With all of these manifestations of musicality in poetry comes an emphasis on the material and materiality of language-its sounds, its formal play, and its patchwork play of motifs and connotations. Pater’s condition of (instrumental) music Polyphony, for example, can be suggested by the simultaneity of thoughts, dialogue, or action by the characters, as in the eight voices of the fugue in Ulysses (Zimmerman 108-13).Ģ. Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style might be considered as a theme and variations.Ĭorrespondences between the arts, of course, are not precise but suggestive. Similarly, once could make a case for the abrupt changes in perspective and style in Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting corresponding with the abrupt rondo-like changes in some compositions by Janacek, who was the teacher of Kundera’s musicologist father. The voices of the fugue are translated into voices of characters, and the repetition of fugal melodies are represented by subject matter or rhetorical mode (description, for example). Yet another sense of musicality is the one that we mean when we speak of James Joyce’s famous fugue in prose in the Sirens chapter of Ulysses. Narrative, descriptive and representational coherence take a backseat to the play of forms: juxtapositions, repeated motifs, and layers of signification whose meaning derives from the relatively abstract play of images and sounds. We also call some poetry “musical” in the sense of “painterly”-words used as colours and texture painted onto a canvas, arranged in such a way to give aesthetic or intellectual pleasure. For example, Frank O’Hara gives us the rhythm of drama, tempestuous or quiet, in his rants and chats. It’s not only ritualistic or condensed poetic language that exhibits musical rhythm ordinary conversation can be extraordinarily musical. I think of metre or rhythm as occurring in the foreground of composition, like timbre and melody. Kenneth Burke’s “On Musicality in Verse” offers a detailed analysis of this microcosmic manifestation of musicality in poetry. Alliteration, assonance, and rhyme, whether obvious or subtle, can add richness to the sound and layers to the meaning of poetry. One way to think of that trait in terms of poetry is on the microcosmic level of the phoneme: the particular combination of consonant and vowel sounds that create a range of sounds from the colourful to the monochromatic, or to stick with the musical model, from the richness of sounds in a Stravinsky orchestra to the relative sameness of, say, Philip Glass’s compositions for saxophone quartet. Timbre in music refers to the configuration of sound waves and overtone series that produces the difference between, say, a clarinet and a violin. I suspect that what people mean most often is musicality on the close-range level of the poem: the timbre and rhythm. What gives poetry (or any other text, for that matter) the quality of musicality? We know when poetry sounds clunky and we know when we feel we’re hearing a string quartet in words. We say that a particular poet has a tin ear, whereas another has an ear to die for. It’s easy to say that some poetry is musical, and when we come across such poetry, we may quietly nod inside as though its musicality were a self-evident characteristic that need be acknowledged only on a barely conscious level. Two types of musicality may be differentiated: to be able to perceive music and to be able to reproduce music in addition to creating music.The continuation of this essay is the next post, “Barbara Guest’s Musicalities.” A person considered musical has the ability to perceive and reproduce differences in aspects of music including pitch, rhythm, and harmony. In the company of two or more musicians, there is the added experience of the ensemble effect in which the players express something greater than the sum of their individual parts. Judges of contest music may describe a performance as bringing the music on the page to life of expressing more than the mere faithful reproduction of pitches, rhythms, and composer dynamic markings. These definitions are somewhat hampered by the difficulty of defining music, but, colloquially, "music" is often contrasted with noise and randomness. Musicality is "sensitivity to, knowledge of, or talent for music" or "the quality or state of being musical", and is used to refer to specific if vaguely defined qualities in pieces and/or genres of music, such as melodiousness and harmoniousness.
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