Words, Music, and the Popular: Global Perspectives on Intermedial Relations (Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature) 3030855422, 9783030855420

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN MUSIC AND LITERATURE

Words, Music, and the Popular Global Perspectives on Intermedial Relations

Edited by  Thomas Gurke · Susan Winnett

Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature Series Editors Paul Lumsden City Centre Campus MacEwan University Edmonton, AB, Canada Marco Katz Montiel Facultad de Letras Pontifical Catholic University of Chile Santiago, RM - Santiago, Chile

This leading-edge series joins two disciplines in an exploration of how music and literature confront each other as dissonant antagonists while also functioning as consonant companions. By establishing a critical connection between literature and music, this series highlights the interaction between what we read and hear. Investigating the influence music has on narrative through history, theory, culture, or global perspectives provides a concrete framework for a seemingly abstract arena. Titles in the series, both monographs and edited volumes, explore musical encounters in novels and poetry, considerations of the ways in which narratives appropriate musical structures, examinations of musical form and function, and studies of interactions with sound. Editorial Advisory Board: Frances R. Aparicio, Northwestern University, US Timothy Brennan, University of Minnesota, US Barbara Brinson Curiel, Critical Race, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Humboldt State University, US Gary Burns, Northern Illinois University, US Peter Dayan, Word and Music Studies, University of Edinburgh, Scotland Shuhei Hosokawa, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Japan Javier F.  León, Latin American Music Center of the Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University, US Marilyn G. Miller, Tulane University, US Robin Moore, University of Texas at Austin, US Nduka Otiono, Institute of African Studies, Carleton University, Canada Gerry Smyth, Liverpool John Moores University, England Jesús Tejada, Universitat de València, Spain Alejandro Ulloa Sanmiguel, Universidad del Valle, Colombia More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15596

Thomas Gurke  •  Susan Winnett Editors

Words, Music, and the Popular Global Perspectives on Intermedial Relations

Editors Thomas Gurke University of Koblenz-Landau Landau, Germany

Susan Winnett Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf Düsseldorf, Germany

Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature ISBN 978-3-030-85542-0    ISBN 978-3-030-85543-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85543-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Contents

1 Words, Music, and the Popular  1 Thomas Gurke and Susan Winnett 2 Of Silent Notation and Historiographic Relationality: Words, Music, and Notions of the Popular 11 Nassim Winnie Balestrini

Section I  Popular Form and Pop-Aesthetics  37 3 Experiencing Dylan: The Effect of Formal Structure and Performance on the Popularity and Interpretation of Two Dylan Songs 39 Yke Paul Schotanus 4  Freewheelin’ with Adorno down Highway 61: Bob Dylan’s Transformative Electric Turn 65 Samuel Caleb Wee 5 Which Side Is This Ex-Beatle on? A Reassessment of the 1970s Rock Press’ Framing, Interpretation, and Consideration of Paul McCartney and Wings 87 Allison Bumsted v

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CONTENTS

Section II  The Geopolitics of the Popular 109 6 PJ Harvey as a Modern War Poet: How Let England Shake Challenges ‘English England’ Through the Pastoral111 Felix Leidner 7 Transmedia Performance in Scandinavian Singalong Shows: On the Transmediation of Liveness and Participation in Community Singing133 Lea Wierød Borčak 8 A Melopoetic Struggle between East and West: Mickiewicz and the Popular Idiom155 Jan Czarnecki 9 Post-Sovietness of the Popular: The West, the Post-Soviet Ukrainian Audience, and the Major Ukrainian Pop Star (1990s)179 Iuliana Matasova

Section III  Popular Classics? 201 10 Café-Concert Parodies of Lohengrin (Wagner) and Othello (Verdi) in the Context of Popularisation Efforts of the Opéra de Paris in the 1890s203 Christian Dammann 11 “The World Wanted to Bleed All the Sass Out My Name”: Interrogating the Popularity of Words and Music in Tyehimba Jess’s Olio225 Alexandra Reznik 12 William H. Gass and the (Un)popularity of Words as Music237 Ivan Delazari Index257

Notes on Contributors

Nassim  Winnie  Balestrini is Professor of American Studies and Intermediality at the University of Graz, Austria, where she also serves as Director of the Centre for Intermediality Studies in Graz (CIMIG). Her research interests include US-American and Canadian literature from the eighteenth century to the present, adaptation and intermediality (as in her monograph From Fiction to Libretto: Irving, Hawthorne, and James as Opera, 2005, and in the edited volume Adaptation and American Studies, 2011), life writing (as in Intermediality, Life Writing, and American Studies, 2018, co-edited with Ina Bergmann), hip-hop culture, ecocriticism, climate change theater, the poet laureate traditions in the US and Canada, and the ever-expanding universe of emerging and (re-)discovered poets, dramatists, and novelists. She particularly enjoys comparative and interdisciplinary approaches in her research across literary genres, media, ethnicities, and cultures. Lea  Wierød  Borčak is an international postdoc fellow at Linnaeus University, Sweden, and Aarhus University, Denmark. Her current research centers on the forms and functions of community singing in a Scandinavian context. She has previously published work on intermedial song analysis, melopoetics, hymnology, and the church hymns of N.F.S. Grundtvig. She was a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Arts, Aarhus University, and has taught numerous courses at the Department of Dramaturgy and Musicology. Allison  Bumsted  holds a PhD in Cultural Studies and an MA in The Beatles, Popular Music, and Society from Liverpool Hope University. She vii

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

completed her BA in History and Political Science at Texas State University. Her research focuses on all things popular: music, print, media, and teen fan magazines. Jan Czarnecki  teaches Polish Literature and Language as well as Word and Music Studies at the University of Cologne (Germany). Born in 1989 in Warsaw, he graduated summa cum laude in Philosophy (BA, MA) from the College of Inter-Faculty Individual Studies in the Humanities (MISH), University of Warsaw, and obtained a diploma with honors from the F. Chopin State Music School in Warsaw. He received his PhD with honors from the University of Padua (Italy). He has been an associated researcher at the University of Lille-3 (France) and a Visiting Postgraduate Research Student at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland). He has performed as a soloist and as a member of chamber and madrigal choirs. He worked as an editor at Universa. Recensioni di filosofia. His research interests range from word and music relations in European literature to the philosophy of music. Christian  Dammann  studied orchestral conducting and piano before obtaining a degree in Romance Languages and Musicology (MA) from Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf and Robert-Schumann-­ Hochschule Düsseldorf. He took part in master classes of the Bayerischer Musikrat and the European Academy for Music and Performing Arts Montepulciano and had engagements at the Wuppertaler Bühnen and the Stadttheater Bremerhaven. He is a vocal coach and pianist at the Deutsche Oper am Rhein Düsseldorf/Duisburg and also teaches score playing at the Robert-Schumann-Hochschule. In 2018, he published a monograph on French parodies of Wagner’s Lohengrin entitled Bonjour Lolo! Französische Lohengrin-Parodien 1886–1900, which was highlighted in wagnerspectrum as a relevant study on Wagner and France. He is currently working on a dissertation project on French Wagner parodies at Folkwang Universität der Künste in Essen. Ivan  Delazari is Associate Professor at National Research University Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg. His two doctoral degrees in Philology (2003) and English (2018) are from St. Petersburg State University and Hong Kong Baptist University. He is the author of Musical Stimulacra: Literary Narrative and the Urge to Listen (2021) and other publications on American and comparative literature, word and music studies, and narrative theory.

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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Thomas  Gurke is Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies at the University of Koblenz-Landau. He has a degree in English Literature and Musicology. His PhD dissertation focused on the intersemiotic, aesthetic, and affective dynamics of music and literature in the texts of James Joyce and is forthcoming as a monograph. His other publications focus on  Joyce, contemporary fiction, ecology, the short-story, and ­popular culture. Felix  Leidner is a graduate of the University of Rostock where he obtained a Master’s degree equivalent (First State Examination) in Education in British and American Literature and Culture and German language and literature. His thesis focused on the correspondences between English War Poetry and the lyrics of PJ Harvey’s album Let England Shake with regard to national identity using an intertextual approach. This research is part of his contribution to this volume. Iuliana Matasova  holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and is Associate Professor at the Department of Foreign Literature at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine. In 2017, she was a Carnegie Research Fellow at the Duke University Program in Literature (USA) as well as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study Sofia (Bulgaria). Her research interests include American-Ukrainian-­Russian comparative literary and cultural studies, post-Soviet studies, women’s and gender studies, popular culture and popular music studies. Alexandra  Reznik  is Assistant Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Chatham University  as well as the Word and Music Association Forum Coordinator and liaison to the International Association for Word and Music Studies. Her work appears in The Routledge Companion to Music and Modern Literature, The Western Journal of Black Studies, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, ESQ: Journal of the American Renaissance, Ars Lyrica, Lamar Journal of the Humanities, and The Journal of American Culture. Yke Paul Schotanus  is an affiliated researcher at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICON) at Utrecht University. In 2020, he was awarded a PhD for his dissertation: ‘Singing as a figure of speech, music as punctuation: A study into music as a means to support the processing of sung language’. His research area is the effect of singing on focusing on and memorizing texts, the interpretation of those texts, and the consequences of this on the

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

position of sung texts in education, health care, and literature. He is also a teacher of Dutch language and literature, author, writing coach, and singer-songwriter. Samuel Caleb Wee  is a graduate student working on a PhD in English at the University of British Columbia, Canada, under the International PhD Scholarship offered by Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research is focused on examining the links between mediation and selfhood in contemporary poetry. As a creative writer, his work has appeared in publications such as Quarterly Literary Review Singapore, Esquire, Moving Worlds and Ceriph. He is also the co-editor of the anthology of anti-realist fiction, this is how you walk on the moon (2016). His debut poetry collection, https://everything.is, is forthcoming from AJAR Press in 2021. Susan  Winnett is Professor of American Studies and Transcultural Studies at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf. She is the author of Terrible Sociability: The Text of Manners in Laclos, Goethe, and Henry James (1993) and Writing Back: American Expatriates’ Narratives of Return (2012) and numerous articles on issues of gender and narrative. She is working on a study of American soldiers’ WW II memoirs, novels and films, the myth of the Greatest Generation, and the attempts of postgenerations to overcome that myth and come to terms with their fathers’ silence about the war.

List of Tables

Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 3.3 Table 3.4 Table 3.5

URLs of the YouTube registrations of “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” mentioned in this chapter Distribution of song versions over categories of predictionbased grouping variables, used as predictors Results of Principal axis factoring analysis with oblique rotation (direct oblimin). Factor loadings >0.4 bold, and 1 was retained (see Appendix A). Stimuli  The seven versions of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” were (see also Table 3.2):

Table 3.2  Distribution of song versions over categories of prediction-based grouping variables, used as predictors Song version

Dylan 1 Dylan 2 Dylan 3 Melanie Joan Baez Edie Brickell Leon Russell

Complete lyrics Line verses

v

5,7,7,6,12 5,5,5,5,12 5,5,5,5,5 5,7,7,8 4,4,5,11 5,7,7,6,12 4,4,4,4

4 3 2 2 2 4 1

Folk/pop

Folk/Ac. Folk/Ac. Folk/Ac. Pop/Amp. Folk/Ac. Pop/Amp. Pop/Amp.

7-5-4

Regularity

Rhythm line verses

v

V

9/8 + 12/8 (7 triplets) 5 triplets, end 7 5 triplets 2 × 4/4 time 9/8 + 12/8 (7 triplets) 5 triplets, end 7 4 × 4/4 time

7 5 5 4 7 5 4

5 4 2 3 4 4 1

The values (v) of complete lyrics are based on the number of line verses within the five sequences (4 = all lines; 1  =  many lines omitted); the values of 7-5-4 based on the rhythm of the line verses within the sequences (7 triplets, 5 triplets, or a quadruple meter); regularity is a quasi-ordinal combination of those measures ranging from 5 (very irregular) to 1 (very regular)

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Y. P. SCHOTANUS

. D1: The original Dylan version. 1 2. D2: A digitally edited version of ‘1’, in which the two instrumental bars between each pair of line verses in the first four sequences were removed along with five line verses. 3. D3: A digitally edited version of ‘2’, in which the two instrumental bars between each pair of line verses in the fifth sequence were also removed along with plus seven of the twelve line verses in this sequence. 4. JB: A predominantly acoustic version by Joan Baez, who keeps the rhythm intact but deletes one sequence and a few line verses from the second and third sequence respectively. 5. M: An amplified rendition by Melanie Safka in an upbeat four-four time, in which one sequence and several lines were omitted. 6. EB: An amplified version by Edie Brickell with complete lyrics, in which the instrumental two bars between each pair of line verses in the first four sequences were omitted. 7. LR: An amplified, four-four time version by Leon Russell, with four sequences of four line verses per sequence. Questionnaire  While listening to the song, the participants were asked to rate from 1 (‘totally disagree’) to 7 (‘completely agree’) whether it was difficult to keep listening to the song until the end. After that, the participants were asked to rate on a similar scale whether they agreed with the following statements.  Overall, there were forty statements: –– The song makes me feel sad, strong, worried, angry, disoriented, nervous, insecure, happy, relaxed (nine statements) –– I like the song because of the music –– It was difficult to stay focused –– The tension increases near the end of the song; you never know when the refrain/chorus comes (two statements) –– I know a better version of this song by the same artist; by another artist (two statements) –– I like this song because of the lyrics –– This song is a fatalistic song; a protest song; a warning; a psychedelic song; a well-structured song; a standard pop song; a love song; a family song; an adventure song; an invitation to have fun (ten statements)

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–– The lyrics are striking; are poetically rich; were intelligible; were comprehensible (four statements) –– I never listen to the lyrics of a song –– I have only heard a few lines –– There is little difference between the song’s parts: they all sound the same –– The music urges me to stay alert –– The form of the song is rather unusual –– The song has an open structure –– The song builds up to a climax –– There are several irregularities in the song –– The lyrics are incoherent –– Several lines could be omitted Subsequently, the participants answered questions on gender, age, native language, musicianship and literary experience (see Participants section) and were asked to rate, on the same scale as used above, whether they would agree with the statement: ‘I am a Dylan fan’. Statistical Analysis  The ratings for the statements about the song were analyzed using Principal Axis Factoring. Subsequently, mixed model regressions with ‘song version’ as fixed factor were conducted on the factors that were retained. In order to eliminate differences caused by familiarity with the song or its singer, random intercepts were modelled for the variables ‘age’ and ‘Dylan fan’. Additional regressions were conducted with several prediction-based grouping variables as fixed factors (see Table  3.2). The variable ‘Folk/pop’ distinguishes between ‘acoustic’ or ‘amplified’, ‘4-5-7’ between several levels of rhythmic complexity, ‘complete lyrics’ between several levels of lyric complexity and ‘regularity’ between levels of complexity in general. Results Before a Principal Axis Factoring analysis could be conducted, several variables had to be deleted because of multicollinearity: ‘feeling nervous’, ‘insecure’, ‘disoriented’, ‘strong’ and ‘worried’ as well as ‘lyrics incoherent’, ‘poetically rich’, ‘like the song because of the lyrics’, ‘song is invitation to have fun’ and ‘never listened to the lyrics’. The subsequent Principal Axis Factoring analysis with oblique rotation (direct oblimin) yielded seven factors with eigenvalues >1, namely: ‘Pop song’, ‘Irregular’, ‘Protest’, ‘Dull’, ‘Warning’, ‘Lyrics +’ and ‘Music +’ (see Table 3.3). Note

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Table 3.3  Results of Principal axis factoring analysis with oblique rotation (direct oblimin). Factor loadings >0.4 bold, and 0.5

Factor loadings I often write journalistic, business or academic texts I often write blogs, poems, novels, et cetera. I like playing with words

0.58 0.74 0.77 (continued)

9  In a Between-Subjects-Design, the participants in an experiment are assigned to different conditions, with each subject experiencing only one of them.

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(continued) Literary Experience I like poetry I like reading

0.69 0.38

Factor information Initial eigenvalue Percentage of variance predicted Sum of squared loadings

2.62 52.39 2.09

Works Cited Agawu, Kofi. 1992. Theory and practice in the analysis of the nineteenth century lied. Music Analysis 11 (1): 3–36. https://doi.org/10.2307/854301. Ball, Gordon. 2012. A nobel for Dylan? In The poetics of American song lyrics, ed. Charlotte Pence, 269–279. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Bax, Sander. 2016. Bob freed your mind the way Elvis freed your body’: Singer-­ songwriter, dichter, Nobelprijswinnaar. Diggit Magazine. https://www. diggitmagazine.com/academic-­papers/bob-freed-your-mind-way-elvis-freedyour-body. Accessed 1 Oct 2019. Beebee, Thomas O. 1991. Ballad of the apocalypse: Another look at Bob Dylan’s “Hard Rain”. Text and Performance Quarterly 11: 18–34. https://doi. org/10.1080/10462939109365991. Behrendt, Michael. 1991. Englische und Amerikanische Rocklyrik, 1950–1975: ästhetische und historische Strukturen. Europäische Hochschulschriften: Reihe 14. Frankfurt am Main/Bern/New York/Paris: Lang. Bornstein, Robert F., and Paul R. d’Agostino. 1994. The attribution and discounting of perceptual fluency: Preliminary tests of a perceptual fluency/attributional modeal of the mere exposure effect. Social Cognition 12 (2): 103–128. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.1994.12.2.103. Boucher, David. 2004. Dylan & Cohen: Poets of rock and roll. New  York: Continuum. Bowden, Betsy. 1982. Performed literature: A case study of Bob Dylan’s “Hard Rain”. Literature in Performance 3 (1): 35–48. https://doi. org/10.1080/10462938209391500. Braae, Nick. 2019. Linearity in popular song. In On popular music and its unruly entanglements, ed. Nick Braae and Kai Arne Hansen, 83–99. Cham: Palgrave. Brackett, David. 1995. Interpreting popular music. Cambridge/New York/ Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Chmiel, A., and E. Schubert. 2017. Back to the inverted-U for music preference: A review of the literature. Psychology of Music 45 (6): 886–909. https://doi. org/10.1177/0305735617697507.

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Denning, M. 2009. Bob Dylan and rolling thunder. In The Cambridge companion to Bob Dylan, Cambridge companions to American studies, ed. Kevin J.H. Dettmar, 28–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi. org/10.1017/CCOL9780521886949.003. Dierks, Sonia. 2007. Dylans Stimme; am Beispiel von “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”. In Bob Dylan. Ein Kongreß, ed. Axel Honneth, Peter Kemper, and Richard Klein, 143–159. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Dylan, Bob. 2004. Chronicles: Volume 1. New York: Simon & Schuster. Eckstein, Lars. 2010. Reading song lyrics. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. Everett, Walter, ed. 2000. Expression in pop-rock music: A collection of critical and analytical essays, Studies in contemporary music and culture. New  York/ London: Garland Publishing. Fink, Nele M. 2015. Bob Dylan’s voice. The inevitable connection between identity and voice. Munich: GRIN Verlag. Goldstein, Richard. 1968/1969. The poetry of rock. New York: Bantam. Gray, Michael. 2000. The song & dance man III: The art of Bob Dylan. New York: Continuum. Hampton, Timothy. 2019. Bob Dylan’s poetics: How the songs work. Zone Books. Harden, Alexander C. 2019. Narrativizing recorded popular song. In On popular music and its unruly entanglements, ed. Nick Braae and Kai Arne Hansen, 39–57. Cham: Palgrave. Hoffman, A. 1983. Performed literature: Words and music by Bob Dylan, by Betsy Bowden. [Review]. Notes 39 (4): 847–849. https://doi. org/10.2307/941120. Huron, David. 2006. Sweet anticipation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2013. A psychological approach to musical form: The habituation–fluency theory of repetition. Current Musicology 96: 7–35. https://doi. org/10.7916/D8KP81FG. Kramer, Lawrence. 1984. Music and poetry: The nineteenth century and after. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1999/2002. Beyond words and music: An essay on songfulness (second version). In In musical meaning  – Toward a critical history, ed. Lawrence Kramer. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press. Langer, Susan K. 1953. The principle of assimilation. In Feeling and Form, ed. Susan K. Langer, 149–168. New York: Scribner. Lloyd, Brian. 2014. The form is the message: Bob Dylan and the 1960s. Rock Music Studies 1 (1): 58–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/1940115 9.2013.876756. Malheiro, R., R. Panda, P. Gomes, and R.P. Paiva. 2018. Emotionally-relevant features for classifications and regression of music-lyrics. IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing 9 (2): 240–254. https://doi.org/10.1109/ TAFFC.2016.2598569. Margulis, Elisabeth H. 2014. On repeat: How music plays the mind. New  York: Oxford University Press.

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Marshall, L. 2009. Bob Dylan and the academy. In The Cambridge companion to Bob Dylan, Cambridge companions to American studies, ed. K.  Dettmar, 100–109. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/ CCOL9780521886949.009. Menon, V., and D.J. Levitin. 2005. The rewards of music listening – Response and physiological connectivity of the mesolimbic system. NeuroImage 28 (1): 175–184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2005.05.053. Miall, D.S., and D.  Kuiken. 1994. Foregrounding, defamiliarization, and affect response to literary stories. Poetics 22: 389–407. https://doi. org/10.1016/0304-­422X(94)00011-­5. Middleton, Richard. 1995. Studying popular music. Milton Keynes/Philadelphia: Open University Press. Moore, Allan. 2018. The bitter taste of praise: Singing “Hallelujah”. In The pop palimpsest: Intertextuality in recorded popular music, ed. Lori Burns and Serge Lacasse, 85–105. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Nainby, Keith. 2019. Not just literature: Exploring the performative dimensions of Bob Dylan’s work. In The Polyvocal Bob Dylan, ed. Nduka Otonio and Josh Toth, 67–83. Cham: Palgrave. Negus, Keith. 2008. Bob Dylan. Sheffield: Equinox Publishing Ltd. Ollen, Joy, and David Huron. 2004. Listener preferences and early repetition in musical form. In Proceedings of the 8th international conference on music, perception and cognition, ed. Scott D.  Lipscomb, Richard Ashley, Robert O. Gjerdingen, and Peter Webster, 405–407. Evanston: Casual Productions. Pattisson, Pat. 2009. Writing better lyrics: The essential guide to powerful songwriting. Cincinatti: Writer’s Digest Books. Proverbio, A.M., L.  Manfrin, L.A.  Arcari, F.  De Benedetto, M.  Gazzola, M.  Guardamagna, V.  Lozano Nasi, and A.  Zani. 2015. Non-expert listeners show decreased heart rate and increased blood pressure (fear bradycardia) in response to atonal music. Frontiers in Psychology 6: 1646. https://doi. org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01646. Ricks, Christopher. 2004. Dylan’s visions of sin. New York: Ecco. Rolison, J., and J. Edworthy. 2012. The role of formal structure in liking for popular music. Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 29 (3): 269–284. https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2012.29.3.269. ———. 2013. The whole song is greater than the sum of its parts: Local and structural features in music listening. Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain 23 (1): 33–48. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0032442. ———. 2015. The musical foregrounding hypothesis: How music influences the perception of sung language. In Proceedings of the Ninth Triennial Conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music, ed. Ginsborg, J., Lamont, A., Philips, M., and Bramley, S., 724–735. Manchester: Royal Northern College of Music.

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Schotanus, Yke P. 2020a. Singing as a figure of speech, music as punctuation: A study into music as a mean to support the processing of sung language. [doctoral dissertation]. Utrecht. ———. 2020b. Singing and accompaniment support the processing of song lyrics and change the lyrics’ meaning. Empirical Musicology Review 15 (1–2): 18–55. https://doi.org/10.18061/emr.v15i1-­2.6863. Schotanus, Yke P., H.V. Koops, and J. Reed Edworthy. 2018. Interaction between musical and poetic form affects song popularity: The case of the Genevan psalter. Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain 28 (3): 127–151. https://doi. org/10.1037/pmu0000216. Shumway, D.R. 2009. Bob Dylan as cultural icon. In The Cambridge companion to Bob Dylan, Cambridge companions to American studies, ed. Kevin J.H. Dettmar, 110–122. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/ CCOL9780521886949.010. Storey, John. 2009. Cultural theory and popular culture: An introduction. Harlow: Pearson Longman. Summach, Jason. 2012. Form in top-20 rock music, 1955–89. [Doctoral dissertation] UMI 3525244. Ann Arbor: Proquest. Tsai, C.-G., R.-S. Chen, and T.-S. Tsai. 2014. The arousing and cathartic effects of popular heartbreak songs as revealed in the physiological responses of listeners. Musicae Scientiae 18 (4): 410–422. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1029864914542671. Van Peer, Willy, Frank Hakemulder, and Sonja Zygnier. 2012. Scientific methods for the humanities: Linguistic approaches to literature 12. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Walser, Robert. (1993/2013). Running with the devil: power, gender and madness in heavy metal music. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, retrieved 2017-11-7 from: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uunl. Wee, Samuel C. 2021. Freewheelin’ with Adorno down Highway 61: Bob Dylan’s transformative electric turn. In Words, music, and the popular. Global perspectives on intermedial relations, ed. Thomas Gurke and Susan Winnett. Cham: Palgrave. Yaffe, D. 2009. Bob Dylan and the Anglo-American tradition. In The Cambridge companion to Bob Dylan, Cambridge companions to American studies, ed. Kevin J.H. Dettmar, 15–27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https:// doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521886949.002.

CHAPTER 4

Freewheelin’ with Adorno down Highway 61: Bob Dylan’s Transformative Electric Turn Samuel Caleb Wee

Introduction Towards the end of his life, the German critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno delivered a scalding critique of pop music that ventured into the realm of political protest. In a televised 1968 interview, Adorno describes music such as the work of Joan Baez or early Bob Dylan as doomed from the start. The entire sphere of popular music, even there where it dresses itself up in modernist guise, is to such a degree inseparable from past temperament, from consumption, from the cross-eyed transfixion with amusement, that attempts to outfit it with a new function remain entirely superficial […] by taking the horrendous and making it somehow consumable, it ends up wringing something like consumption-qualities out of it. (Prill and Schneider 2003)

S. C. Wee (*) University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Gurke, S. Winnett (eds.), Words, Music, and the Popular, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85543-7_4

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Withering, for sure—yet one might also imagine that Dylan himself would lose no sleep over Adorno’s putdown. After all, long-time fans of Bob Dylan know that his disdain of being viewed as a political champion has been a consistent stance since the late Sixties: in a 2004 interview, reflecting upon the critical reception of his early protest folk work, Dylan remarks dryly: “You feel like an impostor […] they call you that all the time: ‘You’re the prophet. You’re the savior’. I never wanted to be a prophet or a savior. Elvis, maybe” (Bradley 2004). Nonetheless, despite this self-­ professed desire for shallow consumption and resistance towards political interpretation, a large body of work has proliferated around reading Dylan’s output—largely, his early protest folk albums, as well as the “Electric Trilogy”—as social critique. Most intriguingly, despite their seeming incompatibility, these two famously misanthropic Jewish men have repeatedly been coupled together by critics, who have alternately read in Dylan’s work an affinity for German Expressionism or a suitability to Adorno’s aesthetic theory. This chapter scrutinizes the space between Dylan and Adorno, between two contesting ideas of what it truly means to make popular art, or what authentic mass culture entails. It thereby also restates the recurring question in Dylan’s chorus to “Like a Rolling Stone”: “how does it feel?” How, indeed, do the complex, visceral, and undeniably compelling aesthetic experiences of contemporary popular music like Dylan’s transpire, and by which processes are these aesthetic experiences elevated to the level of political protest and social commentary, as several critics have argued? As will be shown, several unaddressed complications intervene when attempting to combine contemporary popular music with critical theory. Firstly, and as Brian Lloyd and Keith Nainby have pointed out, contemporary popular music is, fundamentally, a genre which operates not merely in the literary or musical dimension, but at the intersection of both (Lloyd 2014; Nainby 2019). A fact which is reaffirmed in the field of word-and-­ music studies and, hence, throughout the chapters of this volume. Going forward, looking at Tony Fluxman and Lawrence Wilde’s respective arguments for reading Dylan through Adorno, it will become evident that contemporary popular music is more than capable of narrativizing or poeticizing social concerns (Fluxman 1991; Wilde 2009). As Yke Schotanus points out elsewhere in this volume, Dylan’s recent Nobel Prize award “can be seen as a prime indicator of his official inclusion into the realm of ‘high culture’” (Schotanus 2021, 40). Nonetheless, it is surely uncontroversial to suggest that the aesthetic powers of contemporary popular

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music exceed mere literary functions. It therefore follows that in the study of Dylan’s songs, a grave disservice is done when treating their music as merely ornamental or transforming their words into honorary poems. Secondly, and as Dylan’s earlier remark about idolizing Elvis suggests, contemporary popular music is, in a very meaningful sense, popular. A cursory survey of Dylan’s lyrics reveals that he has never shied away from invoking figures of high artistic culture such as Bertolt Brecht, F.  Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, or Arthur Rimbaud. However, the mostly literary nature of these references reveals that Dylan’s particular combination of literary language and musical accompaniment has almost always entirely affiliated itself with Americana traditions and rock and roll elements, with country, folk, jazz, and gospel, rather than the high culture genre that might be referred to as artsong. Crucially, Dylan’s work has always been mostly distributed through the material networks of popular music: the likes of Another Side of Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited, or Blonde on Blonde were recorded and nourished by capital from recording companies, not foundation grants; performed live at festival venues, not concert halls; and popularized through television, radio, and other mass media networks. Finally, it is generally accepted that Bob Dylan is profoundly a product of his generation. Historical readings of Dylan abound that frame his songs as explicit responses to social developments within the era. To extend this logic further, I suggest that it would be remiss to ignore the fact that contemporary popular music is almost inextricably tied to the techno-historical phenomenon of the record, and, as John Andrew Fisher has argued, also to the ontological implications the record as a medium has for our understanding of music. Of course, on one level, the record is capitalist ideology made material—the commoditization of music into, as the record industry parlance would have it, commercial units to be shifted. However, Fisher also points out that the rock record, rather than being a mere transcript of the system of harmonic relations within a song, is instead “an extended sound event” (1998, 111). In doing so, it takes the unique audio characteristics of the medium and turns it into a crucial part of the aesthetic object’s formal design. As I will later demonstrate in my reading of “Like a Rolling Stone”, the technological processes of recording can have fascinating implications for our understanding of a song.

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Ways of Reading Dylan in the Academy I will begin by briefly reviewing two examples of how Dylan’s songs are often read in academia as socio-politically themed literature, for instance, Tony Fluxman and Lawrence Wilde’s respective readings of Dylan through Adorno. In “Bob Dylan and the Dialectic of Enlightenment” (1991), for example, Fluxman argues that Dylan’s work was at its best when it functioned as social critique in a manner not unlike Adorno’s own stances. For Fluxman, Adorno and Horkheimer identified an entanglement of consumption and culture as one legacy of the Enlightenment, implying all social relations to be subjected to a “scientific rationalization of the environment” (92). As an example, Fluxman cites the comedic, talkin’ blues Dylan number, “Motorpsycho Nitemare”, which tells the story of a weary traveler’s encounter with a suspicious, gun-bearing farmer. The violent farmer, who serves as antagonist of this ballad, leads Fluxman to identify “Nitemare” as dramatizing “Horkheimer and Adorno’s characterization of the bourgeois estate-holder as one who operates according to the Enlightenment [principles] […] of utility and self-preservation” (95). Unlike Dylan’s earlier efforts, such as “Masters of War”, however, which Fluxman characterizes as “moral outrage” that lacks the ability to “examine the actual social mechanisms that lie behind the power of the warmongers” (94), Fluxman argues that “Nitemare” functions as a more sophisticated form of criticism of capitalist society. By withholding outright moral judgement and instead merely presenting narrative sequences which expose “the underlying basis of the so-called normal and acceptable values of property and order [as] violence and fear”, Dylan engages in what Fluxman suggests is the “kind of criticism which Adorno regards as genuinely critical” (95). Similarly, in “The Cry of Humanity: Dylan’s Expressionist Period”, Wilde joins Fluxman in contending that Dylan’s refusal of “the mantle of troubadour of the radical opposition” did not constitute a rejection of political critique per se (Wilde 2009, 105). As Wilde explains, Adorno’s conception of commitment in art rejected the reduction of artistic expression to the level of rhetoric. Rather, because “prevailing culture is overwhelmingly alienated”, to “protest against it in its own language necessarily misfires” and “merely serves to affirm the capacity of the established world of meaning to neutralize its opposition” (109). To that end, Wilde considers Dylan’s post-electric period as possessed of “a revolutionary aesthetic

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of immense dramatic force” compatible with Adorno’s “severe criteria for an autonomous aesthetics of protest”, precisely in part because of its aversion to explicit moral outrage (105). More specifically, Wilde argues that Dylan’s transformation of his lyrical style to adopt a fragmented, surrealistic style of writing inspired by German expressionism fulfills Adorno’s demand for “true revolutionary art to effect a rupture with existing artistic form” (109). On this basis, then, Wilde concludes that Dylan’s artistic transformation in the mid-Sixties also effected a shift towards a nuanced critical stance of late capitalism that Adorno would approve of, briefly capturing “the autonomous quality which for Adorno constitutes the peak of aesthetic achievement” (133). At this juncture, it is worth pausing to review certain salient features about the way Wilde and Fluxman read Dylan’s work through Adorno’s theory. The emphasis lies on read because in large part this is precisely what they do: they treat the songs predominantly as poetic creations, with the bulk of their critical relevancy existing at the literary level. Fluxman’s treatment of “Motorpsycho Nitemare”, for instance, largely interrogates it as a narrative which allegorizes the tensions of capitalist society. Similarly, in picking apart the complex tapestry of characters in “Desolation Row”, Wilde makes an initial reference to the “simple and pleasant melody”, “beautiful guitar accompaniment”, and “lightness of tone” of the music (2009, 128), but spends the rest of his analysis subsequently focusing on the poetic structures and the Eliot-like use of collage in the lyrics. As Lloyd has argued, when considering contemporary popular music, literary scholars have been prone to “pry lyrics loose from notes and chords so that they can be dissected as poetry” (2014, 58). Similarly, Nainby notes how “Dylan’s body of work has historically been treated by scholars in one of three distinct ways: as poetry […] as the musicological product of a set of specific song traditions […] or as a textualization of his image as a cultural icon” (2019, 70). Naturally, despite protests from more traditionalist writers, the 2016 conferment of the Nobel Prize for Literature has not abrogated the academy’s perception of Dylan as a wordsmith. Suffice it to say that Dylan’s facility with language has often outshone his status as a composer and a recording artist.1 Revisiting Adorno’s quote about protest folk at the beginning of this chapter, it is necessary to further situate those comments within the larger 1  Yke Schotanus takes up this precise point of Dylan’s treatment in the Academy elsewhere in this volume (2021).

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context of his oeuvre. In the instance of contemporary popular music, the always-difficult task of interpreting Adorno’s idiosyncratic writing—that infamous Adornodeutsch—is further complicated by the extent to which he frequently slips between various fields that all intersect with the subject at hand. To pay his dialectic commensurate attention, it is vital to not only topicalize Adorno’s sociology, but also his aesthetics as well as his musicology. In the former regard, Adorno’s stance seems straightforward enough. Alongside Horkheimer, Adorno’s work in the Dialectic of Enlightenment furnished the contemporary popular music discourse with several dominating concepts viz. their notions of a “culture industry” in which culture took on a dull standardized form that replicated the organizational patterns of a post-Fordist society. Accordingly, the culture industry rendered aesthetic composition a secondary and external aspect to the cultural object, relevant only inasmuch as it was ripe for appropriation and commoditization by the mechanisms of late capitalism. Adorno would later return to the notion of the culture industry’s co-opting of artistic form into Fordist standardization when he observed that its inherent processes “carefully shield[ed] itself from the full potential of the techniques contained in its products [...] liv[ing] parasitically from the extra-artistic techniques of the material production of goods, without regard for the obligation to the internal artistic whole implied by its functionality” (1975, 14). Here, it is important to distinguish two closely interrelated but distinct arguments which Adorno employs in his judgement of the culture industry. The first is an indictment of the original capitalist intent of the cultural object: the idea that work which is produced under the sign of consumption is inherently tainted, for “the entire practice of the culture industry transfers the profit motive naked onto cultural forms” (Adorno 1975, 13). Though Adorno concedes that this quality of cultural production has always been present to an extent, he nonetheless argues that prior to late capitalism, this profit motive was kept apart from the “autonomous essence” of the work, which has now been “tendentially eliminated by the culture industry, with or without the conscious will of those in control” (13). In typical fashion, Adorno inverts the focus of the discourse to prioritize that which is made invisible by ideology, that is to say, the material structures and networks that combine to produce the cultural object. As I have pointed out earlier, the entirety of Dylan’s work, as profound and literate as it might be, has nonetheless existed within that “sphere of popular music”—viz. its distribution on commercial radio,

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television, and concert festival circuits—which Adorno so disdains. It is thus highly likely that in Adorno’s view, any ideological merit which one might derive from the contents of the work would be drowned out by its entanglement with the consumption drive. The second argumentative strain in “The Culture Industry”, however, has even more profound implications for this discussion. I have previously considered Wilde’s take that Dylan employed a certain kind of aesthetic shock which aligned him with modernist poetics, viz. his insistent rupture with folk tradition, his adoption of German Expressionist tropes in his lyrics, and his intertextual references to figures of high modernism such as Ezra Pound and T.S.  Eliot. This alignment with Adorno’s notions of committed art is strengthened when considering his proclamation that “the wounds inflicted by disruption represent the seal of authenticity for modernity […] the act of explosion is itself one of the invariants of modernity” (Adorno qtd. in Habermas 1997, 41). Nonetheless, as previously established, to focus on his lyrics to the exclusion of their musical qualities is to misapprehend the fundamental artistry of the contemporary popular song. Tempting though it might be to establish a theoretical consonance between Dylan and Adorno, to do so by handwaving away Adorno’s antipathy towards popular music and reading Dylan’s work as entirely literary would be to transform these fundamentally musical compositions into something that they are not: pure texts. As gifted a manipulator of words as Dylan undoubtedly is, our encounters with his language are largely aural, not visual. They are mediated by recorded sound, not print, and verbalized through the mouth, not scriptualized through typeface. To acknowledge the essential musicality of Dylan, however, is also to expose his work to Adorno’s musicological judgements of popular music. As Wilde admits, “Adorno made it clear that he saw no genuinely radical potential in popular music or jazz” but qualifies that with insisting that Adorno must “not have heard Dylan when he made his judgement” (2009, 120). The second of those assertions is, however, dubious as the quote at the start of this chapter shows: prior to his death, Adorno was at least acquainted with the protest folk movement Dylan figured prominently in. But Adorno’s pronouncements about jazz were not merely predicated on the basis of the genre’s entanglement with capital, but also upon their musical merit. Wilde himself acknowledges that Adorno prized the “revolutionary innovations of Arnold Schoenberg, first in smashing orthodox tonality and then in introducing the twelve-­ tone compositional technique” (2009, 119–120). By comparison, and in

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a characteristic polemic against jazz and the popular music of the time, Adorno made the following statements regarding its standardized structure: The whole structure of popular music is standardized, even where the attempt is made to circumvent standardization. […] Best known is the rule that the chorus consists of thirty two bars and that the range is limited to one octave and one note. […] Most important of all, the harmonic cornerstones of each hit – the beginning and the end of each part – must beat out the standard scheme. This scheme emphasizes the most primitive harmonic facts no matter what has harmonically intervened. […] regardless of what aberrations occur, the hit will lead back to the same familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced. (Adorno 2002, 438)

Though this description caricatures jazz immensely, it is evident even from a basic knowledge of harmony that from a compositional perspective, Dylan’s work does not depart much from this pattern of standardization. Though Dylan in the Sixties was often cited as a major influence of the Beatles, for the most part, his own music did not reflect their experiments with modulation, shifting time signatures, or musique concrète. On this level, at least, it is clear that Adorno would have considered Dylan as no different from the standardized songsmiths of the culture industry in his emphasis of “the most primitive harmonic facts” (Adorno 2002, 438).

Song and Dance Man: Analyzing “Blowing in the Wind” Musicologically To further illustrate this point, two iconic Dylan songs that perhaps best exemplify pre- and post-electric Dylan—“Blowing in the Wind” and “Like a Rolling Stone”—shall suffice. Here, I will model my reading of “Wind” both after the lyrical-poetic strategies that Fluxman and Wilde have adopted to read Dylan’s work thus far, as well as the musicological frame that Adorno himself employs to examine jazz. Lyrically, “Wind” is composed as a series of rhetorical questions that resolve simultaneous to the cadence of the chorus. “How many roads,” Dylan famously begins, “must a man walk down… before you call him a man?” (1962/2021), Marshall observes that unlike the socialist-utopic expressions of the original folk movement (with champions such as Woody Guthrie), which often utilized the plural pronoun ‘we’, Dylan broke tradition with “Wind” by “utilizing

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singular pronouns (I, and particularly you)” (Marshall 2013, 72). Dylan’s employment of this strategy freed him to emplot a larger narrative of oppression and “political loneliness […] by continually playing plurals against singulars” (Ricks qtd. in Marshall 2013, 72). We may thus observe in these linguistic variants a dialectic between large, sweeping forces and singular entities in the world: “man” versus “roads”, a “white dove” versus “seas” and a “mountain” versus the “years” (Dylan 1962/2021, 1, 3, 9). As a poetic strategy, Dylan’s rhetorical juxtaposition of singularities and pluralities allow him to avoid a single concerted conceit throughout the song. Instead, the singer easily moves between metaphor and synecdoche. In the second verse of the song, for example, a couplet occurs where the wide-sweeping capaciousness of Romantic imagery collapses in an instant into a sharply pointed indictment of institutional racism. Dylan first asks “how many years can a mountain exist […] before it’s washed to the sea?” (1962/2021, 9). The exact same refrain of “how many years” immediately recurs in the next line when he asks the same of “people [being] allowed to be free” (1962/2021, 11). On the surface, these two lines appear to imply a certain hopelessness by equivocating the aims of the civil rights movement with the epochal process of geological change. However, upon closer inspection, a faint reference in the preceding line becomes apparent: it is to Jesus’s homily on transformative faith in the Gospels when he says that faith can move a mountain into the sea. As is common in the African American spiritual tradition, the abstract reference to ‘a people’ has the effect of alluding to the Old Testament’s frequent descriptions of Israel’s slavery in Egypt and its exile in Babylon. The presence of this intertextual moment here functions as an invocation of Christian symbology, grounding the aims of the civil rights movement in the spiritual imperatives of the Bible. On a lyrical level, two literary traditions which the song draws from are thus noticeably the language and lexicon of the King James Bible as well as the nature imagery of Romantic poetry. The deliberate choice to mimic the images of Romantic poetry, however, was itself a political statement that acted as an indictment of industrial capitalism. As Marshall argues, Romanticism “looked to folk culture for an example of a more organic humanity that existed before the encroachment of dark satanic mills” (2013, 63). Our understanding of the musical composition of “Wind”, therefore, has to be framed by this deliberate invoking of tradition, which emerges out of a desire to conceptualize a historio-temporal space outside of what had already been annexed by capitalism. Examining the seemingly primitive construction of “Wind”, it

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is noticeable that a single major key (D) is present without modulation or dissonance throughout the song, which is played in common time (4/4). As is common for acoustic guitar playing in the folk tradition, the song appears to be played with a capo that transposes the chord shapes up several frets. Instrumentally, the song remains sparse throughout, with only Dylan’s voice, an acoustic guitar, and brief bursts of harmonica marking the end of a section. On the guitar, the chordal structure begins at the root (D major) and only briefly ascends to the fourth (G major), or the sub-dominant, for four beats every second bar before descending quickly back to the familiarity of the root. The sixteenth bar finishes as expected on the dominant (fifth, or A major) following the sub-dominant. Melodically, Dylan builds the verse around an old spiritual sung by African American soldiers during the American Civil War, “No More Auction Block”, which Radosta and Nainby view as an example of Dylan “creating a text from a collage of culturally contextual sources” (2019, 16). The particular problems of attribution, appropriation, and authorship involved with this act are perhaps too complex to address within the confines of this chapter, but it is worth noting that Dylan’s own original contribution to the melody comes in the form of the chorus, which furnishes the song its title. The chorus cycles through all the preceding chords and introduces the relative minor (B minor) as a slight detour, with the harmonica taking over from the voice at echoing the main melody, before the chordal structure quickly returns to the root in the next bar. Here, we might note the way in which the musical return to the tonic (D) emphasizes the singer’s ambiguous reply to the questions posed in the verses: that the “answer […] is blowing in the wind” (1962/2021, 7–8), so that a sense of cadence is achieved both on a lyrical as well as instrumental level. Foregrounding these musical aspects thus shows that a stark difference exists between Dylan’s songwriting and the sort of complex modernist compositions which Adorno favors. This point might seem self-evident enough as to be mockingly absurd, but it is worth stating in order to fully emphasize the formal and sociolectal gulf between the largely European tradition of fine art Adorno championed and the American tradition of folk and pop music that Dylan operated in. Dylan’s place in counterculture has ensured his adoption into the Academy, but we do neither Dylan nor Adorno full justice when we disregard the complex relationship between their respective traditions in order to obtain a narrow application of Adorno’s theoretical work. One way of explaining this disjunction might be to localize the universal claims about music that Adorno makes,

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and to contextualize Dylan’s work, as Nainby has suggested, as the “musicological product of a set of specific song traditions” (2019,  70), thus making Dylan an artist in unique dialogue with Americana as an artistic lineage independent of Europe. Be that as it may, it is clear from Adorno’s comments that he regarded the American tradition of music as an impaired one, and his musicological remarks on jazz certainly demonstrated a willingness to read American contemporary popular music as commensurable with, if inferior, to European classical music.

Against the Score: Mediatizing Electric Dylan If neither literary nor musicological approaches suffice, however, how can Dylan’s enduring appeal be explained in order to understand the unquestionable influence he has exerted over popular culture? I propose to adopt the paradigm shift that John Andrew Fisher has called for, in understanding contemporary popular music as a unique genre of cultural production almost overwhelmingly determined by the tremendous technological shifts in the media ecology of the twentieth century. Fisher identifies within conventional music theory “three interconnected concepts: work, score, and performance”, with the musical score functioning as a script or a program for the universal musical work, which is actualized by instances of performance. As Fisher explains, conventional musical notation score functions mostly as a transcript of harmonic relations within the musical work, and insofar as “nuanced variations of performances of scores within norms of performance practice” occur, such variations exist as part of the accepted ontological multiplicity of the musical work, and is thus, in fact, an “essential feature of standard notation” (1998, 118). In this reckoning, one might consider the musical work as the abstract mental ideal that triangulates the written (visual) representation of the score and the instantiated (acoustic) event of performance. This conceptual trinity, however, is disrupted in the twentieth century by the widespread adoption of recording technology, and indeed, the normalization of records as the main site of encounter with music. Here, the turn from score to record through the frame of media theory should be briefly revisited. As Marshall McLuhan has observed, Western culture has been “shaped for some three thousand years by the introduction of the phonetic alephbet,2 a medium that 2  This deliberate misspelling was a pun on McLuhan’s part referring to the Semitic origins of our modern alphabet.

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depends solely on the eye for comprehension” (1967, 44). This emphasis on visuality was exacerbated by the invention of print, which “confirmed and extended the new visual stress” (50). These various technologies of writing thus “forced the magic world of the ear to yield to the neutral world of the eye” (45), shifting us from the “boundless, directionless, horizonless” primordial soup of “acoustic space” into the standardized order of civilization (48). This dynamic plays out in the device of the score, which extends the authority of writing technology to music, transforms the acoustic and the aural into the visual, and subjugates the ear to the eye. As Fisher explains, in the aftermath of rock, contemporary popular recordings call the ontological primacy of the score into question by emphasizing “the particular extended sound event” of the record, and several features that are impossible to represent in conventional notation. They encompass the particular attack of a note by a musician in any given passage, the mixing of the different instruments in question, any particular use of amplifier effects to produce an idiosyncratic sound, “the exact speed of the music, the timbre”, and so on (Fisher 1998, 111). It is this notion of the “particular extended sound event” that Fisher advances as the monadic unit of rock and which may also explain its haecceity in popular terms. Crucially, Fisher argues that what makes rock significant as an event in the development of recorded music is in the way it introduces an unabashedly acousmatic paradigm which blatantly disrupts the relationship of the extended sound event with reality. Fisher distinguishes between veridic and “constructive” recordings, with veridic recordings essentially guided by an ideology of fidelity towards documenting an “independently existing live performance” that are “meant to sound as much as the live extended musical event would sound […] the product of a neutral registration process” (115). In contrast, “constructive” recordings (a term of Fisher’s coining) undermine the expectation of truth-to-performance through a variety of recording strategies pioneered in the mid-1960s, viz. “processes such as feedback distortion, wah-wah, reverb, echo, aliasing, flanging, chorus”, and so on (115). The end result is that with constructive recordings, there no longer exists any objective reality or definitive performance to which the recording is meant to refer to faithfully; rather, as Fisher argues, “the recording is the primary musical work brought into existence when the record is created” (116, original emphasis). This abolishing of recording’s fealty to referential reality can be seen as an example of McLuhan’s famous proclamation that the electronic media revolution

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has brought about a “brand-new world of allatonceness. ‘Time’ has ceased, ‘space’ has vanished […] we are back in acoustic space” (McLuhan et al. 1967, 63). While this quote meant to address the disruption of pre-­ existing societal orders built upon Enlightenment-era of liberal human subjects through the inception of a “global village” (63), it might also easily take as its metonymic figure the music record, for in that technology, we see the return to aurality, the rejection of the printed score as facilitated by electronic media, and the dislocation of time and space through the godlike power to restage the exact same musical event ad infinitum. How can these considerations of a changing media ecology, and the ontological implications of the record for music, however, further an understanding of Bob Dylan’s music as it relates to Adorno’s critical theory? I have discussed the distinction between veridic and non-veridic recordings thus far. At first listen, Dylan’s music seems to exhibit little of the sonic experimentation that his contemporaries such as The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Rolling Stones, or Pink Floyd engaged in during the Sixties. In fact, among the folk-revival scene, a certain sense of authenticity of performance was a guiding value, and this is especially noticeable in the sparse instrumentation, lack of overdubs, and single-take recordings that characterized Dylan’s early work. Even on the records which comprise his “Electric Trilogy” (Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde), Dylan adhered to what appears to be an essentially veridic ideology, employing the recording practice of recording full takes with his band performed live, without any overdubs or ‘cheating’. Reflecting in the Eighties on his recording experiences during the Sixties in an interview conducted by Bono of U2 for the Irish music paper Hot Press, Dylan said: I just take a song into the studio and try to rehearse it, and then record it, and then do it […] You know the studios in the old days were all much better, and the equipment so much better, there’s no question about it in my mind. You just walked into a studio, they were just big rooms, you just sang, you know, you just made records; and they sounded like the way they sounded there. (McGoran 2021)

The existence of the series of recordings known as The Bootleg Series testify to that: released in 1991 as a box set, The Bootleg Series archives demos, soundboard recordings, and studio outtakes from throughout Dylan’s

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career, beginning with his debut Bob Dylan and ending with the 1989 Daniel Lanois-produced Oh Mercy. Yet the very existence of The Bootleg Series clues us in to a rather peculiar feature of Dylan’s recording philosophy during this era, one that has persisted in some form even today. On the second volume of the Bootleg Series, as Dylan’s electric turn begins to occur proper and a fuller band sound enters, one begins to hear the tentative, alternate takes of familiar songs such as “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, “Like a Rolling Stone”, and “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry”. Crucially, these recordings reveal the arrangements to be essentially collaborative, improvisational processes. The version of “Like a Rolling Stone” present here, as Rolling Stone magazine notes, is Dylan’s first introduction of the song to his band, without any additional sheet music or instruction. Dated 15 June 1965 it is noticeably slower and starker, without any of the accompaniments, flourishes, or vitriolic charge that characterizes the final release. As documented by Greil Marcus, the various versions of “Like a Rolling Stone” recorded on this day run the gamut. On the first take, the “drumming is too strong, too loud, and the beat is too crude” as the band seem to lose focus and drift away (Marcus 2005, 214). Tellingly, at this juncture, Dylan overrides producer Tom Wilson’s injunction to “hold tape” (to pause the recording), saying, “‘Even if we screw it up […] we keep going’” (215). Subsequent takes continue this trend of delicately poised confusion: on some the piano slips, on others, the band run aground—towards the end, Dylan’s vocal performance increasingly sounds “tired […] forced, each word emptying itself of emotion as it passes” (221). Remarkably, the song’s signature organ part came close to never existing: initially, Al Kooper had been invited only to watch the sessions; desperate to play for Dylan, however, Kooper determinedly inserted himself into the proceedings, despite knowing “so little about the organ that he didn’t even know how to turn it on” (Greene 2021). Marcus observes that out of the fifteen attempts at recording a full take of “Like a Rolling Stone” that day, the version which was eventually released was the only take “where the song was found” (2005, 215). This observation reinforces the ephemeral nature of the recording as he notes that for the most part, the session was largely characterized by the band being “so far from the song and from each other it’s easy enough to imagine Bob Dylan giving up on the song […] circling around the song like hunters surrounding an animal that has escaped them a dozen times, they [eventually] caught it” (225). Echoing this sentiment, producer Bob Johnston observed that Dylan’s capricious

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moods in the studio meant that he was often liable to completely discard entire songs on a whim: “Dylan would start a song – they’d be a third of the way through, and someone says, Waal, I didn’t git that. […] Dylan would forget about that song and you’d never hear it again” (Marcus 2005, 224). Marcus thus concludes that despite the artistic merit of the recording and its arresting qualities of “craft, inspiration, will, and intent”, it was also, at bottom, “an accident” (224). To point out the chaotic, improvisational origins of “Like a Rolling Stone” does not undercut its strength as an artistic achievement: one can point to the traditions of automatic writing and stream-of-consciousness poetry that resemble these circumstances. What is significant here is that the frictious, ephemeral nature of its recording was entirely of Dylan’s design, and that his much-vaunted electric turn, then, was as much a transformation of his entire praxis as it was of his sound and his lyrical style. These circumstances have telling implications for its musical ontology. Here, I recall Dylan’s professed desire to model himself after Elvis. Nainby notes that Dylan has “consistently marked himself as a live performer first and a songwriter second” and that his “studio performances parallel this series of avowals, reflecting his interest in songs as opportunities for performance rather than as textual objects designed for permanence” (2019, 81). The distinction between performance and permanence that Nainby makes is a profound one, but one that I argue would benefit from a more nuanced articulation. With regard to recording, I submit that it is not so much per se that Dylan favors performance over permanence as much as he is invested in the paradoxical capture of the ephemeral and fleeting. This is a trait we might notice in another facet on Theme Time Radio Hour, the short-lived satellite radio Dylan hosted from 2006 to 2009 that catalogued and broadcast rare, marginalized, and otherwise forgotten Americana tunes. As Peggy Phelan has argued, performance’s relationship with reproduction is a fraught one, and performance’s essential presence is diminished by any efforts to “be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations […]. To the degree that performance attempts to enter the economy of reproduction it betrays and lessens the promise of its own ontology” (1996, 146). Yet, the paradox and promise of performance’s ontology is precisely what Dylan appeared to be interested in exploring through his recording methods on the “Electric Trilogy” albums in this era, and his live performance habits thereafter. Within the conceptual trinity of work-score-performance

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that Fisher has demarcated, both work and score were close to non-­ existent when it came to recording “Like a Rolling Stone”: “Imagine this”, Kooper wrote of improvising his iconic organ part, “[t]here is no music to read […] I’m not familiar with the instrument to begin with. But the tape is rolling, and that is Bob-fucking-Dylan over there singing, so this had better be me sitting here playing something” (Kooper qtd. in Greene 2021). Yet the coalesced, constructed musical work which Fisher suggests emerges out of a recording’s “extended sound event” also does not necessarily occur with “Like a Rolling Stone”. Dylan’s infamous habit of continuously changing the arrangements and the lyrics of his songs throughout live performances has been well-documented, so that one never expects to hear the familiar versions of songs from the records at a Dylan gig.3 These effects perhaps describe the shine of “Like a Rolling Stone” to be the glimmer of a certain ontological fragility: how close it came to never existing, how little it has been reproduced since, and how scarce and beautiful for that reason. And perhaps there is not the definitive version of “Like a Rolling Stone”, but a “Like a Rolling Stone” with an indefinite article. As Grell points out, the version from Highway 61 Revisited is an essentially unadulterated full take that was only achieved once during the recording process. To the extent that the extended sound event of “Like a Rolling Stone” acts as a document, it is an artefact of a singular present moment and thus has the ontological status not of canon, but of myth. Weighed existentially, it has the lightness of absurdity, not the gravity of eternal recurrence. Regarded as an object, it asks not for the reverence accorded a sacrament, but the sentiment associated with a trinket. To listen to the Highway 61 version of “Rolling Stone” today is to almost hear several different temporalities in counterpoint. There is the weight of historical association it has accumulated since its release, with that opening big bang of a “snare shot that sounded like somebody kicked open the door to your mind”, as Bruce Springsteen phrased it during his induction speech for Dylan to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (Springsteen 1988). Yet, there is also the temporality of the actual performance. Listening in real time, we hear the attentiveness with which the band follows drummer Bobby Gregg as he builds up to little swells and humps at the end of each verse’s diatonic ascension. We hear the slight groove created by Kooper’s hesitant electric organ 3  In 2011, I attended a Dylan concert in Singapore which utterly transfigured “Stone” into a slow-dancing, pedal-steel ballad Willie Nelson might have been proud of.

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lagging behind the piano and the guitar as he listens out for the chord changes. We hear, too, Gregg’s dutiful obedience, in turn, to Dylan’s own command of the dynamics through his vocal attack; the fountain-like bursts in the chorus, the gleeful schadenfreude of the lyrics: “How does it FEEEEL?” At the same time, there is a diegetic temporality to the lyrics themselves, too: the song begins with an analepsis as it recounts the arrogant heyday of Miss Lonely in her prime before jumping forward in time to sneer at her current diminished circumstances. It furthermore exhibits a surrealistic conjuring of a specific bohemian scene that is given the quality of a fairytale through its vague opening: “[o]nce upon a time […]”. But the warning tones of the narrative strike a register closer to parable, with Miss Lonely’s disdain for the underprivileged and the hubris of her excessive indulgence contrasted with her eventual downfall. Hence, the peripeteia of the narrative evoked in the pre-chorus’s reversal of the earlier diatonic climb in the verse: while Miss Lonely’s glory days are consistently marked by an ascending progression of C-Dm7-Em-F-G, the pre-chorus inverts this to a descending one of F-Em-Dm7-C. This is clear evidence of Dylan’s evolved musical savvy, with a stronger grasp of how to extend the diegetic possibilities of a chord progression. Beyond that, the distinction between “Stone” and the moralistic overtures of a song like “Wind” lies more fully in its deceptive ethical ambiguity. Upon closer analysis, it becomes evident that the Miss Lonely character is introduced in her act of charity: “threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?”. On the syntagmatic level, this act of charity can be viewed as an exercise of social conscience that is contrasted with Miss Lonely’s former privileged life. On the paradigmatic, the clustered internal rhymes of “fine”, “dime”, and “prime” conversely equivocate the act of charity with the status of privilege, ascribing a certain patronizing superiority to both. Furthermore, as the song develops, Miss Lonely’s former arrogance is associated with a certain moral simplicity, as evidenced by her former refusal to “compromise/with the mystery tramp”. To the extent that “Like a Rolling Stone” indulges in parable, then, it is more accurately a warning against the follies of self-righteousness, of a rigid refusal to concede moral ground, and of seeing the world in black and white. This particular verse thus closes with a tense allusion to the sketchy necessity of transaction and to the capitalist specter of selling out: “do you want to make a deal?” “Like a Rolling Stone” has been associated with several figures: Rolling Stone magazine notes that Miss Lonely has been fingered to be “everyone

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from Edie Sedgwick to Marianne Faithfull or even Joan Baez” (Greene 2021). Yet, the mentioned aspects of transactionality, moral simplicity, the naivete of a social conscience, and the glamorous self-righteousness of a certain bohemian crowd enable another reading. Laid out this way, one cannot help but wonder if these elements point towards Miss Lonely possibly being Dylan himself during his East Village protest folk days. Dylan would later acknowledge after his motorcycle accident that “when I used words like ‘he’ and ‘it’ and ‘they,’ and talking about other people, I was really talking about nobody but me” (Heylin 2009, 241). While the electric sound of the song was not Dylan’s first experiment with plugging into an amplifier, the history of its live performances makes it hard not to hear “Stone” as, on some level, at least, somewhat of a farewell to the folk movement. This is perhaps best exemplified in Dylan’s famous exhortation to his band to “play it fuckin’ loud” as a rejoinder to being loudly named “Judas” by an audience member at a Manchester gig in 1966 (Fleming 2016). The complex temporalities involved with the experience of “Like a Rolling Stone” are thus compounded by Dylan’s rejection of the folk politics of nostalgia and protest. In citing Adorno’s observation that modernism is “zeal directed against tradition […] a devouring maelstrom […] myth turned against itself (Adorno qtd. in Habermas 41), Habermas might not have been thinking of Dylan precisely, but his own conclusion is that modernism “expresses precisely the yearning for a lasting and immaculate present” (40). Taken literally and applied to Dylan, this suggests a new connotation when considering his peculiar recording praxis on Highway 61 Revisited. Whether deliberately or not, by engineering—and subsequently preserving—these ontologically fragile compositions, Dylan delicately suspends the music indefinitely in the instant of rupture from tradition. This suspension of time is heightened in the example of “Like a Rolling Stone”, which combines stream-of-consciousness techniques, non-linear narration, and diegetic composition to affect the multi-sensory evocation of bewilderment and disorientation that Miss Lonely experiences. In this sense, the effect of aesthetic surprise that Adorno calls for in true art is achieved, but it is an effect that can only be truly and profoundly appreciated when the critic breaks away from the traditional paradigms of literary interpretation and musical perception and embraces new ways of artistic feeling that new media call for.

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Conclusion On this level, I suggest that Adorno—a critic so otherwise beholden to modernism—remained in the thrall of the nineteenth century. The temptation is to conclude that only technological paradigms divide Adorno and Dylan, and relegate their aesthetic differences to this mediatic divide. Yet, the problem of the material and the practical persists: Adorno’s insistence on the culture industry’s corrupting influence only deepened towards the end of his life, and it is unlikely that Dylan’s continued entanglement with the industries of late capitalism would have ever passed muster for Adorno. Adorno’s critique of protest folk as “taking the horrendous and making it consumable” (Prill and Schneider 2003) itself echoes his famous declaration that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (1982, 34). In both, Adorno asserts that when faced with the stark horror of history, to attempt a sublimation of that horror back into the positive through art is to betray both history as well as art. Yet this relentlessly strict criteria for true art also has the effect of excluding the very people that Marxism aims to liberate. “Culture”, he writes, “in the true sense, did not simply accommodate itself to human beings; but it always simultaneously raised a protest against the petrified relations under which they lived, thereby honouring them” (1975, 13, emphasis added). In the true sense? Taken to elitist extremes, Adorno’s theory might be accused of turning human beings into faceless masses, subjects only when interpellated by ideology, stripped not only of the agency for political action, but also of the consciousness to determine for themselves the cultural expression which best resonates with their circumstances. In another deeply revealing 1968 interview, Adorno concedes that he considers “individual action […] delimited by an emphasis on societal totality”, but when challenged by the interviewer on how society might be reformed without individuals, Adorno replies, “this is asking too much of me” (Richter and Adorno 2002, 16). As his response to the student protests which swept Germany towards the end of his life showed, Adorno was also deeply skeptical of political projects which sought to transpose ideals from the realm of the theoretical into the practical. Despite having participated in demonstrations against the German Emergency Acts (Notstandsgesetze) of 1968, he would go on to characterize the student protests that year as “essentially traced back to despair, because people sense how little power they actually have to change society” (17). For Adorno, who always viewed theory and art as two sides of the same coin, theory was at its best when it asserted “the strength of its own objectivity than if it had subjected itself to praxis

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from the start” (15). Against the activistic trends of the Sixties, Adorno argued that “one should hold on to theory, precisely under the general coercion toward praxis […] [philosophy] effects changes precisely by remaining theory” (19). Set up in such firm opposition against the younger generation, Adorno’s stance inevitably brought him their ire. At a lecture at the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt in April 1969, three female student activists disrupted the proceedings by baring their breasts and sprinkling rose petals over Adorno’s head, in an incident that would be known as Busenaktion. That same month, across the Atlantic, on the back of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, and multiple riots in several American cities, Dylan would close the first decade of his career by retreating instead into apolitical country ballads with Nashville Skyline. In the summer, exhausted by the upheaval of the spring, Adorno left Germany for Switzerland, where he subsequently died in August of a heart attack. Three weeks later, barely 700 miles away, Dylan would arrive in Europe at the Isle of Wight Festival to croon country versions of his older songs— including “Like a Rolling Stone”—in idyllic Tennyson country. He wore a cream suit and parted his hair neatly down the middle. Almost, but not quite, a perfectly pleasant pop star.

Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. 1975. Culture industry reconsidered. Trans. Anson G. Rabinbach. New German Critique: 12–19. https://doi.org/10.2307/487650. ———. 1982. Prisms. Cambridge: MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.7551/ mitpress/5570.001.0001. ———. 2002. Essays on music: Theodor W. Adorno, ed. Richard D. Leppert. Trans. Susan H. Gillespie. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bradley, Ed. 2004. Bob Dylan gives rare interview. CBS News, December 5. Dylan, Bob. 1962/2021. Blowin’ in the wind. The official Bob Dylan site. https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/blowin-­wind. Accessed 29 Mar 2021. ———. 1965/2021. Like a rolling stone. The official Bob Dylan site. https:// www.bobdylan.com/songs/rolling-­stone. Accessed 29 Mar 2021. Fisher, John Andrew. 1998. Rock n’ recording: The ontological complexity of rock music. In Musical worlds: New directions in the philosophy of music, ed. Philip Alperson. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Fleming, Colin. 2016. Remembering Bob Dylan’s infamous “Judas” show. Rolling Stone, May 17. Fluxman, Tony. 1991. Bob Dylan and the dialectic of enlightenment: Critical lyricist in the age of high capitalism. In Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 77: 91–111.

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Greene, Andy. 2021. Bob Dylan recorded “Like a Rolling Stone”: Complete history – Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-­ news/bob-­dylan-­recorded-­like-­a-­rolling-­stone-­50-­years-­ago-­t oday-­6 5422/. Accessed 30 Jan 2021. Habermas, Jurgen. 1997. Modernity: An unfinished project. In Habermas and the unfinished project of modernity: Critical essays on the philosophical discourse of modernity, ed. Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Heylin, Clinton. 2009. Revolution in the air: The songs of Bob Dylan 1957–1973. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. Lloyd, Brian. 2014. The form is the message: Bob Dylan and the 1960s. Rock Music Studies 1. Routledge: 58–76. https://doi.org/10.1080/19401159. 2013.876756. Marcus, Greil. 2005. Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the crossroads. New York: Public Affairs. Marshall, Lee. 2013. Bob Dylan: The never ending star. Cambridge: Polity. McGoran, Peter. ‘From the Archives: When Bono Met Bob’. Hot Press. https:// www.hotpress.com/music/from-­the-­archives-­when-­bono-­met-­bob-­18949210. Accessed 14 Sept 2021. McLuhan, Marshall, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel. 1967. The medium is the massage: An inventory of effects. London: Penguin. Nainby, Keith. 2019. Not just literature: Exploring the performative dimensions of Bob Dylan’s work. In Polyvocal Bob Dylan: Music, performance, literature, ed. Nduka Otiono and Josh Toth, 67–83. Cham: Palgrave. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-­17042-­4_4. Nainby, Keith, and John M. Radosta. 2019. Bob Dylan in performance: Song, stage, and screen. Lanham: Lexington Books. Phelan, Peggy. 1996. Unmarked: The Politics of performance. London: Routledge. Prill, Meinhard, and Kurt Schneider. 2003. Adorno. Documentary. Südwestrundfunk (SWR). Richter, Gerhard, and Theodor W. Adorno. 2002. Who’s afraid of the ivory tower? A conversation with Theodor W.  Adorno. Monatshefte 94. University of Wisconsin Press: 10–23. Schotanus, Yke P. 2021. Experiencing Dylan: The effect of formal structure and performance on the popularity and interpretation of two Dylan songs. In Words, music, and the popular. Global perspectives on intermedial relations, ed. Thomas Gurke and Susan Winnett. Cham: Palgrave. Springsteen, Bruce. 1988. Bob Dylan. Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. https://youtu. be/SRu66l3QI_U. Accessed 29 Mar 2021. Wilde, Lawrence. 2009. The cry of humanity: Dylan’s expressionist period. In The political art of Bob Dylan, ed. David Boucher. Exeter: Imprint Academic.

CHAPTER 5

Which Side Is This Ex-Beatle on? A Reassessment of the 1970s Rock Press’ Framing, Interpretation, and Consideration of Paul McCartney and Wings Allison Bumsted

Band on the Run was, in its rather vapid way, a masterful album. (Lester Bangs, The New Paper, 1975)

Wings did not fare well in the 1970s rock press and, as this chapter will convey, they were often dismissed as a ‘pop band’ in contrast to being a ‘rock band’. Rock critic Stephen Holden referred to their album Venus and Mars (1975) as “whimsical romantic entertainment concocted on the premise that a lot of good pop music carries no literary or mythical portent whatever. But within its frivolous schema, McCartney systematically explored the textural dimensions of conventional pop music sounds” (Holden 1976). This exemplary evaluation of Wings would have been no

A. Bumsted (*) Liverpool Hope University, Liverpool, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Gurke, S. Winnett (eds.), Words, Music, and the Popular, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85543-7_5

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surprise to any reader in the 1970s, as the majority of reviews of their previous three albums were similar to Holden’s. Intriguingly, four decades later, upon the re-release of the film Rockshow (1980/2013) and Wings Over America (1976/2013), author Glen Boyd claimed, “Wings prove themselves more than up to the task of functioning as a quite formidable, muscular sounding rock band” (2013). In 2014, with the re-release of Venus and Mars (1975) and At the Speed of Sound (1976), PopDose’s Rob Ross even used the term “powerhouse” to describe their single, “Junior’s Farm”, while highly recommending the re-releases (2014). Thus, there has been an inconsistency of opinion from the 1970s to the present regarding the reception of Wings. Moreover, there is an open acknowledgment that their music was originally dismissed, as the re-­ releases of the Wings catalog throughout the 2010s have elicited very different responses. The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis noted this in his 2018 review of McCartney’s Liverpool concert: Beatles hits, particularly those rooted in McCartney’s home city, get a predictably loving response – but there’s power in overlooked Wings material, too […]. There’s also rather more from the oeuvre of Wings than you might expect, unless you’ve been keeping a close eye on McCartney’s quietly insistent efforts to have their work reappraised in recent years. Efforts that have extended to releasing vast editions of Wild Life and Red Rose Speedway, albums critics greeted with mortification on release. (2018)

But these contemporary reviews of Wings do not explain why many rock critics collectively assessed them so negatively from the start. Through a textual analysis of the original reviews from 1972–1979 of both Wings and Paul McCartney and Wings, this research will foster an understanding of the 1970s rock press and what driving factors led to the band being reviewed, framed, and interpreted as they were. In order to do so, I will examine specific reviews that came from the rock and mainstream press, such as Rolling Stone, Creem, the New York Times, and the Washington Post (other reviews ranging from 1973–1979 listed within the bibliography have been considered to further each argument). However, I will consider Lester Bangs’ review of the 1976 Detroit concert from the Wings Over America-tour at length in order to frame a discussion of the observed paradigms within the reviews beginning from 1972. Surprisingly little scholarship exists on this topic: while some historical texts addressing Wings exist, they are mainly written from a factual

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perspective (see Jasper 1977; Pascall 1977; McGee 2003). Other publications consider their music and mention the press’ distaste of the band, but these reflections usually take place within a larger biographical contextualization of McCartney (see Sounes 2011; Norman 2016). Although valuable, they tend to overlook discursive and textual approaches to the subject. This lack of academic exploration is partially due to the belittling of popular culture and music in not only historical fields, but also musicology over the years (see Middleton 1990; Shuker 2008). Thus, in analyzing discourses, such as the reviews of Wings’ music and understanding of the music press’ reaction of the time, this chapter fills a clear gap in prior scholarship and more generally encourages a further look at how we discuss popular music. It will be necessary to gain an understanding of the press’ perspective, rhetoric, and evaluation criteria in order to identify how and why they assessed the band, or rather McCartney, as they did. These reviews were elicited to consider particular Wings’ records or concerts, but they are more telling of their institutionalization of a certain rock ideology, that is “the arguments about what records mean, what rock is for” (Frith 1979, 165). For as Kembrew McLeod argues, “writing rock criticism is an ideological act; the evaluative frameworks that guide the judgments of rock critics connect to belief systems shared by the community of which the critics are a part” (McLeod 2002, 94, emphasis added). These “belief systems” are a vague set of ideals which encompass concepts such as authenticity, consistency, otherness, and meaning within the rock genre and thereby loosely form ‘rock aesthetics’. These aesthetics, in turn, are often evoked when discussing the legacy of the popular music press—specifically the rock press—as they normatively establish such principles through their writings (see Frith 1979; Middleton  1990; Regev 1994; Shuker 1994, 2008; Keightley 2001; McLeod 2002; Lindberg et al. 2005; Brennan 2017). Although they are explored in the history of rock journalism—with the impact of rockism on the perception of women having been considered and questioned by multiple scholars since the early 2000s (see Whiteley 2000; Coates 2003)—very few case studies have expounded on the possible impact of these aesthetics on a group such as Wings. As this chapter will further convey, these aesthetics inform a larger rock ideology as a constitutive persuasive element within the popular and therefore directly affect how artists and bands are perceived, reviewed, and labeled. Finally, this analysis will also illuminate complex and embedded narratives, such as the break-up of the Beatles and a press-induced

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Lennon-­ McCartney rivalry which led to furthering the perception of McCartney as a ‘pop’ musician. Conversely, this influences his and Wings’ failure to meet the rock criteria of the press from the outset. As a consequence, their music is classified as ‘Muzak’ which lacks a revolutionary rhetoric and, hence, any deep cultural significance. Additionally, the press do not consider Wings to be a democratic band, but rather to be McCartney’s project with interchangeable band members. Thus, reassessing these reviews will serve the double purpose of mining the paradox of why Wings’ records were originally dismissed but are currently being reappraised.

I In the 1960s, the popular music press began to flourish with the proof of audience through teen fan magazines and, following suit, came the bi-­ weeklies and monthlies such as Crawdaddy!, Rolling Stone, and Creem. The 1960s and 1970s rock critic also emerged and developed along with folk music’s political connotations and its revolutionary rhetoric of counterculture, which in turn became embedded within the rock genre. Additionally, rock as ‘art’-rhetoric materialized by the late 1960s and began an inclination to sequester the two categories of rock and pop within the popular music press. Now rock became ‘meaningful and authentic’ while pop was deemed ‘meaningless and inauthentic’, thus, “with the expansion of rock magazines and critics in the 1970s, the only movement between the rock and pop spheres will typically be one-way. From the viewpoint of rock, that direction is downward” (Keightley 2001, 128). Or, as Roy Shuker argues: Part of the argument for 1960s rock’s superiority over pop and earlier art forms of popular music rested on the claim that its major songwriters were poets. Richard Goldstein’s The Poetry of Rock (1969) and similar anthologies helped to popularize this view, which emphasized a particular form of rock lyrics. This approach validated ‘rock’ in terms of established ‘art’ forms, elevating the role of the songwriter to that of an auteur figure with the ability to work is a recognizable high cultural mode […]. An extension of this position is the relegation of mainstream commercial pop lyrics to banality and worthlessness. (2008, 103)

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Likewise, Wings entered the popular music world at an interesting time: the counterculture was fading, the Vietnam War was nearing an end, and the Beatles had been broken up for two years. The narrative of how the Beatles split up is a conversation that still includes myth and blame, historically on McCartney or Yoko Ono, and more recently upon  John Lennon and multiple other factors which prove the discussion has complexities beyond a single individual. However, McCartney specifically “was vilified by the group’s fans and the press for his perceived role in the break­up” (Hunt 2005, 14). Robert Rodriguez furthers this by arguing that McCartney was “universally derided by critics and fans alike as the guy that broke up the Beatles” (Rodriguez 2013, ii). Erin Weber highlights that major players in the rock press, such as the founder of the Rolling Stone, Jann Wenner, also blamed him for the separation of the band.1 Wenner was outspokenly anti-McCartney, as Weber asserts: “Among those determined to punish McCartney for his perceived transgression was Jann Wenner, editor of the fledgling American rock and roll newsmagazine” (Torkelson Weber 2016, 68). Subsequently, McCartney faced heavy criticism from the moment the separation of the Beatles was announced. Yet, as Garry McGee notes “at the time, the public did not entirely understand the tremendous personal pressures and legal hassles the Beatles had been involved in” (2003, xi). McCartney had released two albums prior to his debut with Wings of which RAM (1971) specifically was reviewed harshly. Jon Landau of the Rolling Stone referred to the album as “so incredibly inconsequential and so monumentally irrelevant” (1971). He further asserts that “McCartney’s work in the Beatles was always schizoid” (1971) and contrasts specific McCartney-penned songs as “rockers” or—on the opposite pop end of the spectrum—as “schmaltz” (1971). Thus, shortly after the end of the Beatles, Landau places McCartney in a liminal position between the genres and the critics’ associated ideologies of rock and pop. He does so with regard to the Beatles and, as will become evident, also to Wings. Alongside McCartney’s two solo-albums prior to Wings, “the three other Beatles had individually achieved both critical and commercial successes” (McGee 2003, 15). Lennon specifically was gaining auteur status through critical reviews that referred to him as having “carved out a 1  Jann Wenner’s fascination with John Lennon is evident throughout the early 1970s: he wrote a very devotional article on Lennon deeming him Rolling Stone’s “Man of the Year” (see Wenner 1970).

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new career for himself as political gadfly, floating member of the international avant-garde and as rock’s most psychologically daring tightrope artist” (Gerson 1971). Although McCartney was involved in the avant-garde community before Lennon, his “happy family man persona”—as described by Langdon Winner in a review of McCartney (1970) —may have contributed to the aforementioned assessment. The famous cover of Life (1969) further suggests that the press framed McCartney as choosing a more conventional way of life and thereby may have further contributed to affirming Lennon’s artist or auteur status.2

II The first review of Wings’ debut record, Wild Life (1971), written by Rolling Stone’s John Mendelsohn, begins by referencing and comparing it to “Paul McCartney’s first two post-Beatles albums” (Mendelsohn 1972, 48). He therefore not only attributes the album to a solo, “post-Beatles”phase but credits it solely to McCartney, thereby revoking Wings the status of a democratic band within their very first review. This also highlights that McCartney’s attempt to break away from the Beatles had been—and would continue to be—a difficult task, as fans and listeners prior to Wings would compare them to his recent solo work and the Beatles. A perspective which rock critic Mendelsohn also takes up: Wild Life is largely high on sentiment but rather flaccid musically and impotent lyrically, trivial and unaffecting. It lacks the exhilarating highs of Ram […] in the form of a track called “I Am Your Singer,” contains the most embarrassingly puerile single piece of work Paul’s been associated with since “She’s Leaving Home”. (48)

His comments show that both the Beatles and McCartney’s solo albums were of merit, but that Wings are lacking key elements which are commonly attributed to the success of the Beatles or a band within the rock genre overall. The descriptives used such as “flaccid musically and impotent lyrically” (48), set an overall emasculating tone within the often hyper-masculine genre of rock, and emphasize the perception of pop as 2  The issue was published on 7 November and depicts Paul with Linda and their two children whilst on holiday in Scotland. The setting is rural and could be even described as pastoral, since the image prominently features a shepherd’s crook.

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meaningless. However, Mendelsohn finds some value in the record which he locates outside of the genre of rock, referring to it as “unpretentious […] melodically charming in several places […]. Mostly, it’s nicely executed pop music, and should be taken or left on that basis alone” (48). He conveys the idea of pop as an inferior genre and at the same time perpetuates rock’s masculine rhetoric. Mendelsohn also defines rock as meaningful: “[McCartney]’s driven by no obsession to demonstrate rock’s potential as fine, revolutionary, or religious art, but rather is content to make straightforward pop music” (48). He struggles with McCartney’s new band Wings, and this is evident in his overall disregard for Wild Life as a rock record. His review is emblematic of rock aesthetics with pop implicitly presented as lacking social significance (which will be discussed throughout this chapter). However, he never refers to McCartney as a pop star, but encourages listeners to look elsewhere for meaningful rock. Mendelsohn’s review is also telling of the Lennon-McCartney rivalry by referring to Wings three times while Lennon is mentioned eleven times in a 1400-word review. He also alludes to the break-up as well as the ongoing Allen Klein debacle and its subsequent lawsuit between the Beatles: “My own conviction is that we’d be foolish to expect anything much more earth-shaking than Wild Life out of McCartney for a good long while not, I daresay, before he extricates himself from record and publishing companies that he feels little love for” (48). At the beginning of their career, this review of Wild Life highlights what would accompany the band’s critical reception throughout their existence as Wings or Paul McCartney and Wings: the association with the Beatles, the consistent comparison to Lennon, and the discussed elements of rock aesthetics. By 1973, critic Paul Gambaccini’s brief consideration of Wings’ London New Theatre concert recognizes that they had their own fans: “Listen, we’re a little young to remember the Beatles. We’ve heard of them, but we’re here because we’re Wings fans” (1973, 14). Gambaccini further notes, that “[i]t was a respectable concert. Wings don’t rate raves yet, but the time for snickering is over” (14).3 Thus, acknowledging that critics needed to, but were not, taking McCartney or Wings seriously. Within the same year, Paul McCartney and Wings released Band on the Run (1973), which received (mostly) glowing reviews (for a negative review see 3  The fans Gambaccini meets are young teenage females who also are reported to like David Cassidy. This could further the cause to dismiss Wings—as young female teens are often not taken seriously in rock—which Gambaccini however refrains from.

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Downing 1974, 48–49). Rolling Stone’s Jon Landau is mostly appreciative of the album, but the comparison to the Beatles and ex-Beatles was just as present as ever in his review as well as the consideration of ‘meaning’. For Landau compares the lyrical content of McCartney’s past work with Wings to his solo oeuvre: “Up until now, the critical assumption has been that McCartney’s lyrics mean little if anything, that he is a mere stylist […]. And it is of course possible that the words to Band on the Run don’t mean (or weren’t intended to mean) as much as I think they do” (Landau 1974). Yet, Landau claims he will “take a chance, and say that Band on the Run is an album about the search for freedom and the flight from restrictions on his and Linda’s personal happiness” (1974). Although he “take[s] a chance” and interprets the meaning of the album according to what he believes to be McCartney’s intention, the focus still lingers on rock aesthetics and rhetoric in the same way Mendelsohn’s review of Wild Life did two years earlier. Conceivably, Landau felt that Paul McCartney was saying something significant and that the Beatle was back, returning to a form that critics had hoped for all along. For as he argues, Band on the Run “will make it impossible for anyone to classify Paul McCartney as a mere stylist again” (1974). Although the title of the album even features the word “band”, he continuously refers to only two members and thereby reaffirms that the group is not primarily recognized as Wings, but, surprisingly, as both Paul and Linda’s band: “It is also about two people becoming what they want to be, trying to decide what they want to do, and asking to be accepted for what they are now rather than what they were then” (1974). Overall, Band on the Run’s success finally put Paul McCartney and Wings in a mostly favorable light with the rock critics. Yet, even though Wings had achieved critical acclaim, it would not matter to those who had their doubts. Paul Nelson’s review of Venus and Mars (1975) is evident for his dislike of McCartney’s work with Wings and the comparison between Lennon and McCartney is as prevalent in 1975 as it was in 1972. Nelson argues that “John Lennon’s importance to the Beatles becomes more and more self-evident” (Nelson 1975). He continues to state that while “Lennon’s career has certainly had fewer ups and downs […] his strivings, if at times embarrassing, have never seemed to be the product of assembly-­ line manufacture” (1975). In doing so, he not only alludes to McCartney’s work as mass-produced—suggesting it is unoriginal and thoughtless—but institutionalizes the concept of rock aesthetics based on a simple dichotomy: John is authentic rock and Paul is commercial pop. This is

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furthermore affirmed when referring to McCartney as “a latter-day Burt Bacharach trying to invent his Angie Dickinson – but, of the four [Beatles], only Lennon’s plight still reaches the rock & roll part of the heart” (1975). Though the review discusses other aspects of Venus and Mars, too, the majority of it focuses on Nelson’s lack of interest in its lyrics. Again, this signifies a categorical function of the revolutionary rhetoric used in the rock press by necessarily searching for something socio-politically ‘meaningful’ within the lyrics: The last song on the LP carries the galactic couple all the way to the old people’s home, where we are asked to pity the doddering old McCartneys because “nobody asked [them] to play.” […] Pretty damned unlikely. If the musical career doesn’t pan out, guys, you can always get a job writing soap operas or the verses for Hallmark cards. (1975)

While Nelson finds the album boring, he makes it clear that McCartney is a talented musician whose music still matters: “were his talent behind him, McCartney’s current disaster wouldn’t matter much” (1975). Thus, from the beginning of Wings’ career it has been repeatedly commented that McCartney was not producing meaningful revolutionary rock. The New York Times contributes to this by discussing him side by side with Elton John as “Just Two Superstars From Middle Rock” who are “making rock palatable to the multitudes” (Edwards 1975, 12): “Once again Paul has been infected by a virulent case of the cutes, […]. ‘Venus and Mars,’ however, with its meaningless rockers […], is the kind of Muzak one expects to hear in the elevators of the nation’s more progressive junior high schools” (12). This suggests a mediocre status as a middle of the road stadium star who at this point of his career merely creates “Muzak” for the masses, a further implication that yet again, McCartney was perceived as not living up to the idealized standards of the critics. By 1976, the band found success again, as the release of At the Speed of Sound fared well in the press. Despite the fact that he deems their previous record Venus and Mars “frivolous pop” (Holden 1976), he compliments At the Speed of Sound (and McCartney) for its production, and seemingly wants McCartney to be successful: While there is much to admire on At the Speed of Sound, it is contained in the production more than the material […]. McCartney, like almost no one else, seems able to play the studio as an instrument. […] I hope it doesn’t

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distract him from songwriting more than it already has. For the best McCartney songs will most certainly outlast all the studios in which they were recorded. (1976)

Stephen Holden discusses the album’s production favorably, but also in a similar vein as past reviews by opposing Lennon’s auteur status in contrast to McCartney’s commercial success: The solo John Lennon explored (often brilliantly) the sociopolitical potential of late Sixties rock mythology, cultivating a cult of personality to become the most critically popular ex-Beatle. Paul McCartney became the most commercially successful of the four lads by developing into a bravura producer/arranger (especially of singles) as well as a genteel pop archivist devoted to fusing his contribution to the Beatles legacy with mainstream pop. For latter-day McCartney, the megaphone, the brass band and the seedy English music hall tradition are parts of the same musical equation as rock & roll: pop and pop only. (1976)

Holden’s judgment reaffirms a central dichotomy within rock aesthetics: good pop music is judged by the standard of commercial success, whereas good rock music is not. An ideological juxtaposition that had become deeply ingrained with the genres of rock and pop and which conversely has further influenced the popular perception of Lennon and McCartney. To some, Lennon is heralded as the rebel, the poet, and McCartney as the commercial stadium pop star. This also shows that even six years after their separation, the critics were still comparing Wings with the Beatles (as well as the individual Beatles to each other). While it is understandable for the press as a whole to reference McCartney’s prior works, this constant comparison prevented Wings from being assessed as anything else than a disappointing rock band. Most importantly, critics also used it to authenticate McCartney as worthy of review and thus to authorize their own act of reviewing. As shown thus far, these processes were neither exclusive to the mainstream press nor the early 1970s. For multiple headlines addressing the band also referenced the Beatles, such as: “McCartney – The Beatle With the Charm Is Back”, “Hey, Venus, Could That Be a New Beatles Album?”, “Once and for Always a Beatle”, and “‘I’ll always be a Beatle’, says Paul”. Tom Zito’s 1975 review of Venus and Mars begins with “six years after the group disbanded, we have the first true post-Beatles Beatles album”

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(1975, H4), while Henry Edwards review of Venus and Mars speaks of “the most cloying of the ex-Beatles” (Edwards 1975, 12) and Holden’s 1976 review of At the Speed of Sound opens with “In his post-Beatles albums” (1976). Finally, Timothy White’s 1979 review of Back to the Egg even mentions “this ex-Beatle” (1979). With few exceptions, the majority of discussions feature the Beatles within every single review from 1972 to 1979, further signifying that many critics still had not accepted that they had separated and thereby inadvertently contributed to the looming possibility of them reuniting: Perhaps the Beatles will reunite. […] The real context in which his current music must be judged is not that of the Beatles, but of other present-day purveyors of comfortable, catchy pop-rock-artists like Elton John, Neil Sedaka, and the Eagles. On that criterion, Mr. McCartney looks pretty good. There isn’t much he can do about the fact that he himself set us higher standards in the past. (Rockwell 1976a, 61)

Rockwell acknowledges that McCartney and Wings are being compared to a band that existed from the late 1950s and saw world-wide success from the mid-1960s on. Surely, if Wings sounded exactly like the Beatles, this would be equally criticized. Yet again it was not a matter of sound, but of associated aesthetics. Expecting an individual to have the same impact in another decade working with different musicians is an unrealistic expectation. It is superficial to say in hindsight that there was only one Beatles. Arguably, it is evident that McCartney was held to a standard that was set with three other individuals (of course with other influencers along the way) and was expected to epitomize the Beatles. Rockwell’s pinning of McCartney within a different sub-genre of rock is not necessarily complimentary, and accentuates rock aesthetics, but it does highlight the biased comparison to the Beatles.

III To contextualize the previous observations, this section will grant particular attention to Lester Bang’s lengthy 1976 concert review in Creem entitled “Paul and Linda McCartney: Bionic Couple Serves It Your Way”. This is particularly promising, as it is paradigmatic of the described rock aesthetics, the consideration of Wings as McCartney’s band, and the press’ comparison of Wings to the Beatles. Furthermore, it not only scrutinizes

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both McCartney’s and Wings’ popularity, but the state of the musical landscape of the mid-to-late 1970s. The title refers to Paul and Linda McCartney, even though Bangs is reviewing the band’s Detroit concert of 7 May 1976. His first instinct is to reference McCartney—with no mention of Wings—to the Beatles: “Paul McCartney used to be co-leader of a group called the Beatles, who were to some assessors, either the biggest thing in the history of rock ‘n’ roll, or showbiz, or both” (1976, 34). As seen in previous reviews as well as this one, Wings are rarely considered to be a band in their own right by rock and mainstream journalists alike. However, Bangs and other music critics were not necessarily wrong to frame Wings as McCartney’s band, because as time went on, McCartney seemed to confirm this, too: By late 71’s Wild Life, Denny Laine has joined the family, so the group’s name is Wings, but Linda still receives co-production credit, and all the songs save one oldie are listed as composed by Paul and Linda McCartney […]. By 1973’s Red Rose Speedway, however, Paul has begun to tire of sexual democracy. The album’s listed as Paul McCartney & Wings, entirely written and produced by Paul […]. Although by Venus & Mars he has relaxed enough to merely call the group Wings. The recent At the Speed of Sound is all written and produced by Paul, but he re-establishes democracy in more generalized form, allowing Denny Laine and guitarist Jimmy McCulloch each to write and sing one song, while Linda, Laine and drummer Joe English to sing one Paul song a piece. (Bangs 1976, 35)

Bangs further notes that after this specific concert, the press was only invited to speak to Paul and Linda, not the rest of the band. Additionally, while Linda McCartney originally received co-authorship, “the co-writing credits ceased after the ‘Live and Let Die’ single-release” of 1973 (Rodriguez 2013, 19)—and Bangs noticed this. Thus, he and many critics view Wings not as one entity but rather see McCartney in charge. A fact which is also affirmed in the name-change of the band which, apart from Lester Bangs, much of the press did not take any notice of—further signifying that critics and press in general already saw Wings as McCartney’s band with hired musicians. As Kaye noted with regard to Red Rose Speedway: “make no mistake, though the songs are credited to the McCartneys, and though Wings works with an admirable degree of understated restraint, this is really Paul’s album” (Kaye 1973). The following year Landau refers to Band on the Run and all other Wings

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records as “solo albums” (Landau 1974), and in 1975, Edwards even addresses Wings as a “back-up band” (Edwards 1975, 12). Every Wings review, with few exceptions, focused solely on McCartney, with passing discussions of Laine, other members, or unwarranted criticism toward Linda.4 It is evident the critics did not take the band seriously as a collective producer of music. Rather, Wings came across as McCartney pretending to be democratic. This further contributes to the perception of McCartney as a ‘control freak’ as portrayed in the movie Let It Be (1970).5 Thus, the comparisons are solely placed on McCartney’s past oeuvre, rather than Denny Laine’s work with the Moody Blues, for example. It is possible that Wings would have been perceived as a ‘rock’ band if they, from the beginning, were not constantly reduced to the creation of one famed ‘popstar’. Throughout the review, Bangs reflects on his original question, the performance, and the press conference: The man [McCartney] simply seems incapable of a gesture that is not an arch. He’s a plasticine porter, and for all his coyness lacks the obscene smugness of Elton John. […] Whatever nonsense has ever been promulgated in the name of rock ‘n’ roll, it’s certain that Paul is, in every sense, on the side of law and order. (Bangs 1976, 73)

Here, he sets McCartney apart from other stars. While he acknowledges Wings’ place in current history and after commercial success (with two bands), he also notes, as Mendelsohn did in 1972, that McCartney still lacks pretension, not stripping him of his past success or authenticity. While some, such as Edwards, question his role as an auteur, especially, in comparison to Lennon, it is evident throughout these reviews that it did not matter what McCartney did or did not do: the critics never questioned his authenticity. He also acknowledges that certain ideals have been “promulgated” such as rock aesthetics but notes McCartney does not deviate from the norm. Regardless, Bangs clearly struggles to understand why

4  The rock press’ treatment of Linda McCartney will be further explored in a future study. Whilst there are elements of masculine rock rhetoric, Linda’s involvement is ridiculed and questioned beyond her gender. 5  The portrayal of the Beatles in Let it Be (1970) is currently being reconsidered in Peter Jackson’s upcoming release of Get Back (2021). Jackson has curated and narrowed over fifty hours of the original reels of film from the Let it Be sessions into a documentary which has been advertised to portray a very different narrative of the Beatles together at that time.

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something so “synthetic” (73) or meaningless (to him) can be considered successful. Interestingly, this particular review attempts to understand Wings’ popularity. Bangs is unsure of why Wings (or McCartney) are successful: “Beatle nostalgia does not explain McCartney’s Grammy Award for Band on the Run, nor, really, the spectacular success of his current tour of the United States” (35). Scrutinizing McCartney’s pop appeal, he proposes a rhetorical question at the opening of his lengthy article, “What has McCartney got that makes people of all ages the world over respond […]?” (34). His own reflection describes both McCartney’s and Wings’ albums as “some of the blandest discs ever piped into a waiting room” (34) and compares the ex-Beatles’ solo careers. The use of “bland” is not new when considering Wings or McCartney; again, a search for meaning and excitement within the music denotes further remnants of rock aesthetics lingering. Although Bangs does not believe McCartney’s name alone could sell out large arenas, he is still hopeful the audiences were buying the name. He cannot seem to fathom people enjoying what he refers to as “sterile” (71) and that individuals were still conscious of what rock was ‘supposed’ to mean. He states: Paul McCartney’s triumphal tour of U.S. rock arenas is final proof that rock fans can no longer distinguish between rock ‘n’ roll and Easy Listening. Nor do they care. On the basis of his records, they didn’t know Paul would have as relatively gutsy a live show as he did. Clearly they were buying a name. (71)

However, Bangs confusingly admits he rather enjoyed the concert: His [McCartney’s] instincts as a showman and, surprisingly, as the rocker you might have forgotten he was capable of being, were in high gear – he redeemed his worst material […] inspiring, even thrilling in a way if not exactly contagious. (72)

He reiterates that when considering McCartney’s Beatles roots, that he was a rocker. The Beatles were deviant from the norm, but according to Bangs, Wings do not deviate, they are merely “Easy Listening”, or meaningless. In short: attributes which are seen as characteristic of pop. On the other hand, Bangs recognizes the performance as “thrilling” and McCartney’s successful performance confuses him more. Critic Ben Fong-­ Torres makes a similar comment after a performance from the same tour by stating that “it sure sounds like Rock ‘n’ roll, even if it is Wings”

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(Fong-­Torres 1976, 39), suggesting that the critics are enjoying the live shows, and ‘hear’ rock music, but the powerful expectation of rock aesthetics influence them so much, that labeling Paul McCartney and Wings confuses them. Bangs even remarks that while Kiss is somewhat meaningless, at least they are a “war toy” (1976,  73), suggesting that he could move past the perceived trivial pop if McCartney at least had a masculine Altamont-style rhetoric. He somewhat acknowledges a changing musical landscape by commenting “I realize the counterculture is as dead as Davy Crocket hats”, (73) but he still applies a lingering ideology that developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Although Bangs does not provide a final answer to his proposed question and openly admits that “[i]t doesn’t seem to make any sense, but then few things willingly do these days”, (35) he leaves the reader with an example, suggesting that he recognizes (but does not quite understand) and possibly is beginning to accept changes in the musical and cultural landscape of which Wings’ success was a part and the Beatles were not, for better or for worse. Bangs comments: I think my friend Eric has a pretty good handle on the whole situation. […] Eric goes to all the concerts […]. He loved McCartney. “It was a great show,” he said. Eric also loved Bowie, […] Mahavishnu Orchestra, the Stones, Eagles, Elton John, Kiss and Yes. They were all great shows. “I just dig concerts,” Eric says. “I’ll go see anybody who comes to town”. (1976, 73)

Fundamentally, Bangs’ lengthy article, as well as the criticism of Wings in general, illuminates an extremely complex concept of an evolving genre of rock and musical landscape, in which he and McCartney were apart; further suggesting that McCartney was moving forward with Wings, and the rock press was holding on to rock aesthetics, and as argued previously, the popular image of the Beatles.

IV An attempt to re-evaluate Wings through the 1970s popular music press highlights the complexities that shaped the perception of Wings, their position within the popular, and raises more questions than asked by the title “Which Side Is This Ex-Beatle on?”. Although this research is not attempting to classify Wings as rock or pop, but to re-evaluate the popular music press’ reception of Wings, it cannot be denied that an ideological

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divide exists which institutionalizes and encodes the genres of ‘pop’ and ‘rock’ through the eyes of the popular music press. And it appears, to them, McCartney sat on the pop/rock fence often leaning toward the wrong side. Throughout this analysis, I have found a heavy emphasis regarding genre classification in the original reviews: in fact, not only does each writer discuss genre, but they have difficulty placing Wings within a genre, seemingly because of McCartney’s past connection to rock and a desire to stay connected, as well as his musical and production abilities. This highlights the limitations and evolution of genre and musical classifications, as well as an evolving musical landscape. Paul McCartney and Wings, in general, do not fit within a box, and the critics were unsure of how to discuss them. This additionally points to rock aesthetics, as critics were mostly concerned with the perceived lack of a revolutionary rock rhetoric, instead of considering that Paul McCartney and Wings may even transcend genres—which would further suggest they are difficult to categorize. As evident throughout this analysis, rock aesthetics are furthered by the descriptives the critics used such as “bland”, “Muzak”, or “middle rock”. And “[b]eing bland, boring, or middle-of-the-road [which McCartney was accused of several times] flies in the face of what many critics value about rock ‘n’ roll, which is a sense of rebellion or, at least excitement” (McLeod 2002, 101). Moreover, “Rock critics are well aware that rock music is a mass-distributed commodity. Nevertheless, they still raise the specters of ‘commercialism’ and ‘the masses’ to dismiss an artist or albums” (105). The critics noted multiple times McCartney was the most commercially successful of the Beatles, but only to question this success, further placing McCartney away from rock ideology even though ‘rock’ was mass-­ distributed in the same fashion as pop. The exploration of these reviews can serve as evidence for the superiority and hierarchy of rock aesthetics. This is clear as every review used the word or genre of ‘pop’ to question and criticize McCartney’s work. These critics struggled between production and ‘meaning’ within their consideration of Wings records, heavily criticizing, specifically, McCartney for not having ‘meaningful’ lyrics but praising his studio and arrangement abilities, contributing to the notion of him as a ‘producer’ of manufactured music for the masses. They positively associate McCartney with the Beatles and at the same time connote them as ‘rock’ or at least as fitting within the aesthetics of rock. But this association fundamentally prevents Wings (and thus McCartney) from making individual statements or embodying

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cultural meaning. Even if one can argue that the Beatles are not rock, and McCartney wrote and produced in the same manner with Wings as he did with the Beatles, he seemed to move downward in the critics’ estimation. This devaluation was not due to a lack of authenticity, but for the perceived meaningless commercial ‘pop’ he created as the leading member of the band. These oscillating tendencies between a pop and rock assessment ultimately result in the perpetual insinuation that McCartney had become a meaningless ‘pop’ musician. Reviewers, such as Fong-Torres, note and contribute to this indeterminate veering when stating that “McCartney writes, sings and produces in the pop manner. Not that he wants to” (Fong-Torres 1976, 39). The value placed in revolutionary rhetoric completely disregards McCartney’s and Wing’s impact, their ability to gain their own fan base, and their overall success. This further supports the concept that genre is “a set of musical events (real or possible) whose course is governed by a definite set of socially accepted rules” (Fabbri 2004, 7). The genre of rock is complex beyond sounds and production as it is rooted in folk authenticity and revolutionary rhetoric of the late 1960s. These connections further highlight palpable rock aesthetics which are reflected within these reviews and have influenced the way we currently speak about music. Interestingly, this chapter has discovered that the majority of critics wanted McCartney to succeed, but within the confines of their set ideology, which many critics suggest McCartney was not portraying. Ultimately, Wings were unfairly assessed: one could argue all the ex-Beatles are, as they are compared to the Beatles or each other, thus re-evaluated by comparison to prior collaborative efforts. That is to say: Wings are not the Beatles. They represent vastly different eras, the comparison did not do them justice, and rock critics who grew up with the Beatles were not ready to let go of them. As for today, over fifty years on, contemporary reviews still associate McCartney with the Beatles, and even refer to his current oeuvre as ‘solo’ work (see Stubbs 2018)—which reiterates the important role the Beatles still inhabit in popular culture and recognizes McCartney’s contributions therein. However, his re-released (or new) records do not face the same type of scrutiny for a few reasons: Firstly, the blame of the Beatles’ break-up (or a possible reunion) is no longer looming over McCartney’s (and Wings’) music as it once did. Secondly, while modern reviews are not as entertaining or damning, they are not fundamentally different from the original when discussing genre. Yet rock and pop do

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not elicit the same social and political connotations as they once did in the late 1960s and 70s, suggesting that the genre of rock, and the revolutionary/folk connotations associated with it, has evolved, thus evidence the popular music landscape is also evolving and furthering Matt Brennan’s argument that the genres “continue to be negotiated” (Brennan 2017, 193). Finally, McCartney has more control over his image, the music press has less control over what they can print, and rock critics do not exist as they once did (rock has been surpassed in sales by hip-hop/rap). This is not to say that rock aesthetics have been eradicated. Some of these critics still have a high profile, and the generation of fans who read these reviews in real time have been impacted by them and some of them are Beatles authorities who clearly have and project a disdain for McCartney, and Wings, in a similar rockist manner (see Grier 2013 for a consideration of rockism). However, Wings is getting a second wind, even if the group is still considered McCartney’s ‘back-up band’ while he is being reconsidered a rocker—now perceived to be on the right side of the pop/rock fence.

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Tucker, Ken. 1977. Wings over America. Rolling Stone. https://www.rollingstone. com/music/music-­album-­reviews/wings-­over-­america-­bonus-­tracks-­185862. Accessed 10 Feb 2020. Washington Post. 1972. Once and for always a Beatle. December 28. ———. 1975. A new Beatles album? July 6. Wenner, Jann. 1970. Man of the Year. Rolling Stone, February 7. White, Timothy. 1979. Back to the Egg: Paul McCartney. Rolling Stone, August 23. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-­album-­r eviews/back-­to-­the-­ egg-­206167. Accessed 10 July 2020. Whiteley, Sheila. 2000. Women in popular music: Sexuality, identity and subjectivity. London: Routledge. Willwerth, James. 1976. McCartney comeback, Time, May 31: 40–44. Winner, Langdon. 1970. McCartney. Rolling Stone, May 14. Zito, Tom. 1975. Hey, Venus, could this be the new Beatles album? Washington Post, July 6: H4.

SECTION II

The Geopolitics of the Popular

CHAPTER 6

PJ Harvey as a Modern War Poet: How Let England Shake Challenges ‘English England’ Through the Pastoral Felix Leidner

PJ Harvey’s album Let England Shake was released in 2011. It features twelve songs and was critically and publicly acclaimed (cf. Metacritic 2020). The album was accompanied by twelve music videos, one for each song, which were shot by war photographer Seamus Murphy (Gardner 2015, 139) and occasioned a major tour with a distinctly choreographed live show (Empire 2011). Many critics have recognised that the album broaches the horrors of war in general and the topic of the First World War in particular (Freed 2011; Petridis 2011; Plagenhoef 2011) while it also engages questions of national identity and Englishness (Gardner 2015, 143). Peter Grant states that the album was “a milestone in the history of popular music in the way it was received as a serious commentary on both war and England’s military past” (2017, 242). It has been described as “an album about what war does to the aggressor, as much as what it does to the vanquished victim” (Price 2011). Further reviewers remarked that

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it was a “very English record” (Plagenhoef 2011) with an “English sound” (Freed 2011). Other voices have recognised that “this isn’t merely a historical period piece” (Price 2011) and that the album’s “literal pop” (Genders 2017) “has chimed so uncannily and powerfully with the times” (Troussé 2015). Freed (2011) suggested that the lyrics are not only tied to past wars but also “to modern war images”, resulting in Harvey’s being dubbed “a new war poet” (Empire 2011). This last verdict about Harvey is particularly interesting: if she is indeed critically perceived as a “war poet” and her record as a ‘war album’, is there a more profound connection between Let England Shake and English War Poetry? Between popular music and a literary genre so deeply rooted within British society and its traditions of remembering the ‘Great War’? Why does the album shake “England” and not “Britain”? Harvey’s word choice is not random but is significant because the two terms are each connected to different, even opposing, views of nation, identity, and remembrance. Her album shows that there is a strong tendency in Britain to glorify the events of the First World War. Its remembrance, not only through poetry, serves as a catalyst for a construction of a national identity that is exclusive and insular. This construction is strongly connected to ‘England’ and ‘Englishness’ rather than Britain.1 Let England Shake employs different devices to connect to this construction and to reveal it as flawed. In my view, understanding English War Poetry and its cultural significance in Britain is key to understanding the album. English War Poetry is one of the most important literary genres in the United Kingdom, one that is not confined to the realms of connoisseurs of literature but that also appeals to a much wider audience and is received by a broad spectrum of the population—especially in England. PJ Harvey deliberately uses tropes and motifs from that genre to connect her album to a literary and cultural tradition of remembering the First World War. However, she does not simply copy the aesthetics and contents of English War Poetry but, crucially, also deviates from the genre in order to comment on current political issues. Harvey uses the popularity of the genre to bring forward her criticism of a construction of national identity that is strongly linked to the events of the First World War and which is 1  To differentiate the two terms, ‘Britain’ or ‘British’ will be used in a neutral sense to refer to the whole of the United Kingdom. Since the literary genre is called ‘English War Poetry’ it will be used here as well. If not otherwise mentioned, ‘England’ refers to the nation and geographical region within the United Kingdom.

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remembered through War Poetry. The aim of this analysis is to show how Harvey’s album is intertextually linked to this popular literary genre and how this connection enables listeners to understand Let England Shake as a critique of a construction of an exclusive, inward-facing national identity. While there are several aspects of Let England Shake that reveal the intertextual relation between PJ Harvey’s album and English War Poetry, this analysis will focus on Harvey’s use of pastoralism. For Harvey not only alludes to the literary genre of War Poetry but also to other pastoral songs, poems, and imagery. These play an important part in Harvey’s aesthetics and in the way the album connects to the issue of national identity. I will first give an overview of the genre of English War Poetry before examining how Harvey employs pastoralism to connect to the genre. In a second part, I will analyse Harvey’s criticism of the construction of national identity through remembering the First World War and how this differs from the way national identity is represented in English War Poetry.

“Cruel nature has won again”: Pastoralism in Let England Shake English War Poetry is strongly informed by the violence and bloodshed experienced by its poets, (Das 2013, 9  f.), Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg and Edward Thomas (cf. Carter and McRae 1997, 360; Alexander 2000, 321; Seeber 2004, 340). Revision is a prototypical element of English War Poetry (Rawlinson 2013, 83) and is realised on different levels of its poetic form. War poets tend to prefer commonly known structures and regular forms rather than such modernist forms as free verse (Howarth 2013, 52, 57).2 Another marked feature of English War Poetry is the representation of individualised English soldiers in battle against the collective identity of the enemy (Fussell 1977, 82, 84). The “binary deadlock” of trench warfare leads to simplification and loss of ambiguity (84, 87). The use of allusion and intertextual references to older pieces of poetry is also commonly found (171). Lastly, this genre is considered to be informed by Georgian Poetry (Coyle and Peck 2002, 238), employing a “placid, elegiac, and unadorned” (Sanders 1996, 502) style that uses a reduced, colloquial language (Coyle and Peck 2002, 238; 2  There are also adaptations of established poetic forms, as for example in Wilfred Owen’s poetry, which uses the structure of the sonnet “to fixate the horrors of war” (Nowak 2010, 344).

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Seeber 2004, 340). Many poems celebrate nature and revert nostalgically back to rural England (Nowak 2010, 343). According to Edna Longley’s definition, these poems can be considered pastoral as they topicalise “the natural world or the human footprint on that world” (2007, 461). The same is true of Harvey’s album, which has been described as pastoral, as it uses “tropes of rural and imagined England as material upon which to stage narratives that foreground the place of land and countryside within personal stories of […] national identity” (Gardner 2017, 68 f.). Almost every song includes elements of the pastoral; for instance, “The Glorious Land” and “In The Dark Places” feature Russian folk lyrics that are predominately pastoral in their settings and narratives (cf. Reeder 1993, 98, 155). “The Last Living Rose”, “Hanging In The Wire”, and “On Battleship Hill” (Harvey 2011) connect particularly strongly to this pastoral tradition. “The Last Living Rose”3 not only features the rose as a pastoral symbol in its title but also highlights important natural historical and political landmarks and characters (cf. Gardner 2017, 77). England is evoked by foggy mountains, hedges, alleys, the River Thames, and graveyards. All of these symbols are presented such that they appear both pastoral and distinctly English. But as Abigail Gardner points out, the function of Harvey’s pastoralism is not to provide a means of retreat or even escape, but rather as critique (72): In the song, English history is filled with the “grey, damp filthiness of ages” (LLR, V3) and symbols of death (“graveyards, and dead sea-captains”, V5), and its present is characterised by “the music of drunken beatings” (LLR, V7), “stinking alleys” (LLR, V6), and the golden River Thames “hastily sold for nothing” (LLR, V9). England, with its rural past and present, cannot serve as an idyllic refuge, because all its beauty—which is nonetheless recognised in the song—has been corrupted. The strongest marker for this dysphoric use of the pastoral is to be found in the last verse: the quivering of the “last living rose”: The rose is the strongest symbol in the song, as it is a flower that—like the poppy— often features in War Poetry because its colour symbolises blood (Fussell 1977, 264). However, roses also stand in a strong poetic tradition of directly referring to ‘England’, loyalty, and patriotic sacrifice (265). The English red rose is a symbol for Englishness and English national identity. War poets used the rose precisely because it already signified England and placed it into the context of war (266 and 268). In a striking example of 3

 Hereafter abbreviated as LLR.

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the resemblance between Let England Shake and tropes of English War Poetry, Harvey places the rose in a context of decay. Similar to the way Siegfried Sassoon uses “drooping roses” to signify the wounds of fallen soldiers in his poem “The Death Bed” (Sassoon 1917), Harvey’s rose falters and withers away. By letting the rose die, she “deconstructs the fabric of constructed pasts drawn from shared cultural archives of Englishness as pastoral” (Gardner 2017, 79) and thereby also implies the death of the nation. Harvey’s “Hanging In the Wire”,4 on the other hand, exemplifies the use of the pastoral as comfort (Fussell 1977, 256). The song has three verses. In the first verse, the soldier, Walker, describes the anti-pastoral, devastated landscape of No-Man’s Land, without trees, grass, or fields but lined with barbed wire. The second verse reveals that Walker himself is caught up in the wire, hanging upside-down. All the while, he is remembering England through the pastoral: “birds singing ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’” (HTW, V11), “trees to sing from” (HTW, V12), and the wind. In War Poetry, these pastoral moments serve as comfort and are often “sandwiched between bouts of violence and terror” (Fussell 1977, 257). This effect is reproduced in “Hanging in The Wire”: the mist is rising (HTW, V1) and Walker must have been hanging in the wire for several hours because the battles typically only commenced at night (Fussell 1977, 50). While enduring the agony of hanging critically wounded in the wire, Walker is trying to think of peaceful, pastoral images, but the war invades his senses again: “Do you hear the guns beginning” (HTW, V16). Here, too, the pastoral cannot hold its promise of escape and refuge from the war. The song also bears a strong resemblance to Ivor Gurney’s “The Silent One”: “Who died on the wires, and hung there, one of two –” (Gurney 1925/2013, V1). Both poems focus on an extreme moment of panic (Kendall 2006, 100), and both texts invoke music to allude to hopes of survival (Kendall 2006, 99); in “Hanging in The Wire”, remembering Vera Lynn’s song “The White Cliffs of Dover” (Grant 2017, 243) and thinking of home and England calms Walker in the face of his impending death (HTW, V11). The song “On Battleship Hill”5 deals with the human impact on the environment by describing a landscape scarred by trenches in which “a hateful feeling still lingers” (OBH, V5). As Gardner describes it, the song 4 5

 Hereafter abbreviated as HTW.  Hereafter abbreviated as OBH.

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provides an example for how history is remembered through smells and feelings (2017, 77). The speaker’s memories are triggered by the scent of thyme, one of the herbs that cover the hills of Gallipoli today (Davies 1993).6 The homophonic relationship between ‘thyme’ and ‘time’ is clearly recognisable. The “scent of time” would thus point towards the memories experienced at the site of Gallipolli. Because of this homophony, Harvey might have preferred to use thyme instead of rosemary, which also grows at Gallipolli and incidentally is said to aid memory—which is why it is worn as a symbol of commemoration on Anzac Day in Australia (Australian War Memorial 2020). Here, it is not only the speaker—possibly a battlefield tourist (Grant 2017, 245)—who remembers the fighting “80 years later” (OBH, V6) but also the earth itself, that is now “return[ed] to how it has always been” (OBH, V8). Fussell has described the restoration of trench sites and the experience of walking over them in detail (1977, 75): “When the air is damp, you can smell rusted iron everywhere, even though you see only wheat and barley” (75 f.). Although the trenches are hardly visible anymore, “[e]verywhere one senses a quiet fury at being condemned to live in this boneyard and back water, where even the crops contend with soil once ruined by gas” (76). It seems that, in the earth and in the people inhabiting the restored trench sites, “a hateful feeling still lingers” (OBH, V5). Fussell’s generalised account of the experience of trench sites might well be anecdotal and should be taken with a grain of salt. It nonetheless shows how these places can be perceived. As Gardner states, Harvey “reinvest[s] the pastoral with the reality of the repercussion of war upon those who live there” (2017, 73). The earth of former trench sites remembers the dead, and this “boneyard”—that is, the physical reality of war imprinted on the landscape—is what Harvey describes in her song (Gardner 2017, 73). Neither the restored nature of the battlefield nor the surrounding mountains offer comfort but instead are described as dangerously “jutting out, like teeth in a rotten mouth” (OBH, V10/11). What is more, when the wind can be heard singing, “Cruel nature has won again” (OBH, V13). This can refer to either the nature of the land, which is indifferent to human lives (Gardner 2017, 78), or, in my view, to a ‘human nature’ that expresses itself through war and violence.

6  Battleship Hill is a high ground near Chunuk Bair, which was a battleground during the Gallipolli campaign (Stowers 2015).

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“Death was all and everyone”: Dichotomies and Ambiguity of War English War Poetry is characterised by omnipresent dichotomisations, such as the division into friends and foes, soldiers and superiors. Strikingly, this pattern is not retained in Let England Shake but rather reversed: dichotomisation is replaced by ambiguity. The most important example of this reversal is the complete absence of antagonists. Not a single song features a division into enemies and allies. Instead, the trench lines are literally blurred.7 The songs depict soldiers and even civilians “in an unclear world […] and [with] not even an evident enemy” (Azevedo et al. 2015, 190) because they all seem to belong to one and the same group of victims. Where English soldiers (such as Walker in “Hanging In The Wire” or Louis in “The Colour Of The Earth”) experience violence, agony, and death, the enemy is neither blamed nor present. By highlighting “the invisibility of the enemy” (Das 2007, 75), the song constructs death and suffering as something agentless, as the results of “an industrialised war [that] was utterly indifferent to who and how it killed” (Howarth 2013, 51). With this absence of dichotomies, ambiguity becomes a crucial element of the album (Gardner 2017, 69 f.) and is present—particularly with regard to nationality—in two ways: Firstly, it is often left in the dark to which nationality soldiers or civilians belong, creating ambiguity in the possible interpretations of the songs. The soldiers putting up crosses and hiding in the dirt in “In The Dark Places,” for instance, could well be German or English or have any other national identity. Suffering and death become universal conditions of war regardless of nationality or occupation—everyone suffered, killed, died—or, as Harvey puts it: “Death was all and everyone” (“All and Everyone”, V19). Secondly, even where national identity seems defined, it is presented ambiguously. The song “The Last Living Rose” emphasises this ambiguity in its portrayal of England as a generally dreadful country with which, however, the speaker, torn between feelings of repulsion and affection, identifies. The song’s depiction of England as ghastly contrasts with the positive impressions with which it ends: “Let me watch night fall on the river, / the moon rise up and turn to silver” (LLR, V10/11). The listener is thrown into doubt as to whether the speaker actually likes “the grey, 7  Cláudia Azevedo et al. have argued that this is also reflected in the musical composition of the songs (2015, 190).

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damp filthiness of ages” (LLR, V3), which in turn makes the second verse “Take me back to England” ambiguous as well.8 Although Grant argues that  the lyrics are to be understood ironically (2017, 248), I read the ambiguity as crucial to the meaning of the song. Through the use of pastoralism, the album connects to English War Poetry and a certain sense of ‘Englishness’ that it propagates. At the same time, by portraying this Englishness ambiguously, the album comments on that sense of national identity, the First World War, and its cultural representation in Britain. To further outline how the album presents and constructs the English nation and why it ‘shakes’ England and not Britain, an understanding of the role of the First World War in the formation of a certain construction of a specifically ‘English’ national identity is crucial. Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of PJ Harvey’s album is the total absence of the term ‘Britain’.9 All references to national identity in the album are related to England, not Britain. But as the First World War was undoubtedly a British war, and not an English one, this ‘odd’ choice of England over Britain is worth examining.

Challenging English (or British?) National Identity The United Kingdom is a prime example for the difficult idea of national identity. Is it British, English—or even Scottish, Welsh, or Northern Irish? Each of these adjectives expresses different self-images and loyalties, and they show that the concepts of nation and national identity have not only scholarly value but also concern politicians and citizens because they ask the fundamental question of ‘Who are we?’ (Bryant 2006, 13 f.). According to Benedict Anderson, nations are cultural products with a strong “emotional legitimacy” (1991, 4). As “imagined political communities” (6), they serve as reference points for self-identification (Grotenhuis 2016, 28). The construction of a nation is based on a selection of “elements that fit well together to create an identity people can and wish to identify with 8  In the album booklet, the line is given as in the text. On the record, however, Harvey sings: “Take me back to beautiful England” (my emphasis), which highlights the irony even more. 9  Britain, here, is understood to be comprised of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland, however, is included with a caveat since it is “an extension of the British state beyond Britain itself”, i.e. not part of the island Britain, and only a part of the population defines itself as British, while another, significant part identifies as Irish (Bryant 2006, 3).

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and leav[e] out elements that could disturb a coherent picture” (28). During this process, the past is often utilised to “gloss the present” in order to create a national identity (Bryant 2006, 16). Such elements can be symbolic or even iconic representations like flags, anthems, or monuments (16) used in rituals and acts of commemoration. Wars are pivotal points in history that help to create a  sense of identity. They serve as important landmarks by means of which the present community is linked to past events in order to root a nation within its history (Grotenhuis 2016, 28) and establish a sense of national continuity (Bryant 2006, 24). The large number of First World War memorials throughout the United Kingdom is evidence of the fact that wars have a strong symbolic meaning for nations (Anderson 1991, 9). In this process of remembrance, “grand narrative[s] about the nation” function as focal points and offer “cognitive and emotional order in which individuals can locate themselves and find […] meaning” (Bryant 2006, 24 f.). The First World War can be understood as one of these ‘grand narratives’ and derives its significance within British society from its role as a focal point of British identity, which also explains its common framing as “The Great War”. It is simultaneously entrenched as “catastrophically pointless” (Wellington 2017, 15) and as a watershed event (Sherry 2013, 35). In Britain, the First World War is perceived as especially violent wherever the British were involved and is characterised by the victimisation of soldiers, the inability of the civilian public to empathise with them, and, most importantly, by the understanding that it was a war like no other (Grant 2017, 24, 27). Vincent Sherry has called this construction of the First World War both a “legend of history” and a “myth” (2013, 35). Although the perception of the First World War as traumatic catastrophe is also a transnational phenomenon (Grant 2017, 23), the ‘obsession’ with that conflict and the emphasis on its futility as well as the accompanying negative narrative constructed from this war are unique to the British nation10 (21, 26; see also, Fussell 1977, 364). Peter Grant suggests that because myths serve to “simplify, exaggerate or reinterpret events,” they become symbols that bind a society together (2017, 16) and serve as the focal points out of which nations are born 10  The literature uses the term “British”, which is why it is used here as well. However, as England is by far the largest and most populated part of the United Kingdom and is, therefore, culturally and politically dominant, it is difficult to say how and to what extent this narrative is also valid in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

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(18). They infuse the “discursive institutions, ranging from national literatures and languages to national curricula in education” that maintain the ‘imagined community’ of the nation (Hartley 2002, 182). Myths can be seen as a form of cultural memory in which the shared memories of a nation are stored (Molloy 2016, viii). Diane Molloy defines cultural memory as “what survives when the eyewitnesses are dead and society must rely on stories and other reminders to represent the past” (viii). In the case of the First World War, these “stories and [...] reminders” take the form of several different kinds of cultural manifestations, such as Armistice Day celebrations, parts of school curricula, or war memorials in countless villages, towns, and cities. They serve to “convert historical events […] and families’ individual mourning for their dead […] into a grander vision, of a national […] destiny” (Feuchtwang 2010, 288). And English War Poetry is no exception: Given its centrality in the school curriculum in Britain and the rest of the English-speaking world, we associate it with a part of our former selves. Today […] the poetry of the soldier-poets has coalesced, beyond literary history and cultural memory, into a recognisable structure of feeling. (Das 2013, 4)

Clearly, the cultural and political significance of the First World War for British society can hardly be overestimated. Its power in the present is derived from its function as a myth that “make[s] dominant cultural and historical values, attitudes and beliefs seem entirely ‘natural’, self-evident and timeless” (Grant 2017, 17). As such, the myth of the First World War serves a distinct purpose in the present by forming a frame through which Britain views its past (16, 27). By using the tropes and motifs of English War Poetry, PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake connects to this frame and its ‘popular’ “structure of feeling” (Das 2013, 4) in order to offer a sharp critique of it.

Exposing and Transforming the Myth in Let England Shake Grant argues that Harvey is reshaping a “myth” of the First World War in Let England Shake (2017, 228). At first glance, many of its songs affirm this myth by imitating established features of War Poetry such as its pastoralism. Through this imitation of and ‘lyrical participation’ in the national

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myth, Harvey creates sites of memory within her text that evoke the mythical lens through which Britain narrates the First World War. Yet, instead of conserving this world view, Harvey works against affirming the particular narrative of the past expressed in this myth through the ambiguity and uncertainty that set her lyrics distinctly apart from English War Poetry. The way in which Harvey not only challenges this myth but also re-­ conceptualises it becomes most evident in a song that has so far received no critical attention. “Written on the Forehead” is unlike the other songs on the album because the setting it evokes is neither familiar from the First World War, nor ‘English’ in any sense.11 Instead, the landscape is dominated by “Date palms, orange / and tangerine trees,” (WTF, V9/10) and populated by “people throwing dinars / at the belly-dancers” (WTF, V1/2), pointing towards a stereotypical Middle Eastern or ‘oriental’ location. At first sight, the song is clearly remote from the events and places narrated in the other songs. Yet, the language and the imagery used within “Written on the Forehead” bear a striking resemblance to the language and imagery used in the rest of the album. The “trench of burning oil” (WTF, V4) can be connected to the trenches in “On Battleship Hill” and the “fetid river” recalls both the stench of the alleys and the River Thames “hastily sold for nothing” (LLR, V9) in “The Last Living Rose”. The people trying to “swim away / through 10,000 tonnes of sewage, / fate written on their foreheads” (WTF, V22–24) share their dire situation with the young men who hide in the muck in “In the Dark Places”. The war being fought in the song is a foreign one, seemingly remote from the First World War or Britain. The lyrics evoke an inventory of images of war-ravaged cities such as Kabul, in war zones in which British troops were and are actively fighting. By thus transposing the traumata, damage, and pain inflicted on both individuals and the British nation by the First World War to a foreign and contemporary context, Harvey re-conceptualises the British myth as transnational: war causes decay wherever it is waged. Such a transnationalisation challenges the prevailing British myth as a focal point of national identity. While Britain draws upon collective memories of futile and brutal bloodshed for its own national affirmation, it has also brought and brings war to other places, to the ‘beloved cities’ of civilians in Iraq or Afghanistan. In its evocation of contemporary rather than past conflicts, “Written on The Forehead”, unlike the other songs on the album, emphasises that  Hereafter abbreviated as WTF.

11

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Britain’s participation in armed conflict still causes violence and death in other places. Once this re-conceptualised myth has been identified, it can also be read retrospectively into the other songs: “Tanks and feet” did not only plough the “The Glorious Land” of the Somme but also intervened in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the first song of the album, “Let England Shake”, Harvey sings “Indifference has won” and, when listening to “Written on the Forehead”, it becomes evident that this does not only refer to the fallen British soldiers in World War I but is also extended to include the British public’s weariness of current military involvements. Musically, the song also hides a transnational trace: The sampled song in “Let England Shake”, “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” thematises how the name of the city of Istanbul was changed.12 The ancient ‘Byzantium’ became ‘Constantinople’ and eventually ‘Istanbul’ (Ehrlich 2018). Each name reflects its status as capital of a different empire: the Byzantine Empire, then the capital of Constantine’s Christian Empire, and, in 1930, the Turkish capital (Ehrlich 2018). Each change of its name can be seen as an attempt to reconstruct the history of that city to privilege one cultural view of the past over others and to override the previous cultural significance attached to it. In this sense, the song can be seen as an example for processes in which chosen cultural discourses are used to construct a national myth at the expense of other discourses through the changing of place names. Its inclusion as a sample in a song dealing with national trauma (“England’s dancing days are done”) is then only fitting. As Gardner points out, the album focuses on the “equality of carnage” and critically reflects on war and homeland, both of which “can be mapped anywhere” (2015, 142). Much of the album’s critical anti-war power is derived from this transposition and reshaping of the British First World War myth (Grant 2017, 252). Let England Shake thus becomes a mouthpiece for critical voices within British cultural memory that are less audible than the dominant myth of the First World War. Because of this, the album does not, as Grant argues, present “a lingering pride in [Britain’s] military achievements” but quite the opposite (253).

12  In fact, both songs can be played simultaneously as harmonies and rhythm match. Something that Harvey demonstrates during her live performance on the Andrew Marr Show on 18 April 2010 (Marr 2010).

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The Broken Promise of ‘English England’ on Let England Shake So far, the notion of a British national identity has been invoked relatively uncritically. It is, however, a problematic notion—especially with regard to the distinction between England and Britain. MacPhee and Poddar aptly characterise the relation between the two names as being “bound up in a range of distinct but overlapping meanings for inhabitants of the British Isles” (2007, 1). Bryant has argued that “what it means to be English has less salience for them [the English] than what it means to be Scottish for most Scots” (2006, 158). Hidden in this reasoning is a hegemonial view of national identity, as ‘England’ and‘Britain’ are conflated in the views of many English. However, Bryant further outlines that there nonetheless is a strong sense of ‘Englishness’ and has proposed that different constructions of English identity are distinguished by their orientation to time (past vs. present) and place (home vs. abroad) (2006, 159). At various times, different constructions or combinations are “reproduce[d] and transform[ed]” (200) and compete with each other (Kenny 2015, 47). These constructions vary in their degree of emphasis of ‘Englishness’. One of these constructions is that of an urban, open, and tolerant ‘Cosmopolitan England’ (Bryant 2006, 191). It acknowledges that immigration benefits the economy and enriches culture but is largely limited to urban centres, like London, in which ethnic diversity is much more common than in rural areas (192  f.). Seen in this context, nationalism is a progressive, inclusive force that does not emphasise ethnicity (Brooks and Donnelly 2017, 3), but rather propagates a common culture that accommodates all different communities and accepts cultural hybridity (Bryant 2006, 193). This view, however, stands in stark contrast to the construction of the “English England” to which Let England Shake is alluding. This construction has been described as oriented towards the past and insular. It emphasises an essentialised inventory of traditions, landscape, customs, and culture, such as good manners, a special sense of humour, queuing, decency, and individual liberty (Bryant 2006, 177). It marks these characteristics as inherently English and defines English identity so constructed against the ‘Other’ the ‘German’, the ‘French’, the Empire, or the ‘Irish’ (161 f.). It engages with two sub-constructions: an ‘Early and Old England’ and an England as ‘The Green and Pleasant Land’. While the former presents the English nation as rooted within a continuous and fervently English history, the latter explicitly tries to distinguish

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England’s traditions and institutions from those of Britain (Bryant 2006, 170).13 Here, an idealised and mythologised “rural idyll” of the English countryside serves “as the repository for a ‘real’ England where the traditional values of the preindustrial era might be found” and thus becomes a core element of English cultural identity (Blackstone 2017, 562–564). It is in this construction that pastoralism becomes central to the formation of an English identity. This construction asserts a closed English identity and is maintained by English War Poetry and the British First World War Myth, upon which the album draws. Just as English War Poetry emphasises England instead of Britain, its canon has excluded non-‘English’ poets, writers from the Empire (Das 2013, 25). The focus on the English landscape (as in the poems of Edward Thomas), the use of traditional English forms (as in Owen’s sonnets), or the recourse to historical events to make sense of the war (as Graves’ juxtaposition of the First World War with past conflicts) leads to a construction of Englishness that is based on the conviction that Britishness is a product of English tradition and history; Englishness subsumes Britishness. Accordingly, it has been argued that the specific British construction of First World War memory is, firstly, “one of the most nationalist” and, secondly, opposed to European integration and conducive to insularity (Grant 2017, 22 and 26). Through the use of the pastoral, Let England Shake thematises an ‘English England’ and presents this rendition of national identity as a dominant narrative. On the album, landscape, culture, and history are portrayed as inherently English, as the song “The Glorious Land” dramatises. Harvey has used an old Russian folk song as a lyrical basis for this song. This untitled Russian song is categorised as a soldier’s song (cf. Reeder 1993, 155), and its narrative structure remains largely unchanged in Harvey’s rendition. The original song laments those killed in war and juxtaposes agriculture and war as two forces shaping the land. War shapes the land by “ploughing” it and also leaves emotional devastation, grief, and orphans. Harvey removes all particular references (like the “Cossack heads” or the river Don; ibid.) but retains both the catchy question-answer scheme of the song and its main theme, war’s devastating consequences for people and soil. Furthermore, the setting is both modernised (the “horses’ hooves” are replaced by “tanks and feet marching”; TGL, V3) 13  Christopher Bryant identifies the Church of England, public schools, pubs, cricket and fox-hunting as such uniquely English traditions and institutions (2006, 170).

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and ‘Westernised’, as Harvey adds specific remarks to “England” and “America” (TGL). Not only is the song full of pastoral imagery, but it also contains a faint trace of an ‘Early and Old England’: Harvey repeatedly sings “Oh, England”—which, incidentally, is not included in the text printed in the album booklet—in a very odd manner. Upon close listening, that exclamation could be heard as “Oh, Engla Land”, which is the name given to the island of Britain by the Angles and Saxons after they arrived in the fifth century (Kumar 2003, 5) and clearly points towards the earliest beginnings of an English nation. The pastoralism present in other songs and these songs’ closeness to the English folk song tradition14 invoke England as ‘The Green and Pleasant Land’. Gardner argues that Harvey uses this construction of England to tell violent and brutal stories (2017, 77), and indeed, the land Harvey sings about is not all ‘green and pleasant’. Rather, it provides identity in spite of the ugly face it is shown to have on the album. In the context of the album, all there is to find in English history is death, war, and decay, which break the promise of an ‘English England’ as being a “refuge from a variety of threats associated with modern life” and reveals that the “collective inheritance” of Englishness and its customs and culture belie expectations of security (Kenny 2015, 42). Thus, the ‘English England’ is called into question and its role in the construction of a national identity is both problematised and criticised. It is, then, surprising that the identification of the speaker with his or her home country is not negatively affected by this discrediting of England’s historical roots. This identification with a land in decay is what Gardner has described as a “pride of place” displayed in Let England Shake (2017, 79) and is also in line with Bryant’s statement that the “attachment to the green and pleasant land […] seems strong enough to overcome evidence that all too often the land is neither green nor pleasant” (2006, 178). However, since Harvey’s lyrics remain ambivalent on this matter, the possible causes for this decay are largely dependent on the listeners’ construction of England as well as their individual identities. Thus, there remain two extreme possibilities for the recipient of this album: either aligning oneself with an exclusive and culturally pessimistic construction that is historically rooted in an ‘English England’ or opting for an inclusive

14  This refers to the use of the mentioned folk song lyrics and folk instruments, such as the auto-harp (Britannica 2020).

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one which embraces a global and contemporary view of a ‘Cosmopolitan England’. The difference between these two perspectives becomes evident when analysing the ‘nation songs’ on the album, “Let England Shake”, “The Last Living Rose” and “England”.15 All of them not only celebrate landscapes but can also be read as songs drawing upon blood-and-soil politics. They mention English blood (LES, V3), England as a refuge from the “[g]oddam’ Europeans” (LLR, V1–2), and affection and allegiance to England from birth to death (ENG, V14, 23–25). If read from an exclusionary perspective, the songs thematise an ‘English England’ in the sense that they suggest a kind of “ethnic purity” to which English national identity is linked (Bryant 2006, 181). ‘Englishness’, then, is racially coded to refer to the descendants of “the ancient Britons/Celts from the Isles, or from Anglo-Saxon settlers” (Blackstone 2017, 561). This ‘Little England’ construction is characterised by a feeling that immigration is constant threat to a white and homogeneous English culture and that promotes a xenophobia which excludes non-white British citizens (Bryant 2006, 189 f.). The fact that in all three nation songs England is presented as in a process of decay corroborates this idea. Indeed, recent developments, such as the 2008 financial crisis (Brooks and Donnelly 2017, 2) or the political and humanitarian crises in the Middle East that led to increased immigration (Blackstone 2017, 561), can be said to have caused a “backlash against globalisation” (Brooks and Donnelly 2017, 2), which is emphasised in the construction of “English England”. In this context, such a view would then attribute the decline of English blood in “Let England Shake” to immigration. It is, then, only fitting that such an England would fall back on the theme of a “rural, island nation” (Blackstone 2017, 564) that isolates itself to protect “The Last Living Rose” from the threat of the “[g]oddam’ Europeans” (LLR, V1)—that is, further immigration. The fact that a short film for the album was used by a nationalist organisation for its website further proves that Harvey’s songs can be read as representing this ‘white past, multicultural present’ alignment.16 On the website, “below an image of the Cross of St  Hereafter abbreviated as LES and ENG respectively.  It moreover provides a very clear example for the mentioned empowerment of the reader and his/her role with regard to intertextuality. It shows that the meaning of a text can indeed vary for different readers or listeners depending on their socio-cultural and cultural background (Berndt and Tonger-Erk 2013, 22). 15 16

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George, seemingly rendered in blood against snow, under the title ‘Let England Shake’, Harvey’s film sat among anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim and white supremacist posts and adverts” (Gardner 2017, 70). However, the deconstruction and trans-nationalisation of the British myth of the First World War and the interplay of these songs with the remainder of the songs on the album defy this appropriation. As Gardner proposes, an inclusive perspective on English national identity that then reverses cause and effect yields a more convincing reading of the three ‘nation songs’: It is precisely the construction of such an ethnically pure and exclusive ‘English England’ that seems to thwart every effort to construct a positive English identity in the present (2017, 79). The continuous occupation with the past that stains the national landscape can be seen as the “heavy stones” (LES, V16) that fall “by the shores of lovely lakes” (LES, V15). The myth of the First World War, the English history symbolised in the “fountain of death” (LES, V9), and the many soldiers who “have seen and done things [they] want to forget” (WMM, V1) can then be read as scars in the English nation that “[leave] / sadness” (ENG, V5/6) and a “bitter” (ENG, V8) taste. Here, Harvey gives voice to the ubiquitous fatalism present within Britain. The view of an ‘English England’ attributes the decline and threatening of English identity to a relative economic decline, decolonisation processes, increasing European integration, and immigration (Kenny 2015, 37, 43). And exactly this feeling of decay is detrimental to the formation and maintenance of an ‘English England’. In other words, the decline of England is already laid out in the particular construction of England’s past, conveyed within the British World War myth and an ‘English England’. In “The Last Living Rose”, the rural idyll of that ‘English England’ is revealed to be a façade and exposed as a fraud. In the song, the highly-praised—yet ambiguously presented—English landscape is “sold for nothing” (LLR, V9), thus revealing how little regard is in fact shown for  the natural features of England, which have—in the light of an ‘English England’—so much value attached to them in the construction of an essentialised English identity. Such criticism is present in other songs, too. The ambiguity of “The Glorious Land”17 allows that “land” to be read not only as the Somme or Afghanistan but—according to the logic of “English England”—also as England itself. In turn, the “deformed” (TGL, V8) and “orphaned  Hereafter abbreviated as TGL.

17

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c­hildren” (TGL, V10) are the “glorious fruit of our land” (TGL, V7, emphasis added), that is, England. The foreign element in “England” and the “people [stagnating] with time” (ENG, V21) must then be read in light of the English nation’s inability to acknowledge that “components of English culture have […] been enriched by an incredible diversity of sources” (Bryant 2006, 181) and its refusal to recognise that old constructions of national identity have become difficult to maintain in the context of the twenty-first century (Kumar 2003, 38). Even a seemingly ‘timeless’ English identity is subject to change (Blackstone 2017, 576). It is precisely the reliance on mythologised aspects of England’s past that perpetuate English particularity and frame “the English and their heritage […] as an endangered and embattled grouping” (Kenny 2015, 43) that constructs a culturally exclusive sense of national identity. This juxtaposition is what Black describes with his concept of a ‘white past, multicultural present’ alignment of contemporary discourses on English identity (Black 2016, 797). An inclusive and civic construction of national identity that includes all British nations as well as foreign influences is thus presented as incompatible with such particularising tendencies of an ‘English England’ (Kenny 2015, 44). Seen from this perspective, the album can then be described as firmly critical of the dominant construction of an ‘English England’ (Grant 2017, 249), and to have at its core, a distrust for cultural homogeneity (Gardner 2017, 79). Using ‘England’ instead of ‘Britain’ for the album title and the lyrics suggests that the album can be seen as evidence of a “perceived crisis of British identity” (Kenny 2015, 41). In the wake of this development, traditional ideas and sentiments of England and Englishness were presented as a “refuge” from the threats to Britishness: globalisation, immigration and Europeanisation (42 f.). This “more Anglocentric […] sense of identity” can be seen as an explanation for Harvey’s choice of ‘England’ over ‘Britain’ for the album (35). It also explains why the use of pastoral images is so significant in the construction of Let England Shake. Not only is it a means of connecting to the literary genre of English War Poetry but it also serves to engage with a dominant construction of English identity and to offer fierce criticism of it. This analysis is not meant to contradict earlier observations about this album but rather to enrich them with another perspective that takes into consideration how Harvey has employed aspects of popular culture and popular narratives to reshape a view of the past that is deeply rooted within English society. It is particularly through its fundamental connection with the popular genre of English War Poetry that Let

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England Shake is able to lay bare the complex and, often, difficult entanglements of British society with its cultural narratives about the past and their significance for the present. It is also important to note how the album itself has retained its significance, how it still “chime[s] so uncannily with the times” (Troussé 2015). The questions regarding English (and British) national identity of 2011 have never been answered. On the contrary, they gathered pace with the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum and the 2016 Brexit referendum. Let England Shake still aptly reflects the deep rifts within Britain and England that came to light in the wake of these events between Brexiteers and Remainers, rural England and London as well as Scots, Welsh and Anglo-British. Released five years before the Brexit referendum, the album, in a way, foresaw some of the ‘trench lines’ of that vote long before the referendum brought them to light. It aptly and concisely predicts the 2016 events: “Goddam’ Europeans! / Take me back to England” (LLR, V1/2).

Works Cited Alexander, Michael. 2000. A history of English literature. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined communities. Reflections of the origin and spread of nationalism. London/New York: Verso. Australian War Memorial. 2020. Rosemary. Australian War Memorial. https:// www.awm.gov.au/commemoration/customs-­a nd-­c eremony/rosemar y. Accessed 4 Oct 2020. Azevedo, Cláudia, Chris Fuller, et al. 2015. An ambiguous murder: Question of intertextuality in PJ Harvey’s ‘the words that maketh murder’. In Song interpretation in 21st-century pop music, ed. Ralf von Appen, André Doehring, et al., 175–196. Farnham/Surrey: Ashgate. Berndt, Frauke, and Lily Tonger-Erk. 2013. Intertextualität. Eine Einführung. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag. Black, Jack. 2016. Celebrating British multiculturalism, lamenting England/ Britain’s past. Nations and Nationalism: Journal of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity. 22 (4): 786–802. Blackstone, Lee R. 2017. The aural and moral idylls of Englishness and folk music. Symbolic Interaction 40 (4): 561–580. Britannica. 2020. Autoharp. Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/art/autoharp. Accessed 4 Oct 2020.

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Brooks, Lee, and Mark Donnelly. 2017. Introduction: Englishness, whose Englishness. In Mad dogs and Englishness. Popular music and English identities, ed. Lee Brooks, Mark Donnelly, and Richard Mills, 1–16. London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Bryant, Christopher. 2006. The nations of Britain. New  York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carter, Ronald, and John McRae. 1997. The Routledge history of literature in English. London/New York: Routledge. Coyle, Martin, and John Peck. 2002. A brief history of English literature. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave. Das, Sanatu. 2007. War poetry and the realm of the senses: Owen and Rosenberg. In The Oxford handbook of British and Irish war poetry, ed. Tim Kendall, 73–99. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2013. Reframing First World War poetry: An introduction. In The Cambridge companion to the poetry of the First World War, ed. Sanatu Das, 3–34. New York/Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ehrlich, Blake. 2018. Istanbul. Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica. com/place/Istanbul#ref288128. Accessed 10 Oct 2020. Empire, Kitty. 2011. PJ Harvey – Review. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/mar/06/pj-­harvey-­troxy-­live-­england-­shake-­review. Accessed 4 Oct 2020. Feuchtwang, Stephan. 2010. Ritual and memory. In Memory. Histories, theories, debates, ed. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz, 281–298. New  York: Fordham Press. Freed, Nick. 2011. PJ Harvey – Let England Shake. Consequence of Sound. https:// consequenceofsound.net/2011/02/album-­r eview-­pj-­harvey-­l et-­e ngland-­ shake. Accessed 4 Oct 2020. Fussell, Paul. 1977. The great war and modern memory. New  York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gardner, Abigail. 2015. PJ Harvey and music video performance. Surrey: Ashgate. ———. 2017. PJ Harvey and remembering England. In Mad dogs and Englishness. Popular music and English identities, ed. Brooks Lee, Mark Donnelly, and Richard Mills, 66–82. London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Genders, Paul. 2017. Back when pop music was literary. TLS Online. https:// www.the-­tls.co.uk/articles/public/literary-­pop-­music. Accessed 4 Oct 2020. Grant, Peter. 2017. National myth and the First World War in modern popular music. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Grotenhuis, René. 2016. Nation-building as necessary effort in fragile states. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Gurney, Ivor. 2013. The silent one. In Poetry of the First World War. An anthology, ed. Tim Kendall, 134. Oxford: University Press.

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Hartley, John. 2002. Nation. In Communication, cultural and media studies. The key concepts, 180–182. London/New York: Routledge. Harvey, Polly Jean. 2011. Let England Shake. CD. Universal Island Records. Howarth, Peter. 2013. Poetic form and the First World War. In The Cambridge companion to the poetry of the First World War, ed. Sanatu Das, 51–65. New York/Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kendall, Tim. 2006. Modern English war poetry. New  York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kenny, Michael. 2015. The return of ‘Englishness’ in British political culture  – The end of unions? Journal of Common Market Studies 53 (1): 35–51. Kumar, Krishan. 2003. The making of English national identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Longley, Edna. 2007. War pastorals. In The Oxford handbook of British and Irish war poetry, ed. Tim Kendall, 461–482. New  York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. MacPhee, Graham, and Prem Poddar. 2007. Nationalism beyond the nation-state. In Empire and after. Englishness in postcolonial perspective, ed. Graham MacPhee and Prem Poddar, 1–21. Oxford/New York: Berghahn Books. Marr, Andrew. 2010. PJ Harvey Let England Shake Andrew Marr Show 18th April 2010. Youtube Video, 2:16. April 18, 2010. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=64C6Ih4QlrE. Accessed 4 Oct 2020. Metacritic. 2020. Let England Shake by PJ Harvey. Reviews and tracks. Metacritic. http://www.metacritic.com/music/let-­england-­shake/pj-­harvey. Accessed 4 Oct 2020. Molloy, Diane. 2016. Cultural memory and literature. Re-imagining Australia’s past. Leiden: Brill. Nowak, Helge. 2010. Literature in Britain and Ireland: A history. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag. Petridis, Alexis. 2011. PJ Harvey, Let England Shake  – Review. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2011/feb/10/pj-­harvey-­let-­england-­ shake-­review. Accessed 4 Oct 2020. Plagenhoef, Scott. 2011. PJ Harvey: Let England Shake album review, pitchfork. Pitchfork. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15120-­let-­england-­shake. Accessed 4 Oct 2020. Price, Simon. 2011. Album: PJ Harvey, Let England Shake (island). Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-­entertainment/music/reviews/album-­ pj-­harvey-­let-­england-­shake-­island-­2213667.html. Accessed 4 Oct 2020. Rawlinson, Mark. 2013. Later poets of the First World War. In The Cambridge companion to the poetry of the First World War, ed. Sanatu Das, 81–93. New York/Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Reeder, Roberta. 1993. Russian folk lyrics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Sanders, Andrew. 1996. The short Oxford history of English literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sassoon, Siegfried. 1917. The death bed. The old huntsman and other poems. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57214/the-­ death-­bed. Accessed 11 Mar 2021. Seeber, Hans U. 2004. Englische Literaturgeschichte. Stuttgart: Metzler Verlag. Sherry, Vincent. 2013. First World War poetry: A cultural landscape. In The Cambridge companion to the poetry of the First World War, ed. Das Sanatu, 35–50. New York: Cambridge University Press. Stowers, Richard. 2015. Could the attack on Chunuk Bair have succeeded? New Zealand, WW100. https://ww100.govt.nz/could-­the-­attack-­on-­chunuk-­bair-­ have-­succeeded. Accessed 4 Oct 2020. Troussé, Stephen. 2015. PJ Harvey on Let England Shake, poetry and her career: I was quite prepared to fail. Uncut Magazine. http://www.uncut.co.uk/features/pj-­h arvey-­o n-­l et-­e ngland-­s hake-­p oetry-­a nd-­h er-­c areer-­i -­w as-­q uite-­ prepared-­to-­fail-­501. Accessed 4 Oct 2020. Wellington, Jennifer. 2017. Exhibiting war. In The great war, museums, and memory in Britain, Canada, and Australia. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER 7

Transmedia Performance in Scandinavian Singalong Shows: On the Transmediation of Liveness and Participation in Community Singing Lea Wierød Borčak

Introduction The corona pandemic has changed the way we consume culture. As a result of the requirement of social distancing, digital participation in cultural events is proliferating. In this chapter, I pursue the question of what happens to performances when they are transmediated, that is, distributed across several different medialities—a question that is perhaps more pertinent and urgent than ever. I focus on a kind of cultural performance that has become particularly popular as recreation during the social isolation of the pandemic and that has, somewhat surprisingly, turned out to adapt very well to transmediation: community singing. Indeed, even before the

L. W. Borčak (*) Linnaeus University, Växjö, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Gurke, S. Winnett (eds.), Words, Music, and the Popular, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85543-7_7

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pandemic, community singing was strongly on the rise in Scandinavian countries and was already being transmediated in new ways. The cases I examine here range from long-standing community singing traditions to very recently developed ones. This chapter has a double goal of developing the theoretical discussion of transmedia performance and, building on this, analyzing a couple of concrete cases. My purpose here is to engage in a discussion of how performance can be understood as transmedial. Despite the considerable scholarly attention given to the notion of transmedia storytelling, scholars agree that many concepts and phenomena can be transmedial, including performance. A theoretical expansion of this topic will provide a better critical basis for understanding the increasing appeal of transmediated performances like the cases I analyze. The second part examines Scandinavian community singing events in order to propose a concrete approach to the subject of transmedia performance. I focus specifically on singing shows from Danish and Swedish TV.  What characterizes these shows is an ever-greater emphasis on the sheer pleasure of engaging in performance rather than the communication of specific messages in songs (see Borčak 2020). They therefore provide an ideal case for investigating the specifically non-narrative traits of performance. Moreover, Scandinavian singing shows are apt examples of how national identity is literally performed in popular culture—a phenomenon that has so far received little scholarly attention (Edensor 2002, 2). In common discourse, community singing is often assumed to represent high culture, emphasizing a classical, even perhaps somewhat bourgeois song repertoire. However, as will become apparent, Scandinavian community singing is increasingly representative of popular music culture.

Part 1: Transmedia Performance in Theory: How Transmedial Is Performance Even though Henry Jenkins himself acknowledges that storytelling is by no means the only phenomenon that can be transmedial—in fact, he lists several other “transmedia logics” (Jenkins 2011)—the two terms transmedia storytelling have become virtually inseparable, not least due to Jenkins’s own work. In the introduction to a recent anthology on transmediation, editor Lars Elleström points out that even though there is a “plenitude of transmediation types”, research has “only paid attention to and given

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names to very few forms of transmediation” (2020, 5). Transmedial practices are generally regarded to be expanding in contemporary society— even though it should not be considered an entirely novel phenomenon (Freeman 2016, 2). As Jan-Noël Thon and Marie-Laure Ryan point out, the concept of convergence culture raises the crucial question of what it is that is being transmediated (2014, 2)? Like many others, they take the “deliberate step of placing narrative at the center of media convergence”, although narrative is not seen as the only possible common denominator for transmediality (2). The dominance of narrative is the result of particular research interests among transmedia scholars. The field has had an overrepresentation of scholars working with literature and other narrative-based media which is likely to have marked its course. However that may be, the interlinking of narrative and transmediality is arbitrary in the sense that there is no necessity in the current state of affairs. A main incentive to address the bias towards narrative is that it threatens to overshadow the relatively few studies that focus on other aspects of transmediality. For example, in an article on transmedia performance in modern digital theatre, Sophy Smith states that Jenkins “suggests that transmedia storytelling can be broken down into different types, including […] transmedia performance” (2018, 322). This hierarchical exposition shows how storytelling is conceived of as an umbrella term that encompasses other transmedia types. However, this misrepresents Jenkins’s classification of different transmedial phenomena in which storytelling is viewed as just one form among several. In an attempt to contribute to the counterbalancing of an unevenly theorized field, I take the “deliberate step” of placing performance at the center of a discussion of transmediality and thereby emphasize the distinctly non-­ narrative traits of transmedia performance. Adapting one of Jenkins’s notable definitions, transmedia performance can be construed as a performance so large that it cannot be contained within a single medium (Jenkins 2006, 97). Such a definition invites the question of what constitutes a single medium. In some academic discourse on intermediality—in which transmediality is understood as a subcategory—this question has been treated rather casually (Elleström 2010, 11). Irina Rajewsky, for example, criticizes Bolter and Grusin’s influential notion of Remediation for not clarifying what remediation actually remediates (2005, 61), since the phenomena subsumed under the heading are seemingly arbitrary and not comparable (see also Korsgaard 2017, 44). Similarly, Ryan lists phenomena that have been circumscribed as “media”,

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demonstrating the haphazardness permeating the definitions of the term “medium” itself (2014, 25). Both Elleström (2010, 13–27) and Ryan (2014, 25–31) have tried to rid the field of these terminological inconsistencies by providing systematic definitions of medium. To Elleström, media can be divided into three types: basic, qualified and technical. Qualified media have undergone a cultural or aesthetic valuation process and are comparable to the concept of art forms; for example, sound is a basic medium whereas music is a qualified medium. Technical media are the concrete channels needed to display basic and qualified media, such as loudspeakers or musical instruments. Further, Elleström suggests analyzing media according to four modalities: the material, the sensory, the spatiotemporal and the semiotic. Ryan, on the other hand, suggests working with three categories of mediality, the semiotic, the technical and the cultural. What these two approaches have in common is that they provide a definition of medium that is significantly broader than such quotidian definitions focusing on technical media, mass media or digital media. In an Elleström- or Ryan-­ based media paradigm, almost everything can be considered a medium. I find this understanding helpful for the present purposes because it circumvents the common misleading tendency of drawing a line between the mediated and the non-mediated. A clear concept of medium is thus the prerequisite for thinking about transmedia, transmediation or transmediality, that is, the transfer or dispersal of content across different media. Transmedia scholars seem to agree that transmediality is gradable, which means that phenomena, practices or concepts can be more or less susceptible to being mediated through numerous media. Thon and Ryan suggest theorizing this gradeability as a spectrum ranging from “medium free” to “medium specific” with varying degrees of “transmedial validity” in the middle (2014, 3). They mention interactivity as an example of a not quite medium free, yet not totally medium specific concept. In this view, some media (e.g. theater and computer games) but not all (e.g. literature and film) can be seen as interactive. Similarly, Elleström states that media content “may be transmedial to various degrees” (2020, 2). Very much in line with this taxonomical approach, some scholars have called attention to the intrinsic transmedial quality of performance, claiming that “performance lacks a distinctive medium” (Carroll 1986, 78). Thus, from the point of view of performance studies, “the prevailing division of the arts by medium is arbitrary” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2004, 43).

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Seen from this vantage point, one could argue that performance is indeed an inherently transmedial phenomenon. Nonetheless, it is also often claimed that certain media-specific aspects of performance need to be taken into account. Erika Fischer-Lichte claims that “the specific mediality of performance consists of the bodily copresence of actors and spectators” (2008, 38). This resonates with Peggy Phelan’s striking statement: “Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented or otherwise participate in the representation of representation: Once it does so, it becomes something other than performance” (1993, 146). Such statements suggest that performance cannot be rendered by media that preclude the bodily copresence of spectators. This amounts to saying that a necessary precondition for performance is a spatial and temporal “liveness” that is commonly understood to be the opposite of mediation. The idea that live performances are different from mediated ones because they are non-mediated or immediate is, according to Philip Auslander, “commonsensical” (2008, 107). However, recent research on the concept of liveness reveals that the line between live and mediated is not at all that clear.

Liveness in Transmedia Performance Auslander broke the ground for a more basic view on the opposition of live versus mediated by stating that liveness and mediation are mutually dependent (1999, 11). Live experiences very often entail technological mediation, such as sound amplification or on-stage screens in concerts. Moreover, liveness itself cannot be defined except in relation to the mediated (Auslander 2008, 109). For Auslander, cultural context must be considered here, since in our current highly mediatized society, we have become so accustomed to the excessive presence of technological mediation that liveness hardly assumes a privileged status. Likewise, Christopher Balme observes the culturally contingent aspect of the matter when he states that “the relationship between the live and the mediated is far less confrontational in artistic practice than it is in academic discourse” (2008, 85). He furthermore suggests that insisting on the privilege of liveness— understood as non-mediated—would be reactionary since it is increasingly incompatible with the assumptions and experiences of a highly media-­ competent modern audience. In the foreword to a recent anthology on liveness, Reason and Lindelof also argue that liveness is not an ontological category—rather, it

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designates a specific kind of experience (2017, 2). Since liveness is neither bound to physical copresence nor temporal simultaneity “experiences of live performance need to be considered beyond the specific or singular moment of the live encounter” (10–11). Reason and Lindelof are in line with Auslander and Balme in referring to the hypermediated nature of current society as one of the factors pointing to the futility of insisting on immediacy: [S]creen presence today presents us with a hyperreality of presence that is not only confused with the real but is at times more real than the real. In this light, clinging to a purity of absolute presence seems as nostalgic as ancient Greeks mourning how writing had supplanted the presence of live speech. (2017, 4)

This statement conjures up Bolter and Grusin’s central conceptual pairing of immediacy with hypermediacy (1999, 6). The former term denotes media who seek to disguise their own mediality, creating the illusion of non-mediation or liveness. The latter refers to a tendency of media to point to themselves by employing conspicuous media-specific effects. Indeed, immediacy and hypermediacy are mutually dependent, as immediacy can, paradoxically, be obtained through hypermediacy (6–9). This mutual dependency is an issue I will deal with in my case studies below. According to Auslander, the bias toward live events in performance studies is misleading precisely because, as Reason and Lindelof also emphasize, liveness is not a characteristic of “the performance itself” but something “experienced and felt by performers and spectators” (Auslander 2008, 108). The fact that liveness is not an ontological category is demonstrated by the fact that the term lacks a stable definition. Although we tend to think we understand “live” intuitively, Auslander demonstrates that the term actually covers a broad range of meanings. “Classical” liveness requires both physical copresence and temporal simultaneity, but over time we have come to downplay the importance of the copresence dimension, resulting in the concept of “Live TV” to gain widespread acceptance. Indeed, it is even possible to forsake both the physical and temporal dimensions and still retain liveness, as is evident from the fact that we do not conceive of the notion of “live recording” as oxymoronic (Auslander 2008, 111). In the case, for instance, of a musical live recording listened to in spatial and temporal distance from the original event, liveness is really “primarily affective” (110).

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In a comparative study of what liveness means in different disciplines, Martin Barker provides further support for Auslander’s initial observation of there being no clear definition of the concept. Barker demonstrates that “classical liveness”, that is, spatial and temporal immediacy, is more highly privileged in performance studies than in any other discipline, largely because of the mutual influence of performers and audience (2013, 43)— or what Fischer-Lichte terms the feedback loop (2008, 38). Interestingly, it seems that music is the type of performance that privileges copresence and simultaneity the least (Barker 2013, 57). For as Simon Frith observes, “live music does not, in fact, compete with mediated music” (2015, 270). We may even say that this amounts to a false opposition, since “when the full scope of the terms technology and mediation are considered, we see that there can be no such thing as technologically unmediated performance” (Auslander 2008, 117). Such a consideration of the “full scope” of the crucial terms is exactly what lies behind Elleström’s and Ryan’s broadly inclusive definitions of “medium”: nothing is not mediated. Barker concludes his study of the many cross-disciplinary meanings of liveness by observing that all the disciplines dealing with this concept tend to retain some privileging of temporal simultaneity, whereas physical copresence seems to be relatively nonessential (2013, 57), thus supporting Auslander’s conclusion that temporal simultaneity remains more decisive than spatial copresence, although the importance of both is dwindling (2008, 112).

Participation in Transmedia Performance Community singing epitomizes the type of performance that Thomas Turino has termed “participatory performance” (2008, 23). Distinct from presentational performance, participatory performance is characterized by the absence of a distinction between active artist and passive audience. This is exactly what sets community singing apart from many other types of musical performances: its goal is that everyone present actively participates in performance by singing along. This also means that the interaction between performer and audience so insistently foregrounded by Fischer-Lichte cannot retain the same primacy in this particular type of performance—simply because a distinction between those two roles does not exist in this genre. Turino further defines participation as actively contributing to making sound (2008, 28). His definition is somewhat narrow compared to the

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inclusive approaches of musicologists such as Small (1998, 11) and Frith (1996, 203) who consider listening to be an integral part of musical performance. Because of its emphasis on participation in this “restricted sense” (Turino 2008, 28), community singing lends itself to a more critical probing of the degree to which participation in performance can be said to be transmedial. It is arguably easier to understand how a typical “presentational performance” such as a classical concert can be transmediated on television and radio without losing much of its essence, since the listening act—that is, the task of the audience—is already passively inscribed in the “live” event. But what can account for the fact that community singing, with its intense focus on active participation, seemingly also facilitates transmediation? What is the appeal of watching community singing on TV? Taking into account the definition of liveness as an aspect of experience as discussed earlier, the answer might reside in the imagined simultaneity of the performance and reception of the event. For the imagined shared performative community, albeit geographically dispersed, supplants the requirement of physical presence. Participatory performance downplays the musical “work” and the star performer and is instead associated with popular or folk culture rather than with the realm of fine arts. In this respect, Jenkins’s description of today’s culture of media convergence bears striking resemblance to Turino’s concept of participatory performance: Jenkins states that just as “in a folk culture, there is no clear division between producers and consumers”, so in “convergence culture, everyone’s a participant” (2008, 136–137). In the age of YouTube artists, the elitist status of the performer is challenged, as everyone may be a performer. Far from precluding active participation in musical and other types of performances, the contemporary media landscape actually facilitates and encourages participation in performance, albeit in a different sense than the one strictly privileging physical copresence, as in Phelan and Fischer-Lichte. In a foreword to an anthology on participatory art, Claire Bishop describes a similar move toward participation within the realm of art, stating an interest in the “social dimension of participation—rather than activation of the individual viewer in so-called ‘interactive art’” (2006, 10). The difference between participation and interactivity implicitly suggested here by Bishop is actually stated explicitly by Jenkins, who clarifies the confusion of these two conflated notions by proposing a clear distinction: whereas interactivity is a property of technical media, participation is an aspect of culture (Jenkins 2006, 137). In other words, technical media

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may be designed to be interactive, thereby inviting participation. But whether or not participation actually occurs depends on factors outside of the respective medium. It follows from this distinction that “participation is more open-ended, less under the control of media producers and more under the control of media consumers” (Jenkins 2006, 137). Jenkins’s distinction has immense explanatory force with respect to the transmediality of performance. If, of the conceptual pair of interactivity and participation, only interactivity is a feature of a specific medium, then participation is in a very concrete sense transmedial; it can be facilitated by several media and across media, since it is something that people, not technical media, do. This is another factor that might account for the fact that participation in community singing is seemingly unhindered by its mediation through screens and its dispersal across wide spaces.

Part 2: Transmedia Performance in Action: Transmediated Community Singing Scandinavian community singing provides an ideal case study for three reasons. Firstly, although song can certainly be construed as creating a kind of narrative of national identity (and indeed, many song texts constitute little narratives in themselves), there is currently a strong trend among participants in Scandinavian singing events toward emphasizing the performative aspects of singing above the narrative aspects of songs/lyrics (Borčak 2020). Secondly, Scandinavian community singing is currently undergoing a pervasive mediatization enhanced (though not entirely caused) by the coronavirus lockdowns. Community singing is now being mediated in various ways—through TV, internet, social media and apps— all of which foreground the transmediality of singing. Thirdly, since community singing in general is a paramount example of participatory performance, it provides an ideal case for investigating how its dispersal into different media platforms affords or limits performative participation. I have chosen to focus on three cases, two Danish and one Swedish, that exhibit some interesting and at times diverging strategies for transmediating community singing. The Swedish case is “Allsång på Skansen” (‘Community singing at Skansen’, my translation; hereafter APS), a yearly series of singalong shows that take place each summer at Skansen, an open-air museum in the heart of Stockholm. The most viewed APS

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episode in 2020 had as many as 1,409,000 viewers (Kihlström 2020). The Danish cases are, firstly, an all-day singing show entitled “Live fra Højskolesangbogen” (‘Live from the Folk High School Song Book’, my translation; hereafter LFH), which was broadcast twice in 2018 and 2020 with a total of 518,000 viewers tuning in to the first airing of the show (Kahr 2018). Secondly, a series of morning singalong shows initiated in response to the Danish COVID-19 lockdown, called “Morgensang med Phillip Faber” (‘Morning singing with Phillip Faber’, my translation; hereafter MSP). During March 2020, each episode of MSP and/or its “sister show”, “Fællessang hver for sig” (‘Community singing apart’, my translation) which was broadcast on Friday evenings, was watched by an average of 1,370,000 Danes.1 All shows are broadcast on national public TV (Sweden’s Television and the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, respectively).

Allsång på Skansen In an article about performativity of Nordic space in APS, Chad Bergman points out that this show is actually “two distinct events wrapped up in one”: a live event (with a physically present audience) and a mediated one (2010, 81). Considering the preceding discussion of liveness, it is highly questionable whether this distinction is really meaningful; at the very least, we need a qualification of what mediation means if we are to conceive of it as opposed to live. However, there are obviously differences between being physically present and watching the show on TV. Although all of the singing shows discussed here go to great lengths to make distant viewers and listeners feel an excitement that mimes that of being physically present, they have rather different strategies for how to achieve this effect. The strategy chosen by APS seems to be to make the show as spectacular as possible. This entails a lively camera handling including a vivid cutting rhythm and, significantly, a mixing of live and pre-recorded scenes. The show usually opens with a panoramic turning view of Stockholm and Lake Mälaren while the host and audience sing the song “Stockholm i mitt hjärta” (‘Stockholm in My Heart’, my translation) written in 1992 by Lasse Berghagen, a former host of the show. The lyrics praising the Lake Mälaren frame the visual shots of the lake in a rather national-­romanticist 1  The viewer numbers were obtained by mail from the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, 24 March 2021.

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manner. Thus, the two media—sung lyrics and visual footage—reinforce each other’s statement. Nicholas Cook observes that different media can interact in various ways when they are juxtaposed in a multimedial work or performance: when media reproduce each other’s contents, such as when text and image correspond closely in a movie, Cook calls it “conformance”. Conversely, when the contents of different media seem to contradict each other, such as the setting of a happy tune to a sad text, Cook terms it “contest” (Cook 1998, 98ff.). The juxtaposition of sweeping visuals of a picturesque lake with lyrics that praise its beauty is a clear example of medial convergence: the effect is that of a sensorially and semiotically saturated impression of the locality and atmosphere of the event. Another such example of medial conformance, with a similar effect, is the tendency to align the cutting rhythm of the camera with the rhythm of the performed songs. Here, rhythm is clearly also a transmedial phenomenon, one that makes up an important aspect in the transmediality of performance. According to Barker’s review of the varying attitudes to liveness in different disciplines, TV studies have generally regarded liveness as a “false construct” because of the way that mediation on TV is always angled and therefore potentially biased (2013, 45). This seems to hold true for APS, as the show is reported to have avoided filming the elderly part of its audience so as to convey the impression of a younger crowd (Kaijser 2016, 36). This deliberate enhancing of the difference between the experience of the physically present audience and that of the viewers underlines the strategy chosen by APS of exploiting medial effects in order to manipulate the viewers’ experience—at the cost of loyalty to the “original” event. Since many of its guest performers are well-known Swedish pop artists, APS tends to include a large number of pop songs, confirming Bolter and Grusin’s observation that performances of popular music tend to emphasize visual spectacle and multimedia (1999, 53). The mix of solo and community performances is an insistent blurring of the line between Turino’s participatory and presentational performance types. Obviously, this line was never clear-cut—we need to only think of the common practice of singing along at rock and pop concerts. But in APS, this practice is particularly explicit and orchestrated resulting in a tension between two different performative ideals: on the one hand, the joint singing can provide an individual with a sense of deindividuation, of losing oneself in the musical community. On the other hand, singing is obviously also a way to assert one’s individuality in front of others—especially if singing solo. This

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well-described paradox—that music is equally a medium for asserting one’s individuality and for smoothing over individual differences of group members (Hesmondhalgh 2008, 329; Cross 2009)—has also been observed specifically with respect to community singing (see Bailey and Davidson 2009). Indeed, the paradoxically simultaneous pursuit of uniqueness and conformity seems to be a general trait of Western popular culture altogether. John Fiske aptly observes that “the most widely held communal value is that of individualism” (2010, 2). In Fiske’s description, this tension does not need to amount to a contradiction, as individuality and community are understood to be mutually dependent: “The desire to be oneself does not mean the desire to be fundamentally different from everyone else, but rather to situate individual differences within communal allegiance” (2010, 2). APS deliberately plays on this tension between community and individuality, not only by alternating between crowd performances and solo performances by famous singers but also by singling out individuals in the audience. During performance, the lead singer will frequently leave the stage and walk through the audience, handing the microphone to random individuals. In the 2020 season of APS, the live audience was omitted due to the coronavirus risk, but the show maintains the encouragement to participate through the interactive app Duo, which lets viewers sing along with their phone cameras turned on. Images of selected Duo users appear on multiple small TV screens during the live show. The app motivates its users to participate by appealing to their wish to be seen. The underlying message seems to be: “Stay tuned, maybe your face will appear on the screen”. APS thus operates with a tension oscillating between performance as deindividuation and self-assertion. The general medial strategy of APS can be designated as “immediacy through hypermediacy” (Bolter and Grusin 1999, 6). The show employs excessive mediation (lively camera handling, spectacular stage shows, colorful dance acts, multiple split screens etc.) to evoke the experience of being present. Immediacy is thus obtained, paradoxically, through hypermediacy. It is as though APS combines the tendency to “take pleasure in mediation” (Bolter and Grusin 1999, 14) with the pleasure of immediate presence.

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Live fra Højskolesangbogen LFH seems to operate according to almost the opposite strategy. It was a two-time all-day live singalong show broadcast on 17 March 2018 and 12 January 2020 characterized by a generally simplistic, lo-fi aesthetic with a minimum of medial effects. The live event itself did not display many visual spectacles: the hosts wore low-key, formal outfits and there were no stage shows. There were some solo and choir performances but substantially fewer than in an average episode of APS, in which solo and community performances enjoyed more or less equal representation. In general, LFH can thus be said to operate according to an ideal of immediacy or transparency, in which the live event is mediated as authentically as possible to viewers, and community has priority over solo performance. A critical difference between APS and LFH, apart from their medial strategies, is their relationship to the cultural tradition of community singing. Whereas APS is itself cultural heritage (it has existed since the 1930s and is widely known and canonized in Sweden), LFH was a novelty and therefore not (yet) tradition. Instead, LFH latches on to another very strong cultural institution in Denmark: The Folk High School songbook. Appearing for the first time in 1894 and followed by several subsequent editions, this songbook has reached bestseller status in Denmark, something that points to its increasing cultural importance today. LFH’s name documents the centrality of this songbook, and the show both draws its legitimation from this firmly established cultural canon and contributes to its future profile. Even the two hosts wore suits in a dark blue color clearly reminiscent of the color of the songbook, which is often colloquially referred to as “the blue”. The songbook as a medium is in itself interesting from a transmedial perspective. There are two fundamental ways of mediating music: sound recording and written notation; what distinguishes them from each other is their relationship to performance: whereas recording captures a singular performance that has already taken place, written notation (whether linguistic or musical) invites performance(s) that have not yet taken place. In other words, sound recording locates performance in its past, while notation locates performance in its future. The singing shows discussed here all mix these two essentially different mediation types by combining lyrics in subtitles with recorded performance. The songbook, probably the oldest of the media involved in transmediating community singing, could in a

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certain sense be seen as the paradigmatic interactive medium: it does not represent singular, concrete performances like the sound recording, but rather invites, inspires and facilitates infinite possible future performances. While the debate about the relationship of musical notation to the “music itself” is an old and quarrelsome one, the title of LFH indicates a positioning in this question: how could a songbook be “live”? The implicit answer is that by performing the songs represented in the songbook, something lying dormant is being rendered “alive”, as it were.2

Morgensang Med Phillip Faber This series of short, daily sing-along morning shows was aired on Danish National TV beginning on Friday 4 April 2020, shortly after the Danish government had announced a nation-wide lockdown due to the coronavirus spread. The series was a response to these measures and to the government’s encouragement to seek “community apart”. While LFH’s strategy of immediacy involved a lo-fi setup with few spectacular show elements, MSP takes this approach to a new level. Every episode lasts approximately 15  minutes and consists of host Phillip Faber singing two well-known Danish songs while accompanying himself on piano. In contrast to LFH and (under normal circumstances) APS, there is no audience physically present with him in the room. The setting is intimate in a homely living room with cozy lighting, flowers on the table and musical instruments hanging on the wall. Faber clearly indicates, through his gestures and by looking directly into the camera, that the viewer is meant to sing along. This very direct invitation to the viewer is perhaps most obvious in the short warm-up seances opening each episode: Faber demonstrates physical warm-up exercises and leaves time after each exercise for the viewer to repeat it. He even states encouraging and praising remarks after these silences so as to enhance a sense of physical proximity to the viewer. These temporal gaps function as a quite suggestive and palpable mobilization of the viewer. Many episodes are punctuated by a homemade video from a viewer expressing a song wish, often accompanied by a little anecdote, a personal memory or a sentiment substantiating the wish. These effects are similar (although less “hypermedial”) to the split screen presence of multiple alternating viewers on APS. It combines the possibility of individual 2  As Reason and Lindelof point out, the connotation of something being “alive”, as opposed to dead, is at the heart of the concept of liveness (2017, 1).

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viewers experiencing the excitement of appearing on national TV with a communication of a collective national identity through representation of a socially representative vox-pop from across the country. The underlying claim to social representativeness is also evident in the pronounced diversity of the program’s song repertoire. Many of the songs derive from a canonized repertoire of older songs, but the show also incorporates a large number of children’s songs and newer popular tunes. The two songs performed in each episode seem to have been chosen deliberately to exhibit this generic broadness; an archaic church hymn or a nineteenth-century patriotic song will frequently be paired with a children’s song or a pop song. As I argue elsewhere, this genre eclecticism is in itself one of the symptoms of a “melocentric turn” characterizing current Scandinavian community singing culture: a turn toward an ever-­ greater emphasis on musical performance and simultaneously a sign of a diminishing interest in the semantic content of lyrics (see Borčak 2020).

Comparison The three shows manifest some distinct differences as well as crucial similarities in their strategies of transmediation. They can be construed as positioned at three different points along a continuum between hypermediacy and immediacy. While APS exploits hypermedial effects in order to evoke a thrill similar to that of being physically present at a show, LHF significantly downplays the use of these hypermedial effects in favor of a more immediate expression, whereas MSP reduces medial effects to a minimum by suggesting a close, intimate proximity to the viewer. The three shows also involve different ways of “audiencing” (Reason and Lindelof 2017, 1). The 2020 season of APS, in a response to the absence of a physically present audience, incorporated a virtual audience by employing multiple split screens. LFH, on the other hand, combined the presence of a large physical audience with a clear invitation to the TV viewer to participate from a distance. In MSP, then, no audience was physically present and no singing viewers were shown on the screen. Here, the audience remained an implied one, “realized” solely through the host’s address and encouragement. The three shows also differ in their approach to the use of interactive TV.  Recent research shows that TV is generally becoming increasingly interactive. Sharon Marie Ross distinguishes between three kinds of “tele-­ participation” (2008, 4): overt (where TV actively invites viewers to do

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something), organic (where it is assumed that viewers are already participating) and obscured (viewers are implicitly encouraged to mentally fill in “gaps” in the narrative of a TV show). All three shows overtly invite viewer participation through the use of subtitles to songs. MSP is a very explicit example of overt participation because of the virtual dialogue that Faber insists on having with the viewer, while APS and LFH can be said to operate in a more organic manner, assuming participation rather than explicitly encouraging it. The three shows also differ to some extent in the employment of song genres. Over the course of its history, APS has made a move from a mainly national-romanticist frame with an emphasis on Swedish patriotic songs towards increasing its repertoire, resulting in a growth of the number of pop songs being performed (Kaijser 2016, 33–35). While the Danish shows are recent inventions and cannot draw from the same longstanding cultural tradition as their Swedish counterpart, they both rely on the strong Danish cultural heritage of community singing. It is, however, possible to detect some interesting differences between the two Danish shows when it comes to genre choices. What follows are my own statistical observations based on (a) a complete list of songs performed at LFH 2018 and 2020—obtained by enquiry to the Danish Broadcasting Corporation— and (b) the repertoire of songs performed in all 99 episodes of the first season of MSP, available on the DBC’s homepage.3 Both LFH and MSP place particular emphasis on a traditional repertoire. For instance, church hymns are the third most performed genre in both shows. Moreover, they both place great emphasis on songs emerging from the Folk High School tradition, such as those written by the founder of the tradition, NFS Grundtvig. They differ, however, regarding a more popular repertoire. The most conspicuous difference is with respect to children’s songs and pop songs, the latter broadly defined as newer songs known mostly from mass media (TV, movies or popular solo artists), sometimes with English lyrics. Whereas the average number of children’s songs in LFH was approximately 2%, in MSP, this number was significantly higher with a representation of almost 10%. While pop songs were moderately 3  For this counting, I used my own generic classifications instead of preexisting ones like the genre indexing employed by the Folk High School song book. Partly because the latter is too broad and partly because it indexes according to lyrical themes only, forsaking musical genre aspects. The genres I divided the material by are church hymns, folk songs, ballads, patriotic songs, pop songs, songs from revues and movies, children’s songs, political songs, seasonal songs, protest songs, Folk High School songs/educational songs and love songs.

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represented in LFH with an average of just below 7%, in MSP, the number of pop songs amounted to 13.5% of the repertoire, placing the genre in the top 3 throughout the series. Similar to APS, both Danish shows have ‘one foot in history and one in the popular music of later decades’ (Kaijser 2016, 36, my translation), while MSP is more invested in popular genres. MSP’s diverse repertoire can be read as a strategy of the popular: an allinclusion that maximizes the show’s appeal and at the same time functions as a narrative of “national gathering” and “communion” in the face of the pandemic. The genre differences are thus indicative of the societal exigences to which the three shows respond: MSP’s greater generic diversity and “broad aim” is an effect of the show’s response to COVID-19, its aim to provide national cohesion despite the requirement of social distancing. Notwithstanding their different (trans)medial strategies, the three shows share important common traits. Firstly, they all attract(ed) an outstandingly large number of viewers, highlighting the growing popularity of community singing in Scandinavia. Secondly, they negotiate a number of significant oscillating tensions: between tradition versus renewal, between an emphasis on a national-romanticist frame and an effort towards multicultural inclusivity and between a highly mediated show and the wish to establish an immediate safe space in an overly mediated world. Finally, all three shows almost necessarily assume that viewers participate actively from home, since the whole raison d’être of the shows is that there is at least the illusion of a wide net of geographically dispersed mini-­ performances in Danish and Swedish homes. A large part of the shows’ appeal lies in the imagined simultaneity of a nation-wide performance as a unified community. However, bearing in mind Jenkins’s distinction between interactivity and participation, it could be asserted that talking about tele-participation in this sense is misleading. The interactive invitation to participate—however explicitly stated—is by no means a guarantee that viewers will actually participate. Thus, it remains unclear how many of the televised show’s viewers actively sing along.

Conclusion This chapter has interrogated the ways in which performance can be construed as transmedial. The first theoretical section of this chapter sought to contribute to the development of the undertheorized field of transmedia performance. It pursued the question of whether and in what ways performance is transmedial by focusing on two core aspects of

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performance, liveness and participation, and arrived at the conclusion that both of these aspects can be construed as transmedial: liveness, commonly understood to presuppose physical presence and temporal simultaneity, is in reality an aspect of experience rather than an inherent trait of performance. Therefore, liveness is not specific to any particular medium, nor does it preclude technical mediation. Participation is an aspect of a culture rather than of media, and hence participation cannot either be said to be dependent on certain types of media or to preclude technical mediation. The second section of this chapter analyzed the transmediation of Danish and Swedish community singing performances, revealing that even a type of performance so inherently participatory as this one can, quite unproblematically, proliferate into various medial platforms, thus constituting a transmedia performance. Especially surprising is the circumstance that in this day and age of participatory media culture dominated by the internet, a rather dated and static medium such as TV can display such an attraction. The imagined simultaneity of the transmediated singing events plays a powerful role here, as the TV medium enables a sense of temporal communion. Along with the employment of the musical medium, which entrains participants in an immediate rhythmic and tonal unity, the TV medium literally creates a “harmony” that smoothes over individual differences—such as class, gender or race—which nevertheless still exist. Similar to the popular, it thereby creates a closed ideological environment with limited external or social “interferences”. Moreover, an examination of genre constellations among the shows indicates a tendency to mix various genres quite indiscriminately. This trait points both to the intertextuality of the repertoire (songs move fairly freely across different eras and zeitgeists) and to the flexibility of participants (today’s community singers are cultural omnivores). Although popular song genres take on an increasing quantity in all shows, what’s even more interesting is the popularization of the act of community singing itself. Collective singing performance, as a form of intangible cultural heritage, is traditionally understood as an archaic, even bourgeoise, performing of a rather classical ritual, but through shows like these—and especially through their increasingly pervasive transmediation—it is “made popular” (Fiske 1989, 2). Thus, the transmediation of Scandinavian community singing events highlights the dynamics behind the popularity of words and music in songs and singing.

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Fiske, John. 1989. Reading the popular. London: Routledge. ———. 2010. Understanding popular culture. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Freeman, Matthew. 2016. Historicising transmedia storytelling: Early twentieth-­ century transmedia story worlds. London: Routledge. Frith, Simon. 1996. Performing rites: On the value of popular music. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. 2015. Live music. In The Routledge reader on the sociology of music, ed. John Shepherd and Kyle Devine, 269–276. London: Routledge. Hesmondhalgh, David. 2008. Towards a critical understanding of music, emotion and self-identity. Consumption, Markets and Culture 11 (4): 329–343. https:// doi.org/10.1080/10253860802391334. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press. ———. 2011. Transmedia 202: Further reflections. http://henryjenkins.org/ blog/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html. Accessed 29 Sept 2020. Kahr, Kirsten Baltzer. 2018. 12 timers live-fællessang gav DR K den bedste dag nogensinde. https://www.dr.dk/om-­dr/nyheder/12-­timers-­live-­faellessang-­ gav-­dr-­k-­den-­bedste-­dag-­nogensinde. Accessed 10 Mar 2021. Kaijser, Lars. 2016. Allsång på skansen—Musik på museet. In Fataburen 2016, ed. Charlotte Ahnlund and Anders Carlsson, 29–49. Stockholm: Nordiska Museets Förlag. Kihlström, Linnéa. 2020. Så många tittare drog säsongsfinalen av “Allsång på Skansen”. https://www.dagensmedia.se/medier/rorligt/sa-­manga-­tittare-­ drog-­sasongsfinalen-­av-­allsang-­pa-­skansen. Accessed 10 Mar 2021. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 2004. Performance studies. In The performance studies reader, ed. Henry Bial and Sara Brady, 43–55. London: Routledge. Korsgaard, Mathias Bonde. 2017. Music video after MTV: Audiovisual studies, new media, and popular music. London: Routledge. Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked: The politics of performance. London: Routledge. Rajewsky, Irina O. 2005. Intermediality, intertextuality, and remediation: A literary perspective on intermediality. Intermédialités 6: 43–64. Reason, Matthew, and Anja Mølle Lindelof. 2017. Introduction. In Experiencing liveness in contemporary performance, ed. Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof, 1–15. London: Routledge. Ross, Sharon Marie. 2008. Beyond the box: Television and the internet. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2014. Story/Worlds/Media. In Storyworlds across media: Toward a media-conscious narratology, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon, 29–45. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure, and Jan-Noël Thon. 2014. Introduction. In Storyworlds across media: Toward a media-conscious narratology, ed. Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-­ Noël Thon, 1–21. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

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Small, Christopher. 1998. Musicking: The meanings of performing and listening. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Smith, Sophy. 2018. Pervasive theatre: New writing for new environments. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 24 (3): 321–336. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856516675253. Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as social life: The politics of participation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 8

A Melopoetic Struggle between East and West: Mickiewicz and the Popular Idiom Jan Czarnecki

Introduction When the national bard of Ukraine Taras Shevchenko published his epic poem Haidamaki in 1841, no one would have expected that a band named after its protagonists, the eighteenth century anti-Polish rebels, would one day release an entire album based exclusively on Polish verse. Mickiewicz—Stasiuk—Haydamaky, a project realised with the Polish writer Andrzej Stasiuk in 2018, lets the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) resound in a clash of rhythmically recited Polish with sung Ukrainian. I shall reflect upon this remarkable conjunction of refined poetry with folk rock through the following series of oppositions, which I think it suggests: East and West (intended as geographically inconsistent imagological labels), popular and ‘highbrow’ and, finally, music and poetry. The album combines the sophisticated poetic form of the Mickiewiczian sonnet with the powerful sound of alternative rock, encompassing folk

J. Czarnecki (*) University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Gurke, S. Winnett (eds.), Words, Music, and the Popular, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85543-7_8

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instruments as well as folk scales and rhythms. This is the ‘Highbrow’ and Popular axis. Original texts are recited by the writer while Ukrainian translations are sung by the band. Stasiuk’s Polish scandito is at times rapping, at times rhapsodic and in general: highly blasé, in which it contrasts eminently with the refrains sung by Oleksandr Iarmiola and Roman Dubonos. This is the poetry and music axis. The East and West axis, evident in the very contraposition of West Slavic (Polish) and East Slavic (Ukrainian) words, is potentiated by the union of the latter with music. The whole concept of the album suggests a melopoetic journey—or perhaps a ‘wild steppe rush’—between East and West. Its textual core consists of six of the eighteen Crimean Sonnets (1826), the celebrated cycle inspired by Mickiewicz’s 1825 ‘oriental’ travels to the Akerman Steppe and Crimea (Akkerman Steppe, The Storm, The Harem Tombs, Baidary, The Pilgrim and The Road by Chufut-Caleh Chasm). The sources of the remaining four songs are of no lesser importance for the present account (Ordon’s Redoubt, The Living Dead, Alpuhara and [Pytasz, za co Bóg]). If the album’s self-presentation as a journey between East and West relies explicitly on the Crimean Sonnets’ inspiration, it is within the epic poem Konrad Wallenrod that the complex and antagonistic presentation of the three axes of oppositions can be found. The Moorish ballad Alpuhara, analysed here in greater detail, constitutes Wallenrod’s epic apex and, arguably, also the album’s acme. In its original context of the Canto IV, it is a song within a song which symbolically encloses the whole poem’s message as an allegory for Konrad’s fate. Konrad Wallenrod, along with Mickiewicz’s other tale in verse Grażyna, displays a high degree of musicoliterary self-consciousness: The text presents itself as music, namely as epic music, the music of the East, the music of the People. Understanding this mechanism foregrounds the whole interpretation of the album to follow.

Mickiewicz’s Popularity in Music What is Popular? One of the main challenges of the present volume lies within the imminent polysemy of the term ‘popular’, with regard to words and to music. In order to avoid vagueness or equivocation, I distinguish three meanings of the term, all of which are united by its common Latin root ‘popularis’, deriving from ‘populus’ (OED 2020).

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popular1—of popular origin, typical of the oral tradition of the people. In the English tradition, this sphere of culture is referred to as ‘folk’ or ‘traditional’; however, in the Romance languages, it is commonly dubbed populaire (French) or popolare (Italian). The German and Polish languages both follow this etymology, albeit by substituting the radix populus with its translated counterpart, as in Volk (German) or lud (Polish) and Volksmusik or muzyka ludowa, respectively. This also impacts the French and English translations of Mickiewicz from the mid-nineteenth century: ‘O chant populaire!’ / ‘O popular song’ (Mickiewicz 1851, 67). popular2—stylistically and sociologically belonging to ‘popculture’, as opposed to ‘high culture’ or—with regard to music—as opposed to ‘art music’ or ‘classical music’. If rigorously applied to music according to the English usus (cf. Middleton and Manuel 2001), popular2 must be seen as distinct from folk (popular1) as it is from art music. The band Haydamaky can be categorised as such, while their musical identity is grounded in a constant, if somewhat superficial, evocation of the folk idiom (i.e. popular1). popular3—well known and beloved (among the public). Mickiewicz’s poetry engages with the popular1, the folk, not only by praising its value and force but also by sacralising and demonising it, and elaborates it in a highly refined artistic form which masquerades as folksong and requires a musical response from the reader. This poetry remains extremely popular3 among musicians and Haydamaky’s contribution is a recent addition to a long list of musical settings. This list encompasses various genres from classical to popular2. Lieder, cantatas and operas based on Mickiewicz’s poetry have been written by composers such as Maria Szymanowska, Karol Lipiński, Fryderyk Chopin, Stanisław Moniuszko, Mikhail Glinka, Cesar Cui, Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Nikolai Rimsky-­ Korsakov to quote just a few of the most eminent (see Wszelaczyński 1890; Moore Coleman 1955; Michałowski 1986; Sułek 2016). Mickiewicz’s extreme popularity among the ordinary readership along with the intrinsic songfulness of his poems has led them to be featured in many popular songbooks, containing numerous tunes and simple choral settings of his lyrics and of certain dramatic fragments. Popular music settings of Mickiewicz are nothing new, ranging from the setting of Niepewnos´c´ (‘Uncertainty’, Grechuta 1970), through Czesław Niemen’s interpretation of the sonnet Dobranoc (‘Goodnight’,

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Kurylewicz et al. 1971), to most recent settings of fragments of the ballad Romantycznos ́c ́ in the song Astrolog and fragments from Grażyna and Dziady in Lao Che (2002), fragments of Dziady: jazzy Noc smutna w więzieniu (Kleszcz and Krzak 2016) and electronic 40i4 (Rod 2018), not to mention various rap/hip-hop settings (e.g. Oda do młodos ́ci by Popek or Wielka improwizacja by Peja). Settings of the former type (Grechuta, Niemen, Kleszcz) emphasise the poetry’s expressiveness by the use of popular musical means. Lao Che and Rod, on the other hand, transform it by including rap stylistics to highlight an ambiguous battle with the educational system: by ‘rapping’ Mickiewicz, they attempt to reclaim him for the ‘unofficial’ culture and against the perceived oppression of the mainstreamed school system, which, in turn, mythologises the poet as the great Romantic bard of Poland.1 If such an appropriation of Mickiewicz’s canonical poetry for the sphere of popular culture was not the main intention of the project by Stasiuk and Haydamaky, it certainly produces similar side effects.2

Popular Song in Mickiewicz O wieści gminna! ty arko przymierza

Mickiewicz’s ballad Romantycznos ́c ́, written in 1821 and published the following year in Vilnius in the volume of Ballady i romanse, which ­presented itself as a ‘collection of ballads and popular songs’ (Mickiewicz 1822, IX) praises the people’s sensibility and faith as contraposed to scientific rationality impersonated by the figure of the Old Man (Mickiewicz 1925, 159; 1998a, 57). The people’s voice, conserved in the popular tunes of guslars, waydelotas and kobzars, is consequently sacralised, as in 1  Whether this subversive strategy is effective remains doubtful. Users’ comments on the band’s YouTube videos testify that teachers now make it their pupil’s homework to watch these exact videos. See Eldo’s Stepy akermańskie which stages the whole rapped version of the opening Crimean sonnet as the pupil’s school recitation. Ironically, the teacher who is examining her pupils says ‘Adam Mickiewicz wielkim poeta ̨ był’ (‘Adam Mickiewicz—oh, what a great poet he was!’, my translation) which is a travesty of the famous scene in Ferdydurke where the teacher refers to the ‘second’ Romantic bard, Juliusz Słowacki. 2  In a live recording of a concert performance in Dukla (3 May 2019) of the Alpuhara ballad, Stasiuk brags that ‘Sometimes Polish teachers write to me to say that they play this song during classes dedicated to Mickiewicz’, (my translation, https://youtu.be/DFb-­ ahEfHVg; accessed 21 September 2020). All remarks to musical qualities refer exclusively to the album version of the songs, which suffered a lot in live recordings.

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Konrad Wallenrod’s apostrophes: ‘O popular tradition! thou ark of covenant between old and young times! […] O sacred ark! not to be destroyed by time […]. O popular song!’ (Mickiewicz 1851, 67–69). It is explicitly the ‘popular song’—‘wies ́c ́ / pies ́ń gminna’ (Mickiewicz 1998c = KW, IV, 177–183)—which assumes the role of the sacred Ark of the Covenant, carrying the nation’s as well as the individual’s identity—as it is evident in W’s tragic case. Mickiewicz shares his reverence for the Volk with Western Romantics: his paratexts—that is, the titles, subtitles, notes, pre- and post-­ faces—suggest an oral and popular source for the presented poetry and thus remind of Walter Scott’s practices of this kind, following the example of Allan Ramsay’s and Thomas Percy’s collections, together with the greatly admired Macphersonian mystification of Ossian’s songs. By letting Polish and Lithuanian vagabond bards act as Homeric aoids, he follows Johann Gottfried Herder’s conviction that ‘The greatest singer of the Greeks, Homer, is at the same time the greatest folk poet’ (Herder and Bohlman 2017, 51).3 The popular origin of a song guarantees truthfulness, but also offers an ideal for the (art) poet—and this specifically on the musical plane. Wincenty Pol, a fellow Romantic poet, wrote in his 1829 O źródłach narodowej poezji (‘On the sources of national poetry’, my translation): An event or a phrase which makes it to the folksong is true and essential, because if it weren’t such, it wouldn’t have survived on the people’s lips. The folksong is therefore an infallible mirror of truth. […] Each song, before it becomes fettered in speech, must beforehand resound in the soul with all its mute music. The origin of poetry is thus musical.4

This idealisation of popular song has further consequences for the poetics: the Romantic measure of achievement is to create a text that could easily ‘descend’ upon people and live on their lips as popular song (Janion 1979, 16–17; Zgorzelski 1988, 44). This criterion of poetic success is inscribed into the inner structure of the Romantic work in various ways and includes 3  ‘Der größte Sänger der Griechen, Homerus, ist zugleich der größte Volksdichter’ (Herder 1990, 3:320, qtd. in Billings 2011, 106; see also Krzyżanowski 1961, 320–349). 4  ‘Zdarzenie lub zdanie, które jest do pieśni gminnej przyjęte, jest prawdziwe i istotne, bo gdyby nie było takim, nie utrzymałoby się w ustach ludu. Ona jest przeto nieomylnym zwierciadłem prawdy […]. Każda pieśń nim się w mowie zwia ̨że, musi najprzód niema ̨ swoja ̨ muzyka ̨ ozwać się w duszy. Pocza ̨tek poezji jest w ten sposób muzykalny’ (qtd. in Zgorzelski 1988, 44–45, my translation).

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its presentation as belonging to the oral tradition, which grants the written text of the poem only a minor role of a quasi-ethnographic source. This deprecation of the text’s sovereignty in favour of the oral (and musical) tradition of the folksong is traceable most eminently in Mickiewicz’s epic poems Grażyna5 and Konrad Wallenrod. Their musicoliterary nature, discursively established through numerous historical references to Homeric and (partially fictional) Slavo-Lettonic pagan traditions of sung epic poetry, is put in evidence by the mise en abyme scenes containing diegetic music. Through these musical scenes, I shall argue, Konrad Wallenrod construes the political ‘East’-‘West’ polarity, articulated in linguistic and religious contrasts, in terms of a singing contest.

Konrad Wallenrod: A Singing Contest Between East and West This tale in verse was written during Mickiewicz’s Russian exile (1825–1827) and was therefore published in St. Petersburg in 1828 (Chwin in Mickiewicz 1998c, III). The poet had previously been forced to leave his native land after being sentenced in the political process of the Philomaths and Philarets by the Russian imperial administration (see Rymkiewicz et al. 2001, 26–27, 466–467). The text in six cantos is preceded by a historising Foreword in prose (complete with the author’s notes) and an Introduction in verse, which locates the historical time-­ frame of the action in the late Middle Ages during the military expansion of the Teutonic Order State. This historical mask evoking literary traditions of Walter Scott, Thomas Moore and Lord Byron—and hiding the poem’s political actuality, evident to the public of that time—apparently outsmarted Russian censorship, which enabled the book to be printed in the first place (Zantuan 1964, 242; 1969, 153). The famous report of Senator Novosiltsev to the Tsarevich on 10 April 1828 concerning the poem’s political and moral implications that threatened the Empire came post factum (Novosiltsev 1891, 250–255). The story is presented in a most convoluted and fragmentary way.6 In order to understand the musicoliterary significance of the ballad Alpuhara  See esp. Mickiewicz 1998b, 50, lines 99–102, transl. Mickiewicz 1940, 37–38.  For more information, see Ziolkowski (2018, 139–145). It is noteworthy, that Ziolkowski uses the title of the much later Lithuanian translation (1891) instead of the original and that he consequently misspells the name of Almanzor. 5 6

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for the whole—and, later on, within the Album—we need to trace several plot threads, which culminate in it. For one hundred years, the Teutonic Order (mostly referred to as the Germans) has been continuously invading the ‘Northern Heathens’, the Old Prussians, Letts and Lithuanians, meeting any resistance with bloodshed under the sign of the Cross. ­ Konrad, the eponymous hero of the tale, becomes Grand Master of the Order. He is presented as a mysterious stranger, who has fought with the Moors in the mountains of Castile and with the Ottomans during crusades, earning knightly fame in the Western world. The consecutive cantos, especially the tale sung by the Lithuanian bard (wajdelota) at the Banquet in Canto IV, unveil the true biography of the protagonist gradually: he was born in Lithuania and kidnapped by the knights, raised by the Grand Master Winrych, but remained under the influence of the old Lithuanian bard disguised as the monk Halban, who preserved his Lithuanian identity by singing him old epic songs. ‘Knights who are free’, he would tell me, ‘freely may choose their own weapons, Openly meet in fair combat — but thou art a slave, and the single Weapon of bondsmen is treason. But wait, thou wilt learn from the Germans War-craft and conduct of battle. First let them think they can trust thee, Then we will talk of our vengeance’.7 (Mickiewicz 1925, 42, emphases added)

This was Halban’s terrible envoy, which would eventually become flesh in Konrad’s fate. When at war with the Lithuanians, Walter and the old bard abandon the German troops and tell their story to the Lithuanian prince Kiejstut, whose daughter Aldona Walter eventually marries. Due to his vengeance remaining incomplete, he must abandon her to change his identity once more and, years after, come back to Marienburg as Konrad Wallenrod. Aldona becomes an eremite and lives walled up in a 7  ‘Wolnym rycerzom–powiadał–wolno wybierać oręzė / I na polu otwartym bić się równymi siłami; / Tyś niewolnik, jedyna broń niewolników–podstępy. / Zostań jeszcze i przejmij sztuki wojenne od Niemców, / Staraj się zyskać ich ufność, dalej obaczym, co pocza ̨ć’ (KW, IV, 341–345). This verse, in its original diction ‘thou art a slave, and the single / Weapon of slaves is deception’ has been erased by the tsarist censor of the first edition. All editions print the censured version until 1860, when Januszkiewicz and Klaczko restore the missing verse, but in a slightly distorted version: ‘Tyś niewolnik: jedyna broń niewolników jest zdrada’ (Mickiewicz 1860, II:140). The English translation follows this distorted version (‘treason’ in lieu of ‘deception’), ignoring Bruchnalski’s 1922 edition which restituted the original (see Mickiewicz 1998b, 289–293).

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Marienburg’s castle tower. Konrad as the Grand Master of the German Order falters and remains indecisive. The ultimate battle of identities takes place during the Banquet in Canto IV and takes the form of a singing contest during the patronal feast. After having rejected Western courtly love- and knightly praise-songs sung by the Italian and Occitan troubadours, the Grand Master calls for a different song. A duel ensues against all that is noble, orderly and Western: the Wajdelota steps forth with his Prussian lute and sings two lengthy epic songs. Wallenrod answers to the Wajdelota’s implicit call to act for the sake of the oppressed homeland with a ‘bizarre ballad’ (‘dziwaczna ballada’, KW, IV, 756; epithet lost in translation: Mickiewicz 1925, 78)—entitled Alpuhara. The ballad’s protagonist, the fictitious Moorish king Almanzor, approaches the victorious Spaniards and feigns homage and friendship, while actually infecting them with the plague trough a traitorous kiss. This terrible Oriental story of bloody treason prefigures Konrad’s own decision to lead his knights to war with Lithuania, bringing them absolute defeat and himself: condemnation and inevitable suicide. On this (Western and knightly) ground of a singing contest, the East wins with the West: first through the rejection of its courtly minstrelsy (with Konrad as Judge) and second, by Konrad’s defeat in the duel with the Wajdelota.8 Having lost to the force of the Wajdelota’s songs, Konrad takes sides with the oppressed and decides his fate. His defeat has itself two more layers—musically speaking it is first expressed in the form of an oriental ballad9—which, astonishingly, is accompanied by a tune from the ‘local East’, namely, from the childhood’s Lithuania: ‘That note, that childish note, which used to peal / Through the belovèd valley blessèd hours, / When I would carol to it day by day!’ (Mickiewicz 1925, 56; KW, IV, 633–635). This tune is not only Eastern by location but also pastoral, idyllic, that is: popular. When Konrad demands this ‘pagan’ (Lithuanian) accompaniment to the ‘pagan’ (Moorish) ballad, pagan gods are invoked—‘Return, old bard! For by [all gods], / Germanic, Prussian’ (transl. modified, KW, IV, 636–637)—adding a further religious stratum of contraposition. The reader sides with the ‘pagan party’, even though they are depicted as less civilised, treasonous, and prone to act in drunken 8  The old bard is disguised Halban, but monk Halban is in fact a disguised wajdelota, so his disguise unveils his true identity by obscuring the false one. 9  ‘[When I fought] In the mountains of Castile / The Moors their ballads taught me’ (Mickiewicz 1925, 56; KW, IV, 631–632).

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furies. The relationship between words and music is that of Master and Slave: ‘[He struck the lute] / And follow[ed], though with an uncertain chord, / [Konrad’s wild tones], / As a bewildered slave his angry lord’ (my translation),10 which brings to mind Monteverdi’s principle l’oratione sia padrona dell’armonia e non serva, but the slave is triumphant: the apparently subjugated Lithuanian melody wins over Konrad’s heart, at the price of his dreams to flee with Aldona and abandon his impious patriotic duty, namely: treason. Musically speaking the text prescribes here a very singular performance: (1) a Moorish ballad (2) with a Lithuanian idyllic (i.e. popular) accompaniment (3) and featuring a vocal line containing ‘wild tones’. The whole must have sounded very awkward, even to the old bard’s ears, if he followed his master in such a confused way. This stylistic incongruence is clearly prescribed by the text. Konrad’s ballad is ‘bizarre’ because it mixes musical styles in a very disturbing way. Going forward, I will trace the ways of these musical instructions down to Haydamaky’s version of the ballad. Konrad Wallenrod, often considered a (fatal) prelude to the November Uprising of 1830–1831, is arguably a metapoetic deliberation which has at its core the poetry’s political perlocutionary force.11 In other words: itself being an incentive to act politically, it contains a powerful staging of this very mechanism and at the same time denounces its fatal consequences. Wallenrod, if finally conquered by the Wajdelota’s songs before he starts singing himself, produces a bitterly fervent philippic against this melopoetic metier and its dreadful influence on the audience: I know you wajdelotas: every strain Howls and forebodes mischance, like dogs by night; In songs of blood and fire is your delight, Leaving to us the glory and the pain. About the cradled child your traitorous song Twines like a reptile, cruelly to inflame His soul with poison […] I know thee, thou old traitor! Thou hast won! (Mickiewicz 1925, 56, emphasis added) 10  The original reads ‘Uderzył lutnię i głosem niepewnym / Szedł za dzikimi tonami Konrada, / Jako niewolnik za swym panem gniewnym’ (KW IV, 637–640). 11  I owe this application of the terminology used in speech act theory to the classical Mickiewiczian tension between Word and Deed (cf. Witkowska 1983) to Uffelmann (2012, 293–295).

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The poem’s traitor accuses both song (poetry) and the singer (poet) of treason. Eventually, he sings the ballad of treason before acting as the traitor himself. By exclaiming ‘[t]hou hast won!’ he pronounces the verdict of the singing contest. In identifying the polarity of East and West, I partially follow Dirk Uffelmann’s interpretation of the poem in terms of a postcolonial critique (2012). In fact, both categories remain implicit because the explicit antagonism lies between the pagan Lithuanians, Old Prussians and Letts, on the one side, and the Germans on the other. The only explicit mention of the East is to be found in the author’s note: ‘In the East, before the appearance of the plague, a phantom is said to show itself, with the wings of a bat, and with its fingers pointing to those fated to die’ (Mickiewicz 1841, 159). This is how Mickiewicz explains the context of the old bard’s first ‘unintelligible Lithuanian song’. The constant opposition between East and West is thus articulated in terms of a linguistically driven mutual (non)understanding: […] I love to hear The unintelligible, mournful strain, Even as I love the breakers’ echoing, Or gentle patter of the early rain: They lull to pleasant slumber.—Minstrel, sing! (Mickiewicz 1925, 34 [KW, IV, 146–150])

In contrast to the Teutonic audience gathered at the great hall of the Marienburg Castle, the readers hold the privilege of understanding. For them, the Lithuanian song appears as comprehensible Polish. If the contraposition of German and Lithuanian is explicitly thematised through the relation of (non)understanding, other Western languages are implicit: the hymn to the Holy Spirit (KW, II, 7–28) must have been sung in Latin, just as the courtly minstrels must have sung their songs in Romance languages. The Germans do not understand Lithuanian, and Aldona does not understand German.12 Walter, Halban and Kiejstut are presented as bilingual, as is, in terms of understanding, the implied reader. This is why she has no choice but to take sides with the East and its conspiracy against the West. The present discussion permits us now to exhibit the initial three axes of contraposed notions within an extended table of oppositions: 12  Uffelmann emphasises that the Germans are presented as dumb (2012, 275, 279, 292). The present discussion permits to reframe his observations.

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West ‘Highbrow’ (knightly / courtly) Master Catholic German / Latin / Romance Sober Intelligible

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East Popular (peasant) Slave Pagan / Muslim Lithuanian / Old Prussian / Lettish Ecstatic (wild / drunk) Unintelligible Music

Polish—as the medium of poetry

The protagonist exists on both planes: he belongs to the left column as Konrad Wallenrod, the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, who every time when he succumbs to his weakness and drinks wine sings in an incomprehensible language (Lithuanian) and thus inevitably slips into the right column. Whether in Homeric banquets or Mickiewicz’s improvisations, wine brings inspiration to sing but here also reclaims his Eastern identity: in vino veritas.13 The list points towards the supremacy of the left column over the right and exposes the blatant stereotypes at hand (consider the combination of: peasant, pagan, slave, wild and drunk). Yet, while the Germans understand nothing of the Lithuanian songs, the reader feels part of the conspiracy against them, because—by the miracle of poetry— she does understand every single word.

Where Is East? Geopoetics of the Crimean Sonnets By placing an epigraph from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan in his Crimean Sonnets, Mickiewicz seems to subscribe to the Western project of a Romantic fascination with the Orient.14 He puts himself in the position of the Western poet who admires the wonderful treasures of the mysterious, strange, dangerous, dreamy and astonishingly beautiful East. But this East is not as far as Persia: it is Crimea and its Muslim Tatar heritage. Thus, the Polish language of this poetry situates itself on the West, arm in arm with Goethe’s German. However, this ‘Western’ poet still lives in Russian exile and the Orient in question is one of ruins of the subjugated Khanate. The Pilgrim, nostalgic of Lithuania, is guided by the Mirza in his travel among the dangers and wonders of the peninsula. Several sonnets consist  See J. Czeczot’s account Adamowe (Łucki 1924, 52).  ‘Wer den Dichter will verstehen / Muss in Dichters Lande gehen’ (cf. Goethe 1819, 241).

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of a dialogue between the two (V, IX, XV), leaving the whole space of the thirteenth sonnet to the Mirza’s prayer-like apostrophes to Mt. ChatyrDag. The high degree of autonomy given to the ‘Eastern voice’ of the noble and learned Tatar guide permits the East to speak for itself, to express its attitude towards the West, all with the use of an orientalising vocabulary, as in Mogiły haremu (‘The Harem Tombs’, track 5): Mirza do Pielgrzyma Tu z winnicy miłości niedojrzałe grona Wzięto na stół Allaha; tu perełki Wschodu, Z morza uciech i szczęsć ia, porwała za młodu Truna, koncha wieczności, do mrocznego łona. Skryła je niepamięci i czasu zasłona, Nad niemi turban zimny błyszczy śród ogrodu, Jak buńczuk wojska cieniów, i ledwie u spodu Zostały dłonia ̨ giaura wyryte imiona. O wy, róże edeńskie! u czystości stoku Odkwitnęły dni wasze pod wstydu liściami, Na wieki zatajone niewiernemu oku. Teraz grób wasz spojrzenie cudzoziemca plami, Pozwalam mu,—darujesz, o wielki Proroku! On jeden z cudzoziemców poglądał ze łzami. (Mickiewicz 1998a, 243, emphases added) Murza to Pilgrim Here passion’s vinyard garnered unripe grapes For Allah’s board; too soon eternity Ravished these orient pearls from seas of bliss And coffined them inside his sunless shell. Time’s veil, oblivion’s drape envelops them. A turban’d headstone gleams inside the yard, Reared like the martial staff [tug] of wraiths; below Decay the names the giaour’s hand engraved. Eden’s roses! Shame’s leafage sheltered you; Beside a taintless pool your days declined, Forever hidden from the heathen’s [infidel’s] glare.

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Today a stranger’s eyelid stains your tomb; I give him leave: Great Prophet, grant this once, Here stands an infidel [stranger] who gazed with tears.15 (Mickiewicz 1998d, 423, emphases added)

There is a cultural and religious distance which is construed through the stylistically charged expressions, which I emphasised in the line above. ‘Eden’s roses’, though, recall a common Biblical root of both religions. The Pilgrim is here presented as an ‘infidel’ whose visit to the ruined tombs of the Khan’s wives, in the eyes of the pious Muslim, borders on sacrilege. Yet, the Pilgrim is referred to as ‘the only one among the strangers who gazed with tears’ (my verbatim translation of the last line). It is thus all about this gaze, foreign, impious, inappropriate, invasive and yet admitted. By shedding tears, the Pilgrim secretly takes sides with the conquered and gains their confidence. This all happens within a cycle which was received with enthusiasm in Moscow and understood as a confirmation of the Empire’s triumph over the Tatar Khanate. For it is here turned into a picturesque ruin with its Muslim inhabitants safely enclosed within the rigors of the sonnet form (cf. Koropeckyj 2001, 670).16

Literary Folk Rock Haydamaky, the group’s name, bears historical allusions to literary and Ukrainian patriotic contexts that are admittedly anti-Polish. For Taras Shevchenko’s eponymous work glorifies the haidamaki, the Ukrainian peasants and Cossacks who fought for their freedom by leading a bloody rebellion, Koliyivshchyna, against their feudal Polish lords (and Jews and Catholic clergy) in 1768.17 The kobzar—the waydelota’s Ukrainian

 Terms in square brackets indicate my verbatim translation.  Izabela Kalinowska (2001) advocates the cycle’s character of a non-violent, open, intimate dialogue with the foreign Muslim culture. The cycle is not necessarily guilty of orientalism in the Saidian sense, because it was conceived in the form of a genuine, respectful dialogue with another civilisation. This is how Wiesław Rzońca (2018, 176) interprets the fact that the sonnet Widok gór ze stepów Kozłowa—in its Persian adaptation by Dzafar Topczi-­ Baszy—appeared in the 1826 St. Petersburg edition. 17  This would be the viewpoint from a ‘Ukrainian perspective’. The historical allusion is problematic on the grounds of Polish collective memory. It is nevertheless consciously 15 16

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counterpart—is both Shevchenko’s and Haydamaky’s model figure of a national bard who sings epic songs to the accompaniment of a chordophone: kobza or bandura.18 Haydamaky’s engagement with contemporary and Romantic literature—their 2005 album was named after Yurii Andrukhovych’s novel Perverzion—must be read together with their engagement with folk instruments and scales: both allude to the same tradition of an organic union of literature and music, albeit within a postmodern fusion of styles. The popular genre ‘kozak-rock’ embraces a mixture of traditional elements with rock, reggae, ska, dub, punk, jazz improvisation and other styles. It can be contrasted with the revival of the kobzar movement in Ukraine as well as historically informed performance formations such as Taras Kompanichenko’s Chorea kozacka or Sarmatica, who use authentic instruments and erudite musicological source study. However very different in purely musical terms—the guest presence of Chorea’s Berezhnyuk in the discussed album notwithstanding—they subscribe to the same pro-European geopolitical vision of Ukraine as a co-heir of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the religiously tolerant, multi-­ ethnic and multilingual democracy of the szlachta, seen sometimes even as a prefiguration of the European Union.19 In geopolitical terms, Poland is understood to lie on Ukraine’s way to the West. Through the common cultural heritage of the Commonwealth, Ukraine can build an identity that is orientated towards the West and that can function as an alternative to the post-Soviet or pan-Slavic image of Ukraine as necessarily remaining within the sphere of influence of Moscow. The difficult historical relationship between the Poles and the Ukrainians was particularly bloody during the Second World War and in its first following years. A lot of effort to promote Polish-Ukrainian reconciliation and reworking of deeply entrenched negative stereotypes was afforded by both sides, resulting in numerous Polish-Ukrainian cultural projects. This deployed in Haydamaky’s music and has an actualised sociopolitical meaning, as evident in the song Babilon System, sung in Ukrainian and Polish with the band Voo Voo. The song praises the ‘world music and world Koliyivshchyna’ as ‘warriors of light’ against the ‘bloody Babilon, drunk with petroleum’ from ‘that pipe’ (Haydamaky and Voo Voo 2009, my translation). 18  References to this are also made in the titles of Shevchenko’s volume of poetry (Кобзарь, 1840) and Haydamaky’s album (Kobzar, 2008). 19  Cf. John Paul II’s aphorism ‘From the Union of Lublin to the European Union’ added spontaneously to his speech at St. Peter’s Square on 19 May 2003. The slogan, regardless of its historical accuracy, became extremely influential.

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kind of dialogue through popular music is rightly perceived as the primary interpretive context of the album (see Regiewicz 2018, 113; Rott 2018, 125). Nevertheless, Oleksandr Iarmiola, the band’s leader, sees their take on Mickiewicz as more than just another initiative of this noble kind. He explains: ‘On the “sound steppe” nobody was chasing us, we were free, and so we rushed from East to West, from Lithuania to the Black Sea’ (my translation).20 This vision of a homely space between Lithuania (i.e. the Baltic Sea) and the Black Sea alludes to the failed geopolitical project of the Commonwealth of Three Nations. The 1658 Treaty of Hadiach envisaged establishing the Grand Duchy of Ruthenia on the lands under Cossack control and admitting it to equal rights with Lithuania and the Crown to the Commonwealth. The failure of this ambitious union caused conflicts between the Cossacks and the Crown which contributed to the Commonwealth’s decline and inevitably led to the Russian domination over both parties from the late eighteenth through most of the twentieth century. This shared past of imperial oppression makes it possible for ‘haydamakas’ to sing Mickiewicz, who lamented over the ruins of the Russian-­ annexed Crimean Khanate and died in Istanbul.21 If we recall the Hymn to the Holy Spirit solemnly sung by the German knights on the day of Konrad’s election—in the context of the violent Christianisation of eastern pagans—we can perhaps understand better Shevchenko’s lines from his 1858 poem Ляхам (‘To Poles’): ‘А ксёндз скаженим язиком / Кричить: ’Te Deum! Allelujah!’ (‘And the priest cries out in an insane language: ’Te Deum! Allelujah!’, Shevchenko 1876, 2:210, my translation). The foreignness of Catholicism imposed over East Orthodox Christianity of the Ruthenian Palatinates of the Commonwealth is made evident on the level of alphabet of the quoted chants: these are the only Latin characters in the poem.22 Seen from the perspective of a nation which was shaping itself against a cultural and political domination of the Polish ruling class, Shevchenko’s patriotism necessarily entails anti-­Western overtones. And yet, his poetry blames the egoism of the magnates and the clergy, ultimately appealing for a reconciliation of the people. In the last 20  ‘Na stepie dźwięków nikt nas nie ścigał, byliśmy wolni, więc gnaliśmy od Wschodu do Zachodu, od Litwy do Morza Czarnego’ (Stasiuk and Haydamaky 2018, s. l.). 21  Where he went to support the Ottoman Cossack Unit created by Michał Czajkowski (Sadyk Pasha). 22  When it comes to the Hallelujah, the Latin alphabet becomes the only differentiating factor, because the Hebrew acclamation is present in the Eastern Liturgy no less than in the Roman.

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two lines, Shevchenko persuades the Polish addressee: ‘Give your hand to the Cossack […] let us renew our still paradise’ (my translation).23 Stasiuk asserts the band Haydamaky to be the ‘musical heirs of the Cossacks’ who are more entitled than anyone else to ‘bring out all the steppy, Eastern and Oriental elements of this poetry’ (Stasiuk and Haydamaky 2018, n.p., my translation). Here, Stasiuk frames them as legitimate partners of this dialogue regarding the cultural and geopolitical identity of Ukraine. As such they are entitled to recognise themselves in the oriental idiom of Mickiewicz with all its territorial extension, including the Tatar Crimea as well as the Ukrainian steppe. In their self-styled orientalism, Haydamaky repeat Mickiewicz’s gesture with respect to his native Poland-Lithuania, but—in contrast to Konrad Wallenrod’s geopoetics— with no need for symbolic inversion. By Stasiuk acting as Mickiewicz’s medium Poland is presented as this East’s non-violent ‘own’ West—a West to which this East belongs. Stasiuk’s ostentatiously unprofessional style of performance24—as an object of exegesis and not of evaluation—thus becomes meaningful: it showcases him as a tangible specimen of a Polish writer, who represents the wordiness of literature in contrast to its musicality. That these subtle equations need to be read in the contemporary context of the ongoing aggression of Putin’s Russia against Ukraine is reinforced by two further melopoetic statements of the album, made in the spirit of the immense perlocutionary force of popular song. First, in the heavy metal setting of Reduta Ordona, fragments are rearranged to emphasise the powerful anti-war (and anti-imperialist) irony of the poem’s original rhetorical questions: ‘Where is this king, who sends these crowds to slaughter? / Does he share their courage, does he expose his own breast?’ (my translation).25 Here, music becomes illustrative of a series of machine gun shots which create an overall expressiveness of senseless destruction in the face of which courageous defence becomes a necessity. Second, the country-style setting of the poem [Pytasz, za co Bóg] plays on the ‘Western’ as a parody even more striking than the jazzy version of the sonnet Baidary. That the last word—in linguistic, musical and contextual  ‘Подай же руку козакові, […] Возобновим наш тихий рай!’ (Shevchenko 1876, 2:210).  Not only in musical terms (intonation, rhythm), but in terms of poor diction and even distortion of Mickiewicz’s text. 25  ‘Gdzież jest król, co na rzezie tłumy te wyprawia? / Czy dzieli ich odwagę, czy pierś sam nadstawia?’ (Mickiewicz 1998a, 343). 23 24

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terms—is given to the West must be understood as a condensed point of arrival of the album’s to-and-fro between its contraposed idioms and directions. We hear the Polish original only, but Haydamaky are no longer orientalising themselves in this absence of the Ukrainian (as they did in their setting of Alpuhara, see below). Instead, they play Country. As if to say: ‘we are at home not only in Mickiewicz’s steppe and Crimea but in his Lausanne, Dresden, Paris… and beyond!’26 In terms of the poem’s textual meaning, which praises deeds and silence over words which bring fame— Haydamaky seem to define once more their own musical activity as auxiliary to action. The table of contrapositions resulting from the previous analyses of Konrad Wallenrod and the Crimean Sonnets can be expanded in the light of Haydamaky’s music to include the following oppositions: Polish Words: Recitation ‘Highbrow’ (poetry) West

Ukrainian Music: Vocal and instrumental Popular (song), orientalism, ‘wild’ East

Medium: Western Popular music in fusion with Eastern Folk

This extended opposition will now allow for an analysis of the problem proposed at the outset, namely the astonishing stylistic dissonance within Alpuhara, which unites the ‘wild tones’ of a Moorish ballad of war, pestilence and bloody treason with the innocent idyll of an idealised Lithuanian childhood. This unique aesthetic effect is not addressed in numerous musical settings of the ballad, which in most cases emphasise its belligerent character.27 Haydamaky ignore this contrast, too, but only with regard to 26  The authors of the album use the online popular edition of Mickiewicz’s works and assume that [Pytasz, za co Bóg] is one of the so-called Lausanne lyrics, written in Lausanne 1839–1840. However, this is not accurate, as the poem is dated approx. 1833–1836 by the editors (Mickiewicz 1998a, 406). Still, it was written in the West, so if what they meant by closing the album with it was an ‘Eastern travel with a Western happy end’ they achieved their goal, regardless of this inaccuracy. 27  I identified fourteen settings, ranging from Maria Szymanowska’s song (1828), through various other settings including an opera aria in Wł. Żeleński’s Konrad Wallenrod (1885) as well as cantatas and simple tunes contained in popular songbooks of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Another rock setting is featured in Woźniak (2003) and seems to illustrate the Waydelota’s lute by alluding to its ‘uncertain chords’ in the guitar intro. However, no trace of the idyllic childhood tune can be found.

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one of its constitutive elements: the ‘childish’, mild character, prescribed by the drunken Teutonic Master. If this element is lost, the Eastern and the popular idioms have found their (transformed) counterparts here: the former through the ‘oriental’ musical gestures and instrumentation— including ney and sopilkas as well as typical rhythms and scales—and the latter in the very fact that it is a folk rock music setting. Here, Konrad’s ‘wild tones’ become ‘tribal’ war cries that answer a Ukrainian folk fife’s ‘war signal’. The combination of the repeated ‘Hara-hara Alpuhara! Hara-­ hara, hara-hara!’ motive with the ‘tribal’ cry constitute the chorus of Haydamaky’s version. This is most revealing, given the structural position these elements occupy here, as Ukrainian-sung choruses tend to become a strategy of turning poems into songs on this album. This setting, however, together with the album’s concluding song are the only tracks where not a single word of Ukrainian is to be heard.28 The ‘tribal wildness’ of the Moors, who are orientalised here to the extreme, takes the place of the Ukrainian language entirely, making their identification structurally evident. A final line of identification is drawn by purely musical means: the main motive of Alpuhara is first played by a trumpet, then repeated over and over again with guitars, bass and drums. It hence not only becomes the whole’s ostinato but also recalls the ‘music of the steppe’-motive from the first track, the Akerman Steppe, by sharing the same rhythmic pattern. In the Akerman Steppe setting, the musico-literary structure seems to follow Goethe’s assertion of an intrinsic bond between Land and Dichtung, quoted by Mickiewicz in the epigraph. First appears the steppe soundscape (Land) followed by the poem’s recited words (Dichtung). Out of these music is born: at first instrumental, developed from the rhythmic motive of the ‘oriental’ steppe, then melo-recited and finally vigorously sung in Ukrainian. In other words, music (the East) takes its melodies from the words of poetry alone (the West) and these words originate from the wild soundscape (the East once more).

Conclusion The fictitious Ukrainian poet Stanislav ‘Stakh’ Perfetsky, the protagonist of Andruchovych’s novel Perverzion, travels from Ukraine through Poland and Austria to Venice in a humorous post-modern pastiche of Thomas 28  The chorus on track 6, the ballad The Living Dead, is sung by Iarmiola in Polish albeit bearing a heavy Ukrainian accent.

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Mann’s Death in Venice. His Ukrainian journey towards the West through Poland seems to be a congenial prose pendant of the musico-literary journey which we were tracing on the album. It ‘is a dogged, unceasing, and unerring push to the West […] not a single step to the East!’ (Andrukhovych 2005, 13). In Kraków, having read a ‘hermeticized lecture’ at the Jagiellonian University, Perfetsky ‘bacchanalized the neighborhoods of the Market Square […] calling this risky contrivance A Tartar in the City: Scenes from the History of Cracow’ which was followed by a ‘reading at night of the most controversial excerpts of Shevchenko’s long poem Haidamaky before the monument of Mickiewicz’ (Andrukhovych 2005, 13). These few phrases mirror eloquently several crucial points of our discourse. As shown, the popular song is associated with the Homeric tradition, which brings epic music to Mickiewicz’s poetry. The word-notated music of the song is the only armour the politically oppressed have against the colonising power. This sound-picture plays on a conflict between the oppressed, pagan and uncivilised ‘popular’ (East) and the oppressive, colonising, civilised and courtly (West). Words (contrasted in terms of language) and music (contrasted in terms of style and genre) are on both sides of the barricade and—united in song—are the weapon in the war of identities. This war’s decisive battle takes shape as a singing contest. On this knightly Western ground, the East wins with the West by using the musical form of Konrad’s oriental ballad and by combining it with a popular tune from the ‘local East’. This astonishing union constitutes a disturbingly dissonant musical disposition which is consequently disregarded by the text’s interpreters but partially fulfilled in Haydamaky’s setting. The song’s perlocutionary force is first praised in the Wajdelota’s songs and then realised in Konrad’s action, both poetic (his ‘strange ballad’) and political (his high treason). The union of mythos (plot) sung within the narrative with the narrative’s own plot is a means of musicalisation: it serves—on the level of genre identification—to present the whole poem within the tradition of the epic song, as a song which needs musical realisation. This identification, once established, has the reverse validity: by singing his ballad Wallenrod quite literally sings his own fate—albeit in an oriental guise. The performative power of song—that is, that by singing it one decides one’s own fate—thus relies on this very mechanism of identification. Alpuhara brings all these Mickiewiczian symbolic tensions and mechanisms of substitution at the heart of the album. Haydamaky have been

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playing on literary strings from the very beginning of their existence: in Polish, the group’s very name connotates crime, violence and injustice, while in Ukrainian—through a literary tradition—it is associated with the patriotic struggle against foreign oppression. Through their subsequent projects with various Polish artists, they seek to recontextualise it, building a new opening in the two nations’ historically difficult relations. At the same time, Haydamaky present themselves as a pop-cultural continuation of the guslars, whose songs are sacralised and politicised in Mickiewicz’s texts. In their hands, the wajdelota’s Old Prussian lute and the kobzar’s bandura become an electric guitar. In the Crimean Sonnets, solidarity with the oppressed Orient is shown and repaid with trust (cf. Mogiły haremu). In Konrad Wallenrod, the reader is won for the Eastern case and understands its ‘unintelligible’ language no less than her mother tongue. That East is a disguise for one’s own invaded political community. The language of imperial stereotypes which construes old Lithuania as the East with respect to the Teutonic State is thus used as a subversive weapon. The historical mask permits this operation and also to deploy its symbolic power, actual geographical directions being reverse (Poland-Russia). Thus, historicism permits not only to outsmart Russian imperial censorship but, much more significantly, to present the Polish case in lights similar to that known from Byron’s oriental tales. Such a self-orientalisation in disguise permits the twenty-first-­ century reader of Mickiewicz to overcome the specifically Polish reluctance to use postcolonial critique with respect to Poland, seen as a menace to Polish (Europocentric) self-identification with the West (cf. Skórczewski 2007, 151–152). We have traced bi-medialism and bilingualism, differently realised in both sources. In Konrad Wallenrod, the ‘Homeric union’ of music and epic poetry is rendered in mere words; in the album: Polish recited words are contrasted with Ukrainian music: instrumental and vocal. Antagonistic bilingualism present in Konrad Wallenrod, rendered in the poem’s Polish, is augmented by the disjunction of the media ostensive in the album’s Polish scandito constantly contraposed with sung Ukrainian. The musical interpretation develops and re-enacts the three polarities discussed within Mickiewicz’s Romantic melopoesis, re-setting Poland in the position of the West and placing Ukraine (in lieu or as a continuation of Mickiewicz’s Lithuania) as Poland’s own, inner East. Thus, Ukraine identifies itself as a ‘European’, ‘Western’ East, rather than as a satellite of the post-Soviet Empire. Orientalising musical gestures, particularly drastic

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in the ballad Alpuhara, where they underline its ‘wild’ aspects, can be read in two ways: as an extreme case of self-orientalisation or as a less innocent gesture, as if to say: ‘with all our orientalism, to which we proudly admit, and which we skilfully integrate with the Western popular music idiom, we are still not as wild as that’. After all, finding one’s East is a way to feel more West. The latter sentiment seems to be mercilessly true of the Polish glimpse eastwards encoded in Stasiuk’s unprofessional (and thus: totemic) recitations: Poland, feeling the postcolonial complex of being the West’s East and Russia’s ex-annexed territory, and not willing to accept either, orientalises East Slavic countries, to reaffirm its hurt sense of its own mythologised Westernness. This inevitably happens, even if, as in this case, it is done in a fully appreciative way. ‘Instead of being a part of the Eastern Leviathan’, Poland seems to say impersonated by its Writer, ‘be my East. Trust me, because I am your West. Come through me to the West’s West’.29

Works Cited Andrukhovych, Yuri. 2005. Perverzion. Trans. Michael N. Naydan. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Billings, Joshua. 2011. Epic and tragic music: The union of the arts in the eighteenth century. Journal of the History of Ideas 72: 99–117. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. 1819. West-östlicher Divan. Stuttgart: Cotta. Herder, Johann Gottfried. 1990. Werke in zehn Bänden. Vol. 3. Deutscher Klassiker Vlg: Frankfurt am Main. Herder, Johann Gottfried, and Philip V.  Bohlman. 2017. Song loves the masses: Herder on music and nationalism. Oakland: University of California Press. Janion, Maria. 1979. Reduta: romantyczna poezja niepodległosciowa. ́ Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie. Kalinowska, Izabela. 2001. The sonnet, the sequence, the Qasidah: East-West dialogue in Adam Mickiewicz’s sonnets. Slavic and East European Journal 45: 641–659. Koropeckyj, Roman. 2001. Orientalism in Adam Mickiewicz’ s Crimean sonnets. The Slavic and East European Journal 45: 660–678. Krzyżanowski, Julian. 1961. O ludowości Mickiewicza. In Paralele: Studia porównawcze z pogranicza literatury i folkloru, 320–349. Warszawa: PIW. Łucki, Aleksander, ed. 1924. Towarzystwo Filomatów: wybór tekstów. Kraków: Krakowska Spółka Wydawnicza.

29  I would like to thank Jeremy Coleman and Paweł Stępień, as well as the Editors of this volume, for their helpful comments on the earlier versions of this chapter.

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Rzońca, Wiesław. 2018. Natura ‘metafory unaoczniaja ̨cej’: ‘Sonety krymskie’ Adama Mickiewicza. In Liryka Mickiewicza: uczucia, swiadectwa, ́ ekspresje, ed. Andrzej Fabianowski and Ewa Hoffmann-Piotrowska, 170–186. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego. Shevchenko, Taras. 1876. Кобзарь. Vol. 2. Prague: Gregr & Dattl. Skórczewski, Dariusz. 2007. Dlaczego Polska powinna upomnieć się o swoja ̨ postkolonialność. Znak: 145–153. Sułek, Małgorzata. 2016. Stanisław Moniuszko i inni kompozytorzy wobec poezji Adama Mickiewicza: Studium komparatystyczne. Kraków: Musica Iagellonica. Uffelmann, Dirk. 2012. Lithauen! Mein Orient! In Der Osten des Ostens: Orientalismen in slavischen Kulturen und Literaturen, ed. Wolfgang Kissel, 265–301. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Witkowska, Alina. 1983. Mickiewicz, słowo i czyn. Warszawa: PWN. Wszelaczyński, Władysław. 1890. Adam Mickiewicz w muzyce: szkic muzyczno-­ bibliograficzny. Lwów: Piller. Zantuan, Konstanty. 1964. Mickiewicz in Russia. The Russian Review 23: 238–246. ———. 1969. Mickiewicz’ Konrad Wallenrod: An attempt at reappraisal. Comparative Literature Studies 6: 148–166. Zgorzelski, Czesław. 1988. Jak doszło do kariery piosenki w poezji romantycznej? In Zarysy i szkice literackie, 26–54. Warszawa: PIW. Ziolkowski, Theodore. 2018. Stages of European romanticism: Cultural synchronicity across the arts, 1798–1848. Rochester, N. Y.: Camden House.

Discography Che, Lao. 2002. Gusła. Warszawa: SP Records. Grechuta, Marek. 1970. Marek Grechuta & Anawa. Warszawa: Polskie Nagrania Muza. Haydamaky, and Voo Voo. 2009. Voo Voo ï Haydamaky. Warszawa: Agora. Kleszcz, Maja, and Wojciech Krzak. 2016. Romantycznos ́ć. Warszawa: MTJ Agencja Artystyczna. Kurylewicz, Andrzej, Czesław Niemen, and Wanda Warska. 1971. Kurylewicz, Warska, Niemen: muzyka teatralna i telewizyjna. Warszawa: Muza. Rod. 2018. Lelum polelum. Zdzieszowice: Karrot Kommando. Stasiuk, Andrzej, and Haydamaky. 2018. Mickiewicz—Stasiuk—Haydamaky. Warszawa: Agora. [unpaginated booklet]. Woźniak, Tadeusz. 2003. Ballady polskie. Warszawa: Kameleon Records.

CHAPTER 9

Post-Sovietness of the Popular: The West, the Post-Soviet Ukrainian Audience, and the Major Ukrainian Pop Star (1990s) Iuliana Matasova

Simon Frith’s Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (1996) contributes substantially to a discussion of the relationship between popular music and identity construction. In the chapter “Toward a Popular Aesthetic”, Frith argues for a directness of our experience of “musical pleasure” and claims that “music gives us a real experience of what the ideal could be” (274). He identifies the transcendence of popular music as that which “articulates not music’s independence of social forces but a kind of alternative experience of them” (275). Finally, Frith emphasizes music’s importance for matters of identity because of its ability to define “a space without boundaries” (276). To enter this space with the help of music requires relating to “the story it is heard to tell” (275). A pop song, a “self-consumption of the public by the public”, as Antoine Hennion observes, gives expression to “what cannot be said any other way” (1983, 161) potentially revealing “unknown aspects of society” (162). These are often blind spots, unrecognized but perceptible. One and the same

I. Matasova (*) Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Gurke, S. Winnett (eds.), Words, Music, and the Popular, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85543-7_9

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storyteller can capture these spots, either to the excitement of their listeners or, it may be, to their embarrassment or recoil. Some (undesirable) stories need to be told because to enunciate them is a political act. This act may be regarded in a vein similar to Lauren Berlant’s “work of citizenship” that she defines as “performative belonging to the now in which potentiality is affirmed” (2011, 261). Decent storytellers will quite often forfeit themselves for the sake of the story. This chapter provides a reading of a story of the post-Soviet Ukraine expressed through music. Hopeful, complicated, cringey, troublesome, and at times unbearable, this story was bound to be authored by women singer-songwriters. The potential of female artists met with the new nation’s desire for its own story. The legacy that emerged as a result is of vital importance in post-Soviet cultural history; its study exposes the structural relations between the event of post-Sovietness and the West.

Telling the Post-Soviet Rupture The intense potentiality of the post-Soviet 1990s is proverbial. The immediate mainstream narrative attributed this potential to the West alone and failed to imagine a place that would have an agenda of its own. Such discursive denial flattened its intensity. Yet, if place can be said to be “the range of kinds of places—as intimate as the body, and as abstract, yet distinctive, as […] a nation-state” (Gilmore 2002, 15, original emphasis), places may strike back. In this chapter, I attempt to employ the framework of the global post-­ Soviet 1990s to open up a perspective on its inherent disruption. I do so by addressing popular culture as the site of anxiety and hope.1 More than an exercise in the recent cultural history of a location (Ukraine), this critique relates a minor popular culture to the major popular culture industry (Ukrainian to American). Such a relation allows for the exploration of the inevitable political agency of minor actors. In the Ukrainian post-Soviet condition, their work exposes the failing libidinal logic of becomingWest—itself possible only as always-postponed2—and, in the post-Soviet 1  In Fredric Jameson’s view, popular culture possesses the power of handling “anxieties about the social order” by recovering them and then providing voice for “the deepest and most fundamental hopes and fantasies of the collectivity” (1979, 144). 2  Sergei Zherebkin elaborates on this idea of his in “Hotiat li zhenshchiny voiny? (sluchai Ukrainy)” (2018, 121–124, 133–134) (‘Do women want war? (the case of Ukraine)’ (my translation).

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condition of the West, intuitively expresses the turning of being-West into an incessantly deferred experience. This chapter focuses on the legacy of Ukrainian female singer-­ songwriters of the 1990s, paying special attention to the Ukrainian-­ language oeuvre of Iryna Bilyk—Ukraine’s first pop superstar and singer-songwriter.3 Producing a whole generation of women writing and performing their own music, the 1990s became an environment that encouraged them to work on imagining a new Ukraine. I would describe their legacy as storytelling: these otherwise very different women, whose similarity was defined by their authorial agency, imagined and narrated Ukraine with their music. If the Soviet Ukrainian estrada canon mostly featured women as performers necessarily working with composers and lyricists, the majority of post-Soviet Ukrainian artists of the 1990s authored their own lyrics, wrote their own music, and performed their own songs.4 In the post-1990 Ukraine, it was this agency that ensured these women’s crucial participation in the construction of a new social imaginary. In the case of Iryna Bilyk, the singer-songwriter’s stamina to keep on weaving the story of the new nation lasted until 2003, climaxing in her last Ukrainian-language release, aptly named Bilyk. Krayina (‘Bilyk. The Land’, my translation). After 2003, Bilyk began to sing in Russian. This unfortunate detour was, on the one hand, an attempt to widen her audience. On the other hand, it coincided with and revealed the universalizing operation of Russia’s popular culture industry as it came to occupy the new— Ukrainian—market. Although continuing to create music and lyrics for her songs, Bilyk also allowed for more and more collaborative activities. Her endeavors were largely futile: the music changed, the magic was gone, and the performer herself ended up being stigmatized as an alleged traitor.5 However, other singer-songwriters of the same generation, the ones who kept writing in Ukrainian, were also not rewarded. Not only did they have no intention of becoming part of the major (Russian) industry; as less popular stars, they also had practically no chance to do so. At the turn of the millennium, Ukraine’s popular culture industry was p ­ articularized and 3  Except for Bilyk other prominent names are Marichka Burmaka, Yuliya Lord, Katya Chilly, and Liuda Orlenko of the DAT band and others. 4  According to David MacFadyen, estrada is “a wide-ranging term that includes pop music but also applies to […] any other performance not on the ‘big’, classical stage” (2002, 3). 5  To a large extent, such a diversion from the initially adopted creative process might as well be explained as surrendering to the logic of the apparatus of area that Bilyk debased with her storytelling for over a decade, from 1990 to 2003.

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nationalized as minor in relation to its major Russian counterpart. As a result, it was rendered obsolete and unusable for the larger, Russianspeaking audience. First and foremost, this affected the women’s legacy since, as singer-songwriters, they directly participated in the formation of a new social imaginary. Along the way, a number of Ukrainian male rock bands were harmlessly exoticized and appropriated.6 While the popular music of the 1990s in Ukraine was notably defined by the decisive presence of women singer-songwriters, at the end of the decade, they were replaced by a nascent generation of glamorous male-­ produced girl bands (like the legendary VIA Gra, of a Lego-like quality, with interchangeable female members). This symptomatic shift highlighted an exceptional moment for Ukrainian popular music—one that became its entry point and that I elsewhere call a “‘happy’ precarious state” (2019, 205). An extraordinary number of women singer-­songwriters occupied the stage as the popular culture industry of Soviet Ukraine became defunct and left behind—in abundance—its means of production. The gap-like quality of this juncture allowed for a number of developments, including an entrepreneurial DIY-operation and the emergence of new artists, most of whom were women managing their own creative output. Not only were they imagining the new nation but they also took the most active part in establishing the new conditions of an industry yet to come. In fact, they could engage themselves both in ideology and economy only because this kind of labor was regarded as insecure. Unlike their Western peers, even the bigger stars of this generation were able to earn only affective capital, that is, popularity and the audience’s recognition. Once the industry was re-launched, largely due to their efforts, the women maintaining their creative operation generally lost their positions 6  The most famous example would be Okean Elzy whose song “Koly Tebe Nema” (‘When You’re Gone’, my translation) was featured on Aleksei Balabanov’s Brother 2 movie soundtrack—the band, importantly, started rising to prominence at the end of the 1990s. Vopli Vidopliasova should be mentioned as well: this band became the object of Pesni Zapadnykh Slavian: Vopli Vidopliasova. Liapis Trubetskoy (‘The Songs of the Western Slavs: Vopli Vidopliasova. Liapis Trubetskoy’, my translation)—the 2007 book by the controversial Russian journalist Illya Stogov. Both Ukrainian bands were seen as not dangerously participating in the construction of a new social imaginary during the first decade of Ukraine’s independence. Vopli Vidopliasova were still late Soviet, according to their birth certificate, so to say (they became active right before the dissolution of the Soviet Union), while Okean Elzy were too young to be held responsible for the particular Ukrainian consciousness of the 1990s. Hence, they could have been rediscovered or discovered by the Russian popular culture industry as exotically entertaining Ukrainian-speaking artists.

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in the Ukrainian pop scene7 but without losing their importance in creating the story of a new Ukraine. In her book Borderlands into Bordered Lands: Geopolitics of Identity in Post-Soviet Ukraine, Tatiana Zhurzhenko defines post-Soviet borders as lacking symbolic power on an international level (2010, 19) and emphasizes in particular that “the Ukrainian-Russian borderlands appear as part of a non-differentiated, […] ambiguous ‘post-­ Soviet space’” (23). From day one, Ukrainian popular culture engaged precisely in empowering this symbolic borderline, first and foremost, in relation to Russia. Considering that feminist sensibility—preoccupied with the problematic of identity construction and with thinking the border— was tangibly present in Ukrainian literature and scholarship of the 1990s as well, most of the border thinking may be regarded as notably women’s work.

The Original 1990s: Engaging the Minor If this feminization happens to be one of the distinctive features of Ukraine’s post-Soviet version of late capitalism, then one should consider the singularity of the original 1990s. Franco “Bifo” Berardi describes them as an “obsession with identity” (2009, 92). Berardi equates this condition to “a civil war […] on a planetary scale”, in itself the aftermath of “the crisis of the internationalist perspective after 1989” (92, original emphasis). Trying to comprehend the 1990s once they started, Lawrence Grossberg states that the failure to fathom the “rapidly changing political alliances, positions and struggles” characteristic of this time is especially tangible at “the intersection of popular culture, capitalism and the structures of social power” (1992, 89). Anglo-American popular music of the 1990s is associated with a group of prominent women singer-songwriters known for their overall disruptive operation. Artists like Tracy Chapman, Annie Lennox, Sinéad O’Connor, Indigo Girls, Tori Amos, PJ Harvey, Ani DiFranco, Alanis Morissette, Liz Phair, Fiona Apple, Joan Osborne, Courtney Love, Kim Deal, Kim Gordon, Shirley Manson, Skin, Bikini Kill, L7, and Babes in Toyland (to name a few) represented an outstanding creative and political event. Their very presence on stage seemed like a game-changer for at least two reasons: firstly, up until the 1990s, most women only performed music 7  With several notable exceptions, something similar happened to the Anglo-American generation of women singer-songwriters of the 1990s.

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written, played, and produced by men, and secondly, many of these women gained global commercial success. Indeed, popular cultural production in the 1990s was very much engaged with the making of gendered identities and was quite successful in that regard. Women’s work in the cultural field as well as femininity as a subject of critical speculation contributed to this success. In her 2008 book Feminism and Pop Culture, Andi Zeisler labels the 1990s “a short but unquestionably fertile time when music was a chief site of feminism and mainstream resistance” (105), while Ronald D. Lankford, Jr. reckons that the women-in-rock movement “pushed feminism into mainstream American culture” (2010, xviii). The brevity of the phenomenon was telling, though. In 2005, for instance, the Grammy Award category of Best Female Rock Vocal Performance (which existed from 1980 to 2004) was merged with the category of Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance. Closer to the end of the 1990s, Girl Power, a concept developed by the underground Riot Grrrl movement, was mainstreamed, leaving its original political message essentially stifled. Once women were able to pronounce and instill into master narratives the necessity to recognize difference as vital for the reproduction of liberal democracy under the conditions of late capitalism, their efforts were conveniently co-opted into the bigger picture. In this context, Cressida Heyes rightfully invokes Wendy Brown’s suggestion that, bearing its genealogy in liberal capitalism, identity politics’ claim for equality in fact entraps the marginalized. Brown’s argument goes: “Politicized identity […] enunciates itself […] only by entrenching, restating, dramatizing, and inscribing its pain in politics; it can hold out no future—for itself or others—that triumphs over this pain” (qtd. in Heyes 2002). However diverse in their methodologies, many women singer-­ songwriters of the 1990s shared an attachment to the creative tool of anger as a way of channeling their pain: “our generation loves our pain […]. We like our pain. And we’re packaging it, and we’re selling it”, said Tori Amos in a Rolling Stone interview in 1994 (29). Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth asserted that her creative standpoint was anger employed for the sake of transgression (c.f. Nehring 1997, 87). Indeed, Anglo-American cultural production of the 1990s—including women’s music—was generally angry. In fact, angriness may have been one of the most prominent features of the indie boom and the rise of the alternative scene that the 1990s brought forth.

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It is symptomatic that this disruptive stance and resistance—based on individual as well as collective stories of struggling against domination— were quickly introduced into mainstream culture. By the early 1990s, as Charlie Bertsch notes in his essay on the Seattle scene, it became easier for alternative or indie bands to work with major labels and gain a notable mainstream success (c.f. Shuker 2002, 268). Among the reasons for this phenomenon were the “new relationships between creativity and commerce” introduced into the industry operation through indie (Hesmondhalgh 1999, 35). As for the women singer-songwriters, some of them were and still remain independent musicians, while most shared dramatic histories of first trying to sign with a major label and then working according to the constraints of these contracts.8 Nevertheless, as Lori Burns and Mélisse Lafrance suggest, “the articulation of resistance politics” could still be realized “through forms mediated by late capitalist patterns of consumption” (2002, xii). While resistance as creative method trended, in popular discourse, its message was conveniently reduced to unspecific, inarticulate, incoherent rage.9 One of the affects that underlay such alleged incoherence in the alternative cultural production of the 1990s—including the women singer-songwriters’ legacy and practice—was the presence of anti-­corporate pathos. In his essay, “What is indie rock?”, Ryan Hibbett draws an important parallel between indie rock and high art (2005, 57–59). This perspective suggests that the alternative canon of the 1990s appeared to be doing the work of the minor, especially considering that the pertaining resistance strategies were mainstreamed in accordance with the logic of appropriation. This job was political. It is relevant in this context to recall Deleuze and Guattari’s reflection on minor literatures that famously reads: “everything in them is political” (1986, 17).

The Post-Sovietness of It All? A reading of the 1990s as a disruption, a gap in the post-Soviet nations, is a well-known chorus of popular discourse. The self-declared West, however, did not at that moment quite conceive of an encounter with the 8  For example, Ani DiFranco established her DIY-enterprise that later became known as the independent record label Righteous Babe Records in Buffalo, New York, in 1990. 9  Numerous examples of reviews from music journalists are collected in Neil Nehring’s Popular Music, Gender, and Postmodernism: Anger is an Energy (1997, 79–104).

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world behind the Berlin wall, a world that the Western self-imagination presumably never contained and would not have had to embrace in its difference—since the so-called second world,10 as transitology discourse had it, was destined to perform its smooth adjustment and assimilate. However, attentive interpreters of the supposedly glorious victory in the Cold War— such as the band Sonic Youth—showed a growing suspicious sensibility towards this apparent success. “It takes a teenage riot to get me out of bed right now”, sang Thurston Moore on the title track of Daydream Nation (1988). But why think of a revolt when the winning battle has just been fought? Why attach the epithet “daydream” to the winning nation? In 1990, Kim Gordon, of the same band, wrote and recorded the lyrics to “Kool Thing”. The spoken interlude of the track alluded to Public Enemy’s “Fear of Black Planet”, and in a dialogue with Chuck D she asks: Hey, Kool Thing […] I just wanna know, what are you gonna do for me? I mean, are you gonna liberate us girls From male white corporate oppression? […] Don’t be shy [Chuck D] Word up! [Gordon] Fear of a female planet? [Chuck D] Fear of a female planet? [Chuck D] Fear, baby! (Sonic Youth 1990)

Between these two recording events, Sonic Youth toured to promote Daydream Nation and visited the Soviet Union playing in Kyiv, Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Vilnius and elsewhere. It seems prophetic that the band’s 1989 album Live in Moscow was released just recently, in February 2020. David Browne poignantly describes it as “a town crier yelling into the void, warning us what was coming when only a few people were listening” (2020). The minor political actors in Western popular culture of the 1990s seemed to have been confronted with several unanticipated revelations. Generally, they regarded the now perpetual capitalist future with distress, and not as a disconcertingly happy outcome of the Cold War. From this perspective, the struggle for an identity might have seemed a lesser task as compared to coming up with a defying politics of resistance. The genuine 10  Highly relevant for the analyzed time frame, the dependency theory terminology remains as problematic as it has always been.

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message of the politics of resistance needed to contain a more precise definition of the power structure, something like Gordon’s “male white corporate oppression”. It also made sense to pay attention to the complex changes happening in the West’s non-capitalist Others. To return to Browne’s observation and the question of the audience of the minor: could such a message be enunciated if listeners were available? And was it not precisely for the “void”, suddenly yawning here and there, that such enunciation finally acquired its vocabulary? Does this set of conditions show, then, that the 1990s carried in them a certain outstanding quality of a gap, and not only in relation to the new nations of a post-Soviet/post-­ socialist locality? The end of the Cold War served to define the post-Soviet/post-socialist space as quite specific, the very existence of this space being indicative of the condition of unipolarity. With the West declaring itself as central to the power structure, a purportedly smooth transit of the former so-called second world was generally conceived of as westernization. Such an incantation produced a situation in which the post-Soviet difference was unrecognized but also, simultaneously, included into the operative ideological arrangement of the West. Considering such a recognition as necessary, I am here subscribing to Susan Buck-Morss’s registering of “a new constellation of humanity that finds itself in a ‘post-Soviet condition’” (2008, 31). Buck-Morss shifts the focus from spatiality to temporality: “The post-Soviet condition does not apply to a curio of specimens who presently inhabit the former Soviet Union or define their situation as unique” (30). Maintaining the significance of acknowledging the shared quality of time, she claims that “‘post-Soviet’ refers to an ontology of time” (30). While a single post-Soviet identity has never existed, one of the most conspicuously unifying features of post-Sovietness has been the predicament of self-identification. The fierce ongoing fight for an identity other than post-Soviet—the struggle for a distinct name—is a current fact in  locations like Ukraine and Belarus and not simply a flashback to the immediately post-Soviet 1990s. Dramatic and tragic, this battle brings to life unequivocal and irreconcilable configurations. Importantly, these developments in the former second world are taking place alongside the striking polarization that presently defines large parts of the former first—or Western—world. While the place of the imaginary West shrinks, the present-day post-Soviet collapse signals the constructed conditionality of the event of post-Sovietness. Post-Sovietness exists in the

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domain of the bipolar: through its relation to the West, it both reveals and sustains a condition of bipolarity that only seems to have been alleviated. Post-Sovietness also manifests the mechanisms that function to perpetuate such a sustainability—those of exclusion and of repression of the post-­ Soviet difference. With Ukraine, the exclusion is reflected in the apparent necessity to constantly reproduce a modern (Western) nation-state in a transnational reality—that is, in the circumstances that render such efforts impossible. At the same time, the construing of the post-Soviet difference as non-radical summons Ukraine to affectively perform the imaginary West and maintain such an affective attachment. In the post-Soviet condition then, the former first and second worlds have entered the mode of deferral. In Sergei Zherebkin’s words, ‘a mode of “the coming democracy” in Ukraine is only possible as long as it is at the same time a mode of “postponing”’ (my translation).11 For the West now, as we come to learn, a sustained mode of democracy becomes that of a crumbling one. In a certain way, the current dissolution of the post-Soviet space—invoking post-socialism’s “queer temporality” (Atanasoski and Vora 2018, 141)— reflects the evolving transmutation of the project of the West.

To Be the Major of the Minor: Popular and/ or Emancipated The rise of popular culture in the first decade of Ukraine’s independence was unprecedented. Its quality was distinctively new compared to late Soviet Ukrainian popular culture. Politically, it was in the domain of popular culture that an imagined story of Ukraine was being constructed. Imagination and storytelling helped envisage an affirmative narrative that would contain Ukraine’s history and its becoming. As it turns out, most of the effective storytellers in Ukrainian popular music of the 1990s were women singer-songwriters. Working precariously in the transient economy of the largely disintegrated popular culture industry,12 they were able to occupy the leading positions on the pop stage. In exercising their authorial agency, they endeavored to creatively channel Ukraine’s (utopian) ­political 11  “Modus ‘griadushchei demokratii’ v Ukraine vozmozhen tolko v toi mere, v kotoroi on odnovremenno yavliayetsia modusom ‘otkladyvaniya’” (quoted in Irina Zherebkina’s Facebook post of 30 April 2018). 12  At least in the first half of the decade until the industry gradually started to re-establish itself.

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desire and spur a working narrative of the new social imaginary.13 If the Western condition endowed the minor actors with acute political sensibility, the minor place of Ukraine produced a reverse situation. In it, a similar agency was an option only available to the major actors. Importantly, Iryna Bilyk, the first Ukrainian major pop star, happened to be a woman singer-songwriter. It was crucial that her stories were listened to and heard, because the audience she could address arrived precisely when she did. The dynamics between a post-Soviet female singer-songwriter/major mainstream pop star and her post-Soviet audience points to a series of important developments. Particularly, they reveal the failing structure of post-Sovietness in its affective relation to the West at the same time as they emphasize the importance of storytelling as emancipatory practice. To look at this relation is to try to answer the question: what does it mean to be post-Soviet and popular? Or: what is always already problematic about the major star of a minor popular culture? Iryna Bilyk (born in Kyiv in 1970) defined the Ukrainian musical 1990s, epitomizing a distinctive newness and embracing the very concept of a super star. Simply put, her music was good enough to have helped many live through the post-Soviet 1990s. Not merely a subjective designation but rather a cultural category, good here indicates a particular quality of Bilyk’s musical creativity. Its aesthetics met the ethical challenge of mitigating post-Soviet everydayness, an exhaustingly constant transformation that afflicted the majority of Ukrainians from all different generations and social perspectives. From the beginning, the story of herself and the story of Ukraine that Bilyk chose to tell were framed as post-apocalyptic. Bilyk began her career at the very end of the Soviet Union, a time of total social, economic, and cultural breakdown. This situation determined that Bilyk decidedly draw a line between herself—the artist of a new time and place—and whatever came before. Instead of creatively re-thinking the past, she circumvented the traumatic experience of being Soviet altogether. And to perpetuate the logic of this mythology, Bilyk invoked a nominalist magic and called herself “Nova”.14 13  It should be noted that other than the storytellers of utopia, the Ukrainian post-Soviet 1990s produced a macabre dystopian vision of a new Ukraine. Tamara Hundorova’s The Post-Chornobyl Library: Ukrainian Postmodernism of the 1990s (2019) gives an account of this trend in literature. 14  Bilyk’s 1995 LP was entitled Nova and included the eponymous track which became one of her most popular releases.

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The initial strategy for becoming Nova was that of de-sovietization. The first Ukrainian superstar was determined to act as if she was devoid of any Soviet trace. This included any tinge of the national, because national particularization was necessarily characteristic of Ukrainian cultural production in the Soviet modernist project. As if pristine, Bilyk was coming from nowhere and everywhere at the same time when, of course, nowhere and everywhere pertained to the West. Determined to tell the story of a new Ukraine, the singer-songwriter’s preference was to downplay pathos and weave her narrative from the matter of everydayness. Strategically, she sang in Ukrainian—a language so unexpected for a trendy pop star that it sounded as Western as English. These creative decisions could easily be dismissed as simply mimicking the West. But they could also be read along the lines of Aijaz Ahmad’s reflection on the condition of the so-called Third World nations at the beginning of the 1990s. Ahmad rightfully questions the discourse of cultural nationalism that necessarily associates these nations with a culture and a tradition which, “for the ‘Third World’, [are] always better than ‘modernity’” (2000, 9). He expresses serious doubts as to whether “to speak from within that culture and that tradition is itself an act of anti-imperialist resistance” (9). An important episode from Bilyk’s career illustrates this kind of logic in action. In 1989, the future star competed in and failed to win what was to become the most important national song contest of Ukraine, the Chervona Ruta festival. Most of its winners later went on to shape the new Ukrainian pop music and, inevitably, the new social imaginary. The festival’s vision of how the story of a nascent Ukraine should be composed largely relied on appealing to a specific culture and a tradition.15 For example, Maryna Odolska—singer-songwriter and winner of the 1995 festival—wrote a song symptomatically entitled “Jdemo v Daleku Put’” (‘Starting on a Long Way’, my translation). Its chorus reads: “Jdemo v daleku put’ / vid kintsia na pochatok”, that is, ‘Starting on a long way / from the end to the beginnings’ (1996, my translation) and thus suggests that the nation-building methodology was that of going backward—‘from the end to the beginnings’. Odolska’s chorus line conveys exactly such a backward progress, a moving away from the Soviet and into the national, to where the roots to revive the nation would lie. Bilyk’s creative gesture was different—universal and non-national. It was effectively an attempt to 15  For more on the Chervona Ruta festival and its ideology, see Catherine Wanner, “Nationalism on stage: Music and change in Soviet Ukraine” (1996).

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reject the becoming-Third World (to follow Ahmad’s line of thinking) in favor of becoming-West. Potentially disrupting the logic of the apparatus of area, this same gesture ensured her build-up to the status of a major star that was affirmed by the festival itself when she performed as its headliner in 1997.16 A straightforward dropping of the Soviet in favor of the imaginary West proved to be the simplest strategy. In this endeavor, the artist and her audience came together: both were eager newcomers, so to speak. Bilyk’s third release Nova served as a successful display of her initial strategy of westernization. Her newness became a brand and Bilyk demonstrated her self-awareness as the first pop star of an independent Ukraine able to fearlessly demand change: “Spravy ok, tvoya Nova z toboyu”, that is, ‘We’re ok, your New is by your side’ (1994, my translation).17 Quite a clear-cut statement, the album signaled the well-prepared inception not only of the singer-songwriter herself but also of Ukrainian pop music. The chorus to “Nova” with its mantra-like repetitions of the song’s title emphasizes this ambition. Additionally, the album’s artwork seems inspired by a Western (American) pop mainstream look à la Madonna: the inside image shows the singer in a light-colored sweater, sporting a trendy wet-hair look and a nude manicure to convey a relaxed but glamorous naturalness. In the cover image, she is pictured wearing shades—the conventional accessory of any superstar to protect their privacy. Yet, these creative choices should not be regarded as simply derivative. Rather, they signal a claim to Western privilege as the basis of the new social imaginary: Bilyk demonstrated the advantage of looking and acting trendy, at ease, self-asserted, realized, full of energy and, most of all, new—a sentiment widely shared by her audience. At the same time, the album’s success proved that new Ukrainian 16  Bilyk’s success was quite impressive. In 1995, she became the first Ukrainian performer to go on a national sold-out tour, repeating this accomplishment in 1997. The tours being a material proof of the audience’s devotion, Bilyk’s popularity was also officially appreciated by the state, in the form of state awards—a tradition dating back to the organization of popular culture in the Soviet times. She became the Honored Artist of Ukraine in 1996 and in 2008 accepted the next title rank—that of the People’s Artist of Ukraine. Such a hybrid combination of the alleged inevitability of the free market supply and demand with the formalized valuation coming from the planned economy arsenal was indeed a manifestation of the event of post-Sovietness. Bilyk also holds a number of other awards. 17  The song was originally written in 1994 and first recorded on Ya Rozkazhu LP (‘I Will Tell’, my translation). It became the title track for Nova in the form of a dance remix. Both in the original and remixed versions, “Nova” was a catchy, unsophisticated pop tune.

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popular music could be appreciated, at least when it could securely rely on the major Western narratives. In 1996, Bilyk released her next LP entitled Tak Prosto (‘That Simple’, my translation), which, ironically, signaled that things were getting quite complicated. Discovering the resistance practices of women like Courtney Love and Tori Amos, Bilyk turned from American mainstream pop to the alternative pop-rock canon whose disruptive musical operation had been rapidly co-opted by the industry and safely mainstreamed. In this respect, Bilyk’s own resistance was still only a reference to the American mainstream. However, actualized by the major star of a minor popular culture, her creative decisions in the second half of the 1990s yielded a number of unexpected outcomes.18 The artwork of Tak Prosto emphasizes the singer-songwriter’s everyday activity as a musician: Bilyk is pictured in the studio, wearing headphones— that is, doing her job. The singer looks boringly normal, which in itself represents a move away from her earlier image. Visually simplistic, the album features songs that the singer-songwriter calls “filosofs’kiye”, that is, ‘philosophical’ (2007, my translation). One of these is Bilyk’s first pop-­ rock song and one of her most popular tracks to date: “Ya Idu na Viynu” (‘I’m Going to War’, my translation). Probably for the first time in her career, the performer sings in quite an aggressive manner and employs unconventional vocal techniques. These qualities are also visible in the music video. Bilyk describes her appearance in it as “realno strashnenkaya”, that is, ‘indeed ugly’ (2007, my translation). Therefore, the simplicity implied by the album’s title and artwork should not be taken at face value. In fact, a straitjacket, the heavily exaggerated make-up and matching hairstyle allude to the topos of madness. All levels of the track’s musical-lyrical-visual language conspicuously communicate the impression of a struggle, a “war” made palpable with the help of the “practices of ‘ugliness’”—a performance of resistance largely employed by Anglo-­ American singer-songwriters of the 1990s (Eileraas 1997, 137). Later, Bilyk stated that “pochemu-to nikto ne prinial etu bor’bu, i moi prizyv idti na voiny s samim soboy”, that is, ‘for some reason, no one accepted this fight, as well as my call to wage war on themselves’ (2007, my translation). 18  Such unexpectedness is one of the reasons why rendering post-Soviet cultural production as solely aspiring to erasing the traces of the Soviet and favoring the becoming-West is a regrettable over-simplification: if anything, Ukrainian women artists rather performed as translators of the West.

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Considering that the uglifying strategy was used by a number of AngloAmerican female artists and was becoming more and more normalized, Bilyk was still merely translating the Western mainstream for her audience. However, this time the becoming-West operation did not work as smoothly as before. So, why did the audience refuse to partake in the consumption of the ugly image and the philosophical lyrics despite the fact that they still immensely liked the music? It seems improbable that the major Ukrainian pop star clearly recognized the message articulated in the alternative cultural production of what I have earlier called the original 1990s. And she did not have to. But she unintentionally came up against the problematic structure of the imaginary West. Although Bilyk’s following of the subversive practices of alternative singer-songwriters was hardly aimed at debasing the master narrative, she still succeeded in doing so. Her Ukrainian listeners, in their post-Soviet neoliberal transformation and in love with the imaginary West, would not have their object of desire flawed. And if the Ukrainian singer-­ songwriter even came up with her own version of an anti-corporate message—her resistance being a response to the industry’s and nation’s corrupt development19—the (be-)longing to the fantasized space of the West felt much safer. Bilyk read the lackluster response of her audience as an outright denial of agency and as an appeal that she reproduce the comfortable, non-questioning Western mainstream. Entertaining the status of the major star, she still had to learn that in the logic of the apparatus of area, her newcomer’s subjectivity could work only as either a mimetic or an excluded one. For after all: she was only the major star of a minor popular culture. The artist confessed her tragic and unspeakable notion when stating that “nikto ne veril v ukrainskuyu muzyku”, that is, ‘no one believed in Ukrainian music’ (2007, my translation). In other words, Ukraine’s most popular and successful performer insisted on her ability to create a high-­ quality competitive cultural product and was taken aback by the fact that she was not trusted as a valid and independent author. Ironically, Bilyk claims that this realization dawned on her during her sold-out Tak Prosto 19  For example, the emerging radio stations and TV channels would start playing tracks for cash, and the first, mostly male, producers would only work with the new artists demanding that they sponsored their own production. This not only ruined the DIY-action of the first half of the 1990s but drastically reduced chances for young artists. Ukraine’s power, meanwhile, was establishing as oligarchic at a breathtaking pace.

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tour in the course of which she started addressing her audiences in a somewhat assertive manner and encouraging them to give her their hands, echoing the lyrics of another hit track “Dai Ruku Meni” (‘Give Me Your Hand’, my translation). It was as if, through a personal disappointment as an artist, Bilyk came to desire the audience’s (and the nation’s) self-­ reliance, alongside her own. The strategy of de-sovietization/westernization—already trivial and naïve—was exhausted. The next task imposed on her by her situation was to further imagine and narrate Ukraine non-­ reflexively and not through the negative value of not being Soviet/ Russian. Thus, having begun as post-apocalyptic, Bilyk’s story of Ukraine was becoming more and more situated, positioned in a particular time and place, that is, in the post-Soviet Ukraine of the 1990s. Bilyk’s storytelling entered the domain of the political: in Alain Badiou’s terms, she was doing “justice” to the nation in its post-Soviet quandary (1999, 29). It is significant that this endeavor was accomplished by someone who started under the condition of a non-capitalist operation. Discussing the non-existent popular music industry, with its still functioning instrumentality, Bilyk defined this brief moment as follows: “Vsio bylo v Ukraine besplatno”, that is, ‘Everything was for free in Ukraine’ (2007, my translation). It seemed like a perfect combination of the actor, the time, and the place entering a “singularity” indifferent to the “particularity of interests” (Badiou 1999, 29). Indeed, Bilyk’s “interest” at this point expanded beyond herself. Badiou calls poetry “an authoritarian form of declaration” (2006, 40). Equipped with her poetry and her music, Bilyk authoritatively insisted on her creative decisions, despite the fact that with every step, she was entering a lonelier conversation with her audience.20 The OMA LP (2000) turned out to be arguably her best record—and one of the best in Ukrainian pop music to this day. Yevgen Stupka, the album’s producer, defined the record some seventeen years later as “daring”.21 It should be 20  For the sake of conciseness, I am here excluding the analysis of the largely self-censored 1997 release Farby (‘Colors’, my translation). It should be mentioned, however, that it featured one of Bilyk’s most prominent tracks, “A Ya Plyvu” (‘And I Float’, my translation), which was later covered and remixed by other Ukrainian artists. It was an example of a disruptive creative gesture on all levels—musical, lyrical, visual—and a statement of a lonely transgressive act: “Mene nese techiya / Ya nichyya”, that is, ‘I am taken by the flow / I am nobody’s’ (Bilyk 1997, my translation). 21  In a personal conversation in January 2017.

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mentioned that OMA did not receive the attention Bilyk was counting on. On this pop-rock concept album, she remains loyal to at times aggressive vocal techniques while creating a series of elegant yet heartfelt images, all fitting beautifully with the leitmotif of the album: “Vybachai za dushu bez prykras”, that is, ‘Sorry for the soul as is’ (2000, my translation). The visual language of the artwork casts not a nationalized but rather an archetypal and mythologically infused image. Changing her hair color from her usual blonde to a dark brown shade, the performer wears a scarlet heart on her black dress, scarlet wings behind her back and a halo above her head. A mixture of witch, angel, and dark woman-warrior, the narrating persona of the album expresses perseverance as well as liminality and vulnerability. If, on Nova, Bilyk was working to project an effect of newness, OMA continued and climaxed the narrative of transgression that had started on Tak Prosto. Its multilayered story of profound openness was the singer-­ songwriter’s response to Ukraine’s decade of independence. In this sense, the release may be read as the account of the failure of the dream of a self-­ sufficient Ukraine that develops on its own terms. The visual image of the album, with its use of the Shadow archetype, contains the story of an existence that never came to be as imagined, or, rather, was never conceived of as possible. In a psychoanalytic logic, having taken in her dark side, the narrator of OMA gains self-expression in disregard of self-­ censorship—ahead of the audience, despite the audience, and for the sake of the audience. The text of OMA renounced the dissimulation of the safe mimicking of the Western subject. Having put the double bind of the Soviet Ukrainian behind her, Bilyk faced a sort of non-binary condition, with seemingly nothing to set herself against. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick maintains that the most useful work of a nondualist kind “is likeliest to occur near the boundary of what a writer can’t figure out how to say readily” (2003, 2). What the artist could not express until after the 2003 release of ‘Bilyk. The Land’ was the word solidarity, unimaginable in Ukraine’s cruel neoliberal glamour at the turn of the millennium. OMA’s loneliness and melancholy led to the desire for solidarity, or, to Bilyk. Krayina. To further honestly narrate Ukraine, its major pop star had to embrace the nation as is: with its post-Soviet anxiety, incoherence, and embarrassment along with its marginalized working-class and rural population using

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vernaculars such as surzhyk.22 Going vulgar and detecting her own reflection in this mirror, Bilyk actually dropped the claim for Western privilege and incorporated the exclusion defining the post-Soviet Ukraine. The final track on Bilyk. Krayina, entitled “Krayina”, that is, ‘The Land’ (my translation), communicates a mixture of self-persuasion and make-believe but also persistence. It reads, ‘I believe there is a land / That is called the land of dreams / I close my eyes / And I fly over to a wizard world / I crave to find it / A land that is like a reverie’, and concludes with ‘The dreamland is so close / Close / I know’ (2003, my translation).23 The lines are sung to a lively melody reminiscent of folky drinking tunes, while the music video portrays a spontaneous village feast, happy and inviting, organized by the surzhyk-speaking folk for their beloved pop star.24 Bilyk. Krayina became the last Ukrainian-language release by Iryna Bilyk.

The People’s Artist “Something in the term ‘people’ wants to figure its object as a wayward and subordinate other  – a prodigal underside challenging […] the elite ego of a centered collective self”, remarks Richard Middleton (2012, 277). The major actor of a minor popular culture, Iryna Bilyk started a relationship with her audience by embodying “the elite ego”, the one asserting its relation to the West. She gained popularity by providing the nation with precisely this desired self-representation, no matter that it denied any multivalence, multiplicity, and complicated depth in favor of the flat glamorous façade of the new. The audience, however, welcomed 22  A macaronic Ukrainian-Russian prevailing in large parts of the rural population and certain layers of the working class. 23  “Ya viriu ye na zemli krayina / Vona krayinoyu mriy zvetsia / Ya zakryvayu svoyi ochi / I vidlitayu u svit dyvnyi / Ya vidshukaty yiyi tak hochu / Krayinu skhozhu na son charivnyi. […] Krayina mriy na zemli tak blyz’ko / Blyz’ko / Ya znayu”. 24  One of the prominent themes of this concept album was also a self-contemplation of the poet’s mission in the construction of a national imaginary. On two songs off the release, “Banduryste, Orle Syzyi” (‘Bandura Player, The Grey Eagle’, my translation) and “Ne Plach, Marichko” (‘Don’t Cry, Marichko’, my translation), Bilyk virtually collaborated with the iconic national romantic poet Taras Shevchenko and the legendary seventeenth century singer-songwriter Marusia Churai. The first track is a cover version of a folk tune composed to Shevchenko’s lyrics, while the second is Bilyk’s original imitation of a folk song that appeals to the demonized Cassandra-like figure of Marusia Churai. Both songs provide a dramatic woman’s (Churai) and feminized man’s (Shevchenko) view of Ukraine’s insurmountable coercions on the way to becoming.

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such a strategy in their longing for becoming-West. After all, only the performance of exclusion could help obliterate the covert knowledge of being the excluded. For, as Middleton summarizes, “a structure of exception” always contains “the People [...] as an excluding […] power” and “a ‘people’ as […] the excluded” (278). In this respect, the initial creative narration of Ukraine by its first pop superstar could have been reduced to Bilyk’s construction of herself as a perfect neoliberal subject. Or, in Angela McRobbie’s line of thinking, as “subjects par excellence”/“subjects of excellence” (2004, 257). Yet, this people’s artist—the major-of-the-­ minor star—who was denied full agency once having claimed it revealed the “prodigal underside” from which she voiced what her post-Soviet audience would have downplayed as absent.25 Having undertaken to exercise disruption from the minors of the major, she groped for the limits of her authorial force to extend them and include—with understanding and love—her own and her people’s post-Soviet difference. She performed continuing acts of resistance—against her audience and the logic of the apparatus of area, and acts of love—toward and for the sake of the people. This was when she became Ukraine’s very own major pop star. In conclusion, this chapter returns to Frith’s consideration of popular music’s emancipatory potential, Hennion’s reflection on pop song’s revealing power, and Berlant’s contemplation of the political as sensual work that highlights the potential situated in the present. With her Ukrainian-language musical oeuvre, Iryna Bilyk was able to effectively create a space dismissive of limitations and indicative of an imagined future experienced in the present. This same oeuvre articulated what could not have been said otherwise: that, whether we liked it or not, we were all post-Soviet. That, in the gap of the 1990s, we—a briefly non-capitalist non-West, or the post-Soviet Ukraine of the 1990s, and the West—were constructed through a miserably forged hierarchical relation. And emancipation, that is, a nomination other than post-Soviet, was only to be traced outside this construction. Until this construction is vanquished, there is still some good popular music exposing the listener to an envisaged ideal. People miss it massively, as their YouTube comments show.

25  In the late Soviet era, the title of the People’s Artist carried a connotation of being deeply bureaucratic and somewhat cheesy. However, in the peculiar contingency of post-­ Sovietness, the title conjured up the incantation of its name.

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Works Cited Ahmad, Aijaz. (1992) 2000. In theory: Classes, nations, literatures. London: Verso. Amos, Tori. 1994. Interview by Chris Mundy. Rolling Stone (Nov): 28–29. Atanasoski, Neda, and Kalindi Vora. 2018. Postsocialist politics and the ends of revolution. Social Identities 24 (2): 139–154. https://doi.org/10.108 0/13504630.2017.1321712. Badiou, Alain. 1999. Philosophy and politics. Trans. T. Sowley. Radical Philosophy 96 (Jul/Aug): 29–32. ———. 2006. Plato, our dear Plato! Trans. A. Toscano. Angelaki 11 (3): 39–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/09697250601048499. Berardi, Franco “Bifo”. 2009. Precarious rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the pathologies of the post-alpha generation, ed. E. Empson, S. Shukaitis. Trans. A. Bove, E.  Empson, M.  Goddard, G.  Mecchia, A.  Schintu, and S.  Wright. London: Minor Compositions. Berlant, Lauren. 2011. Cruel optimism. Durham: Duke University Press. Bilyk, Iryna. 1994. Nova. Ya rozkazhu. NAC. ———. 1997. A ya plyvu. Farby. Nova Records. ———. 2000. Vybachai. OMA. NAC. ———. 2003. Krayina. Bilyk. Krayina. JRC Records. ———. 2007. Vsi klipy. ‘All the videos’ (my translation). Interview by Aliona Novitskaya. M1 Music Channel. January 1. Browne, David. 2020. Sonic Youth’s ‘Live in Moscow’ is a snapshot of the indie-­ rock greats at their peak. Rolling Stone, 27 February 2020. https://www. rollingstone.com/music/music-­a lbum-­r eviews/sonic-­y ouths-­l ive-­i n-­ moscow-­958642/. Accessed 17 Mar 2020. Buck-Morss, Susan. 2008. Theorizing today: The post-Soviet condition. Log 11 (Winter): 23–31. Burns, Lori, and Mélisse Lafrance. 2002. Disruptive divas: Feminism, identity, and popular music. New York: Routledge. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1986. What is a minor literature? In Kafka: Toward a minor literature. Trans. Dana Polan, 16–27. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Eileraas, Karina. 1997. Witches, bitches and fluids: Girl bands performing ugliness as resistance. TDR (1988-) 41 (3): 122–139. https://doi.org/ 10.2307/1146612. Frith, Simon. 1996. Toward a popular aesthetic. In Performing rites: On the value of popular music, 269–278. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2002. Fatal couplings of power and difference: Notes on racism and geography. The Professional Geographer 54 (1): 15–24. https://doi. org/10.1111/0033-­0124.00310.

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Grossberg, Lawrence. 1992. We gotta get out of this place: Popular conservatism and postmodern culture. New York: Routledge. Hennion, Antoine. 1983. The production of success: An anti-musicology of the pop song. Popular Music 3: 159–193. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0261143000001616. Hesmondhalgh, David. 1999. Indie: The institutional politics and aesthetics of a popular music genre. Cultural Studies 13 (1): 34–61. https://doi. org/10.1080/095023899335365. Heyes, Cressida. 2002. Identity politics. Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, ed. E.N.  Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2002/entries/identity-­ politics/. Accessed 12 Sept 2020. Hibbett, Ryan. 2005. What is indie rock? Popular Music and Society 28 (1): 55–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/0300776042000300972. Hundorova, Tamara. 2019. The post-Chornobyl library: Ukrainian postmodernism of the 1990s. Trans. S. Yakovenko. Boston: Academic Studies Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1979. Reification and utopia in mass culture. Social Text 1 (Winter): 130–148. https://doi.org/10.2307/466409. Lankford, Ronald D., Jr. 2010. Women singer-songwriters in rock: A populist rebellion in the 1990s. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press. MacFadyen, David. 2002. Estrada?!: Grand narratives and the philosophy of the Russian popular song since Perestroika. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Matasova, Iuliana. 2019. The desired Ukraine in Ukrainian female singer-­ songwriters of the 1990s: What it meant to sing a new (utopian) song. In Popular music in communist and post-communist Europe, ed. J.  Blüml, Y. Kajanová, and R. Ritter, 201–210. Berlin: Peter Lang. McRobbie, Angela. 2004. Post-feminism and popular culture. Feminist Media Studies 4 (3): 255–264. https://doi.org/10.1080/1468077042000309937. Middleton, Richard. 2012. Locating the people: Music and the popular. In The cultural study of music: A critical introduction, ed. M. Clayton, T. Herbert, and R. Middleton, 275–287. New York: Routledge. Nehring, Neil. 1997. Popular music, gender, and postmodernism: Anger is an energy. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. Odolska, Maryna. 1996. Jdemo v daleku put’. Bozhevilne Sonze. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 2003. Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity. Durham: Duke University Press. Shuker, Roy. (1998) 2002. Seattle scene; Seattle sound. In Popular music: The key concepts, 267–269. London: Routledge. Sonic Youth. 1988. Teen age riot. Daydream nation. Enigma Records. ———. 1990. Kool thing. Goo. DGC Records.

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Wanner, Catherine. 1996. Nationalism on stage: Music and change in Soviet Ukraine. In Retuning culture: Musical changes in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. M.  Slobin, 136–155. Durham: Duke University Press. https://doi. org/10.1215/9780822397885-009 Zeisler, Andi. 2008. Feminism and pop culture. Berkeley: Seal Press. Zherebkin, Sergei. 2018. Hotiat li zhenshchiny voiny? (sluchai Ukrainy). Genderniye Issledovaniya 23: 120–140. Zherebkina, Irina. 2018. Facebook post. April 30. https://www.facebook.com/ irina.zherebkina.7/posts/2060442660879902. Accessed 30 Apr 2018. Zhurzhenko, Tatiana. 2010. Borderlands into bordered lands: Geopolitics of identity in post-Soviet Ukraine. Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag.

SECTION III

Popular Classics?

CHAPTER 10

Café-Concert Parodies of Lohengrin (Wagner) and Othello (Verdi) in the Context of Popularisation Efforts of the Opéra de Paris in the 1890s Christian Dammann

Introduction Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner are undoubtedly the most influential opera composers of the second half of the nineteenth century. While differing in their aesthetic views, both sought the greatest possible impact on a cross-class audience in order to emphasize their political ideals of national unification. To achieve this end, it was vital to succeed on the stage of Europe’s most important opera company, the Opéra de Paris (Académie nationale de musique). Lohengrin and Othello premiered at the Académie nationale at a time that saw efforts to renew the repertoire and to open the institution to socially disadvantaged visitors who usually frequented the

C. Dammann (*) Deutsche Oper am Rhein, Düsseldorf-Duisburg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Gurke, S. Winnett (eds.), Words, Music, and the Popular, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85543-7_10

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café-concert. Since the performances at the Opéra were credited with an educational value they were supposed to serve as an alternative to the ‘pernicious’ (“influence désastreuse”, Patureau 1991, 392) and ‘dulling’ (“abrutissant”, Paris 11 February 1892, 4 [quoting La Revue suisse]) spectacles of the café-concert, where opera parodies were an integral part of the programme.1 Both Lohengrin and Othello have triggered numerous parodies in publicly more accessible settings such as amusement theatres or the aforementioned concerts. The question arises, however, which popularizing effect these parodies might have had and how this early creation of low and high culture exposes the political potential of the popular. Due to a limit of space, the following analysis will compare the entrances of both title heroes in Lohengrin à l’Eldorado and Ovelo ou le petit encrier to the corresponding scenes of the original operas. This comparison will show how these seemingly playful parodies can be read as negotiating power hierarchies inscribed in the popular and that are here used to reinforce the changes in the educational policies of the re-­established republic and their marginalization of the lower social class.

Opening the Opéra The most obvious change the Opéra de Paris went through in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was its move into the sumptuous new opera house which was named after its architect Charles Garnier who conceived it as an homage to the reign of Emperor Napoleon III. Its process of construction began in 1860 and took 15 years—a time during which the emperor was deposed and a republic was re-established in France. Thus, the composition of the audience on the evening of the inauguration on 5 February 1875 differed from what would have been expected when the building was planned. The layout of the Palais itself, with its spacious foyers, ample stairs and an auditorium with a seating capacity of less than 2000, reflects the elite consciousness of an aristocracy and grande bourgeoisie that preferred to keep to themselves. In contrast to this, efforts to dissolve class barriers and to open the Palais Garnier to lower classes increased from the mid-1870s onwards. These efforts were not only motivated by the composers’ aforementioned vision of opera as a classless mass-phenomenon but were a result of measures undertaken by the newly formed government. Just like the other three state-subsidized theatres in  My translation, here and throughout.

1

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the city—the Comédie-Française, the Opéra-Comique and the Théâtre de l’Odéon—the directors of the Opéra were obliged to schedule performances, called représentations populaires, with reduced prices of admission (“à prix [très] réduit”) or even free of charge (“gratis”).2 However, a large number of the seats at the Opéra were firmly in the hands of subscribers while the over-the-counter tickets were bought up by black market dealers in order to be resold at considerable surcharges. Therefore, even the cheapest tickets were next to inaccessible for people of low income. A further obstacle was its location: the new opera house was based in an affluent part of the city centre with poor transportation to its outskirts, where the working class lived. The late start of performances as well as the mandatory dress code represented further disadvantages for the less well-off. Apart from a traditional free performance on Bastille Day—a Paris institution to date—that generally started in the late afternoon instead of 8 pm, the distribution of the représentations populaires in a season’s programme was subject to strong fluctuations. The only exception being the director of the Opéra Eugène Betrand, who went furthest towards opening the house by increasing the number of représentations populaires to 49 between 1893 and 1894 (Patureau 1991, 407).3 At the same time, it remains significant that the programme of the Opéra was generally catered towards the taste of the higher classes and subsequently featured many operatic works by Verdi and Wagner.4 Less 2  Whether it is true that, from an international perspective, France is to be assigned a pioneering role in the establishment of the représentations populaires, cannot be elaborated in the context of these considerations. In Le Ménestrel, however, it was stated that the system of the représentations populaires, which had been introduced in France, had also spread to Italy (see Le Ménestrel 28 February 1892, 71). At the représentation populaire of La Favorite coupled with Coppélia on 10 January 1892, an orchestra seat cost 2.5 francs, less than a seat in the café-concert (see L’Univers illustré 16 January 1892, 2). 3  See also Henri Maréchal’s detailed article entitled Les représentations populaires à l’Opéra in Le Soleil 4 November 1899, 5. In addition to the représentations populaires, there were also plans over a longer period of time to set up theatres on the outskirts of Paris where operas would have been performed for the working class (Patureau 1991, 397). Since these were never realized, they will not be discussed in greater detail in this context. 4  A dominance which was also criticized by contemporaries, such as Alfred Delilia, who feared that French works were being suppressed as a result of this: “Moralité: lundi et vendredi à l’Opéra L’Italien Verdi; mercredi l’Allemand Wagner. Espérons que le samedi, ʻjour épicierʼ, sera réservé à un compositeur français” (Alfred Delilia in Paris 14 October 1894, 2). ‘Morality: Monday and Friday [are for] Verdi, the Italian; Wednesday for Wagner, the German. Let’s hope that Saturday, [the] “Fine Food Day” will be reserved for a French composer’.

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wealthy Parisians, however, had no opportunity to witness these productions at the Palais Garnier, because works by Wagner and Verdi in general seldomly appeared as a représentation populaire during this time.5 The reason being that particularly Wagner’s operas were seen as demanding more attention from the listener than the traditional repertoire. A generalisation which appealed to an elite-conscious section of the audience and therefore marginalized lower classes from the outset. Thus, while an impulse towards a delimiting of access to the Opéra existed, the mentioned obstacles show that it nevertheless remained a class-conscious site of social demarcation. A fact which grants the more accessible opera parodies a significant status in the popular dissemination of Wagner’s and Verdi’s works.

Lohengrin, Othello and Their Parisian Parodies Thirty years after the three famous Tannhäuser performances in 1861, the French premiere of Lohengrin on 16 September 1891 represented a decisive and long-overdue renewal of the repertoire. The opera, which originally premiered in 1850 in Weimar, became one of the most frequently played works of the next few years and paved the way for further performances of Wagner’s musical dramas in Paris and throughout France. In addition, Wagner’s works became points of reference which were used by both his supporters and opponents to judge the works and performances of French and foreign composers.6 The Paris premiere of Verdi’s penultimate opera Othello took place in 1894, seven years after its initial 5  The représentations populaires of Aida (13 April 1892) and Rigoletto (15 November 1893) are the only documented exceptions with regard to works by Verdi (Paris 14 April 1892, 4 and La Cocarde 12 November 1893, 3). Wagner’s works do not seem to have been included: in December 1893, Bertrand and Gailhard signed a contract with Adolf von Gross, which stipulated the express consent of Wagner’s heirs to a représentation populaire for Tristan et Isolde and Tannhäuser (Patureau 1991, 410). Yet, there is no documented evidence of either performances. 6  In his review of the Paris premiere of Othello, for example, Henry Bauer compared the love duet between Othello and Desdémone at the end of Act 1 with the love duet in the bridal chamber at the beginning of Act 3 from Lohengrin (see L’Écho de Paris 14 October 1894, 2). “Le grand compositeur italien a accentué dans cette nouvelle partition, notamment dans le deuxième et quatrième actes, son évolution dans le genre wagnérien, déjà constatée dans Don Carlos, puis plus nettement marquée dans Aïda [sic] et dans Falstaff” (L’Éclair 14 October 1894, 1). ‘The great Italian composer accentuated in this new score, notably in the second and fourth acts, his evolution in the Wagnerian genre, already seen in Don Carlos, then more marked in Aida and Falstaff’.

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perfor­mance at La Scala in Milan.7 It was conducted by Paul Taffanel who was obliged to enhance it with a spectacular ballet in Act 3 to meet the expectations of the Parisian audience. It remained in the repertoire during the following years but must be considered less popular because it was not performed as frequently as Aida or Rigoletto.8 Like every major theatrical event, Lohengrin and Othello were the targets of dramatic operatic parodies that highlighted both the particular characteristics and interpretations of the originals. Opera parodies originated in France during Jean-Baptiste Lully’s lifetime and were mainly based on the libretto. The original music was usually replaced by popular chansons, with occasional references to particular compositional innovations. Easily recognizable elements of the staging and—if they occurred— the salient circumstances of the performance also found their way into the parody. After theatrical privileges ceased to exist in 1864, opera parodies increased and became part of the flourishing cafés-concerts, either as segments within a revue de fin d’année or as stand-alone pieces. The revues reflected the whole of social and political life in an entertaining way and also gave a summary of the most important theatrical events of the year. The phenomenon of parody and its influence on the reception of operas on a popular level is still widely neglected by musicologists and theatre scholars. From the fact alone that many more viewers saw the parodies than the original versions, one can assume that key moments and basic dramatic constellations of an opera are as or more likely to have become familiar via the parody as through the original. In other words: the common conception of the character of the swan knight or the dark-skinned Venetian General is likely to have been shaped, at least for a certain period of time, by their counterparts in popular parodies.

7  Verdi’s ultimate opera, Falstaff, was shown in Paris on 18 April 1894 and there with 6 months prior to the Parisian premiere of Othello and only 14 months after its creation at La Scala. But due to its cheerful character, it was included in the repertoire of the Opéra-­ Comique and was therefore not performed at the Opéra before 3 April 1922 in this very production. 8  Between 1892 and 1905, Aida was performed 81 times at the Palais Garnier, Rigoletto 66 times and Othello only 40 times. Lohengrin on the other hand had 235 performances in the same period, with the anniversary of the 100th performance being celebrated in spring 1894 before the premiere of Othello (Kahane and Wild 1983, 166 f.; Patureau 1991, 279; Schwartz 1999, 310 f.).

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The Parisian Performance History of Lohengrin and Lohengrin à l’Eldorado The performance history of Wagner’s operas in France and Paris is quite complex and characterized by a very long absence of scenic productions. Several attempts to stage Lohengrin in Paris or elsewhere in France caused protests and demonstrations, due to the prevalent Anti-German sentiments following the defeat of 1870/1871 and its thematization in Wagner’s Eine Kapitulation (c.f. Dammann 2018). A production at the Éden-Théâtre in 1887 was cancelled after the first performance because of demonstrations and threats against Charles Lamoureux, who scheduled and conducted this production. The opening night at the Opéra in September 1891, also under his direction, was accompanied by a demonstration outside the theatre of some 1000 protesters. Said evening simultaneously marked the climax of anti-Wagnerism in Paris and the beginning of an era that would last until 1914, during which Wagner’s operas dominated the repertoire of the Opéra. This extremely successful production of Lohengrin remained in the programme well into the twentieth century.9 The title of its parody, Lohengrin à l’Eldorado, refers to the Parisian Théâtre de l’Eldorado on the boulevard de Strasbourg in which it was performed.10 This café-concert, which opened in 1858 and seated around 1500, was also distinguished, albeit naturally on a much smaller scale than 9  According to Kahane and Wild, the first Lohengrin performance at the Opéra sung entirely in German took place on 17 April 1959 (1983, 165). 10  This was not the first time Wagner’s works had been treated in such a manner for there had previously been proleptic parodic reactions in Paris to the Bayreuth Festivals of 1876 and 1882. The Parisian press reported on several projects of parodies on Lohengrin in the autumn of 1891, but the Théâtre de l’Eldorado seems to have been the first to put out such a play, despite the relatively long preparation time of two months (see Dammann 2018, 75, 84, 86 f.). In the course of the winter, however, numerous theatres followed and presented their revue de fin d’année which contained a parody: Théâtre de Cluny (L’Année franco-russe) on 22 November 1891, Éden-Concert (Fin-de-grève) on 5 December 1891, Concert Européen (Batignolles–Clichy–Odéon) on 10 December 1891, Théâtre des Menus-Plaisirs (Que d’eau! Que d’eau!) on 11 December 1891, Théâtre de l’Eldorado [sic] (Cherchez le titre!) on 15 December 1891, Concert de la Scala (C’est dégoutant) on 21 December 1891, Concert de la Gaîté-Montparnasse (Paris-Bicyclette) on 24 December 1891, Divan japonais (Tous en grève) in January 1892, Théâtre de Belleville (Funicu, Funiculì) on 1 January 1892, Concert de la Gaîté-Rochechouart (Allez! Roulez!) on 5 January 1892 and Nouveau-Cirque (À fond de train) on 10 January 1892. Since the current state of the source material is very fragmentary, I do not claim that this list is complete.

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the Opéra. Nevertheless, it boasted a luxurious architecture which featured a double row of columns, arcades, statues, a ceiling painting, reliefs and even an indoor fountain (Caradec and Weill 2007, 43, 56). The production of the parody commenced on 13 November 1891 at 8 pm, two months after the premiere of the original at the Opéra, and was performed on about 32 nights, reaching a considerable amount of spectators.11 The libretto was written by Julien Sermet and Henri Boucherat and the musical adaptation by Alfred Patusset features original excerpts from Lohengrin and music by other composers.12 Interestingly, these authors withheld the fact that the play was an actualization of their earlier parody entitled Lohengrin l’Alcazar (1886)—a detail which the press seemed to have missed, too (La Justice 17 November 1891, 4). This detail is not trivial, however, for it points to a further Wagner-parody with immense popular repercussions. Lohengrin à l’Alcazar was shown at the Théâtre de l’Alcazar on the occasion of the thwarted Parisian premiere of Lohengrin at the Opéra-Comique. Its director Léon Carvalho had had the opera rehearsed and ready for performance. Yet, when Lohengrin was billed at short notice on 14 February 1886 instead of Ferdinand Hérold’s Zampa, the audience protested so fiercely that the originally announced piece was staged. This circumstance led to the curious case of a parody being performed successfully on more than 30 nights without the curtain ever being raised on the original (Ellis 2013, 125). A fact which highlights the undervalued but nevertheless important role parodies played in the popular reception of high culture.

11  Up to 14 December 1891, the day of the last performance of the parody, both works were shown 32 times in theatres with approximately 1500 and 2000 seats, respectively (Kahane and Wild 1983, 166). One can calculate as a rough estimate the total number of tickets by multiplying the number of performances and the number of seats. Accordingly, 48,000 tickets were available for Lohengrin à l’Eldorado and 64,000 for Lohengrin at the Opéra. 12  Since no information about the music was given in the libretto of Lohengrin à l’Eldorado, it is only possible to draw conclusions about the music based on the syntax and lexis of the verses, but these cannot be further substantiated (Dammann 2018, 80–84).

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Comparison of Lohengrin and ‘Eldorado-Lohengrin’ The first act of Lohengrin is set on the banks of the Scheldt near Antwerp during the first half of the tenth century. When the curtain opens, several groups of men can be seen on the stage around the German King Henry the Fowler, who is dispensing justice. In addition to the Saxon, Thuringian and Brabantian counts, there are also noblemen, squires and members of the general population of Brabant (“le peuple de Brabant”, Wagner 1892, 5).13 Young women—“des jeunes filles” (Wagner 1892, 22)—explicitly appear on stage as Elsa’s entourage at the beginning of the second scene and create a counterbalance to the previously male-dominated assembly. Elsa, the orphan princess of Brabant, is accused of fratricide and asks to be defended by the celestial knight she has seen in her dreams while praying to God. Finally, Lohengrin, her longed-for savior, arrives in a boat drawn by a swan. The chorus and orchestra celebrate his mysterious appearance as a miracle. The setting of the parody Lohengrin à l’Eldorado—a “pastiche musical en un acte et deux tableaux […] avec poésie et prose pour les besoins de la cause” (“a musical pastiche in one act and two scenes […] with poetry and prose as warranted”)14—is also on the River Scheldt, but without any mention of Antwerp. Since the Scheldt also flows through northern France, one could very well imagine the scene set in France and, lacking a definite time-frame, the story could at least partially be transferred to modern times. The parody’s “Roi Henri”, who is not specified but inevitably brings to mind well-known French kings such as Henry IV, is also dispensing justice. According to the stage directions, he is surrounded by noblemen, squires and an unspecified crowd now referred to broadly as 13  Since the literal takeover of text passages or their parodic changes can be used to prove that the authors of the parody were familiar with the translation by Charles Nuitter (which was sung at the Opéra), reference is made to him instead of Wagner. Nuitter’s translation, in turn, is based on the prose translation by Paul Challemel-Lacour which also contains the phrase “le peuple de Brabant” (Wagner 1861, 177). It should be mentioned that Wagner’s original text contains the word “people” but it no longer appears in the score, although Lohengrin declares Elsa’s innocence with the words: “Euch, Volk und Edlen, mach’ ich kund” (“I will make it known to you, people and nobles”, Act 1, bars 830 f). 14  This is the genre description featured on the performance poster that is kept at the Bibliothèque-musée de l’Opéra (not catalogued). Further quotations from Lohengrin à l’Eldorado refer to the handwritten and non-paginated censorship libretto, held at the National Archive of France (F/18/1426).

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“peuple”, in the sense of a ‘mass’. In the Herald’s salutation, which opens the first scene, dukes, counts as well as peasants are addressed, thereby encompassing members of all societal spheres. This process not only reflects the mixed social strata of the café-concert in contrast to the elite, class-conscious audience at the Palais Garnier but also emphasizes the power of the popular—in the form of the parody—as an all-inclusive mass-­ engaging phenomenon. Similar to the original opera, Elsa enters accompanied by women, but differs in character from what Wagner had in mind: the parody’s Elsa defies the accusation against her from the onset and emphatically protests her innocence. The use of verse intensifies her defence and indicates a sung text, whose music would further reinforce her protest. Then she confidently announces that a stranger has promised to fight for her. Whereas in the opera, Elsa first describes the circumstances under which she fell into a deep sleep and dreamed of a strange knight who makes such a strong impression on her that she can describe both his knightly regalia and his character, the spectator of the parody receives no information about Lohengrin from Elsa’s prose declaration: “Je connais un lascar qui m’a promis de me défendre […] un noble étranger”. One only learns that she knows someone who is a ‘lascar’ (“un lascar”) and a ‘noble stranger’ (“noble étranger”) and who has promised to defend her. The stylistic change from verse to prose underscores the demystification of the scene preceding Lohengrin’s entrance, thereby excluding any supernatural or metaphysical occurrences. Although the relationship between Elsa and Lohengrin is, in its own way, no less puzzling than the opera’s dream-­ narration, this ambiguity does not serve as a romantic exaggeration, but creates an alternative connection between these two characters from the outset: Lohengrin is no longer the celestial knight as pictured by Elsa in the opera, but rather a common and even slightly peculiar man. Shortly afterwards, Lohengrin’s entrance is announced through music that attracts the attention of a sergent de ville (‘town sergeant’), who is also on stage. The authors of the parody included a further policeman and also one protester presumably to allude to the demonstrations during the first performances outside the Opéra. This added subplot pervades the main storyline and creates political tension. For the scènes dans la salle (‘scenes in the auditorium’), common in this type of entertainment theatre, and the inclusion of the auditorium as the scene of the action, not only involve the spectators directly by breaking the fourth wall but also showcase the political potential of the popular by literally ‘arresting’ the

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audience as ‘comrades’. While the rest of the parody resembles much of the plot of Lohengrin, it is distorted and supplemented by interpolated scenes involving the police officers and demonstrators. Lohengrin arrives on stage on a tricycle crowned with a duck’s head and equipped with a horn that can be heard several times as he approaches. His entrance does not contain any supernatural elements that might provoke a reaction similar to the wonder inspired by the swan in the opera. On the contrary, having reached the front centre of the stage, he makes a lap of honour and honks repeatedly right in front of the king before dismounting from his peculiar vehicle. His entry music is not specified in the libretto, but the sergent recognizes the “chouette motif” (‘the nice motive’). The term “motif” is indicative and makes it very likely that the musicians of the Théâtre de l’Eldorado played a new arrangement of the “swan-chorus” based on Lohengrin’s leitmotiv (first heard in Elsa’s dream-narration in bar 358  f.). Overall, Wagner’s music—which had been accused of lacking melodies since the 1850s—is here parodically transposed into the more melodic style of the popular chansons of the café-concert.15 It is significant that the sergent would only be able to recognize this musical allusion if he had a good knowledge of the original. Conversely, this recognition could only be grasped by the guests of the Eldorado who had previously attended a performance of the original at the Opéra. The figure of the sergent thus not only becomes a political actant between reality and fiction but also a 15  The parody begins with the orchestra’s prélude, which the protester interrupts by pointing out that this music is too difficult for the café-concert. Even if he attributes it to “Monsieur Patusset”, it is unmistakable that Wagner’s style, generally labelled as harmoniously too complex, is criticised by the protester. Since not all Parisian newspapers were able to send their own critic for each theatre premiere, the same short reviews can be found in several newspapers. Three critics whose names could not be identified, but whose reviews were printed in a total of at least 12 different newspapers, emphasized that Patusset gave Wagner’s music a new melodic quality. They wrote: “donnons un bravo tout particulier à la jolie musique de M. Patusset, qui tire de ses imitations wagnériennes de jolies [sic] effets mélodiques” (e.g. La Cocarde 16 November 1891, 3) or “Le compositeur [A. Patusset] a su tirer, des procédés wagnériens, des phrases mélodiques qui ont produit le plus grand effet” (e.g. L’Écho de Paris 18 November 1891, 4) or even “M. Patusset, qui a superbement pastiché et mélodisé l’œuvre du maître allemand” (e.g. La Justice 17 November 1891, 4). ‘let us give a very special bravo to the nice music of M. Patusset which obtains nice melodic effects from its Wagnerian imitations’, ‘The composer [A.  Patusset] was able to obtain melodic phrases from Wagnerian processes which produced the greatest effect […]’, ‘M. Patusset, who superbly pastiched and melodized the work of the German master’.

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mediator between the original and its parody—including the clash of classes embedded therein. He thereby endows this popular parody of Lohengrin with the possibility of direct political commentary and with an all-inclusive affordance which the original has no access to. Using all intermedial possibilities of the theatre—words, music and visual elements—Lohengrin is demystified and reduced to an odd stranger who is willing to help Elsa. By riding a tricycle instead of a bicycle, he is further ‘deflated’, not even possessing the speed and artistry that fascinated the audience about this new means of mobility. When it comes to a fight between Frédéric and himself, he turns out to be a coward who ambushes his opponent but at the same time lacks the necessary skills to do so.16 In the opera as in the parody, Lohengrin is made a political leader, who could even replace the king to some extent. In the opera, his virtuous character combined with his supernatural appearance legitimizes such a promotion into monarchy. The parody, however, shows the rise of a coward and a deceiver into the highest political office. In view of the mentioned elements that are explicitly added in the stage directions—the presence and description of the crowd, the policemen and demonstrator, the involvement of the audience and especially the figure of the sergent— this parody must be read as a subliminal criticism of the non-democratic allocation of political offices in the Third Republic. A criticism that is veiled by the vague allusions and overall seemingly playful and harmless genre of parody, which here expounds the political potential of the popular. The censorship authorities did not intervene in the libretto of Sermet and Boucherat in this regard—unlike in the case of Ovelo.

The Parisian Performance History of Othello and Ovelo ou le petit encrier Verdi’s original Italian version Otello was based on a libretto by Arrigo Boito and has a notable performance history in France, particularly associated with the name Pedro Gailhard. Together with Eugène Ritt, he took over the management of the Opéra in 1884 and in 1885 tried to convince Verdi to sign over the rights for the first performance of his new opera 16  In this context, it is downright absurd when, in the third scene of the second tableau, the Herald announces that Lohengrin has been appointed “sergeant of the civic guard” (‘sergent de la garde civique’) and when, in the third scene of the third tableau, the people want to be led into battle by him.

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with the working title “Jago”. This opera was to be Verdi’s first since Aida in 1871 and was a sensation for that reason alone. The directors were unsuccessful in their endeavour but nevertheless continued to pursue their goal even after its Milanese premiere on 5 February 1887 and finally negotiated a fee with Victor Maurel, who played the role of Jago (Patureau 1991, 199). In March 1893, when Gailhard was promoting his return to the Opéra as director, he even announced that in case of his hiring, he would commission an adaptation of Verdi’s Othello by Jean Richepin (Le Journal 28 March 1893, 2).17 The Parisian premiere finally took place on 12 October 1894 in the presence of Verdi, who was also honoured by the French president Jean Casimir-Perier after the performance. Like Lohengrin, this production (including the same staging and translation) remained in the repertoire of the Opéra until well into the twentieth century.18 Verdi’s original “dramma lirico in quatro atti” was transformed to a “parodie burlesque en un acte”: Ovelo ou le petit encrier (‘Ovelo, or the little inkwell’) to a text by P.-L.  Flers (the pseudonym of Pierre-Louis Puyol) and opened on 16 November 1894 at the Concert de la Gaîté-­ Rochechouart, close to Montmartre (Annuaire de la Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques 1895/1896, vol. IV, fasc. 2, 284, Travers 1941, 101; Wicks 1979, 159).19 A contemporary Feuilleton-Novel describes the ambiance of this theatre as follows: 17  One can only speculate what would have become of Verdi’s Otello if it had not been performed in the conventional translation by Du Locle and Boito, but in a translation by Richepin, who, despite all his versatility as a writer, expressed his preference for the poor in drastic descriptions of the beggar and crook milieu. 18  The last performance of this production took place on 7 May 1966 and was sung in Italian (Dutronc et al. 1990, 132). 19  The handwritten and non-paginated censorship libretto, held at the National Archive of France (F/18/1436), included a subtitle of presumably seven words. But since they have been crossed out so thoroughly with ink, it is no longer possible to reconstruct what was originally there without technical aids. The following Parisian theatres also showed parodies of Othello of different length in response to the Paris premiere (the dates refer to the first representation): Théâtre des Nouveautés (Les Grimaces des Paris) on 26 October 1894, Théâtre des Folies-Dramatiques (Tout Paris en Revue with the parody Othello ou le Nègre de la Porte-Saint-Denis [sic], see Le Journal, 10 November 1894, 2) on 9 November 1894, Nouveau-Cirque (Pirouettes-Revue) on 21 November 1894, Ba-ta-clan (Sucrez-vous) on 28 November 1894, Concert Européen (La belle Otello, in which the title character’s name was disfigured to Chocothello) on 30 November 1894 and Olympia (Les Turlutaines de l’année) on 7 February 1895. As with the parodies of Lohengrin, the current state of the source material here, too, is very fragmentary. I therefore do not claim that this list is by any means complete.

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La salle de la Gaité-Rochechouart [sic] ressemble aux théâtres de certaines petites villes et nullement à un café. Prodigieusement allongée, elle se compose d’un orchestre de trois à quatre cents places, d’une galerie supérieure et d’un amphithéâtre où grouille un public mêlé. Mais les allées et les venues des garçons chargés de plateaux couverts de consommations, l’odeur de l’office et les nuages de fumée qui remplissaient la salle indiquaient que le directeur de l’établissement sait allier ingénieusement l’attraction du bock et du mazagran au charme séduisant des flons flons. (Brunaux 1894, 2)20 The Gaité-Rochechouart’s [sic] auditorium resembles the theaters of some small towns and by no means a café. Prodigiously elongated, it consists of an orchestra of three to four hundred seats, a superior gallery and an amphitheater teeming with a mixed audience. But the comings and goings of the waiters laden with trays full of drinks, the smell of the kitchen and the clouds of smoke that filled the room indicated that the director of the establishment knows how to combine ingeniously the attraction of the bock and the café mazagran with the seductive charm of oompah music. (my translation)

The inkwell in the opera’s title alludes to Ovelo’s dark skin and the whole parody is replete with racist remarks. Since laughing at minorities—or socially disadvantaged people—can function as a compensation for one’s own social dissatisfaction, this albeit problematic feature may have also contributed to the parody’s popular appeal.21 The music of Ovelo ou le petit encrier is a compilation of chansons, excerpts from operettas and operas, all but one of which were written by French composers, containing neither material from Verdi’s libretto nor any of his music.22 The name 20  Giovanni Brunaux: Les filous du grand monde, Le Petit Caporal 12 December 1894, 2. It was serialized in Le Petit Caporal between 20 November 1894 and 24 January 1895. However, the same novel was published in various newspapers albeit with alternating titles and accrediting it to other authors, too. 21  The explicit reference to Othello’s blackness and the associated insulting racist remarks are greatly reduced in the opera compared to Shakespeare’s original. Boito and Verdi have their opera begin with the second Act of the drama, so that the action begins directly in Cyprus and with the effective thunderstorm scene. As a result, the hateful utterances by Brabantio and Jago in Shakespeare’s first Act, which are often aimed at Othello’s skin colour, have been dropped. As early as 1879, when Verdi was working on Boito’s first drafts of the text for this opera, he referred to them with the term “progetto del Cioccolatte” (‘chocolate project’) in his letters (Abbiati 1959, 86, 99). Jago’s reference to Otello’s “gonfie labbra” (‘thick lips’) from Act 1, bars 274 f. is one of the few overt racist formulations in the opera. 22  In addition to Funiculì, Funiculà, which will be analysed in greater detail later, the following musical numbers are also indicated in the libretto: Je suis pochade (chansonnette comique) by Léon Laroche and Louis Byrec; Viens, ma Joséphine (chansonnette) by F. Salomon; Valse des cent vierges (from Les cent vierges, opéra bouffe) by Clairville, Henri

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of a composer or arranger is not mentioned and due to a lack of documents such as announcements or reviews in the daily press, it remains unknown how often the parody was played, how it was cast, staged or even received. Intriguingly, the only information available from the press stems from a daily Parisian cycling newspaper called Le Vélo, journal quotidien de la vélocipédie. Although this newspaper had a theatre column, the only reason for reporting this parody seems to have been its title, as the name of the protagonist Ovelo is also a homophone for “au vélo” (‘by bicycle’): Avez-vous vu Othello? Si le succès de l’opéra de Verdi ne vous permet pas de trouver encore de places à l’Opéra, vous pouvez toujours aller voir Ovélo [sic], grande parodie, qui nous était bien due, de l’ouvrage à la mode. On voit que les auteurs de la pochade qui se joue au concert de la Gaîté [sic], sont des cyclistes convaincus et des abonnés du Petit Vert [sic], témoin leur cri: Ovélo, c‘est-à-dire: au Vélo [sic]! (Unidentifiable author who used the pseudonym “Robert du Voisinage” in Le Vélo, 20 November 1894, 2). Have you seen Othello? If the success of Verdi’s opera does not allow you to find any more seats at the Opéra, you can always go and see Ovélo [sic], a great parody, which was well due to us, of the in vogue work. We see that the authors of the burlesque which is played at the concert de la Gaîté [sic] are convinced cyclists and subscribers to the Petit Vert [sic], witness their cry: Ovélo, that is to say: au Vélo [sic]! (my translation)

As customary in parodies, Flers replaced the names of all protagonists with nonsensical ones. As far as can be judged from the libretto, the bicycle allusion in both the title and the main hero’s name plays no role in the course of the parody. Bicycles were simply extremely popular at that time and were integrated into many shows. They thus literally become a vehicle of the popular to create a widespread appeal as in Lohengrin à l’Eldorado.

Chivot and Alfred Duru; Duo des ouvreuses (from Le château des Tire-Larigot, opérette fantastique) by Ernest Blum, Raoul Toché and Gaston Serpette; Havanaise (from Carmen, opéra-comique) by Henri Meilhac, Ludovic Halévy and Georges Bizet; Si j’étais roi (from Un voyage aux Pyrénées, opérette) by Albert Bornier and Georges Lamothe; Air de cochon (not identified); Air de: c’est la terre (not identified); “Anges purs, anges radieux” (from Faust, opéra) by Jules Barbier, Michel Carré and Charles Gounod; and Estelle’s chanson (excerpt from No. 10 from La femme de Narcisse, opérette) by Fabrice Carré and Louis Varney.

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Comparison of Othello and Ovelo Verdi’s original Otello is set on the island of Cyprus towards the end of the fifteenth century. When the curtain rises after only three measures of music—a common trait of Verdi’s last two operas—the people of Cyprus are seen gathering in a tavern in front of the castle. They are watching the sea and praying for the safe return of their governor Otello, who has fought a naval battle against the Turks. Now his ship is endangered by a terrible thunderstorm. When he finally comes ashore, Otello is saluted by the chorus with exclamations of “evviva” (‘hurray’). He presents himself as a vigorous and victorious hero, gives a short speech and enters the castle. The joy of the battle won and Jago’s sinister plans of vengeance for not being promoted by Otello lead to an excessive consumption of wine and culminate in a sword fight between Rodrigo and Cassio. Startled by the general commotion, Otello returns to the stage to ensure order by punishing Cassio. Both entrances of Otello in Act 1 are composed as imperative recitatives that underline his power and his authority. The first of these in particular is a touchstone for any performer in this role to this day. While Cyprus plays an integral part in the original, the setting of the parody is not as clear-cut: Ovelo is simply sitting in a furnished room with a sea-view. It is not certain whether this scenery was regarded as exotic or whether the spectators thought they were seeing a contemporary French seaside resort. For Cyprus is not explicitly mentioned in the spoken or sung text. It only appears in a stage direction and—although it may have been noted in the evening programme—does not feature as an integral part of the parody.23 The plot of Ovelo, on the other hand, basically follows that of the opera albeit allowing for individual parodical distortions.24 In the opening scene, one sees a jolly company of men sitting at tables, drinking and singing—dancers may also have been included in this scene 23  A parody without a local point of reference is considered unusual and it testifies to Verdi’s fame when the Théâtre des Variétés alluded to the Milanese creation of Othello in 1887. On 17 April 1887, a parody entitled Otelli, allegedly an Italian opera composed by “maestro Verdo”, was inserted in the reprise of Dumanoir’s and Clairville’s vaudeville Les folies dramatiques (1853) (see Le Figaro 18 April 1887, 2, La Liberté 19 April 1887, 3, La Nouvelle Lune 24 April 1887, 4, Le Monde illustré 30 April 1887, 287, L’Univers illustré 30 April 1887, 278). 24  The tragic ending, according to the unwritten laws of the genre, becomes a happy one and Vieilledémone (‘old demoness’) survives Ovelo’s attempt to smother her with the ‘feuilleton’ and a pillow by closing her eyes and counting the French mistakes in the newspaper.

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although there is no reference to them in the text. The men sing of Ovelo’s heroic deeds to the well-known melody of Funiculì, Funiculà, while the sword fight of the opera is ridiculed and becomes a fork fight between Rotricot and Cassenoisetto. In addition, Ovelo’s sinister opponent Mago provides a racist description of him before his first appearance. However, in the first version of the text, Mago’s further words could have easily been linked to the incumbent French president Casimir-Perier when he states that Ovelo is a show-off who wants to dazzle everyone with his luxury and points out that he went to sea with four galleys as if he were “le chef de l’État” (‘the head of state’). For a French viewer—especially when taking into account the mentioned ambiguity surrounding the parody’s setting—the anachronistic designation “head of state” must have been an unmistakable reference to the President of the Third Republic. It was therefore also not tolerable for the censorship authorities leading to the text being subsequently altered to read “le doge de Venise” (‘the doge of Venice’). This handwritten alteration ensured that the supposedly luxury-­loving president Casimir-Perier, who came from a very wealthy Parisian family, could no longer be identified immediately. Several passages in the fourth and fifth scenes of the original uncensored version mention Ovelo to be the bearer of “la croix d’honneur” (‘the Cross of Honour’). Since Casimir-Perier had been made a Knight of the Legion of Honour for his services in the war of 1870/1871, it becomes clear why each of these allusions was struck out: to silence this political commentary and its subsequent precarious renegotiation of recent French history (see Élysée and Assemblée online). This yet again showcases the political potential of the popular inscribed in seemingly playful forms such as the parody. Ovelo enters the stage just as Rotricot pushes his fork into Cassenoisetto’s backside. However, he does not arrive with the intention of ensuring order nor is his appearance marked by a musical climax as in the original. Instead, his entrance is unaccompanied by music and seems rather accidental. Overall, the parody lacks the tension of the original: there is no thunderstorm, no imminent danger and thus no prayer for the leader’s safe return. As in Lohengrin à l’Eldorado, religious references are avoided and the hero’s symbolically charged transition from water to land is omitted.25 It is thus hardly exaggerated to state that Ovelo caters to the public of the 25  In Lohengrin à l’Eldorado, the authors keep the conflict in front of the church from Act 2, but avoid any other religious overtones and even remove references to the Holy Grail entirely.

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Concert de la Gaîté-Rochechouart where—as seen in the previously cited description—people sat at tables and drank. There, they would occasionally follow an absurdly comical plot which is not overtly complicated and avoids religious overtones—thereby literally ensuring an easy consumption. This observation is moreover underscored by the song used to praise the exploits of Ovelo: Funiculì, Funiculà. A song which to this day remains highly popular, as it has transgressed various musical styles and genres, and to which the spectators of Ovelo most definitely sang along to: Courant glissant sur l’onde frémissante C’est Ovelo.26 (bis) Debout quand sa galère bondissante Vole sur l’eau. (bis) Le Sarr-azin [sic] éprouvant son épée Fuit épaté. (bis) Buvons—en célébrant son épopée À sa santé! (bis) Buvons—mettons la tabl’ sens d’sus d’sous Nous gliss’rons d’ssous. Quand nous s’rons saouls. (bis) Ovelo ou le petit encrier (1st Scene) Running, sliding on the wave That’s Ovelo. (bis) Standing up when his bounding galley flies On the water. (bis) The Sarrazin experiencing his sword Flees impressed. (bis) Let’s drink while celebrating his heroic deeds To his health! (bis) Let’s drink, let’s put the table upside down! We will slide below When we are drunk. (bis). (my translation)

In its first edition of 1880, the lyricist Giuseppe “Peppino” Turco and the composer Luigi Denza refer to the song as a “canzone populare”. The publisher Ricordi sold one million copies of it within one year and the 26  It is perhaps just a coincidence that this verse in Flers’s text ends with the vowel “o” like the Neapolitan original (“tu saie addò?”, ‘Do you know where?’), thus creating a tonal correspondence between the parody and the original, which, however, is not retained in Silvestre’s translation (“C’est le matin”, ‘It is morning’).

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French version by Armand Silvestre, published in 1889 as L’amour s’en vient, l’amour s’en va, was also a big success. The song, originally written to celebrate the inauguration of the funicular railway on Mount Vesuvius on 6 June 1880, also won the annual folk song competition of the Festa di Piedigrotta in Naples on 8 September of the same year. It is a serenade in which a man attempts to convince his fiancée Giovanna to go with him to the top of Mount Vesuvius and is thus a thoroughly inappropriate choice of music to celebrate Ovelo’s military achievements. The altered lyrics underscore this inappropriateness by drinking to a ridiculed hero who in the original uncensored version alluded to the head of state. Seen from this viewpoint, the song thus becomes a matrix of the popular that affords multiple connections: it contributes to the boozy context to which it has been transposed and thereby directly comments on the societal make-up of the parody’s spectators, that is, being more divers compared to the Opéra. Its popularity ensures a direct recognition and makes this a seemingly harmless participatory event which nevertheless underscores the political criticism suggested in the original version of the parody. Finally, the song must also be seen as a mediator between high and low culture: while its melody was as popular at the end of the nineteenth century as it is today, it has also remained a part of every tenor’s repertoire. This not only connects diverse cultural and societal spheres but paradoxically grants the parody—through its use of a popular Italian song—access to a level on which it becomes directly comparable to Verdi’s original.

Conclusion As the previous discussion has shown, the main purpose of an opera parody was to appeal to as many people as possible, thereby making it a popular (inter-)medium by any standard. In order to achieve this all-inclusion, the authors rewrote the libretto by changing the poetic language to a colloquial variety, transforming the main diegetic elements in a recognizable way and downgrading the protagonists to common people. The plot was not only simplified in terms of language and content to allow for an easy consumption but was also staged in a way that made it accessible for members of lower social strata. In addition, these are even metareferentially included in the parodies. For, as shown, the opening scene in Ovelo can almost be seen as a mirror of the spectators in a café-concert. In Lohengrin à l’Eldorado the ‘folk’ hardly interacts with the main characters and is rather presented as a ‘mass’ that is not purely composed of

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aristocratic warriors and their entourage—as the original would have it. These elements lead to an identification of the spectators as participating in a lower class spectacle and thus opens a political potential of the popular within the parody which the original production at the Opéra would have had no access to. The choice of music also purposefully allowed for the parodies to reach the widest possible audience whilst delineating alternative metareferential strategies. According to the press, Patusset’s highly melodic arrangements not only ensured a general acceptance of the parody but also must be furthermore seen as a creative refashioning that allowed for a mass-mediation and popularization of the original material of Lohengrin. Although Wagner’s music had become a mainstay in French concert halls by 1891, it was still perceived as new and, above all, as complex and at times even inaccessible. The performance of the parody provided an ample opportunity to expound on these stereotypes by creatively resetting Wagner’s music, thereby making it more melodious and easier to follow than the original. These compositional efforts speak for the complexity of the parody and its popularizing effect. Verdi’s music had also long been established in Paris at that time. But even if the original Italian version Otello broke new stylistic ground, it did not contain a ‘hit’ comparable to Wagner’s swan- or bridal-chorus. Thus, the unknown musical arranger of Ovelo clearly had no interest in making references to Verdi’s original music and instead opted to include a popular canzone as he presumably did not want to forego the allusion to a certain italianità. As harmless and playful as this choice may seem, its inclusion elevates this seemingly trivial parody to the higher cultural sphere of the opera. Here, the popular ‘hit’ Funiculì, Funiculà not only stands in direct competition to Verdi’s original music: its immense popular appeal can even be seen as surpassing it. Moreover, the participatory and boozy characteristic of the song metareferentially engages with the parody’s spectatorship and therefore with the overall framework of its performance. The perceived changes in and effects of words and music are not the only factors which contributed to the popularization of Lohengrin and Othello. The Lohengrin parody usually did not start until 8 pm and thus shared the same performance time as the opera. Since the Théâtre de l’Eldorado was located about two kilometres further east on the Grands boulevards its spectatorship would have largely consisted of the middle class, however, leaving a potential for traction among lower social classes, too. The Théâtre de la Gaîté-Rochechouart, for its part, was also located slightly outside of the

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centre—if albeit further north—and, as Brunaux’s description verifies, was attended by a “mixed audience” from its direct neighbourhood (1894, 2). Later, however, it was also frequented by comparatively wealthy Parisians, as it had become a custom for snobs to enjoy an evening in Montmartre on one day of the week (Caradec and Weill 2007, 76 f.).27 This showcases the competitive status and cross-societal impact of the parodies as well as their growing popularity amongst higher classes. A fact which is moreover underscored by the only known reception of Ovelo in the newspaper Le Vélo which was also primarily aimed at well-off readers. Finally, it should also be taken into account that a parody could be enjoyed by both, the spectator familiar and unfamiliar with the original. For the former, the extensive knowledge of its original could enrich the reception of the visual and acoustic components in order to understand where the parodic changes lie. Only those who attended the performances of Lohengrin or Othello at the Opéra knew the stage productions well enough to appreciate the parodies in this detailed manner. However, major changes in these adaptations—such as the deletion of a certain locale or the inclusion of a popular song—also make them accessible without prior knowledge of the original, thus widening their popular scope. In any case, the political implications of these parodies—ridiculing the ruling class while simultaneously referring to a protesting mass—would have been perceivable on both levels of familiarization and throughout all social strata. Since the Opéra seldomly included the works of Verdi and Wagner in its représentations populaires, the parodies Lohengrin à l’Eldorado and Ovelo ou le petit encrier must be seen as popularizing these operas whilst also fulfilling the initial efforts to delimit access to them in the first place. A last but not least achievement of words and music within the popular medium of the opera parody.

Works Cited Abbiati, Franco. 1959. Giuseppe Verdi. IV. Ricordi: Milan. Articles and unsigned announcements in Parisian daily newspapers and periodicals: Annuaire de la Société des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques, La Cocarde, L’Écho de Paris, L’Éclair, Le Figaro, Le Journal, La Justice, La Liberté, Le Ménestrel, Le Monde illustré, La Nouvelle Lune, Paris, Le Soleil, L’Univers illustré, Le Vélo. 27  An 1895 woodcut by Auguste Lepère entitled “La sortie de l’Eldorado” (‘The exit of the Eldorado’) shows a predominantly male audience who, based on their ties and top hats, can be clearly assigned to the bourgeoisie (Montorgueil 1895, 80).

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Assemblée nationale. 2019. Casimir, Pierre Périer. http://www2.assemblee-­ nationale.fr/sycomore/fiche/(num_dept)/12328. Accessed 27 Sept 2020. Brunaux, Giovanni. 1894. Les filous du grand monde. Le Petit Caporal, December 12. Caradec, François, and Alain Weill. 2007. Le café-concert. 1848–1914. Paris: Fayard. Dammann, Christian. 2018. Bonjour Lolo! Französische Lohengrin-Parodien 1886–1900. Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler. Dutronc, Jean-Louis, Monique Barichella, and Christophe Capacci. 1990. L’œuvre à l’affiche. L’Avant-scène opéra (Otello) 5 (1990): 130–143. Ellis, Katharine. 2013. How to make Wagner normal: Lohengrin’s “tour de France” of 1891–92. Cambridge Opera Journal 25 (2): 121–137. Élysée. 2019. Jean Casimir-Perier. https://www.elysee.fr/jean-­casimir-­perier. Accessed 25 Sept 2020. Gouiffès, Anne-Marie. 2004. Le réception des livrets français de Lohengrin (1891) et d’Othello (1894) lors de leur création à l’Opéra de Paris. Enjeux politiques et esthétiques. In La Traduction des Livrets. Aspects Théoriques, Historiques et Pragmatiques, ed. Gottfried R.  Marschall, 455–465. Paris: Presses de l’université Sorbonne. Kahane, Martine, and Nicole Wild. 1983. Wagner et la France. Paris: Herscher. Montorgueil, Georges. 1895. Paris au hasard. Illustrations composées et gravées sur bois par Auguste Lepère. Paris, Henri Béraldi. Patureau, Frédérique. 1991. Le Palais Garnier dans la société parisienne. 1845–1914. Liège: Pierre Mardaga. Schwartz, Manuela. 1999. Wagner-Rezeption und französische Oper des Fin de siècle. Untersuchungen zu Vincent d’Indys Fervaal. Sinzig: studio. Travers, Seymour. 1941. Catalogue of nineteenth-century French theatrical parodies. A compilation of the parodies between 1789 and 1914 of which any record was found. Morningside Heights, New York: King’s Crown Press. Wagner, Richard. 1861. Quatre poèmes d’opéra. Trans. Paul Challemel-Lacour. Paris: A. Bourdilliat. ———. 1892. Lohengrin. Opéra en trois actes et quatre tableaux. Partition chant et piano. Trans. Charles Nuitter. Paris: A. Durand et fils. Wicks, Charles Beaumont. 1979. The parisian stage: Part V (1876–1900). Alabama: The University of Alabama.

CHAPTER 11

“The World Wanted to Bleed All the Sass Out My Name”: Interrogating the Popularity of Words and Music in Tyehimba Jess’s Olio Alexandra Reznik

Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones was born in Portsmouth, Virginia, in the latter half of the nineteenth century.1 In 1883, she began her studies at the Providence Academy of Music, moved on to the New England Conservatory of Music and the Boston Conservatory, and eventually ­performed at Madison Square Garden, Carnegie Hall, Boston’s Music

 Maureen D. Lee explains that “no birth certificate has yet been found to verify Matilda Sissieretta Joyner’s birth date. Various sources give different dates for her birth”, providing various texts, including her death certificate, the 1880 federal census, 1905 Rhode Island Census, and an 1896 interview with Jones that said 1869 (256). Jones (1868/9?–1933) was born in Portsmouth, Virginia. Her father was an African Methodist Episcopal Minister and her mother was a washerwoman and a church choir member. Their family moved to Providence, Rhode Island, for her father’s minister career. 1

A. Reznik (*) Chatham University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Gurke, S. Winnett (eds.), Words, Music, and the Popular, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85543-7_11

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Hall, and the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.2 In 1888, prima donna Adelina Patti’s manager saw Jones perform and suggested she tour with the Fisk Jubilee Singers.3 Around that time, critics began to refer to Jones as “the Black Patti”. Building Black women singers’ credibility by naming them in relation to their white counterparts was a popular practice; in this case, the “Black Patti” nickname stayed with Jones throughout a career that spanned more than three decades. This popular practice of naming is where this chapter begins to pinpoint Jones’s context as an African-American woman soprano: in one respect, white reviewers and audiences denied Jones autonomy by naming her in relation to her white, European counterpart. In another way, such naming was understood as complimentary, comparing Jones’s talent to that of Patti’s. As Maureen D.  Lee explains in her 2013 biography of Jones, “Unfortunately Sissieretta did not leave diaries or letters that might have provided more insight into her private life” (Lee 2013, xii). However, Lee includes an instance in which a reporter quoted Jones reflecting on “The Black Patti” name: “It rather annoys me to be called the ‘Black Patti.’ I am afraid people will think I consider myself the equal of Patti herself. I assure you I do not think so, but I have a voice and I am striving to win the favor of the public by honest merit and hard work” (13). Jones communicates that she does not like the “Black Patti” name, not because it denies her individuality, but because it gives her too much credit as an equal of Patti’s. She explicitly humbles herself in a strategic rhetorical move while implicitly staking out her individuality as a performer. Materials such as this newspaper interview can give us a glimpse into the past based on what the archive includes, but also raises questions of what is not there. How was Jones empowering herself within an oppressive entertainment industry by saying one thing and not saying another? The African-­ American male poet Tyehimba Jess, in his poetry collection Olio (2016), engages with what historical archives we have of Jones’s, and, plays with those archives by imagining what else might be there. 2  Jones first performed at the White House in February 1892 for President Benjamin Harris, and returned for Presidents Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt. She performed for the British Royal Family in London, as well as Paris, Berlin, Milan, Munich, St. Petersburg, the Caribbean, South America, Australia, India, and Southern Africa (Lee 2013, 9). 3  According to Lee, Adelina Patti (1843–1919) “was a white Spanish-born opera singer” considered “the most famous soprano of the last half of the nineteenth century” (Lee 2013, 12).

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Building upon this collection’s approaches to theorizing the popularity of words and music, I argue that through reading archives about performers, both historical and imagined, we can theorize the popularity of words and music by understanding how voice is embedded within complex matrices of power. Specifically, in this chapter, I analyze Jess’s Olio to argue that through her choice of material Jones participated in theorizing the popular in an international constellation of women singers. Specifically, Jones performed both classical opera and popular musical comedies in her enormously successful show “Black Patti’s Troubadours”. In addition, I identify and situate Jones’s voice within the power structures of the early twentieth-century entertainment industry using Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, which highlights institutional failure to focus on and legitimize experiences of Black women.4 If, as Crenshaw avers, “race and gender interact to shape the multiple dimensions of Black women’s employment experiences” (1244), then how do texts created within entertainment and publishing industries dominated by white men represent Black women singers? What and how can Black women’s voices and experiences teach us about how the popular both oppresses and empowers? Analyzing Jess’s representation of Jones with an intersectional lens, I argue that maintaining the focus on Black women within this field expands our understanding of the popular, both in their historical moments and in our own. Jess’s Olio imagines various perceptions of African-Americans who influenced US culture between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of World War I, taking historical events as jumping off points to imagine their interior lives and experiences. In the brief section on Jones, 10 pages of a 235-page collection, Jess powerfully represents her navigation of oppression and empowerment, taking up and challenging the popular expectations for minstrel shows during the twentieth century. For instance, in the poem “My Name Is Sissieretta Jones”, Jess offers Jones’s imagined perspective on “The Black Patti” sobriquet, one embedded within an entertainment industry that both raised her up and celebrated her as a great talent and also denied her agency to self-identify. Jones begins her 4  In her article “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color”, the term intersectionality highlights institutional failures in focusing on and legitimizing experiences of marginalized identities in legal discourse. She draws a direct connection between legal discourse’s failure and “contemporary feminist and antiracist discourses” that fail to “consider intersectional identities such as women of color” (Crenshaw 1991, 1242).

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first “imagined testimony” (Rutter 2015, 58–59) entitled “My Name Is Sissieretta Jones”, reflecting on the power of naming: Once word got out about the way I sing, the world wanted to bleed all the sass out my name. To scratch out the gift my mother gave me and shove a would-be white diva in my spotlight. They couldn’t imagine the colored in coloratura standing on its own onstage, so they claimed I was just part of Adelina Patti’s chorus. They stuck me beneath her name, a shadow sentenced to the borders of her light, called me Black Patti. (Jess 2016, 156)

Jones identifies “they”, or, “the world”, which regarded her in comparison to her European contemporary, Patti, rather than allowing her to exist as an individual singer-celebrity. While published reviews and audiences labelled Jones as “Black Patti”, here Jess provides insight into how specifically, from Jones’s standpoint, she understood how the popular worked to render Black women singers invisible in plain sight, seeking to “bleed” all of her individuality by shaping her celebrity status in relation to a European counterpart. Jess’s representation of Jones illuminates the irony of her experience by juxtaposing “colored” with “coloratura”, suggesting how the racist system of the popular entertainment industry worked against such an accommodation; specifically, white audiences’ imaginations couldn’t accommodate a Black woman having the ability to sing European opera. One way to navigate white audiences’ expectations of Black talent was to name Black singers in relation to white singers. Jones literally describes how the popular act of naming Black women in comparison to their white women counterparts worked, literally “[sticking her] beneath her name, a shadow sentenced to the borders of her light” (Jess 2016, 156). While Jones first describes how the popular entertainment industry rendered her sass-less, conveying her experience to a specifically Black audience creates a visibility that exists and endures to resist the popular entertainment industry’s oppressive practice. Jones continues: But the darkened sense inside my name won’t be silenced. With its sister and shush gospel of ocean, I sing each night from the way I’d stand on the docks of Providence, a straggle-boned bundle of lungs and tremble lifting wave after wave into wave after wave of Atlantic. Its applause keeled over me, calling me with its bell of salt, its belly of sunken hulls, its blue green fathoms of tremolo. Every night, in the dark offstage, I hear my mother’s voice in my head, her backyard hum, the sea in her distance with the weather of storm.

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She’d look out and see the thrall of water heave its back to the sky. I’d look out to the darkness and hear my true name. (Jess 2016, 156, original emphases)

Claiming and amplifying “the darkened sense inside [her] name” focuses attention on audiences hearing a woman stripped of her own name who exists “in the dark offstage”. Jones decenters her European counterpart and instead centers herself and her name. She explains that “on the docks of Providence” she can summon and reanimate the “sister and shush” of her name, Sissieretta Jones, displacing the label “Black Patti”. In addition to reanimating the sass in her own name, “sister and shush” are fluid sounds that summon the water and place from which she came, Providence, and reanimate the blood that she explains was drained from her name by the popular entertainment industry. The “sass” that the racist entertainment industry tried to “bleed” out of her name by labelling her in contrast to her European counterpart gains life from the fluid sounds of “sister and shush” that also remind listeners of the Atlantic Ocean. This moment within the poem summons Jones’s individual history and memories to sustain her, a way of performing resistance to the popular naming practice which denies her individuality. Even though Jones was a world-famous African-American woman artist, she could not book performances in major venues as her Black woman predecessors could in the mid-nineteenth century and that white counterparts continued to be able to do into the early twentieth century. The image and sound of a Black woman concert singer that piqued white audiences’ “curiosity” and opened access for concert singers such as Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield earlier in the nineteenth century had changed by the end of the century. Eileen Southern explains, “By the mid-1890s the black prima donna had almost disappeared from the nation’s concerts halls because of lack of public interest” (Southern 1983, 244). In response to her inability to access a concert hall to perform concert music, Jones used the vaudeville stage to perform both popular and concert music and, capitalizing on the “Black Patti” nickname that led to her visibility in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century US performance arena, Jones appropriated the “Black Patti” name for her own show, which she formed in the 1890s. Black Patti’s Troubadours, not the only Black touring company of its kind but the most popular, took advantage of the popularity of Black musical comedies, originally called “coon shows”, which reappropriated the minstrel show, in which white per­ formers donned blackface and performed disparaging stereotypical

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representations of blackness.5 Rather than closing her shows with the typical cakewalk, Jones significantly sang opera selections and spirituals, signifying on the disparaging, popular art form of minstrelsy and injecting her agency and talent to resist stereotypical, oppressive representations of blackness. Her strategy worked. Jones was established as “the star of the troupe, [wore] beautiful dresses and costumes, and [sang] concert and operatic selections of her choosing”, performed “a forty-week season with an income of about five hundred dollars a week, or twenty thousand dollars annually, which would make her the highest-paid African American entertainer in her time” (Lee 2013, 98). Even though Jones’s career extended into the era of the phonograph, there are no known recordings of her performances; other than quotes cited in newspapers, her personal opinions and experiences remain largely unknown. Jess picks up on this archival gap: the poem, “Sissieretta Jones, Carnegie Hall, 1902”, subtitled “O patria mia”, imagines a performance that never took place. The poetic representation of Jones’s perspective showcases poetry’s potential to theorize Black women’s celebrity by representing her interiority. In Guiseppe Verdi’s opera Aida, the eponymous heroine bids farewell to her home, Ethiopia, in the aria “O patria mia”. As a captive in Egypt, Aida anticipates that she will never return home. As an Ethiopian woman, Aida expresses the nostalgia for a lost homeland that resonates historically with the African-American experience of being stolen across the Atlantic Ocean and forced in to chattel slavery. As Verdi’s original lyrics can be taken to speak to Black women’s reality in the United States as descendants of slaves brought from Africa, Jess’s poem “O Patria Mia” can be read as a further “imagined testimony” (Rutter 2015, 58–59). While the performance named in the poem’s title never actually took place, Jess’s representation of Jones’s voice illuminates the material 5  According to Lee, “There were at least three African American companies traveling around the country with this kind of show. For example, in the fall of 1895, white manager John W. Isham established the Octoroons company, which performed a three-part show. It began with a one-act farce with song and dance, followed by several vaudeville specialty acts, and finished with ‘Thirty Minutes around the Operas’. It also included a female chorus and gave leading parts in the show to women. This show was so successful that Isham formed another show in 1896 called Oriental America, which was like the Octoroons but ended with ‘Forty Minutes of Grand and Comic Opera’. What the Black Patti Troubadours had that these shows did not was Black Patti—a well-known star whose name and reputation would draw large audiences and ensure the success of Voelckel and Nolan’s venture” (Lee 2013, 97–98).

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realities implicit in her performance as represented in the poem. To analyze Jess’s imagined representation of Jones’s operatic performance, I draw upon Naomi André’s assertion regarding opera’s potential to “be a flexible and capacious genre. It can give voice to the different experiences that exist outside the mainstream […] opera compellingly expresses multiple vantage points tha[t] have not been previously engaged” (2018, 6). Specifically, representing Jones’s operatic performance through poetic form allows for a reframing of Jones’s position within the context of the popular travelling show where she was only able to showcase her operatic skill. This representation “gives voice” to an experience of performing “O patria mia” in Carnegie Hall, which Jones herself never got to have. Jess opens this poem within the context of the opera itself; an unidentified poetic persona explains: “Aida, buried in the darkness / of her fate. Aida, singing / in the tomb of her love”. Then, the poem continues into a process of redefining and resituating Jones within the context of “Carnegie Hall, 1902”: Her lover a notion pale as the aria circling from her mouth. Aida, lowered into the pit Cloaked in breath’s ocean, a war inside her voice. A battle of tongues sung doloroso, The husk of shadow on air. (Jess 2016, 158)

In singing an Italian opera that represents a Black woman character, Jones experiences the tension of a “battle of tongues” in which the voice originating in her Black body sings “pale” Italian music. The poetic persona’s description of the “aria” Jones sings as “pale” calls attention to the blackness of her “mouth” and body. Whereas in the earlier poem “My Name Is Sissieretta Jones” Jess represents the ocean as a safe, comforting place, here we can read the ocean in historical context as a place underpinned with painful memories of the triangle trade route and enslavement that established institutionally sanctioned exploitation and commodification of Black bodies. This dual understanding of the ocean complicates the history that underpins the “war” inside Jones’s voice; like the ocean, the US culture and entertainment industry in which she performs both provide Black performers success and still exploit Black bodies. While Jones did not, and arguably could not, publicize her struggles with identity and

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performance, this poem imagines that struggle in light of her historical reality. This section continues to connect the opera with the many cultural signifiers that situate Jones within her own sociopolitical context. The poem/rewritten aria lyrics continues: With the soar of her father’s sermon for truth. With the burn of nigger heaven. With the hum of oceans wrapped in bone. With the legacy of bones wrapped in ocean. With a national healing hogtied to song. (Jess 2016, 158)

Through the repetition of the word, “with”, the poem enumerates the various contextual layers that determine Jones’s performance and that the popular entertainment industry renders invisible. The “soar of her father’s / sermon for truth” connects to and honors Jones’s father, the African Methodist Episcopal minister, Jeremiah Malachi Joyner, as part of her history (Lee 2013, 4). The burning pain that the line articulates alludes to the historical realities of oppressive mental and physical violence inflicted upon Black people in the United States. The “healing” the persona articulates is not healing at all, as “hogtied” signifies the act of tying limbs together to trap. At the same time, identifying and honoring these realities counters the popular entertainment industry that sought to render these details of Black women’s lives invisible. “Sissieretta Jones, Carnegie Hall, 1902, O patria mia” thus exposes the socio-historical realities of Jones’s performance context for readers, audiences, and listeners. Repetition shifts from “with” to “let”, as the perspective shifts from that of the unidentified poetic persona to Jones’s direct first-person perspective: “Let me hum it to you sweet / With vivace; let me scrape it into / our history”. This persona, arguably Jones singing as Aida, refers to all the preceding information about the racist, sexist, and classist history of the United States as “it”. How to “scrape” those material realities into history, especially if there is no acceptable evidence in the archival record? Through poetry. While “O patria mia” is a slow, sorrowful song, the persona wants to hum these realities with “vivace”, the musical term for lively, very quick, and upbeat. Jones pushes against the limitations of the song’s form by using the “tools” of musical notation to include her

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first-person perspective in the rewriting of the aria’s lyrics. Jones, as imagined by Jess, is not scraping it into “our history”, the history of Black women singers for the comfort of White listeners, but for the project of fleshing out the historical record that includes Black women’s experiences. This poem continues to showcase a process of becoming. Jones voices her socio-political context underpinned by historical oppression to enact resistance within the entertainment industry that rendered those realities silent. After moving rapidly through a fluid understanding of herself within an industry which oppresses her but that also has the potential to empower her, this poem ends by returning to the repetition of “let”: Let this belting be our unbinding. Let o bring the sound of all our wanting. Let patria speak the names Of all my fathers. Let the curtain rise to show the face that is known. Let the country be mine. Let the country be mine. Let this country be mine. (Jess 2016, 159, original emphasis)

The poem ends with a call for “unbinding” a “national healing hogtied to song” as a way to understand Jones’s agency within an entertainment industry that exploits her. This “husk of shadow on air” articulates the complexities and material conditions that Jones could not speak or sing on stage. The ending also calls for a widening of the frame of the historical record itself, calling to acknowledge “all our wanting” and “all my fathers” to “[l]et this country be mine”. The poem ends with a call for reclaiming self-ownership in a country that excluded and oppressed, and arguably still excludes and oppresses, Black women, even if they achieve celebrity status. Jess continues to represent what Jones imagined she was accomplishing by singing this aria. The pattern of repetition shifts from “let” to “I” for Jones to clearly articulate her intent, which is so easily erased within the performance context of an opera in which one plays a character. Jones claims her individuality and subjectivity by connecting herself with the character and struggles of Aida, rather than with the identity of “the Black Patti”. In this imagining of Jones’s performance, she was not upholding a

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Eurocentric, white supremacist ideal, but rather connecting with Aida’s struggles as a Black woman within an oppressive system. Jess represents Jones complexly articulating her own complex context: I stand solo in this country of concert. I am multitudes of broken chains. I am Aida with war on her lips. I am Aida against drowning In all that summons her alive. I bear the crescendo of ocean inside me. I carry its bones inside my attack. I am a wave reaching beyond this shore. (Jess 2016, 159)

Jess imagines Jones to be the first genuine performer of the character, Aida, because she represents the heroine’s sociopolitical realities more closely than any white woman performer before her could. The ocean, like the early twentieth-century popular entertainment industry in the United States, is both everything that endangers and oppresses her and everything that empowers and can liberate her. The next poem in Jess’s collection, “Sissieretta Jones, ad libitum”, which translates to “Sissieretta Jones, at or according to one’s pleasure”, further dramatizes the intersectional oppression and liberation that Jones would have experienced within the popular entertainment industry. By imagining the ways in which Jones would have understood her artistry and experiences of her own oppression and empowerment, it helps us understand how she might have theorized the “popular” in her own context. In this poem, Jones explains, I sing this body ad libitum, Europe scraped raw between my teeth until, presto, Ave Maria floats to the surface from a Tituba tributary of Swanee. Until I’m a legato darkling whole note, my voice shimmering up from the Atlantic’s hold; until I’m a coda of sail song whipped in salted wind; until my chorus swells like a lynched tongue; until the nocturnes boiling beneath the roof of my mouth extinguish each burning cross. I sing this life in testimony to tempo rubato, to time stolen body by body by body by body from one passage to another; I sing tremolo to the opus of loss. I sing this story staccato and stretto, a fugue of blackface and blued-up arias. I sing with one

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hand smoldering in the steely canon, the other lento, slow, languorous; lingered in the fields of Babylon’s Falling…. (Jess 2016, 162, original emphases)

For Jones, singing is simultaneously oppressive and empowering; the representation of Jones’s performance with Europe “between [her] teeth” calls attention to the historical reality of colonization and the act of voicing resistance to that reality’s consequences in her present moment. This testimony begins by making clear that Jones “sings” her body for the pleasure of others, not her own; “Europe scraped raw between my teeth” refers to the European music that she sings. Her performance as a Black woman communicates to us that her understanding of her voice, and all the national and racial identities tied to music, is fluid. The references to Mascagni’s “Ave Maria”, Foster’s “Swanee”, and the African-American spiritual “Babylon’s Falling” situate Jones within a history that encompasses many musical styles including opera, blackface minstrelsy, and African-American spirituals.6 Jones juxtaposes all of them within the concert program choices that Jess shapes in his imagined presentation of her commentary on her concert program choices. What remains of Jones’s archival presence, and Jess’s poetic representation shows how the “popular” dictated the ways in which Black women could, and arguably can still, take to the stage to sing. Jones strategically used what she had to create her own artistic freedom and empowerment; specifically, she took her popular minstrel show and used it as a platform to showcase her artistry.

Works Cited André, Naomi. 2018. Black opera: History, power, engagement. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 1991. Mapping the margins: Intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. Stanford Law Review 43 (6): 1244. 6  Jones’s Black Patti’s Troubadours performances first included three segments, reflecting traditional minstrel shows, called “At Jolly ‘Coon-ey’ Island”, “Songs and Those Who Sang Them”, and “Vaudeville Olio Performers”. The fourth section “The Operatic Kaleidoscope” was the only segment in which Jones performed; this segment included classical music in contrast to the traditional minstrel songs in the first three segments. Specifically, Mascagni’s “Ave Maria” was the first song in the segment, sung by the chorus. The first song listed in the program that Jones would perform solo is Verdi’s Il Trovatore and La Traviata (Lee 2013, 111).

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Jess, Tyehimba. 2016. Olio. Seattle: Wave Books. Lee, Maureen D. 2013. Sissieretta Jones: “The greatest singer of her race,” 1868–1933. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Rutter, Emily R. 2015. ‘The story usually being’: Revising the posthumous legacy of Huddie Ledbetter in Tyehimba Jess’s leadbelly. South Atlantic Review 77 (1–2): 58–59. Southern, Eileen. 1983. The music of Black Americans: A history. New York: Norton.

CHAPTER 12

William H. Gass and the (Un)popularity of Words as Music Ivan Delazari

In his witty dismissal of Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry, Aldous Huxley likens “[v]ulgarity in Literature” to “the wearing of a diamond ring on every finger” (1930, 158). What Poe’s “bad taste” promotes and what his eminent French admirers, who fail to have been “born into the [English] language” (1930, 158), are quite insensitive to, is a crucial misconception of the musicality of verse. The “word music” (Scher 2004, 30, 180–181) of Poe’s poems—those onomatopoeic alliterations and memorable repeats—is, for the author of Point Counter Point (Huxley 1928), a lethal overdose of “ready-made, reach-me-down” jingles and clatter, “all too musical” to express any music at all (Huxley 1930, 158). In 1930, Huxley could not foresee how much further the twentieth and twenty-first centuries would promote Poe’s popularity, with cinematic, musical, comic-strip, This research was supported by the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. I. Delazari (*) HSE University, St. Petersburg, Russia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Gurke, S. Winnett (eds.), Words, Music, and the Popular, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85543-7_12

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and sports-related evidence of Poe’s posthumous fame catalogued by dozens (Hardy 2019). Vladimir Nabokov’s best-selling and scandalous novel Lolita (1955), which leans on Poe through multiple intertextual reference starting from the very sound of Humbert Humbert’s opening lines (Schweighauser 1999, 257; Pier 2004, 254–255), may not prove the decisiveness of such vulgar “short cut” musicality, in Huxley’s terms, for tagging a text as musical. However, should a writer’s prose style invoke the echo of music in the reader’s ear, it apparently must be emphatically poetic, while verse is commonly considered to be musical when its ringing rhymes and rhythmic regularities are “vulgarly” foregrounded rather than subtly draped. Poetic and musical may turn out to be contextual synonyms as far as prose fiction is concerned. This chapter asks what may, and what may not, make narrative prose musical and musical prose popular. The criticism and fiction of William H. Gass (1924–2017)—the influential early postmodernist American writer—may exemplify how sonorous style correlates with popular success, popular culture, and popular music. Gass’s career stretched over several literary eras, as maximalist and minimalist writing trends devoted to contrasting causes succeeded one another. Despite his many honours and solid reputation among literary experts, Gass is hardly ever popular with larger audiences. One aspect of good prose that he consistently underscores is its musicality. But since hearing words as notes is, after all, up to the reader, that musicality is contingent upon matters of public taste no less than on personal preferences—a fact which Gass simultaneously discerns and pities.

William H. Gass: A Career Outline On the American literary scene of the 1960s and 1970s, William H. Gass was a prominent and irreducible presence. The short texts he published in periodicals were frequently collected and anthologized. His books were praised and prized with awards and medals, which he kept receiving in subsequent decades as well. His first novel, Omensetter’s Luck (1966), impressed readers with masterfully stylized character voices. Gass’s story collection In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (2015b), with its rich range of narrative repertories, along with Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (2014), the experimental, illustrated, obscene book-length novella, were major literary events in 1968. Several volumes of essays compensate for the long wait for Gass’s second novel, The Tunnel, famously in-progress

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for almost three decades. His non-fiction debut, the 1970 essay collection Fiction and the Figures of Life—“a Bible for contemporary innovative writers” (McCaffery 1982, 153)—made Gass a powerful spokesman for the anti-realist agenda of the decade. The notorious debate between Gass the formalist and John Gardner the moralist about the right techniques and strategies of writing took place at the University of Cincinnati in 1978 (Ammon 2003, 46–55) and inspired many literature students to prefer the playful storytelling of John Barth, Donald Barthelme, William Gaddis, and Gass himself to the topical social and personal matters dramatized in the works of John Updike, John Cheever, or Gardner. Gass, who not only wrote “metafictions” but also coined the term (Gass 1989, 24–25), never accepted the prefix post in postmodernism (Holloway 1990, ix, 3), which literary critics and historians soon applied to Gass, Gaddis, Barth, and Barthelme as a group. Both reputationally and in terms of his literary friendships, however, Gass is generally considered to belong with those American postmodernists,1 too young to join the transatlantic modernist pantheon of James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. At the same time, there is a profound traditionalism—even conservatism—at the heart of Gass’s writing, as became increasingly apparent when the New Criticism that dominated America’s academic literary attitudes since the mid-forties was attacked by still newer critics—iconoclastic, politically engaged, and armed with Critical Theory. Marxists and Feminists (Bloom 1994), for instance, did not care much for Gass personally and accused formalist writers generally of buttressing a white male capitalist authority disguised as disinterested aestheticism. In the early 1980s, Gass fell out of popular intellectual and writerly favour. If he had represented a mainstream of self-reflexive literary innovation of the “high” postmodernist avant-garde and been, in this sense, popular, he was no 1  In the three latest editions of The Norton Anthology of American Literature (Baym 2007; Baym and Levine 2012; Levine 2016), Gass’s 1970 essay “The Medium of Fiction” is featured among the “Postmodern Manifestos” (see Baym 2007, 2488–2492; Levine 2016, 372–376). “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” is anthologized in Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology (Geyh et  al. 1998, 65–84) between the selections from Ishmael Reed and Kurt Vonnegut. Critics outside of the academe habitually mention Gass among the postmodern authors following the Beat generation (Grassian 2003, 10). Yet even Gass’s longest novel The Tunnel (1999), by all means a classic of postmodern “historiographic metafiction” (cf. Hutcheon 1988, 87–123), demonstrates certain features that critics are inclined to regard as articulately modernist, not postmodernist (Hix 2002, 86–87). A similar anti- and ante-postmodern trend can be discovered in the 2013 Middle C (O’Hara 2014, 211).

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longer so. His tenured professorship in philosophy and his stable output of quality essays kept him afloat throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, while the publication of his long-awaited magnum opus, The Tunnel, in 1995 won him respect and an American Book Award. Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas (1998), Middle C (2013), and Eyes (2015a), together with the posthumously published William H. Gass Reader (2018) complete the list of Gass’s fiction books. While volumes of his non-fiction are more numerous, and to some also more brilliant, they remain unsuccessful in addressing a broader readership.2 Although neither the intricately styled metafictional experiments nor the conservative aesthetics behind his works can be considered to be relevant to a discussion of the popular, there are elements of Gass’s work that are generally accessible and that participate in and stimulate a discussion of the popular. In all of Gass’s output, one recurrent theme is the notion of prose as music. From what Gérard Genette (1997, 5) would call epitexts—authorial letters, lectures, and other commentaries—we learn that the notepad layout of “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” is associated with musical notation, and that in Gass’s earliest story, “The Pedersen Kid”, the author allegedly “used a fugue, literally” (Ammon 2003, 76). The arrangement of typefaces and font sizes in Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife presents further evidence of Gass’s ambition to write polyphonically, while twelve-­ tone serial music is seen as providing the structural matrix for The Tunnel (Neighbors 2002, 619). Gass’s interest in utilizing complex musical stylistics in his work is also evident in the title “Cartesian Sonata”, which functions as a cryptic paratextual reference to musical form, although there is no trace of music or musicians in the storyworld.3 In Gass’s last novel, however, music is performed and spoken of intensively: the protagonist of Middle C (2013) develops from a lover of popular classics to a college music professor. In terms of Werner Wolf’s The Musicalization of Fiction (1999), Gass’s career thus follows an intermedial trajectory from imitating music to thematizing it: while readers could only detect how “The Pedersen Kid” is a fugue, The Tunnel a dodecaphonic composition, and “Cartesian Sonata” a sonata from the narrative layout and style of those works, Middle 2  For readers to access the sharpness of Gass’s thought and the beauty of his phrasing more readily, his interviews are collected in print (Ammon 2003) as well as online (Schenkenberg 2014). 3  For an attempt of solving Gass’s paratextual puzzle by revealing the sonata implications in that novella, see Delazari (2021a).

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C and “Don’t Even Try, Sam” (2015a, 151-169), to orient the reader in terms of where this story comes from in particular, feature music as an explicit subject matter. Although some kind of musical experience is always at stake in Gass, it is not entirely clear what exactly “the music of prose” in his eponymous 1996 essay and in his fiction stands for, and whether this “music” has anything to do with popularity. Does Gass’s theory and practice of prose musicality make his fiction more complex or more accessible? Possible answers to this question are more likely to be found in some contextual constraints around Gass’s writings than within their textual qualities. Popularity cannot depend entirely on style. As the outline of Gass’s career demonstrates, there may be moments when one kind of style is relatively popular (in the 1960s and 1970s), while at other times (in the 1980s), it is displaced by a different fashion. Furthermore, popularity may not depend on the literary work’s formal properties at all. Whether Poe’s steady readerly success is due more to subject matters than to rhyming patterns is tested when his work is set to music (The Alan Parsons Project 1976). One of Poe’s poetic masterpieces, “The Raven”, is abridged and paraphrased to the point of being entirely rewritten by the lyricist Eric Woolfson—the original poem of 108 lines being too long for a song, even within the framework of a Progressive Rock conceptual studio album. Transformed into a popular music hit, Poe’s popular plot takes priority over poetic form. Following this logic, one might consider whether Gass’s “music of prose” is not actually a deliberate way of staying away from the popular. This may appear a credible proposition when considering the author’s stubborn adherence to his formalist values at a time when Raymond Carver’s minimalist diction and the Brat Pack’s punky yuppie narratives were the literary vogue in the United States.4

“The Music of Prose”: Between Analytic and Cognitive Approaches to Metaphor Gass’s doctoral dissertation at Cornell was entitled “A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor” (1954) and supervised by the famous philosopher of language, Max Black (1909–1988). It is no surprise that the essay 4  In a 1991 interview, Gass stipulated that, for “the minimalist group”, the “old ambition” of such writers as John Hawkes, John Barth, and, presumably, himself was “the last gasp of the Romantics”: the minimalists would primarily exercise “commercial values” and “understand the junk” (Saltzman and Gass 2014).

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“The Music of Prose”—from the National Book Critics Circle Award-­ winning collection Finding a Form—opens with: “To speak of the music of prose is to speak in metaphor” (Gass 1996, 313). Black’s approach to metaphor was analytic, in accordance with the philosophical tradition he represented. In his line of thought, in a sentence such as “The chairman plowed through the discussion” (Black 1962, 26), “some words are used metaphorically while the remainder are used nonmetaphorically” (27). The chairman and the discussion are literal and thus function as the frame of the metaphor; plowed through, being figurative, constitutes what he calls the metaphor’s focus (28). This schema yields a logically consistent model of how metaphoric machinery works in a sentence. Black continues by distinguishing between a simplistic “substitutional view” and the more interesting “interaction view” of metaphor. In the former case, the focus of the metaphor is a gap-filler in a literal vocabulary. If there is no word to express a certain meaning, a metaphorical word or phrase is used as a catachresis, only to be lexicalized in the new meaning, which becomes another of its literal senses (31–33). When metaphorical usage figures despite the existence of a literal word, it functions as a simile—for ornamental effects: Such “comparison view” of metaphor is a subclass of substitutional metaphors (33–35). The interaction view is more complex, since in Black’s paradigmatic sentence “Man is a wolf”, its “subsidiary subject”—the focus of the metaphor—“will not convey its intended meaning to a reader sufficiently ignorant about wolves” (39–40), even if that reader is familiar with the dictionary definition of wolf and knows what the animal looks like. There is a “system of associated commonplaces” about what wolves are like—which are not necessarily true in a scientific sense—that the reader needs to be aware of in order to grasp the metaphor; some intertextual interaction between the sentence and cultural texts beyond the internal frame and focus of the metaphor is at stake. Even so, Black remains firmly within the strict logic of a grammatical sentence, because the focus of the metaphor must be a word within the literal frame of other syntactic elements. For Black, metaphor is confined to a sentence, where its focus can be discerned because it is explicit: “Man is a wolf” is a clear predication despite the fact that the semantic features supporting the metaphor stem from the reader’s background knowledge acquired through fairy tales. We seem to encounter a similar approach to metaphor in the work of Black’s pupil, Prof. Gass. In the title of his essay, “The Music of Prose”, music is the focus and prose the frame of the metaphor. In elaborating his

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notion of music, Gass echoes analytic philosophers of music such as Peter Kivy or Roger Scruton when he writes that in music, “the notes are allowed to have their own way and fill the listener’s attention with themselves and their progress. Nonmusical associations (thinking of money when you hear do-re-me played) are considered irrelevant and dispensable” (Gass 1996, 313). In Scruton’s (1997) understanding of acousmatic listening, which brackets physical sound in favour of the abstract movement of self-­ propelled tones, and Kivy’s (2006) notion of formalistic listening, aimed at the appreciation of compositional nuances, music represents prose narrative’s opposite by virtue of the routinely abstract and self-referential nature of musical signs. Guided by this analytic philosophy of music, which goes back to the late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concept of “absolute music” (see Dahlhaus 1989), Gass appears to know exactly what “music” means in his prose as music metaphor. The title of Gass’s essay corresponds to Black’s “interaction view”: the focus of the metaphor is clear to readers who know about and/or share the formalist, analytic definition of music. However, Gass’s further application of the concept in both his non-fiction and fiction transcends the boundaries of Black’s theory of metaphor and complicates matters of popularity as clarity. In “The Music of Prose”, Gass does not directly revisit his anti-mimetic views on narrative literature. Instead of analysing the logical status of fictional discourse and negating the link between novels and reality,5 he retains this negativity in his style and syntax but proposes a very different argument for fiction’s relation with music. First, he reminds us that “prose has no notes, no scale, no consistency or purity of sound, and only actors roll its r’s, prolong its vowels, or pop its p’s with any sense of purpose” (Gass 1996, 313–314). Without public declamation, literature is muted. Second, though, he contends that prose has a pace; it is dotted with stops and pauses, frequent rests; inflections rise and fall like a low range of hills; certain tones are prolonged; there are patterns of stress and harmonious measures; there is a proper method of pronunciation, even if it is rarely observed; alliteration will trouble the 5  A celebrated Gass dictum from the late sixties reads: “There are no descriptions in fiction, there are only constructions” (1989, 17). To restate that fiction has no commitment to external reference, Gass writes in the mid-eighties, “There is no gist, no simple translation, no key concept which will unlock these works; actually, there is no lock, no door, no wall, no room, no house, no world” (1985, 223).

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tongue, consonance ease its sound out, so that any mouth making that music will feel its performance even to the back of the teeth and the glottal’s stop. (314)

Gass—who continues these observations for another thirteen lines— grants to prose what Poe denies it 160 years earlier: music as an essential, immanent substance of prose. In “Letter to B—” Poe writes that “[m]usic, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness” (2006, 542). Unlike Poe, Gass equates prose with poetry, because prose, too, has music by default; the clarity of declarative language is explained through the referential illusion, as meanings are attached to the sonic side of words by sheer convention. For Gass, some fiction’s refusal to communicate clearly and report the true facts of life affirms that prose is—or should be—music, in a sense. It is also here that Gass leaves the confines of the restrictive analytic definition of “music alone” (cf. Kivy 1990), since his thinking now allows the “sound” and its articulational means of producing to join the abstract, acousmatic parameters of music along with its other physical aspects. The metaphor that Gass builds in “The Music of Prose” identifies music as the physical event of the performance: the sound of prose can be muted, but it can be heard once its textual score is properly performed—with pitch changes, note lengths, and silent rests. Gass departs from Black still more radically insofar as the music of prose that he theorizes is not only an “interaction-metaphor” (Black 1962, 40) but also a conceptual metaphor, in George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s (1980) sense. Lakoff and Johnson do not regard metaphors as textual phenomena manifesting themselves through particular words at a sentence level. Rather, since metaphors are “not just in language but in thought and action” (3), specific utterances reflect the conceptual structures of everyday life that foster our “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (5). Conceptual metaphors such as ARGUMENT IS WAR “don’t just talk about arguments in terms of war” but expose how “the things we do in arguing are partially structured by the concept of war” (4). Thus, the metaphor can be detected in situations and texts that mention neither the explicit metaphor frame argument nor the focus war. It is not that words have literal and figurative meanings; it is that metaphors are what “we live by” (4). It is not the word “music” in Gass’s title and text but rather the essay’s diverse and suggestive ways of

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exemplifying what he means by the music of prose that constitute his metaphor. Gass’s music of prose entails not only the sentence “Prose is music” but also the conceptual metaphor PROSE IS MUSIC. All in all, Gass’s notion of music pertains to the embodied mind ideology (cf. Varela et  al. 1991). For him, musicality is no abstraction: the music of prose is the performable-but-unperformed sound that resonates holistically through the silent reader’s body. Prose is to be sung and listened to; its semantic plane is subordinate to what it sounds like. At the macro-level of narrative structure, which is built from symmetries and parallelisms of diegetic events, characters, and settings, rhythmic unities are more difficult for readers to grasp and be affected by. Music is felt and experienced somatically at the level of pronounced sentences, which form textures of phonemic repetitions, intonations, and punctuated pauses. Gass himself was arguably better at short stories than novels presumably because controlling small-scale narrative unities, in which the flow of sonic flesh overrides the plot, was seemingly easier and more pleasurable for him than maintaining a large novelistic design.6 This is also apparent in Gass’s composition method as fragments of The Tunnel and Middle C appeared in periodicals as short stories long before the novels were completed and published in separate volumes. Gass must have witnessed the rise of the audiobook, but for much of his lifetime, reading aloud was either a private luxury or came as part of a small-scale reading-event in a library. He valued passages of beautiful prose that “aspires towards the condition of music” (Pater 1980, 106) for provoking a range of sensations in the mode of mental simulation: Since the music of prose depends upon its performance by a voice, and since, when we read, we have been taught to maintain a library’s silence, so that not even the lips are allowed to move, most of the music of the word will be that heard only by the head and, dampened by decorum, will be timorous and hesitant. That is the hall, though, the hall of the head, where, if at all, prose (and poetry, too, now) is given its little oral due. (1996, 314–315)

In determining what is primary and what is secondary, Gass concedes that “[i]n music, sounds form phrases; in prose, phrases form sounds” (1996, 6  In 1978, Gass confirmed that his “natural scope in whatever genre—fiction or essay—was about 40 pages” (Janssens and Gass 2014).

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321). In his private normative poetics, the auditory side of fictional diction is not a means but an end: literature exists for the sake of music. Unlike Gass, most second-generation cognitive narratologists, who theorize embodied response to fictional worlds (Caracciolo 2014; Kukkonen 2017; Martínez 2018), assume that readers empathize with, and experience the presence of, storyworld entities—mainly by identifying with fictional characters through enactment. We may gasp as we read viscerally about someone in danger, and our body generates a sensorimotor and biochemical reaction of fear—as if the narrative “infects” us with fear, to quote Leo Tolstoy (1913, 41–42). Popular genre-fiction offers readers such stimulation in formulaic ways, much as a popular Schlager tune hooks us with familiar and well-calculated emotional effects.7 Gass differs in this regard: although his concept of music celebrates the physicality of sound, it is not the imaginary experiences of what characters hear that his readers are invited to perform. Instead, it is the physicality of the words themselves—“word music”, and not what Steven Paul  Scher terms “verbal music” (2004, 23-35)—which reaches the reader in the shape of what Anežka Kuzmičová calls “rehearsal-imagery”, speech that is internally presented in the reader’s own voice: The distinctive corporeal feature of rehearsal-imagery […] is that it is consciously felt to deploy the reader’s vocal cords and the muscles in her mouth and throat. It is literally inner in that it originates in the reader’s articulatory apparatus. Thus rehearsal-imagery is not only auditory, it is also, and necessarily, kinesthetic. There need not be much of a voice for one to experience rehearsal-imagery, as long as one feels the vibrations. (2014, 286)

According to Kuzmičová, generating rehearsal-imagery requires a significant effort on the reader’s part and thus tends “to lag behind the text as it were, because this is where the limits of the verbal medium are tried, the reader becoming aware of language in its opacity” (286). In comparison with the other types of mental imagery that Kuzmičová discerns, rehearsal imagery is rather rare and marginal: it normally occurs when the reader has trouble making sense of the text and slows down to 7  Music psychologist John Sloboda (2005, 169–170, 210–215, 260) describes a number of turns in melody and/or harmony that unmistakably, almost reflexively, invoke the listener’s psychophysical reactions such as tears. Sloboda’s musical examples are classical pieces, but pop tunes employ the same harmonic and melodic effects much more openly and routinely.

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mouth it to increase comprehension. This observation may explain how Gass’s music of prose is different from Poe’s excessively musical prosody. Poe’s “nevermore’s”, “Ulalume’s”, and “bells” belong in the fancily depicted realities of the respective poems and facilitate the reader’s infiltration into those realities (2006, 422–434). Gass’s repeated sonant alliterations in “Later, Luther would lecture me about the virtues of the Shaker way of life” (1998, 211) distract us from his diegetic settings, as if we were to suppress our instinct to reproduce them mentally and look there for the point of the story. Reconnecting this to Huxley’s aesthetic axiology, Gass’s plentiful puns and vignettes for the voice may abound, but with too little backing from interesting and pleasant subject matters, they hardly promote popularity.8

Away from the Popular The mobilization of the reader’s dispositions for the embodied experience of the music of prose differs from the common practices of “reading for the plot” (Brooks 1992) and being “transported” (Gerrig 1993) to its setting, to “the world within the word”, as one of Gass’s (1979) non-­ fiction titles goes. Or to use Ortega’s metaphor: it is not the garden seen through the windowpane (of a printed page), but the pane itself where our eye (or, rather, our ear) has to halt and linger, attending to the medium instead of the message (1968, 10). Due to the oral origin of the written words we behold, meanings—“the figures of life” (Gass 1989)—behind verbal signifiers are only significant insofar as they are configured in relation to the tangible play unfolding on their material interfaces, auditory as well as visual.9 It is not that readers need to treat fiction as speech in a totally unknown language, whose message may only be deciphered gradually and laboriously by discovering some repeated patterns. We read and listen to words, but, in Gass’s opinion, we should not rush past them for 8  Deliberately so, considering Gass’s subject matters. In “The Master of Secret Revenges”, where the quoted sentence comes from, the protagonist’s art of diegetic, as opposed to discursive, deeds is typified by the act of mailing dog shit to his unaware enemies (Gass 1998, 219). “The Order of Insects” (Gass 2015b, 143–150) celebrates bugs and roaches. Even music is travestied when it becomes a subject matter in Middle C and “Don’t Even Try, Sam”. 9  The idea that orality precedes literacy is famously questioned in poststructuralist thought, whose opponents such as Walter J. Ong argue against the counterintuitive view of the pre-­ eminence of writing (2012, 75–77, 127, 162–166). Gass, in that debate framework, would prefer Ong to Jacques Derrida.

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their immediate referents and with far-reaching conclusions. What Gass asks of us is to feel the harmony brought about by the parallels and concurrences across the visual, auditory, semantic, syntactic, and narrative strands of his prose work. The reader seems to be expected to wait until all these patterns start revealing themselves from the level of sound onwards.10 This preoccupation with the music of prose is, on the one hand, a readerly option, not a mandatory reading strategy. It is not even a common strategy, although admirers of Gass readily follow it (see Hereld 2011). Perceiving prose texts as if they were poetry or music may come naturally to some people—a gift akin to a mild form of dyslexia: instead of going pragmatically straight to the message of the text, they busy themselves with detecting regularities in different strata of its texture. These strata might include the looks of letters, the way syllables are linked and phrases intoned, the words’ plain lexical meanings, the accumulated sense of combined syntactic unities, plot-related imagery and the various interpretive implications of the story. Furthermore, apprehending the sound of words and sentences as self-contained music means neglecting other aspects of the narrative, which “normal” readerly perception takes for granted, such as the assumed relationship between fictitious and real-life experiences. Attending to this kind of music entails what Viktor Shklovsky describes as defamiliarization, whereby “art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known” in order “to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged” (1965, 12). Lingering over the sound of prose instead of hastening to picture its referents in the mind’s eye is somewhat counterintuitive. It is no coincidence that Roman Jakobson arrived at his theory of metaphor as the principal trope of poetry and metonymy as the main motor of prose by looking at various aphasic disturbances and citing contemporary neurological research (1987, 95–114). Readers who focus on the medium because the text is difficult to read may be “disturbed” in the same way as writers who defamiliarize reality by veering from representation. The capacity for perceiving and conceiving not only texts but also everyday objects and notions as strange is traditionally attributed to artists—that is, producers, not recipients of art. For Shklovsky (1965), the exemplary artist of this kind is Leo Tolstoy. Defamiliarization starts with 10  See Gass’s experiments concerning typefaces, images, and page layouts in The Tunnel and Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife.

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the artist’s vision, from which formalist theories, including Gass’s, transfer it metonymically to art products themselves. In this sense, not all prose texts but only those crafted in a certain way convey music to hear. The music of prose is thus an a priori property of writing itself and not a feature in the act of reading. As a result, Gass maintains a “musical style” of selecting and combining words into intricately arranged sentences and thus targets “the careful reader (bless his moving lips)” to perform the music in the mind’s ear (1979, 329)—a feat not every reader is willing to accomplish. While the popularity of Poe’s poetry has a lot to do with the way it sounds, his biographical circumstances and gothic themes are equally important factors in his massive success. Though Gass may lack much of Poe’s mystery, as a literary critic and storyteller he is as charismatic and no less self-conscious than the popular poet Poe. But when viewed from Huxley’s critical vantage point, Gass’s style is not as straightforwardly imposing as Poe’s: it does not “hit” the reader’s ear quickly enough to be considered “vulgar”—and thus a popular hit. The sound effects of Gass’s prose are less foregrounded and more subtly musical. Their musicality may well be missed unless the reader stops to attend to the text deliberately. Gass’s sardonic humour, metafictional preoccupations, and grotesque plots and characters are characteristic of the American literary scene of the 1970s. At the same time, the narrative pace of his prose is intentionally slowed down to attune it to an old-fashioned style. As Gass said in an interview: Writing for voice, in which you are imagining a performance in the auditory sense going on, is traditional and old-fashioned and dying. The new mode is not performative and not auditory. It’s destined for the printed page, and you are really supposed to read it the way they teach you to read in speed reading. You are supposed to crisscross the page with your eye, getting references and gists; you are supposed to see it flowing on the page, and not sound it in the head. If you do sound it, it is so bad you can hardly proceed. It can’t all have been written by Dreiser, but it sounds like it. Gravity’s Rainbow was written for print, JR was written by the mouth for the ear. By the mouth for the ear; that’s the way I’d like to write. (Ammon 2003, 22)

Gass even sees Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)—one of the most challenging and multi-styled classics in the postmodernist canon—as reference-driven and prefers Gaddis’s JR (1975), a 700-page nonstop dialogue between various unspecified characters on numerous obscure

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occasions. While both Pynchon and Gaddis are critically acclaimed authors, the latter would probably be regarded as more unpopular. In any case, Gass’s statement about these authors’ works shows that he is self-­ consciously staying away from the popular. If hearing the music of prose is not a commonly shared practice, it can be cultivated as a skill. The arguments favouring this unconventional approach to reading and assessing fiction, which Gass develops throughout his essays and interviews, may be seen as a pedagogical endeavour. Although treating literature as if it were music involves “switching from a firmly established ‘natural’ to an ‘unnatural’ frame of reference, and this would never be done spontaneously” (Wolf 1999, 92), Gass’s eloquent “educational practice” is a strategy to recruit yet another “chosen few”. In this sense, his devoted readership—a fandom of sorts—is a token of in-group popularity away from the popular.11 In Middle C, Gass’s protagonist, the fake music professor Joseph Skizzen, discovers the innovative composer Pierre Boulez though a book (Gass 2013, 222). Reading about music proves to be more satisfying to him than listening to the actual twentieth-century avant-garde. The protagonist’s pretended love of and expertise in Arnold Schoenberg’s work is contrasted to his secret but sincere taste for the popular “Polly-Wolly-­ Doodle” kind of tunes collected in Songs That Never Grow Old (Gass 2013, 230). Such a double standard of taste marks out a middle-brow insecurity; one seemingly needs to put on airs and cherish sophistication to gain some cultural capital where the “vulgar” and vernacular are perceived as shameful. The music sociology of Theodor W. Adorno, whose name appears in Middle C alongside Arnold Schoenberg’s, Thomas Mann’s, and Bertolt Brecht’s (Gass 2013, 96), would place Skizzen somewhere in the middle between two types of listeners: The first being cultural consumers of music, whose “attitude runs the gamut from an earnest sense of obligation to vulgar snobbery” and who are “hoarding as much musical information as possible, notably about biographical data” (Adorno 1976, 6–7). The second group could be described as emotional listeners whose “instinctual stirrings otherwise tamed or repressed by norms of civilization” music triggers (8). Gass does not necessarily share the contempt for six out of 11  Visitors to Stephen Schenkenberg’s “Reading William Gass” at readinggass.org are certainly not the only Gass admirers worldwide. But the website is a tangible manifestation of Gass’s “unofficial”, that is, popular appeal beyond academic institutions and commercial marketing.

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seven groups of music listeners in Adorno’s taxonomy, where only expert listeners are acceptable. One could imagine that, like his satirized protagonist, Gass is charmed by Songs That Never Grow Old—a volume of simple “lyrics from some old-time tunes” that he describes as “quaint” in the Acknowledgments to Milddle C and has Skizzen discover and enjoy (2013, ix, 230–236, 387–389). Ludwig van Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata— which Skizzen adores as a youth (Gass 2013, 74–78)—is a popular classic and thus inhabits a status similar to that of Poe’s poems and stories in the literary canon.12 If artefacts are not deliberately manufactured as part of an evil and corrupt popular culture that Gass defines as “the product of an industrial machine which makes baubles to amuse the savages while missionaries steal their souls and merchants steal their money” (Madera and Gass 2014), popularity is no crime. The Tunnel, for example, is packed with dirty limericks that are all attributed to the narrator’s morally ambivalent taste but nonetheless contribute to Gass’s prose polyphony. One could even say that, like the popular, they are fun to write and read. But in foregrounding the complexities of the music of prose at the expense of his either intentionally trivial (as in Middle C) or deliberately obscure (as in “Cartesian Sonata”) storylines, Gass stays away from, instead of stepping towards, the popular. His music of prose is art music, not pop music, and the popular jingles it consists of are to be processed further: “[T]hough a new work of art may consume our souls completely for a while, almost as a jingle might, if consumption were all that mattered, we are never, afterward the same; we cannot consciously go on in the old way” (Madera and Gass 2014). Gass’s attitude to popular music is best illustrated by a confession he made in 2011: My wife’s very much younger than I. When we were first courting, I had to hear a lot of pop music, because she was an eighteen-year-old. But after a few years, she scorned it and listened to Monteverdi. I’ve watched a lot of sets of people—children and two wives, and so on—get culture. And it’s wonderful to see people deepen. (Gerke and Gass 2014)

In deepening, however, the process matters more than the result. For the point is not that Monteverdi is the last stage in perfecting one’s musical 12  For a discussion of how the folk song “Polly-Wolly-Doodle” and Beethoven’s Op. 27 No. 2 are used in the text of Middle C, see Delazari (2021b, 75–85).

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understanding, regardless of whether or not we deplore or sympathize with Gass’s ultra-conservative take on high-culture supremacy. The refinement that Gass’s rhetoric seeks to point out entails the concentration of our embodied cognitive radars and the expansion of the range of phenomena to which they are sensitive. Marketing can work miracles: Random House made Joyce’s Ulysses (1922)  a best-seller in America in the 1930s by “stepp[ing] across the great divides between sacred and profane, commerce and art, highbrow and popular” and establishing “a servile reliance on critics in readers whom they hoped to make more independent” (Turner 2003, 213). Knopf— Gass’s publisher in North America—is now an imprint of Penguin Random House, but it has not accomplished a similar marketing feat for Gass: despite all the critical praise, his readership can claim neither quantitative nor moral superiority over that of Stephen King or Bob Dylan, now that Popular Culture Studies in both literature and music has long become a legitimate academic field. Gass’s articulated wish to physicalize the text and affect us accordingly is intended to challenge perceptual constraints that we may not want to work through and overcome. At the same time— as if to reaffirm one of the many paradoxes of the popular—there are regular contributions to the online forum on Gass’s fandom web site readinggass.org. Hundreds and even thousands of views on YouTube of his interviews and public readings over the years suggest that Gass’s style continues to fascinate some of us. It remains to be seen how sustainable and extinction-resistant his precious hardcopy book interface can be, but Gass seems to have found a strategy to prevent his beautifully written sentences from receiving a multimedia afterlife in a popular culture of 3D movies, musicals, cartoons, and boardgames such as has befallen Poe’s poetry and prose. Gass’s undermining of plot and subject matter deliberately deters popularity. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, his ardent critical advocacy and numerous practical exemplifications of the PROSE IS MUSIC metaphor exert an effect that is precisely the opposite of what we find in Poe, whose “vulgar” sonorities continue to guarantee his popular appeal. Gass’s proud prose roulades are all properly recorded in his publications and effectively distributed in book and ebook forms. In the last three decades, they have tended to interest the kinds of readers who would also collect “vintage records”. Yet fashions come and go, and a literary “vinyl” Renaissance after an era of “digital discs” is not unthinkable. Wait and see.

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Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. 1976. Introduction to the sociology of music. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York: Seabury. Ammon, Theodore G., ed. 2003. Conversations with William H. Gass. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Baym, Nina, gen. ed. 2007. The Norton anthology of American literature. 7th ed. Vol. E: Literature since 1945. New York/London: Norton. Baym, Nina, and Robert S. Levine, gen. eds. 2012. The Norton anthology of American literature. 8th ed. Vol. E: Literature since 1945. New York/ London: Norton. Black, Max. 1962. Models and metaphors: Studies in language and philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bloom, Harold. 1994. The western canon: The books and school of the ages. New York: Harcourt Brace. Brooks, Peter. 1992. Reading for the plot: Design and intention in narrative. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Caracciolo, Marco. 2014. The experientiality of narrative: An enactivist approach. Berlin: de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110365658. Dahlhaus, Carl. 1989. The idea of absolute music. Trans. Roger Lustig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Delazari, Ivan. 2021a. Literary “sonatas”: A joint sample of William H. Gass and Leo Tolstoy. Comparative Literature Studies 58 (2): 308–339. https://doi. org/10.5325/complitstudies.58.2.0308. ———. 2021b. Musical stimulacra: Literary narrative and the urge to listen. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367688189. Gaddis, William. 1975. JR. New York: Knopf. Gass, William H. 1966. Omensetter’s luck. New York: New American Library. ———. 1979. The world within the word. New York: Knopf. ———. 1985. Habitations of the word. New York: Simon and Schuster. ———. 1989. Fiction and the figures of life. Boston: Godine. ———. 1996. Finding a form. New York: Knopf. ———. 1998. Cartesian sonata and other novellas. New York: Knopf. ———. 1999. The tunnel. Normal: Dalkey Archive Press. ———. 2013. Middle C. New York: Knopf. ———. 2014. Willie Masters’ lonesome wife. Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press. ———. 2015a. Eyes: Novellas and short stories. New York: Knopf. ———. 2015b. In the heart of the heart of the country and other stories. New York: New York Review Books. ———. 2018. The William H. Gass reader. New York: Knopf. Genette, Gérard. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Gerke, Greg, and William H. Gass. 2014. William H. Gass: Interviewed by Greg Gerke, 2011. In Schenkenberg 2014. https://medium.com/the-­william-­h-­ gass-­i nter views/william-­h -­g ass-­i nter viewed-­b y-­g r eg-­g erke-­2 011-­ 88b925ca2a55. Accessed 15 Sept 2020. Gerrig, Richard J. 1993. Experiencing narrative worlds: On the psychological activities of reading. New Haven: Yale University Press. https://doi. org/10.4324/9780429500633. Geyh, Paula, Fred G. Leebron, and Andrew Levy, eds. 1998. Postmodern American fiction: A Norton anthology. New York: Norton. Grassian, Daniel. 2003. Hybrid fictions: American literature and generation X. Jefferson: McFarland. Hardy, Liberty. 2019. I’m Poe-pular: Edgar Allan Poe in popular culture. https:// bookriot.com/edgar-­allan-­poe-­in-­popular-­culture. Accessed 29 Aug 2020. Hereld, Diana Christine. 2011. William Gass and the music of prose. An und für sich: Blog at Wordpress.com. https://itself.blog/2011/12/26/william-­gass-­ and-­the-­music-­of-­prose/. Accessed 21 Mar 2021. Hix, H.L. 2002. Understanding William H. Gass. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Holloway, Watson L. 1990. William Gass. Boston: Twayne Publishers. Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A poetics of postmodernism: History, theory, fiction. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203358856. Huxley, Aldous. 1928. Point counter point. New York: Doubleday, Doran. ———. 1930. Vulgarity in literature. The Saturday Review of Literature, September 27. Jakobson, Roman. 1987. Two aspects of language and two types of aphasic disturbances. In Language in literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, 95–114. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press. Janssens, G. A. M., and Willian H. Gass. 2014. William H. Gass: Interviewed by G. A. M. Janssens, 1978. In Schenkenberg 2014. https://medium.com/thewilliam-h-gass-interviews/william-h-gass-interviewed-by-g-a-m-janssens1978-83d7b77362f2. Accessed 13 Sept 2020. Joyce, James. 1922. Ulysses. Paris: Shakespeare and Company. Kivy, Peter. 1990. Music alone: Philosophical reflection on the purely musical experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ———. 2006. Mood and music: Some reflections for Noël Carroll. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64 (2): 271–281. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.0021-­8529.2006.00248.x. Kukkonen, Karin. 2017. A prehistory of cognitive poetics: Neoclassicism and the novel. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof: oso/9780190634766.001.0001. Kuzmičová, Anežka. 2014. Literary narrative and mental imagery: A view from embodied cognition. Style 48 (3): 275–293.

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Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levine, Robert S, gen. ed. 2016. The Norton anthology of American literature. 9th ed. Vol. E: Literature since 1945. New York: Norton. Madera, John, and William H. Gass. 2014. William H. Gass: Interviewed by John Madera, 2010 In Schenkenberg 2014. https://medium.com/the-­william-­h-­ gass-­i nter views/william-­h -­g ass-­i nter viewed-­b y-­j ohn-­m adera-­2 012-­ 4b48ee6fd0c4. Accessed 15 Sept 2020. Martínez, María-Ángeles. 2018. Storyworld possible selves. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110571028. McCaffery, Larry. 1982. The metafictional muse: The works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1955. Lolita. Paris: Olympia Press. Neighbors, Jim. 2002. An interview with William H.  Gass. Contemporary Literature 43 (4): 617–643. https://doi.org/10.2307/1209036. O’Hara, Daniel T. 2014. Inside out again: In William H. Gass’s Middle C. Boundary 2 41.3: 203–218. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-­2812109. Ong, Walter J. 2012. Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. New York: Routledge. Ortega y Gasset, José. 1968. The dehumanization of art and other essays on art, culture, and literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Pater, Walter. 1980. The Renaissance: Studies in art and poetry. The 1893 text, ed. Donald E. Hill. Berkley: University of California Press. Pier, John. 2004. Narrative configurations. In The dynamics of narrative form: Studies in Anglo-American narratology, ed. John Pier, 239–268. Berlin: de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110922646.239. Poe, Edgar Allan. 2006. The portable Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J.  Gerald Kennedy. New York: Penguin. Pynchon, Thomas. 1973. Gravity’s rainbow. New York: Viking. Saltzman, Arthur, and William H. Gass. 2014. William H. Gass: Interviewed by Arthur M.  Saltzman, 1991. In Schenkenberg 2014. https://medium.com/ the-­william-­h-­gass-­interviews/william-­h-­gass-­interviewed-­by-­arthur-­m-­saltzm an-­1991-­40d86feafe73. Accessed 13 Sept 2020. Schenkenberg, Stephen, ed. 2014. The ear’s mouth must move: Essential interviews of William H.  Gass. https://medium.com/the-­william-­h-­gass-­interviews. Accessed 5 Sept 2020. Scher, Steven Paul. 2004. Essays on literature and music (1967–2004). Amsterdam: Rodopi. Schweighauser, Philipp. 1999. Discursive killings: Intertextuality, aestheticization, and death in Nabokov’s “Lolita”. Amerikastudien / American Studies 44 (2): 255–267.

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Index1

NUMBERS, AND SYMBOLS 1990s, 7, 179–197 A Absolute music, 3, 243 Adorno, Theodor W., 6, 15, 65, 83, 250, 251 Alan Parsons Project, The, 241 Amazon, 51 Americana, 67 Amos, Tori, 183, 184 Amplification, 40, 43, 49, 50, 58, 76, 82, 137 Apple, Fiona, 183 Archive, 6, 77, 88, 89, 226, 227, 230, 235 Auslander, Philip, 137–139

B Babes in Toyland, 183 Badiou, Alain, 194 Baez, Joan, 52, 58, 65 Barth, John, 239 Barthelme, Donald, 239 Beatles, The, 72, 77, 89, 91, 92, 97, 98, 100, 103 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 22n9, 251 Benjamin, Walter, 4 Berlant, Lauren, 180, 197 Bikini Kill, 183 Bilyk, Iryna, 7, 189 Birmingham School, 16 Black, Max, 241 Boogie-woogie, 27 Boulez, Pierre, 250 Brahms, Johannes, 21

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Gurke, S. Winnett (eds.), Words, Music, and the Popular, Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85543-7

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INDEX

Brecht, Bertolt, 43, 67, 250 Brickell, Edie, 48, 58 Broadway, 12, 26, 29 Buck-Morss, Susan, 187 Busta Rhymes, 27 Byrds, The, 23 Byron, George Gordon, 160 C Carnegie Hall, 225, 231, 232 Carver, Raymond, 241 Chapman, Tracy, 183 Cheever, John, 239 Chopin, Frédéric, 157 Classical music, 18, 20, 21, 25, 75, 157 Community singing, 133–150 Convergence, 4, 14, 135 Country music, 67 Cover versions, 6, 40, 46, 49, 50 D Dahlhaus, Carl, 3, 243 Deal, Kim, 183 Deleuze, Gilles, 23, 185 DiFranco, Ani, 183 DNA, 19, 20, 24, 25, 27 Dylan, Bob, 6, 40, 43, 45, 55, 58, 59, 65, 66, 252 Another Side of Bob Dylan, 67 “Ballad of a Thin Man,” 43–45 Blonde on Blonde, 67, 77 “Blowing in the Wind,” 6, 72 The Bootleg Series, 77 Bringing It All Back Home, 77 “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” 43, 44, 48, 49, 51, 55–57, 60 Highway 61 Revisited, 67, 77 “Like a Rolling Stone,” 6, 66, 67, 72, 78–81

“Masters of War,” 68 “Motorpsycho Nitemare,” 68 Rolling Thunder Revue, 48 “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” 78 “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” 78 E East and West, 7, 155–175, 191, 193, 197 Eliot, T.S., 67, 69, 71 Elvis, 66, 67 Engle, Paul, 16 F Fauré, Gabriel, 21 Ferry, Bryan, 49 Fischer-Lichte, Erika, 137 Fiske, John, 3, 144 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 67 Folk music, 45, 67, 171, 196 folk rock, 76, 155, 172 protest folk, 43, 66, 69, 71, 82, 83 Frankfurt School, 15, 20 Frith, Simon, 18, 89, 140, 179, 197 G Gaddis, William, 239 Gardner, John, 239 Gass, William H., 7, 237–252 Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas, 240 Eyes, 240 Fiction and the Figures of Life, 239 In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, 238 Middle C, 240 “The Music of Prose,” 7, 242, 243 Omensetter’s Luck, 238

 INDEX 

259

The Tunnel, 238 William H. Gass Reader, 240 Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, 238 Genette, Gérard, 240 Gilroy, Paul, 31 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 165 Gospel music, 67, 228

Joyce, James, 239, 252

H Händel, Georg Friedrich, 21n8 Messiah, 21n8 Harpsichord, 27, 28, 30 Harvey, PJ, 6, 111–129, 183 Let England Shake, 6, 111, 113–115, 117, 120, 123, 128–129 Haydamaky, 155, 157, 158, 163, 167, 168, 168n17, 168n18, 169n20, 170–174 Heavy metal music, 170 Hendrix, Jimi, 77 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 159 Hip-hop, 26, 27, 29, 104, 158 Huxley, Aldous, 237, 238, 247, 249

L Lamar, Kendrick, 30, 31 Lennon, John, 90, 91, 93, 94, 96, 99 Lennox, Annie, 183 Liveness, 7, 133–150 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 16–18, 17n6 Love, Courtney, 183 L7, 183 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 207 Lyrics, 2, 3, 6, 11, 12, 16, 18, 23, 27–32, 39–46, 42n1, 48–53, 55, 57–60, 67, 69, 71, 80, 81, 94, 95, 102, 112, 114, 118, 121, 125, 125n14, 128, 141–143, 145, 147, 148, 157, 181, 186, 193, 194, 196n24, 220, 230, 232, 233, 251

I Indigo Girls, 183 Intermediality, 1n1, 2, 11, 14, 29n14, 135 Intersectionality, 227, 227n4, 234 J Jamaican dancehall, 27 Jameson, Fredric, 15, 180n1 Jazz music, 67, 71, 72, 158 Jenkins, Henry, 134, 140 Jess, Tyehimba, 7, 225–235 Olio, 7, 226, 227 Jones, Sissieretta, 7, 225–235

K King, Stephen, 252 Kramer, Lawrence, 3 Kula Shaker, 48

M Mann, Thomas, 250 Manson, Shirley, 183 Marcus, Greil, 78 Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth, 30, 31, 42 Marx, Karl, 4 McCartney, Linda, 94, 98, 99 McCartney, Paul, 6, 90, 94, 96, 97, 99, 101–103 McCartney, 92 RAM, 91 McLuhan, Marshall, 12, 75, 76

260 

INDEX

Media theory, 1, 12, 75, 136, 137 Melopoesis, 3, 7, 174 Messiaen, Olivier, 22, 23 Mickiewicz, Adam, 7, 155, 157 Crimean Sonnets, 171 Grażyna, 160 Konrad Wallenrod, 160, 163, 171 Minor popular culture, 180, 189, 192, 193, 196 Miranda, Lin-Manuel, 5, 12, 26–29 Hamilton, 5, 12, 26, 29–31 Mitchell, Anaïs, 48 Mobb Deep, 27 Moore, Thomas, 160 Morissette, Alanis, 183 Music, 11–32, 39–42, 50, 52, 53, 58, 60, 65, 67, 69, 72, 74–78, 80, 82, 87–90, 93, 95–104, 111, 114, 115, 136, 139, 144–146, 150, 155–160, 163, 168, 168n17, 170, 172–174, 179–181, 181n4, 183, 184, 185n9, 189–194, 207, 209, 209n12, 211–213, 212n15, 215, 217, 218, 220–222 meaning, 13, 21, 24 recording, 67 repetition, 44 rhythm, 27, 44, 48, 50, 52, 58, 72, 74 structure, 42, 43, 46, 48, 57, 74, 81 Musique concrète, 72 N Nabokov, Vladimir, 238 Nirvana, 21 Cobain, Kurt, 21 Nobel Prize, 40, 66, 69 Notorious B.I.G., The, 27

O O’Connor, Sinéad, 183 Ono, Yoko, 91 Opera, 7, 22n9, 157, 171n27, 203–209, 205n3, 207n7, 211–213, 215, 215n21, 217, 220–222, 226n3, 227, 228, 230–233, 235 Osborne, Joan, 183 Owen, Wilfred, 113 P Parody, 170, 207–213, 208n10, 209n11, 210n13, 212n15, 214n19, 215–218, 217n23, 219n26, 220–222 Participation, 4, 7, 30, 133, 139–141, 148–150, 181 Phair, Liz, 183 Phelan, Peggy, 79, 137 Pink Floyd, 77 Poe, Edgar Allan, 237, 238, 241, 244, 247, 249, 251, 252 “Letter to B—,” 244 “The Raven,” 241 Poetics, 2, 3, 17n5, 26, 30, 31, 41, 42, 44, 45, 69, 71, 73, 81, 113, 113n2, 114, 155, 159, 173, 220, 230–232, 237, 238, 241, 246 Poetry, 3, 6, 7, 11–13, 26, 27, 30, 31, 69, 73, 79, 83, 112, 113, 113n2, 120, 155–160, 163–165, 168n18, 169, 170, 172–174, 194, 210, 226, 230, 232, 237, 244, 245, 248, 249, 252 English War Poetry, 6, 112, 113, 115, 118, 128 Popularity, 2, 6, 7, 12, 16, 17, 17n5, 19, 98, 100, 112, 149, 150,

 INDEX 

156–158, 182, 191n16, 196, 220, 222, 237, 241, 243, 247, 249–252 unpopularity, 250 Popular music, 3, 6, 7, 11, 12, 16, 18, 20, 21, 28, 30–32, 46, 65–67, 69–71, 75, 89–91, 101, 104, 111, 112, 134, 143, 149, 157, 169, 171, 175, 179, 182, 183, 188, 192, 194, 197, 221, 238, 241, 251 Postmodernism, 239 Post-Sovietness, 7, 168, 174, 179–197 Pound, Ezra, 71 Powers, Richard, 5, 12, 19–25, 27, 29 Orfeo, 5, 12, 19–25, 29 Public enemy, 186 Pulitzer Prize, 30 Pynchon, Thomas, 249 R R&B, 27 Rajewsky, Irina, 2, 14, 14n3, 15, 31, 135 Rap, 17n5, 20, 26, 27, 30, 31, 104, 158 Reggaeton, 27 Remediation, 7, 135 Représentation populaire, 205, 206 Rimbaud, Arthur, 67 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai, 157 Rock, 6, 43, 76, 87, 89, 92, 96, 102, 155, 182, 185, 241 alternative rock, 155, 185 indie rock, 185 Progressive Rock, 241 rock aesthetics, 6, 89, 93, 94, 96, 97, 99–104 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 80 rock criticism, 87–90, 94, 103

rock journalism, 89–91, 95 rock ‘n’ roll, 67, 98 Rolling Stones, The, 77 Romanticism, 3, 7, 73, 158, 159 Rosenberg, Isaac, 113 S Sassoon, Siegfried, 113, 115 Scher, Steven Paul, 3, 246 Schoenberg, Arnold, 250 Scott, Walter, 160 Shevchenko, Taras, 155 Shklovsky, Viktor, 248 Skin, 183 Song, 1, 11, 39, 67, 91, 111, 134, 156, 181, 219, 241 repetition, 42, 44–46 rhythm, 50 structure, 42, 45 Sonic Youth, 184, 186 Daydream Nation, 186 Gordon, Kim, 183, 184 Live in Moscow, 186 Moore, Thurston, 186 Spotify, 40 Springsteen, Bruce, 80 Stasiuk, Andrzej, 155 Stein, Gertrude, 16, 239 T Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 157 Thomas, Edward, 113 Time, 116, 160, 183, 186n10, 191n16, 207n8, 208n10, 209n11, 249 Tolstoy, Leo, 246, 248 Transmediality, 7, 19, 133–150 Triggerfinger, 46 Tupac, 27

261

262 

INDEX

U Ukrainian Popular Music, 167, 171, 172, 182, 188, 191, 193, 197 Updike, John, 239 U2, 77 V Verdi, Giuseppe, 7, 203–222, 230, 235n6 Aida, 207, 214, 230, 232, 234 Il Trovatore, 235n6 La Traviata, 235n6 Othello, 7, 204, 206, 207, 214, 221 Rigoletto, 207 W Wagner, Richard, 7, 203–222 Eine Kapitulation, 208 Lohengrin, 7, 204, 206, 207, 213, 214, 221 Tannhäuser, 206 Weill, Kurt, 43

Whitman, Walt, 17 Williams, William Carlos, 16 Wings, 6, 87–104 At the Speed of Sound, 88, 95, 97 Back to the Egg, 97 Band on the Run, 93, 94, 100 Red Rose Speedway, 98 Rockshow, 88 Venus and Mars, 87, 94–96 Wild Life, 92–94 Wings Over America, 88 Wolf, Werner, 2, 14, 240, 250 Women singer-songwriters, 113, 180, 182–185, 183n7, 188 Word-music relations, 1, 2, 5, 12, 13, 17–20, 22, 27, 29, 31, 32, 66, 227, 237 World War I, 6, 111–113, 118–122, 124, 127, 227 Y YouTube, 17n4, 43, 46, 50, 140, 197, 252