A visit to Eastwood

One weekend in 1970, during a family vacation cum research summer in London, my husband and I drove up to Nottinghamshire, to explore Lawrence country. I was in the midst of converting my dissertation on Lawrence's poetry into a book, so of course I wanted to see where 'my' writer came from - although, having read Lawrence so intensely for so long, I was pretty sure I knew what I'd encounter in the 'industrial Midlands'. Nor was I shocked when, as we approached Eastwood, we found ourselves facing several large, cone-shaped mountains of darkness: 'slag heaps', we realised. This was grimy mining country indeed, and these bleak black hills were outposts of a waste land shaped by the grim technology Lawrence decried in novels from Sons and Lovers to Women in Love to Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Yet I was surprised to discover that these huge mounds of debris were surrounded by greenery - by flowery meadows and by the ancient forests of Robin Hood. Even in Eastwood, when we located what we decided was the original Lawrence home, we saw that the 'Backs' he'd so vividly described still sloped down toward open country. Lawrence's Eastwood, I realised now with a certainty no library research could have produced, was a geography of paradox, as marked by the juxtaposition of untrammelled nature and constricting culture as this writer's entire literary oeuvre. In fact, Lawrence's whole body of work might be seen as an effort to drag the substance of nature - the bodies of men and women, of birds, beasts and flowers, even of fields and hills - out from under the shadow of those slag heaps reared by the tools of reason.

Among composers of comparable reputation, Mahler's output is quite concise in quantity and limited as to type. Its inverse proportion to commentary is correspondingly striking. In recent years, more than with most composers, literature about literature has become an increasingly pressing concern in specialist publications on Mahler. Partly this is because of the peculiarly intense relationship between the composer's music and certain commentators. Deryck Cooke's views have acquired for many an added interest in that he is also the best-known and most widely accepted of those who have ‘finished’ the Tenth Symphony. Henry-Louis de La Grange has worked a sea-change in the way that Mahler has been perceived in France. Adorno's interpretation has steadily acquired an interest in its own right: his Mahler is virtually a separate entity from the composer Mahler, a forerunner and commentator who illuminates the world-view that is expounded systematically and cumulatively from Dialektik der Aufklärung to Negative Dialektik.

None of these can unequivocally be called an analyst. Cooke perhaps comes closest to the popular image in that he comments directly on specific works, and makes some effort to link discussion with formal categories that for concert-goers are staples of old-fashioned programme notes. La Grange behaves in a similar fashion on a grander scale. His sections on works, however, tend to be a special case of the massive documentation of reception history that is a key feature of his biography.

The computer has long been considered an extremely attractive tool for creating and manipulating sound. Its precision, possibilities for new timbres and potential for fantastical automation make it a compelling platform for experimenting with and making music – but only to the extent that we can actually tell a computer what to do, and how to do it.

A program is a sequence of instructions for a computer. A programming language is a collection of syntactic and semantic rules for specifying these instructions, and eventually for providing the translation from human-written programs to the corresponding instructions computers carry out. In the history of computing, many interfaces have been designed to instruct computers, but none has been as fundamental (or perhaps as enduring) as programming languages. Unlike most other classes of human–computer interfaces, programming languages don't directly perform any specific task (such as word processing or video editing), but instead allow us to build software that might perform almost any custom function. The programming language acts as a mediator between human intention and the corresponding bits and instructions that make sense to a computer. It is the most general and yet the most intimate and precise tool for instructing computers.

Programs exist on many levels, ranging from assembler code (extremely low level) to high-level scripting languages that often embody more human-readable structures, such as those resembling spoken languages or graphical representation of familiar objects. Domain-specific languages retain general programmability while providing additional abstractions tailored to the domain (e.g. sound synthesis). This chapter provides a historical perspective on the evolution of programming and music.

In November 1962, three months before her death, Sylvia Plath wrote to Stevie Smith: 'I better say straight out that I am an addict of your poetry, a desperate Smith addict.' This addiction had been fed by her experience of listening to the recordings that Smith had made for the British Council with Peter Orr a year earlier, a task that Plath was now similarly engaged in. In the interview with Orr that Plath recorded concurrently she noted that her own recent poems were written by being spoken aloud and how 'wonderful' the new development was of 'recording poems, of speaking poems at readings, of having records of poems'. That Plath was particularly impressed by the sound of Smith's poems - whether we mean by that Smith's remarkable reading of her own poems, or the way the poems themselves indicate the spoken voice - is confirmed in an article that Plath had written earlier in the same year for the London Magazine where Smith is grouped alongside Lowell, Roethke and Bishop as poets who seem to invoke the physical production of voice:

The word 'possession' echoes the 'addiction' which Plath had lightheartedly confessed to Smith. The sense of the poet or person surrendering to some other force suggests a Romantic tradition of poetic inspiration; however, this tradition, with its exulting of the masculine subject, could also work to re-inscribe feminine subordination: 'I married a real poet, and my life is redeemed: to love, serve & create.'

If Modernism implies experimentation with the limits of art, shocks and thrills beyond all previous bounds, then, in the matter of poetic form, the Victorians were more Modernist than the Modernists themselves. As inventors of new stanza forms, transgressors of prosodic boundaries and explorers of new sonorities of verse, the Victorians were unsurpassable - the Modernist poets began their careers in a world in which the Victorians had already broken all the rules and developed strange and idiosyncratic new rules. It might be good to start this review of Modernist poetic form with a catalogue of some of the formal innovations of the nineteenth century, and their relation to the aesthetics of Modernism.

Scrutiny of rhyme

Rhyme has always been a somewhat dubious attribute of English poetry, partly because classical Greek and Latin poetry did not use it. Around 1603 Samuel Daniel felt he had to publish A Defence of Ryme, because Campion and others had attacked it; and Milton began Paradise Lost (1674) with a note defending the rhymelessness of his epic: he called rhyme 'to all judicious ears, triveal, and of no true musical delight'. By the nineteenth century the propriety of rhyming was no longer an issue - the canon of rhymed poetry was obviously too magnificent to be dispensed with - but poets kept experimenting with aspects of rhyme.

In 1978, David Hare observed that 'It would be sad if this historical period had no chronicler', and one of the roles he has subsequently adopted has been to act as a witness of our times. Indeed, the theatre critic Michael Billington characterises Hare's work as demonstrating a 'sustained conviction that writers have a Balzacian duty to record what is going on around them', and Blake Morrison agrees that 'When future historians come to study the state of Britain in the late twentieth century, Hare will be the playwright they turn to first.' Hare's 'State of the Nation' trilogy of plays centring on the key public institutions of law, church and politics, which was staged at the National Theatre in the early 1990s, was significant in establishing his reputation in this respect; but some of his more recent work has also chimed with the rediscovery of 'documentary drama' and 'verbatim theatre', and the recognition of the potency of these forms as political theatre.

Paul Scofield once wrote this to a friend of mine who'd had been rash enough to write to ask him to give a lecture on the subject of acting. 'I have found that an actor's work has life and interest only in its execution', he said; 'It seems to wither away in discussion, and become emptily theoretical and insubstantial.' If discussing acting is difficult - 'writing on water', Garrick called it - imagine the folly of trying to describe directing, an activity of which audiences are largely unaware unless it's intrusively self-advertising, and which even its practitioners find hard to define and harder still to describe. It's something you do, like gardening, and, like gardening, you only learn about it by doing it.

Directing is the process of understanding the meaning of a play and staging it in the light of that knowledge, underscored by a view of what the writer is trying to say and why. In the case of a play by David Hare the ‘why’ is as important as the ‘what’ – the politics and attitudes to class and gender are seamlessly woven into the writing. But even the most innocent of comedies reflects a view of the world that a director endorses or indicts by his or her choices in casting, design, costume and performances: they demonstrate a view about how people live, how they behave and how they are influenced. What do the characters earn? Where were they were born? What do they believe in? Answering these questions is central to deciding how a director physicalises the world of a play and how the actors speak and move and dress.

In 'The Owl', written in February 1915, three months before he enlisted, Edward Thomas characteristically sets himself on the open road: walking at night feeling hungry, cold and tired. When he enters an inn, though, the exterior world is 'quite barred out' except for 'An owl's cry, a most melancholy cry // Shaken out long and clear upon the hill' - and shaken out too across a stanza break, a formal prolongation dramatising the owl's effect on the poet. In fact the cry is also shaken out across English literary history, since it is explicitly distinguished from the owl's 'merry note' in Shakespeare's song. For this owl carries an echoing message 'telling me plain what I escaped / And others could not, that night, as in I went':

'Salted': seasoned, but also rendered poignant or piquant. The bird's voice, the only voice we hear in this poem of human shelter and sustenance, transforms the poet's circumstances by its insistent reminder of all who lack such things, 'soldiers and poor'.

Where the owl is insistent, however, this poet is not. 'The Owl' is merely shadowed by the symbolic properties of its eponymous bird; but this voice is a wise one too, offering exemplary but disconsoling counsel, and doing so by 'speaking for' others. And, by taking their part, by speaking in their stead, the owl obviates the need for the poet to do likewise more directly.

Where better to start than with Charles Tomlinson's poem, 'Class', whose speaker confesses, 'Those midland a's / once cost me a job'? He had been employed as secretary to the author of The Craft of Fiction, a title that is 'full of class', but 'the job couldn't last' because his accent 'visibly shredded' the upper-class writer's 'fineness'. Still, the speaker reflects, 'I'd always thought him an ass / which he pronounced “arse”. There's no accounting for taste.'

Tomlinson's anecdotal poem prompts a number of reflections about poetry and class. One is that class, at least as it is manifested in poetry, is apparently inseparable from region. When I recently tried to get students to talk about class in Tony Harrison's poetry, what I actually provoked was a heated discussion of the cultural divisions between the north and south of England. Another is that it becomes visible in poetry only when a working-class point of view is being articulated. 'Middle-classness' tends to be invisible in poetry. This is what Harrison means when, addressing the bourgeoisie, he calls poetry 'your lousy leasehold' ('Them & [uz]'). A third reflection is that 'class' and the associated region are inscribed on the body of the language of poetry, and this is at least as important as overt thematic treatment. Tomlinson plays on this explicitly in his poem (when I heard him read it he pronounced 'class' with a short 'a' and 'craft' with a long 'a'). Harrison does so less explicitly in 'Book-Ends' where he rhymes 'gas' with 'pass', forcing a northern pronunciation, and most explicitly of all in 'Them & [uz]' where he distinguishes a working-class Leeds accent from Received Pronunciation by using the phonetic alphabet.

Critics have always been interested in the gender politics of David Hare's work. In general this interest has resulted in a focus of attention on his female characters - understandably, since Hare, more than most male playwrights of his generation, has tended to write plays with large central parts for women. Hare has talked, too, of his ambition to write plays in which women would be 'represented as I thought more roundly and comprehensively than was then usual'. He has also attributed certain kinds of values to his female characters. 'Women', he has said, 'are characteristically the conscience of my plays. They often stand outside a man's world and so can see it much more clearly.' In Changing Stages Richard Eyre and Nicholas Wright put it in these terms:

When Monteverdi arrived in Mantua, he stepped from the provincial Cremonese environment into one of the most cosmopolitan and artistically ambitious courts of northern Italy. Under the Gonzagas’ rule, Mantua had been for over a century an important commercial centre, and its financial resources had fuelled the patronage goals – musical, artistic, and literary – of a succession of rulers: in the first decades of the sixteenth century the Marquis Francesco and his wife, Isabella d'Este, established a permanent musical chapel and through their court composers, Marco Cara and Bartolomeo Tromboncino, cultivated the development of such Italian vernacular forms as the frottola; Duke Federico II and in particular his brother, Cardinal Ercole, enhanced the sacred cappella; Guglielmo, himself a competent composer, built the basilica of Santa Barbara and as a strongly religious ruler fostered primarily sacred music, employing such composers as Alessandro Striggio, Giovanni Giacomo Gastoldi, Giaches de Wert, and Benedetto Pallavicino, as well as maintaining a correspondence with Palestrina, whom he tried to hire and from whom he sought advice on his own compositions; and Monteverdi's direct employer, Vincenzo I, sought to make Mantuan music competitive in its forward-looking style with that of the Ferrarese court under Alfonso II d'Este, encouraging the composition of secular works by Wert, Pallavicino and Monteverdi himself.

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth, a zany noir spoof of Raymond Chandler, Malcolm Pryce has his private eye, Louie Knight, buy a ticket to Nantyronen that includes 'admission to the Iago Prytherch “home-stay”'. Having reached his destination, he is guided by signs such as 'You are now entering Iago Prytherch Country' and 'The bald Welsh hills' to the hovel ('Warning: spittled mirth') where Iago himself huddles. Parody of this order is an inverted tribute to the power of the early R. S. Thomas to recreate the human and physical landscape of rural, upland Wales in the very image of his own obsession. He gave that obsession a name, Iago Prytherch, and a local habitation, Prytherch country, as broodingly mapped as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.

If Dylan Thomas was the definitive poetic talent of pre-Second World War Wales, then it was this other Thomas, culturally, politically and poetically his polar opposite, who became the defining poetic talent of post-war decades. It is therefore with a shock that one realises that R. S., who fully blossomed only after Dylan's death in 1953, was in fact a year older than his namesake. But whereas the quintessential South Walian was a prodigy, who had completed a corpus of remarkable lyrics by the age of eighteen, the North Walian was by his own admission a late developer, both as a poet and as a man, an emotional retardation he blamed on his snobbishly genteel mother's possessiveness. And while his poetic development was impeded by his lingering attachment to the variously Romantic poems in Palgrave's Golden Treasury, he saw it, too, as ultimately deriving from the immature sensibility cultivated in him by her. Iago was therefore the tutelary spirit not only of a breakthrough poetry but also of a personal maturation that took the form of a narcissistic adult's belated encounter with the Reality Principle.

Monteverdi studies have been associated with the so-called ‘new musicology’ since the first time the latter was mentioned in print, in a column reviewing the 1991 meeting of the American Musicological Society for the New York Times. Papers on Bob Dylan, desire in Skryabin, reflections of Nazi ideology in German musicology during the Second World War, and the gendered rhetoric of the Monteverdi/Artusi controversy served the author as signs of

Using the phrase ‘new musicology’ three more times as he cautiously welcomed a ‘classic paradigm shift’, the writer conferred the status of a movement on an eclectic group of papers whose authors had never met. Yet the label, and the sense that it referred to some kind of movement, stuck. It was in part because the Monteverdi paper sparked criticism when it was published, leading the author to compare ‘new musicology’ to the ‘second practice’, that the label ‘new musicology’ has had a special resonance in Monteverdi studies. This essay will survey the intersections of Monteverdi studies with the new approaches to music scholarship that emerged, mainly in the United States, over the last twenty years.

Mahler was a prolific composer neither in quantity nor in his choice of genres, and the diversity evident in his early music was not to recur. The ‘early’ compositions that were published in his lifetime include four markedly different works or groups of pieces. His hybrid cantata-oratorio Das klagende Lied is discussed in Chapter 4. The five pieces in Volume 1 of Lieder und Gesänge (aus der Jugendzeit, as the title's later, unauthorized extension has it) comprise a group of miscellaneous solo songs with piano accompaniment. Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen is a set of four, apparently similar songs in that they, too, were initially written for voice and piano. But these pieces constitute a true cycle, and were to be turned into the composer's first orchestral songs. This, the ‘first period’ of Mahler's creativity came to a close with the First Symphony, again a cyclic work that was to be recast. He took some ten years to write these works, beginning with the text of Das klagende Lied in 1878, and ending with the ‘Symphonic Poem in two parts’, the original, five-movement form of the First Symphony, in the spring of 1888. Those years saw him advance from an adolescent, unemployed graduate of the Vienna Conservatoire to the threshold of the international musical stage as director-designate of the Royal Hungarian Opera. Indeed, that lofty position was to play an important part in securing Mahler's first appearance as a composer of consequence with the première of the ‘Symphonic Poem’ in 1889.