...the marriage of the poem and music here certainly bears the stamp of emotional significance, but seeks to go deeper than the invention, to its very structure.

Pierre Boulez, on his Improvisations on Mallarmé, originally quoted in the program to his 1974 "rug concert"

A few weeks ago we saw a performance of the piece described in that quotation. You can sample a different performance here. It's striking on many fronts. It's aggressively modern; it's the kind of modernism that people who don't have much time for avant-garde art music would find indistinguishable from a parody of avant-garde art music. It's plinky-plonky, has no real pulse, and the vocal line swoops around without no concessions at all to traditional expectations of melody.

I didn't like it; I think that when I was in high school I would have liked the idea of it very much, because I was intensely concerned with whatever was most modern, and I could have probably allowed my attraction to its position vis-a-vis the canon to sufficiently influence my experience of the performance itself.

Carinne did like it; more importantly, my journey from young radical to mature conservative hasn't yet gone so far that I want to waste any ink on decrying the corrosive effects of the modernist project and bitching about how nobody knows enough to write a good tune anymore. You're welcome.

What did strike me, though: my experience of the performance betrayed not any impression at all of a deep resonance between the text and the structure of the piece.

Here's what I can tell of the text: its structure, in fact, is quite conventional. It's a true sonnet, two ABBA quatrains followed by two tercets. The rhymes are all in the right place. The content on the other hand is opaque, mysterious, symbolic, hermetic.

I will attempt to give no deep analysis of the text, formally or in terms of content. But I do wonder what Boulez had in mind. Clearly it was important to him that we knew that the structure of his piece was informed meaningfully, and not superficially, by the text he was setting.

In other words: we are to grasp some part of the piece and, taking up the text in the other hand, feel: "these two are the same". But I perceived in the Boulez, unlike the Mallarmé, broadly no structure at all. I suspect that if I studied the score and read a couple analyses, I would see what was not apparently communicated by the performance itself.

I'm tempted by the impression that Boulez's experience of the piece is quite different from mine. And it is, of course: to reach back to last edition's metaphor, Boulez's Improvisations on Mallarmé is the langue while mine is merely (you will forgive my subjugation of the one to the other!) the parole. The piece that Boulez was talking about in the quotation at the top of this document was a structure of internal relations, planning decisions, and juxtapositions; on top of which was layered a score; on top of which was layered innumerable performances.

In a limited way, I could claim that Improvisations on Mallarmé is a failure insofar as we consider the aim I suggested, "to get at the thing itself". Boulez's "these two are the same" was not available to me. I know it existed, because he told me it did, but the beauty it implied couldn't touch me. And I believe that a work of art, like a joke, can't be truly successful if it only works after it's been explained to you.

But consider the Hermetic poets, like my beloved Montale:

(sounds of shaking crystal which startle you
in your nest of sleep; and the gold
snuffed on the mahogany, on the backs
of the bound books, flares again
like a grain of sugar in the shell
of your eyelids)

tr. Charles Wright

When I think about something like The Waste Land, I always get very slightly annoyed. It dates back to school. When you are taught a poem like The Waste Land, you are first and foremost taught about how many allusions it has. And, student that you are, your responsibility is to get every allusion. To know the thing to which it refers and to thereby to import that thing into the text you're reading. Thus your "these two are the same".

It's annoying! It suggests, at the worst, the poet as supremely learned know-it-all, dropping references you're not going to get unless you've got his schooling. A more charitable but still-annoying interpretation is that of a hypertext, the poem not as a single text that contains everything necessary for its interpretation, but instead contains dozens of pointers out, into other texts, that the reader has to follow before they'll get what it's about.

When I think about the difference between Montale and Eliot, it's this: Montale is just as replete with reference as Eliot, but his references are to things that I couldn't gain access to even if I were willing to follow the hyperlink. They're not other texts; they're people or queer images or passing thoughts from his own life. I can't gain access; I can't hope to know just what they meant to him. They are fundamentally closed in a novel way. For me, they're signs that have to assume their own meaning, and I have to reconcile myself to the knowledge that the poet's experience and intentions are cut off from me.

The poems feel "difficult" but one is also capable of entirely relinquishing the desire to read each of his metaphors (one is capable of relinquishing that desire when reading The Waste Land, but one will get a bad grade in English) and letting their images speak for themselves. I think to exhaustively annotate Montale is to murder him. Montale's langue is clearly complex, rich, and well-structured; his landscapes and spines and cicadas stand in definite relation to each other, and his poems---his parole, to beat the analogy to death---stand in definite relation to them. I can discern that the relation is there, but I can't trace the lines of relation past the fog of his other-person-ness. So I have to trust that it's doing its work in a way that I can't directly perceive. Montale's inner world has left some trace on the words that have made their way to me. The words---what I have access to---stand in relation to each other in a way that evokes deep sensations, aesthetic satisfaction, mystery, resonances with my own inner world.

I wonder if that would be enough for Boulez. To trust that the "very structure" of the sonnet was at work in his Improvisations even if the nature of its formal relationship to the work as performed was fundamentally unrecoverable.

A certain sort of absolutist would at this point claim that that's the only way that the formal relations that reside in the inner universe of the artist can be perceived in the work that makes it all the way to their audience. Only as traces, and we can only trust that they will thus do their work in a way that will have a direct effect on the audience while never being seen clear through. The artist is always other, after all; I have no more access to Boulez's subjectivity than I do to Montale's, and even if Eliot's references feel open in a way that the other two artists' don't, his personal universe is fundamentally closed to me, too.

Thus, the absolutist would say, no one has ever gotten at the thing itself, or ever will. One wonders.

Other Publications

I wrote up some real-world examples of using the K programming language for data analysis.

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