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Chapter 4 - ‘Scoured and Cleansed’

Ezra Pound and Musical Composition

from Part I - Pound’s Texts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 October 2019

Mark Byron
Affiliation:
University of Sydney
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Summary

What does ‘an opera of mankind’ sound like? It depends on what mankind sounds like, and what sounds the ‘prose’ prevents us from hearing. For Francois Villon, on whom Pound based his first opera, it sounded like the brothel, the street, the tavern, the sounds of ‘theft, murder, whoring, and praying’ and the rhythms of everyday language. It is of no small importance that Pound’s primary musical curator is R. Murray Schafer, the Canadian composer who edited Ezra Pound and Music (1977), and who helped Pound prepare Le Testament for a revival radio performance. In The Soundscape (1993), Schafer reads many of the sounds in Pound’s Cantos – the sea, the woodcutter and the machine. In establishing a new cultural-scientific-aesthetic ‘interdiscipline’ of soundscape design, Schafer found that Pound, for whom all disciplines were interdisciplines, exemplified this tendency in poetry.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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References

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