Without musicality, I am afraid we are making our poetry forgettable.

It is not surprising that popular songs—with singable melodies, repetitive verses, steady rhythms, and strong rhyme—are the only poems that our younger generations know by heart. My girls know the bulk of Taylor Swift’s works, even the song that lasts for a gutsy 10-minutes.

The long line of tortured poets stretches millennia. Sappho to Swift—singing songs of love and heartache.

And the beat goes on…

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psappha_(Xenakis)

2. https://www.honest-broker.com/p/is-the-three-minute-song-bad-for

3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0013469461900141