Density

This chapter explores the ‘vertical’ or the simultaneous way in which non-denotative elements contribute to a piece or poem. This simultaneous quality is referred to as ‘density’. As so often with abstract forms, density is more easily spotted in music than in verse, as it is easier to believe there just is more going on at any one moment of a thickly orchestrated symphony than of a string trio: more diversity, even though not necessarily more in the way of musical ideas, and above all simply more noise. In poetry, however, the chapter sums up the principle of poetic density through an equation: D = CV (or, density = content × versification).

Introduction: A Little Conversation

This introductory chapter ponders on the connections between poetry and music, their similarities, and also what sets them apart. It talks about music and poetry from a maker's standpoint, in particular how poetry and music are performed and that poetry turns out to share with music in performance, was connected with other qualities both genres share. These qualities, in turn, have more to do with technical, makerly concerns than with types and occasions of performance. They are more concerned with something intrinsic to how music and poetry are structured than simply with the giving and receiving of a particular experience.

Performance: The Role of the Audience

This chapter considers how we experience as well as draw meaning from music and poetry. Far from arguing about the true value of a poem or a piece of music, the chapter instead emphasises a smaller and more ‘intimate’ way of experiencing artforms. The point is simply that whatever is there, in a piece of music or a poem, is something we co-create each time that work happens. One way to say this might be that experience is something that cannot exist without us, but that is built into verse and music so as to be released by us. It is not raw time, but it is a temporal element that we are the measure of — and that is also the measure of us. Their experiential nature is what makes poetry and music chronologic; and experience is what locates us as ourselves.

The Consolations of Tradition

This chapter looks at how, since the millennium, certain trends in Anglophone poetry have echoed the ‘turn’ in Western art music away from what we might think of as mid-century ‘scholasticism’ towards such conventional musical rewards as readily detectable patterning, or euphony. Artistic credibility and a response by non-specialist audiences no longer appear inimical. It has once again become possible to develop serious original work using traditional verse forms such as the ballad, or musical tropes as familiar as the rising or falling scale on which Arvo Pärt's famous Fratres is built. This shift, from the complex and unfamiliar to material that is distilled and empirically accessible, makes us ask whether it is cultural conditioning, or some innate human capacity, that lets us experience certain tropes as more accessible than others.

Closer Still: The Total Artwork

This chapter considers the Gesamtkunstwerk, which English musicologists translate as ‘total artwork’. Richard Wagner had used the expression to characterise his operas, though he had only ever used the term in two essays, both published in 1849: ‘Art and Revolution’ and ‘The Artwork of the Future’. Moreover, the term did not originate from Wagner himself, and he did not even spell it in the conventional way. Since the late twentieth century ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ has been applied to other artforms, particularly architecture, which like opera can unite a number of elements. (Architecture, for example, marries engineering, landscaping and interior decoration, among others.) But the term's origins are in the late eighteenth-century notion that all the arts could be unified in poetry.

Chromaticism

This chapter examines the uses of chromaticism in music and poetry. Chromaticism is a concept drawn from Western Classical music, and refers to the tonal or harmonic variations in terms of colour. Chromaticism is guilty of revealing how porous the boundaries are between a work of art and the social conditions under which that work was produced. But it also reveals something about the musical project itself. But the concept goes much further than that. In the context of Western music and poetry, ‘chromatic’ can mean not merely what is formally disobedient, but more broadly whatever is put in the poem for sensory, rather than grammatical or denotative, reasons. Chromaticism represents a principle of ‘give’ — of flavour, or even of deviation — within poetic language, and this principle has a number of aspects.

Drawing the Line

This chapter considers the logic or the ‘line’ or linearity, which signifies the connectedness, or the ‘and then … and then’ process in music and poetry. It illustrates the continuous pattern of notes in a melody and how the notes come one at a time and have a stronger relationship to each other than to other musical lines going on at the same time. They are chronologically connected. Residually, and often actually, they are also connected by something internal, yet constitutive: they share a ‘breath’. In addition, music demonstrates linearity in a different way, by ‘growing’ in parallel to poetry. Fleshing out the themes of linearity between the two genres are rhythms, grammar, and semantics, among many others.

Song

This chapter looks at how music and poetry meet in song. The ballad form is one way of recognising the continuity between genres, with its familiarity and narrative potential. Song also links music and poetry by the obvious means of making them collaborate directly with each other. But this is also where tensions between the two forms are most marked. Precisely because they must work most closely together, we see here the ways they struggle with each other: for example, in ongoing debate about the status of song lyrics. As well as such arguments about songs, makerly tensions exist within them, as music and words struggle for priority, and force each other into compromises.

The Meaning of ‘Meaning’

This chapter considers whether one can think of the semiotic or ‘musical’ elements in language, particularly in poetry, as meaning-laden in their own terms. The previous chapters have shown how abstract formal elements such as texture and formal proportion can supplement literal, denotative meaning. They have also revealed how a richer sense of ‘meaning’, and richer meanings, can be found in discourses such as poetry, which try to harness the semiotic elements in language, than in those such as instruction manuals, that do not. A distinctive characteristic of the semantic in language is the syntactic relationship it makes with the objects of experience. This orderly sense-making turns out to be the engine of denotation, and it is the very element of language that this chapter explores.

And Story Came Too: From Epic to Opera

This chapter discusses the associations between the epic and the opera. The epics that remain with us were not the first human expressive practice, but early examples date back more than four millennia. They offer surprising insights into opera, which is in certain ways their successor: both forms grapple to combine the same trio of constituents. Though occurring across centuries and cultures, all epics have in common a public storytelling role that relies on both linguistic and ‘musical’ — that is, at least pitched or incanted — tropes to make it more absorbing for its audience, and memorisable for the performer. Additionally, opera is a highly specialised form compared to the song; one that's frequently portrayed, by both admirers and critics, as having at least as much cultural significance off the stage as on it.