I am developing a course for when I come back, a graduate seminar called "Ritmo, cante, voz." It's basically my "song studies" idea cast as a single course. I think it will work.
I was reading Barthes' essay "The Grain of the Voice" last night. I think that would be a good place to start. That along with García Lorca's "Juego y teoría del duende." What else would you put on the syllabus for theoretical texts, aside from obvious choices like Bernstein (ed.) Close Listening?
There was a breathless-toned pop book about the human voice I saw a few months ago. That kind of thing might be useful.
Orality and Literacy? The Singer of Tales?
ResponderEliminarYou might have a look at Pinsky's book-length essay in which he claims that the medium of poetry is not words but rather the column of air in the body of the speaker of the poem. It's about as close to an Olsonian poetics as anybody's come in thirty years.
ResponderEliminarIt surprises me that Pinsky believes that, because that's not his own poetic practice at all.
ResponderEliminarI do have Lord and Ong on my list already. Thanks!
You could look at some of Stanley Cavell's stuff on music, like "Music Discomposed" or "A Pitch of Philosophy."
ResponderEliminarThere's also a great bit about "Home on the Range" in one of the essays in "Pursuits of Happiness."
Yeah, Cavell's an interesting writer for some, though curiously I haven't been able to pick up that frequency in my brain. I never seem to get a specific idea out of his writing. I'll see if those essays are any different for me.
ResponderEliminarDavid Antin's theories of the relationships between speech, prose, poetry, and thinking changed my perceptions. I'd start with "Talking to Discover" in the Rothenbergs' anthology of ethnopoetics, "Symposium of the Whole," which has lots of other stuff on orality in there, including something by Dennis Tedlock, whose practice of translating oral, semi-improvised storytelling by Zuni elders into verse influenced Antin.
ResponderEliminarAlso, "Aloud!," the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe anthology, edited by Miguel Algarin and Bob Holman (I think), has a lot of stimulating stuff about "voice."
And -- "A Year From Monday" by John Cage has a beautiful transcription of a talk he gave on Ives that pertains to Tedlock and Antin's practice. His practice of "voice" in general is worth considering.
Yeah, I went through my Antin phase too, though curiously I don't see his lecture poems as particularly relevant to my current project. They've always seen more interesting to me as lectures than as poems.
ResponderEliminarEarly "talk" Antin, my reaction is similar to yours, but the whole of "what it means to be avant-garde" is vivid narrative stuff, and the lecture in "Symposium of the Whole" is . . . a lecture!
ResponderEliminarAnother recommendation: "The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry" by W. R. Johnson. Not about "voice," per se, but brilliantly theorizes the question of address.
In "The Idea of Lyric," Johnson shows how Frankie Valli has, in some respects, a closer connection with Sappho than does Eliot or Mallarme. Pop culture comes up very little, but the unspoken notion of "song studies" runs throughout the book. The choral lyric of the Greek tragedies is a realm of song that present-day culture approaches only obliquely, and Johnson addresses it with great interest.
ResponderEliminarI've read the Johnson, but many years ago. It would repay a fresh look.
ResponderEliminar