This essay is about words and sounds. It addresses the concept of ‘field’ and considers how it informs the relationship between literary texts and text scores, particularly in the context of recent work by the composers Michael Pisaro and Manfred Werder. Field is invoked in the sense of field recording (that is, a non-studio recording); as the delimited scene of intensified experience (as suggested in John Berger's ‘Field’); and as the acoustic and conceptual terrain in which sounds and words make themselves felt. A particular focus of this essay will be poetic texts, as it is my contention that poems and text scores sometimes operate in similar ways, generating effects that cannot be described in textual or conceptual terms. How does one move between words and sounds? For Pisaro, text scores both elicit and prescribe performance: ‘[The text score] is asking for translation. It is also an incitement to action.’ Can such action be captured in a field recording? Werder has written of the difficulties of translating experience into recorded sound: ‘how to render or to evidence mental constructions or processes that are rather non-transferable (as a content) but are nevertheless present’.

What is described, then, is an aesthetic presentation of an experience in which meaning and non-meaning coincide. The relationship between the two is at the heart of that between poetry and music, text score and performance. In what follows, I seek to open the discussion of sound and meaning on to the literary, arguing that text scores that engage with poetry, or that have para-poetic qualities of indeterminacy and condensation, explore the relationship between sound and meaning in distinctive ways. For my purposes, poetry is meaningful-sensible with an accent on the former, and music as meaningful-sensible with an accent on the latter. The text score exploits qualities of contingency that are specific to both of the domains it encompasses. The score's very status as an artwork is equivocal because of the temporality it embodies: is it the work or merely the prefiguring of the work? The temporal trajectory of the score is to point towards a future realisation that is other to itself. In reading a text score, as opposed to a mere text, the performative rendering of the text is always at least implied, even if one's interest in the piece is primarily theoretical or historical.