M. C. Escher - and John Martin's “The Bard”

The aim of these pages is to have a closer look at some more or less famous texts that have become ‘protagonists’ also in the musical world. Eminent scholars have published studies, analysing each single detail of these works: well, this is not my purpose. Being a former teacher, I have just tried to make ‘appealing’ what is often seen as something boring and old-fashioned, to arouse curiosity and so favouring, possibly, further studies. Actually, the search for possible links between music and literature proves to be endless, even limiting the search to English or American writers. The list could include, just to give a few examples, a couple of works by Benjamin Britten who, before Billy Budd, composed an adaptation of The Beggar’s Opera by John Gay, and then took inspiration from Henry James’s famous ghost story novella to compose his own The Turn of the Screw. Laureen Mazel, the well-known conductor, is in the list, as well, thanks to his opera 1984, based on George Orwell’s novel. Also Virgil Thomson, besides writing two operas to librettos by Gertrude Stein, set a few poems by William Blake to music in the cycle Five Songs from William Blake. As a consequence, the choice of which works to consider here has been difficult. I have decided to give a geographical limit: this time, differently from my previous survey , all the writers involved are North American. I have also chosen to devote these pages to works which sound quite familiar to our European ears: Madama Butterfly and La fanciulla del West by Giacomo Puccini, Billy Budd by Benjamin Britten and Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson by Aaron Copland, especially because of the great appreciation of Emily Dickinson in Europe. Four Saints in Three Acts by Virgil Thomson is in the group, as well, mainly because of its extreme originality and also because of the familiarity with the two protagonists, Saint Theresa of Ávila and Saint Ignatius of Loyola.

2009

Among the many reasons for our perpetual fascination with composers’ borrowings is the sense of secrecy the evoke. With few exceptions, borrowings are generally kept quiet by the composer and their discovery therefore requires a good deal of musical as well as musicological detective work. Schenkerian methodology, also occupied with hidden matters, would appear to be a suitable vehicle for such an endeavor, despite the serious danger of mixing apples and oranges its use poses: It is all too easy to mix levels and to look for figural borrowings, which occur near the surface, among the linear progressions that reside well below. The benefits of a reductive approach to borrowings reside, rather, in a heightened and more acute sensitivity to the multiplicity of tonal and durational relationships a passage (in either a borrowing or its source) can realize at different levels of structure.

2013

2014

My world is multifarious and God bless the child and bless me at the same time. Check these 38 reviews and other productions. It is said that multifariousness is nothing but eclecticism. You can’t imagine what some people may say. They always grumble they cannot do what they want and at the same time they consider one has to do one thing at a time and a life is just one time so they imagine themselves having the same job in the same business or corporation from birth to death, and yet at times they would like to be able to go to school up to 45 and to retire as soon as they get out of school. God bless them then. You will see that in these musics I am not necessarily always on one line. I added at the end what I am doing in the musical field as an artist this time and here too I can say I must be multifarious too though since I am only an author I am aiming high and hard. Then the difficulty is for musicians around me, and authors in general, to accept that multifariousness and that idea that nothing is high enough for me to stop climbing, or digging actually since high and low is nothing, but a metaphor as Lakoff would say. Enjoy. Jacques COULARDEAU

Burkholder defines the musical borrowing field as the study of the different procedures that composers use to create their compositions based on previous melodies, tonal plans or structures. More specifically organized in two parts, Burkholder uses the first part to describe the most important conclusions about the use of existing music as a field based on his expertise in Ives’ music. In the second part, the author explores the possible typology and chronology of the field. Despite the big lack in discussions about the concept as a field, the author uses the article to create awareness about the study of musical borrowing as an important issue. His method encourages a deeper analysis of the whole background of the piece and helps his reader to search the original development of a work and the thoughts of the composer.

Osmania Journal of English Studies, 2022

Music and literature are axiomatically treated as parallel arts, sometimes even as being complementary, but they are semantically different; meaning in music is quite different from meaning in literature and other arts (Bernstein 113; Said 16). However, there has always been an exchange between music and literature (Brown 11; Correa 2020) and one could characterize it in a number of ways. Writers have either used music by way of songs in their works, like the Elizabethan playwrights or Brecht in the twentieth century, or structured their work after musical forms such as symphony, fugue or quartet, while some like Thomas Mann or Vikram Seth have made music a theme/subject of their writing. Certain composer's influence is acknowledged by and perceived in some writers like that of Mozart on Bernard Shaw. Sometimes critics find parallels between literary and musical works as Eliot's The Waste Land and Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (Boaz 218). One could also include theorists who have used musical terms to articulate critical concepts Edward Said's idea of "contrapuntal" or Bakhtin's "polyphony" are perhaps the most well-known. However, this interface seems to be the least explored area in literary/cultural studies in India. The present paper will attempt to explore the relationship between music and literature in Benjamin Britten's celebrated antiwar masterpiece War Requiem (1962), focusing on the composer's use of Wilfred Owen's war poems in a liturgical composition and examine how, in the listener's experience , Owen's poetry(with its pronounced biblical resonances), music and the liturgical text, in the fashion of a triptych ,negotiate and engage with each other to create a unique and powerful work.

2018

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