Introduction: Musical Poetry, Poetic Music
Setting poems to music is as ancient as the chorus of Greek tragedies. Embedded in the very root of words tied to poetry, such as lyric (lyre) and sonnet (little song), is an expectation for poetry to sing–and this was to set it apart from prose. At some point, however, things changed. The lyrical aspect of poetry took on the form of lyrics in a song. Though often poetic, lyrics are distinct these days from what we think of as poetry. Composed alongside music, often driven and constrained by the rhythm and form of the music, lyrics have kept outdated aspects of poetry like rhyme and strict meter, use diction that most people understand, and share generic subjects and themes (like love). At the same time, poetry seemed itself to become less lyrical. It turned inward, dedicated to the individual reader with the advent of reliable book-making processes, relieved of its place in drama or performance, and directed for quiet reading by those who had time (generally the upper class). Driven more by language and the didactic, poetry took on a cadence of natural speech. Poetry during Romanticism, embodied by Wordsworth, reads now like speaking breathlessly about poetic experiences, rather than being song-like, lyrical itself. With Modernism came newer developments which threatened to divorce poetry from song: the death of rhyme, the celebration of free-meter, the borrowing of technical, scientific, or journalistic language into poetry. One only has to read Gertrude Stein to know what I am talking about. If poetry’s evolution during Modernism can be said to be a series of emancipations from restricting notions of what poetry could be, then it can also be said that poetry had carved out a niche for itself in which music seemed strangely absent. It seems both Hip-Hop and “Spoken Word”, in turn, moved in to fill our need for musically driven poetry. Imagine Emily Dickenson at a Poetry Slam at the Nuyorcan Poetry Cafe in the East Village of Manhattan.
And yet, here is the grey area. Poems do not have to rhyme to be musical. Langston Hughes wrote intentionally rhythmic poems. And finally, like the difference between sound and noise, hearing the music in poetry is a matter of creative listening and creative reciting. Ultimately, music too can shift around poetry, itself emancipated from traditional notions of what music can and should be. To imagine the untapped potential of music and poetry, turn the tables: rather than poetry set to music, imagine for a moment, music set to poetry: that is, music driven or constrained by the flow and form of a recited poem. Imagine drumming without a steady pulse: Paul Motian was championing this style up to his recent death in 2011. Imagine music set to the cadence and pitch of natural speech: Steve Reich was doing it in the 90s with Different Trains, in which he wrote a string quartet to interviews of holocaust survivors. The symmetrical, machine-like para-diddle rhythm (LRLL RLRR) imitates the chug of a train while the melodies almost perfectly articulate the cadence and pitch of the speaker’s voice.
Drumming about Poetry
In the prologue to The Invisible Man, written by Ralph Ellison in the 1950s, the invisible man himself describes the music of Louis Armstrong after smoking marijuana. I had read it 6 years ago, yet it stuck with me. As I embarked to do something relating my love of jazz and poetry, this passage struck gold in my brain as I fetched the book off my shelf. Striking the blues-roots of American music, I found it relevant to an undertaking with little precedence: setting poems to jazz drumming. More specifically, I was setting American modernist poems to a distinctly American art-form given breath largely by black experience.
“There is a certain acoustical deadness in my hole, and when I have music I want to feel its vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body. I’d like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing “What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue”–all at the same time…Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music. Once when I asked for a cigarette some jokers gave me a reefer, which I lighted when I got home and sat listening to my phonograph. It was a strange evening. Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time; you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’ music…So under the spell of the reefer I discovered a new analytical way of listening to music. The unheard sounds came through, and each melodic line existed of itself, stood out clearly from all the rest, said its piece, and waited patiently for the other voices to speak. That night I found myself hearing not only in time, but in space as well. I not only entered the music but descended, like Dante, into its depths. And beneath the swiftness of the hot tempo there was a slower tempo and a cave and I entered it…” (Ellison 8).
Laurie Anderson, Frank Zappa, Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis have said it before: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” A quote whose origins remain murky–it rings true. Using one medium to explain another is expensive–its costs often outweigh the results, and somehow, some paranormal weight lifts away from a dying body. However, for all of this, it’s funny that the sentiment is so often found, biting the hand hand that feeds it, in a written piece about music. Miles, for example, uses the quote in his autobiography knowing that inevitably he would write about music by the very nature of his project. Suffice it to say, I too share this sentiment in two ways: writing about my project, and my project itself: well, drumming about poetry. After all, poetry rarely has the sort of rhythmic zing of spoken word or rapping, and unlike lyrics, is hardly written alongside a steady pulse or musical form (AABA, verse-chorus, etc.). But there is always the reminder that everything is connected, that difference and similarity if a matter of where you stand. Because musicologists have long thought that music was from its earliest inception using natural objects to mimic natural sounds. And, well, music-ing about nature is like poem-ing about life–an imperfect likeness, yet so very human. So that’s the crux: all art forms point outward, mimic, hold, gesture–its integral to what we’ve always been and done as human being. What’s more, drumming is probably the most ancient way of gesturing back at the world. Perhaps at its most basic level, when humans began to drum marked our awareness of time, and our willingness to spend time extravagantly: think about a bunch of people literally passing time making noise–it’s not cooking. And if the language of human rhythm imbibes natural phenomenon, then surely human rhythm has absorbed the rhythm of language, the natural flow of the spoken word–sentence, accent, breath, and period. Call and response.
The Project
Click the link above to listen to poems I set to rhythm.
