The dust-jacket illustration of Music and the Irish Literary Imagination shows
a still life by William Harnett of musical instruments, books and manuscript
paper heaped on a desk. “Music and Literature”, the painting is called,
evoking an old and homely pairing. And indeed, music and literature have
long muddled together, in fact and in metaphor. The poet’s lyricism gives
the composer his lyrics; the musician’s tempo gives the writer her rhythm.
Both art forms address the ear, and both draw on a critical language of
lyricism, rhythm, voice, tone, phrasing and line. Yet as anyone knows who
ventures into interdisciplinary territory, the potential for music to be
literary, and literature musical, is also full of difficulties. Hard
equivalences of genre or technique risk a barren formalism, while the softer
comparisons, of transferred epithet or metaphor, easily run into uncritical
praise.
Harry White, Professor of Music at University College Dublin, recognizes and
skirts these dangers. His book is an often fascinating account of the role
of music in the work of Irish poets, novelists and playwrights, and it
suggests one way forward in the study of the two arts. If the term “Irish
Literary Imagination” is admittedly a generalization, dependent on a
familiar list of men – Thomas Moore, W. B. Yeats, J. M. Synge, G. B. Shaw,
James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel and Seamus Heaney – it also proves
a surprisingly fruitful field of inquiry. In the absence of any classical
musical tradition in Ireland, the baton, White suggests, passes to the
writers. His investigation of music in their lives and works draws on the
premiss that the absence of the one strengthens the hand of the other, and
that Irish literature benefits from attending to music.
At the head of this tradition stands Thomas Moore, the once popular poet of
oriental ballads and Irish songs. White reminds us of Moore’s place in
European Romanticism, his importance to Berlioz and Schumann who set his
verse to music, as well as his influence on the causes of Catholic
Emancipation and Polish nationalism. Moore’s peculiar gift for composing
verse to pre-existing tunes helped reclaim and disseminate traditional Irish
music, and made that music audible in language. The nineteenth-century craze
for Lalla Rookh and the Irish Melodies led to an understandable reaction
against them, but it is time, White argues, to reconsider this curious,
hybrid poetry in the light of what was to come.
Both Shaw and Synge had musical careers, Shaw as a professional music critic,
Synge as student of composition before he turned to literature in 1894. Shaw
could use his plays to castigate British musical insularity and promote his
love of Wagner, but Synge internalized musical processes, writing “speeches
which function like arias”, using “musical markings” of pace and tempo and,
in rehearsal, insisting that actors follow “the cadential music of the
line”. Synge is a writer who constantly transposes the sounds of music into
words, his plays becoming, in White’s repeated phrase, “verbal operas”. That
phrase, and variations on it, runs throughout his book. Brian Friel’s
dramas, too, are “operas of the Irish mind”, not only in their many
references to music – Mendelssohn in Philadelphia, Chopin in Aristocrats,
Beethoven in Wonderful Tennessee – but also in the way their language pushes
towards pure sound, silence and dance: “a mirage of sound – a dream music
that is both heard and imagined . . . both itself and its own echo”, he
writes at the end of Dancing at Lughnasa. Both Synge and Friel let us hear
other languages, those of Irish or music, pushing at the limits of English.
With Joyce and Beckett the argument is more familiar. Joyce’s ability to
“write general noise on paper”, as his brother put it, records a lifelong
love of music, especially opera. From Bellini to the “The Lass of Aughrim”
in “The Dead”; from Rheingold to “The Croppy Boy” in “Sirens” (Ulysses), the
musical languages in Joyce are not only a matter of frequent allusion (there
are 3,000 references to opera in Finnegans Wake), but also of hearing
language as if it were played or sung; as if a bel canto of the imagination
drove the rhythmic interior monologues of his works. Joyce once asked a
friend “whether he didn’t think the musical effect of Ulysses superior to
Wagner’s music drama” – a comparison not meant to be taken lightly. If this
is “fiction adulterated by music” or, yet again, a kind of “verbal opera”,
certainly Joyce’s language is one which constantly listens to non-linguistic
sounds, to a rhythm and pitch which drum their own kinds of playful,
self-estranging music. Beckett, like Joyce, was a good amateur pianist, and
if his tastes inclined more to chamber music than opera, he too peppered his
writings with musical sound effects. Moreover, his insistence that his plays
be performed with absolute faithfulness to certain tempi and speech dynamics
could be exacting. “No one can possibly follow the text at that speed”, one
of his actors complained. “It’s like music, a piece of Schoenberg in his
head.” The point at which language gives way to composed sound is always
close for Beckett, as is the point where it gives way to silence – a silence
which, in his works, always has the timed expressiveness of a rest in music.
Among these writers Yeats proves the misfit. His avowed indifference to music
as an art form, his claim to be tone-deaf and his scratchy squabbles with
the composer Edmund Dulac, suggest that he is an exception to the general
rule. Yet, anyone hearing Yeats reading “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” hears a
sound which is hard to forget. Tone-deaf or not, Yeats’s experiments in
“speaking to the psaltery” with Florence Farr (mocked by Shaw as “the
maunderings of an idiotbanshee”), or the late BBC broadcasts of his poems
with musical settings, suggest a poet finically obsessive about the sounds
poetry makes. “No vowel must ever be prolonged unnaturally, no word of mine
must ever change into a mere musical note”, he instructed. The title of one
of Yeats’s poems, “Words for music, perhaps”, encapsulates this ambiguity.
For him words must not be set or sung to music; but words, when recited,
might have a music, a chant and rhythm of their own.
The awkwardness of Yeats’s place in this tradition raises the question of what
“music” means when applied to literature. White's final, disappointingly
short chapter on Heaney, which heads off into questions of ethics and
aesthetics, does not help. If actual musicality is not the condition of the
“Irish literary imagination”, then that title loses some of its point. Any
good writer, musical or not, Irish or not, might belong. The meaning of
“music” as a quality of words thus remains largely undefined and
undiscussed. White’s reluctance to evaluate writers – is Moore a good poet
or just an odd phenomenon? – along with a shortage of quotation and close
reading, means that literariness, the actual musical workings of words, is
not examined. We have to take it on trust that the works of Synge, Joyce and
Friel are “verbal operas”. Occasionally too, White falls into the kind of
generic comparisons which bedevil interdisciplinary studies: that Schoenberg
and Joyce stand in a symmetrical relationship to Webern and Beckett, for
instance, or that “Webern’s style and technique . . . [are] strongly
suggestive of Beckett’s later plays”. Without closer analysis, such
statements tend to flap in the wind. White’s conclusion that “the general
absence of art music from Irish cultural history is significantly redeemed”
by a musical literature might seem, to musicians at least, wishful thinking.
It is a pity that White curtails and simplifies Yeats’s quotation when he
asserts that “the principal concern of this book is to examine how words
become ‘words for music’ in the Irish literary imagination”. That
phrase, “for music”, in fact means different things throughout: for Moore,
words are literally written to music; for Shaw, they might argue a case for
music; for Synge, Joyce, Beckett and Friel, they variously echo the rhythms
and melodies of music; for Yeats, words sound instead of music. White tends
to overlook the note of caution in Yeats’s own title, his approximate
“perhaps”, so that music slips sometimes without question between an art
form in its own right and a quality of words. “Words for music, perhaps”
warns that the two disciplines, literature and music, might still retain
their stand-off, assert different conditions and, at some level, refuse to
be pressed into each other’s service.
Harry White
MUSIC AND THE IRISH LITERARY IMAGINATION
260pp. Oxford University Press. £55 (US $115).
978 0 19 954732 6
Angela Leighton’s On Form: Poetry, aestheticism, and the legacy of a
word, and her collection of poems, Sea Level, were both published in 2007.
