Scoring Speech & Scoring Song in Michael Cross’ IN FELT TREELING
Michael Cross’ in felt treeling is a series of eclogues in the form of a libretto. The musicality of the language is evident in the internal assonance and the shortness of his lines. It lends itself to song and to melisma, encouraging the reader to embellish and to cut away. The short verses lend themselves to intense structural and formal analysis and aestheticized considerations of image and representation.
The verses sung by the two characters in the libretto, Eumenides and Lavina are scored not only with line breaks, but virgules. The virgules are meant to alert the reader to phrasing which extends beyond the practice of acknowledging line breaks as a sort of added punctuation in poetic performance. This lends itself to a sense of phrasing that reflects the realities of vocal performance and the way the voice—especially in contemporary classical/theatrical music (as libretto hints at)—is not treated as a purely sing-song device, but rather as an instrument functioning within an ensemble of structural, tonal, and aesthetic considerations.
e.
hath added water / to the sea
hath disengaged our sight / it’s teeming brink
and naught our watch / upon your lips
anon / kindly met and tempt
tempt such / purely sharp in fragrance
that we propelled / that those around can see
l.
not paper / nor brittle
in that stolid / posturing
in brandish crux/
so brackish / as to splendor
I, helpless / I am
within the chamber / of my mouth
of what became / a remedy
within that even / night
(Michael Cross, in felt treeling, p. 42, Chax Press 2008)
It is interesting to note the difference between the rhythmic devices and aural consilience in each characters verse. Eumenides’ repetition of “hath”, lends a certain amount of archaic grace to his address. The first two lines are nearly, but not quite, halved by their virgules. Five syllables then three in the first. Six and then four in the second. This sense of the elongation of the line gives the stanza a sense of momentum which is maintained by the even split in the third line (four syllables on each side of the virgule) but the momentum is halted in the fourth line by “anon”, which stands as the lone word on the left side of the virgule. There is a deferment here which is then thematically suggested on the second half of the virgule (“kindly met and tempt”) and the meter is balanced by how nicely the “k’s” glottal stop plays off of the ephemeral “m” and the repeating dentals of the “t”. There is also the strong, short “e” in “met” and “tempt”, a perfectly rhymed assonance which restores the sense of momentum, which is built by the repetition of “tempt” in fifth line. The stanza then opens up into the neatly constructed six syllable line on the right side of the virgule (one 2-syllable word, two 1-syllable words, one 2-syllable word) and ends with the longest line in the stanza, the eleven syllable final line with four syllables followed by the longest syllabic grouping of seven. This sense of peak and valley and the knowing manipulation of momentum in this stanza pushes and pulls the reader much as Eumenides’ himself is pushed and pulled by the temptation and anxiety hinted to in the content of the line (“teeming brink”, “tempt such”, “that we propelled”). It is a stanza about unrealized momentum, a paradoxical inertia which is both “teeming” and “tempting”—replete with possibility and yet somehow also fraught (the “teeming brink” after all, implies an overflowing, yes—but that overflow might result in emptiness). In this sense the formal construction may aid the reader in the same way that the dramatic construction of opera aids the spectator. Even though I don’t understand Italian, I can understand Puccini sung in Italian due to the formal features of the music: its tempo, a major or minor key, the preponderance or absence of dissonance, how lyrical or disjointed the melody may sound, sharp & stabbing staccato or warm & rich legato.
Lavinia’s stanza contains many of these same formal elements (though it is more sparse than Eumenides’). Let us instead focus on the aural qualities of this verse. One of the striking things about Lavina’s verse is the third line. The lacuna after the virgule clearly signifies a longer silence. The sense of silence absolute due to the terminating consonant “x” in “crux”. Still, the lingering “s” sound at the end of crux could—I suppose—be drawn out for effect. The “s” sound is repeated when Lavaina’s voice re-enters in the fourth line and is reinforced by the glottal stop in the “k” in “brackish”. The device is even more accentuated due to the repetition in the words “brandish” and “brackish” themselves. The “-nd” is substituted for “-ck” and the suffix remains the same. Our “s” sounds then return “as to splendor”. The following line “I, helpless / I am” lends itself to dramatic moments in the frequency of pauses combined with the invocation of the lyrical “I”. We are made aware of whose voice is silenced in these pauses, of whose “helpless” voice was absent in the previous lacuna. We are then propelled forward by the longest lines of the stanza before we are halted in the last line, on the right side of the virgule with the single word “night” and its definitive terminating consonant. Lavina’s stanza is more sparse, there are more internal silences and thus more chances for dramatic phrasing. One can imagine the way one might “sing” these pauses. As I mentioned before, drawing out the “s” in crux, putting a little ritardando over the entirety of the line “I, helpless / I am”, and then snapping back a tempo into the next two longer lines—as in Eumenides stanza, we are “propelled” to the final line where an even more dramatic ritard awaits “within that”; setting up the drawn out elongated “e” ’s in “even” and finally climaxing on the “ah” of “night” (if one were singing anyway—best not to sing out of the back of one’s throat as the “aye” in the “i” sound of “night” implies; a nice open “ah” is better), closed off with unambiguous finality in the crisp, consonant “t”.
This is what—as both a musician and poet—I find most beautiful, most fascinating, and so thoroughly impressive about Michael Cross’ book/libretto. He managed to score the speech in such away that the musicality of phrasing not only lends itself to the evocative, that is, implicit suggestiveness which music possesses but also manages to capture the way in which structural inventiveness and formal awareness can inform the musicality not just of lyric poetry, but of song itself. When one sings in a contrapuntal piece, you are functioning within a fugal structure; when Messiaen writes vocal lines in modes of limited transposition (scales which cannot be transposed into every key and thus are limited as to which keys they can be used in within a piece) then that singer, too, is limited in the range they may sing in and, depending on the tonal qualities of the scale (or the lack of tonal qualities) what stylistic or interpretative options are open to them; one may also think of dodecaphonic music (Boulez’s strict serialism to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone rows) as an entire school of composition dedicated to exploring the ways in which structural, formal, and conceptual “limits” inform the performance, style, and interpretation of a piece for a performer and fellow composer far more than the “average” spectator or listener. Cross’ book manages to do the same for poets while still embracing the pastoral and elegiac tradition of lyric poetry—however, like the poet whom he studies (Louis Zukofsky), he has made great strides in helping to re-invent, complicate, and enrich the tradition of lyric poetry and what it can mean outside of the mainstream conception of lyric poetry as writing which is reader friendly and “not difficult” (i.e.—nuanced, subtle, elegant &c.). Michael Cross’ in felt treeling is a brilliant, innovative and experimental contribution to lyric poetry and full of gorgeous pastorale and beautiful, concise writing.
more info
Recent Comments