Chapter 8

‘Together, dogs!’:1 Feldman’s Music for Words and Music

Ten years after Neither, Feldman wrote the music for another Beckett text: the radio play Words and Music. In this play Beckett deploys Music (named Bob) as an actual ‘character’, cast alongside Words (Joe) in a dramatic contesting of their relative powers of expression. James Knowlson (1996, 496) sketches an attractive scenario as a pos- sible biographical source for the play: a meeting in 1960 between Beckett, actor Roger Blin, and composer Marcel Mihalovici, where Beckett listened ‘as the composer played through the music of his op- era, Krapp, while Blin read the words. He then worked hard with Mi- halovici to adjust the words to the musical phrases and vice versa. Words and Music bears the imprint of these struggles to bring the two different elements together’ (ibid.). Beckett’s attitude towards the ‘collaboration’ of words and music was ambivalent, at the very least. On 3 January 1951 he wrote to Georges Duthuit: ‘I do not believe in collaboration between the arts, I want a theatre reduced to its own means, speech and acting, without painting, without music, without embellishments’ (Letters, 2:218). As noted in chapter 6, his reactions to composers who wanted to add mu- sic to his works were generally negative. Nevertheless, altogether new works were considered a rather different proposition, and by the time of Words and Music he had agreed to the composition by his friend Mihalovici of an operatic version of Krapp. Likewise, many years lat- er he suggested possible extant texts to Feldman for musical setting, and when none of these proved acceptable he wrote neither. On one level, then, Words and Music dramatises Beckett’s very uncertainties about the possible relationships between these arts. The Words and Music manuscript is dated 1961, but Knowlson (1996, 798) suggests that the play was probably developed months be-

1 WM, 129. 322 Headaches among the Overtones fore this, closer to the time of Beckett’s work on Krapp’s Last Tape. It was originally commissioned by the BBC, and this 1962 production used music specially composed by the author’s young cousin, John Beckett. The cousins first met as adults in 1948: Beckett wrote to Duthuit (11 August 1948) of having ‘come across someone really worth knowing here, my cousin, a cousin, musician, 22, obsessive bear of a man, he played me his songs (Shelley, Blake [poor man]), whistling the voice, his quartet, his concerto for flute and strings’ (Let- ters, 2:97). John Beckett wrote the music for the production of Acte sans paroles 1 (1956) at the Royal Court, London, in 1957. He also provided musical interludes for a BBC radio production of extracts from Molloy read by Patrick Magee. Given some of his expressed opinions on the use of music as ‘embellishment’, it seems surprising that (Sam) Beckett allowed such a venture, let alone approved of the results, but he seems to have been very happy. He wrote to Donald McWhinnie (11 December 1957): ‘I had wondered a little if the text would take it. It not only did, it benefited’ (quoted in Overbeck 2011, 729). However, as Lois Overbeck suggests, a later comment, also to McWhinnie, indicates that what he liked about his cousin’s music for the Molloy recording was that (in his opinion, at least) it made no at- tempt to support the text, retaining its own identity: ‘John writes that he would do the music differently if he did it again. But I thought it was right, in a spirit not of reinforcement but of otherness’ (ibid.).2 This seems pertinent to the choice of John Beckett as the composer for Words and Music, a play that explores exactly that ‘otherness’ of mu- sic relative to language. Unfortunately, as with Actes sans paroles 1, John Beckett was not happy with his music: after that first production the score was withdrawn, and the recording has been unavailable for subsequent use. A later production by Katharine Worth (recorded in 1973) commissioned music from Humphrey Searle, but the most pub- licly available productions – there are currently two different re- cordings (Beckett and Feldman 1988, 1996) – use music written by Morton Feldman in 1986–87 at the request of Everett Frost (Feldman 1987).

2 Letter to Donald McWhinnie, 23 December 1957.