Music and Hyperspace

Abstract

Thus, throughout my childhood, I thought a poem was first of all to sing, though I read my way through many of Louis Untermeyer’s poetry anthologies unaccompanied, which taught me that even without a melody, poems could tell a story or make an argument or ring true enough to remember. (Of course, I didn’t know that the abstract form of argument had become mathematical logic or that the Russian formalists and their structuralist heirs had been trying to make an algebra out of plot and character.) Throughout my teenage years, songs continued to play a central role in my life. I sang in the choir at the church of St. Martin in the Fields in Radnor, Pennsylvania, and learned to read musical notation there, while singing the poems of Robert Bridges, George Herbert, John Masefield, John Milton, Christina Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Isaac Watts in the Episcopalian/Anglican Hymnal (Washburn et al. 1940); we also listened attentively to the prose-poetry of the King James Bible (Blayney 1769) and the Book of Common Prayer (Suten 1945). Later, in my high school choir, we sang Benjamin Britten’s beautiful setting of W. H. Auden’s “Hymn to St. Cecilia,” whom I re-discovered last year at the church of Santa Cecilia, founded in the fourth century, in the Trastevere district of Rome: she was the patron saint of musicians, though martyrdom ended her earthly singing. I listened to Anna Moffo (she came from Wayne—I have often shown visitors exactly where her father’s barber shop was), Marian Anderson (she grew up in Philadelphia), and Joan Baez (she starred at the Philadelphia Folk Festival in 1968) sing art songs, poems in Italian, French, German and Spanish turned into music.