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This item is the archived peer-reviewed author-version of: Introduction: Stevens into music: an interdisciplinary conversation Reference: Eeckhout Bart, Goldfarb Lisa.- Introduction: Stevens into music: an interdisciplinary conversation The Wallace Stevens journal - ISSN 0148-7132 - Baltimore, Johns hopkins univ press, 43:2(2019), p. 147-151 Full text (Publisher's DOI): https://doi.org/10.1353/WSJ.2019.0018 To cite this reference: https://hdl.handle.net/10067/1642610151162165141 Institutional repository IRUA WSJ 43.2 Introduction - 1 Introduction Stevens into Music: An Interdisciplinary Conversation BART EECKHOUT AND LISA GOLDFARB WALLACE STEVENS’S POETRY has long been associated with music: scholars and critics have noted the musical themes, allusions, and structures in his verse, from Harmonium to The Rock and in late poems. Stevens also famously writes of the musical analogy in his prose: in his essays, aphorisms, and letters, he often discusses the music of poetry and music proper, including some of the composers he admired (Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Mahler, Stravinsky), pieces of music he was fond of (symphonies by Schubert and Tchaikovsky early on, later also Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier), performers he liked (Leopold Stokowski), and concerts he attended. He had an extensive record collection, and his musical tastes were broad and lifelong: repertoire for piano solo, symphonic music, and opera, as well as more popular music (Bing Crosby, Jack Benny), were among the genres he enjoyed. Many of his poems have been set to music (most frequently, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” but scores of others as well), both in his lifetime and to the present day. While he did not attend performances of music composed for his poems, Stevens delighted in composers’ musical efforts, corresponded with and occasionally met with them. In a 1955 letter to Barbara Church, less than two months before his death, he reported how the Julius Hartt School of Music in Hartford had awarded him an honorary Doctor of Humanities degree (L 887). We cannot help but think of that degree as a tacit acknowledgment of WSJ 43.2 Introduction - 2 the fundamental importance of music in Stevens’s verse, and the actual music it continues to inspire. Given the ubiquitous presence of music in Stevens’s poems and prose, a few years ago the officers of the Wallace Stevens Society decided it was high time to mount an MLA roundtable on the subject, which we did in early January, 2018, with an eye to an eventual special issue. To foster as interdisciplinary a conversation as possible, we invited not only literary scholars but also a noted musicologist and a working composer to share ideas about Stevens’s musicality (thematically, structurally, and in relation to the genre of lyric), his record collection, and the relation of his work to that of the composers he admired and whose names occasionally surface in his verse. The early morning roundtable (at 8:30 a.m.!) on that snowy, ice-cold Saturday in January drew an unusually numerous crowd, and we reveled in the conversation among panelists and with audience members. Aspects of these conversations appear in the pages that follow, along with new voices that we have encountered since. In titling the issue Stevens into Music, we want to highlight a distinction between our current focus and the inspiring work that has already been done on the poet’s ideas and relationship to music--notably, Barbara Holmes in her 1990 book The Decomposer’s Art: Ideas of Music in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens and the long string of essays on the topic, as well as excellent broader studies of sound and the auditory imagination in his work. Anca Rosu’s The Metaphysics of Sound in Wallace Stevens (1995) and two special issues of this journal--Stevens and Structures of Sound, edited by Jacqueline Brogan in 1991, and Wallace Stevens and “The Less Legible Meanings of Sounds,” edited by Natalie Gerber in 2009--merit special recognition. Here we aim to chart new ground in providing a musical lens alongside our usual literary one to examine Stevens’s musicality. We propose to look not only at different ways in which Stevens as a poet was himself “into” music, but also at how his poetry has been turned “into music” by WSJ 43.2 Introduction - 3 composers and performers. That two-way street between the literary and the musical is what sets this special issue apart and constitutes its interdisciplinary nature, for we bring musical and literary insights together in the hope that they will illuminate each other. To highlight this interaction, we start off by discussing a musical composition--the same work that also inspires the cover image we commissioned. We are excited to present an elaborate interview with the composer Matt Barber about his 22-minute song cycle for soprano and percussion ensemble entitled, after the Stevens poem with which it both starts and ends, To the Roaring Wind. From this conversation, we learn about the genesis of the song cycle and the particular challenge of setting Stevens--a poet whose verse is already so musical--to music. (We are reminded, in this respect, of Stéphane Mallarmé’s response to Claude Debussy when the latter told him he was planning to set Mallarmé’s poem “L’Après-midi d’un faune” to music: that he thought he had already done so.) While this may seem “counterintuitive,” Barber explains that with a strongly musical poet, the composer “has to find a way to embody the music of the poetry without hiding it, all the while adding something that isn’t merely an add-on.” Barber further explains how he came to make his musical choices, the style in which he composes, his choice of instruments, and, importantly, the precise choice of poems from Harmonium that he selected for his composition (“To the Roaring Wind,” “Valley Candle,” “Fabliau of Florida,” and “Ploughing on Sunday”), as well as the synergy between text and music. Continuing the back-and-forth conversation between music and poetry, we begin our section of essays with a musician’s personal reflections. Mark Steinberg, the first violinist of the renowned Brentano String Quartet, tells us of the rationale behind a recent recital, in March of 2019, at the 92nd St. Y in Manhattan, during which the quartet performed Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor, Opus 132. Given Stevens’s own esteem for this composer--“Beethoven is my meat,” he writes in a letter (L 604)--it is tempting to speculate on how pleased the poet would WSJ 43.2 Introduction - 4 have been to hear of this experimental performance, in which, Steinberg explains, lines of Stevens’s poetry “were projected on a screen behind the quartet, fading in and out to correspond with events in the music.” Steinberg recounts the performance--the effect of juxtaposing lines from “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “The Wind Shifts,” and “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” among other poems--and, in the process of walking us through the individual movements of the piece, contemplates the centrality of music and poetry both in his life and as a performer. The essays that follow these engaging reflections by two professional musicians explore different facets of the complex relation between the two arts. The sequence we devised for these essays is roughly chronological in terms of the primary materials juxtaposed with Stevens. First, we linger with two poetic peers of Beethoven from the same romantic era, Keats and Wordsworth; then we move on to a discussion that gives pride of place to several turn-of-the- century composers, Strauss, Mahler, and Debussy; Stravinsky, the most towering musical figure by the middle of the twentieth century, follows next; an analysis of the work of Elliott Carter takes us into the new millennium; and we end, fittingly for an artform that lives only in the here and now, with the surprisingly diverse range of music Stevens continues to inspire today. First in this series is Langdon Hammer’s brilliant discussion of the theory of lyric. By way of Virginia Jackson and, especially, Alan Grossman’s understanding of “the virtual poem,” Hammer considers lyric as “metaphorical music.” In his description, it “echoes a song that can no longer be heard, and perhaps never could be heard” except through the poem. Starting with a handful of canonical scenes from Keats’s odes and Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper,” Hammer moves on to Stevens and offers us readings that include “Life Is Motion,” “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon,” and, especially, the music of the sea in “The Idea of Order at Key West.” Hammer’s readings beautifully demonstrate Stevens’s distinctive revitalization of the musical analogy. WSJ 43.2 Introduction - 5 If the poet, as Hammer suggests, writes a kind of music that cannot otherwise be heard, Stevens’s letters, essays, and poems still suggest that he measured his own musical-poetic practice in relation to that of the composers he most admired, and his poetics and poetry call to mind affinities he shares with them. Bart Eeckhout pursues this point further, and widens the sphere of how we think about the relation between the two arts, by composing his essay in a series of musical-poetic movements, each one positing a way of studying Stevens’s writings in musical terms. Eeckhout theorizes a “latent music” in Stevens’s poetry, thereby extending Hammer’s understanding of lyric, and demonstrates connections between the poet’s life and work, on the one hand, and those of four composers he loved, on the other: Strauss, Mahler, Hindemith, and Debussy. Eeckhout also points the way to musical-poetic terrain yet to be explored in Stevens’s work, and proposes a theoretical language with which to do so.

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