Heard Melodies Research Articles

“Heard Melodies are sweet, but those unheard are Keatsean”: Linguistic Blind Spots in Ode on a Grecian Urn

John Keats’s famous Ode, although well-received by the critical fraternity at large, continues to baffle many, as it anxiously unites the ekphrastic with the epigrammatic, the unheard with the overheard, and most controversially, beauty with truth, towards its end. The blind spot, created through an inapparent harmony is, I argue, the result of a misreading of Keatsean ideology in general. Ode on a Grecian Urn is the product of an intellectual and ideological entanglement with the philosophers of the German Enlightenment, especially Friedrich Schlegel, whose On the Study of Greek Poetry (originally published in 1797) remains the most prominent influence of Germanic Hellenization on Keats. Furthermore, the Ode must not be read as an allusive perpetuation of aforementioned influences, but a conscious departure from it, vis-à-vis allusion and the false consciousness of reality birthed within the linguistic perfection of epigrammatic utterances in the poem. This is complicated by the manifold references to psycho-physiological exhaustion across the poem whose origins, I emphasize, are to be comprehended linguistically, for Keats carefully resists third-order ideology through punctuated lines and their subsequent parentheses, where Keatsean counter-argument exists in-between ideologically approved, rhetorical exuberance and pauses that should ideally symbolize an inside-out reading, or reading the text backwards. Particular emphasis is laid on the second and fifth stanzas of the Ode, and the connotative implications of words like “goal”, “cloyed” and “wilt”. Through close-reading and textual analysis, I further argue how Keatsean resistance often exposes the written lie without uttering the textual truth. By way of a conclusion, I shall present the different adaptations of an apparent dialectic harmony between “beauty” and “truth” amongst the Victorians, early and late, but also how the transcendental illusion of dialectic harmony, in essence, is the mutual contradiction of an antinomian sublime, fabricated to indulge in the false consciousness of Germanic Hellenization while re-textualizing itself palimpsestically in an analytic reading. Keywords: Greek Poetry; Keats; Grecian Urn; Germanic Hellenization; Ideology

Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald

Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald

Accurate Decoding of Imagined and Heard Melodies.

Music perception requires the human brain to process a variety of acoustic and music-related properties. Recent research used encoding models to tease apart and study the various cortical contributors to music perception. To do so, such approaches study temporal response functions that summarise the neural activity over several minutes of data. Here we tested the possibility of assessing the neural processing of individual musical units (bars) with electroencephalography (EEG). We devised a decoding methodology based on a maximum correlation metric across EEG segments (maxCorr) and used it to decode melodies from EEG based on an experiment where professional musicians listened and imagined four Bach melodies multiple times. We demonstrate here that accurate decoding of melodies in single-subjects and at the level of individual musical units is possible, both from EEG signals recorded during listening and imagination. Furthermore, we find that greater decoding accuracies are measured for the maxCorr method than for an envelope reconstruction approach based on backward temporal response functions (bTRFenv). These results indicate that low-frequency neural signals encode information beyond note timing, especially with respect to low-frequency cortical signals below 1 Hz, which are shown to encode pitch-related information. Along with the theoretical implications of these results, we discuss the potential applications of this decoding methodology in the context of novel brain-computer interface solutions.

Lyric, the Virtual Poem, and Stevens

Lyric, the Virtual Poem, and Stevens Langdon Hammer I. Melodies Heard and Unheard WRITING ABOUT THE HISTORY of the category of “the lyric,” Virginia Jackson remarks, “lyric was from its inception a term used to describe a music that could no longer be heard” (826). Jackson is referring to the Alexandrian songbook where “lyric” appears for the first time as a generic term to classify poetic texts that had been performed as songs accompanied by the lyre centuries before. She is pointing out the historicity of the idea of “the lyric,” and arguing that its absence in poetics prior to the Alexandrian era suggests “that our notion of subjectivity, emotion, and compression in poetry—in sum, the personal lyric—did not match ideas about poetry (or persons) in antiquity” (826). Jackson’s argument and the body of criticism known as historical poetics with which it is allied tend to reject general statements about the lyric as symptomatic of “lyricization,” which is Jackson’s term for the cultural processes by which manifold poetic kinds have been absorbed and collapsed under the general category of “lyric” in discourse about poetry, and to some extent in poetic practice, since the nineteenth century (831–32). I’m sympathetic to this project. The questions about mediation and circulation it opens up are ignored by poetics when the object of attention is taken as given rather than constructed: often what modern criticism has to say about lyric poetry, historical poetics shows, is a back formation, a critical fiction produced by modern reading practices. But it should be possible to recognize that the lyric has been idealized, simplified, and reified, and still identify common poetic structures as they are elaborated across periods and in diverse cultural situations, as principles by which poems are made and re-made, and we need schematic models to help us do that sort of description and analysis. In the short space of this essay, I will try out one such model, based on Allen Grossman’s idea of “the virtual poem,” before going on to consider what that model might have to say about the poetry of Wallace Stevens, and vice versa. Keeping in mind Jackson’s remark about the always-already lost music that underlies the category of “lyric,” I propose that lyric, the literary genre most associated with music, is defined by its distance and difference from music. Lyric is [End Page 179] metaphorical music. It is a type of song that quotes, interprets, remembers, describes, imagines, dreams about, simulates, or echoes a song that can no longer be heard, and perhaps never could be heard except as translated or otherwise made available by the poem. “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter”: Keats’s famous lines remind us that the idea of an unheard music somehow inside the poem is central in romantic poetry (282). Their familiarity shouldn’t keep us from noting the basic strangeness of the image: an unheard melody is a contradiction in terms. The phrase refers to a remembered or imagined and therefore silent music: “ditties of no tone” can’t be perceived by “the sensual ear,” only by the mind or spirit. That Keats is contemplating painted figures on an ancient Greek urn fits nicely with Jackson’s point about the Alexandrian songbook. Lyric poetry positions itself in the ode as commentary on an ideal music that belongs to the remote past. But we might say something similar about poetry’s relation to the exquisite birdsong in “Ode to a Nightingale,” which is just as tantalizingly elusive (“Fled is that music . . .” [281]). The distance between lyric poetry and music is not simply a fact of historical belatedness with respect to the supposed pre-textual unity of sign and sound in sacred ritual and ceremony. Nor is it a product of the evolutionary differentiation of the sister arts. It is a seemingly perennial figure by means of which lyric texts imagine what they are and do. Already when the trope appears alongside the category of lyric in late antiquity, the “music of poetry” presumes “a loss of actual music for poetry” and “the identification of poem with text,” as...

‘Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter’: an unfinished response

This brief response to a symposium discusses some of the themes sounded by Oishik Sircar (pathos, minor literatures, and benign neglect), Adil Hasan Khan (Quixotism in international law from the antechambers of history of interregnums) and Debolina Dutta (relatedness as a virtue of care and responsibility in doing legal pedagogy, and social activism).

Queen Anne: Patroness of Arts by James Anderson Winn

Reviewed by: Queen Anne: Patroness of Arts by James Anderson Winn David Oakleaf James Anderson Winn. Queen Anne: Patroness of Arts. Oxford: Oxford, 2014. Pp. xxi + 792. $41.95. Scholars in the arts usually approach monarchs through their reflection in the arts or historical events. This handsome study of an underestimated queen tells a familiar story of personal tribulations and public duties with uncommon sympathy and respect, giving the last Stuart to rule England due credit for major accomplishments in peace and war, not least the Act of Union (1707) that joined Scotland with England in the single British nation whose flag is still the Union Jack. Looking at the arts through Anne rather than the reverse, Mr. Winn gives us a life in spectacle, spectacle involving sound as fully as sight. Well trained in music and dance, Anne was a discerning participant; the critic, this book argues, must move easily among different arts to interpret royal performances, birthday odes, coronations, and services of national thanksgiving or mourning in which poetry, dance, visual spectacle, song, and instrumental music collaborate to assert royal authority. Thirty-five black-and-white illustrations, eighteen color plates, and scores for twenty-eight musical examples bolster the text. In a welcome innovation, Mr. Winn and Boston area specialists in early music have produced recordings of his musical examples, some never recorded before, and made them available on a companion website (see p. x). Sometimes, heard melodies are sweeter than those unheard. Spectacles dominate this book. Queen Anne enters it in 1675, a ten-year-old acting with other ladies, including her twelve-year-old sister Mary, in John Crowne's Calisto; or the Chaste Nimph, an extravagantly produced masque framed by professionally performed opera scenes. Since the princesses declaimed in favor of chastity and innocence to a notoriously licentious court, Stuart mythmaking clashed with reality—as it had in the masques of Anne's ill-fated grandfather, Charles I. When the newly crowned James II attended a performance of John Dryden and Luis Grabu's Albion and Albanius (1685), he was again taking refuge in royal myth, this one embodied in "the only full-length, through-sung opera in English publicly presented in London before the eighteenth century." The arts are clearly no more separable from one another than they are from politics. A conspicuous strength of this book, the analysis of musical passages captures grand patterns and nuances. Musical dissonances on peace and love, it is argued, register Henry Purcell's consciousness that the kingdom was far from the harmony celebrated in the psalm he was setting for James II. Elsewhere, Purcell emphasizes Princess Anne's virtues ("Her virtues make all hearts their own") to obscure an awkward text's tactless claim that "[Anne] reigns without a crown," a claim that risked offending William III, with whom Anne had a strained relationship. Mr. Winn is alert to the challenges posed by collaboration when Grabu falls short of Dryden's verse, say, or Jeremiah Clarke deftly treats an awkward poem by Nahum Tate. A versatile cultural critic, he shows brilliantly, can capture sometimes awkward, sometimes splendid negotiations within the spectacles commanded by the Queen. As new arts gained ground, old ones adapted to modern challenges. Mr. Winn is naturally alert to the gradual naturalization in England of Italian style opera. Handel's success [End Page 51] with Rinaldo receives its due, of course, but readers of the Scriblerian may especially relish the account of a Whig project that failed, Addison and Thomas Clayton's Rosamond (1707). Mr. Winn shows why and how Addison merits some of the blame for failure that is usually shouldered disproportionately by Clayton. Unable to grasp the necessary subordination of his words to music, Addison looks as uncharacteristically awkward socially as aesthetically. How else could he inscribe to the Duchess of Marlborough an opera about a conquering hero returning not to his wife but his mistress? If a sympathetic modern like Addison failed to rise to opera's challenge, Scriblerian resistance to it may be less purely philistine than it sometimes seems. Addison's whiggish modernity looks more attractive in Mr. Winn's account of The Campaign (1704), the...

`Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter': synaesthetic metaphors and cognition

Synaesthetic metaphors exhibit a robust, universal, tendency to use the `lower-tohigher' structure more frequently than the inverse one. This robust pattern was found across genres (poetic and non-poetic discourse), language boundaries (e.g. English, Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Indonesian) and historical periods. A cognitive account of this pattern is introduced, according to which this lower-to-higher mapping reflects a cognitively simpler and more basic directionality than the inverse one. Several predictions that follow from this account were tested, using various psychological measures (recall, difficulty in context generation, and naturalness judgments). In accordance with the present account, it was found that the lower-to-higher structure is judged as more natural than its inverse, is better recalled and is judged as easier to construct a context for.

Letter of the month Mentoring

Sabina Dosani's editorial on how a mentor can turbocharge your career1 was interesting and inspirational. As John Keats said, “Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter.” A mentor not only motivates through …

Conceptual and methodological problems in the study of residual vision after damage to the geniculo-striate system in man

This chapter provides an overview of different types of amusias. Amusia is a collective term denoting the loss or impairment of musical capacity that may occur as a consequence of brain disease. The impairment may take a variety of forms. It may be manifested in motor or expressive performances, for example, in loss of the ability to sing, whistle, or hum a tune (oral-expressive amusia); loss of the ability to play an instrument (instrumental amusia or musical apraxia); or loss of the ability to write music (musical agraphia). By definition, the latter two disabilities can be sustained only by trained musicians. On the receptive side, the impairment may be manifested in noteworthy loss of the ability to discriminate between heard melodies (receptive or sensory amusia); loss of the ability to identify familiar melodies (amnesic amusia); or loss of the ability to read musical notation in a person who possessed this skill (musical alexia). Alteration of emotional response to music is still another form. Any of these disabilities may occur singly or in combination. They are encountered frequently in association with aphasic disorders but this association is not at all obligatory.