Week 1 Song As Incantation: the Roots of Poetry

EN992 Poetry and Music

Week 1 — Song as incantation: the roots of poetry

(Peter Blegvad)

[POWERPOINT: Lyre with course title:

Poetry and Music / Song as Incantation: the Roots of Poetry] Welcome to ‘Poetry and Music’, Week One. Let’s begin at the beginning. We can’t be sure how poetry and music began, there’s no fossil record, but that leaves us free to conjecture. So, today’s topic will be ‘Song as incantation: the roots of poetry’. (The conjectural consensus being that poetry, maybe all language, began as song, and that song, like all music, was originally a form of magic). OK. Any questions so far? [POWERPOINT: Lyre with Rushdie quote:

“Why do we care about singers? Wherein lies the power of songs? Maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation,... song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us ourselves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.”

— Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (1999) ] Here’s a question: “Why do we care about singers? Wherein lies the power of songs?” The question was asked by Salman Rushdie in connection with his 1999 novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Here’s the answer he proposes: “maybe we are just creatures in search of exaltation,... song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us ourselves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.” What do you say? Can you relate that to your own experience? I assume you’ve probably all experienced the power songs have to exalt, to excite, to relax, to unite, to console, to transport — whether listening alone to an iPod or as part of a concert audience or abandoning yourself to collective Dionysian frenzy at a rave or in a mosh pit — you might also be familiar with the power of people singing patriotic anthems or songs of worship — a power that can be benign but is also, as we well know, potentially daemonic. So how would you answer the question ‘Wherein lies the power of songs?’ Someone might say ‘songs make us feel connected to something larger than

1 ourselves, and we’re temporarily exalted thereby’ — or ‘songs give us strength’ or ‘courage’ — or they might quote the lyricist E. Y. Harburg:

[POWERPOINT: “Words make you think thoughts. Music makes you feel a feeling. But a song makes you feel a thought.”]

(Harburg wrote the words for such classics as “Over the Rainbow” and “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?”)

And here he is, in his prime…

[POWERPOINT: photo of E. Y. ‘Yip’ Harburg (1896 – 1981)] But these answers merely raise another question, namely how? How does song have these effects on us? Here’s an answer: it’s magic. A bit vague? Let’s try to clarify. The ‘cant’ in incantation, like the ‘chant’ in enchantment means ‘song’, and songs have been used in charms, spells and rituals by all cultures since culture began. Victor Zuckerkandl in Man the Musician (1973) writes: “...music [is] the form in which magic survives down to our day.” “...the affinity between music and magic is rooted in their very nature. ...in both, man’s sense of being at one with the world outweighs his sense of being distinct from it: what links man to man, man to thing, and thing to thing outweighs what separates them.” (Which could be said of poetry also. But we’ll get to that.) As for what motivated our ancestors to invent, to give vent, to song, a crucial factor was probably fear. French musicologist, Jules Combarieu, in his book Music and Magic (1909) put it thus: “the origins of music can be traced to man’s anxiety in the face of the hostility of Nature which he interprets as being due to savage spirits who have to be appeased with incantations, which can be used both as an offensive and a defensive weapon.” Like Orpheus, who could tame wild beasts with his song. [POWERPOINT: ORPHEUS TAMES THE WILD BEASTS – Roman mosaic] According to Ralph Waldo Emerson “every word was once a poem” — the best poem about a fish, for instance, was once the word ‘fish’. [BOOK FISH – ghoti – (G.B.S. enough, women, action]. Every word was once a poem, OK. Similarly, it’s not hard to imagine that all human language (not just poetry) might have begun as some kind of song — influenced by the vocal cries of beasts and birds, perhaps, as some linguists have proposed (this is the so-called bow-wow theory).

2 Or perhaps song was adopted as a technique to help synchronize collective rhythmic labour — like on a chain-gang, or slaves rowing on a galley (the yo- he-ho theory). Then there’s the la-la theory which proposes that language may have developed from “sounds associated with love, play, and (especially) song.”1 Theories are all we have. Experiments have so far proved inconclusive. [POWERPOINT: Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor] (A famous example being Frederick II’s C12th ‘language deprivation’ experiment — raising infants without human interaction in hopes that when they began to speak of their own accord it would reveal the original tongue as taught by God to Adam and Eve. Would it be Hebrew, Greek, Arabic or something altogether alien, something not so much human as divine? Maybe their first utterances would be song not speech. The monk Salimbene di Adam reported in his Chronicles that the experiment was “in vain, for the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments.”) Poor kids. [PPOINT: Cover of The Songlines, by Bruce Chatwin, Penguin Classic, US edition] Are you familiar with Bruce Chatwin’s idea, expounded in his book The Songlines, that culture — in the form of songs and stories — was invented by our early ancestors around the fire and served an analogous purpose? [PPOINT: Joseph Lycett (ca.1775 – 1828), Aborigines Resting by a Camp Fire near the Mouth of the Hunter River, Newcastle, NSW]

That is, just as fire kept the savage nocturnal predators ‘out there’ at bay, so the stories and songs that were told and sung around it were effective against the dangers that threatened from within. By giving their worst fears imaginative form, by consciously performing and refining their dreams, as it were, people were able to order and control what might otherwise overwhelm them. [Wanatjalnga, 1974, Charlie Tjaruru (Tarawa Tjungurrayi)] Chatwin’s book focuses on Australian Aboriginal culture, exploring the idea of song as the first language, and of song as magic. The songlines are “the invisible (to non-Aborigines) tracks which represent the Dreaming, the way in which the land was sung into being by the ancestors. Part map, part history, part geography, part genealogy, part culture, the songlines are a complex weave of origin mythology, the link between man and landscape, between inner and outer worlds, between body and spirit, between present and past.”2 The songlines are used as an instrument of navigation across both space and time. You’ll find an excerpt from Chatwin’s book in your course packs:

1 “Where Does Language Come From?”, by Richard Nordquist, About.com Guide 2 http://tomconoboy.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/songlines-by-bruce-chatwin.html

3 There were people who argued for telepathy. Aboriginals themselves told stories of their song men whizzing up and the down the line in trance. But there was another, more astonishing possibility. Regardless of the words, it seems the melodic contour of the song described the nature of the land over which the song passes. So, if the Lizard Man were dragging his heels across the salt-pans of Lake Eyre, you could expect a suggestion of long flats, like Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’. If he were skipping up and down the MacDonnel escarpments, you’d have a series of arpeggios and glissandos, like Liszt’s ‘Hungarian Rhapsodies’. Certain phrases, certain combinations of musical notes, are thought to describe the action of the Ancestor’s feet. One phrase would say, ‘Salt-pan’; another ‘Creek-bed’, ‘Spinifex’, ‘Sand-hill’, ‘Mulga-scrub’, ‘Rock-face’, and so forth. An expert song-man, by listening to their order of succession, would count how many times his hero crossed a river, or scaled a ridge - and be able to calculate where, and how far along, a Songline he was.

‘He’d be able’, said Arkady ‘to hear a few bars and say, “This is Middle Bore” or “That is Oodnadatta” - where the Ancestor did X or Y or Z.’‘So a musical phrase,’ I said, ‘is a map of reference?’‘Music’, said Arkady, ‘is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world’.3

‘Music is a memory bank.’ In the early days that must have been a crucial part of song’s power. In the T. S. Eliot Lecture, 2004, entitled “The Dark Art of Poetry”, Don Paterson said: “what you remember changes how you think” and therefore “poetry is a form of magic, because it tries to change the way we perceive the world.” The same goes for song. Songs enabled oral cultures to store and retrieve information long-term. Because they endured, songs established a continuity that connected young and old, living and dead, and defended tribal and cultural identity against attrition and alien influence. What makes a song memorable? It’s ‘magic’, sure, but magic has rules. What are some of the rules of song? (Are these rules also shared with poetry?) Consider: The information in a song is usually organized into forms and patterns, rhythms that repeat. [Woven blanket, West Africa] This woven blanket from West Africa could be a map of such a song. (It even looks a bit like the sound wave patterns in a digital multi-track recording). A nice coincidence. They rhyme. [Digital recording tracks (Audacity)] The formal ‘rules’ that songs and poems follow probably evolved as mnemonic devices. Repetition, melody, rhythm and rhyme all help to effect the transfer

3 Chatwin, 1987, pgs 119-20

4 of data from short to long-term memory. As I’m sure you know from experience, songs are adhesive, they stick. We speak of the ‘hook’ in a song. Germans refer to the ‘earworm,’ the part of a song that keeps going round and round in your head. In oral cultures this ability of song to insinuate itself into the synapses was precious. Myths, rituals and other traditions could be preserved and passed on in this way. Song was the social glue which bound communities together. David Byrne (the singer and principle songwriter from the band Talking Heads) in his book How Music Works notes that songs feature “… in most religious and social ceremonies around the world… —birth songs, lullabies, naming songs, toilet training songs (I want to hear those!), puberty songs, greeting songs, marriage songs, clan songs, funeral songs. A Sia Indian who lives in a pueblo in northern New Mexico said, ‘My friend, without songs you cannot do anything.’ Without music, the social fabric itself would be rent, and the links between us would crumble.” Another part of song’s magic was (and still is) physical rather than mental or psychological. Song combines emotion with motion, it moves the mind, but it also makes the body move. It addresses both the body and the spirit or soul. [LARYNX] Singing involves the breath, identified with the soul — anima — in the West, and known as prajna in Sanskrit. Regulating the breath is an essential part of yoga and other ancient meditation techniques. Traditionally, breath exercises are combined with chanting. Chanting a mantra — a verbal formula, sometimes long and convoluted, sometimes just a single syllable like the cosmic ‘Om’ — is hypnotic, entrancing — literally, a form of enchantment. Breath pushed by the diaphragm through the larynx produces the vibration of voice. Voice is the vehicle for song, for poetry, for magic. [Gaston Maspero, New Light on Ancient Egypt (1908): “The human voice is the instrument par excellence of the priest and of the enchanter. It is the voice that seeks afar the Invisibles summoned, and it makes the necessary objects into reality. Every one of the sounds it emits has a peculiar power which escapes the notice of the common run of mortals, but which is known to and made use of by the adepts. One note irritates, appeases, or summons the spirits; another acts on the bodies. By combining the two are formed those melodies which the magicians intone in the course of their evocations. But as every one has its peculiar force, great care must be taken not to change their order or substitute one for the other. One would thus expose oneself to the greatest misfortunes."] (As I said before, magic has rules. Strictly enforced. A kind of fundamentalism…)

James Fenton, in his Introduction to English Poetry, writes, “Poetry… begins in those situations where the voice has to be raised . . .”

In his book Fenton includes a street vendor’s song. As he said in an interview:

5 some people “…thought it was ridiculous for someone seriously interested in poetry to consider a street vendor’s song. But to me, the idea that you need to do something to produce your voice, that you need to do something to heighten your language, to distinguish the activity that you’re taking part in from daily conversation—that’s basic to poetry.” (In your course pack you’ll find an excerpt from Fenton’s book...

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[Read this – [CHAIN GANG image] group performs the HUNH as you read the text of the chain gang chant? –

[MICHAUX photo by Claude Cahun]

THEN read Michaux blessing/curse and notes??? Is there enough time?? estimate it will take abt 15 mins]

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Here’s Jorge Luis Borges. He says “Truly fine poetry must be read aloud. A good poem does not allow itself to be read in a low voice or silently. If we can read it silently, it is not a valid poem: a poem demands pronunciation. Poetry always remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art. It remembers that it was first song. ” 4

Or, as Ezra Pound put it: “Poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music.”

Despite which these days, in our own culture, many connoisseurs would argue that poetry suffers when it gets too close to music — i.e. when it’s sung. They’d point out that the original rhythm — the meter — will be distorted when a poem is set, and the words garbled when sung. (Surtitles in opera were introduced to help audiences follow what was happening onstage for this reason). So the poetry will be lost.

On the other hand, the words to many excellent songs — from classical arias, to folk or pop — are lousy poetry. In the introduction to An Elizabethan Song Book which he edited in the 1950s, W. H. Auden conceded that song lyrics are often “trivial and silly” and a listener might reasonably suppose that “all a composer requires from a poet are so and so many syllables of such and such a quality, and that their meaning is irrelevant. They quote Rossini’s remark, ‘Give me a laundry-list and I will set it,’ unaware, apparently, that a laundry- list, or any list for that matter, has a poetic value, and one which is exceptionally translatable into musical terms.”5

Part of the appeal modern lyrics usually have (there are exceptions, of course)

4 Lecture entitled "The Divine Comedy," 1977 5 Introduction to An Elizabethan Song Book, edited by Auden and Chester Kallman (1955)

6 is that they’re not demanding in the way poetry often is. Lyrics tend to be less occult, more overt than poetry. Less oblique, more direct. Less elitist, more democratic. Less Apollonian, more Dionysian. Less work, more play.

[Lady Gaga]

Lady Gaga tells her paramour “I got nothing on but the radio,” for instance. It’s not hard to decipher. Everybody gets what she means.

(I was interested to learn that Lady Gaga also goes in for “nonsense syllablizing” leading a resurgence of interest in the vocal technique known as ‘scat’.)

You all know what ‘scat’ is?

To do is to be. (Schopenhauer) To be is to do. (Sartre) Doobeedoobeedoo (Sinatra)

[Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald]

It’s a language which rejects meaning altogether and therefore never lies.

Scat is a jazz term and mainly associated with legendary musicians/singers like Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, but — here’s a fact for you trivia fans — centuries ago, when the church banned pipes and fiddles, Gaelic musicians responded by making “mouth music”, a kind of scat still performed today...

The dictionary defines ‘lyric’ as a form: ‘suitable for singing to the lyre or for being set to music and sung.’ But, everyone has to decide what ‘suitable’ means in different contexts for themselves. What ratio of sound to sense is required?

Song teaches us that sometimes understanding is overrated.

Here’s Combarieu again, from Music and Magic: “…in certain tribes the most celebrated songs are sung by people who do not understand the words. For the poet, the words of the song may very well have an independent signification; for others they only have a value when joined to a melody. Often, in fact, the sense of a song is sacrificed, without hesitation, to its form."

[STILL FROM COCTEAU’S ORPHÉE]

Like a lot of people, I’ve always been attracted to language which seems to be in some kind of code, not opaque, but resistant, mysterious. Like the messages Orphée (Orpheus transplanted into the modern world) receives over the radio in Death’s Rolls Royce in Jean Cocteau’s fabulous film Orphée — strange phrases like “birds sing with their fingers”, or “a single glass of water lights the world.” Corny? Maybe. To me there’s a whiff of the ineffable about them.

7 I quoted David Byrne earlier. In the 1980s the concert film of his band Talking Heads was entitled “Stop Making Sense.” Byrne, like many other songwriters — David Bowie perhaps being the most prominent — was successfully using the cut-up method made famous by William Burroughs to write lyrics that took listeners (and the authors themselves) by surprise. A lot of writers and artists at the time were scorning linear, coherent logical sense as intrinsically suspect, unreliable, not to mention boring. The writer Padgett Powell talked about his own writing as "...a series of impulses which qualified for my interest if I could detect no point in them at all."

All of which is perhaps an extension of the traditional Romantic quest for self- estrangement.

[Lord Byron (1788 – 1824) in Albanian dress, painted by Thomas Phillips

Consider Lord Byron: “To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.”

[Arthur Rimbaud, by Jean-Louis Forain (1872) “Je est un autre”

It’s also a quest for the numinous. To create something with the power to attract, fascinate and compel. Rimbaud embarked upon his “systematic disorganization of all the senses” in order to become a seer or visionary, a poet and his own other. (‘Je est un autre’ he announced aged 16.) His program is similar to the initiation trials a shaman or witch-doctor undergoes.

Such a program often involves doing violence to words themselves. Octavio Paz: “No one is a poet unless he has felt the temptation to destroy language or create another one, unless he has experienced the fascination of non-meaning and the no less terrifying fascination of meaning that is inexpressible.” 6

The German Romantic poet, Novalis, describes in this passage from Heinrich von Ofterdingen: “...a very odd song, which... became very popular because it [he means the lyric] sounded so strange, nearly as obscure and unintelligible as the music itself, but for this very reason was incomprehensively fascinating and delightful as a dream to one awake.”

[The Delphic Oracle]

According to Nietzsche God was dead, but if She wasn’t poets reckoned She would probably talk funny, the way the Oracle spoke at Delphi. She usually spoke in riddles.

People in the grip of religious frenzy spoke in tongues — glossolalia — a glorious kind of gibberish.

[SÉANCE – drawing]

And when the dead spoke at séances — through mediums or ouija boards —

6 Quoted in Alexis Lykiard’s Introduction to his trans of Maldoror

8 their messages were often obscure, garbled, broken.

[STATIC IN THE ATTIC - image]

OK. To explore this theme a little further I thought I’d play you a recording. It’s not a song, it’s a dialogue between the two halves of my divided self, but the subject under discussion is song as incantation, the power of gibberish.

[PLAY EARTOON: “WOPS – WORDS OF POWER” – 4 minutes]

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[PPOINT: Photo of Franz Boas posing for figure in US Natural History Museum exhibit entitled "Hamats'a coming out of secret room" 1895 or before. Courtesy of National Anthropology Archives]

Music , Its Laws and Evolution, by Jules Combarieu: “Among the songs collected by [the anthropologist pictured here, Franz] Boas from the Esquimaux there are five of which the text consists solely in a rhythmical repetition of an interjection, devoid of sense. ‘This, therefore, forces on us the conclusion that primitive logic, before everything, offers a musical signification, and that the poetical sense at times remains in the background.’" (Grosse).

That applies to plenty of popular songs too. Cf. “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.”

Can you think of a song that mangles language to make it more memorable? (Slang is a potent tool. Decreeing that henceforth the word ‘bad’ shall mean ‘good’ is a radical poetic act. Antiphrasis.)

Mangling grammar: a jazz standard (Louis Jordan, 1941), “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby?”

Mangling language makes a statement about resistance, rebellion, or protest — an oppositional stance which is very much part of the history of popular song. Who controls the language? Song defies control. Ditto poetry. Poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world” (Shelley).

Breaking the rules (grammar, spelling, etc.) also a way to create a persona. e.g. Bob Dylan “The Times They Are a-Changin’” (1963) — nobody talks like that.

(Trivia: in 2010, Dylan's hand-written lyrics of the song were sold at auction at Sotheby's, New York, for $422,500. Purchased by a hedge fund manager)

As we heard from Octavio Paz, poets mangle language too.

Combarieu concludes disparagingly that it’s ‘primitive logic’ which is drawn to and practices this sort of thing. If so, one only has to think of nonsense poetry like Lewis Carrol’s ‘The Jabberwocky’, Dadaist ‘sound poetry’ and the literary experiments of Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Dame Edith Sitwell, the Beats,

9 John Ashbery, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, etc. to realize we’re all ‘primitives’ at heart.

[EDITH SITWELL

“Nobody comes to give him his rum but the Rim of the sky hippopotamus-glum” —from When Sir Beelzebub, a lyric from Facade

“Rap music was invented in England by Dame Edith Sitwell in 1922 when, perched atop a stepladder, she recited the poems of Facade through a megaphone over the musical accompaniment of her homeboy Sir William Walton. The words to the poems were chosen for their sound, colour and rhythm, and make very little sense. Having said that, they conjure up a sense of wonderment and weirdness – a bit like De La Soul. ” — John Moore on the Guardian Music Blog 30.1.07

• 2nd SLIDE of SITWELL young]

More questions: What makes us as individuals and as a species ‘whole’? How can we give expression to this wholeness? Is reason enough to sum up who and what we are? Are words enough? Words and numbers? Words and pictures? No. We need something else as well. This is the point of Victor Zuckerkandl’s book Man the Musician, published in 1973 — that the human species, which he calls homo musicus, is “the being that requires music to realize itself fully.” In his Foreword, Zuckerkandl cites Socrates and Nietzsche, ancient and modern philosophers, both of whom recognized the “limitations of logical- scientific thinking.” [Socrates – cigar band]

10 In prison, in the last days before his execution, Socrates told his disciples that he had turned away from philosophy, from the rigors of logic, and was now composing songs, setting words to music. As Zuckerkandl says, Socrates had devoted his whole life “…to the service of a single power, that of the spoken word. Now, before it is too late, he must make amends for not having served the only power that shapes man’s spiritual essence. …he will raise his voice in song at least once before dying.” Zuckerkandl says words are not enough “to give utterance to the whole of things, to be whole oneself, tones are needed, and song.” To assume that what is “unintelligible” is meaningless is to ignore the power of art, especially of music. I’ve tried to suggest some of the ‘rules’ song traditionally followed in order to be more effective as magic — like the use of pattern, rhythm, repetition and so on. These rules were useful as mnemonic devices and gradually petrified into stylistic conventions but are thought to have originated as imitations of the patterns, rhythms and cycles observable in nature. A fundamental law of magic is that ‘like influences like’ so a song is a kind of model or map, highly abstracted, like the ‘Songlines’ Bruce Chatwin described, meant to resemble what it’s designed to influence, namely the natural world. On some deep level it seems likely that our ancestors understood that what lies at the heart of it all is vibration, and vibration is all about number.

[William Congreve, English playwright and poet, (1670 –1729)] You know the phrase “Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast”? Coined by William Congreve, in The Mourning Bride, 1697:

Musick has Charms to sooth a savage Breast, To soften Rocks, or bend a knotted Oak. I've read, that things inanimate have mov'd, And, as with living Souls, have been inform'd, By Magick Numbers and persuasive Sound.

“By Magick Numbers and persuasive Sound”. The seventeenth century philosopher Gottfried Leibniz wrote: “Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting.”

Cymatics, the study of visible sound and vibration, reveals that not only music but sound itself is ruled by number.

[Cymatics — “When a bow is drawn along the edge [of a metal plate covered with fine sand] there appear in the sand nodal lines and curious geometrical figures. Nature is not a musician and yet she composes : she has a plan and a method ; and she obeys inflexible laws.”

—Music , Its Laws and Evolution, by Jules Combarieu (1910)]

From which someone might be tempted to deduce that the same patterns run like rhymes through everything, that there’s an intelligence and intention behind it, singing it all into being. Magic.

Hark! Do I catch a whiff of the ineffable?

[MAGIC SEALS & TALISMANS] [PATTERN POEMS -- Dylan Thomas, "Who are you who is born in the next room..." (1945) from a series of pattern poems called Vision and Prayer The figured poetry created by Publilius Optatianus Porphyrius – several illustrations Palindromic poem composed by Su Hui a Chinese poet of the Fourth Century CE .]

‘It was by incantation that primitive man, in his ignorance and fear in the presence of nature, tried to defend himself against sickness, death, or the cruelty of the gods.’

At the beginning of this talk I quoted Jules Combarieu’s Music and Magic when he mentions the use of incantations as both offensive and defensive weapons.

What about songs today? How might you or I use music to defend ourselves? Against what? (Environment, boredom, depression. Is music used as a kind of self-medication?)

Songs support us, they give us strength, they make us feel more alive. (Which poetry does too, though usually in a quieter more intimate way. The success of the Bloodaxe anthologies Being Alive and Staying Alive7 suggests that many readers put poetry to good use as a sort of secular prayer.)

Can you name a modern song that would soothe a savage breast, for instance? That would calm fear, quiet rage or console grief? [It’s not so modern anymore, but ‘Let it Be’ by the Beatles was seems designed to do something like that. ‘Everybody Hurts’ by REM] Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind” became the biggest selling single of all time when it was re-released as a tribute to Lady Diana in 1997. You may dismiss it as schmaltz, but…

7 Billed by the publisher as “anthologies of life-affirming poems fired by belief in the human and the spiritual at a time when much in the world feels unreal, inhuman and hollow”. Hundreds of thousands of copies sold.

12 It’s soothing, sad but somehow consoling (a ‘homeopathic’ cure for melancholy is to indulge in a mild or vicarious form of it?).

An old metaphor for the effect sad music has on us is that it " inflicts on the soul a voluptuous wound and leaves the point therein." It sounds painful, but we like it.

In “As You Like It”, Jaques [jay-kweez] begs Amiens to sing. Amiens hesitates, “it will make you melancholy” he says. Jaques replies “I thank it. More, I prithee, more. I can suckmelancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs.”

Why we like it is a subject explored in a book called ‘Why Humans Like to Cry’ by Michael Trimble. He thinks it may be a byproduct of our need to be social — we like sharing feelings with other people, especially sorrow, because it's one of the strongest and longest lasting emotions. Trimble is particularly interested in how music and the other arts can move us to tears. How and why. He concludes that once we realised that crying provided a sort of catharsis, we devised ways to prompt this experience on demand. Certain types of music evolved in response to this. The lament, the sad ballad, blues and soul music, to name a few (of my favourites)… What about anthems, marching songs, songs sung by soldiers going off to battle? Maybe these are offensive rather than defensive… designed to banish the spirit of fear? As for weapons of ‘offense’, consider rap artiste Tyler the Creator’s response when Newsnight reporter Stephen Smith asked him what his music was about: “Shit to piss old white men off like you.” As an old white man myself I don’t listen to rap much. But, as you heard in the eartoon I played you, the music I grew up on also had the power to offend adults and that was definitely part of its attraction. We began with Salman Rushdie, so let’s return to him. He asked:

I like Rushdie’s phrase “a world that is worthy of our yearning” – lovely as it is in so many ways, the world we live in is a fallen world, and often it does not feel worthy of our yearning. Reading a newspaper, for instance (if you still do that). The news is usually bad at best. Most of us do yearn for a better world. And songs are an expression of, or response to, this deep yearning — which is partly selfish but also altruistic. [PPOINT – Rushdie onstage with Bono at a U2 concert, 1993]

13 Although under a fatwa and in hiding at the time, Rushdie appeared onstage with the band U2 in 1993. So when he asks ‘why do we care about singers?’ your immediate response might be ‘I don’t care about Bono!’ — but that would be unfair. Let’s try not to get side-tracked by personal taste when we talk about song. It won’t be easy. In our consumerist culture we often feel defined by the stuff we buy, our choice of which songs and singers to care about is often intimately tied up with our sense of identity and self-worth. Our choices proclaim us part of certain taste-communities, and we usually have a lot more than money invested in them. When Rushdie “why do we care about singers?” part of the answer is because we identify with them. Song dissolves the borders between us and them, though it’s a one-way transction — we become them, in a way. A pop singer’s young fans dress like their idol, and so on. An act of impersonation. Walter Benjamin once said “our dolls don’t live through us, we live through our dolls.” For better or worse, a lot of people seem to live vicariously through celebrities, singers especially. Susan Boyle is an interesting demonstration of the power song, or rather VOICE, has to effectively transform a person. She didn’t have the looks to be a TV star, but she had a ‘gift’ as we call it, like a dispensation from the gods, and when she opened her mouth her soul came out. Jaws dropped all over the realm. The nation fell at her feet. We identified with her, or with her story. What about the idea of Karaoke as a kind of transformative ritual? Consider these 2 Youtube films: 1. “Bad” singer made “good” (lovable) - by the power of the song. Bill Murray in “Lost in Translation”: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqQ8NrNs3E0 2. “Homely” girl made “beautiful” – by the quality of her voice. Jewel in dubious “Laugh or Die” prank : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmv1VhrtYRo

[PPOINT: Cohen receives PEN award from Rushdie, 2012] (Here’s another singer/songwriter Rushdie cares about: Leonard Cohen. When he introduced the 79 year old Canadian bard to the audience at the ‘PEN New England Awards for Song Lyrics of Literary Excellence’ event in February 2012 Rushdie quoted from Cohen’s song "Bird on a Wire": "Like a bird on the wire/ Like a drunk in a midnight choir/ I have tried, in my way, to be free" – Rushdie said, "Put simply, if I could write like that, I would.") [PPOINT: Cohen and Chuck Berry backstage at PEN awards]

14 Cohen was being honoured at that event alongside Chuck Berry who Bob Dylan called “the Shakespeare of rock ‘n’ roll”. All three — Cohen, Berry and Dylan — are generally regarded as great lyricists. They were huge figures in my youth, I don’t know how much resonance they still have for young people today. Well, fashions come and go. But the power of song, of Poetry and Music, endures. I quoted E. Y. Harburg: [POWERPOINT: “Words make you think thoughts. Music makes you feel a feeling. But a song makes you feel a thought.”]

Do you know the song “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” How about “Over the Rainbow”?

[POWERPOINT: photo of E. Y. ‘Yip’ Harburg (1896 – 1981)]

[YOUTUBE: Harburg talking about and singing ‘Over the Rainbow’ here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNiXnzh3abk ]

What Harburg says in that film about “a better world, a rainbow world” evoked by song is similar to Rushdie’s: “song shows us a world that is worthy of our yearning, it shows us ourselves as they might be, if we were worthy of the world.”

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IDEAS for possible ASSIGNMENTS: (C19th German Romantic poet) Friedrich Schlegel wrote,

Through all the noise of life's multi-coloured dream,One song sings to the secret listener.

A lot of art is created like a message in a bottle. We hope it will someday find its way to a secret listener who understands us. Write about a song that sings to you, ‘you’ (or another protagonist) are the person it was meant to find, the ‘secret listener.’ (Can be fiction, fact, poetry)

Choose one of the texts from the course pack to respond

15 to. Your response can be an essay (literary criticism), an imitation, or another kind of creative ‘response’ (prose, poetry, performance, song).

Discuss the appeal of a song with incomprehensible or nonsense lyrics.