Words and Music: Introduction

Abstract

Words andMusic Introduction ROBERT VILAIN Amongst the various literaryworks thatbear the titleWords andMusic, one film and one radio play suggest between them both themore straightforward and the more esoteric aesthetic possibilities offered by combining the two elements of their titles.The film, made in 1948, directed by Norman Taurog, and starring Mickey Rooney and Tom Drake, is a somewhat bowdlerized version of the collaboration between Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers, 'thewords' and 'the music' respectively in a long-lasting partnership that produced nearly thirty musicals and hundreds of songs. Itwas a successful cooperation, aesthetically and commercially ('nine hits in ten tries', as one historian remarks1). However, the paradigm the film offers for the integration of light verse and melodious music is relatively simple: one partner writes thewords, the other themusic, and the two (the products, not necessarily the artists) interact in an essentially harmonious and mutually completing manner. This is not to condemn this mode ofwriting ? such a stance would fail to do justice to awhole series of critically respected partnerships from Gilbert and Sullivan to Hofmannsthal and Strauss2 ? and it is not intended as a snobbish comment on the relative merits of so-called 'high' and 'low' (or 'lower') art. Itmeans only that the film does not begin to exhaust the potential ways inwhich the linguistic, or the textual, and themusical interact. Another work with that title, Samuel Beckett's play, first broadcast by the BBC inNovember 1962, gives amore challenging and altogether more troub ling insight into this potential. Here Words and Music are characters, the servants Joe and Bob, who are enjoined to entertain their frail and irritable old master, Croak, with joint illustrations of the concepts of 'Love', 'Age' and 'Face'. Ifwe read Words andMusic as in some sense allegorical of the creative act,with Croak as the artist, and Joe and Bob as the dual media inwhich he creates, then it is clear that these media are to some degree independent of their shaping spirit; they can ignore him and they existwhen he isnot present. Croak demands that they represent his chosen themes, but they 'have to stumble by roundabout ways to reach the desired epiphany', which reflects both 1 Geoffrey Holden Block, The Richard Rodgers Reader (Oxford, 2002), p. 4. 2 It also includes works inwhich both elements stem from the same pen, of course, such as No?l Coward's Words andMusic, amusical from 1932 (inwhich 'Mad Dogs and Englishmen' first featured). Austrian Studies 17 (2009), 1-11 ? Modern Humanities Research Association 2010 2 Robert Vilain on the instability of this partnership and on itsnecessity.3 The servants' own relationship ismore than a little fraught. They are told 'be friends' by Croak,4 but argue and irritate each other most of the time, as the * dialogue' prompted by Croak's demand for the representation of 'Age' shows: CROAK: Bob. (Pause.)Age. (Pause.Violent thump ofclub.) Age! MUSIC: Rap ofbaton. Age music,soon interrupted byviolentthump. CROAK: Together. (Pause.Thump.)Together! (Pause.Violent thump.) Together, dogs! MUSIC: Long la. WORDS: (Imploring.) No! (Violentthump.)(pp. 129-30) The dialogue is such that Bob answers Joe's verbal prompts with musical responses. Music's 'speeches' (in italics but without parentheses, to distinguish them from the stage directions) are Samuel Beckett's shorthand for actual music, which in the original production only was provided by his cousin, John Beckett. When Katharine Worth proposed a production in 1973, she approached John Beckett forpermission to re-use hismusic but thiswas denied. Her score was written by Humphrey Searle; subsequent versions use music byMorton Feldman, written in 1986?87.5 The difficulty that a reader of the printed textwill have in conceiving of the sounds suggested by Beckett's very laconic descriptions inMusic's 'speeches' is thus compounded by the fact that there isnot even an authorized score formusicians to interpret.The reader has virtually no ideawhat one half of the dialogue is, although this indeterminacy does not seem to be acknowledged by the text itself, which proposes 'humble muted adsum', 'Age music', 'suggestion for following', 'air', 'warm suggestion from above' or 'irrepressible burst of spreading and subsiding music' at various points. Worth notes how the author was not interested inmeeting...