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2 results

  • Chapter 4 - ‘Scoured and Cleansed’

  • from Part I - Pound’s Texts
  • Edited by Mark Byron, University of Sydney
  • Book:
    The New Ezra Pound Studies
    Published online:
    17 October 2019
    Print publication:
    07 November 2019, pp 57-71

  • 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.