What Makes Music?

Greetings!
I was reading this poem for my Modern Poetry class by Wallace Stevens and it really resonated with what we started to touch on in class on Wednesday. This question of what music actually is. Do simple sounds create a sort of music? I think that this poem argues that these sounds indeed are music. When the speaker mentions "Just as my fingers on these keys/ Make music, so the self-same sounds/ On my spirit make a music, too. / Music is feeling, then, not sound;", it is very clear that the speaker believes music is simply a sound that moves you. The poem is kind of long but check it out! What do you think?

Peter Quince at the Clavier

Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the self-same sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna;
Of a green evening, clear and warm,
She bathed in her still garden, while
The red-eyed elders, watching, felt
The basses of their beings throb
In witching chords, and their thin blood
Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.

II
In the green water, clear and warm,
Susanna lay.
She searched
The touch of springs,
And found
Concealed imaginings.
She sighed,
For so much melody.
Upon the bank, she stood
In the cool
Of spent emotions.
She felt, among the leaves,
The dew
Of old devotions.
She walked upon the grass,
Still quavering.
The winds were like her maids,
On timid feet,
Fetching her woven scarves,
Yet wavering.
A breath upon her hand
Muted the night.
She turned —
A cymbal crashed,
Amid roaring horns.

III
Soon, with a noise like tambourines,
Came her attendant Byzantines.
They wondered why Susanna cried
Against the elders by her side;
And as they whispered, the refrain
Was like a willow swept by rain.
Anon, their lamps' uplifted flame
Revealed Susanna and her shame.
And then, the simpering Byzantines
Fled, with a noise like tambourines.

IV
Beauty is momentary in the mind —
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.
The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden's choral.
Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death's ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

Remembering Rhoda

We start to worry for Rhoda fairly early in The Waves, it seems, as it becomes evident that her hold on ordinary reality is rather tenuous, and as we get intimations that she desires to escape from that reality. There's complexity and poignance to her plight, though, most especially, I find, in that moment when she observes that "there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now" (224). There's something beautiful about that passage, something that suggests that maybe death can be envisioned as something to be embraced, as something that will offer a compensatory reality.

Anyway, this posting comes less from a need to fill in Rhoda's story than to share a wonderful poem. Do you all know Stevie Smith's 1957 poem "Not Waving but Drowning"? We could note the parallel to Woolf's novel in Smith's title, of course, but more importantly we get a kind of vivid mini-drama that suggests a person (consider Rhoda) whose gestures have been tragically misinterpreted throughout his (her) life:

Not Waving but Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

It's a shattering poem when you think about the contrast between the dead man's inner torment and the image of good nature his friends saw in his comings and goings (his "larkings"). Like The Waves, it's a work that suggests many of us don't always feel at home in the world, and that we have to try to convince ourselves and others that we do. And sometimes, alas, we can't call upon that resolve Bernard summons at the end of the novel.

Get Your Motor Runnin'

I'm invoking Steppenwolf's 1969 chestnut, of course, with that title line, but it's neither "Born to Be Wild" nor Easy Rider that's on my mind, but, rather, the music that rallies our burning muscles during workouts. I was reflecting that I probably pull off my best times on the elliptical machine when I listen to a playlist that looks something like the following: "Tower" (by Angel, an undervalued progressive rock band from the 70s!), "Unchained" (Van Halen), "Hallowed Be Thy Name" (Iron Maiden), "The Hellion & Electric Eye" (Judas Priest), "Don't Fear the Reaper" (Blue Oyster Cult), "Magic Power" (Triumph), and maybe "Trains" (Porcupine Tree). Now, I know that's not the music of the spheres (and you may be thinking less of me already), but one can't argue with results! Anyway, all of this makes me wonder what music you call upon when you need a little extra adrenaline in your pedals, your running shoes, or when you're in the car on the way to your soccer game? Because, after all, in these instances Joni Mitchell just won't do! Macklemore's "Can't Hold Us" is seeming like a candidate lately, too -- what a great song!

OK, back to more serious matters: I hope you didn't leave class last time in a greater state of loss than when you entered. I'm reminded of the pedagogical challenges of The Waves -- part of me thinks the best approach would be a linear one, moving in some kind of modestly representative way through each "time pool," but, then again, I'm also inclined to go at it in a more random way, as we did last Wednesday, letting the particles fall where they may. Either, I suppose, is true to the formal spirit of the novel, which is linear in one sense (the interludes) and recursive in another (the soliloquies). Anyway, do use the posting below (i.e., "Waveriders") -- or start a new one -- to comment, share a passage, an observation, etc.; the more of these that we can get circulating the better off we'll be this week. Keep in mind, too, that as the posts pile up the older material will get pushed out of view -- but don't let that stop you from reviving an older thread. Don't be put off by some of those loooonngggg posts, either -- I guess this is material for my own multigenre essay, and my hope is (to quote Bernard) that you'll at least find a "fin in a waste of waters" in some of the lengthier posts, and be inclined to share even a modest observation or two of your own! Polyphonically yours, Eric.

Music of Fruit

I found this pretty interesting video and thought I would share it with the class. It certainly presents the music of nature that we discussed from our poets in a unique and entirely modern way. Perhaps this speaks to the fresh fruit and vegetables that we get in the grocery store, no longer are they local or seasonal. Technological music from technologically produced vegetables in a modern world. Entertaining nonetheless. Enjoy.


http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/02/19/172431202/this-music-is-bananas-really

Waveriders

We move on, of course, to the enormous challenges (and hopefully the enormous delights) of Woolf's 1931 novel (her seventh), The Waves. Previewing some of your reactions and comments in this space might be a good way to get things going as we look ahead to Wednesday's class (when we'll start by returning to Joyce & "The Dead" but then make our way in short order to Woolf). First of all, some relevant excerpts from her diaries, where she emphasizes issues of both sound and rhythm: "Could one not get the waves to be heard all through? Or the farmyard noises? Some odd irrelevant noises" (6/23/1929); "The Waves is I think resolving itself into a series of dramatic soliloquies. The thing is to keep them running homogeneously in and out, in the rhythm of the waves. Can they be read consecutively? ... I think this is the greatest opportunity I have yet been able to give myself: therefore I suppose the most complete failure. Yet I respect myself for writing this book" (8/20/1930).

Woolf certainly felt the pressure of form when she wrote the novel (like Beethoven, she struggled fiercely throughout her career to free herself and her art from conventional form, from the "two and thirty chapters" of her literary predecessors, as she pursued what she memorably called the "luminous halo" of life). And now we feel the pressure of reading and responding to that form. Most skeletally, we will encounter nine episodes that each follow an italicized interlude (or maybe prelude is a better word for these): the latter trace the arc of the sun, from dawn to dusk, and aspects of the natural world, in a day-spanning progression that may nearly make us recall the similar sort of (metaphorical) arc in Keats's "To Autumn." The episodes follow six individuals from childhood (episode 1) through their school years (episode 2), their university years (episode 3), and all the way up through middle age (episode 7) and, in some cases, death; through it all, the six (Bernard, Jinny, Neville, Rhoda, Louis, and Susan) remain life-long friends.

Our job, I guess, is to understand how Woolf is using form in this novel -- especially musical form -- but also to look for the presence of music as a thematic context, and, hopefully, to enjoy the aesthetics, the story, and the wisdom that the novel has to offer. As you would expect from Woolf, this novel will not be about a sequence of events, but about what Wordsworth calls "spots in time": we don't, after all, typically think of our lives in strictly chronological terms. The emphasis will be on lucid moments, on bright, vivid scenes and impressions. Many of them will recur. If the characters share anything, it's probably the desire to achieve reintegration and deeper meanings, to find in all those disparate moments and images a kind of pattern and unity. So, try to perceive some manner of relationship between the preludes and the melodies and concerns of the voices that follow in the attached section, try to identify the ways the six voices/individuals resemble each other and differ from one another, try to track the role of memory in the novel, and, especially as we work towards the conclusion and our 2/27 meeting, try to figure out where this all leads.

(Do feel free, as well, to offer some comments on the presence/role/influence of music in Joyce's story -- especially if you missed our previous class session or haven't yet had a chance to share some of your observations)

Of Abbeys, Nightingales, Urns, and Swallows

Adieu! Adieu! to the Romantics, and on to the Modernists. I guess we're leaving the exposition stage of the course, and, with the weighty literature that looms (Woolf, Kundera, Morrison, etc.), we enter the development stage; we also move from poetry to the novel. I hope some of the important questions (theoretical, structural, thematic, musicological, etc.) are circulating productively for you. We will create more, I'm sure.

I hope, too, that the musical contexts informed and even enhanced your experience of Wordsworth and the Keats odes. We're realizing that we can study the presence of music in literature, or literature in music, or, perhaps most interestingly, the seemingly shared structures of literature and music. The ode and the sonata forms both provided public models/genres for artists, and to that end tended to produce similar expectations and "landmarks." I tried to emphasize the treatment of time in each genre and artistic form. Sculpture and painting (and of the latter you should visit Jenna's posting on O'Keeffe below), we might say, unfold meaning in the context of space, while music and literature reveal themselves as arts of time (and here I'm remembering Nancy Cluck's book, Literature and Music: Essays on Form). Reading "Tintern Abbey" and listening to Beethoven's 5th, we learn important lessons about human life and about dealing with the passage of time. It would be useful for us to map the movements in time (i.e. present time, past time, and future time) in Wordsworth's poem, and what these movements mean in the context of the overall meaning of the poem. It is no doubt a work of crisis (and here you might think of our experience listening to the Mozart and Beethoven movements, where the first theme must undergo crisis and fragmentation before "coming home again" in the recapitulation): the speaker must struggle between confidence in the truth and in the moral power of the imagination (especially in the context of the human heart's ballet with nature) on the one hand, and the ravaging effects of time on the other, the irrepressible sense of mortality. The speaker achieves an affirmation at the end, but it's not without a sense of loss and anxiety.

We didn't talk about the Preface to Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, and we probably should have. We might have thought about (in the context of literary and musical composition) Wordsworth's famous lines that poetry constitutes "emotions recollected in tranquility." Romanticism in some respects becomes obsessed with recovering a sense of lost wholeness.

This is a recapitulation itself, of course, but the Keats odes trace a similar effect. They reflect a kind of lost tonal stability (ah, there's that phrase again!") in the midst of the anguished strivings and questions of "Nightingale" and "Grecian Urn," but arguably turn a corner in that stanza in "Grecian Urn" when the urn (now a funeral urn) begins to suggest not an art of escape from the conditions of mortality, but an art that can soothe and console human suffering. This leads to the deeply consoling treatment of time in "To Autumn," which, in a season-spanning day, and a life-spanning metaphorical trajectory (sunrise to sunset), finds the speaker ultimately perceiving that life means life in time, and that, contemplated properly, we can find beauty and consoling meaning even in the moment that we know must now pass. The swallows are gathering to leave, but in order that they might come back. The sounds of nature and animal life in that gloriously elegant third stanza become a kind of a music in the poet's soul (John Minahan writes convincingly about this in his study, Word Like a Bell) -- music becomes a path to insight, teaching the speaker (and us) that even in passing, time leaves something of value behind. This reminds me of when we listen to a favorite captivating, well-constructed, emotional song (pop, rock, or otherwise): we must somehow both relish where it takes us and be prepared for that moment when it ends, when the notes vanish into the air.

A (Long) Keatsian Postscript

For what it's worth (and it may be worth very little), I thought maybe I'd post some outtakes from that essay I was telling you I wrote on Michael Stipe's "Find the River" and Keats's "To Autumn" (the full text of which is available on Moodle, should you be interested). Maybe it will be useful as an example of how one might go about writing up something formal in this interdisciplinary field, but mostly I thought you might just find it to be interesting (and maybe you'll tell me I have gone off the deep end with the analysis!). So, I pick up the action about 2/3 of the way into the essay:

***************************

Helen Vendler observes that "the constitutive trope of the ode "To Autumn" is enumeration, the trope of plenitude" and, indeed, the poem is "o'er-brimm'd" (l.11) with a catalog of fruits, nuts, flowers, grains, and animals. This abundance appears formally, as well, in the dense textures of Keats's poetic line, in the subtleties of sound and rhythm, and, as H.T. Kirby-Smith adds, "in a wealth of vocalic resonances, echoes, and reflections" (225) that finally turn the poem over to music and the ambivalent songs of autumn in the final stanza.... Stipe, too, loads his poetic line with an abundance of carefully considered sound elements, and creates a speaker whose cornucopia of spices and scents -- referencing, as he does, bergamot, vetiver, ginger, lemon, indigo, coriander stem, rose of hay -- articulates his own pursuit of sensuous immediacy and expression of "the richness of this transient existence" (Kirby-Smith 249).... What neither writer or speaker possesses in abundance, though, is time, and thus each lyric proceeds with the painful awareness that what now is "loaded," "swelled," and "o'er-brimm'd" must finally fall, turn to "last oozings," or reach the ocean. Amidst all the temporal and spatial movement, the poetics of each lyric also ironically strive to produce stoppages and stasis, seeking to arrest the flow of time with challenging syntax, rhythmic variation, and metaphor.

Stipe, of course, manages the progression of time most obviously with his masterful rhythmic variations and metrical anomalies. In addition, the obliqueness of some of his phrasings (e.g., “bergamot and vetiver / run through my head and fall away” (l. 17-18)), the tactical breaks with syntactic convention (e.g., “river poet search naïveté”), and the Hopkins-like coined phrases (e.g., “bayberry moon” (l. 8)) all serve to slow down the reader’s experience of time, and thus work brilliantly with the thematic content of “Find the River” even as they work against those rhythmic elements that sweep one along in its current. As a lyric, then, “Find the River” stops, rearranges, and even at one level transcends the problems of time in the way that poems can; as a musical composition and auditory experience, however, the song accedes to a sense of linear inevitability, proceeding from the soft opening strums of the acoustic guitar to its preordained conclusion after three minutes and fifty-two seconds. Because music happens to us in “real time,” argues Matthews, “to change the time of a piece of music is to alter, as it were, its cellular makeup, and for the worse” (38); to violate the flow seems to do a kind of violence to it. Although it’s repeatable and we can find the river over and over again, we always necessarily swim in different waters —- it is always, at some level, an experience of one-timeness. While its meditative content and formal qualities do, as we’ve seen, extend the reader in time, the semantic coda of “Find the River” does not exhibit the expressive qualities of what Barbara Smith calls “weak closure” (250): the last line, in which the speaker, seemingly again addressing the young auditor, promises that “all of this is coming your way” (l. 39), feels so declarative, so wise, and so full of final significance as to secure strong closure.

If, though, we consider, as we should, the musical elements that surround and complement Stipe’s words, then, when the rushing stateliness of the final verse seems at last to capitulate to the unforgiving linear nature of time, we realize Stipe receives help from his band-mates. We’re delivered definitively and emotionally to that final end-stop, but yet the song, in its very last moments and just after Stipe’s voice has exited, yields to the soft repetitive strums of the acoustic guitar, which fade gently as if loath to leave, and as if the notes -— and we the listeners —- are being stretched like gossamer in an unending present: like “permanence wrung out of wane,” as Rilke writes in his poem “Gong.” We think, perhaps, of Plumly’s assessment of Keats, that “at his best, in the odes, time is not only suspended but extended to an edge, to where the running-over almost spills” (344). This is poetry’s “timeless, time-bound business,” writes Linda Gregerson, “to trace both portal and mortality, to write against death, yes, but also into it” (263).... Just as Keats’s poem provides that exhilarating spatial sensation of veering upwards into the expanse of sky, “Find the River” widens out to the ocean and the horizon as the river dramatically approaches the estuary. In each case, we ultimately experience a poetic work “whose visionary size transcends its local space” (Plumly 172).

[....]

As convinced as Keats was in his last year that he’d leave little of value behind in his poetic work, no one any longer, of course, needs to argue for his legacy or for that of his odes. Using “To Autumn” as an ongoing reference point in a discussion of Stipe’s “Find the River” in no way implies an equivalency of stature or accomplishment -— the latter will never, after all, appear in a single poetry anthology. All the same, “To Autumn” uniquely helps to reveal the thematic and emotional amplitude of “Find the River,” as well as to draw out the intricacies of Stipe’s nuanced poetics. Considered together, however improbably, we value these two lyrics because they convince us that the imaginative can be situated “in a harmonious relation to the natural” (Vendler 126) and in so doing they provide recompense and instructions for our experience of time. By being so resolutely embedded in the fleeting, both “To Autumn” and “Find the River” teach us how to assimilate the implications of the reaped furrow and the river’s arrival at the ocean, and thus to extend ourselves temporally -— with grace and with the expectation that sweetness will follow. We are, in turn, perhaps newly appreciative of the “stubble-plain,” accepting of the power of the undertow, and welcoming of the expanse (and possibly the void) of the boundless sky and sea. With sense that “seems to be brought along by chimes of sound” (Hallberg 164), these two lyrics allow us to reach beyond the linguistic, to sense “a cohesion and ongoingness to which we adhere even when we cannot know its ground” (Stewart 331). And if and when there is, indeed, “nothing left to throw,” and no more songs of Spring in the sonorous air, these lyrics tell us we can make peace with the accompanying doubts and uncertainties, trusting that our figurative last line will be some manner of enjambment and not an end-stop.

Georgia O'Keeffe: Music and Painting

"Georgia O’Keeffe was fascinated with what she called “the idea that music could be translated into something for the eye.” Modern artists such as O’Keeffe admired music because it is expressive and can communicate powerful emotions, even when it doesn’t have words or suggest specific images. For Music, Pink and Blue No.2, O’Keeffe was interested in the relationships between music, nature, color, and form.

O’Keeffe used organic shapesand vivid colors to suggest the forms she saw in nature. Soft shapes spread across thecanvas from top to bottom in pink, blue, green, and lavender. The combination of colors and forms creates visual rhythms and harmoniessimilar to those you can hear in music." 

(Whitney Museum of American Art website) 

Photo from artblart.com

(Not so) Distant Music

Tomorrow will find us visiting Joyce's supremely elegant and moving short story, "The Dead." Joyce, as you may know, was a musician before he was a writer, which may explain why there are so many musical episodes distributed across his writing, from the stories in Dubliners to the far more complexly realized permutations in Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. For our purposes, the questions are probably fairly obvious: in what sense is music relevant to our understanding of "The Dead"? When and how does music appear in this story? Is music used as ... a metaphor? ... a structuring device for the narrative? ... thematic content for the story and its characters? Can what we learned about the (narrative) structure of sonata form be deemed relevant to the progression of this story in any way? How do you read and experience the sublime conclusion to this story in light of what we've been reading and discussing over the past couple weeks? Feel free, of course, to get things started in this space in advance of class ... or to drop by, later in the week, to continue what will necessarily have been an abbreviated conversation on Wednesday.

First, though, at the beginning of Wednesday's class, having discussed "To Autumn" and listened to R.E.M.'s song at the end of Monday's class, I still want us to talk a little bit about the Stipe lyric for "Find the River." I find it to be one of their most supremely graceful and touching tracks, and I wonder if any of you might be inclined to share some thoughts here as to how we might put this song lyric in conversation with the Keats poem and aesthetic? What do they share, if anything? If you were to make a case for this lyric rising to the level of poetry, how would you go about doing it?

These Beauteous Forms

The "beauteous forms" for Wordsworth's speaker in "Tintern Abbey" are, of course, the sylvan glories of the natural scene he sees from the banks of the Wye, which offer an antidote to his current life in "lonely rooms, and 'mid the din / Of town and cities" (l. 25-26). For us, though, the beauteous forms might also be the vessels that, in both poetry (in Wordsworth's and Keats's case, the ode) and in music (the sonata), somehow concretize time and help us to learn how to handle (with some measure of grace and acceptance, hopefully) the passing of time.

At issue during much of our discussion during the past few class meetings, I guess, was the juxtaposition (available to us in both musical and poetic works) of elements that are referential, mimetic, or conceptual with elements of pure form and experiences of pure sensations. In that crucial section early in "Music, Language, and Composition," Adorno asserts that musical communication exists somewhere between the poles of no signification and absolute signification. Good music (whatever that may be) has something to say to us and somehow gives us insight and comprehension about the human condition -- but of course we struggle to understand how that works ("no art can be pinned down as to what it says," proposes Adorno, "and yet it speaks" (122)). We think of poetry as more unambiguously providing such insight, and yet the poems we read last week ("Kubla Khan," "Ode to a Skylark" etc.) seem to valorize joy and spontaneity rather than intellectuality, as if the authority of a poem derives from its (ecstatic) pleasure ("such harmonious madness / from my lips would flow" (Skylark l.103-4); these poems show us, I think, that we also respond to poetry in terms of the texture of the sounds of words, and that this "music", this semiotic excess or untranslatability, somehow conveys to us something more than pure abstraction. I think the third stanza of Keats's "To Autumn," which we'll talk about on Monday, is another example of this. What I guess we should be seeing at this point is that we're implicitly raising big questions about the experience and interpretation of art, generally -- questions that relate to the interpretive vs. sensory dimension of that experience. That's why I thought you might like to refer at some point to those optional essays on Moodle by Sontag and Iser. We remember that Poe sees the "Poetic Principle" as being "always found in an elevating excitement of the Soul," a sentiment with which Sontag seems sympathetic when she stresses that "what is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all." But then there's Adorno's rejection of the notion that music is pure expression; he finds in music (including purely instrumental music like the music we listened to in class this past Wednesday) a form of cognition through which we can understand things about the world. Big questions for sure, ones I hope you'll continue to wrestle with and perhaps write about.

So, back to "Tintern Abbey." Might you continue to try to find access points into this poem with the assistance of what we now know about sonata form? Does the idea of tonal stability being established, then lost, then recovered help us with the journey of Wordsworth's speaker in this poem? Do the ode and the sonata form movement share structural rhythms? Can we say that Wordsworth's speaker, Mozart, and Beethoven are all giving us a very similar personal response to temporality in these works? Clearly time is at the center of the poem as surely as it is at the center of those symphonic movements: they all involve hearing and memory, and they are all about trying to recover something that has been challenged, and perhaps lost. Like the first themes in the Mozart 40th and the Beethoven 5th that get deconstructed and broken apart, Wordsworth's speaker finds his attempt to recover those "sensations sweet" (l. 27) that come to him via an unmediated encounter with Nature imperiled by a "sad perplexity" (l. 60), by "the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world" (l. 39-40). Like a first theme that is put to the test (and recall that moment in the Beethoven movement when that single, solitary note gets passed back and forth, when we perhaps see just how profoundly things have been broken down) and then is able to reappear with at least some of its former glory in the recapitulation, Wordsworth's speaker transcends "the still, sad music of humanity" (l. 91) and finds again, however chastened his spirit may be, that Nature is still "the anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, / The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul / Of all my moral being" (l. 109-111). This sounds like the crescendo, the big conclusion of a sonata-form movement, and yet the poem doesn't end here. Like Beethoven in that opening movement of the 5th, when he nearly adds more development in the extended coda, Wordsworth, too, seems to resist or be suspicious of closure. He hedges and seems to question whether what he has just affirmed is enough. And so even this return and resolution comes with a difference: he needs the appearance of his "dearest Friend" (l. 115), his sister, a kindred spirit who might bolster him by creating a communal experience (notice how the first person pronoun yields to the collective "we" throughout that final prayer-like verse paragraph), who might carry on ("nor wilt thou then forget" (l. 155)) with the buoyant relationship with Nature even if he himself is unable to.

Well, that's just a start. You all can add to that, especially since I'm now feeling "the burthen of the mystery" (l. 38) in trying to make sense of all this! I guess what I find most persuasive and helpful here is that both the music and the poem are trying (in very similar ways, I think) to find affirmation in the face of loss, to find ways of discovering recurrence to combat the linear march of time: to play with Keats's famous concluding lines from "Ode on a Grecian Urn," we might say "'Meaning is loss, loss meaning,' -- that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Tuning in: 2012

Greetings, LitMusicians! I still plan to post something retrospective/summarial about our first two weeks of discussion (perhaps this weekend), and to seek out more comments on "Tintern Abbey," perhaps, especially in light of our immersion in sonata form (via Mozart and Beethoven) on Wednesday, but for now a posting of lesser import. It's not quite my take on the musical DNA assignment you're working on this weekend, but this will at least give you a snapshot of one very small strand of my DNA. At the end of every year I tend to sink countless hours into scouring the music blogs and the "best of the year" song and record lists; combining new finds with music I myself picked up during the year, I then assemble compilation cds that I call "Alts, Indies, Pop Confections, and Other Notables." Here are the track listings for Volumes 1 & 2 for 2012 (after all the classical music we had in class Wednesday, this will help mix things up!):

Vol 1:
1. "Eyeoneye," Andrew Bird 2. "Animal Life," Shearwater 3. "Trembling Hands," The Temper Trap 4. "I Will Wait," Mumford & Sons 5. "Long Slow Dance," The Fresh & Onlys 6. "Ho Hey," The Lumineers 7. "1904," The Tallest Man on Earth 8. "Ways of Man," Old Crow Medicine Show 9. "Live and Die," The Avett Brothers 10. "Love Spent," Madonna 11. "Priscilla," Sea Wolf 12. "Change the Sheets," Kathleen Edwards 13. "I'm Not Talking," A.C. Newman 14. "Emmylou," First Aid Kit 15. "Leonard," Sharon Van Etten 16. "Little Talks," Of Monsters and Men 17. "All the Rowboats," Regina Spektor 18. "Skyfall," Adele 19. "Is Your Love Big Enough?" Lianne La Havas 20. "It's Only Life," The Shins.

Vol. 2:
1. "Proceed to Memory," Pinback 2. "That's What's Up," Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros 3. "Cherry Blossom Tree," Imaginary Cities 4. "Cry for Judas," The Mountain Goats 5. "Andrew in Drag," The Magnetic Fields 6. "Love is a Country," The Wallflowers 7. "Life's a Beach," Django Django 8. "Gun Has No Trigger," Dirty Projectors 9. "Losing You," Solange 10. "Into the Night," Chromatics 11. "I Belong in Your Arms," Chairlift 12. "Lord Knows," Dum Dum Girls 13. "Capricornia," Allo Darlin' 14. "Heaven," The Walkmen 15. "When I Was Young," Nada Surf 16. "Back to the Stone," Woods 17. "Teardrop Windows," Ben Gibbard 18. "Thinkin Bout You," Frank Ocean 19. "Myth," Beach House 20. "My Flaming Thirst," Pepe Deluxe 21. "Milk-Heavy, Pollen-Eyed," Laura Gibson.

My most memorable records of 2012 were probably The Avett Brothers' "The Carpenter," Shearwater's "Animal Joy," First Aid Kit's "The Lion's Roar" (and, wow, if you don't know their song "Emmylou," you must seek it out, such as this performance from their appearance on Conan -- it's a sweet song with a chorus to die for from a Swedish duo who wonderfully channel Americana and alt-country), and Woods's "Bend Beyond." I guess in sharing all this I'm implicitly asking you to add some songs of the year I may have missed! Have a good weekend, everyone!

Aslan's Creation Song

The Music of the Spheres will hopefully stay audible to us all semester (in its own way, that quote from Joyce's Ulysses I had on the board this past Monday is another permutation of the idea in the sense of the air being "made richer" when music disappears into it), but I did want to make good on one of my references from the first day of class. You have that wonderful creation scene from Tolkien's The Silmarillion in your portfolios, but there's also C.S. Lewis, who was equally drawn to the idea of the world being created through music, of the world and music sharing a mutual (and mathematical) orderliness. There's a wonderful extended sequence in The Magician's Nephew, which commences The Chronicles of Narnia, in which Aslan brings the world into being through song. Here's just a paragraph from that section:

Then two wonders happened at the same moment. One was that the voice was suddenly joined by other voices; more voices than you could possibly count. They were in harmony with it, but far higher up the scale: cold, tingling, silvery voices. The second wonder was that the blackness overhead, all at once, was blazing with stars. They didn't come out gently one by one, as they do on a summer evening. One moment there had been nothing but darkness; next moment a thousand, thousand points of light leaped out -- single stars, constellations, and planets, brighter and bigger than any in our world. There were no clouds. The new stars and the new voices began at exactly the same time. If you had seen and heard it, as Digory did, you would have felt certain that it was the stars themselves which were singing, and that it was the First Voice, the deep one, which had made appear and made them sing.

I can imagine putting an episode like this into conversation not only with the Tolkien chapter, but also with poems like Coleridge's "The Eolian Harp" and "Kubla Khan," Shelley's "To a Skylark," Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush," etc. Creation not only bespeaks God-like presences in these diverse works, but also the questions and desires of the creating poet.

Poetic Music

On our first day we briefly discussed music that we thought was poetic. Lets get some more music on here.
I'll start.....

Listener- Wooden Heart
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8k9rD7lx9c

I also recommend just reading the lyrics. They are truly amazing.

http://www.songlyrics.com/listener/wooden-heart-lyrics/

I also feel like I should add some Buddy Wakefield here too. It's not a band, but he does spoken word poetry. Amazing guy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmmkEySkQas

Poem starts at 4:30 for those who don't care to sit through the rest.

Ciao, and I hope you enjoy!

The Poem I Was Talking About in Class

Light, At Thirty-Two 
Michael Blumenthal 

It is the first thing God speaks of
when we meet Him, in the good book
of Genesis. And now, I think
I see it all in terms of light:

How, the other day at dusk
on Ossabaw Island, the marsh grass
was the color of the most beautiful hair
I had ever seen, or how—years ago
in the early-dawn light of Montrose Park—
I saw the most ravishing woman
in the world, only to find, hours later
over drinks in a dark bar, that it 
wasn't she who was ravishing,
but the light: how it filtered 
through the leaves of the magnolia
onto her cheeks, how it turned 
her cotton dress to silk, her walk
to a tour-jeté.

And I understood, finally,
what my friend John meant,
twenty years ago, when he said: Love
is keeping the lights on. And I understood
why Matisse and Bonnard and Gauguin 
and Cézanne all followed the light:
Because they knew all lovers are equal 
in the dark, that light defines beauty
the way longing defines desire, that 
everything depends on how light falls
on a seashell, a mouth ... a broken bottle.

And now, I'd like to learn 
to follow light wherever it leads me,
never again to say to a woman, YOU
are beautiful, but rather to whisper:
Darling, the way light fell on your hair
this morning when we woke—God,
it was beautiful. Because, if the light is right,
then the day and the body and the faint pleasures
waiting at the window ... they too are right.
All things lovely there. As that first poet wrote,
in his first book of poems: Let there be light.