Morton Feldman's writings on music are very profound.

His distate for "attack." In other words, he doesn't want music dominated by the front end of the note or by loud flashy dynamics. Think how much more interesting the decay of the note is than its onset.

His notion of a note as a "stencil." He didn't want the stereotype of an instrumental sound. He was hearing something more subtle in his mind.

All his interest in oriental rugs and painting, in musical sound as a visual surface.

He even out-Cages Cage.

The Spanish poet who I consider the best alive, Antonio Gamoneda, has just received the Premio Cervantes. (It's like the Nobel prize for writing in the Spanish language; they usually give it to a Latin American and a Spanish writer in alternating years.)

I was the first to write about Gamoneda in English, in my 1994 book The Poetics of Self-Consciousness. So evidently I knew something then, intuited it almost, because he was not all that well known at that point.

Pound is like the amateur better than all the professionals. He sets the standard, only to violate it himself in the semi-doggerel of the Confucian Odes. And then there's that dull didactic fervor, that humorlessness.

My Diacritics piece is out. You'll need access to Project Muse from a University Library to read it. If you really find the topic compelling I will send you an offprint, once I get them. It's on Paul Celan and a cont. span. poet, J.A. Valente, and issues of translation theory. The editorial process was long and protracted. I'm afraid to read the final product myself, fearing it's a little bloated.

Don't be confused by the 2004 date: it just came out last week.

***

Reading some Henri Meschonnic. I don't quite know what it's about yet. It has rhythm in the title but doesn't seem to really be about that in any recognizable sense. I know what he doesn't like, at least.

The most fascinating thing about rhythm is that we don't know what it is. I don't mean we're lacking in definitions. Obviously there are many definitions, but none seems wholly pertinent to the phenomenon itself. There are not even good metaphors for rhythm, that are not simply examples of it.

And the philanthropes, don't even get me started on those.

Does the misanthrope hate himself? Or does he think himself an exception?

Speaking of Topeka, it's Coleman Hawkins' birthday today.

A few prosodic principles.

1) The asymmetry principle. Even classical and neo-classical forms will involve huge areas of asymmetry and irregularity. (Conversation with David Shapiro inspired this one.)

2) Inexhaustibility. Even a seemingly limited number of permutations will permit seemingly endless variability.

3) Poverty of means. You only need a few "pitches" to make verse musical. That is, intonational contours, combined with all the other phrasal and accentual business, are enough to create greatly varied effects.

4) The critical gap. Most literary critics will never care enough about this stuff.

5) The "Topeka Principle." When driving toward Lawrence, Kansas and thinking too hard about these issues, you will miss the exit and end up 15 miles to the West in Topeka, and have to retrace your steps to get home.

All these principles are really versions of the same basic principle.

Carmen McCrae. That's another one for the list below.

Here are my favorite singers of jazz, in no particular order of preference. I can't rank them really. Did I do this before? If I did I apologize:

Dinah Washington. She's like Billie Holiday but with a stronger voice. Very bluesy even in her more popular facets. Check out "Dinah Jams."

Ray Charles. I know he isn't a "jazz singer" per se. It doesn't really matter to me. Make your own list if you don't like it,

Billie Holiday. That's pretty obvious. She is simply one of the great jazz musicians period.

Armstrong. Yes, I know he can be quite awful. I can't stand to hear "Hello Dolly" or "Mack the Knife." You have to go back to the early days to find better stuff by him. How about the duets with Ella? You can't beat those.

Nat King Cole. Ok. That's an interesting one. He is obviously a jazz musician, but is he a jazz singer? Or does his singing represent a turn away from jazz? I love his voice and his phrasing. He inspired the early Ray Charles, even. He is "jazz" even when he is not "jazz."

Ella Fitzgerald. Another obvious one. Get away from the novelty numbers and into the song books.

Billy Eckstine. The male Sarah Vaughn? You got to give him his due.

Sarah Vaughn. I love that over-the-top quality to her performances. There is the sheer power and range of her voice, but I prefer her when she is the most "swinging." I hated her "Send in the Clowns," maybe because I hate all of Sondheim's music.

Sinatra. Ok. Sinatra could be awful too, when he became his mannerisms. A lot of singers do that. I like him best with those Nelson Riddle string arrangements. Sweet.

Antonio Benedetti. Tony Bennett is the purest jazz singer among the Italian crooners. He has his mannerisms too. If you like those mannerisms you will like him.

Shirley Horn. Not for nothing was she Miles Davis' favorite singer.

Bessie Smith. This was jazz singing before there was jazz. It's the original source--or one of them at least.

This is a tricky category because it merges into plain old "pop" singing at a certain point--at one end--and into rhythm and blues at the other end. It's interesting that there are more pure jazz singers among the women, and more cross-overs among the men. Ella, Sarah, and Dinah are "jazzier" in the generic sense than Frank, Ray Chas., the later Armstrong, or Nat Cole--or even Mel Tormé, who doesn't make my list.

Not my 10 favorite jazz albums of all time (but pretty darn close


Lester Young and Teddy Wilson. Pres and Teddy.
Herbie Hancock. Empyrean Isles.
Miles Davis. Birth of the Cool. Kind of Blue. Miles Smiles.
Coltrane. Coltrane's Sound. Equinox. Soultrane.
Ornette Coleman. The Shape of Jazz to Come.
Bobby Hutcherson. Dialogue.
Art Tatum. Complete Capitol Recordings.
Cecil Taylor / Elvin Jones / Dewey Redman. Momentum Space.
Bill Evans. Waltz for Debby.
Rollins. Saxophone Collosus.
Charlie Parker (and Miles Davis). Bird Song.
Thelonious Monk. Brilliant Corners.
Art Blakey. Live at Birdland.
Roach and Clifford Brown. Study in Brown, etc...
Coleman Hawkins. The Hawk Flies High.

I'm bringing in music to my grad class. For example, Count Basie. Take the late 30s recording with Lester Young. The rhythm section is the most advanced of its time, with Walter Page and Jo Jones. (Don't forget, his full name was not Joseph but "Jonathan.") What makes it sound modern is the relatively even pulse of four quarter notes on the bass, rather than an up and down movement between the two halves of the measure. It's more of a 4 feel than a 2 feel. Still, the band might sound a little bit cornball to our ears today. But when Lester comes in for his solo, it's like something that could have been played yesterday. He sounds totally free, rhythmically speaking, though of course he is objectively playing in time with the band, in other words, referring to the beat enough so that there is no lack of synchronization and phrasing within the basic framework of the four or eight measure phrases. But his rhythmic concept is his own creation. Something unequalled to this day, except in Charlie Parker himself.

So what am I trying to teach here? Rhythm is not meter? Be attentive to theis kind of things? I think every educated person should know that a Blues has 12 measures.

Everyone else in my department feels that if you give too much versification, you will put students off. Because it is considered dry and technical. For me, it the very breath, the very substance of the thing. Don't get me started.

Ok. This will be my last post on prosody for a while. (Well, at least until later this afternoon or tomorrow morning.)

I think the situation in Spanish is even worse, in the sense that critics take a purely mechanical view of the subject, when they consider it at all. It's not that the mechanics are not interesting in themselves. They are, if you happen to be a prosody geek like me and seven other people in the world. The problem is that there have only been baby steps beyond that point.

The Spanish poet Carlos Piera is also a theoretical linguist and has some very nice articles on intonation and line-ending, which he was kind enough to send me. (For some reason he wrote them in English, which is nice for other linguists that might not know Spanish, but also means they won't have as much impact within Spain.} He has inspired me to write my article on the verse-paragraph. The idea has been rattling around my head for a while, and I'm ready to go with it now.

The idea is a very simple one: look at the verse beyond the level of the individual line of poetry. It seems astonishing that this has not been done (for Spanish.) Even in English only Richard Cureton really has developed a phrasal theory that also incorporates metrics. Needless to say Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse is my libro de cabecera. I don't know how many times I have checked that book out of the library.

There are 4 main possibilities for verse construction, in order of complexity.

1 (Mostly) end-stopped lines of the same length.
2 Lines of the same length, with frequent enjambment
3 Lines of unequal length, mostly end-stopped.
4 Lines of unequal length, with frequent enjambment
[5 = prose?]

So there are three variables: the metrical line, the intonational phrase, and the visual line ending. We can study the correspondence between the metrical line and the intonational phrase (in 1 and 2) without even taking into account line endings as a visual convention. Even in the case of (3) we don't really need line endings. We can just use punctuation! So only in (4) does the line ending really come into play--as more than a marker of what's already present in the implicit phonology of the text. We want to mark our lines in (2) in order to visually mark the syncopation between lines and phrases. In the case of (4), we need to enjambment because otherwise, it would be the same as (3).

Even the rhythmic structure of (1) could be incredibly complex, taking into account all the relevant factors. In fact, there is a certain "embarrassment of riches" or "law of diminishing returns" in (4), that ends up reducing complexity. Prose, after all, is more rhythmically complex, by this measure, but also less rhythmically interesting. My hypothesis is that (4) is the most interesting when it approaches the condition of (2) while also drawing on the resources of (3).