Samuel Beckett, Repetition and Modern Music - John McGrath - 2017 - Anna's Archive

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“Samuel Beckett’s experiments at the intersection of music and literature are among
the most unique and interesting of their kind. McGrath’s study contributes new elem-
ents to our understanding of Beckett’s work in this area, particularly in its potential
to enrich the thinking of musicians and composers. Not ‘just’ a book on Beckett, it
makes Beckett the starting point for a number of fruitful meditations on repetition,
representation, improvisation, and structural experimentation in the arts. The chapters
on Morton Feldman and Scott Fields are especially welcome in this regard.”
Eric Prieto, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA
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Samuel Beckett, Repetition and

Modern Music
Music abounds in twentieth-century Irish literature. Whether it be the “thought-

tormented” music of Joyce’s “The Dead”, the folk tunes and opera that resound
throughout Ulysses, or the four-part threnody in Beckett’s Watt, it is clear that the
influence of music on the written word in Ireland is deeply significant. Samuel Beckett
arguably went further than any other writer in the incorporation of musical ideas into
his work. Musical quotations inhabit his texts, and structural devices such as the da
capo are metaphorically employed. Perhaps most striking is the erosion of explicit
meaning in Beckett’s later prose brought about through an extensive use of repetition,
influenced by his reading of Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music.
Exploring this notion of “semantic fluidity”, John McGrath discusses the ways in
which Beckett utilised extreme repetition to create texts that operate and are received
more like music. Beckett’s writing has attracted the attention of numerous contempor-
ary composers and an investigation into how this Beckettian “musicalized fiction” has
been retranslated into contemporary music forms the second half of the book. Close
analyses of the Beckett-inspired music of experimental composer Morton Feldman
and the structured improvisations of avantjazz guitarist Scott Fields illustrate the
cross-genre appeal of Beckett to musicians, but also demonstrate how repetition oper-
ates in diverse ways. Through the examination of the pivotal role of repetition in both
music and literature of the twentieth century and beyond, John McGrath’s book is a
significant contribution to the field of Word and Music Studies.
John McGrath is a guitarist and academic from Ireland. He works in many styles
of music including improvisation, noise, blues, avantfolk, scratch, rockabilly and
avantrock and has collaborated on various performance, TV and art projects. His solo
fingerstyle compositions have been featured in The Wire magazine and on numerous
international radio stations. John is a lecturer at ICMP, having previously taught at
University of Liverpool and LIPA.
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Samuel Beckett, Repetition and

Modern Music
John McGrath
vi
First published 2018

by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 John McGrath
The right of John McGrath to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him
in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McGrath, John (Guitarist) author.
Title: Samuel Beckett, repetition and modern music / John McGrath.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017028278 | ISBN 9781472475374 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781315607566 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Music and literature. | Beckett, Samuel, 1906–1989–Criticism
and interpretation. | Music–20th century–History and criticism. |
Repetition in literature. | Repetition in music.
Classification: LCC ML3849 .M38 2018 | DDC 780/.082–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028278
ISBN: 978-1-472-47537-4 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-60756-6 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Out of House Publishing
Bach musicological font developed by © Yo Tomita
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For Holly and Daisy

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ix
Contents
List of figures x
Acknowledgements xii
Introduction 1
1 Music and literature 6
2 Repetition in music and literature 33
3 Musico-literary interaction in modern Ireland and the

musical aesthetic of Samuel Beckett 53
4 Beckett’s semantic fluidity: repetition in the later work 66
5 Beckett and Feldman: time, repetition and the liminal space 86
6 Improvising Beckett: chance, silence and repetition 124
Conclusions 148
Bibliography 156
Index 169
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Figures
4.1 The Human Condition (1933) –René Magritte © ADAGP,

Paris and DACS, London 2016 67
4.2a Analysis of segment no. 1 from Ill Seen Ill Said 75
4.2b Analysis of segment no. 1 from Ill Seen Ill Said 76
4.3 Analysis of segment no. 2 from Ill Seen Ill Said 80
4.4 Analysis of segment from Worstward Ho 82
5.1 Analysis of neither text 101
5.2 Neither, bars 1–12 103
5.3 Neither, excerpt from figure 14 103
5.10 Neither, excerpt from figures 25/26 106
5.15 Neither, figure 135 109
5.16 Neither, figure 46 110
5.22 Analysis of Words and Music 120
5.23 Words and Music, 2 bars 121
5.24 Words and Music, 7 bars 122
6.1 The Scott Fields Ensemble –photo credit: Stefan Strasser 133
6.2 Page 1 of Not I analysis 136
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Figures xi
6.3 Billie Whitelaw in Not I138
6.4 Julianne Moore in Not I139
6.5 Fields’ Not I, page 1 141
6.6 Fields’ Not I, page 2 144
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newgenprepdf
Acknowledgements
First, I’d like to thank both Annie Vaughan and Emma Gallon for their sup-
port with the book.
Special thanks to Michael Spitzer, Anahid Kassabian, Kenneth Smith,
Helen Abbott and Catherine Laws. I’m obliged to ADAGP, Paris and DACS,
London for the Magritte permissions.
The Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Society for Musicology
in Ireland both provided much-appreciated support for the project.
As always, I’m grateful for the continued encouragement from Bríd, Joe,
Cormac, Cian, Emmet, Polly, John and most of all, Holly.
Lastly, a huge thank you to Gustavo Alberto Garcia Vaca for kindly grant-
ing the use of neither for the cover image and to Scott Fields for his time,
scores and music.
1
Introduction
Music and words have always relied on each other; in fact, they are mutually
dependent. We need words to try and make sense of music, to describe it, to
fulfil the human need to compartmentalise, and to box music into disparate
genres and subgenres. On the other hand, words need music to express what
they cannot. Music can be seen to have a syntax of its own, a repertoire of
signifiers that connote certain affiliations for listeners.
If we consider music and words historically, this mutual dependence is tan-
gible. Linguistic and sonic articulations were not always separated into dis-
tinct artforms but rather were disciplines collected under the same heading: in
Ancient Greece, words and music were described by the single term, “mous-
ike”, while for the Celts the file was the poet/musician for the community.
It was only during the Enlightenment that the two arts gradually began to
separate into recognisable discrete forms. As rhetoric shifted emphasis away
from performance, “literature” became more of a “silent” artform. Words
and music would continue to work together of course, in song, opera and
music theatre, but one was usually subordinate to the other. Often, the work
was divided, with librettists contributing the words and composers the music.
With the Romantics and Symbolists in the late nineteenth century, however,
came new ideas concerning music’s ineffable qualities. Influenced by the phil-
osophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and literary Wagnerism, these artists and
thinkers began to view music as the highest artform, believing it expressed
what could not be articulated in words; that it enabled a higher, and purer,
form of engagement with the intangible. Walter Pater, part of the Symbolist
movement, famously proclaimed that “all art constantly aspires to the con-
dition of music” ([1873] 1980, 86) at this time, and certainly throughout the
arts many were turning to musical ideas and devices to structure, form and
sound their own work in novels, poems, plays and paintings. The use of the
term “musical” has been a persistent debate in Word and Music Studies, the
scholarly field that explores the various interactions of both arts. Any direct
attempt of one artform to imitate another will always be metaphorical, and
one of the main problems in the academy has been the futile search for the
appropriateness of said metaphors, or an idealised set of absolute or direct
correspondences. I employ the term “musical” in a manner similar to the way
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2 Introduction
in which Proust, the Symbolists and the Romantics used it and not as an
analytical object.1 For these writers the idea of musicality represented that
which was inexpressible in words alone. “Music” is itself a fluid term, act-
ing as a label that encapsulates vast variance and disparate meanings. Music
means many things to many cultures –it has “multiple ontologies” (Bohlman,
1999). As such, it is impossible to pin music down to a definitive set of identity
conditions. This is important to consider when we reflect on how artists have
conceptualised musical ideas in other artforms.
The twentieth century saw musicians and writers pushing at the boundar-
ies, as ideas that had developed and evolved into particular disciplines began
to be applied to other artforms. Crucially, intermedial Modernist artforms
could no longer be re-separated in any intact manner, as one could not, for
instance, read a libretto on its own to fully engage with an opera. Both music
and literature were so intertwined that to remove any one component would
reduce the whole to an incomplete fragment.
Repetition was one of the salient devices that musicians and writers began
to explore and concentrate on at this time in a wide array of disciplines.
Although the repetition of notes, motives or modal areas has always been a
formative structural device in music, it began to assume a considerable cre-
ative influence that is traceable during the twentieth century from rock to min-
imalism, and from rave to ambient music. Repetition in music moved beyond
the pejorative towards apotheosis, as it became heralded as an end in itself,
rather than being a maligned necessity. A similar trajectory can be found in
literature. Although the textual refrain had been key for the Symbolists, the
traditional rhetorical repetitive qualities of alliteration, assonance, anaphora
and epistrophe were taken to whole new levels, as individual words began
themselves to be reiterated in extremis. The poems of Gertrude Stein, the cut-
ups of William Burroughs, the jazz-inspired syncopations of the Beats all stem
from the Symbolist and Modernist focus on transformation through repeti-
tion. Repetition’s ubiquity in many artforms makes it a transmedial device,
one that is shared amongst them, rather than belonging to one in particular.
The historical thresholds reveal some of the reasons why repetition becomes
attached to the idea of “musicality”, a notion we will explore in Chapter 2.
The formation of transmedial discourse through the art of repetition was
an integral part of Samuel Beckett’s creative aesthetics. Inspired by the same
Schopenhauerian philosophy of music that provoked the Symbolists, the
Irish writer created an unprecedented form of “musicalized fiction” (Aldous
Huxley’s term ([1928] 1978, 301), adopted by Werner Wolf (1999)). Frustrated
by the inability of words to express depth and intangibility sufficiently, Beckett
strove to interrogate the essence of meaning and created a form that enabled
a certain liquidity of semiotics. Repetition allowed Beckett to create a liter-
ary language that, at the levels of both creation and reception, appeared to
assume certain musical traits. I propose that Beckett’s late fiction represented
a peak in twentieth-century investigation into transmedial culture: more than
any other, Beckett’s musicality enabled what I theorise as a semantic fluidity,
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Introduction 3
a flow of meaning afforded in part by a common form of repetition. Related
to semantic satiation or sometimes saturation, a scientific term for the point
at which repetition begins to erode rather than reinforce meaning, I theorise
that Beckett utilised repetition as a device that could endow his texts with a
music-like quality –more fluid in their meanings. My term semantic fluidity
describes this less explicit feature of Beckett’s late prose, a style influenced
by his Romantic philosophy of music. Inherent ambiguity is infused within
the distilled precision of Beckett’s texts while a perpetual semiosis ensues at
the reception level. Through extensive repetition, Beckett’s semantic fluidity
erodes meaning instead of emphasising comprehension. I relate this semantic
fluidity to a positive and transformative Deleuzian concept of repetition dur-
ing the course of the book, and develop an original taxonomy of repetition
that can be applied transmedially to both music and literature.
Although Beckett was influenced by the Symbolists, lived in Paris and
wrote in French for much of his life, his musicalised literature situates him
within a long line of Irish musicians-turned-writers. His friend and mentor
of sorts, James Joyce, for instance, infused both Ulysses ([1922] 2000) and
Finnegans Wake ([1939] 1975) with leitmotifs, songs, operatic references and
even an attempted fugue in words in the famous “Sirens” episode. Playwright
J. M. Synge had initially intended to become a composer; Yeats’ lyricism
placed him within a “singing school” of Irish balladeers –Mangan, Davis,
Ferguson and Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies (1808–1834). George Bernard
Shaw used many operatic devices in his plays and wrote extensive music criti-
cism. The fact that many others shared such an affinity with music has led
Harry White to believe that Irish literature is particularly “musical” in this
regard (White, 2008).
The musical qualities that abound in Beckett’s work have proved intensely
attractive to many contemporary composers, and his writing has been used as
the libretto, text or the inspiration for a variety of musical responses in several
different genres. Through an examination of repetition in music and literature,
and an investigation into several musical responses to, or sonic translations
of, Beckett’s texts, I will analyse the author’s employment of recurrence and
reiteration and explore the possibility of translating this Beckettian semantic
fluidity into other artforms.
The following chapters trace the development of Beckett’s musical aes-
thetic from his metaphorical understanding of musico-textual transmediality
in his early fiction, to the foregrounding of musical devices in his later prose,
a subject which remains as yet largely unexplored in the scholarly literature.
The first chapter will investigate Gotthold Lessing’s temporal classification
of music and literature, in order to explain the particular transmedial affinity
that both arts share. I offer a historical survey of music and literature inter-
action that outlines various types of combination. Next, I provide an over-
view of the recently blossoming field of Word and Music Studies. The main
trajectories and issues of the field are explored before a progressive method-
ology is suggested.
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4 Introduction
Building on this contextual work, Chapter 2 opens out to laterally investi-
gate repetition’s place in music and literature. Here, I offer a survey of repe-
tition theory and explore the differences between the forms and traditional
tolerances of repetition in music and those of literature. Chapter 3 opens
with a discussion of Beckett’s place within Irish literature before outlining
the author’s developing aesthetic of music in his early fiction. Early texts like
Murphy ([1938] 2003) frequently use musical metaphor and show nascent
signs of the repetition device. It is important to contextualise this work in
terms of Beckett’s merging of literature and music, as this was not an iso-
lated endeavour but instead fed into a rich arena of intermedial experimenta-
tion during the twentieth century. In Beckett’s semantic fluidity, however, the
author took this medial convergence to unparalleled heights. To compare and
contrast his work with that of his contemporaries in Ireland, such as Joyce,
and globally, such as Pound, highlights the particular innovations that form
the foundation of Beckett’s work.
Chapter 4 provides an exploration of repetition in Beckett’s aesthetic in
terms of the semantic fluidity that underpins much of his later prose. In this
chapter, repetition is viewed as a salient feature of Beckett’s later aesthetic,
one influenced, in particular, by his Schopenhauerian philosophy of music.
We will see that Beckett’s employment of musical repetition would become
much more complex in his later prose, no more so than in Ill Seen Ill Said
([1981] 1997). Whereas the music in Murphy is relatively “intelligible”, the
repetitive nature of Beckett’s later prose employs the “inexplicable” (Beckett,
[1931] 1999, 92, quoting Schopenhauer) nature of music by providing a
method of writing a “non-specific” text, to use Alec Reid’s term, without clear
meaning (Reid, 1968, 34). In his later prose, in other words, exact meaning
erodes through the use of repetition (Cohn, 1980, 96). The musical metaphors
of Murphy are replaced by a more formalist approach, whereby, alongside the
introduction of notation in the text, the author began to experiment with a
more “musicalized fiction” that would permeate The Trilogy (1951–53) and
later prose. The chapter culminates in a close analysis of four distinct types of
repetition in three separate Beckett excerpts.
The next two chapters delve into the translation of literature into music,
exploring the ideas of transmediality (shared properties) within a single
text: the movement between a written text and a musical object. Using two
different forms of composition, I focus on the translation of Beckett’s work
into music alone and consider the problems of translation between disciplines.
Chapter 5 extends my theory of repetition and semantic fluidity by focusing
on Beckett’s collaborations with composer Morton Feldman. Extended time,
waiting and stasis were concerns that Beckett and Feldman both shared –
themes that played themselves out through literary and musical repetition.2
Can the transmedial offer us new insights into the ways in which repetition
itself enables music and literature to collide?
In contrast, Chapter 6 investigates the ways in which aleatoric proced-
ure operates in Beckett’s Lessness (1970). I explore how indeterminacy and
5
Introduction 5
improvisation might be compared. After outlining some of the connections
between the aesthetics of John Cage and Beckett, I provide a close analysis
of Scott Fields’ avantjazz instrumental music. Fields has used Beckett’s
repetitive texts as a structural device for his improvisations, and an exam-
ination of these works in relation to Beckett’s prose raises theoretical ques-
tions around how temporal repetition transgresses the boundary of silence
to become performed music. As fiction becomes sounded as inspiration for
new music beyond Beckett, Fields’ two albums based on Beckett texts dis-
play how transmedial repetition can be translated in transformative ways.
Samuel Beckett, Repetition and Modern Music, then, offers several things.
I explore how repetition in music and in literature can create a semantic fluid-
ity that can pull together the creative use of words and the musical treatment
of sound. Contextual investigation into the work of artists, musicians and
theorists, who used repetition as a salient creative device during the twentieth
century provides an important backdrop to the work of Samuel Beckett, a
writer who used a “musical” form of repetition, or rather a “musical” rate of
employment of repetition (as we’ll explore in Chapter 4), in his literature to
form an oeuvre that has been and continues to allure many writers, artists and
musicians. By analysing two very different instances of such inspiration –the
work of Feldman and Fields –my theory of semantic fluidity is taken beyond
the single artwork and into its afterlife; moving from written text created
through “musical” ideas, back into repetitive forms of instrumental music
that reflect this perpetual semiosis.
Notes
1 Peter Dayan is a progressive thinker in this regard. See Dayan (2002).
2 Both showed disdain for opera. In Proust, for instance, Beckett issues contempt for
the subordination of music in opera, a corruption of the purity of music’s “Idea
that he views as worse than vaudeville” (Beckett, [1931] 1999, 91). Beckett wrote the
libretto for Feldman’s Neither (1977), a self-proclaimed “anti-opera”.
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1
Music and literature
“It is good for thought, when it takes music as an object, to lend an ear to
literature”
(Lyotard, 1997, 220).
The twentieth century heralded a new era of intermedial and transmedial pos-
sibility. Modernist writers in particular seized the opportunity to interrogate
the notion of discrete artforms and to utilise the powers that other disciplines
could bring to their work. Samuel Beckett’s creative aesthetic was founded on
the nucleus between two separate artistic disciplines: music and literature. Not
only did the author continually refer to his musical influences and incorporate
musical devices into his writing, he also engaged with the philosophical idea
of music at a time when the two artforms were reaching towards each other
at an accelerated rate. The tumultuous history of intermedial practice had
reached a point, during the twentieth century, where Beckett spoke of a “rup-
ture in the lines of communication” and a “breakdown of the object” ([1934]
1983b, 70); language was being interrogated to such an extent that, in Daniel
Albright’s words, it was beginning to “lose connection to the world of hard
objects” and “become more and more like musical notes” (Albright, 2000, 6).
This chapter traces the historical trajectory that the idea of music took fol-
lowing the Enlightenment: a journey from sound to metaphor.
Aesthetic debates concerning intermediality have raged since the
Enlightenment. For the Greeks, as in ancient Irish culture, poetry and music
were one. Whereas medieval artists and composers sought a consonance that
brought artforms together in a manner that reflected theological harmony,
Enlightenment figures, such as Gotthold Lessing, argued that individual art-
forms should be divided into distinct categories, an idea that has been instru-
mental in the evolution of the separate disciplines that we still recognise today.
Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk would reclaim the power of unification in the arts
during the nineteenth century, while the French Symbolist movement, and lit-
erary Wagnerism, brought about a new age for interdisciplinarity that would
have a significant influence on the Modernists.
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Music and literature 7

A roaring start
A marble statue dating from between 160 to 20 BC (excavated in Rome in 1506),
depicting the mythical Greek Laocoön, was the beginning of an aesthetic
debate that has lasted for almost 250 years. Virgil’s Aeneid is the best source
for the myth of this Trojan priest of Apollo (some say Poseidon) who warned
his fellow citizens of the dangers inherent in the acceptance of the equestrian
offering: “Have no faith in the horse! /Whatever it is, even when Greeks bring
gifts /I fear them, gifts and all.” After throwing a spear at the horse’s leg, some-
what worse than looking it in the mouth you might say, Laocoön angered the
gods, and subsequently two sea serpents were dispatched to strangle him and
his two sons. Virgil depicts the gruesome episode as a noisy, chaotic affair:
At the same time he raised to the stars

hair-raising shouts like the roars of a bull
when it flees wounded from a sacrificial altar
and shakes the ineffectual axe from its neck
(Virgil quoted in Albright, 2000, 8).
The excavated statue depicted the gruesome end of Laocoön, but with a single
crucial difference: his mouth was only half-open, there were no bull-like roars
on show as in Virgil’s story. The sculpture became known as Laocoön and his
Sons, and few could have envisioned the debate that this physical depiction
of the anguished protagonist would fuel. The central aesthetic issue of con-
tention for Enlightenment thinkers here is that for a sculptor in this period
to have created a dynamic artwork paralleling Virgil, portraying such pain
through fully open-mouthed contortions, would have been a transgression of
certain parameters of decorum, as we will now explore.
Albright’s Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature and
Other Arts (2000) traces the various historical intermedial trends through the
reception history of Laocoön, a case study that allows him to investigate how
successive aestheticians have dealt with, and used, the Trojan myth.1 The first
work to consider the incongruities between Virgil and the anonymous sculp-
tor was Lessing’s Laokoon: or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry ([1766]
1984). For him, the half-shut mouth embodied the essential abilities and limi-
tations of the visual arts alongside those of literature: poetry and sculpture,
he believed, should each have a separate set of rules to follow. Whilst Virgil
could describe a terrible gaping mouth, a sculptor must adhere to the aesthet-
ics of beauty and visual decorum, according to which a screaming mouth was
impermissible. For Lessing, “[t]‌he wide naked opening of the mouth –leaving
aside how violently and disgustingly it distorts and shoves aside the rest of
the face –becomes in a painting a spot and in a sculpture a hollow, mak-
ing the most repulsive effect” (Lessing quoted in Albright, 2000, 9). Using
the Laocoön statue as an example, Lessing introduced an influential aesthetic
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8 Music and literature

theory that saw the arts divided into two distinct categories: Nacheinander
and Nebeneinander. The arts of Nacheinander were teleological artforms, such
as music and poetry, which required the passing of time for complete com-
prehension. The arts of Nebeneinander, such as painting and sculpture, on the
other hand, were juxtapositive forms in which the full picture is presented at
once (Albright, 2003, 6–7). Lessing explains further:
this essential difference between [poetry and the visual arts] is found in
that the former is a visible progressive act, the various parts of which take
place little by little [nach und nach] in the sequence of time; whereas the
latter is a visible static act, the various parts of which develop next to one
another [neben einander] in space.2
The idea that these discrete artforms inhabit separate worlds, a space–time
divide, with painting and the visual arts bound by space, while poetry and
music are bound by time, explains Lessing’s disdain for the crossing of said
borders. For him it was impossible and futile to combine these temporally and
spatially distinct worlds in a sincere artistic fashion.
But such categories are, of course, highly problematic. Though poetry and
music are categorised as Nacheinander, the clear distinction between temporal
and visual arts (Nebeneinander) relies on a number of erroneous assumptions.
Is time the defining factor that distinguishes one artform from another? Is
the time it takes to look at a painting and glean some “understanding” from
it less than the time it takes to “grasp” (Peter Kivy’s term) that of a piece of
music? It could be suggested, for instance, that in the first few seconds of a
piece of music, a listener can gain a general sense of the music’s trajectory.
This is certainly the belief of many working in modern record companies,
where often only the first 30 seconds of a demo is needed to make a judge-
ment: this amount of time, it is believed, is adequate to form a good opinion
of the work. This listening strategy is akin to the amount of information a
reader is given in the first few paragraphs of a novel. While Susan McClary
([1998] 2004) reminds us of the historical importance of linear narratives in
Western music, exactly how much time does it take a listener or a spectator to
“comprehend” a work, if this is ever possible? Does it actually take less time
for a painting than for a symphony? If so, then how long should one stand in
front of a painting in a gallery before “understanding” it? Such specifics are
of course neither attainable, nor should we yearn for them, having learned the
lessons of postmodernism and poststructuralism –the fallacy of intention
(Wimsatt and Beardsley, 1954), the creative powers of the reader and so on.
Laocoön has continued to ruffle feathers and he remains part of the mod-
ern aesthetic debate on intermediality. Irving Babbitt’s The New Laokoon
(1910), for instance, berates Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk and Strauss’ extra-
musical visual imitation in a Lessing-esque manner.3 In Clement Greenberg’s
“Towards a Newer Laocoon” (1940), the Trojan priest appears again, this
time in order to condemn intermedial practice as “artistic dishonesty”, as
the resort of an artist who fails to confront the problems and essence of his
9

chosen medium. In Greenberg’s eyes, Shelley’s description of poetry as the
medium that comes closest to “being no medium at all” marks him as a cow-
ard (Greenberg quoted in Albright, 2000, 11). In contrast, Greenberg praises
avant-garde art for its foregrounding of materials. The goal is for the “opa-
city” of a medium to be accentuated while the form itself remains undegraded
by the artist seeking to explain herself/himself clearly through secondary
media. Greenberg believes that if a work or idea is absolute, it will not require
further clarification through attached music or text. He writes:
The history of avant-garde painting is that of a progressive surrender to

the resistance of its medium; which resistance consists chiefly in the flat
picture plane’s denial of efforts to “hole through” it for realistic perspec-
tival space … The motto of the Renaissance artist, Ars est artem celare
[Art is the concealing of art], is exchanged for Ars est artem demonstrare
[Art is the manifesting of art].
(Greenberg quoted in Albright, 2000, 12).
Such foregrounding of materials occurs in Beckett’s All That Fall ([1957]

2006), wherein the individual locational sounds are deliberately unsutured
(like Laocoön’s lips), instead occurring in a fragmentary stop-start fashion
with intermediary pauses. This emphasises the artifice of the radio play, rather
than seeking diegetic realism. Beckett was well aware of Lessing’s aesthetics, as
Franz Michael Maier points out in his study of the Trinity lectures and German
Diaries (Till and Bailes, 2014, 9–25.) What Greenberg fails to notice, however,
aside from the enormous issues regarding absolutism, is that in an interme-
dial work, the individual artforms can synthesise in a manner that foregrounds
the individual materials. Sergei Eisenstein’s call for cognitive dissonance in the
employment of film music alongside image, for instance, ensures that the result-
ing ironic clash makes both media acutely manifest (Eisenstein, [1949] 1977).
The theoretical and practical implications of intermedial expansion in film,
opera, art and technology has been the subject of productive scholarly debate.
Dick Higgins first used the term “intermedia” in 1966 (Higgins modestly cred-
its Samuel Taylor Coleridge with its actual coinage), in order “to define works
which fall conceptually between media that are already known” (Higgins, 1998,
9). Since Higgins, the field has made strong progress. Yvonne Spielmann, a
central figure in intermedial studies, describes the merging of artforms as “the
exchange and transformation of elements that come from different media”:
Intermedia therefore is a formal category of exchange. It signifies an

aesthetic encompassment of both form and content. In an intermedia
work of art, content becomes a formal category that reveals the struc-
ture of combination and collision. The related meaning of content is to
express such modes of transformation that are effected by the collision
of painting and film, of film and electronic media, and so on. The con-
textual meaning of intermedia is to reveal the media forms themselves.
The making visible of elements that are considered media specific can
10

be performed by ways of comparing and transforming elements such
as the interval.
(Spielmann, 2001, 59)
Artforms have, since the Enlightenment, defined one another through diffe-
rence, and will continue to do so, it seems. Irina O. Rajewsky provides a use-
ful overview of the taxonomic difficulties relating to the scholarly field of
intermediality studies (Rajewsky, 2005, 43–65). In her categorisation of the
various, and often confused, forms of intermediality, she places the “musi-
calization of literature” type of intermediality within a group called “inter-
medial references” (Rajewsky, 2005, 52). The other two categories are “medial
transposition” (such as adaptations in films and novels) and “media combin-
ation” (including opera, sound art installations and multimedia performances
amongst others) (Rajewsky, 2005, 51). “Intermedial references”, the category
which contains the “musicalization of literature” within its remit, is what pri-
marily concerns Rajewsky, however. She writes:
Intermedial references are thus to be understood as meaning-constitu-

tional strategies that contribute the media product’s overall significa-
tion: the media product uses its own media-specific means, either to refer
to a specific, individual work produced in another medium (ie., what in
the German tradition is called Einselreferenz, “individual reference”), or
to refer to a specific medial subsystem (such as a certain film genre) or to
another qua system (Systemreferenz, “system reference”).
(Rajewsky, 2005, 52–53)
Yet the narrowing of the disciplinary gap between music and literature during
the twentieth century has been left relatively untheorised until recently.
Music and literature interaction

The intermedial or transmedial (shared properties) possibilities of music and
literature owe much to the philosophical journey that the idea of music has
undergone in the last few centuries. As mentioned earlier, the artforms were
considered to be one and the same in Greek culture: at a time of low liter-
acy, for example, Homer’s epics were sung, and the term “mousike” incorpo-
rated what we now call music, poetry and even dance (Prieto, 2002a, 2). It is
believed that the rhythm and rhyme of these poems, or the alliterative poetry
of Old English epics like Beowulf, helped the illiterate to remember and to
find something familiar within the newness of a first telling. These “musical”
qualities were also an aid towards the memorisation and promulgation of
tales and narratives in oral traditions.
During the Enlightenment, artforms began to move into increasingly dis-
crete entities, following Lessing’s strict categorisations of the arts. While this
was happening, music and literature continually gauged one another through
1

identification with their respective antithesis, in what Eric Prieto refers to
as the “fundamental heterogeneity” of the two media (Prieto, 2002a, xi).
While the desire of musicians to include certain qualities from literature led
to programme music, symphonic poems and such, poets and writers began
to “invent” a Romantic idea of music. This “idea” of music owed a great deal
to Plato’s “Idea”, later developed by Schopenhauer and Walter Pater. While
Plato believed in the power of the music of the spheres, he also feared its
power to corrupt (banning the Lydian and Ionian modes from his Republic
for their “relaxed” properties for instance) (Plato, [c.380BC] 1968, 117). For
Schopenhauer and Pater, the essential power of music, and its aesthetic
prominence over the other arts, rested upon its very lack of worldly denota-
tion. Music was both “intelligible” (we could understand its forms), but at the
same time “inexplicable”, its essence and meaning a mystery (Beckett, [1931]
1999, 92). This “idea” of music was the beginning of the separation of music
from sound. What literary Wagnerism and the French Symbolist movement
(Mallarmé and Dujardin in particular) thought of as music had nothing to
do with sounded music whatsoever: instead music acted as a metaphor for
the spirit, or an idealised existence. The English Romantics echoed these sen-
timents; Keats’ “heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter
still” (“Ode on a Grecian Urn”), for instance, adopts this rise of silent music.
Music and literature have interacted in many ways, particularly in view of
the supremacy that music held during nineteenth-century Romanticism. As
music became larger and longer (literally with bigger orchestras and extended
symphonies), Mahler and Bruckner stretched the Beethoven paradigm. In such
a climate, it is fairly easy to see why Pater and the Aesthetes bestowed music
with such unparalleled status. Influenced by the developments in music, some
authors sought an escape from mimetic realism via techniques such as the
interior monologue (Dujardin) and the theme and variation (Pinget).4 These
innovations were very influential for the Modernists, who would take the “musi-
calization of fiction”, to borrow Huxley’s term, into the most experimental and
extensive terrains.5 The dawn of photography and film also clearly played their
part, as artists turned to more abstract forms. If a photograph could accurately
represent the exterior, artists would explore the interior –the inner working
of the mind and its dreams. There are clear links here between Freudian psy-
choanalysis, photographic technology and the development of devices such as
stream of consciousness, literary leitmotifs, interior monologues and various
other transmedial musical devices. One tenet of modernism was its presentation
of a shift from nineteenth-century exterior realism to interior expression.
Eric Prieto puts forward in Listening In the concept that the modernists
turned to music to express the inner consciousness rather than an objective
exterior; a complex web of interior monologues, leitmotifs and streams of
consciousness for the twentieth century instead of the Aristotelian mimesis of
nineteenth-century realism (Prieto, 2002a). Binaries were always part of mod-
ernism too, however –exterior and interior, ancient and contemporary. Let
us not forget that one of the main tenets of the modernist approach was the
12

juxtaposition of the old with the new: the ancient bull in Picasso’s Guernica or
Joyce’s paralleling of Homer’s epic.
This exterior/interior dichotomy somewhat mirrors another binary –that
of realism/fiction –occurring cyclically in aesthetic history. Oscar Wilde fam-
ously called for a return to fiction in what he saw as the mundane boredom of
social realism (“The Decay of Lying”, [1891] 1997b). James Bond and Batman
both provide brief illustrations. The gritty realistic fight scenes and flawed
humanity of Daniel Craig’s Bond reflect certain semiotic codes of authenti-
city, attributes and values of the documentary aesthetic perhaps first appro-
priated by Jason Bourne. This is in stark contrast to the fantastical escapades
of Roger Moore, of course. Similarly, we see Batman’s journey from comic
character to television comedy, on to the gothic Tim Burton representation,
through to the camp and playful portrayal by George Clooney, before a return
to a surrealistic comedic character constituted of Lego via the Bourne-esque
realism of Christian Bale. The discourse of art is often one of reaction. The
binary of perceived rawness versus decadence is another such trajectory –
consider punk versus prog rock, grunge versus hair metal.
When Stephen Dedalus declares “the cracked looking glass of a servant”
to be an apt symbol for Irish art, we must consider Joyce’s dual role as a mod-
ernist with a laborious attention to factual detail –there is a famous expres-
sion that one could rebuild Dublin from its accurate depiction in Ulysses – but
who at the same time created a highly complex, encyclopaedic novel teeming
with interior monologues and streams of consciousness.6 While working on
the novel in exile he would often write back for specific cross-checking on
specific geographic details –the verisimilitude of Bloom’s walk across the city
was one such concern. Joyce documented the interior as much as the exterior.
But what does the “cracked looking glass” say of Irish modernist art in
terms of this dual position, and how might it relate to realism? How does a
broken mirror symbolise modernist Irish literature and its employment of a
musical aesthetic towards the creation of a “literature of the unword”, to bor-
row Beckett’s phrase? While Roy Foster reminds us that a cracked looking glass
will depict multiple selves instead of the singular body of an intact mirror, we
must also remember that a cracked looking glass may not represent the individ-
ual that peers into the shards at all; it may in fact merely appear as a glimmering
mass (Foster, 2000, 16). What I mean here is this: the modernist use of music,
a non-representational artform that could, in Schopenhauer’s view, enable us
to reach higher aesthetical states of purity, the philosophy that by music not
saying anything it effectively says everything, enables the inner movements of
modernist narratives to hold up a cracked looking glass to society and reflect,
particularly in Joyce’s Nighttown and Beckett’s narrators, the schizophrenia of
a consciousness that doesn’t clearly recognise its face, or even looks “into the
depths” of its character and doesn’t particularly like what it finds.
Prieto’s discussion of Beckett concentrates almost exclusively on the
Parisian avant-garde, drawing many nuanced conclusions about French mod-
ernist literature. However, Beckett was also an Irish author who found freedom
13

in the French language at points in his life. Joyce and Beckett were trying to
escape another nation’s imposed language: English.7 When in A Portrait of the
Artist, Stephen Dedalus undergoes a revelation, recognising the gulf between
himself and the dean upon a point of supposed Hiberno-English translation
(tundish vs. funnel, Ch. 5), Joyce was highlighting such a point. Stephen sees
his language as an “acquired speech” in a key moment in the Bildungsroman.
What does Beckett’s musical syntax tell us about his relationship with
Ireland, and his turn to the stylistic freedom of French? Might this “cracked
looking glass of a servant” concern the Anglo-Irish use of an imposed lan-
guage in a deconstructive way that set Beckett on his course of the “unword”?
Can Beckett’s breakdown of the semiotic signs, the relationship between sig-
nifier and signified be seen as part of this destruction of a borrowed language
by an artist in exile?
Music and the literary diegesis

In Romantic novels of the nineteenth century, diegetic music (music created
within the literary world and audible to the characters) became a useful nar-
rative device. The occurrence of music performance within a story could fulfil
many functions, whether to set a scene, enhance a location, adumbrate a plot
twist or create a convincing backdrop for the unfolding drama. Most signifi-
cant, however, are the listening strategies that such performances encourage
within each character. Descriptions of listening, for instance, have played an
important role in literary history.8 By listening, I mean narrated instances of
concentrated musical attention by certain characters within the diegetic world
of the work.9 In terms of contextualising a scene within a certain milieu,
Austen’s employment of diegetic music is abundant. Many of her characters
perform music: Elizabeth Bennet sings, while Jane Fairfax plays piano. But
more significant is the chronicling of musical taste and gendered practices
within early nineteenth-century English high society, similar to the way in
which Joyce, in “The Dead” ([1914] 1996), documents a bygone operatic cul-
ture in Dublin. In Emma ([1815] 2003), the Victorian vogue for the exoticism
of Thomas Moore’s Irish Melodies (1808–1834), in which he set old Irish tunes
to original poetry, is suggested:
He took some music from a chair near the piano-forte, and turning to
Emma, said, –“Here is something quite new to me. Do you know it
Cramer? And here are a new set of Irish melodies.”
(Austen, [1815] 2003, 207)
Music can also provide a dramatic backdrop, or afford an intense experience

for a character, one that mirrors their personal journey. Dorian Gray’s attend-
ance at Tannhäuser leaves him “in rapt pleasure”, for instance, as the young
protagonist finds a kindred tortured soul in Wagner’s hero:
14

He felt a curious delight in the thought that art, like Nature, has her mon-
sters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voice. Yet, after some time,
he wearied of them, and would sit in his box at the opera … listening in
rapt pleasure to “Tannhäuser” and seeing in the prelude to that great
work of art a presentation of the tragedy of his own soul.
(Wilde, [1891] 1997c, 94)
While diegetic narrative music presents for Gray the “tragedy of his own
soul”, such sound can also invoke strong emotional recollections, as does the
“airy and perfumed phrase” of Vinteuil’s sonata for Swann in Proust’s A La
Recherche Du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time):
[s]‌carcely had the young pianist begun to play than suddenly, after a
high note sustained through two whole bars, Swann sensed its approach,
stealing forth, from beneath that long-drawn sonority … and recog-
nized, secret, murmuring, detached, the airy and perfumed phrase that
he had loved.
(Proust, [1913] 2001, 207)
The significance of music in Proust’s magnum opus was of particular interest

to Beckett, who described it as the “catalytic element” of the author’s work
in his monograph, Proust ([1931] 1999), further explored by Jean-Jacques
Nattiez in Proust as Musician (1989). Other important studies are Peter
Dayan’s Music Writing Literature (2006) and Cormac Newark’s Opera in the
Novel from Balzac to Proust (2011).
Often, literary scenes of listening rely on the aesthetic interaction between
music and text –on the emotional effects the heard melodies induce in the lis-
tening characters. The narrative impact of Bartell D’Arcy’s rendition of “The
Lass of Aughrim” in Joyce’s “The Dead” is a good illustration of this: the
song reminds Gretta of her lost love, Michael Fury, who “was going to study
singing only for his health”, a recollection that brings the story to its dra-
matic, melancholic conclusion (Joyce, [1914] 1996, 252). Here, music operates
as a salient tool in the discourse, a means by which an author can reveal the
underlying turmoil, hopes, despairs or joys experienced within his or her fic-
tion. Like music in film, a particular melody or musical genre is placed in a
scene in order to skew the reader towards a specific interpretation of events;
the melodies, in other words, operate as a literary soundtrack, using cultural
codes to counterpoint the fiction with a secondary narrative voice, one able to
reinforce, or contradict, the principle discursive trajectory.
Music as structural device in literature

While scenes of listening embedded within the text help to flesh out the char-
acters, allowing the reader to understand their state of mind better, some
15

authors also include musical reference at a more structural level. Texts can
become music-like more formally in a number of ways through the employ-
ment of devices associated with musical form, such as the repetition of words
or phrases, the interweaving of certain themes, subjects or voices (the struc-
ture of the three recorded voices, A, B and C, in Beckett’s That Time ([1976]
2006)10 for instance), motifs reappearing in different guises, and the use of
silence. Of course, repetition is a transmedial link between music and litera-
ture; both artforms traditionally utilise it, but the proliferation of repetition
in work like Beckett’s prose is the result of the adoption of musical prac-
tice (music allows more repetition before seeming absurd) in literature as a
means of achieving a music-like semantic fluidity, as will be explored later.
As the written word is incapable of melody (apart from where a notated score
is inserted on a specific page, as in Beckett’s novel Watt, [1945] 1963), repeti-
tion and rhythm are the basic elements involved in creating a “musical” text.
These devices are the fundamental building blocks of many musics through-
out the world, and often hold a greater weight than melodic invention: the
interlocking rhythmical patterns of Balinese gamelan music, for instance, or
the complex polyrhythms of African drumming. While Western art music (at
least until the twentieth century) has traditionally placed melody at the top of
the list, it has always been underpinned and propelled by pulse and meter, an
observation famously made by music analyst and theorist Heinrich Schenker,
who claimed that “[o]‌ur understanding of musical technique would have
advanced much further if only someone had asked: Where, when, and how
did music first develop its most striking and distinctive characteristic –repeti-
tion?” (Schenker quoted in Kivy, 1993, 327). The Western focus on teleology
is achieved largely through repetition in functional harmony. Repetition is
fundamental to the form and pattern of a work. Sonata form, for instance,
is predicated on the principle of repetition with growth: the recapitulation.
Music must traditionally be heard in a sequence; to hear any movement out
of place would sound nonsensical (Kivy, 1993, 353). Peter Kivy maintains
that the practice of not including repeats in a performance is detrimental to
the artform, as repeats not only allow the listener time to “grasp” (problema-
tised earlier) the ideas given, but they also provide a fabric of sound that
should not be altered:
repetition is the means of grasping pattern; but, by definition, pattern is

that very repetition, and to dispense with the remainder after it has been
grasped would be to dispense with it, whereas it, the pattern, is the whole
point of the exercise.
(Kivy, 1993, 353)
Clearly modern music transgresses such boundaries as loops, cut-ups, DAWs

(digital audio workstations) and new modes of listening enable sectional play,
16

but Kivy is here concerned with structural repeats in concert music, such as
the cutting of a da capo. Such repeated material historically aided a new lis-
tener and quickened familiarisation, outlining significant moments; but such
positions as Kivy’s rely on the essentialist notion that form and content are
one in music. If the receiver has an input into the creation of the meaning of
a work, why and how could a singularly directed vehicle of form–content ever
be communicated fully?
The lyricism of certain poetry has clear links with musical technique,
through an emphasis on rhythm, metre and sound, such as that found in
Yeats’ employment of iambic tetrameter, trimeter and repeated refrains,
reminiscent of the ballad tradition, in early poems like “The Stolen Child”
(1889):
Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you
can understand
(Yeats, [1889] 1990, 20)
Seamus Heaney recognised this quality in Yeats’ work, and indeed car-
ried on the lyrical tradition in his own poetry. His essay The Makings of a
Music: Reflections on the Poetry of Wordsworth and Yeats (1992) links such
technique with the more philosophical, Romantic idea of music in Yeats’
work. Heaney praises Yeats’ musicality, suggesting that the poet’s contempt
for poetry “that is effeminate in its continual insistence upon certain moments
of strained lyricism” led him to create a music that, in Heaney’s words, “came
ringing back off the ear as barely and resonantly as a shout caught back off a
pillar in an empty church. It is the music of energy reined down, of the mas-
tered beast stirring” (Heaney, 1992, 12).
Keats’ notion that “unheard” melodies could be sweeter than those
sounded, extends easily to the format of fiction. Prose, being for the most part
read in solitude to oneself, can, in this manner, develop an “unheard” music
that enables fascinating fictions.
The sounding of text

The music/text relationship also operates contrarily, with poetry and dialogue
providing the structure, theme and subject matter for many musical endeav-
ours. In its incarnation, art music was predominantly a means for carrying
a religious message or divine praise in an age before Romantic creative self-
expression became normative. J. S. Bach saw himself as a deeply religious
craftsman, in the service of his God –far from what the Romantics would
17

refer to as the “genius” expressing his or her soul for all subsequent genera-
tions. The idea of infinite legacy superseded that of the infinite deity, as it were.
The relationship between text and music in art music was often tenuous,
however; the frequent use of contrafacta (a vocal composition in which the
original words are substituted for new ones), for instance, meant that certain
melodies could be reused for a number of text settings with little regard for
their suitability beyond that of metre and rhythm. Combined with the highly
contrapuntal styles of Renaissance composers such as Palestrina (styles with
a complexity that tends to obscure the clarity of words), such practice often
favoured the beauty of the music over the didactic message. One might add
that of course many of these texts would be well-known religious ones that
were being repeatedly retransmitted. Indeed, the question of clarity of lan-
guage when set to music, from early church music to the flamboyant fluidity of
texture in the Baroque, to the obscured text of contemporary opera, Harrison
Birtwistle’s The Minotaur (2008) for instance, is a complicated issue.11 The
balance of power between words and music has continued to fluctuate over
the centuries. Overall, perhaps it was music that reigned supreme in collabor-
ation, while Monteverdi’s early calls for unsubordinated operatic music still
resonate with film composers.12 Claudia Gorbman paradoxically suggests that
a good film score is traditionally one that is not heard –that to notice the
music would render a break from the diegesis and the immersion of the nar-
rative (Gorbman, 1987). So, in this way the music is subservient to the nar-
rative, although there are, of course, many composers and directors since the
golden era of Hollywood who have put music first; consider John Williams’
shark leitmotif from Jaws (1975) or Mark Mothersbaugh’s scores for Wes
Anderson’s films. In opera, music’s dominance restricted words to the limita-
tions of metre and pitch and the conventions of musical form. The popularity
of the da capo aria format, such as those in Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1791)
or in motets like Vivaldi’s Nulla in Mundo pax sincera (RV 630), concretised
the aesthetic position that it is perfectly fine to have words repeated over and
over again in order for the music to play out the required structure. Certainly,
the story is more likely to be followed after the second or third repeat, but the
very fact that we must listen to these repeats is the result of hierarchical aes-
thetic choices.
The most literal form of music-text is word painting, a method by which
music is used to sonically mirror the word content. Here, melody can enact
the word or sentiment stated: the falling line for “descendit de caelis” (“He
came down from Heaven”) is a famous example (Carter, 2001, 563). That
said, there is inevitable creative interpretation involved in how the word is
painted; the degree of shade or colour chosen can yield various results no
matter how literal the parallelism. Onomatopoeia, like Mahler’s cuckoo, and
scoring, such as the use of three voices to depict the Trinity, are forms of word
painting. In 1624, Joachim Thuringus proposed three categories of words that
could be expressed through music including “words of affection” (“weep”,
“laugh”), “words of motion and places” (“leap”, “cast down”) and “words
18

of time and number” (“quickly”, “twice”) (Carter, 2001, 564). This practice
quickly became a staple of the madrigal and sixteenth-century chanson, and
was popular with Renaissance Humanists, who, believing that the message
of the words was paramount, held the view that music should help reinforce
this through parallelism. In the words of Nicola Vicentino, music should be
“written for words for no other purpose than to express the idea, the passions
and the affections of these words by means of harmony” (Vicentino, quoted
in Carter, 2001, 564). While some critics may have always considered the tech-
nique to be naive, such as Vincenzo Galilei, in his Dialogo della Musica Antica
et della Moderna (1581), it has continued to be used (even in avantjazz, as we
will see in Chapter 6). Examples of pictorialism can be found from Donizetti’s
birdsong to Berg’s snoring and Hendrix’s “Machine Gun” (1970). “Mickey-
mousing” in film and of course animation works along similar lines –music
sounding the movement in literal fashion.
A more symbolic example of music/text interaction is mood or tone-
painting –the German Tonmalerei –where what starts out as a musical trans-
lation of words, such as Schubert’s galloping horse in Erlkönig (1815), is taken
into the accompaniment as the motivic basis for the entire song. In instrumen-
tal music, as in the tone poems of Liszt, for instance, a text or an image can
be used as a springboard, a mood from which the music can grow. In these
cases, the translation is even more subjective –the product of a composer’s
interpretation, rather than the more literal representations of word painting.
While Schenker might have seen the defining feature of music as its use of
repetition, others have considered the non-referential nature of the artform
to be the quality that truly sets it apart from the other arts. Schopenhauer
believed that music was capable of enabling contact with a higher unknown
sphere of consciousness, an intangible realm, inconceivable in perceived real-
ity. Pater, as previously mentioned, saw music in a similar light, viewing it as a
virtuous uncorrupted form to which all arts should aspire. “Absolute” music
might not mean anything explicitly tangible, but when composers such as
Berlioz began to incorporate narratives in what became known as programme
music in the nineteenth century, an enormous rift opened up between the aes-
thetic purists and the textually influenced programmatic composers.
The debate between absolute and programme music continues even today,
and is closely related to Lessing-esque media sectarianism: the belief that it
benefits an artform to separate it from others permanently. Such segregation
can indeed lead to a medium receiving unadulterated creative attention; and
yet, this also relies on the purist aesthetic assumption that all arts exist outside
of normal reality, somehow transgressing their respective mode of execution.
Nevertheless, one is reminded of the simple truth of Goethe’s dictum: “In
der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister” (It is in working within limits
that the master reveals himself) (Goethe quoted in Wilde, [1891] 1997b, 930).
In the twentieth century, Theodor Adorno was perhaps the most significant
advocate of the Lessing school, especially in regard to music’s relationship to
the other arts. In Philosophie der neuen Musik ([1949] 1973), Adorno declared
19

his contempt for what he termed pseudomorphosis, the mimesis of one art-
form by another. Stravinsky was the arch-villain for Adorno in this regard,
the trespasser of such an aesthetic border. Adorno argued that the Russian’s
work resembled that of a cubist painter instead of a true musician, writing
that “the spatialisation of music is witness to a pseudomorphosis of music to
painting, on the innermost level an abdication” (quoted in Albright, 2000,
17). Like Greenberg’s view of Shelley, Stravinsky was a coward for not facing
up to his own medium, instead running to another, in Adorno’s eyes. The
concept of pseudomorphosis reiterates Lessing’s disdain for attempts of one
artform to move into the realm of another, this time from the standpoint of a
musicologist/sociologist. For a poet to write a lengthy poem depicting a flower
would be wasteful, Lessing believed; we must know what our own medium can
do and what it cannot. While the poet might take great effort to simulate the
image, the painter could achieve this far better in the end (Albright, 2000, 17).
The music of Stravinsky likewise embodied for Adorno such an “abdication”
of the true abilities of “absolute” music. According to this belief, Stravinsky’s
music, instead of temporally expanding the discourse, stagnated in the spa-
tial sphere of the visual arts. Lessing’s categories were being breached and
Adorno was fighting a losing battle to save a sinking ship. Of course, such
judgements rest on the flawed assumption that the visual representation of
a flower and the poetic description of it are “intended” to achieve the same
result. Artists, no matter how realist, have always, whether it be deliberate or
not, brought their own perspectives into their work, and no two artworks,
whether they be poems or paintings, ever set out to express the same idea.
Despite the aesthetic purism of Adorno, the twentieth century witnessed a
huge escalation in music–text interaction. Albright writes that:
The twentieth century, perhaps more than any other age, demands a style
of criticism in which the arts are considered as a whole. This is partly
because the artists themselves insisted again and again upon the inextric-
ability of the arts. Ezra Pound, for one, believed that in antiquity “music
and poetry had been in alliance … that the divorce of the two arts had
been to the advantage of neither, and that melodic invention had declined
simultaneously and progressively with their divergence. The rhythms of
poetry grew stupider.” He thought it was the duty of the poet to learn
music, and the duty of the musician to study poetry.
(Albright, 1999, vii)
Much of the interdisciplinary practice of the twentieth century is indebted

to the radical experimentation of the Modernists. Modernism introduced a
fresh outlook that brought the old and new together, revitalising the art world
and abolishing many of the aesthetic taboos that had dominated it. Paul Klee
began to explore the possibilities of creating static polyphony on canvas in
imitation of the temporal flow of Bach’s music, a mixture of Nebeneinander
and Nacheinander, while Picasso’s Guernica (1937), including a bull from the
20

ancient Spanish cave of Altamira, exemplified the Modernist sensibility for
synthesising the prehistoric with the contemporary (Davenport, 1984, 16–28).
The boundaries of Lessing’s spatial and temporal realms were being inter-
rogated and stretched as artists from all media, and new emerging media,
experimented freely with the possibilities of intermedial art. The influence of
musical technique and form in literature was obvious, but more significantly
the non-referential, intangible qualities of music were also being utilised by
the Modernists. George Steiner writes:
Where poetry seeks to dissociate itself from the exactions of clear mean-
ing and from the common usages of syntax, it will tend towards an ideal
of musical form. This tendency plays a fascinating role in modern lit-
erature. The thought of giving to words and prosody values equivalent
to music is an ancient one … More recently, the submission of literary
forms to musical examples and ideals has been carried even further. In
Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann, we find the belief that the musi-
cian is the artist in essence (he is more an artist than, say, the painter or
writer). This is because only music can achieve that total fusion of form
and content, of means and meaning, which all art strives for. Two of
the foremost poetic designs of our time, T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and
Hermann Broch’s Death of Virgil, embody an idea that can be traced
back to Mallarmé and L’Après-midi d’un faune: they attempt to suggest in
language corresponding organizations of musical form.
(Steiner, [1961] 1985, 47–48, original emphasis)
Language that attempts to “dissociate itself from the exactions of clear mean-
ing” becomes essentially music-like, for Steiner. The non-referential qualities
of music, those that Pater and Schopenhauer found so compelling, became
for the Modernists a device whereby words could function in what Alec
Reid calls a “non-specific” manner (Reid, 1968, 34). Wittgenstein wrote that
“[u]‌nderstanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in
music than one may think”, and certainly the boundaries between the arts, and
in particular those between music and literature, were becoming blurred in the
minds of philosophers, linguists and artists (Wittgenstein quoted in Albright,
2000, 6). Albright further explains that “[t]he linguistics of Ferdinand de
Saussure, the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Jacques Derrida,
tend to strip language of denotation, to make language a game of arbitrary
signifiers; and as words lose connection to the world of hard objects, they
become more and more like musical notes” (Albright, 2000, 6). Structuralism
and post-structuralism (Barthes, Derrida, de Saussure) questioned the role
of the listener/reader, how language is created in tandem with society, and
how language itself is created in an arbitrary fashion; the reason that a word
signifies and denotes any given concept or thing is essentially random. If we
are denied any universals at the reception level, we are also denied them at the
creation level.
21

If, where before the methods in which music and text were combined were
for the most part weighted on the music side (in operatic arias, for example,
the text being subordinate and subject to pitch, bar length and repetition –
sometimes to the point of absurdity), in the twentieth century, there was a
reversal of this: music became enveloped by literature. George Bernard Shaw
observed that Wagner could repeat “Tristan” many times musically with-
out any problems, whereas Shakespeare could not simply repeat the word
“Romeo” ad infinitum; the audience required more variation in vocabulary in
the absence of music (Shaw quoted in Meisel, 1963, 41). In the twentieth cen-
tury, such a repetition of the word “Romeo” in place of new material would
begin to appear in literature, as authors experimented with what had previ-
ously seemed absurd only in the pejorative sense.
Music began to receive a greater global literary attention, with many high-
profile writers attempting to encompass it either formally, structurally or con-
ceptually, from the scored violin music in Pound’s Pisan Cantos (Canto 74
in particular), to the music notation in Zukofsky’s A (1978), or the fiction of
Hermann Hess, whose novel The Glass Bead Game emphasised the import-
ance of music in culture. The “airy and perfumed phrase” that propelled
Proust’s world was not an isolated phenomenon.
The growth of Word and Music Studies

The increasing scholarly attention towards interdisciplinary practice has
meant that an independent, international field of musico-literary explor-
ation has begun to blossom in recent decades, with more musicologists in
particular entering the foray in the last few years.13 As a result, the field has
come a long way since the pioneering work of Calvin S. Brown’s Music and
Literature: A Comparison of the Arts, first published in 1948. Brown’s work
was instrumental in setting the main aesthetic parameters of what would
become the field of musico-literary studies (his term), later to be named melo-
poetics by Lawrence Kramer. Referred to as Music and Literature Studies
or Word and Music Studies (the now established term) by many of Brown’s
later disciples, Brown’s work introduced the long-standing issues and ques-
tions that were deemed most in need of scholarly attention, and which would
remain so over the course of the next sixty or so years.
As a result of Brown’s early work, the field began to expand, if somewhat
sporadically, as did the worldwide academic predilection for interdisciplin-
ary scrutiny. Word and Music Studies underwent its most vitalising burst of
energy after a number of forging conferences in Dartmouth College (1988),
Graz (1990) and Lund (1995). Perhaps the most beneficial result of these
meetings was the joint decision to found the International Association for
Word and Music Studies (WMA) in Graz in 1997. Since then the WMA
has organised biennial conferences (the eleventh to be held in Stockholm in
2017) focusing on the salient problems and issues in the burgeoning field. The
WMA also publishes collected volumes of scholars at the forefront of this
2

research. What had begun with Brown in 1948 is now a worldwide academic
community. The WMA website boasts a membership of 129 scholars from
26 countries, representing a truly international field of scholarly attention.14
In 2010 the inaugural conference of the Word and Music Association Forum
(WMAF) was held in Dortmund, Germany. The WMAF is held on alternate
years (most recently in Arizona 2016) between the WMA conferences, and is
particularly geared towards younger scholars and current PhDs in the field
with half of the conference being billed as a colloquium for works in progress.
The existence of these multi-institutional associations has had a posi-
tive impact on Word and Music Studies within universities: in the UK, for
instance, the Open University began a Literature and Music Research Group
with the aim of fostering a healthy research community within the OU; and a
Words and Music Studies Graduate School was established in the University
of Edinburgh where the world’s first and, so far, only Professor of Words and
Music Studies, Peter Dayan, was appointed. However, perhaps the call of the
WMA was not as loud as it could have been; in 2009, for instance, one of
the research strands that featured on the Royal Musical Association (RMA)’s
annual call for papers was “music and literature”, a call that seemed to sug-
gest an institutional desire to encourage interdisciplinary work. But despite
this public proclamation, in the end only one panel out of almost forty was
allocated to the subject. Either there was a dearth of proposals, the submis-
sions received were not very good, or perhaps the subject, although coming
with a promise of innovation and intermedial conversion, is a tough one to
engage with, not least as it requires a background in both musicology and
literary studies.
More recently, the RMA 2010 conference, “Boundaries”, hosted a sin-
gle panel entitled “Literature at the Boundary of Music Research”, and the
RMA student conference 2011 featured a panel on “Music and Literature”,
in which I participated. There are signs that the field in the UK is beginning
to flourish; in February 2011, I co-organised a study day at the Institute of
Musical Research (IMR) in London on the topic of Music and Literature,
alongside Peter Dayan, Helen Abbott and Delia da Sousa Correa, to an audi-
ence of researchers and scholars. The fact that the 2013 WMA conference was
held in London did a great deal to strengthen the field in the UK.
The problems of cross-disciplinary work that focuses on music and lit-
erature are articulated by such scholars as Eric Prieto, Lawrence Kramer,
Peter Dayan, Stephen Benson, Werner Wolf, Daniel Albright, Jean-Jacques
Nattiez, Helen Abbott, Delia da Sousa Correa, Walter Bernhart, Catherine
Laws, Robert Samuels, John Neubauer, Mary Breatnach, Steven Paul Scher,
Mary Bryden, Timothy Martin and Harry White.15 Many of these authors
proclaim the particular difficulties inherent in holding together the discip-
lines of musicology and literary studies: at the same time, these difficul-
ties are tackled with great excitement. Until the 2000s, the approach to the
subject, beginning with Brown’s book, was rather formalist. In Music and
Literature: A Comparison of the Arts, for example, topics are arranged under
23

headings such as “Rhythm and Pitch”, “The Literal Setting of Vocal Music”
and “Repetition and Variation”. Brown’s study attempted to identify the
underlying structures that both artforms shared and tried to find general
points of convergence between them, rather than to cite specific similarities
between individual works: by asking what music is and consequentially what
literature is, Brown opened the Pandora’s Box of interdisciplinary philo-
sophical and aesthetic relations.
For Brown, music and literature shared certain characteristics: both, he
argued, “are arts presented through the sense of hearing, having their devel-
opment in time, and hence requiring a good memory for their comprehension”
(Brown, 1948, 11). The use of the term “hearing”, yet to be problematised
at the time of Brown’s study, is an issue here. Another point of conjecture
might be that both arts can indeed be read visually. In his discussion of time,
Brown could not account for process music (such as Minimalism) and does
not consider Adorno’s criticism of spatialisation in Stravinsky’s work. As for
the assumption that both arts require a “good memory for their comprehen-
sion”, we must not only ask what defines “good” in this sense, but also, once
accepted, whether this unquantified amount of memory is always necessary
for “comprehension”. Although some of Brown’s assumptions may seem
naive today, others were particularly astute, echoing the structuralism of de
Saussure.
The key differentiating factor between the two artforms, in Brown’s view, is
that music is an “art of sound in and for itself, of sound qua sound” whereas
literature is “an art employing sounds to which external significance has been
arbitrarily attached “ (Brown, 1948, 11, original emphasis). Another observa-
tion of Brown’s that was to be theorised further by later writers was his recog-
nition of the progressive abandonment of representation by authors during
the twentieth century and the resultant move towards abstraction (Brown,
1948, 269). Like Schenker and Kivy, Brown recognised the transmedial nature
of repetition and variation, and viewed them as the cornerstones of both art-
forms: “[r]‌epetition and variation can be seen in the smallest real structural
units of both literature and music” (Brown, 1948, 103).
Steven Paul Scher was prolific in building on Brown’s work, producing a
wealth of scholarship in the field. Perhaps his most controversial move was to
proclaim the uselessness of the term “musical” in reference to literature (Scher,
1972). This may seem rash, but it was the result of a highly frustrating canon
of scholarship wherein the vague employment of a Romanticised adjective,
“musical”, was used in reference to anything that sounded pleasing to the ear.
The traditional and uncritical use of the ambiguous word “musical” to denote
subjective approval was a remnant of Romanticism that should, according to
Scher, be scrapped by academics. In this rather uncritical sense, the academic
employment of the term was of no use whatsoever, being simply an empty
signifier. Perhaps Scher went too far in this regard: it does seem strange to
outlaw a term simply because of its misuse, instead of trying to set clear and
useful parameters for the word. However, this kind of intense interrogation
24

and circumnavigation –to the point of absurdity –would prove an ongoing
tenet of meta-critical musico-literary investigation, one that scholars like
Prieto began moving beyond in terms of methodology and focus. As previ-
ously discussed, Prieto and Dayan offer progressive licence in the use of the
term “musical”, but we are now far beyond the free-for-all that it had been
pre-Scher. The term should be used metaphorically, in an informed manner, in
relation to work that reflects the idea of music and its philosophical discourse,
and not as an analytical classification.16
For Scher, the analogy of music with literature was only useful when it
came to structure. He suggested a tripartite division, three distinct categories,
into which he divided the myriad forms of musico-literary interaction. Simply
put, these are: music and literature (the collaboration of literature and instru-
mental music, be it song or opera and so on); music in literature (the appro-
priation of musical devices in poetry or prose, such as Joyce’s attempt at a
fugue in the “Sirens” chapter of Ulysses); and literature in music (music influ-
enced by or referring to literature, such as programme music). Scher’s focus
on subterranean embedded structural parallels would influence the work of
Lawrence Kramer.
Kramer’s contribution to the field marks a change in direction from these
earlier theories. Whereas those before him had struggled to find general rules
that applied to the interaction of music and literature, Kramer abandoned the
notion of prescriptive practices, suggesting instead a “mobile” scholarship for
a “mobile” artform:
Any discourse that hopes to embrace both arts must, so to speak, be

mobile. Its mobility would consist in the power to treat connotative and
combinatory structures with equal exactness, agility, and sophistication.
An interpretative language with this property would have access to both
the tacit and explicit dimensions of music and poetry alike, its structural
argument could incorporate materials as diverse as parallel chords and
parallel metaphors.
(Kramer, 1984, 7)
Kramer’s Music and Poetry: The Nineteenth Century and After (1984) would
prove a formative text for the new breed of scholars in the 1990s. Kramer saw
time and process as major areas of similarity between the two artforms: music
and literature, he argued, are “saturated with time” and the respective arts
essentially go about the “transformation of time into form” (Kramer, 1984,
7). It is clear that we are never far from Lessing’s temporal and spatial realms
in musico-literary aesthetics. For Kramer, the “transformation of time into
form” is the defining role of the composer and poet. This leads him to explore
the structural similarities in the methods utilised by the respective artistic
media: “[p]‌oetic structure or structural rhythm” is the deep subterranean
level where the two artforms share an essential nature. Edward T. Cone’s dec-
laration (1968) that “musical form, as I conceive it, is basically rhythmic” is
25

used by Kramer to highlight what Barbara Herrnstein Smith calls the “tem-
poral and dynamic qualities that poetry shares with music” (Smith, quoted in
Kramer, 1984, 9–10).
For Kramer, what distinguishes the two artforms is not the non-
representational aspects of music; he finds a “richer fountain” of informa-
tion in Liszt’s “Les Jeux d’eaux à la Ville d’Este” than in Baudelaire’s “Le Jet
d’eau” for instance, but:
A complementarity in the roles the two arts assign to their connotative

and combinatory aspects: each art makes explicit the dimension that
the other leaves tacit. Musical meaning, even when focused by a text or
program, is always non-predictive and inexact. Its connotations are per-
ipheral, always somewhat displaced –not so much vague as unlocalized,
at a third remove, like a name on the tip of the tongue. Music achieves
its unique suggestiveness, the power [first identified by Hegel] to embody
complex states of mind as they might arise pre-verbally in consciousness,
by resting its tacit connotations on an explicit combinatory structure that
is highly charged with complexity, expectancy, and tension. In poetry, this
expressive balance is reversed; poetic meaning, as it unfolds to an inter-
preter, is a virtually limitless play of explicit connotative relationships.
(Kramer, 1984, 6)
He takes the terms “tacit” and “explicit” from Michael Polanyi’s work, The
Tacit Dimension ([1967] 2009), in order to address the great debate as to
whether “music expresses feelings and states of mind or elicits them –the
answer being: neither” (Kramer, 1984, 6). Kramer explains:
When we listen, what we attend to is the music itself as it unfolds its com-
binatory sequence; this is the focus. The connotative element –which as
Polanyi would predict seems to be internal to us –continually involves us
in (and guides and shapes) the activity of listening. In a complementary
way, the combinatory play of rhythm and sonority in poetry involves us
in a reading of –a reading of ourselves into –the connotative play of
the text.
(Kramer, 1984, 6)
This key development in Music and Poetry is based on Kramer’s faith in the
existence of deep structural parallels between the two artforms, which he
explores through a number of case studies. In Kramer’s own words, “a poem
and a composition may converge on a structural rhythm: that a shared pattern
of unfolding can act as an interpretive framework for the explicit dimension
of both works” (Kramer, 1984, 10). Like Brown, Kivy and Schenker, Kramer
here emphasises the importance of rhythm and repetition in defining music
and any further parallels with literature. Kramer recognises that the “possi-
bility of convergence is a function of cultural history” (Kramer, 1984, 15).
26

In a similar way to what Peter Rabinowitz describes as “attributive screens”,
our socially constructed idea of what constitutes a specific artform, what dis-
tinguishes it from another, is, like all perception, influenced by our history of
experience and affiliation. I will be returning to Rabinowitz’s ideas shortly.
Music and Poetry is, as the title suggests, focused on music’s relationship to
poetry rather than to novels or drama. Kramer’s coinage of the term “melo-
poetics” is also indicative of his preferred literary form. Narrative compli-
cates the dialogue between the two arts for Kramer, as he explains: “[o]‌n the
whole, narrative form is opposed to the heightened rhythm of connection and
association that is typical of music and poetry” (Kramer, 1984, 10). He sug-
gests that rhythmic continuity is disrupted by the presence of multiple narra-
tors and personas (Kramer, 1984, 10). What then of Eliot’s The Wasteland,
with its series of narrators? Do such ideas offer us insights into the poetry of
the Modernists, or do Kramer’s ideas only remain relevant to the nineteenth
century?
Kramer’s method of studying two works in parallel, Beethoven’s Piano
Sonata in F minor, op. 57, “Apassionata” (1806), alongside Wordsworth’s
“The Thorn” (1800), for instance, exemplifies his belief in deep structural
similarities, and cultural building blocks inherent in such designs. He dis-
cusses both pieces in terms of “reconciling the antithesis that shapes them”,
through a battle of style versus subject (Kramer, 1984, 15). His recognition
of the futile search for “prescriptive” general criteria for music-literary syn-
thesis, a key problem in the field, especially pre-Kramer, leads him to believe
that only on an individual basis can real underlying useful links be made. Is
there something more fundamental operating here than mere individual simi-
larities? In Kramer’s words, “the trouble is that convergence does not depend
on overt formal similarities between works but on shared ways of organising
change and provoking interpretation … [there is] no way to be prescriptive”
(Kramer, 1984, 24). This very statement would seem to oppose the tenets of
Brown and more recently that of Werner Wolf.
Wolf proclaims his dislike of the term “melopoetics” on the grounds that
it can confuse perception of a field that includes the study of the “musicali-
zation of fiction”. Wolf adopts Huxley’s term for the title of his book, The
Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the History of Intermediality (1999).
Recognising the neglect shown to literary forms other than poetry within
the field, Wolf is one of the first to dedicate an entire book to the study of
musical ideas in the novel. He also believes in general principles of interaction
that can and should even regulate what might and what might not consti-
tute a musicalised literature. Under the chapter heading “[h]‌ow to recognize
a musicalized fiction when reading one”, and the subheading “[t]ypes of evi-
dence and criteria for identifying musicalized fiction”, Wolf enlists “circum-
stantial/contextual evidence” (including peripheral documents and facts like
cultural and biographical evidence, parallel musicalised works by the author
and direct commentaries by the author) as well as textual evidence (including
use of notation, thematisation of music, evocation of vocal music, acoustic
27

foregrounding and unusual patterns) as the necessary factors in determining
whether or not a text is truly “musicalized” (Wolf, 1999, 73–83). Wolf docu-
ments the evolution of musicalised fiction from early experimental works by
De Quincey through to the Modernists and offers a contextual intermedial
history that situates this emerging phenomenon. Wolf refutes the scholarship
that heralds Tristram Shandy as an early precursor of an intermedial text:
As far as textual evidence is concerned, Tristram Shandy does not contain

overtly intermedial elements (musical notation) indicating a presence of,
and perhaps also a concern with, music, nor are there paratextual thema-
tizations of music which might betray a musicalized intention.
(Wolf, 1999, 86)
While Wolf allows the fact that there are certain “musical” elements to Tristram
Shandy, then, the novel does not meet his criteria for a “musicalized fiction”,
the experimentalism largely reflecting Sterne’s concern for meta-fiction rather
than music. Wolf, then, is particularly prescriptive when it comes to musico-
literary interaction, a trait that scholars such as Prieto believe we should move
beyond, as we’ll return to shortly.
As mentioned earlier in relation to Kramer’s ideas, Rabinowitz intro-
duced some vital insights into the field. In Scher’s edited collection, Music
and Text: Critical Enquiries (1992), Rabinowitz’s article, “Chord and
Discourse: Listening Through the Written Word” investigates perception
and reception in terms of interdisciplinary interaction (Rabinowitz, 1992,
38–56). Rabinowitz writes: “[m]‌y claim is that neither the score as written
nor the sounds as performed offers sufficient grounds for interpretation or
analysis … But I do believe that what you hear and experience is largely
dependent upon the presuppositions with which you approach it, and that
those presuppositions are to a generally unrecognised degree verbal in ori-
gin” (Rabinowitz, 1992, 39). He relates reception to a game of cards, in which
a three of clubs means nothing without the prior knowledge of what it means
within the context of the given game. The three of clubs represents the tech-
nical level of observation, but for it to make sense to others, an “attributive”
level is required, wherein prior knowledge imbues the empty sign with a sig-
nifier of meaning. In this way, Rabinowitz explains the process by which we
engage with music: according to him, a certain amount of prior knowledge
is often necessary in order to make sense of it. What is significant here is
that the individual reader/listener brings with him/her a matchless magni-
tude of “prior knowledge” or lack thereof. A person’s history of experiences
and tastes, his or her social context and listening history, all colour his or
her initial experience of a new composition through what Rabinowitz calls
“attributive screens” (Rabinowitz, 1992, 56). Slavoj Žižek suggests viewing
ideology in a similar manner, that we must remove imaginary “ideological
spectacles” in order to unpack the “real” mechanisms in operation (Fiennes
et al., 2012).
28

The presence of multiple “attributive screens” does not, however, make
reception entirely subjective, but is, rather, an acknowledgement that we all
live “and are partly formed by a culture (or cultures)” (Rabinowitz, 1992, 52).
It follows that “attributive screens” are formed by social and cultural con-
texts. To take this idea further, in order for meaning to be created, it must be
shared at some level and cannot be entirely subjective.17 This is similar to how
Wittgenstein pointed out the impossibility of a “private language”; the fun-
damental point of a language, communication, cannot exist without shared
knowledge (Wittgenstein, [1953] 2009).
Peter Dayan’s Music Writing Literature: From Sand via Debussy to Derrida
(2006) echoes Kramer’s ideas on the inseparable nature of the two artforms.
Dayan concludes that:
[m]‌usic and literature … as defined by each other in an argument whose

circularity is vicious to science but perhaps central to life, confound self-
identity. They are never the same twice, they are never simply present;
and they, too, in defiance of logic, and (often explicitly in the case of lit-
erature) also in defiance of the truth about our cultural and political life
(which requires plurality to avoid imperialism and oppression).
(Dayan, 2006, 132)
Dayan praises the “musical” writing of Barthes and Derrida, something

for which they were often criticised. In a manner similar to Wilde’s view
expressed in “The Critic as Artist” ([1891] 1997a), Barthes and Derrida wrote
their criticism as an artform, a poetic musical style that Dayan ties back to the
French Symbolists. Dayan explores how George Sand understood there to be
“sublime equivalents” between music and literature, rather than there being
“servile repetition of external sounds” in the work of Chopin, for instance
(Dayan, 2006, 5). In his discussion of Chopin’s “raindrop” prelude (cited as
15D here, the legitimacy of which has been an ongoing area of scholarship),
Dayan suggests that we have lost the post-Romantic unspoken uncertainty
about representation in music. It seems to be suggested here that before the
study of scores alongside contextual biographical anecdotes, scholars allowed
a kind of Keatsian “negative capability” towards programme music.18 It is
Dayan’s conviction that literature “depends” on:
the presence of rain in Chopin’s music … The existence of literature, as

distinct from any other kind of writing, can only be maintained through
analogy with a non-verbal artform that is believed to be at once full of
meaning, and irredeemably corrosive of reference.
(Dayan, 2006, 10)
In other words, whether or not the composer intended a specific motif to

sound like raindrops or not, whether or not it was composed during a torren-
tial downpour or blazing sunshine, is trivial. What matters, for Dayan, is that
29

the relationship between a non-representational art (music) and a denota-
tive one (literature) ensures their respective symbiotic evolution and mutual
survival.
Though in line with Kramer and Dayan’s understanding of the “mobil-
ity” of music and literature, Prieto’s Listening In: Music, Mind, and the
Modernist Narrative (2002a), calls for a further change of analytical dir-
ection. He reminds us that when an author applies musical techniques to
his or her work (such as Joyce writing a fugue, or inserting an overture that
introduces the material that is to be developed in the course of the chapter),
this practice is always metaphorical in nature. It can be music-like, but it
cannot be music. Nor does it claim to be absolute. While Dayan rightfully
acknowledges this problem, Prieto pushes further that the fundamental
flaw in the dominant methodology in musico-literary scholarship is, at its
most basic level, the clichéd and vague use of music terminology in literary
scholarship.
The field had begun to spiral out of control in a whirlpool of metacritical
publications, with the “appropriateness” of a metaphor perhaps the most per-
sistent quandary. Precursing and perhaps partly responsible for Scher’s cen-
sorship of the term “musical”, an early example of this was Northrop Frye’s
paradoxical declaration that “the literary meaning of musical is unmusical”
(Frye, 1941–42, 178, emphasis added). Here, Frye suggests that, contrary to
popular misuse, music-like poetry is more suited to the “grotesque and hor-
rible” with its employment of “barking accents, crabbed and obscure language,
mouthfuls of consonants, and long lumbering polysyllables” (Frye quoted in
Prieto, 2002a, 22). Instead of pleasant poetry being termed “musical” (the
clichéd and tired convention), Frye suggests the opposite, yet in doing so
achieves very little other than replacing a vague usage with another equally
ambiguous one. Brown entered equally troubled waters when he called for
“more precise metaphors” (Brown, 1948, 20). How can a metaphor really
be more precise? Prieto notes that, in the fifty years since Brown’s pioneer-
ing study, “a viable methodology has not yet emerged” (Prieto, 2002a, 18).
Instead, what dominates publications is, he argues, metacritical literature that
attempts “to develop a methodology for the study of the relationship between
literature and music”, but that has hitherto been unsuccessful in ‘defining’ a
field” (Prieto, 2002a, 18).
The first WMA publication, Defining the Field (Bernhart, Scher and Wolf,
1999), included an essay by Scher entitled “Melopoetics Revisited”. In the
final pages, Scher issued a mission statement in the form of a to-do list for the
field, set out in eight bullet points, that included the planning of conferences,
the launch of the new WMA book series, but also the formulation of a “defin-
ition of melopoetics that would reflect the field’s disciplinary and institutional
prospects” (Scher, 1999, 21). Scher called for scholars to “subject to renewed
scrutiny the terminology employed in musico-literary studies”; “compile a
dictionary/glossary of melopoetics terms”; “attempt a systematic overview of
the different types of music-analogous structures in literature”; and “analyze
30

familiar music-related texts as well as newly emerging, more experimental
ones” (Scher, 1999, 21). Eighteen years on, a viable definition of melopoetics
remains elusive, as does a definitive methodology. Why is this?
Perhaps the wrong questions were being asked initially. Prieto questions
the fifty-year delay it has taken for scholars to move beyond the pedantic in
order to see the greater landscape. To rectify this delay, he proposes a model
for moving beyond the metacritical minefield of musico-literary study: instead
of seeking futile formal criteria, he asks what we can learn from metaphors.
According to Prieto, the notion of setting out criteria by which to judge the
appropriateness of a metaphor is a dead end –something, in other words,
that no author will adhere to. Instead, we should attempt to understand the
motives that drove writers to musical devices in the first place, and to assess
the consequences that have resulted from such practices: we should look at
how such phenomena affect the semiotic functioning of the “text”.
J. P. Baricelli’s critique ([1943] 1998) of Eliot’s Four Quartets exemplifies
such a problematic approach for Prieto, when he argues that: “Eliot does
not seem to realize, nor do the critics who take his clues, that [the relation-
ship between these two passages] is in no way contrapuntal” (Baricelli quoted
in Prieto, 2002a, 21). The redundancy of a scholar deciding that an artist
has “failed” in creating a metaphorical musical text, when the artist expli-
citly “intended” to –explaining this in documented interviews or notes, for
example –misses the point completely. Should a critic or scholar have the
right to tell an artist that he or she has failed in creating an adequate meta-
phor? When musicologists still have no complete set of identity conditions
for “music” itself, how can we expect to have a clear set for metaphors for
music within literature? If there are indeed “multiple ontologies” of the broad
term “music” (Bohlman, 1999), music-like texts must then be even more dif-
ficult to define and categorise into prescribed units. Returning to Baricelli’s
critique of Eliot, how can a scholar expect an artist to adhere to a category
invented by (and one not unanimously agreed upon) the scholar himself/her-
self after the artwork itself was created? The application of a category to an
artist, to whom it doesn’t apply, seems simply redundant (one is reminded
of Groucho Marx’s playful dictum regarding club membership (Marx, 1959,
321)). Aristotle viewed metaphors as didactic tools that could suggest new
insights through the juxtaposition of two separate objects. Prieto recognises
the potential of metaphors, after Aristotle, to “teach us something new” as
the fundamental premise for scholarship “beyond musico-literary studies”
(Prieto, 2002a, 23). He proposed a complete shake-up of the field and out-
lined his model in five distinct areas, which he set out in an article entitled
“Metaphor and Methodology in Word and Music Studies” (Prieto, 2002b, 51)
as follows:
1. Metaphoricity.
Accept and embrace the inherently metaphorical status of all attempts to
apply terms from one art to objects in another.
31

2. Cognitive dissonance.
Promote “surprise” and “cognitive dissonance”, not “appropriateness”
or “adequacy”, as the primary criteria of value when studying word–
music analogies.
3. Deep structures.
Emphasize the search for deep structures and underlying principles, not
the description of direct one-to-one correspondences between the arts.
4. De-essentializing the arts.
Think of these analogies as tools helpful in reconfiguring and deepening
our understanding of the arts and their various roles. Resist the tempta-
tion to force them to fit established definitions, however widely accepted.
5. Focus on significance and implications.
Analysis should always be guided by broader cultural questions of mean-
ing and value. The central question for word and music studies is: why do
these analogies matter?
These five points, a quasi-self-help list of aphorisms or mantras for the

musico-literary scholar, summarise Prieto’s general methodology. The second
point introduces a new idea, however, as Prieto suggests that instead of seek-
ing “appropriateness”, we promote “surprise” and “cognitive dissonance”.
Unlike the other points, this point seems unnecessary and unqualified. It is
reminiscent of Eisenstein’s ideas promoting counterpoint in the employment
of film music, bringing about an ironic effect in relation to the image, as men-
tioned earlier. It remains unclear in Prieto’s work why an ironic effect might be
deemed of more value than a text that operates in line with more predictable
musical devices. Perhaps it is the fact that it would draw a clearer line between
two narrative currents –the music and the words –beyond the obvious fact
that it might be more innovative and experimental. The “opacity” of each
medium is certainly foregrounded in such cases, the individual materials on
full show, as Greenberg wanted. No matter how interesting the “surprise”
might be, surely this should not be the sole or “primary criteria of value when
studying word-music analogies”?
Aligned with Scher’s aforementioned trinity of categories (music and litera-
ture, music in literature, and literature in music), the methodological toolkit
for Word and Music Studies seems somewhat more substantial in recent years.
The question remains: should we completely abandon, as Prieto suggests, the
futile search for definitive terminologies that has consistently been called for
in musico-literary inquiry? This quest would seem the basis of most scholarly
fields, it might be posited, with the very intangibility of terms, the failures
of language itself, accounting for much of the academic discourse. Despite
the efforts of Scher and Wolf, such a satisfactory and conclusive taxonomy
remains elusive, perhaps inevitably so. Is the fact that a clear methodology has
not come to fruition a good enough reason to abandon the quest completely?
Yes, the time has arrived to move on, as it were. When the right answers are
unattainable, perhaps it is the question that needs interrogation. The original
32

questions –Scher’s plea for definitions –were, I believe, the wrong ones to pro-
pose at the time. With Prieto, the right questions have begun to be explored.
Perhaps what is really happening, a point touched on by Kramer and Dayan,
is that each of the artforms, both music and literature, define one another in
relation to the mirror, a kind of self-discovery through recognition, of the
“other”: morphing identification by antithesis.
Notes
1 Albright (2000, 7) calls this the “Laocoön problem”.
2 The quote continues: “But if painting, by virtue of its signs or its means of imi-
tation, which it can combine in space alone, must completely renounce time, then
progressive acts, because progressive, do not belong among its subjects –painting
must content itself with acts next to one another, or with mere bodies”, (Lessing
quoted in Albright (2000, 9)).
3 Babbitt refers to Wagner as an “eleutheromaniac” (freedom-crazed) (Albright,
2000, 10).
4 For a study of Pinget’s theme and variation technique see Prieto, 2002a, 59–100.
5 Aldous Huxley coined the term in the novel Point Counter Point ([1928] 1978, 301).
6 Foster (2000, 323).
7 The postcolonial element in the author’s aesthetic has been well discussed; see for
instance Ann Banfield’s article “Beckett’s Tattered Syntax” (2003).
8 The Arts and Humanities Research Council- funded Listening Experience
Database Project run by the the Royal College of Music and the Open University
is one example of how listening has become a recent focus of scholarship.
9 Of course, there are problems with such terms as “listening”, “diegetic”, “con-
centrated”, and indeed “attention”, and these debates are outside of the scope of
this book; but for the required purpose here, they will suffice. For problematised
explorations of these terms, see the work of Anahid Kassabian and Janet Staiger.
10 I ACB ACB ACB CABII CBA CBA CBA BCAIII BAC BAC BAC BAC
(Libera, 1980).
11 See Tristan Jakob-Hoff (2008).
12 Monteverdi called for music to be free from subservience to words in the preface
to Scherzi Musicali (1607) (cited in Prieto, 2002a, 4).
13 The term “musico-literary studies” was coined by Brown (1948).
14 WMA website 2015 minutes –http://wordmusicstudies.net [accessed 22 August
2016].
15 This list is by no means exhaustive: for further information see the WMA website
and publications – http://wordmusicstudies.net.
16 See Dayan (2002).
17 See Kassabian’s theorisation of “distributive subjectivity” in Ubiquitous Listening
(2013).
18 Keats defined his concept, in a letter dated 22 December 1817, as follows: “Negative
Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts,
without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”, quoted in www.oxfordrefer-
ence.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100227203 [accessed 14 August 13].
3
2
Repetition in music and literature
Repetition as device spans all the arts; it is crucial to both music and litera-
ture, and is also integral to painting, film and even sculpture (we need only
step onto Crosby Beach in Liverpool to witness the proliferation of Anthony
Gormleys). For this reason, repetition has recently been theorised by Werner
Wolf as a “transmedial” device.1 Whereas the “intermedial” is achieved
through synthesis, whereby two disciplines combine to achieve a new art-
form, as in video art-music, transmedial refers to devices or features that are
not exclusive to a specific artform but are instead shared. The transmedial
device is not founded on convergence, but rather employs a common tech-
nique among disciplines. For Wolf, repetition can therefore never be thought
of as intermedial in itself. Within the interdisciplinary realm of Word and
Music Studies such taxonomy has been the perennial goal, particularly for the
Austro-German scholars, a practice that Chapter 1 explored to some degree.
Once alert to the idea of transmedial repetition, we begin to find it every-
where. How then are we to deal with such abundance theoretically? A lateral,
wide-ranging approach is taken by Robert Fink, whose book on repetition in
modern culture, Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural
Practice (2005) relates the abundance of repetition in American minimal-
ism to the commercial material repetition and franchising of corporations
such as McDonalds and Starbucks. While Fink makes eloquent observations
concerning the high–low art convergence since Pop art, and the proliferation
of repetitious material in society, his arguments follow the traditional con-
cept of repetition as reproduction of the same, an idea that I would like to
problematise.2
Focusing on repetition in words and music, the subject of this chapter, the
idea of exact replication, as Fink envisions, becomes a difficult one to accept
as it ignores the reception of the repeated fragment. When we hear something
again, it is never the same. The very notion of “again” negates “sameness”.
How can something be the same at a different point in time and context?
While the echo of a motif might sound the same, its repositioning, or recon-
textualisation, nevertheless achieves difference. Heraclitus’ famous saying, as
told by Plato, touches on this perpetual flux –we can indeed never step into
the same river twice.3 The second time we hear a motif, in other words, it is not
34
34 Repetition in music and literature

the same but changed utterly. There is no such thing as the “innocent eye”;
we each approach what we experience with an individual history of experi-
ence, education, and taste (Stahn cited in Best, 1980, 10). The concept of
an “innocent ear” is just as unfeasible. Philip Tagg’s theorisation of “codal
incompetence” and “codal interference” in the semiotics of music deals with
the same issue (Tagg, 2012). A knowledge of the signifiers and the history
of accumulated references adds a depth of appreciation for a listener and
vice versa, while taste itself can often form a blockade against semiotic con-
tent reaching the more narrow-minded reader. Another layer is added upon
hearing something for the third and each successive time thereafter, a rehear-
ing that further engages our faculties of memory and both conscious, and
unconscious, familiarisation. To return to Gormley’s statues, –the repetition
of the artist’s own body in iron, an act that may seem narcissistic on the one
hand but democratic on the other –difference results from the varying effects
of erosion, but more fundamentally from where each figure is positioned. In
broader terms, Gormley’s repetition of a human body brings into question
the complicated concept of identity, what concerned Freud with the unheim-
lich, or uncanny, effect of the Doppelganger. Collectively they face the sea,
but individually their place in the sand provides difference. The shore provides
a canvas of altered repetitions. Gormley has repeated this installation, albeit
more temporarily than in Liverpool, at various locations, including across the
skyscape of London’s South Bank. Each time we encounter this iron man, his
perspective transforms ours.
In Difference and Repetition ([1968] 1994, 18), Gilles Deleuze defines true
repetition as “repetition of difference”, contrary to a traditional opinion of
sameness. For Deleuze, a repetition is never the same but both the same and
other. Nietzsche’s concept of “eternal return”4 –a cyclical universe in which
everything will at some stage repeat –is regarded by Deleuze to be pioneer-
ing in this regard; he writes: “The subject of the eternal return is not the
same but the different, not the similar but the dissimilar, not the one but the
many” (Deleuze, [1968] 1994, 126). For Nietzsche’s universe to be infinite,
repeated lives must be repeated differently. Each “Groundhog Day” must
vary to some extent in order for all permutations to occur (Golan, 2007,
2–3). In Nietzsche, Deleuze finds a means whereby his ideas of repetition can
be freed: “repetition cannot be understood as a repetition of the same, and
becomes liberated from subjugation under the demands of traditional phil-
osophy”.5 Kierkegaard’s doubles, as portrayed in his seminal text Repetition
([1843] 2009), also somewhat foreshadow Deleuze’s repetition as difference.
He writes: “The dialectic of repetition is easy, for that which is repeated has
been –otherwise it could not be repeated –but the very fact that it has been
makes the repetition into something new” (Kierkegaard quoted in Gendron,
2008, 7).
Deleuze’s concept of “passive synthesis” describes this perceptual diffe-
rence in repetition (Deleuze, [1968] 1994, 70). Deleuze critiques Husserl’s
phenomenology a great deal as he does that of Kant and Hegel throughout
35
Repetition in music and literature 35

Difference and Repetition. If a melody is to be perceived in time, we must
be able to retain some consciousness of previous notes and subsequently
expect others, indicating consciousness of the not- present. Time and
memory become the crucial factors of reception. If in the Berkeley sense
([1710] 2008), we must perceive in order to exist, does each perception
bring about another existence? A motif might adumbrate another, proph-
esise the future, while with every repeat we travel “from the past to the
future in the present” (Deleuze quoted in Latartara, 2011, 113). As John
Latartara writes, when we listen to a piece of music, “the second state-
ment, although physically identical, will be perceptually different from
the first because the first statement is already retained in memory (past)
and possible future statements of the same material generate anticipation
(future)” (Latartara, 2011, 113).
In opposition to the negative forces of repetition found in Freudian con-
cepts of regression and repression, Deleuze views repetition as “a creative
activity of transformation”, whereas “psychoanalysis limits repetition to
representation” in attempting to cure and put an end to such re-enactments of
trauma (Parr, 2005, 224). But who is right? As Adrian Parr writes: “Deleuze
encourages us to repeat because he sees in it the possibility of reinvention,
that is to say, repetition dissolves identities as it changes them, giving rise to
something unrecognisable and productive. It is for this reason that he main-
tains that repetition is a positive power (puissance) of transformation” (Parr,
2005, 224–225). Further to this, Deleuze distinguishes between two distinct
types of repetition, as Sarah Gendron explains:
distinguishing between two types of repetition: “naked” or “mechanical”

repetition that faithfully reproduces its original and “clothed” repeti-
tion –the Darwinian inspired variety … that distorts or adds to its ori-
ginal, creating difference from within. The difference between Deleuze’s
dual conceptualization of repetition and those who came before him is
that the first form –“naked/mechanical” –is theorized as necessary for
the sake of argument, in the sense that it sets up a relationship between
an original or authentic element and a copy that seeks to duplicate it
exactly. This form is nonetheless described as ultimately unattainable.
The only possible repetition is therefore the “clothed” version which seeks
to expose the difference that is inevitable (Gendron, 2008, 19).
Gendron describes how historical viewpoints on repetition have fluctuated

from Plato’s view that imitation was inherently “inferior”, to Aristotle’s
positive spin on repetition, seeing it as an inbuilt part of human biology
(Gendron, 2008, 16). Among repetition’s more contemporary disparagers,
following Freud, were both Jacques Attali and Frederic Jameson: Attali
(1985) for what he saw as mass reproduction and standardisation (not unlike
Adorno in some regards), while for Jameson “repetition effectively volatizes
the original object” in commodification (quoted in Rose, 1994, 71). Tricia
36

Rose rightly argues that such a negative standpoint misses a great deal in the
wide-ranging phenomenon that is repetition, that it “marginalizes and erases
alternative uses” and identities (Rose, 1994, 72), such as negating the cultural
capital of black music. She also puts forward African American music as the
primary innovator of music that “identifies” positively with repetition. Yes,
African developments utilise repetition extensively, but Rose’s reliance on
James A. Snead’s declaration that Western music historically “secrets” repe-
tition is flawed. While Snead (1981) and indeed Christopher Small (1987)
successfully outline many of the cultural differences between Western and
African traditions, an essentialist dichotomy between linear Western and a
“deliberately” circular African music is tenuous. Gendron on the other hand
recognises the fact that circularity goes far beyond one tradition, and in
many ways the apotheosis that repetition underwent in the twentieth cen-
tury was the result of a long cultural journey. She visualises various forms of
repetition over time in terms of particular shapes, in fact: circles (The Eternal
Return, the Egyptian Ouroboros, Neolithic burial mounds like Newgrange
and solstice traditions, Buddhist beliefs in reincarnation, feasts, and farming
practice, orbits, days and seasons); lines (Christian and Jewish teleology);
and spirals (Hindustani philosophy). Gendron writes:
As theorizations of repetition have evolved over time, so too has the shape
one imagines them to embody. As previously stated, in Hindu philosophy,
time is understood to be comprised of repetitive spirals. In Greco-roman
thought, the dominant symbol of duration was that of the circle fall-
ing back upon itself in a self-seeking, self-absorbed way. Judeo-Christian
belief systems flattened and straightened out the circle by theorizing
linear interpretations of history. The 19th and 20th century thought of
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Deleuze, combined both ways of conceiving
of duration, thereby bestowing on repetition the possibility of producing
difference. Rather than closing back upon itself, the Eternal Return, by the
addition of an “imperceptible difference”, is thrown off center and pro-
pelled in another direction. While it may be propelled onward, upward,
backward, even Beckett’s preferred “worstward”, what remains constant
is that it is always propelled away from itself. The insistence on repetition
with difference by Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Deleuze –again, despite
the differences in how they choose to articulate the Eternal Return –rep-
resents, therefore, a departure from both Occidental cyclical and linear
theorizations of duration and a return to ancient Oriental celebrations of
cyclical growth, flow, movement, and deviation. The prevailing symbol is
now –and again –that of the spiral.
(Gendron, 2008, 12–13)
One might even compare such a visualisation of a straight line with the
Adornian view of Modernism’s need for a continually challenging new, and
37

the spiral perhaps as reflective of postmodern pastiche and the thought of
Lyotard and Derrida, but such a course is outside of the scope of this chapter.
Another avenue might include exploring the connections between Lacanian
and Barthesian discussions of the loss inherent in jouissance and signifiance
in relation to the transformative powers of repetition (see Middleton, 1983).
As we shall see later, the spiralling world of Beckett’s texts questions the very
notion of the “original”, as characters and themes consistently return inter-
textually, from work to work.
Repetition in music
As a “puissance of transformation”, repetition is fundamental to music. It
enables structures, development, form, rhythm, tempo, pulse, metre, func-
tional harmony and, at the most basic level, music itself.6 Tonal music needs
repetition in order to exist. With only twelve notes in a chromatic scale, repeti-
tion is an obvious necessity for melodic drive, serialist composition and many
forms of music from other cultures. Operating both at a macro, formal or
structural level and at the micro level of single repeats, there are many ways
in which repetition is employed in music. Take for example the most widely
known example of motivic development, the four-note motif that begins
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (1808). This raw material is transparently played
out, composed through, for the remainder of the movement, being repeated
in many guises until its original declamatory statement becomes a complex
and multifaceted discourse. Repetitions of phrases or motifs can be trans-
posed, inverted, appear in retrograde presented with different instrumenta-
tion, different attack, or dynamic, or even used to form new variant motifs,
as in fugue. In the nineteenth century, sonata form became the ultimate para-
digm of repetition with development: the original second subject returning in
a triumphant tonic transposition during the recapitulation.
Antiphonal music, the call and response of liturgical music, in which a
phrase sung solo or by a choir is repeated back by the congregation, shares
a focus on repetition with binary and ternary forms, like the rondo, min-
uet, scherzo and trio (the third movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony
(1812) is an extended trio –ABABA).7 From the tutti ritornello in the
Baroque concerto, interspersed with episodes of increasing virtuosity by the
soloists making each return more emphatic than the last as familiarity builds
a level of assurance and closure, to large-scale fugues (the first movement
of Bartok’s Music for String Instruments, Percussion and Celeste (1936), for
instance) and canons (themselves repeated ad nauseam at countless weddings
and graduations in the case of Pachelbel), it is clear that repetition is the
prime catalyst of the tonal Western art music tradition. It is therefore obvi-
ous why Schenker would claim that repetition was the “most striking charac-
teristic” of music. The “transformation” brought about by musical repetition
is often transparent (for Steve Reich, a “process” especially deliberate).
38

Adam Ockelford goes further, proclaiming: “the source of perceived
musical order lies ultimately in repetition” (Ockelford, 2005, 21). For
Ockelford, it is deciding which repetition is “structurally salient” and deter-
mining the very “nature of that significance (in different listening contexts)”
that amounts to “the principal challenge facing the analyst” (Ockelford, 2005,
34–35). Ockelford’s formulation of zygonic theory, wherein the “interspec-
tive relationships through which imitative order is perceived”, does much to
explore how layers of repetitions interweave structurally.
Repetition, then, can be used to various ends: it can have a narrative role
and can gain great importance –leitmotifs in Wagnerian opera, and film
music, the Jaws motif for instance. The music can adumbrate the action –we
know the shark is coming before the characters do –but it can also contradict
the action –Eisenstein’s cognitive dissonance. In Wagner’s music, motifs are
developed, juxtaposed, combined and transposed, all with narrative signifi-
cance. Ruth Katz and Carl Dahlhaus suggest that the time-based nature of
music is the very thing that brings repetition to life. Lessing’s temporal cat-
egorisation of music holds in this regard:
If repetition was “nothing but repetitions, nothing but ‘the same thing
over and over and over …’ it would be incomprehensible how they could
pre-empt so much space in statements intended to be meaningful. From
the point of view of the tones, they are precisely this: the same thing again
and again and again … But music is not only tone; it is tone and time.
Tones may repeat themselves; time cannot repeat itself.
(Katz, 1992, 726)
This concept of “tone and time” concerns the listening perceiver, the recep-
tion of the music. As Leonard Meyer wrote, musical repetition “never exists
psychologically” –we never quite hear the same thing twice (Meyer cited in
Ball, 2010, 125). Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis does much to reveal the cog-
nitive consequences of such listening practice from a scientific standpoint in
her book On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind (2013). Deleuzian repetition
is also based on the limitations of time-based reality. For music to be new, it
must engage with the past, converse with previous works, and participate in
a vocabulary of signs and clichés that render it intelligible enough to adhere
to the value criteria of what is perceived as “new”. T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and
the Individual Talent” ([1919] 2005) and Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence
([1973] 1997) interrogate the complex conversation between sameness and ori-
ginality, the canon and the revolutionary work, repetition and difference. The
threat of history always remains as composers and writers struggle to create
something original while at the same time engaging with their context and place
within a tradition of work –the ten years it took Brahms to write his first sym-
phony under Beethoven’s shadow, or Beckett’s struggle to escape that of Joyce.
For Deleuze, repetitions are inextricably linked with difference, an inter-
dependent relationship of past and present, old and new. Jeremy Begbie
39

posits that the “relations of sameness would appear to play a more crucial
role than relations of difference” in music (Begbie, 2000, 156). Do the scales
of Deleuze’s symbiotic relationship seem a little heavy on the sameness side
in music, though? Begbie writes: “This bias towards repetition need not, then,
be seen as the enemy of newness (in the sense of the unprecedented, different
from what has gone before); rather repetition serves to highlight the ever-
new variegated material matrix which music ‘rides’ ” (Begbie, 2000, 164). Peter
Kivy, as mentioned previously, views repetition as a didactic tool, whereby the
listener is given help in order to “grasp” the musical material, a guiding hand
that itself becomes the very musical structure itself:
Repeats not only allow the listener time to “grasp” the ideas given, they
also provide a fabric of sound that should not be altered: “repetition is
the means of grasping pattern; but, by definition, pattern is that very
repetition, and to dispense with the remainder after it has been grasped
would be to dispense with it, whereas it, the pattern, is the whole point of
the exercise.
(Kivy, 1993, 353, original emphasis)
We’ve already problematised this terminology, but the notion of repetitions

allowing the listener to “grasp” the ideas or patterns within music is also part
of a larger question that asks what the matter of “attention” really is. Surely
listening is much more complicated than simply grasping and not grasping,
understanding and misunderstanding; there exists instead a plane of compre-
hension. In any case, it is heavily debated as to whether there is indeed ever a
single “right” way of understanding a work of art. Oscar Wilde, for instance,
believed that the more interpretations a work enabled, the better the work, and
certainly this is central to a work’s longevity and survival; it is through each
new audience’s engagement with the text coming from their own context that
brings about a new staging or interpretation of Hamlet (Wilde, [1891] 1997b,
965–1016).
Of course, it is not the case that simply anything goes in terms of inter-
pretation –consider the famous Wittgensteinian duckrabbit. The image may
clearly be interpreted as a duck or a rabbit, and either would be a justified
intelligible and informed interpretation (Best, 1980, 126). It could not, how-
ever, be justifiably interpreted as a cello –as David Best writes, there is “an
indefinite but not unlimited possibility of valid or intelligible interpretation”
(Best, 1980, 126). If meaning itself is impossible to pin down, can repetition
really be considered an important aspect of enabling the listener to “grasp”
or comprehend the material?8 If so, is this repeated, reinforced understanding
the listener’s own individual construct, somebody else’s, or a combination of
both? Programme notes, reviews, liner notes and critical views aside, when a
listener hears a repeat, might we be certain that the fact that there is a repeti-
tion in the first place suggests that this note, or series of notes, requires more
attention or focus?
40

As a means of differentiating between short motivic riff-based repeats and
larger architectonic, structural ones, Richard Middleton formulated the terms
musematic and discursive repetitions. He writes:
Musematic repetition is the repetition of short units; the most immedi-

ately familiar examples –riffs –are found in Afro-American musics and
in rock. Discursive repetition is the repetition of longer units, at the level
of the phrase (defined as a unit roughly equivalent to a verbal clause or
short sentence) … The effects of the two types are usually very different,
largely because the units differ widely in the amount of information and
the amount of self-contained “sense” they contain, and in their degree of
involvement with other syntactic processes. Moreover, musematic repeti-
tion is far more likely to be prolonged and unvaried, discursive repetition
to be mixed in with contrasting units of various types (as in the AABA
structure of the classic Tin Pan Alley ballad form). The former therefore
tends towards a one-levelled structural effect, the latter to a hierarchically
ordered discourse.
(Middleton, 1983, 238).
Middleton’s categorisations will be further extended as I employ my own

taxonomy of repetition in relation to Beckett’s later prose in Chapter 4.
Repetition in experimental music

Minimalist music brought with it the apotheosis of repetition: repetition for
itself. Steve Reich wrote of “the gradual process” (Reich, [1968] 2002) in his
music, while the structural units of repetition in Philip Glass’ work take pri-
ority over melody.9 Of course, the term minimalism brings with it certain
pejorative connotations10, Terry Riley and La Monte Young seemed most
comfortable with the term, but the respective evolving compositional aesthet-
ics of the so-called minimalist composers are so various and idiosyncratic that
the term has a tenuous definition at times. Dan Warburton maintains that
although the term “minimalism” is far from perfect, it is the best available,
and there are certainly worse terms in use.11 The minimalist canon rests, for
Keith Potter, with the “four giants” of minimalism: Young, Riley, Glass and
Reich (Potter, 2002), the same four that Michael Nyman’s pioneering study
focused upon (Nyman, [1974] 1999). Repetition is arguably the salient fea-
ture that connects and binds the approaches of these Americans together.
What is striking in Nyman’s study is his suggestion that, far from being the
product of Americans hiding their heads in the sand, rather than face the
European avant-garde, the “origins of this minimal process music lie in seri-
alism” (Nyman, [1974] 1999, 139).12 Webern’s technique of “repeating pitches
at the same register” would greatly influence Young, as did his method of
stacking chords in static fashion (Potter, 2002, 44). Webern once wrote that
“development is also a kind of repetition” (Webern quoted in Prieto, 2002a,
41

57), recognising its centrality to structural intelligibility. The antagonistic pos-
ition towards repetition found in serialism, however, meant that no note could
repeat until the other eleven had been played, the very notion of repetition
or avoidance of it being paramount, an “anxiety of influence” in Modernist
Europe (Bloom, [1973] 1997).
Potter has even suggested that Cage, another important influence on
Young and Riley, was a “proto-minimalist” on account of his focus on
rhythm and repetition rather than pitch as the organising principle of his
early pre-indeterminate works, though Cage later positioned himself in vehe-
ment opposition to what he termed the “fascist” post-minimalism of Glenn
Branca’s guitar ensembles (Potter, 2002, 4).13 Repetition in modern music was
clearly a site for healthy debate.
In many ways, the high and low art dichotomy started to crumble in the
downtown New York of the 1960s, as Andy Warhol, The Velvet Underground,
Tony Conrad, Glass and Reich infused their work with repetition. Lou Reed
wrote “The Ostrich” while a staff songwriter for Pickwick Records in 1964, an
experimental popular song written with all the guitar strings tuned to a single
note. John Cale, hired to perform this piece, noticed the similarities between
what Reed was doing and the music he was performing with La Monte Young
in the Theatre of Eternal Music –Cale soon joined Reed in the formation of
The Velvet Underground.14 For some, the repetitious qualities of minimalism
evoked a corporeal sensuality –while other critics found Glass’ music detached
from emotion and “cool” (Greenaway, 1983), a result of the performers in the
Philip Glass Ensemble’s belief in the need to remove all expression –vibrato
for instance –from their playing in order to let the music work (Greenaway,
1983). The removal of individual passionate expression enables the dense fab-
ric of the music to operate clearly. With the bodily connotations affiliated to
repetitive rhythms, the influence of African drumming and Balinese gamelan
on Reich and Glass meant that they, like pop musicians from Muddy Waters
to Elvis, could not escape being branded with the “devil’s music” pitchfork
of middle-class white America and beyond. In some ways blues, jazz, dance
and rock –pop music –offer an interesting dichotomy with minimalism –
the “accessible” high art music for the commercial public, as some labelled
it.15 Young and Riley were also particularly close to the jazz world; Riley’s
modal approach owed much to Coltrane’s explorations. In “Poppy Nogood
and the Phantom Band” (1969), Riley experimented with tapes and overdubs
of his sax playing alongside influences from one of his other passions, Indian
classical music.
While the tape technology that Riley employed on “Poppy Nogood and
the Phantom Band” was primitive and expensive, with technological advance-
ments, looping and sampling became available to the masses rather than
just Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM)
alumni, and record studios. Riley’s Phantom Band, the tape, was soon avail-
able in a cheap looper, sampler or digital delay pedal. The huge impact
that loop pedals have had in modern music ranges from the innovations of
42

guitarists Bill Frisell and Nels Cline, the live manipulations of Colleen, the
additive soundscapes of Dustin Wong and Noveller, to the avantpop of Low.
But what should we make of the recent trend towards the use of loops in
music? Technology plays a huge role in the development of new music: as the
parameters are expanded, new technology inspires musical innovations; they
may even be “imagined into existence”, as Jason Toynbee writes:
Technology and the social and cultural are always imbricated. Technology
is never just selected, rather it is already a discursive formation … tech-
nologies take off because they are congruent with an emerging aesthetic
among musicians: they must literally be imagined into existence.
(Toynbee, 2000, 99)
Keith Negus also recognises this fluidity when he writes: “[t]‌echnology has
never been passive, neutral or natural. Music has for centuries been cre-
ated through the interaction between ‘art’ and technology” (Negus, 1992,
31). Middleton sees it as a symbiotic relationship –“[t]echnology and music
technique, content and meaning generally develop together, dialectically
(Middleton, 1990, 90). Middleton equates such looping as the manifest-
ation of the end of history: “The rise to prominence of digitalised sampling
and looping techniques –‘borrowing’ as a multi-faceted principle –can be
regarded as a symptom of a new paradigm, marked by an increased blurring
of the distinction between musical work and musical field” (Middleton, 1996).
As Deleuzian repetition blurs the boundary between the new and old, the
same and different, authorship too is called into question, especially when it
comes to sampling and copyright.16
Noise music presents another relationship with repetition. Luigi Russolo
recognised early on how the repetitive noises of the modern industrial
world would inevitably infiltrate an art of that world (Russolo, [1913] 2001).
Paul Hegarty suggests that at the heart of noise music is the quest for fail-
ure (Hegarty, 2009, 147). Is noise, then, a particularly Beckettian form of
music? Hegarty’s description of the form reminds us of Beckett’s laments on
the failures and inadequacies of language and of his famous statement in
Worstward Ho to “fail better”. This occurs at a much deeper level than sim-
ply trying to play things the “wrong” way, or at painful volumes. Japanese
noise music in particular, Merzbow for instance, often sees performers either
employing broken analogue equipment or breaking their equipment during
performance. We have seen destruction on stage before of course –whether
it was Hendrix setting his guitar alight or Pete Townshend smashing his; the
destructive Romantic rock star seems very clichéd in the Spinal Tap sense
nowadays, but beginning a performance with damaged equipment also
brings to mind the lo-fi alternative music aesthetic of Pavement or Smog,
or even Harry Partch’s microtonal or “out-of-tune” instrument construc-
tions. The construction of value through the fetishisation of fidelity has
been a mainstay is popular music aesthetics from the “hiss” of vinyl to the
43

supposed “fakeness” of autotune. Technology often brings with it moral
panic and stigma before initial “Judas” moments undergo a period of accli-
matisation –the popularity of vocoders as a foreground instrument in cur-
rent chart music is a case in point.
There is a balance between making the right mistakes in noise music and
keeping the audience guessing. In a strange way the very striving for surprise,
the avoidance of repetition and cliché, leads to much noise music being rather
predictable –we usually get what we expect, a barrage of noise, an extremely
loud, visceral wall of sound at some stage in the set or track. Like the drop
in techno music, the climactic noise peak (also in some cases embodying a
Romantic self-expressive catharsis) is appreciated or at least willingly tolerated
by the audience. That is not to say that noise music is easy to create; it requires
the ability to set up the right accidents, for the performer to be at one with the
technology, which is, according to current aesthetic trends, generally analogue
in nature. Through the negation of repetition, noise music increases its unset-
tling and difficult qualities. The listener is left without Kivy’s didactic repeats.
Still, even in noise music we sometimes hear repeats or recurrence –as
Hegarty shows in K2’s Molekular Terrorism (1996) (Hegarty, 2009, 141).
Certain repetitive blocks of sound start to be perceived by the audience. Are
these moments, as with the serendipitous parallelism of such early mash-ups
as Dark Side of the Rainbow, a result of the psychological need of humans to
find patterns and conversely filter out data that does not fit the pattern –a pro-
cess termed apophenia?17 We might mistakenly recognise a face on Mars in a
chance arrangement of shadows, yet such pattern recognition was an import-
ant part of human evolution –face recognition having obvious social benefits.
Noise is certainly changed upon second hearing; the music mutates or morphs
for the listener, like subatomic particles for the onlooker. John Latartara
employs spectrographic analytical methods in order to highlight such repeti-
tions in the later work of Merzbow, alongside Oval and Kid 606 (Latartara,
2011). Repetition is, however, as rare in noise music as it is in free improvisa-
tion. To repeat in an improvised performance might fit the moment, but the
idea of repeating wholesale what was done in a previous performance goes
entirely against the aesthetic. As Fred Frith (2006) explains, discussing repeti-
tion in improvised music, “it’s usually the wrong path, and turns out badly” to
return to what may have worked in previous performances: it generally proves
more successful to start afresh. Derek Bailey, a key pioneer of free impro-
visation, shares this notion of avoiding repetition, viewing such a negation as
paramount to successful improvisation (Bailey, 1980). John Cage believed that
recorded music –records –amounted to an abomination, not “real music”, and
that they actually work against “real music” (Cage in Greenaway, 1983). When
we hear a recording, we absorb a particular interpretation, a fully loaded text,
with far more parameters concretised than on any notated score. The timbre,
dynamics and playing style are set on the recorded text, and any subsequent
relationship with the piece, whether from a performer’s or listener’s perspec-
tive, will be influenced, even where negated, by the record. The “anxiety of
4

influence” of the record holds a heavier threat than the notated score. Cage
joked about this in an anecdote relaying a child’s response to a Stravinsky con-
cert, conducted by Stravinsky –the child familiar with the record exclaimed
“they’re not playing it right” (Cage in Greenaway, 1983). Equating “authen-
ticity” with “liveness” is not wholly satisfactory, though; while Simon Frith
links rock music’s rawness with the live spectacle for instance, this does act
to stigmatise somewhat the affordance that technology has awarded since the
early twentieth century. We no longer need to be in a room with a musician,
or perform ourselves, in order to engage with music. The cultural capital of a
constructed badge like “authenticity” is often more problematic than useful.
Hegarty suggests that although noise music might be a non-commercial,
underground music, the fact that so many new records are being released in
small limited runs, in an attempt to work against commoditisation, actually
achieves the opposite. The collector may become obsessed, but can never actu-
ally possess all Merzbow records, for example (Hegarty, 2009, 141). At least it
would take a great deal of time and expense to do so. One Merzbow record,
Noisembyro (1994), was initially available as a limited edition of one, sealed
inside a Mercedes-Benz that was wired to play the album when the engine
started. The car went unsold and subsequently broke down, the record ultim-
ately becoming available through other means. Hegarty suggests that contrar-
ily this music becomes “an ultra-commodity, an ultra-fetish” (Hegarty, 2009,
142). It follows, that to “know” all the work would seem impossible. So, it
seems the lack of repetition, a deliberate aesthetic approach in noise music,
is manifested in the production, industrial side too, in a manner that Cage
might have approved. But what of the listener who listens attentively to one
Merzbow record continuously? The product, the notes, the music remain the
same in the real sense (the record was only pressed once), but the reception of
the music for the listener changes. Likewise, even in a performance context,
if we stand for 90 minutes listening to a Merzbow gig or even a continuous
record, the effect or impact of noise changes; some may even be lulled to
sleep – as a baby is comforted by womb-like white noise.. So, even in noise and
improvised music, repetition’s grip is tight; those who attempt to avoid it are
made keenly aware of its ubiquity.
Cage’s conch shells piece, Inlets (1977), formulated perhaps the truest
method of free improvisation; there is literally no way of predictably control-
ling what sounds the shell would produce when the performer moves it back
and forth with the water inside (Cage in Greenaway, 1983, 38 minutes). Is
not being able to predict the outcome of an instrument, the sound produced,
no matter how much practice and research is done, or conscious effort, the
true goal of free improvisation? Free jazz as a genre became anything but
free, sounding consistently exactly like itself: free jazz. When we hear Ornette
Coleman, we know it is him; the style is constitutive, no matter what you
label it, in a similar way to how much noise music is representative of the
genre. With Cage’s conch shells do we get any further? What does the fact that
deliberate repetition is consciously or subconsciously impossible mean for the
45

music? Or does this just sound like a conch shell making random sounds,
what Cage would perhaps want most, a music devoid of extramusical con-
tent? Such an aesthetic is mirrored today in Brian Eno’s computerised experi-
ments with randomised sound.
Joe Pass once said that “if you hit a wrong note, then make [it] right by
what you play afterwards” (Pass quoted in Sudo, [1997] 1998, 54). Any note
can be made right (tonally resolved or not), but if we repeat a mistake, the
audience might also consider it deliberate. In this way, particularly in jazz,
to repeat is to emphasise intent. If we consider this idea of intent in terms of
Deleuzian repetition, the fact that the repeated note is inherently “different”
from the first sounding is significant. To intend to transform the reception of
a note through repeating it is a manifestation of Deluzian positive repetition.
In the words of Adrian Parr, “in terms of discovery and experimentation;
it [Deleuzian repetition] allows new experiences, affects and expressions to
emerge” (Parr, 2005, 223). As already mentioned, in the traditional jazz con-
text any note can technically be resolved; one can always “step out” as long
as a “step in” occurs soon enough afterwards. You can in a sense make that
“wrong” note a “right” one. More than simply masking an error, the error
itself becomes transformed or legitimised, accepted and absorbed, under-
stood, contextualised or “grasped” even, to use Kivy’s term, through repe-
tition. This operates in a similar manner to how scatological terms become
cutifyed by parents while teaching their children about the world through
mimesis and repetitive learning.
That dissonant note when heard again seems to sound more consonant, as
the player can “turn a wince into a smile” (Sudo, [1997] 1998, 54). Likewise,
for Stephen Dedalus, accidents act as “the portals of discovery” (Joyce, [1922]
2000, Ch. 9).18 In improvisation, of course, there are mistakes and then there
are real mistakes. Errors that fit the bill, that adhere to the socially constructed
codes or rules of practice, differ from blatant blunders. Sometimes the way to
succeed is through “better” failure.19
Repetitions in literature
At the macro level, the word “car” only represents that particular danger to
cyclists because it is repeated enough times in English to take on that mean-
ing. The relationship of the signifier (medium) to the signified (concept) is
arbitrary, as de Saussure taught us. Without repetition there can be no affilia-
tions or connotations of meaning. At the micro level, the repetition of a word
in a poem can reinforce meaning, emphasise weight and importance, or bring
about a particular aural effect. As Derrida puts this, “there is no word, nor in
general a sign, which is not constituted by the possibility of repeating itself.
A sign which does not repeat itself, which is not already divided by repetition
in its ‘first time’, is not a sign” (Derrida, 1978, 213). In literature, words, like
music, need to be repeated in order for these signifiers to represent anything
in the first place.
46

Repetitions may not be as frequent in literature but they have always been
important. Let us consider briefly the importance of rhyme and alliteration.
Rhyming involves the repetition of word endings with similar sounds; the
eighteenth-century rhyming couplet, as those found in Pope’s Dunciad for instance:
Maggots half-form’d in rhyme exactly meet,

And learn to crawl upon poetic feet.
(Pope, [1743] 2004, 170)
Alliteration involves the repetition of the first letter in a series of succes-

sive words. In a line from Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “The Raven” (1845), for
instance, –“Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken” –“star-
tled”, “stillness” and “spoken” all repeat the “s” sound. Alliteration has been
crucial in the stylistic history of poetry, structurally important in Old English,
in texts like Beowulf, written in the eighth century, through fourteenth-century
Middle English, like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, to contemporary lyrical
poetry such as the work of Seamus Heaney.
In alliterative verse, the dominant form for Anglo-Saxon poets, alliteration
is the crucial structural device rather than rhyme or metre. Beowulf exhibits
this clearly as each line is composed around words that begin with the same
letter, in this case “h” and “m”:
to bid his henchmen a hall uprear,

ia master mead-house, mightier far
(Gummere trans., [1910] 2008, 7)
Alliterative verse continued to be an important structural device in Middle

English. Was this repetitive alliteration an aid to memory, in a society in
which stories were transmitted orally? Did it help listeners to “grasp” the
material?
Refrains employ the repetition of whole sentences or phrases in poetry. In
Yeats’ “September 1913” (Yeats, 1990) the famous refrain “Romantic Ireland’s
dead and gone /It’s with O’Leary in the grave” repeats and ends every stanza.
But single words can also be repeated as refrains. The raven from Poe’s poem
recites the word “nevermore” at the end of each stanza that follows his arrival.
Here one word repeats while others rhyme with the bird’s utterence:
But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing farther then he uttered –not a feather then he fluttered –
Til I scarcely more than muttered “Other friends have flown before –
On the Morow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before.”
Then the bird said “Nevermore”.
(Poe, 1845, in Ferguson, Salter and Stallworthy eds, 1996, 882)
47

The repetitions of the internal rhyme (lonely/only –uttered/fluttered/muttered)
are also clear in this stanza, as is the rhyming scheme of ABCBBB. Rhythm
and metre themselves are also, of course, repetitive in nature. The rhythm of
the poem is trochaic, while the metre is, according to Poe himself, “octameter
acatalectic, alternating with heptameter catalectic repeated in the refrain of
the fifth verse, and terminating with tetrameter catalectic” (Poe, 1846, 166).
Poe’s repetitions would greatly influence Mallarmé. Helen Abbott discusses
this mysterious quality that the Symbolists sought in the “variant refrain”
(as opposed to the “fixed” exact refrain) through the process of “unexpected
returns” (Abbott, 2009, 207–219). The altered rhyming of “fluttered” and
“uttered” or of “feather” and “farther”, for instance, from the same line above
in “The Raven”, resonate an echo of previous material but with subtle differ-
ences, as opposed to the fixed “nevermore”. Mary Breatnach sees Mallarmé’s
interest in music as part of a turn towards the intangible, and works like “Un
coup de dés” (1897) certainly show a poet less concerned with explicit meaning,
and instead experimenting with the medium and form (Breatnach, 1996, 28).
Images and themes are also repeated in various ways in literature;
Shakespeare repeats the idea of loss in various ways throughout Sonnet 30
for instance, while in Dylan Thomas’ fine example of villanelle cyclical struc-
ture, “Do not go gentle into that good night” (1951), the first and third lines
of the first stanza alternate as the closing lines of each successive stanza, while
the last stanza ends with both:
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
(Thomas, 1951, in Ferguson, Salter
and Stallworthy eds, 1996, 1465–1466)
The word “rage” forms a repeating couplet in the recurring line “Rage, rage
against the dying of the light”, also appearing earlier in the first stanza –here
the anger of the poet in the face of inevitable death is torturously evoked
with each repetitive plea. While in Ginsberg’s “Howl” (1956), the word “who”
repeatedly punctuates the beginning of each sentence (anaphora), giving an
ostinato-like rhythm to the poem:
who got busted in their public beards returning through Laredo with a
belt of marijuana for New York
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death
or purgatoried their torsos night after night.
(Ginsberg, 1956, in Ferguson, Salter and Stallworthy eds, 1996, 1599)
48

From sonnets, stanzas, couplets, triplets, ballads, to songs and alliterative
verse, rhetorical devices like anaphora, epistrophe and anadiplosis, repetition,
then, holds important large-scale structural and small-scale stylistic roles in
literature.
In Repetition and Semiotics: Interpreting Prose Poems (1986), Stamos
Metzidakis writes: “[t]‌he new is always seen in terms of the old, the unknown
in terms of the known. Repetition is that process which allows the reader to
grasp any meaning whatsoever” (Metzidakis, 1986, 2). Metzidakis believes
that repetition brings with it understanding. Here again, like in Kivy, we have
repetition being understood as a route to comprehension, a means of enab-
ling the reader to “grasp” the material. But Metzidakis later concedes that
with the developments of Deleuze and Derrida, alongside the now uncon-
cretised “author” (Barthes, Lacan, Kristeva, Foucault), the reader’s relation-
ship towards the material has become far more complex (Metzidakis, 1986,
12). One can strive towards definitive interpretations of a poem, like music,
but they are inevitably unachievable. There are simply too many variables
involved to, as Metzidakis describes, “pinpoint such an imagined individual”
(Metzidakis, 1986, 12).
Repetition in literature enables structural unity but it also allows Proustian
memories, echoes, and in the Deleuzian sense what Bloom calls “recollecting
forward”, quoting Kierkegaard (Metzidakis, 1986, 14). Repetitions in litera-
ture, like music, can foreshadow future events. The “future present” is engaged
in the time we take to read the temporal form of a poem or novel, or indeed
sit to watch a play. We compare the specific differences in what we perceive
in relation to what we have experienced before, while these new repetitions
become the recollections of future experiences.
But what are the contrasting factors in the use of repetition in words
and music? The difference in the conventions of employment of repetition
between music and literature is of particular interest here. Put simply, the scale
of tolerance is different. George Bernard Shaw made the observation that
though repetition occurs in both music and literature, we the reader/listener
accept separate thresholds of each (Shaw cited in Meisel, 1963, 41). Language
requires more new material while music allows the use of more abundant rep-
etitions and variations –transpositions, retrogrades, and so forth. Shaw sug-
gests that in opera, the music can repeat the same phrase in multiple ways in
a perfectly acceptable fashion; it is the sustenance of the intended feeling and
its development through time that is important. Literature, on the other hand,
must vary its language and ideas in order to hold interest: where Wagner can
repeat “Tristan” twenty times, Shakespeare cannot have twenty lines consist-
ing of the single word “Romeo” (Shaw cited in Meisel, 1963, 41).
Calvin Brown devoted a chapter (albeit a brief one) to the question of
repetition and variation in both music and literature (Brown, 1948, 100–114).
Like Shaw, Brown recognised the respective supposed rules governing the
employment and acceptability of repetitions in both arts. He writes: “The
general principles of repetition are much the same in music and in literature,
49

but there is a conspicuous difference in degree. In general, music demands
far more repetition than poetry can tolerate” (Brown, 1948, 109). As Carolyn
Abbate writes:
Verbal repetition on a small scale is often read as a degradation of lan-

guage, as a sign of a flattened self, as something to be feared, struggled
against: as uncanny … Repetition in music is as manifold as repetition
in language, yet it tends to be accorded a higher value. In music, small-
and large-scale recurrence is generally read as a fundamental means of
coherence … Music will bear far more repetition than any literary art –a
thousand times more.
(Abbate, 1996, 176, original emphasis)
But why this increased tolerance in music? For Brown, the abundance of
repetition in music is first due to the relatively young age of music (Brown’s
understanding) as a discrete discipline compared to literature, and he believed
such differences in the employment of repetition may become less apparent
over time. He writes:
[t]‌he repeat-marks often found in sonata-form … are often ignored in pre-

sent-day performance. Also, later composers seem not only to specify less
of this formal repetition, but to repeat themselves in general somewhat
less than did their predecessors. If this tendency continues, and if litera-
ture remains stable in this respect, five centuries from now the difference
in the use of repetition in music and literature may be far less striking
than it is now.
(Brown, 1948, 113)
The claim that music is a younger discipline is somewhat tenuous, if we con-

sider Steven Mithen’s recent work The Singing Neanderthals ([2005] 2006),
which offers persuasive conjecture on the primitive evolution of music and
language from a possible Neanderthal hybrid medium. Writing in 1948,
however, Brown could not have foreseen the huge importance that repeti-
tion would have in the new music that we have been documenting so far in
this chapter. His theory does hold for the development from standards in
jazz towards improvised music, however. Prior to the Historically Informed
Performance (HIP) movement of the 1980s onwards, performers indeed often
ignored the repeats in sonatas; in the same way that Shakespeare’s songs were
often omitted or swapped around between plays until recently, as directors
became more informed and conscientious. Such instances generally resulted
from an underestimation of their value to narrative function, mood-setting
and formal coherence, something that recent developments in performance
studies –Kivy, Dreyfus, Rifkin, McCreesh –have worked to rectify.
The second reason for such a tolerance of repetition in music, that
Brown suggests, is the importance of repetition as a large-scale structural
50

compositional tool in music. He suggests that repetition has long been the
basis for composition; a composer would begin with a motive, phrase or idea
and then work through the music with repetitions, retrogrades, transpositions,
recapitulations and so on, and that the literary author would proceed in a
different manner (Brown, 1948, 111). Brown’s idea of repetition seems par-
ticularly vague here, however. As we will explore later, repetition works dif-
ferently at various structural levels, be they local or discursive. My analysis in
Chapter 4 instead proposes a taxonomy of distinct forms of repetition.
But is there a more convincing reason for this scale of tolerance? The
semantic content of words, the signification of specifics renders the insistent
repetition of such materials boring or redundant in a relatively short period,
it might be posited. Does the lack of clear representation in the content allow
music more reworking of the materials? For Jeremy Begbie, the “relations of
sameness would appear to play a more crucial role than relations of diffe-
rence” in music (Begbie, 2000, 156). Similarly, Edward T. Cone believes there
is no such thing as redundancy in music (Cone cited in Begbie, 2000, 162).
Here we must clarify that redundancy in this respect refers to the idea of
“boredom” rather than the Leonard B. Meyer use of the word “redundancy”,
which he describes as a pervasive and necessary repetition of musical mater-
ial in order to achieve cohesion (Meyer, [1967] 1994, 277). It would seem that
the pejorative qualities of the word “redundancy” being applied by Meyer to
such an important feature of music is the issue here for Cone, and perhaps
rightly so.
If sameness is important to music, it is because of the temporal nature of
music described by Dahlhaus earlier. Theatre is traditionally closer to music
than novels in this regard, being temporally directed. Peter Kivy differen-
tiates between different types of time (“interrupted” and “continuous”) in
music, as does Max Paddison in his work on Adorno’s Bergsonian division
of time into “interpretative experience” (Erfahrung) and “lived experience”
(Erlebnis).20 Gérard Genette (1979), along similar lines, divided time into “dis-
course time” and “narrative time”. To read a novel can take more or less time
than the narrative itself takes to play out –Ulysses, for instance, takes place
in the course of a single day, yet many never reach the end of the book, or if
they do, it almost certainly takes more than twenty-four hours to complete
(certain Bloomsday challenges notwithstanding): the “discourse time” in this
case outweighs the “narrative time”. We do not have to read a novel at a par-
ticular speed, with certain dynamics, or even in a specific order –much like
how recording technology has changed the way listeners have developed new
modes of listening. Literary modernism did much to deconstruct such restric-
tions of the realist novel, Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1966), with its open form,21
or the cyclical nature of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, in which the final sentence
links back to the first in a continuous stream, a running river of endless read-
ing, inspired by Vico’s cyclical theory.
Musical repetition also allows a spatial depth that literature does not have.
Contrapuntal textures cannot be represented on the page –Joyce’s famous
51

attempt at a fuga per canonem during the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses, men-
tioned previously, is a fabulously ornate series of sounds, including an oper-
atic overture at the start that contains all the materials to be worked through
in the chapter. It is not, however, contrapuntal; each word follows another.
We simply cannot read interwoven and layered worded text simultaneously. It
would be wrong to say that Joyce failed in his attempt at textual counterpoint;
it is a beautiful metaphor of fugue in a musicalised fiction, but a single line all
the same.
There is a point at which repetition ceases to reinforce an idea or meaning,
and instead begins to deconstruct it. This is sometimes called “semantic sat-
uration” or “semantic satiation”. As John Kuonios, Sonja A. Kotz and Philip
J. Holcomb (2000, 1377) observe in their study of brain processes and seman-
tic transformation, the destabilisation of word meaning through repetition is
analogous to that of a retinal image as it starts to disappear.
It is at this later stage that Beckett’s late work operates. As Ruby Cohn
observed: “[i]‌n his verse and fiction of the 1930s he [Beckett] anchors an
order in repetition, but from 1949 to 1976 he seems to erode order through
the relentlessness of repetition, which is one of his ways ‘to find a form that
accommodates the mess’ ” (Cohn, 1980, 96). This “eroding” through repeti-
tion would continue after 1976, until Beckett’s death in 1989 (Cohn’s book
was published in 1980). Indeed Beckett’s arrangement of musical repetition
would become much more complex in his later prose, no more so than Ill Seen
Ill Said ([1981] 1997). Whereas in Murphy, as we’ll see in the next chapter,
the music is still relatively “intelligible”, the repetitive nature of Beckett’s
later prose employs the “inexplicable” (Beckett, [1931] 1999, 92) nature of
music towards providing a method of writing a “non-specific” text without
clear meaning (Reid, 1968, 34). In his later prose exact meaning erodes, to use
Cohn’s term, through the use of repetition.
Notes
1 For more on transmedial theory see Wolf (2009).
2 Brian Hulse, “A Deleuzian Take on Repetition, Difference, and the ‘Minimal’ in
Minimalism”, available at www.operascore.com/files/Repetition_and_Minimalism.
pdf [accessed 15 August 2013].
3 Graham, Daniel W., “Heraclitus”, in The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy
(Summer 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta ed., http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
sum2011/entries/heraclitus [accessed 15 August 2013].
4 See Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882) and Thus Spake Zarathustra (1891).
5 Anon (n.d.), “Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995)”.
6 An exploration and contrasting study of metre, repetition and rhythm is outside of
the scope of this book –my arguments keep to repetition as device, but for more
problematisation see Christopher Hasty’s Meter as Rhythm (1997).
7 The antiphonal nature of Caribbean and African musics and their ongoing influ-
ence on popular music is discussed by Tricia Rose in Black Noise (1994).
8 See Wimsatt and Beardsley (1954) and Roland Barthes ([1967] 1977b).
9 Philip Glass in Peter Greenaway’s documentary Four American Composers (1983).
52

10 For more on the problems behind the taxonomy of minimalism, see Dan
Warburton, “A Working Terminology for Minimal Music” at www.paristransat-
lantic.com/magazine/archives/minimalism.html [accessed 14 August 2013].
11 Ibid.
12 Of course there were many American serialists; Riley himself even studied and
wrote some early twelve-tone pieces under the supervision of Leonard Stein
at Los Angeles City College, where Stein was at one point an assistant to
Schoenberg.
13 Ironically, some German critics would also call Reich’s music fascist.
14 The term ostrich tuning has since described this practice of tuning many strings
to a single note, enabling repetitive drones, and has been employed by post-
minimalists such as New York composer Rhys Chatham, in compositions such as
Die Donnergotter, (1987).
15 Middleton discusses the repetitive nature of chart pop songs and the verse–chorus
format in “Play it Again Sam” (1983).
16 See Hesmondhalgh (2006).
17 For more on “apophany”, see Conrad (1959).
18 The quote is: “A man of genius makes no mistakes. His errors are volitional and
are the portals of discovery.”
19 The famous Beckett quote –“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail
again. Fail better” –occurs in Worstward Ho (1983c).
20 See the contributions by Paddison (2004) and Kivy (2004) in the special issue of
Musicae Scientiae devoted to time.
21 Umberto Eco’s (1989) concept of the “Open Work” is central here.
53
3
Musico-literary interaction in
modern Ireland and the musical
aesthetic of Samuel Beckett
Ireland in the early twentieth century was a hive of musico-literary invention.

While Yeats was composing a verbal music that encompassed the song tradi-
tions of Ireland, many Irish authors working in the early twentieth century
proclaimed a great interest in art music: Synge initially intended to be a com-
poser but was financially thwarted; Shaw, who began his career as a London
music critic, brought his extensive musical knowledge to his plays and viewed
himself as a direct successor to Wagner –the “perfect Wagnerite” even, mani-
festing itself most clearly in his “play of ideas”.1 Joyce was an accomplished
tenor, once appearing on the same bill as John McCormack. He was simultan-
eously documenting a bygone musical Dublin, most notably in “The Dead”,
while also developing texts that employed multiple musical devices, filling
both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake with leitmotifs, operatic references, ballads
and even an attempt at a fugue in prose (the structure of which has recently
proven to have been taken from the second edition of Grove’s Dictionary of
Music and Musicians).2 It is no coincidence that it is in the chapter entitled
“Proteus” that we find Stephen Dedalus pondering upon Lessing’s categories,
Nebeneinander and Nacheinander. Ovid was a favourite of the Modernists
and metamorphosis a liberating idea, a breath of fresh air from Lessing-esque
aesthetic purism. Joyce’s art was protean to its very core and encyclopaedic in
its scope. The “Sirens” chapter of Ulysses, though historically the subject of
intense debate and ranking up there amongst the most prevalent areas in the
vast mountain of literature written on Joyce, displays categorically the writer’s
predilection for intermedial art.
But Beckett would go further than any of his precursors. He praised
the music-like immediacy of expression in Finnegans Wake as “not to be
read –or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to”
(Beckett, [1929] 1983a, 27). Joyce’s musical text was, for Beckett, not “about
something; it is that something itself ” ([1929] 1983a, 27). In developing the
non-representational musical text, Beckett would, as we will see, take Irish
verbal music to a whole new realm. His music would, like Modernist music,
be a difficult one to comprehend; it would provide his work with the mys-
terious “inexplicable” quality that he wanted to achieve but still maintain a
certain intelligibility (Beckett [1931] 1999, 92). His reading of Schopenhauer’s
54
54 Musico-literary interaction in Ireland

philosophy of music encouraged him to go beyond the employment of musical
technique as superficial device; instead, his art of the “non-specific” could
be enabled through invoking the non-referential qualities of music (Reid,
1968. 34).
Harry White’s study of the phenomenon of Irish musicians-turned-
writers suggests that the creative focus on literature, rather than on art
music, in Ireland was the result of negative cultural-nationalism during
the early twentieth century and a lack of educational infrastructure. The
attitude of public figures like Richard Henebry, for instance, who main-
tained that “the more we foster modern music the more we help to silence
our own” (quoted in White, 2008, 5) created a culture in which new music
was shunned in favour of traditional folk music (or trad), which became
increasingly audible in Irish culture. The reluctance to embrace the musical
trends that were seizing Europe, however, had a significant impact on the
Irish literary style. White theorises that a silent art music in Ireland, a coun-
try “entirely absent from the ‘imaginary museum of musical works’ ”, using
Lydia Goehr’s metaphor, found its voice within literature (White, 2008, 3).
He suggests that the absence of a significant art music tradition resulted in
the integration of musical ideas and concepts into Irish literature at a deep
structural level. In fact, White claims that, during the 1890s, literature was
utilising music to such an extent that “a verbal understanding of music
(and of Irish music in particular) as the unheard melody of the literary
imagination attained far more significance than music itself ” (White, 2008,
6). Initially then, the cultural-nationalistic role of traditional music appears
to dominate both Irish society and its literature; and yet there appears to
be a hidden desire for the more European strains of the art music tradition,
a desire that is fulfilled in hitherto coded, or secret, ways. But do Beckett’s
musical texts solely reflect this Keatsian silenced Irish art music tradition,
or was there also another aesthetic reason developing in his late work, an
aesthetic that many Modernists shared to some degree?
Joyce and Beckett exhibited an affinity for music that resonated with many
of their international counterparts to some extent –Pound and Eliot were
also experimenting with musical ideas, for instance. In Listening In: Music,
Mind, and the Modernist Narrative (2002a), Eric Prieto suggests that the
Modernists, although divergent in their musical aesthetics, all held the view
that music enabled the expression of consciousness. It follows that, as the
Irish narrative moved away from objective realism to interior discourse, music
was able to assume great structural importance. The ability of Irish literature
to harbour musicality, then, was not only culturally conditioned but also his-
torically contingent.
The complex nature of Beckett’s musical aesthetic illustrates this phenom-
enon of music and literature interaction in Irish Modernism particularly well.
While Prieto situates Beckett in France, locating the author’s place in the
Parisian avant-garde, it is also important to recognise the writer’s position
in a line of Irish writers who engaged with musical ideas. Beckett, therefore,
5
Musico-literary interaction in Ireland 55

provides us with a useful window through which we can explore the theoret-
ical issues and questions posed by Word and Music Studies.
Beckett was a writer preoccupied with musical ideas. He employed musical
devices and techniques progressively throughout his career, but in a more fun-
damental way he questioned the very nature of music more than any of his
contemporaries. The study of music in Beckett’s work has attracted notable
scholarly attention. Vivian Mercier was somewhat ahead of his time when,
in 1977, he noted how “Beckett’s visual awareness, developed so cerebrally
and almost painfully, could never match his aural awareness, developed so
early and, relatively speaking, unconsciously” (Mercier, 1977, 114). Mary
Bryden’s collection of essays entitled Samuel Beckett and Music (1998) and
Lois Oppenheim’s Samuel Beckett and the Arts (1999) have encouraged inter-
disciplinary Beckett studies, while major studies have been conducted by Eric
Prieto (2002a) and Daniel Albright (2003). More recently, the field has bene-
fitted from Franz Michael Maier’s German-language monograph Becketts
Melodien: Die Musik und die Idee des Zusammenhangs bei Schopenhauer, Proust
und Beckett (2006), Catherine Laws’ Headaches Among the Overtones: Music
in Beckett/Beckett in Music (2013) and the French-language collection Beckett
et la musique, edited by David Lauffer and Geneviève Mathon (2014), in add-
ition to the collection Beckett and Musicality, edited by Nicholas Till and
Sara-Jane Bailes (2014).
In terms of Beckett’s musical background, his interest in the artform was
the result of an unusual musical upbringing for a child in early twentieth-
century Ireland. The Beckett family sent their boys to piano lessons, a prac-
tice generally restricted to girls in 1920s Foxrock (Mercier, 1977, 114). John
Beckett, Samuel’s cousin, became a composer and pianist, while Samuel him-
self continued his musical education at Portora and emerged an accomplished
amateur pianist. He would play duets for hours with his uncle Gerald, an
activity that John Beckett recounts:
My father was a good pianist, a very good sight-reader, but also the sort
of person who could go to a cinema and hear a song and come back
and play it. The piano was in the dining room of our house and he and
Sam would play for hours … They would have played what we had in the
house. We had volumes of Haydn symphonies, Haydn quartets, Mozart
symphonies, Beethoven symphonies and our favourites were arrange-
ments for four hands of the late quartets of Mozart.
(Quoted in Knowlson, 1996, 7).
Beckett harboured a great love for Schubert and Beethoven all his life, and this
childhood relationship with music would greatly influence his later literary
endeavours. James Knowlson, the writer’s biographer, documents Beckett’s
daily playing of the piano (Knowlson, 1996, 191). Beckett’s lifelong friend,
the poet Thomas MacGreevy, became somebody with whom the writer could
discuss musical matters and attend various concerts, particularly when they
56

both resided in London in the early stage of their respective careers. Their
letters are full of references to music, which along with their interest in Joyce
and poetry was a mutual obsession.
One such letter, recounting a Maryjo Prado piano recital, is typical of their
musical criticism and illustrative of Beckett’s knowledge of performance prac-
tice in particular. Beckett writes, “her Chopin and Debussy were dragged out
by the scruff of the neck, very disagreeable … [h]‌er left hand in the Scriabin
was extremely scrupulous and good” (quoted in Knowlson, 1996, 192). The
Shavian humorous overtones of the critique, while colloquial, nevertheless
exhibit confidence in a particular musical taste and stance as regards “scru-
pulous” practice.
Beckett’s letters continually demonstrate an engagement with music on
three levels: as performer, listener and critic. These activities informed one
another and played a significant role in the formation of the writer’s creative
aesthetic. But his enthusiasm for music went far beyond amateur performance
and appraisal; instead, it influenced his work at both a structural and a philo-
sophical level. Beckett inserted stage directions that required recorded music –
the Schubert lied (D. 827, op. 43, no. 2) that lends the play Nacht und Träume
([1982] 2006) its title, for instance, or the specific segments from the second
movement of Beethoven’s Piano Trio in D Major op. 70, no. 1 (“Ghost”)
for the television play Ghost Trio ([1975] 2006). In the radio play Words and
Music ([1961] 2006) the respective artforms of the title are personified as two
opposing characters, as Beckett effectively plays out the aesthetic problems of
musico-literary interaction in dialogue format. Words and Music will be fur-
ther explored in Chapter 5.
The repetitive speech patterns in many of Beckett’s plays also contain
strikingly musical characteristics. Perhaps the best illustration of this is Not
I ([1972] 2006), in which a solitary mouth performs the entire monologue,
and, which will be discussed in Chapter 6. The lack of any real visual staging
in Not I foregrounds the aurality of the work as the very process of creating
sound and delivering words is prioritised above any other dramatic element.
Knowlson recounts how Beckett would actively encourage the musical traits
of his work during rehearsals, insisting that the primacy of sound was his aes-
thetic intention: it was thus his job, he stated, to set the actors on “the right
musical road” (Knowlson, 1996, 668). Beckett was known to bring a metro-
nome to rehearsals when directing, and Knowlson describes him more like a
conductor than a theatre director, with the author beating out rhythms to the
actors’ speech, sometimes even prompting the pitch of the actors’ speech from
the piano (Knowlson, 1996, 668).
The “musical” qualities inherent in Beckett’s work have made him particu-
larly attractive to composers from Morton Feldman to Richard Barrett and
Scott Fields, whether seeking a text to set or as a general inspiration, as we
will further explore in Chapters 5 and 6. Beckett has arguably had as signifi-
cant an impact on modern music as he has had on literature.
57

What sets Beckett apart from other contemporary writers in terms of the
absorption of musical techniques and ideas into his work are his explora-
tions of the philosophy of music. Where the musicality of Joyce’s work mani-
fests itself as surface technique, device and quotation, Beckett’s writing also
involves a philosophical enquiry that operates at a deeper level. His 1931 cri-
tique Proust ([1931] 1999) (his first published book) displays Beckett’s con-
cerns with the meaning of music at an early stage in his artistic awakening.
The book recognises the significance of music in Proust’s work, going so far as
to posit: “music is the catalytic element in the work” (Beckett, [1931] 1999, 92).
Proust employs the metaphor of music to symbolise the non-representational
aspects of human life; for him, the term “musical” connotes a Romantic spirit
or consciousness rather than being a mere technical device. The influence on
Beckett is clear. In my analysis and discussion of Beckett’s musicality, I there-
fore do not shy away from the term “musical” in the Scher fashion (discussed
in Chapter 1), but rather employ it in the same way that both Beckett and
Proust themselves used it as Romantic symbol. Peter Dayan’s progressive “On
the meaning of ‘Musical’ in Proust” (2002) has been of great aid in this regard.
What is of particular significance in Proust is Beckett’s documented under-
standing, and misunderstanding also, of Schopenhauer’s musical thought
and its subsequent application in critique of the French novelist. J. D. O’Hara
points out that Beckett’s Schopenhauer deviates in quite an extreme man-
ner from the philosopher’s own writings, and that Beckett’s distortion of
Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation ([1818] 1969) is moulded
to fit the writer’s own musical aesthetic (O’Hara, 1988). Schopenhauer did not
posit the puritanical view that opera was a “corruption” of music through
the subordination of music to text (as Beckett describes); instead, he viewed
it as a combined expression of the same “embodied will” (Pilling, 1998, 176).
Schopenhauer did, as we have already discussed, view music as an artform
separate from the “other arts”, a discrete entity that inhabited a higher realm
similar to the one that Walter Pater would later envision. It is these devia-
tions from Schopenhauer’s own ideas, however, that best highlight the young
Beckett’s own aesthetic beliefs and prejudices, and most importantly grant us
an insight into his own philosophy of music –further explored in relation to
Beckett’s later work in Chapter 4. Beckett’s praise of the da capo form at the
end of Proust may provide insight into his employment of binary forms in
some of his own works. Mercier’s famous description of Waiting for Godot
([1953] 2006) as a play in which “nothing happens, twice”, might be viewed
as a kind of mysterious Beckettian da capo form, later providing the repeti-
tive structure of Play ([1963] 2006)) (Mercier, 1956, 6). Proclaiming “the ‘da
capo’ as a testimony to the intimate and ineffable nature of an art that is per-
fectly intelligible and perfectly inexplicable”, he realised that repetition does
not always bring comprehension (Beckett, [1931] 1999, 92). For Beckett, no
matter how many times we might hear a piece of music, we can never “com-
prehend” it “fully”; there is always the “inexplicable” aspect.
58

Beckett’s writing style, I suggest, evolved towards an aesthetic of intangi-
bility, or a semantic fluidity, attaining a universal quality through which the
writer allowed the reader to bring their own connotations and affiliations to
the work. As Beckett wrote:
My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as

fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else. If people
want to have headaches among the overtones, let them. And provide their
own aspirin.
(Beckett, Letter to Alan Schneider, Paris, 12 August,
1957, in Beckett and Schneider, 1998, 15)
Recognising the unattainable nature of definitive meanings, particularly with

the developments in structuralism and poststructuralism –Barthes’ “The
Death of the Author” ([1967] 1977b) with its interrogation of assumptions of
“intent”, echoing Wimsatt and Beardsley’s notion (1954) of the “Intentional
Fallacy”, for instance –Beckett created worlds with a certain semantic flu-
idity; the musical text provided the means. This semantic fluidity would not
emerge until later, however; Beckett’s musical aesthetic took many turns
beforehand. Instrumental music went in and out of favour in his stage direc-
tions, for instance, as the author grappled with his views on interdisciplinary
practice, while Beckett’s early novels employ music as metaphor rather than
ever granting the work semantic fluidity.3
Music and metaphor in Beckett’s early fiction

From Beckett’s first forays into prose he began incorporating musical ideas.
The “Walking Out” chapter of More Pricks Than Kicks ([1934] 1993), for
instance, contains a reference to one of Beckett’s favourite Schubert compo-
sitions, An die Musik (1817). Mary Bryden has discovered within Beckett’s
“Whoroscope” notebook, which he carried in the 1930s, the words and music
of the Schubert piece copied out. The final lines of “Walking Out” express
the same yearning for “better worlds” that the lied does: “They sit up to all
hours playing the gramophone, An die Musik is a great favourite with them
both, he finds in her big eyes better worlds than this” (Bryden, 1998, 29). In
the name “Belacqua”, the protagonist of Dream of Fair to Middling Women
([1932] 1992) and More Pricks Than Kicks, itself, there are musical connota-
tions. Belacqua is the indolent lute-maker in Dante’s Purgatorio (2008); in
Beckett he retains this lassitude and wishes for his relations with women to be
“like a music”, a theme that reappears in Murphy ([1938] 2003).
Musicality becomes increasingly significant in Beckett’s novels over time
as musical devices become more central to a non-representational quality
in the text. Watt ([1945] 1963) contains much musical discourse, as John
Fletcher points out: “the voices play as important a part in Watt’s existence
as mental retreat plays in Murphy’s” (Fletcher, 1964, 65). Watt contains
59

Beckett’s score for a threnody and the often confusing non-representational
nature of the novel has led scholars such as Eric Prieto to view Watt as a piv-
otal novel in Beckett’s development of a musical aesthetic, moving towards
a more relational artform than a denotative one (Prieto, 2002a, 252). The
Trilogy: Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), The Unnamable (1953) (1994)
sees Beckett progressively employing musical technique and philosophy, and
indeed, as we will see in the next chapter, these elements reach a peak in the
prose of the 1980s.
One of the principal techniques in Beckett’s fiction is the Joycean “echo”
that Knowlson spoke of:
Beckett may also have acquired from Joyce some of his practice of intro-
ducing echoes into his own writing, as if in music. It was a technique that
he developed much more fully even than Joyce, particularly in his later
prose and theatre.
(Knowlson, 1996, 106)
Take the “duet” of Moran and his son, for instance: “Just listen to what I am
going to say, because I will not say it twice … If you can’t find the second hand
bicycle buy a new bicycle. I repeat. I repeated. I who said I would not repeat
… It was not the moment to introduce another theme” ([1951] 1994, 143). The
epistrophe patterns here (repeated words at the end of sentences) are early
signs of a technique that Beckett would build on in later works, and repetition
would later become the defining characteristic of Beckett’s musical aesthetic,
as we will see in the next chapter. Repeated statements are scattered through-
out Molloy, such as Molloy’s exclamation that he is not “hard of hearing”
([1951] 1994, 49), reiterated in Moran’s “I have an extremely sensitive ear”
([1951] 1994,128). The act of listening is significant in Molloy; while Molloy
himself exhibits an outward disdain for music, his ear is always attuned to the
sounds around him: “bees hum in various tones” ([1951] 1994, 169).
In Murphy ([1938] 2003) we can see Beckett employing music in a number
of interesting ways at an early stage in his artistic career. His experiments with
the musical text would develop over time as these devices became progres-
sively more pervasive in his work, but it is this work that truly monumentalises
his first real musical explorations in fiction. Having written Proust in 1931,
as mentioned above and to be further explored in the next chapter, Beckett’s
Schopenhauerian philosophy of music had been well established by the time
he began Murphy. The sexual metaphor in Murphy is in fact one level of this
Yeatsian “sensual music” (“Sailing to Byzantium”, 1928, in Yeats, 1990), but
much more than just a ploy to avert the so-called “filthy censors”, those who
would not publish Beckett’s earlier novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women
(Beckett, [1938] 2003, 47). Murphy and Celia’s relationship is described in
musical terms; together they manage to reach a “higher realm” of harmoni-
ous, loving music, “their nights were still that: serenade, nocturne and albada”
([1938] 2003, 46). When they are in disagreement, this music is lost: “Celia
60

said that if he did not find work at once she would have to go back to hers.
Murphy knew what that meant. No more music” ([1938] 2003, 47). This music
metaphor spans the theoretical knowledge that Beckett possesses: “He kissed
her, in Lydian mode” ([1938] 2003, 82); “A kiss from Wylie was like a breve
tied, in a long slow amorous phrase, over bars’ times its equivalent in demi-
semiquavers” ([1938] 2003, 69).
At one point, Celia describes Murphy’s indecipherable speech in
musical terms:
She felt, as she felt so often with Murphy, spattered with words that went
dead as soon as they sounded; each word obliterated, before it had time
to make sense, by the word that came next; so that in the end she did
not know what had been said. It was like difficult music heard for the
first time.
(Beckett, [1938] 2003, 77)
Murphy’s words, like music, bear little tangible referentiality for Celia, and
she is unable to comprehend his outlook on life. Murphy’s words sound like
“difficult music heard for the first time”, as if she was listening to Webern or
Berg. White has compared Beckett to Webern, relating their shared concern
for the reduction of materials following the encyclopaedic grandeur of their
respective “masters”, Joyce and Schoenberg. He writes:
the contrast between Joyce’s verbally heroic largesse and Beckett’s con-
centrated parsimony of discourse … and the messianic compulsion of
Schoenberg’s reanimation of large-scale musical forms (opera, concerto,
cantata) by comparison with Webern’s scrupulous reductionism … On
both sides, reciprocity defines the relationship of master-builder (Joyce,
Schoenberg) and the “master of undermining” (Webern, Beckett).
(White, 1998, 163)
Schoenberg wrote his first serial compositions in 1923, while Joyce’s Ulysses,
published the previous year, marks what White believes to be “crucial devel-
opments in modernist fiction and music respectively” (White, 1998, 163).
Beckett himself once wrote: “James Joyce was a synthesizer, trying to bring
in as much as he could. I am an analyzer, trying to leave out as much as I can”
(19 April 1981, quoted in Gussow, 1981). The famous epiphany that Beckett
had, following the death of his father, was to go down the road of reduction
and distillation rather than to do battle with Joyce in the epic Modernist
tradition.
Music also metaphorically assists Beckett’s early fiction in terms of
character development or lack thereof. Among Murphy’s many erudite
accomplishments is his musical education. We know he is a musician of
sorts, who has over time ceased to engage with it: “his books, his pictures,
his postcards, his musical scores and instruments, all had been gradually
61

disposed of in that order rather than the chair” (Beckett, [1938] 2003, 107).
Murphy’s personality is entirely out of tune with his surroundings: the
“celestial” prescriptions of Suk advise Murphy to “resort to Harmony”
([1938] 2003, 23), but it is impossible for him to ever achieve this. As the
narrator writes:
His troubles had begun early. To get back no farther than the vagitus, it
had not been the proper A of international concert pitch, with 435 dou-
ble vibrations per second, but the double flat of this. How he winced, the
honest obstetrician, a devout member of the Dublin Orchestral Society
and an amateur flautist of some merit. With what sorrow he recorded
that of all the millions of little larynges cursing in unison at the particular
moment, the infant Murphy’s alone was off the note.
(Beckett, [1938] 2003, 44)
From his very first scream then, Murphy was out of tune with the world.
Neary’s ability to stop his heart from beating as a method of meditation,
something he refers to as “Apmonia” or the “Attunement”, is a trick that
Murphy fails to master. His personality proves too erratic and unbalanced to
achieve such consonance. In a Cartesian sense, and Descartes features heavily
in the novel, Murphy wishes to exist solely in the “little world” of the mind,
and thus fails to unify the mind/body dichotomy in any harmonious manner.
The very first image of the book is of Murphy naked and bound to a chair in
an attempt to achieve a possibly maternal kind of peace; the cradle-like rock-
ing is perhaps significant. Murphy views himself as an alien amongst ordinary
society; the only people he can truly identify with are patients in the Magdalen
Mental Mercyseat –it’s no coincidence that the protagonist of Ken Kesey’s
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) is named McMurphy. The funda-
mental drive of the narrative is the paralysis, or unwillingness, of Murphy to
engage with the outside, real world; upon hearing street sounds, he is reminded
of his contempt for the outside: “These were sights and sounds that he did not
like. They detained him in the world to which they belonged, but not he, as he
fondly hoped” ([1938] 2003, 6). In contrast, Murphy’s chess-mate, the schizo-
phrenic Mr Endon, possesses an “inner voice” that is “unobtrusive and melo-
dious, a gentle continuo in the whole consort of his hallucinations” ([1938]
2003, 105), perhaps endowing him with the upper hand that enables him to
defeat Murphy.
Ruby Cohn writes that Murphy’s repetitive nature was one of the reasons
why it was rejected in the first place until its eventual acceptance in 1937
(Cohn, 2001, 84). Perhaps these publishers/critics saw only monotony or what
they took for a lack of variety and originality, where in fact Beckett was using
repetition in a deliberate and complex manner.
There are also many sentences or passages that are repeated discur-
sively (on a more structural level) throughout the book. Murphy’s ultima-
tum to Celia that if he was forced to work in the “mercantile gehenna”,
62

either she, his body or his mind would have to go: “If you, then you only;
if my body, then you also; if my mind, then all” (Beckett, [1938] 2003, 27),
for instance.4 Murphy recollects this later and repeats to himself, “You, my
body, my mind … one must go” ([1938] 2003,107). Other discursive repeats
in the book are the “acoustic properties” of the stairwell in the dark, rec-
ognised by the prying Miss Carridge as she listens out for Celia’s move-
ments upstairs ([1938] 2003, 89), later repeated by the narrator: “that black
night so rich in acoustic properties, and on the landing, to the infinite sat-
isfaction of Miss Carridge” ([1938] 2003, 130). Likewise, the directions of
Professor Suk constantly reverberate in Murphy’s mind, and are also reiter-
ated by Celia: “ ‘Avoid exhaustion by speech’, she said” ([1938] 2003, 25);
“ ‘Avoid exhaustion’, she murmured, in weary ellipsis of Suk” ([1938] 2003,
80). The triple “M” of “Magdalen Mental Mercyseat”, Murphy’s work-
place, soon takes on another meaning for him: “MMM stood suddenly
for music, Music, MUSIC, in brilliant, brevier and canon” ([1938] 2003,
132). This alliterative triplet is later echoed as Murphy contemplates his
return to Celia: “leaving Ticklepenny to face the music, Music, MUSIC,
back to Brewery Road, to Celia, serenade, nocturne, albada” ([1938] 2003,
141). The format is repeated in the rising crescendo of the triplet “all, All,
ALL” ([1938] 2003, 135). Other repeats occur several times on a single page,
imposing a tempo or rhythm on a passage while also informing us of certain
facts: “A lie” ([1938] 2003, 84), for instance, or “In vain” ([1938] 2003, 141).
“All out” repeats musematically (locally) six times on the final page ([1938]
2003, 158), calling to a close the park as well as the book –the reader must
vacate the premises just as Celia and Mr Kelly do.
Characters are often identified by their own idiosyncratic repeats in leit-
motivic fashion: Wylie by his continuous repetition of “The horse leech’s
daughter is a closed system. Her quantum of wantum” ([1938] 2003, 112),
a reference to Proverbs 30:15, and his eloquent way of expressing his theory
of covetous greed; Miss Counihan by her stilted “er”s ([1938] 2003, 33); Miss
Carridge by her reiterations of “the principle of the thing, the principle of the
thing” ([1938] 2003, 85); or Neary as he emphasises intelligibility: “ ‘Outside
us’, said Neary. ‘Outside Us’ ” ([1938] 2003, 120), or his attempts to com-
fort with the reassuring lullaby-like “ ‘There there’, aid Neary. ‘There there.
There there’ ” ([1938] 2003, 150). These leitmotivic repetitions are similar to
the “exact clothed repeats” that I discuss in terms of Beckett’s later work in
the next chapter.
Murphy’s rocking is perhaps the most significant act of repetition in the
novel, a motif that would reappear most famously in Rockaby ([1981] 2006).
The rhythm of his rocking chair provides his only method of attaining a
peaceful state of mind:
The rock got faster and faster, shorter and shorter, the iridescence was
gone, the cry in the mew was gone, soon his body would be quiet. Most
things under the moon got slower and slower and then stopped, a rock
63

got faster and faster and then stopped. Soon his body would be quiet,
soon he would be free.
(Beckett, [1938] 2003, 9)
The repetitions of “faster and faster” and “soon his body would be quiet” in
just this short passage emphasise the repetitive nature of the ritualistic act.
If we compare this early passage to Murphy’s final moments, we can see that
most of the passage is repeated:
The rock got faster and faster, shorter and shorter, the gleam was gone,
the grin was gone, the starlessness was gone, soon his body would be quiet.
Most things under the moon got slower and slower and then stopped, a
rock got faster and faster and then stopped. Soon his body would be
quiet, soon he would be free.
The gas went on in the WC, excellent gas, superfine chaos.
Soon his body was quiet.
(Beckett, [1938] 2003, 142)
When Murphy leaves Celia alone, she in fact repeats his repetitive rocking, and
even begins to comprehend the motives behind his strange activities: “Thus
in spite of herself she began to understand as soon as he gave up trying to
explain … She could not sit for long in the chair without the impulse stirring,
tremulously, as for an exquisite depravity, to be naked and bound” ([1938]
2003, 42).
One of Murphy’s “highest attributes”, according to the astrologer Suk, is
“Silence” ([1938] 2003, 22). In the passage quoted above, Murphy imagines
his death in terms of such quietude. I return to the integral role of silence in
Beckett’s work in Chapter 6, a trait that itself develops in the author’s aes-
thetic. In Murphy, pauses or rests often follow passages of intensity, be it a
heated debate between Murphy and Celia –“There was a long silence, Celia
forgiving Murphy for having spoken roughly to her” ([1938] 2003, 81) –a
moment of unease –“There was a silence, Bim liking the look of Murphy
less and less, Murphy racking his brains for plausible curiosity” ([1938]
2003, 92) –or when at the morgue, upon the group being asked to iden-
tify Murphy’s body, “Such a silence followed these words that the faint hum
of the refrigerators could be heard” ([1938] 2003, 148). John Cage (1973)
observed that true silence doesn’t exist; here we have the inescapable sound
of a kitchen appliance. Other passages contain musical rests that accentuate
the drama while also instilling a sombre tempo to the episode. An abandoned
and heartbroken Celia attempts to explain her plight in stilted fashion, as
follows:
“At first I thought I had lost him because I could not take him as he was.
Now I do not flatter myself.”
64

A rest.
“I was a piece out of him that he could not go on without, no matter
what I did.”
A rest.
“He had to leave me to be what he was before he met me, only worse, or
better, no matter what I did.”
A long rest.
“I was the last exile.”
A rest.
(Beckett, [1938] 2003, 130–131)
Likewise, the integral final moments that Murphy shares with the slumbering
Mr Endon are enhanced by the use of musical rests:
Murphy heard words demanding so strongly to be spoken that he spoke

them, right into Mr Endon’s face, Murphy who did not speak at all in
the ordinary way unless spoken to, and not always even then.
“the last at last seen of him
himself unseen by him
And of himself ”
A rest.
“The last Mr Murphy saw of Mr Endon was Mr Murphy unseen by
Mr Endon. This was also the last Murphy saw of Murphy.”
A rest.
“The relation between Mr Murphy and Mr Endon could not have been
better summed up by the former’s sorrow at seeing himself in the latter’s
immunity from seeing anything but himself.”
A rest.
“Mr Murphy is a speck in Mr Endon’s unseen.”
(Beckett, [1938] 2003, 140)
Beckett’s use of epistrophe is clearly apparent here, as are the binaries and
chiasmus of the line “The last Mr Murphy saw of Mr Endon was Mr Murphy
unseen by Mr Endon”. Such wordplay abounds in Murphy and is very char-
acteristic of early Beckett. The narrator often interjects with witty wordplay
on senses (paronomasia) or repetitions of sentences, such as “He was vigilant
and agitated. His vigilance was agitated” ([1938] 2003, 68). Such rhetorical
devices become increasingly pivotal in Beckett’s musical repetition, as we will
see in the next chapter. Mr Endon’s condition meant that he never truly saw
Murphy as anything but a chess-mate: he was perhaps however, tragically,
the closest that Murphy found to a peer or friend, a genuine inhabitant of
the “little world” that Murphy so wanted to inhabit. As Murphy sees his own
reflection in Mr Endon’s eye, the cracked looking glass of a lost mutual rec-
ognition, this is the nearest Murphy gets to harmony or unison in a distorted
65

world before his inevitable tragic end. Beckett’s musical text would evolve
alongside his aesthetic, but its beginnings are clear to see in Murphy.
Notes
1 Wagner became a hero to Shaw and the subject of his culminating work of music
criticism The Perfect Wagnerite (1898). Harry White believes Shaw’s “play of ideas”,
drama of the intellect, was Shaw’s only way forward following Wagner’s achieve-
ments in melodrama. See White (2008, 133–153). Shaw writes: “The drama of pure
feeling is no longer in the hands of the playwright: it has been conquered by the
musician, after whose enchantments all the verbal arts seem cold and tame. Romeo
and Juliet with the loveliest Juliet is dry, tedious, and rhetorical in comparison with
Wagner’s Tristan, even though Isolde be both fourteen stone and forty, as she often
is in Germany … there is no future now for any drama without music except the
drama of thought. The attempt to produce a genus of opera without music (and this
absurdity is what our fashionable theatres have been driving at for a long time with-
out knowing it) is far less hopeful than my own determination to accept problem as
the normal material of the drama” (Shaw cited in Meisel, 1963, 44).
2 Brown (2007).
3 Lois Overbeck provides a useful overview of Beckett’s changing stance on musical
collaboration in “Audience of Self/Audience of Reader” (2011).
4 For a detailed explanation of my taxonomy of repetition, see Chapter 4.
6
4
Beckett’s semantic fluidity
Repetition in the later work
One of the most striking features of Beckett’s later writing are the persist-
ent repetitions that infuse his prose, repeated sounds that seem to break
apart the narrative and move towards a guttural form of enunciation. For a
reader hoping for a clear, intelligible story, such stuttering appears like hesi-
tation: a fissure in the flow of information that might suggest an author bat-
tling uncertainty or anguish. However, it is precisely within these moments
of excessive repetition that the key to Beckett’s narratives lies. At first glance,
repetition draws the reader’s attention away from the story and onto the writ-
ing itself, initiating a formal, structuralist materiality; but I will argue that
these moments in fact take us further into the Beckettian musical aesthetic,
by dissolving explicit meanings that we can grasp, and instead endowing the
work with a semantic fluidity. This, I suggest, is due to the inherently musical
nature of Beckett’s repetition, a result of his philosophical engagement with
Schopenhauer.
Beckett’s later Schopenhauerian music

Might Beckett’s abundant employment of repetitions in his later work be
related to a Schopenhauerian philosophy of music wherein the writer
attempts to express the Kantian noumenon through a musical text: to evoke
“the universal in the particular”, as Bryan Magee (2000, 170) puts it? For
Schopenhauer, the noumenon and the phenomenon are two sides of the same
reality. For him, the unknown noumenon, outside of all experiential know-
ledge and void of material objects as well as time and space themselves, could
be reached, if only briefly, through music. An artform not “condemned to
explicitness” yet structured within “intelligible”, amenable forms –music –
represented the highest of the arts for Schopenhauer. Music, he believed,
enabled engagement with the “thing in itself ”, the reality that we cannot
comprehend or express in words. Kant recognised that we can only perceive
that part of reality that our physical capabilities allow, and for Schopenhauer
music offers us a teasing, satisfying, yet unexplained, glimpse of this other
side of reality: the noumenon –“the world is my representation” (Budd,
1985, 78).
67
Beckett’s semantic fluidity 67
Figure 4.1 The Human Condition (1933) –René Magritte © ADAGP, Paris and DACS,
London 2016
This concept can be explained by looking at Magritte’s painting The

Human Condition (1933) (Figure 4.1). A key element of the human condi-
tion is, as Kant ([1781] 1998) pointed out, that all we understand as reality
is only our perception, a small portion of reality that our senses allow us to
view. Magritte’s painting inside the room represents the painter’s perception
or interpretation of the exterior landscape –sans noumena. Magritte clearly
understood the problems inherent in forms of representation. The landscape
may be repeated in canvas, but it is always different as a result of perception.
In reality, science tells us, the outside that is depicted here would in fact be
blue with ultraviolet light. Our brains compensate for this and decode our
surroundings in a manner that makes sense to our understanding and mental
68
68 Beckett’s semantic fluidity

capability. As humans, there is indeed a great deal more that we can’t perceive
than that which we can. Neural Darwinism, the study of brain development
in its environment and how it becomes perceptually conditioned as a result
of context, explores these issues. At the subatomic level, the world changes
upon the gaze of the onlooker (Heisenberg principle); so too does the recep-
tion of phenomena in the world of our senses. Schopenhauer’s Romantic
view actually sounds strikingly similar to how quantum physicists describe
our perception of the world; Schopenhauer’s “the world is my representa-
tion” (Budd, 1985, 78) is echoed in Einstein’s “[r]‌eality is merely an illusion,
albeit a very persistent one” (Einstein quoted in Montgomery, 2010, 1), or
Plato’s allegory of “The Cave” (Plato, c.380 BC). Schopenhauer was fasci-
nated with Eastern philosophies, and Buddhism was a major influence on his
thought; Buddha’s teaching that the universe is itself a concept pre-empts
these Western developments. Of course, there is yet another layer to this
painting, due to the fact that the whole picture of the room is itself a visual
representation on canvas.
Beckett’s involvement with the work of Schopenhauer has been well docu-
mented and his preoccupation with “the thing itself ” is established.1 In his
early essay on Joyce, for instance, Beckett spoke of the Work in Progress as not
“about something; it is that something itself ” (Beckett, [1929] 1983a 27). The
book, Beckett writes, is “not to be read –or rather it is not only to be read. It
is to be looked at and listened to” ([1929] 1983a, 27). Joyce himself referred to
the book as “pure music” (Joyce quoted in Ellmann, [1959] 1982, 703).2 The
performative musicality of Finnegans Wake would influence Beckett’s own
musical aesthetic.
Beckett was not concerned about incongruities between the philosophies
and texts that he read, borrowed from, and incorporated in his own work.
Intertextual material abounds in Beckett, and the contradictions that arise
employ a postmodern poetic licence. In a letter to MacGreevy (July 1930), he
writes: “I am reading Schopenhauer. Everyone laughs at that” (see Knowlson,
1996, 122). But Beckett is not concerned with the problems of the philoso-
pher, nor the futile search for hard truths; instead he seeks “an intellectual
justification of unhappiness –the greatest that has ever been attempted” (see
Knowlson, 1996, 122).
The writer continued to harbour a love for Schopenhauer throughout
his life, and, like Wagner, consistently reread the The World as Will and
Representation. A convalescing Beckett wrote to MacGreevy of the comfort
he found in the work:
the only thing I could read was Schopenhauer. Everything else I tried
only confirmed the feeling of sickness … I always knew he was one of
the ones that mattered most to me, and it is a pleasure more real than any
pleasure for a long time to begin to understand now why it is so. And it is
a pleasure also to find a philosopher that can be read like a poet.
(See Knowlson, 1996, 248)
69

Beckett’s study Proust ([1931] 1999) examines the French novelist from a dis-
tinctly Schopenhauerian perspective:
The influence of Schopenhauer on this aspect of the Proustian demon-

stration is unquestionable. Schopenhauer rejects the Leibnitzian [sic] view
of music as “occult arithmetic”, and in his aesthetic separates it from the
other arts, which can only produce the Idea with its concomitant phenom-
ena, whereas music is the Idea itself, unaware of the world of phenom-
ena, existing ideally outside the universe, apprehended not in Space but
in Time only, and consequently untouched by the teleological hypothesis.
(Beckett, [1931] 1999, 92)
Here, Gottfried Leibniz’s notion of a grand order of things –there being a

reason for everything, a greater good –is condemned as “occult arithmetic”,
in the face of Schopenhauer’s view of the meaninglessness of reality. For
Schopenhauer, music has the ability to express the “Idea” without any of the
“concomitant phenomena”, the multitude manifestations of the noumenon in
the phenomenon without the baggage. As Magee writes: “[music] is, according
to Schopenhauer, the self-expression of something that cannot be represented
at all, namely the noumenon. It is the voice of the metaphysical will” (Magee,
2000, 171).
Just like his lifelong affinity for Schopenhauer, Beckett’s concern with the
nature of music never waned. Beckett told Lawrence Shainberg as late as 1987
that he viewed music as “the highest art form” for the very fact that “it’s never
condemned to explicitness” (see Bryden, 1998, 31), an obvious reference to
the following Schopenhauer passage:
The inexpressible depth of all music, by virtue of which it floats past us a

paradise quite familiar and yet eternally remote, and is so easy to under-
stand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the
emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote
from its pain.
(See Pilling, 1998, 177)
It is this notion of music, never being “condemned to explicitness”, not tied

down to definitive semantics, that I believe Beckett sought in his own art. In
Proust, Beckett explores how the novelist achieved this combination of the
“intelligible” and “inexplicable” in a work in which music was the “catalytic
element” ([1931] 1999 92). Of course, he was a writer first and foremost,
and we must read his idealistic proclamation of music as “the highest art
form” with some caution. The crucial element that Beckett borrows from
music is the possibility of what I refer to as semantic fluidity, the creation
of a language that is both “intelligible” and “inexplicable” at the same time.
Semantic fluidity occurs when an artform disallows any definitive interpret-
ation of the signs involved. Beckett’s later writing offers a more universal
70

world in which the reader can, to a certain extent, create his or her own
meanings.
Beckett’s semantic fluidity stems not only from musical sound, but also
from the silences that punctuate and propel it. In a letter to Axel Kaun in
July 1937, the author wrote: “Is there any reason why that terrible materi-
ality of the word surface should not be capable of being dissolved, like for
example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses, of Beethoven’s seventh
symphony” (Beckett, 2009, 518). The relation of the frequent “pauses” and
rests in Beckett’s work to that of his beloved Beethoven is apt and the use of
silence is certainly a central element of Beckett’s musical formalism. However,
this idea of “dissolving” the word surface, melting its very meaning, presents
a fundamental problem. Words will always carry some semiotic content no
matter how they are deconstructed. A persistent problem for Beckett was
the failure of words to express anything sufficiently: the imperfections of the
medium lead to confusion and communication is often stifled by insurmount-
able gulfs of expression. For him, such problems became the basis for creation
itself; focusing upon the issue led to the production of art. Catherine Laws
argues that:
Beckett’s work exposes the complexities and deliberate contradictions of

the postmodern condition. His assertion of the impossibility of expres-
sion is offset by the experience of reading, watching and/or listening, and
the paradox of the success of his writing resists simplification and focuses
on problematization as a force for creation (without ever suggesting that
the problems have been solved)
(Laws, 1996, 254)
The juxtaposition of the “intelligible”, distilled, accurate words, alongside

the “inexplicable” mysterious quality in his work, then, deliberately fore-
grounds the very failures of language itself. Adorno touched on this duality
when he likened Beckett’s work to music. In his notes on The Unnamable,
written towards an unpublished essay (recently translated), he writes: “In
B[eckett] there is, a kind of counterpoint, something like sound common
sense. Everything so meaningless, yet at the same time the way one speaks
is so normal” (Adorno, [1961] 2010, 175). The paradox of Schopenhauer’s
philosophy of music is that the philosopher equates music with something
that can never be represented; it is a representation of an invisible inner real-
ity, but how can a copy (music) depict the unrepresentable? As Budd puts
it, Schopenhauer’s music is “the copy of an original that can itself never
be directly represented” (Budd, 1985, 86). Budd’s devastating critique of
Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music highlights the contradictions inherent
in believing that all music brings about satisfactory conclusions and endings
while still evoking endless yearning –how Schopenhauer describes the prelude
to Wagner’s Tristan, or how a Beethoven symphony could contain all human
emotions while music remains “a representation of that which cannot be
71

represented” (1985, 92). Schopenhauer’s misunderstandings regarding music
and the problems contained in his outdated ideas on representation lead Budd
to proclaim: “Schopenhauer’s philosophy is not a fitting monument to the
art” (1985, 103). The real rub in Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music is, as
Budd explains, that to access the “will”, one must be in a state of pure con-
templation, unaffected by emotion; yet Schopenhauer contradicts himself by
suggesting that music, an emotional form, is the key to our innermost being.
If, in order to access what it represents, we must approach it without emotion,
should music then be free from emotion (1985, 101)?
Very few would proclaim nowadays that music represents our innermost
being in such a Romantic fashion, just as a repetition can never be exact. But
such contradictions were not important to Beckett, who saw the philosopher
as a poet; instead, such problems became the focus of his work, material to
be employed creatively. The foregrounding of the impossible and futile search
for direct representation, mimesis, of communicating exactly and sufficiently
became Beckett’s life work.
Recognising the unattainable nature of definitive meanings, Beckett cre-
ated worlds with a certain semantic fluidity. Eric Prieto believes that Beckett’s
art is music-like in the fact that it is relational rather than denotative –words
operate in relation to one another, as notes do in music, without clear relation-
ships to external objects (Prieto, 2002a, 252). Beckett’s words do, of course,
always contain connotation and meaning, but what Prieto is suggesting here
is that Beckett’s words are moving towards a non-representational realm simi-
lar to that of music. Through the influence of the French Symbolists, the
Romantics, and the literary Wagnerism that swept across late nineteenth-
century Europe, Schopenhauer’s philosophy of music began to take root in
numerous artists’ aesthetics.3 Music does contain semantic content obviously,
but in this grey area between the two artforms, such metaphor manifests itself
as a kind of asymptotic curve, as one reaches towards the other, never to meet
fully. Did the language of Beckett’s late work become so “dissolved” that the
words no longer held any hard objective meaning in relation to the external
extra-textual world?
In a 1968 television discussion, Adorno argued that Beckett’s musical-
ity is not based on “linguistic imitation of musical effects,” as it is in Joyce’s
work, for instance, but instead on “the way in which linguistic sounds are
organised into structures,” such that the “prose is not simply organised by
meaning” (Adorno, [1961] 2010, 187). If the prose is not “organised by mean-
ing,” however, how is it organised, and to what end? Beckett’s writing style,
I theorise, evolved towards an aesthetic of intangibility, attaining a universal
quality through which the writer encouraged readers to bring their own con-
notations and affiliations to the work. When approaching Beckett, the reader
gazes through a kind of filter, like the “attributive screens” proposed by Peter
J. Rabinowitz, wherein a person’s history of experiences and tastes, their social
context and their listening history all imbue their initial experience of the
work (Rabinowitz, 1992, 38–56). This is true of all reading experiences, but is
72

particularly emphasised and elevated in Beckett’s case. The less that is certain
for the reader, the more possibilities there are. By eroding definite meaning
and reducing materials to a minimum, Beckett managed to say more with less.
Did Beckett’s Schopenhauerian philosophy of music lead to his employ-
ment of repetitions that operate in a Deleuzian manner? The repetitions do
not help us “grasp” the narrative, in Kivy’s manner. Instead, clarity is eroded,
dissolved; the repetitions are not the same but evolve on the page and in the
ear of the listener/reader. The liberation of repetitions in Beckett’s work
would seem to deliberately embrace the “absurd” that Shaw suggested earlier
would be the result of repetition’s proliferation in literature.4 Beckett’s use of
repetition is also clearly in opposition to Abbate’s categorisations.
Beckett found the semantic fluidity that he sought in the Schopenhauerian
Romantic philosophy of music, and this influence manifests itself primarily
in the form of repetitions and echoes. As we saw in Chapter 1, Modernist
experimentation had reached a point at which Beckett spoke of a “rupture
of the lines of communication” and a “breakdown of the object” (Beckett,
[1934] 1983b, 70); in Daniel Albright’s words, language was beginning
to “lose connection to the world of hard objects” and “become more and
more like musical notes” (Albright, 2000, 6). Was Beckett employing repeti-
tion in a manner that enabled the “intelligible” and the “inexplicable” to co-
exist? Ultimately this would always remain an asymptotic curve, as the move
towards music in Beckett’s language and the development of semantic fluidity
in his words always remains a teleology without a finite terminus.
Ill Seen Ill Said ([1981] 1997) is a book haunted by a ghostly music, set in
an unearthly realm removed from the spatial and temporal boundaries of
reality. Beckett here delves into a base of half-remembered memories and per-
ceptions. Is this female protagonist more than “pure figment” ([1981] 1997,
20)? The time and unspecific location are unknown, while the solitary old
woman’s faculties of sight and memory continue to fade. Questions remain
unanswered; like Beckett’s idea of music’s virtue, the narrative here is “never
condemned to explicitness” (Beckett quoted in Bryden, 1998, 31). Specific
details are neither seen nor said.
Knowlson’s observation of “echoes” in Beckett’s work”, seen in Chapter 3,
is particularly apt with regard to this book. Within the fabric of Ill Seen Ill
Said’s staccato sentences lies an interwoven system of motifs, as we can see
from this excerpt:
1.Back after many winters. 2.Long after in this endless winter. 3.This end-
less heart of winter. 4.Too soon. 5.She as when fled. 6.Where as when
fled. 7.Still or again. 8.Eyes closed in the dark. 9.To the dark. 10.In their
own dark. 11.On the lips same minute smile. 12.If smile is what it was.
13.In short alive as she alone knows how neither more nor less.14.Less!
15.Compared to true stone. 16.Within as sadly as before all as at first sight
ill seen. 17.With the happy exception of the lights’ enhanced opacity. 18.
Dim the light of day from them were day again to dawn. 19.Without on
73

the other hand some progress. 20.Toward unbroken night. 21.Universal
stone. 22.Day no sooner risen fallen. 23.Scrapped all the ill seen ill said.
24.The eye has changed. 25.And its drivelling scribe. 26.Absence has
changed them. 27.Not enough. 28.Time to go again. 29.Where still more
to change. 30.Whence back too soon. 31.Changed but not enough. 32.
Strangers but not enough. 33.To all the ill seen ill said. 34.Then back
again. 35.Disarmed for to finish with all at last. 36.With her and her rags
of sky and earth. 37.And if again too soon go again. 38.Change still
more again. 39.Then back again. 40.Barring impediment. 41.Ah. 42.So
on. 43.Till fit to finish with it all at last. 44.All the trash. 45.In unbroken
night. 46.Universal stone. 47.So first go. 48.But first see her again. 49.As
when fled. 50.And the abode. 51.That under the changed eye it too may
change. 52.Begin. 53.Just one parting look.54.Before all meet again.
55.Then go. 56.Barring impediment. 57.Ah.
(Beckett, [1981] 1997, 50–51, sentence numbering added)
Even from this one segment of text the use of repetition is striking. If we ana-
lyse this single paragraph of the 61 paragraphs in the book, we can begin to
realise the extent of Beckett’s employment of repetition. Four categories of
repetition that I will highlight are labelled as follows:
1. Exact clothed repetitions –these are recurrences of the “same” material,

always with Deleuze’s warnings of the importance of different successive
contexts –hence the use of his word “clothed” rather than “naked” repe-
tition –there is always an assimilation of meaning that snowballs with
each exact repetition.
2. Local musematic repetitions, after Middleton’s “musematic” –these are
local repeats often with minor variations; position and phonetics are of
particular importance here.
3. Binary oppositional repetitions –those used to emphasise contrasting
themes, contradictions, homonyms.5
4. Discursive repetitions, again named after Middleton –these are repeats
acting on a more architectonic, structural level, often recurring through-
out an entire work, coming and going in almost leitmotivic fashion in
that these combine and develop over time; also often self-reflexive, like
Joycean stream of consciousness, these repeats often direct the narrator.
Close reading No. 1 from Ill Seen Ill Said
1. Exact clothed repetitions

Of the 57 lines in this paragraph, there are 53 different sentences, and
most of those indeed include segments of others. Four sentences are exact
repeats, albeit clothed Deleuzian ones; two of these recur in a row and end
the paragraph (40–41/56–57: “Barring impediment. Ah”). In sentences 21/46
74

(“Universal stone” –“stone” also appears in sentence 15), both occur after
the words “unbroken night” in sentences 20 and 45. The other exact clothed
repeat is in sentences 34 and 39, “Then back again”. There are 261 words in
the paragraph, of which only 130 are unique. This means that the ratio of
repetition in Beckett’s writing here is almost an exact 2:1, a ratio that can be
found in many of his works that I have analysed. The individual words are
as follows: back, after, many, winter(s), long, in, this, endless, heart, of, too,
soon, she, as, when, fled, where, still, or, again, eye(s), closed, the, dark, to,
their, own, on, lips, same, minute, smile, if, is, what, it, was, short, alive, alone,
knows, how, neither, more, nor, less, compared, true, stone, within, sadly,
before, all, at, first, sight, ill, seen, with, happy, exception, of, lights, enhanced,
opacity, dim, day, from, them, were, dawn, without, other, hand, some, pro-
gress, toward, unbroken, night, universal, sooner, risen, fallen, scrapped, said,
has, change(d), and, its, drivelling, scribe, absence, not, enough, time, go,
where, whence, but, strangers, disarmed, for, finish, last, her, rags, sky, earth,
barring, impediment, ah, so, till, fit, trash, see, abode, under, may, begin, just,
one, parting, look, before, meet, then.
Figures 4.2a and 4.2b set out the frequency of the repetition rate for each
word within the paragraph, including the percentage of the entire word count
each accounts for and the repetition of the grouping of words into repeated
phrases:6
2. Local musematic repetition

The position at which Beckett employs these repetitions within successive sen-
tences is important. In the first three sentences “winter” occurs at the end of
each, an example of Beckett’s use of epistrophe. This endless winter is itself
an echo from That Time, featuring the line “always winter then endless win-
ter” ([1976] 2006, 393). The word “dark” occurs at the end of sentences 8, 9
and 10 –“Eyes closed in the dark. To the dark. In their own dark.” This trio
of successive closing words produces striking phonetic rhythms.
Further ternaries can be found in sentences 5 and 6 –“as when fled” closes
both (“She as when fled. Where as when fled”), appearing again later, towards
the close of the passage, as the complete sentence 49 –while repeats at the end
of sentences remain crucial: in sentences 31 and 32, this time in direct suc-
cession with the words “not enough” –“Changed but not enough. Strangers
but not enough.” “Not enough” appears earlier as a complete sentence at 27.
In sentences 35 and 43, a six-word repeated phrase occurs at the end of each
sentence with the slight variation of including the word “it” in 43: “Disarmed
for to finish with all at last”; “Till fit to finish with it all at last”. The title of
the book, Ill Seen Ill Said, is itself a repeating discursive phrase throughout
the book and it appears in this paragraph at the end of sentences as a six-word
repeated phrase in sentences 23 and 33: “Scrapped all the ill seen ill said”; “To
all the ill seen ill said”. There is a shorter echo of the phrase with variation in
sentence 16 –“first sight ill seen”. It would appear that such expressions of
75
PHRASE COUNT PERCENT
the 13 4.962
again 10 3.817
to 8 3.053
all 7 2.672
as 7 2.672
and 5 1.908
ill 5 1.908
in 5 1.908
changed 4 1.527
back 4 1.527
with 4 1.527
too 4 1.527
of 4 1.527
go 4 1.527
as when fled 3 3.435
not enough 3 2.29
when fled 3 2.29
too soon 3 2.29
ill seen 3 2.29
as when 3 2.29
all the 3 2.29
change 3 1.145
enough 3 1.145
stone 3 1.145
still 3 1.145
first 3 1.145
when 3 1.145
seen 3 1.145
dark 3 1.145
fled 3 1.145
then 3 1.145
more 3 1.145
soon 3 1.145
but 3 1.145
not 3 1.145
day 3 1.145
her 3 1.145
it 3 1.145
on 3 1.145
at 3 1.145
all the ill seen ill said 2 4.58
the ill seen ill said 2 3.817
all the ill seen ill 2 3.817
barring impediment 2 1.527
ill seen ill said 2 3.053
the ill seen ill 2 3.053
all the ill seen 2 3.053
universal stone 2 1.527
then back again 2 2.29
unbroken night 2 1.527
to finish with 2 2.29
but not enough 2 2.29
Figure 4.2a Analysis of segment no. 1 from Ill Seen Ill Said

76
seen ill said 2 2.29

this endless 2 1.527
ill seen ill 2 2.29
the ill seen 2 2.29
finish with 2 1.527
has changed 2 1.527
all at last 2 2.29
all the ill 2 2.29
impediment 2 0.763
before all 2 1.527
back again 2 1.527
still more 2 1.527
universal 2 0.763
then back 2 1.527
to finish 2 1.527
unbroken 2 0.763
go again 2 1.527
seen ill 2 1.527
ill said 2 1.527
the dark 2 1.527
endless 2 0.763
barring 2 0.763
but not 2 1.527
the ill 2 1.527
at last 2 1.527
winter 2 0.763
before 2 0.763
finish 2 0.763
on the 2 1.527
all at 2 1.527
night 2 0.763
where 2 0.763
smile 2 0.763
after 2 0.763
less 2 0.763
them 2 0.763
said 2 0.763
last 2 0.763
this 2 0.763
she 2 0.763
eye 2 0.763
has 2 0.763
if 2 0.763
ah 2 0.763
so 2 0.763
Figure 4.2b Analysis of segment no. 1 from Ill Seen Ill Said

7

deficiency or of depletion –dark, winter, fled, not enough, ill seen ill said –all
close sentences as their semantic meaning implies, by ending negatively.
At other times, the last word of a sentence becomes the first of the next,
the rhetorical figure anadiplosis being a common feature of Beckett’s writ-
ing.7 The importance of successive repeats in consecutive sentences is seen in
sentences 11 and 12 for instance, where the word “smile” recurs in different
positions –“On the lips same minute smile. If smile is what it was.” This gives
the text an improvisational quality, as if this meticulously crafted prose was
through-composed or written automatically as one word creates the next. We
will return to this quality of Beckett’s writing in Chapter 6. The final word of
sentence 13 “less” is repeated as the complete sentence 14, as the words them-
selves act out this direction –the sentence itself consisting of fewer words. This
brings to attention another of Beckett’s most salient stylistic traits, showing
the influence of Joyce. Like Flaubert, Joyce would often craft words to reflect
the content of the prose, with the words becoming more short and agitated
for anxious moments or long and meandering to reflect the subject of a river,
for instance. Words are also often chosen for their homonyms, or their ability
to yield multiple interpretations: take the sentence “Leopold Bloom ate with
relish the inner organs of beasts and fowl” (emphasis added). Here, the word
“relish” could be read as the protagonist’s carnivorous nature or as his chutney
requirements. Another example is Joyce’s use of journalese in the Aeolus chap-
ter of Ulysses, with each paragraph having its own headline.
S. E. Gontarski describes a similar effect in another of Beckett’s prose
pieces, Company (1980), that was collected and published as Nohow On, with
Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho (1989) (Gontarski cited in Gendron, 2008,
76). As Sarah Gendron writes: “Far from ‘unwording the world,’ the tech-
nique of repeating a few basic words –‘with only minor variants’ –allows for
a gradual accumulation of language. In effect, the text produces itself by con-
tinuously reusing words and expressions that had previously been employed”
(Gendron, 2008, 76).
The verb “change” changes position upon repeating as Beckett employs
the word to carry out its own command, as it were, as a kind of internal
wordpainting. It occurs at the end, middle and beginning of sentences –“The
eye has changed” (24); “Absence has changed them” (26); “Where still more
to change” (29); “Changed but not enough” (31). Here the words reflect the
content, as we saw with the word “less” earlier. The word “changed” appears
many times, in sentences 24, 26, 31 and 51, and as “change” in sentence 38.
Another word that moves position is “go”, appearing in sentence 28 (mid-
sentence) and echoed in sentences 37 (mid-sentence), 47 (at end) and 55 (at
end). Similarly, “Too soon”, sentence 4, is an echoing motif that recurs later
as “no sooner” (middle of 22), and again in its original format but within a
longer sentence in sentences 30 (at end) and 37 (in middle).
The word “again” occurs no less than ten times in this one paragraph, (7,
18, 28, 34, 38, 39, 48, 54 and indeed twice in 37), often but not always at the
end of the sentence. The densest appearance of “again” is in sentences 37
78

to 39: “And if again too soon go again. Change still more again. Then back
again.” Here, the very act of repeating is reflected in the frequent appearance
of the word “again”.
3. Binary oppositional repetitions

Ill Seen Ill Said is full of binaries such as “First last moment” (p. 59), and
these binary oppositional repeats are so frequent in Beckett’s work that
I have categorised them separately. The antiphonal, question and answer
trope in Beckett’s writing is certainly related to this. Here, Beckett employs
binary oppositional repeats in lines 13 and 14, “more nor less. Less!”
Line 22 may not repeat a word but the binary of dawn and dusk follows
the same idea: “Day no sooner risen fallen” (emphasis added). The light/
dark dichotomy in this paragraph further manifests itself in the contrast
of day and night –“day” (18, 22), “night” (20, 45). Other semantic bin-
aries are “before” (16, 54)/“after” (1, 2) –what is interesting here is that
“before” occurs at the end of the paragraph while “after” appears in the
first sentence. Beckett plays with time: as tenses shift, the centre is dis-
placed. Similarly, we see the binary of “Begin” (52) with “finish” (35, 43);
“still” (29, 38) and “go” (28, 47, 55); sadness versus happiness –“sadly”
(16), “happy” (17), “On the lips same minute smile. If smile is what it was”
(11–12); parting versus meeting –Strangers” (32), “parting” (53), “see her
again” (48), “meet” (54). These binaries all serve to deconstruct the idea
of certainty, of creating a greyer world of semantic fluidity, which is what
Ill Seen Ill Said seeks to achieve and what Beckett’s overarching aesthetics
gravitate towards. Ill Seen Ill Said is, at its core, the story of a woman whose
senses are in decline, a process which leads her to question the very nature
of reality. In the “winter” of her life the woman progresses, as does the lan-
guage, through “change”.
4. Discursive repetition recurring throughout Ill Seen Ill Said

Some of the phrases that appear in this paragraph repeat elsewhere in the
book as a whole. The sentence “Neither more nor less. Less!” appears earlier
on page 49 and later on page 57. And the smile motif from sentences 11 and
12 is on page 49 (“If smile is what it is”). “What is the wrong word?” appears
on pages 17, 44 and 59.
As previously mentioned, one of the motifs that recurs throughout the
book, “ill seen ill said”, is present here, fragmented in sentence 16 and fully
reiterated in sentences 23 and 33. It also occurs on page 43. Other discursive
motifs that are employed throughout the book include “when not evening
night” (pp. 25 and 41) and the self-reflexive tropes whereby the narrator seems
to self-direct progress –“careful” (pp. 8, 9, 18, 20, 23, 30, 39, 41, 47), “On”
(pp. 7, 8, 20), “gently” (pp. 11, 20, 31, 48), “enough” (pp. 10, 50, 54), “question
answered” (pp. 9, 29, 37, 38, 41, 47, 48).
79

Close reading no. 2 from Ill Seen Ill Said
1.Times when she is gone. 2.Long lapses of time. 3.At crocus time it
would be making for the distant tomb. 4.To have that on the imagin-
ation! 5.On top of the rest. 6.Bearing by the stem or round her arm the
cross or wreath. 7.But she can be gone at any time. 8.From one moment
of the year to the next suddenly no longer there. 9.No longer anywhere
to be seen. 10.Nor by the eye of flesh nor by the other. 11.Then as sud-
denly there again. 12.Long after. 13.So on. 14.Any other would renounce.
15.Avow, No one. 16.No one more. 17.Any other than this other. 18.In
wait for her to reappear. 19.In order to resume. 20.Resume the –what is
the word? 21.What is the wrong word?
(Beckett, [1981] 1997, 16–17, sentence numbering added)
Of the 126 words in this paragraph, only 72 are unique, so that we again
approach the ratio of 2:1. Figure 4.3 sets out, as in the previous example, the
repeated words and phrases by number and percentage in relation to the word
count of the paragraph.
If we include “times” as a slight variant pluralisation of “time”, then we
can see four repeats of the word in this short paragraph of 21 sentences.
There are in this case no exact clothed repetitions, but there are indeed a
number of binary oppositional repetitions and positional musematic local
repetitions.
In terms of position, the word “time” occurs at different points in four
sentences, as again Beckett employs the transience implied by the word to self-
command its function. The paragraph opens with “Times” as the first word,
while “time” ends sentence 2. In the third sentence time is absorbed into the
middle of the phrase before appearing once more at the end of sentence 7. The
phrase “one moment” appears in the middle of sentence 8, further emphasis-
ing the theme of ephemerality in this paragraph. Many of the sentences close
with a word that begins the next consecutive sentence –anadiplosis again. In
sentences 8 and 9 we see “no longer there. No longer anywhere”, in 15 and
16 “Avow, No one. No one more”, in 19 and 20 “to resume. Resume the”,
and in 20 and 21 “what is the word? What is the wrong word?”. The last two
sentences are also an example of a binary oppositional repetition as Beckett
questions the very existence of a satisfactory and comprehensive word choice,
a common theme in his work. “What is the word?” as a phrase itself is in fact
the name of Beckett’s last written work, a poem. In Ill Seen Ill Said, Beckett
furthers his long exploration of the failures of language and, as mentioned
above, engages in deconstructing the notions of certainty itself. The phrase
also recurs discursively throughout Ill Seen Ill Said, as previously mentioned
(on page 17 as “what is the word? What the wrong word?” and on both pages
44 and 59 as “what is the wrong word”).
These examples of musematic repetition, ending one sentence and spark-
ing the next, in anadiplosis, produce a phonetic quality akin to the effect of
80
the 12 9.524
to 5 3.968
other 4 3.175
of 4 3.175
no 4 3.175
by the 3 4.762
time 3 2.381
one 3 2.381
any 3 2.381
on 3 2.381
is 3 2.381
by 3 2.381
be 3 2.381
what is the 2 4.762
nor by the 2 4.762
no longer 2 3.175
any other 2 3.175
suddenly 2 1.587
what is 2 3.175
longer 2 1.587
resume 2 1.587
nor by 2 3.175
of the 2 3.175
no one 2 3.175
is the 2 3.175
would 2 1.587
there 2 1.587
gone 2 1.587
what 2 1.587
word 2 1.587
long 2 1.587
she 2 1.587
nor 2 1.587
her 2 1.587
for 2 1.587
or 2 1.587
in 2 1.587
at 2 1.587
Figure 4.3 Analysis of segment no. 2 from Ill Seen Ill Said
conversation or of being through-composed. As with the previous example,

this meticulous prose provides at times the illusion of improvised automatic
writing of the kind that Yeats experimented with in his esoteric explorations
with his wife George that eventually led to A Vision ([1925] 2008).
The repeated words here are often self-reflexive, once again in the Joycean
fashion. Reminiscent also of Swiftean directions to the “gentle reader”, the
narrator directs himself during the course of the writing. Of special interest
81

in this paragraph is the appearance of sentence 13: “So on”, another discur-
sive phrase within the book as a whole, having appeared as sentence 42 in the
example analysed in the previous section.
To further illustrate how these repeats appear in Beckett’s later prose, let us
explore a short excerpt from Worstward Ho (1983c).
Close reading from Worstward Ho

1.Less. 2.Less seen. 3.Less seeing. 4.Less seen and seeing when with words
than when not. 5.When somehow than when nohow. 6.Stare by words
dimmed. 7.Shades dimmed. 8.Void dimmed. 9.Dim dimmed. 10.All there
as when no words. 11.As when nohow. 12.Only all dimmed. 13.Til blank
again. 14.No words again. 15.Nohow again. 16.Then all undimmed.
17.Stare undimmed. 18.That words had dimmed.
(Beckett, 1983c, 39, sentence numbering added)
Of the 59 words in this paragraph, 29 are unique –thus the c.2:1 repetition
ratio is present again. The individual unique words are as follows: less, seen,
seeing, and, when, with, than, dim, there, as, til, then, that, had, not, some-
how, nohow, by, all, no, only, all, again, words, stare, shades, void, blank,
undimmed.
Figure 4.4 sets out the frequency of each repeated word and phrase.
The theme of this paragraph is most likely the act of writing itself (words)
and the common Beckettian trope of “failing better”.8 The protagonist toils
with the blank page invoking inspiration in order to assuage the need and
obligation to express in the void. “Stare by words dimmed” –the narrator
gazes at the page attempting or straining to enlighten, to undim, or know, to
somehow remove the nohow and the shade.9
Position is imperative in these repeats as we have seen in the previous
examples. Anaphora is prominent: “Less” always appears at the begin-
ning of a sentence (4 times) in four successive occurrences (1–4). So is epis-
trophe: “dimmed” always appears at the end of a sentence (5 times, sentences
6, 7, 8, 9, 18) and twice as “undimmed” (16, 17), its contrasting binary.
Sentence 9 in fact consists of the verb “dim” alongside the past participle
“dimmed”. Beckett was preoccupied with beginnings and endings as much
as he was with unendings –we remember his comments on “the long son-
ata of the dead” (Molloy, [1951] 1994, 31–32) –and we are given no better
or more succinct expression of this aesthetic than in this paragraph. During
the peak section, in terms of Beckett’s correspondence with the golden ratio
(13–15), three sentences end with “again”, producing a distinct ternary ostin-
ato effect. The phrase “when nohow” ends sentences 5 and 11, but upon
nohow’s reappearance as “nohow again” in sentence 15, its repetition is at the
start of the sentence.
It is the middle section of this paragraph that is most repetitive, the syl-
lables holding a pattern before again breaking apart. Between sentences 11
82
dimmed 6 10.169
when 6 10.169
words 5 8.475
less 4 6.78
nohow 3 5.085
again 3 5.085
all 3 5.085
when nohow 2 6.78
than when 2 6.78
less seen 2 6.78
undimmed 2 3.39
no words 2 6.78
as when 2 6.78
seeing 2 3.39
stare 2 3.39
seen 2 3.39
than 2 3.39
no 2 3.39
as 2 3.39
Figure 4.4 Analysis of segment from Worstward Ho
and 15, each sentence holds a four-syllable metre. The ratio of 11 out of 18
corresponds with the golden ratio (.61%), making this a peak stage within the
structure of the paragraph. Sentence length is also of interest in this para-
graph. Ironically “less” is additive; four sentences add and extend the material
following the repeated word. Further to this, in the four consecutive dimming
(6–10) sentences, the verb “dim” takes over rather than fizzling out. “Words”
and “nohow” appear throughout, while the contrasting “undimmed” opposes
the repeat of dim and combines with “words” to conclude the paragraph. In
the last five sentences only three new words are introduced (“then, that, had”),
the remainder amounting to entirely repeated material.
In terms of binary oppositions, we see “somehow” (5) versus “nohow” (5,
11, 15), the aforementioned “dimmed” versus “undimmed”, “words” (4, 18)
versus “no words” (10, 14). Sentence 4 is of particular interest in this regard,
as two separate binaries are juxtaposed alongside the dual tense of “seen” and
“seeing” –“Less seen and seeing when with words than when not”.
Conclusion
If we consider George Steiner’s point that where texts abandon the “exac-
tions of clear meaning and syntax” they become musical, we can move one
step closer to understanding the nature of Beckett’s prose (Steiner, [1961]
83

1985, 47–48). Clear referentiality and meaning in words is certainly reduced
as they instead operate more like musical notes. Beckett manages to main-
tain a semantic fluidity while at the same time writing with such distilled
precision. Prieto suggests that a “work of literature that didn’t denote any-
thing would not be abstract, it would simply be unreadable, in every sense
of the word” (Prieto, 2002a, 27). The problem of a word’s associative con-
tent perhaps presented more possibilities than hindrances for Beckett; these
attributive connotations were used to great effect by him in the creation of an
“intelligible” yet “inexplicable” artwork.10 While the words will always hold
some meaning, in Beckett’s late work there exists a semantic fluidity; instead
of focusing on definitive detail, the reader perceives the text in a manner
closer to music.
Stephen Connor writes: “[t]‌he most important aspect of being-in-the-
world, for Beckett, is being in time” (Connor, 2006, 45). The temporal fac-
tor is key to the art. Like Feldman’s later music, in which he experimented
with extending time, repetitions in Beckett become crucially important.
Connor believes that Beckett’s writing always imposes particular conditions
or limitations –the human condition; we are thrown into life in medias res,
Heidegger’s Geworfenheit (Connor, 2006, 44). These limitations are what
paradoxically enable freedom. As Goethe wrote, “In der Beschränkung
zeigt sich erst der Meister” (It is in working within limits that the master
reveals himself); the artist is forced to innovate within constraints, just as
humans learn to live in the face of death (Goethe quoted in Wilde, [1891]
1997b, 930).
Like the loop music discussed in Chapter 2, Beckett would embrace tech-
nology in his work,11 in the many media for which he wrote. Krapp’s Last Tape
([1957] 2006), uses loops in order to explore the nature of memory and the
recorded text. As Krapp listens back to these documents of any earlier self,
he undergoes a Proustian journey through a painful past. The novel Molloy
is also a kind of loop, ending where it began but transformed to some degree.
Indeed, the entire series of novels from Murphy to The Unnamable are a kind
of recapitulation of the same story.
In the theatre, the precision of Beckett’s stage directions might prevent
errors of direction, but the fact remains that while the codes of production
might be clear, the codes of reception are certainly not. The author plays with
expectation, meanings and symbols. It would seem futile to seek out Beckett’s
own intention of meaning in his writing (he himself avoided discussions of
meaning, or indeed any exegesis of his work at all cost throughout his career),
for the very structures of the work itself defies and deconstructs clear and
definite meanings.
As mentioned in Chapter 2, Hegarty describes noise music as being based
on an aesthetic of failure. This is also an apt description of Beckett’s aesthetic.
The writer’s famous dictum “Try again. Fail again. Fail better” (Worstward
Ho, 1983c) is manifested in the “fundamental sounds” of repetition (letter to
84

Alan Schneider, Paris, 12 August, 1957, in Beckett and Schneider, 1998, 15).
As the word “Fail” is repeated anaphorically, so Beckett’s repetition of words,
themes and familiar characters and situations perennially bemoan the short-
falls of language in fully expressing the human condition. Daniel Albright
views Beckett’s theatre as “the dramatic equivalent of the music of John
Cage” (Albright cited in Abbott, 2004, 716). In the final chapter I will explore
how Beckett experimented with chance procedures. The complex dialectic of
meaning and erosion of meaning does echo Cage’s views on the removal of
extramusical meaning, and indeed his emancipation of sounds for their own
sake. For Cage (1973), natural sounds did not require added connotations,
or metaphors, in order to be viewed as “music”: they already were music.
Beckett’s “fundamental sounds” have much in common.
For Cage, the fact that nothing was being symbolised in sounds made them
no less important as “music”, while Beckett’s words –free of absolutes –never
render the work anything less than literature. Instead, his work has reached
out to audiences and readers because of this factor. As Wilde believed that
openness bred longevity, a new King Lear or Hamlet for audiences, so
Beckett’s semantic fluidity, his theme of the human condition and his avoid-
ance of exegesis help to ensure the lively interpretation of his work. (Wilde,
[1891] 1997b, 965–1016). As Beckett himself wrote: “All I know is what the
words know, and dead things, and that makes a handsome little sum, with a
beginning and a middle and an end, as in the well-built phrase and the long
sonata of the dead” (Beckett, Molloy, [1951] 1994, 31).
Notes
1 Scholars who have claimed the importance of Schopenhauer to Beckett
include: Harvey, Hesla, Märtens, Cohn, Pilling, Rabinovitz, Knowlson, Maier,
Moorjani, Rabaté, Acheson, O’Hara, and Büttner.
2 “Pure music” is of course untenable as a term today. Perhaps Joyce meant an
unproblematised “absolute” music or maybe “instrumental music” –that the work
acted as a performative text exhibiting musical qualities, or this may even be an
example of the common Hiberno-English practice whereby a noun is preceded by
the attributive adjective “pure” to emphasise quality. Beckett did occasionally use
the unproblematised expression “pure music” subsequently.
3 A fine example is Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés” (1897).
4 The term “absurd” was famously applied to Beckett much later, notably by Martin
Esslin, but in a different sense. See Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, Third Edition
([1962] 2004).
5 I owe a debt to Elisabeth Bregman Segrè for her conceptualisation of oppositional
poles in Beckett’s prose (Segrè, 1977).
6 The software that I used for counting these repetitions was developed by Steven
Whitney, at http://25yearsofprogramming.com/perl/phrasecounter.htm (no longer
available). Whitney explains that the percentage is = ([# of repetitions of the phrase]
* [# of words in the phrase] /[total word count of the text]) * 100.
7 See http://rhetoric.byu.edu/Figures/Groupings/of%20Repetition.htm [accessed
14 August 2013].
85

8 The famous Beckett quote –“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail
again. Fail better” –occurs in Worstward Ho (1983c).
9 Company, Ill Seen Ill Said and Worstward Ho were later published together in a
collection called Nohow On (1989).
10 The terms “intelligible” and “inexplicable” are the ones Beckett borrows from
Schopenhauer in the quote above, taken from Beckett ([1931] 1999, 92).
11 Beckett’s All that Fall ([1957] 2006) was a pioneering work for the BBC Radiophonic
Workshop –for more see Porter (2010).
86
5
Beckett and Feldman
Time, repetition and the liminal space
Beckett’s semantic fluidity was deeply informed by his exploration of the

philosophy of music. But how might such repetitive, fluid texts be trans-
lated into music? How have the repetitive qualities of Beckett’s literary texts
been transmitted from text to sounding objects? And what happens to the
notion of intermedia when another author, or composer, is involved in the
transformation?
Beckett’s work has been very influential on modern music. His extensive
use of silence and repetition and his experimentation with indeterminacy are
interests that he shared with contemporary composers such as John Cage,
while Beckett’s interest in the distillation of material is echoed in the reduc-
tive pieces of György Kurtág and Earl Kim, and the repetitive complexity
would greatly influence composers such as Brian Ferneyhough.1 Other not-
able Beckettian compositions include Roger Reynolds (Ping, 1968); Philip
Glass (Company, 1984, Mercier and Camier, 1979); Luciano Berio (Sinfonia,
1968, containing fragments of The Unnamable); Richard Barrett (stirrings,
2001); John J. H. Philips (The things one has to listen to … (1990); Wolfgang
Fortner (That Time, 1977); Heinze Hollinger (Come and Go, 1977; Not I,
1980), Michael Nyman (Act Without Words 1, 2001); Antonio Giacometti, Le
allucinazioni di Watt (1982), based on Watt; and the piano interpretations of
experimental composer John Tilbury.
But it is perhaps in the work of American composer Morton Feldman
that Beckett’s influence –and his desire for semantic fluidity in particu-
lar –can most clearly be seen. Feldman was attracted by the intangibility
of the author’s repetitive writing, and sought to transform this musicalised
literature, this intense textual recurrence, into an instrumental soundworld.
Feldman viewed repetition itself as a kind of translation, and his Beckettian
work witnesses the translator (Beckett often self-translated his own work into
French and vice versa) translated, via an intermedial slippage, into another
artform – music.
Beckett engaged in collaboration with only a couple of composers. He
often showed disdain for proposed musical settings of his works, but was also
known to encourage the composers whom he respected.2 Beckett’s letters dis-
play responses ranging from benevolence (he allowed a young Gerald Barry
87
Beckett and Feldman 87

to use his text) to blunt refusal (he deterred Edouard Coester from setting
one of his texts and Werner Egk from composing stage music for Godot). In
a letter to Coester dated 11 March 1954, Beckett explains his feelings about
musical settings and responses to his work in some detail:
I have already publicly expressed my opposition to any stage music

(Werner Egk had thought of writing some). For me that would be an
awful mistake. A very different case would be music inspired by the play
and I would be greatly flattered by any venture in that direction. But, in
saying that, I have in mind instrumental music, no voices. To be quite
frank, I do not believe that the text of Godot could bear the extensions
that any musical setting would inevitably give it. The piece as a dramatic
whole, yes, but not the verbal detail. For what is at issue is a speaking
whose function is not so much that of having a meaning as of putting up
a struggle, poor I hope, against silence, and leading back to it. I find it
hard to see it as an integral part of a sound-world. But this drama which
you seem to have felt so keenly, if you thought fit to translate it, however
freely, into pure music, that would interest me a great deal and give me
great pleasure. And then what about silence itself, is it not still waiting for
its musician?
(Beckett, 2011, 475–476)
Beckett’s position at this stage in his career echoes many of the author’s senti-
ments explored in Chapter 4: namely that a Schopenhauerian “pure music”
(see Chapter 4, note 2) should not be corrupted by words (we saw this in
our examination of Proust ([1931] 1999) in particular); and that his dramatic
works “could not bear the extension” that a literal musical translation may
afford them.
We must remember, however, that Beckett, always one for contradictions,
would later embrace music in many of his plays, including the Schubert lied
(D. 827, Op. 43, No. 2) that lends the play Nacht und Träume ([1982] 2006) its
title, for instance, while Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” (String Quartet
No. 14) features in the radio play All that Fall ([1956] 2006), or the specific
segments from Beethoven’s Piano Trio, Op. 70, No. 1 chosen for the televi-
sion play Ghost Trio ([1975] 2006).3 He would also go on to collaborate with
composers, the radio play Words and Music, offering his most distilled and
thorough philosophical interrogation of the interrelationship of both art-
forms, music and literature, Beckett’s cousin John providing the original score.
In 1961 the composer Marcel Mihalovici became quite close to Beckett and
wrote a small opera inspired by Krapp’s Last Tape, entitled Krapp, ou, La
dernière bande. John Calder has described how Beckett would sit alongside
Mihalovici at the piano, actively involved in the arrangement and narrative
development of the opera (Calder, 2001, 75). The partnership proved suc-
cessful; Mihalovici later composed the original music for Beckett’s radio play
Cascando ([1962] 2006). But by far the most fruitful musical collaboration
8
88 Beckett and Feldman

was that between Beckett and Morton Feldman. Feldman composed an anti-
opera to Beckett’s libretto Neither (1977), a new score for Beckett’s Words and
Music (1987), and the last piece that Feldman ever wrote was dedicated to the
author, For Samuel Beckett (1987). Though Feldman had spent his life explor-
ing temporality, sadly he himself ran out of time before he could compose the
intended score for Cascando.
I will examine the ways in which Feldman’s repetitive music shares many
qualities with the author’s own aesthetic. But why did such collaboration
arise? And what was it in Feldman’s work that opened up the possibility
of such creative audio-textual exchange, something Beckett had repelled in
the past? From the 1950s onwards, and under the influence of John Cage,
Feldman began experimenting with open works that incorporated a meas-
ure of indeterminacy. Cage’s rebellion against previous compositional tradi-
tions excited the young Feldman a great deal. Feldman met Cage when both
attended a performance of Webern’s twelve-tone Symphony, Op. 21; both left
before the Romanticism of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, Op. 45 dared
taint their evening of High-Modernism. And yet, Feldman’s aesthetic differed
a great deal from that of Cage, in that he shared little of his fellow American’s
interest in musical tricks and grandiose, conceptual statements such as those
promoted in 4’33”. Feldman preferred to stick to traditional instruments
and, though he remained a staunch avant-gardist throughout his life, he
would often defend those derided by the trend followers (Alex Ross points
out Feldman’s praise for Sibelius in this regard; Ross, 2006). Feldman once
remarked on Cage’s influence on his music as follows: “I owe him everything
and I owe him nothing” (Feldman in interview with Alan Beckett, 1966).
Feldman’s first music after meeting Cage bore the influence of the new
artistic circle to which Feldman had been introduced. The New York intel-
lectuals and artists of the 1950s that Feldman knew best included Jackson
Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Earle Brown
and Christian Wolff. In particular, the work of painters Rauschenberg and
Rothko exerted a profound influence on his musical ideas. Rauschenberg’s
early monochromatic work, White Paintings (1951) for instance, has clear par-
allels with Cage’s silence, emphasising an ambient environmental engagement
with shadow.
This visual influence can be seen most clearly in the employment of pat-
terns as a compositional device, a creative prompt that became a salient char-
acteristic of Feldman’s music. The scores for early pieces such as Projection 1
(1950), for instance, look like paintings themselves, as Feldman developed his
idea of graphic scores that allowed the performer certain creative freedoms.
Written for solo cello, Feldman left pitch undetermined and to the perform-
er’s discretion, within the broad register categories of high, middle and low.
Other symbols in the grid include the directions pizzicato, arco, harmonics
(the three performing modes), while the duration of each box is depicted by
the amount of space within it. The individual boxes are made up of icti that
each account for a 72bpm pulse. In John P. Welsh’s analysis of the piece, he
89

astutely points out that “silence is present far more than sound in each of the
three performing modes” (Welsh, 1996, 23).
But Feldman would soon tire of graphic scores that allowed so much inde-
terminacy, and his later music evolved to be much more specific, only allow-
ing freedoms with regard to durations –the extension of which, playing with
time, became a key focus for him. Late works such as String Quartet No. 2
(1983) can last as long as six hours, putting a deliberate amount of strain on
performers and listeners alike. In a conversation with Howard Skempton in
1977, Feldman explained that he was trying to “hold the moment”:
I don’t think any composer really wants variation, though variation

might be a marvellous technical device to achieve the maximum unity
of the moment. I don’t even like variation as a musical device. I’m try-
ing to hold the moment with the slightest compositional methodology.
The thing is how do you sustain it, how do you keep it going? There are
many ways you can keep it going. You can become a composer and that’s
easy! I think that Beethoven’s big problem was how not to be just another
composer.
(Feldman quoted in Skempton, 1977, 6).
Feldman’s desire to stop time, and to “hold the moment” is reminiscent of

Beckett’s concept of time. This suggests a concord between the two artists that
was emerging independently of one another, and from very different sources.
In her work on Feldman’s concern for the sustainable moment, Catherine
Laws posits the composer’s intent in terms of an ungraspable narrative:
To create a purely static spatial object would, therefore, be no more

appropriate than the “measuring out of time” that Feldman finds in
most Western musical composition. Feldman’s undertaking is more com-
plex; the attempt to hold the moment is the attempt to capture time –an
impossible task –but in the attempt Feldman exposes the experience of
the attempt, taking us close to grasping the ungraspable.
(Laws, 2013, 284)
Feldman’s later works play with and interrogate the nature of time. Not a
great deal changes in the almost static environment of String Quartet No. 2,
and while the listener may slip in and out of focused attention, as they might
when viewing a painting in a gallery –only occasionally “grasping” the piece –
Feldman’s music has the power to immerse the listener: suspending redun-
dancy, these small changes mark enormous moments. In the opening bars of
the quartet a single pulsing chord is heard 36 times, the only variation being
dynamic, although, in the absence of any rhythmic, motivic or harmonic
change, the changes in volume become highly noticeable and serve to “keep
it going”. The stillness of the static chords is reminiscent of Rothko’s verti-
cal paintings or Beckett’s insistent repetitions. Feldman writes: “The degrees
90

of stasis, found in a Rothko or a Guston, were perhaps the most significant
elements that I brought to my music from painting” (1981, 149). The com-
poser would often move between sections, without any kind of development,
juxtaposing blocks music, like Rothko’s blocks of colour.
Another example of Feldman’s use of repetition, this time employing exact
clothed repeats in a single part, is The Viola in My Life (3) (1970). Here,
riff-like ostinato motifs recur throughout the piece. This particular viola run
occurs three times in the short composition, each time being preceded and
followed by a single bar of silence in the viola and piano line. For the fourth
piece in the series of The Viola in My Life, Feldman reused the material from
the first three, describing the piece itself as a “translation” (1971–1972, repr.
2000, 90). Here, the composer, much like the revisional music of Meredith
Monk, wherein the composer often reworks older pieces to form new music,
echoes Beckett’s process of returning to the same themes and characters in his
work (Monk, 2013). Feldman’s description of translating his own work is apt
considering his relationship with Beckett –the self-translator –but also when
exploring whether or not interdisciplinarity involves a kind of translation.
String Quartet No. 2 and The Viola in My Life (3) also clearly display how
central repetition became to Feldman’s approach to composition in his later
work, a focus that we will return to shortly.
It was not just his American contemporaries in the visual arts that inspired
Feldman: the composer was also greatly influenced by Cézanne’s portrayal of
time. The composer wrote that Cézanne’s concern was “not how to make an
object, not how this object exists by way of Time, in Time or about Time, but
how this object exists as Time … Time as an Image … This is the area which
music, deluded that it was counting out the seconds, has neglected” (Feldman
quoted in Laws, 1996, 202). Laws emphasises this idea of “experiential time”
in Feldman’s music:
All music creates a kind of virtual experience of time, but Feldman sees
this as a mere falsification: the focus should instead be upon the very
point of intersection or collision of the two temporal experiences: “real
time” and musical time. While music must be played through actual time,
he requires it to reveal the experiential nature of time.
(Laws, 2013, 283)
We previously encountered Max Paddison’s description of Adorno’s sense of

“experiential time”, in which a Bergsonian ([1946] 2002) understanding of
time is divided into “interpretative experience” (Erfahrung) and “lived experi-
ence” (Erlebnis).4 For Feldman, such a form of “experiential time” is necessary
in order to perceive time itself, for time to reveal itself as a creative medium.
Jonathan Kramer’s ideas of “vertical musical composition” and “sta-
sis” in non-teleological works make a great deal of sense when considering
Feldman’s music in this way. Kramer defines “vertical musical composition”
as follows: “In music without phrases, without temporal articulation, with
91

total consistency, whatever structure is in the music exists between simultan-
eous layers of sound, not between successive gestures. Thus, I call the time
sense invoked by such music ‘vertical’ ” (Kramer, 1988, 55). He gives, as an
example of “vertical time”, Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air (1969), in
which the composer overdubbed improvisations on top of droning textures.
According to Kramer, this provided the “most radical of the new tempor-
alities”, with links to the “process” music of Reich and Rzewski (Kramer,
1988, 57):
Listening to a vertical musical composition can be like looking at a piece

of sculpture, we determine for ourselves the pacing of experience: We are
free to walk around the piece, view it from many angles, concentrate on
some details, see other details in relationship to each other, step back and
view the whole, contemplate the relationship between the piece and the
space in which we see it, close our eyes and remember, leave the room
when we wish, and return for further viewings. No one would claim that
we have looked at less than all of the sculpture (though we may have
missed some of its subtleties), despite individual selectivity in the viewing
process. For each of us, the temporal sequence of viewing postures has
been unique. The time spent with the sculpture is structured time, but the
structure is placed there by us, as influenced by the piece, its environment,
other spectators, and our own moods and tastes. Vertical music, similarly,
simply is. We can listen to it or ignore it. If we hear only part of the per-
formance we have still heard the whole piece, because we know that it will
never change.
(Kramer, 1988, 57, original emphasis)
There are, of course, metre changes in Feldman, but in many ways his works
do act on this surface level akin to the sculpture that Kramer describes.
Significantly, the composer liked to refer to his music as “time canvasses”
(Feldman quoted in Laws, 1996, 212). If we return to Lessing’s categorisa-
tions, it is possible to see that a merging of temporal and spatial artforms
is at play in Feldman’s spatial “canvasses”. But Kramer’s assertion that
“if we hear only part of the performance we have still heard the whole
piece” is clearly problematic. Kramer suggests that the general idea of a
piece can be grasped from an encounter with only part of the work; and
yet Kramer misses the significance of this type of music, it seems. Such an
idea is not operable in Feldman’s music, which can progress almost like a
mantra, rather than via the teleological forms to which Kramer is referring.
Feldman’s music is meditative, and to appreciate the stillness of such music,
the ways in which he holds “the moment with the slightest compositional
methodology” requires more than just a few moments. Of course, to sug-
gest an amount of time that a listener must submit to, or whether or not
an entire piece must be experienced, is pure conjecture (or is at least well
beyond the scope of this chapter, as is the vast amount of nascent research
92

on listening and reception post-Adorno’s expert listener).5 If we consider
Kramer’s ideas in relation to Gérard Genette’s notion of “discourse time”
and “narrative time” introduced earlier, we can see that, rather than step-
ping into a piece and “grasping” its structure, one must engage and submit
to the lengthy “discourse time” of Feldman’s music in order to fully appreci-
ate its coherence in terms of “narrative time”. How would repetition apply
in Kramer’s static “vertical” music then? The temporal nature of music will
always mean that repetitions will remain Deleuzian. Repetitions that seem
exact can never be the same at the reception level. As Sarah Gendron puts
it: “In repetition, the only certainty is the impossibility of exact repetition”
(Gendron, 2008, 7, original emphasis).
As it did for Beckett, then, repetition provided Feldman with a method
for undermining clear semantics. The composer strove for the same flu-
idity in music that Beckett sought in literature: a way in which he could
negate function and form, in order to reveal sounds in and of themselves.
If we return to the analytical categories outlined in the previous chapter,
we can usefully unpack Feldman’s use of recurrence as an example of what
I termed “clothed exact repetition” after Deleuze. For this category, I noted
that Beckett would often reiterate the same word or phrase in texts, but
their appearance in different contexts and in different time frames brought
about change at the reception level. In music, such repetition may manifest
itself as recurring motifs. Feldman himself seems to describe his method of
“sustain through stasis” in terms of clothed exact repetition, as he finds, at
times, old-fashioned ideas of replication to be flawed: “there is a sugges-
tion that what we hear is functional and directional, but we soon realize
that this is an illusion: a bit like walking the streets of Berlin –where all
the buildings look alike, even if they’re not” (Feldman, 1981, quoted in
Benson, 2005, 174). If we return to the example of String Quartet No. 2,
these repetitions, these literal reiterations, cannot be called exact repeats in
terms of reception.
Walter Zimmerman’s interview with the composer gives us a unique insight
into Feldman’s Deleuzian understanding of clothed exact repetition and its
importance in his work:
Zimmerman: I see in your pieces that every chord which follows [sic] tries
to establish a completely different world from the former one.
Feldman: Yes. Actually now [in the later music] I just try to repeat the
same chord. I’m reiterating the same chord in inversions. I enjoy that very
much, to keep the inversions alive in a sense where everything changes
and nothing changes. Actually before I wanted my chords in a sense to be
very different [one] from the next, as if almost to erase in one’s memory
what happened before. That’s the way I would keep the time suspended …
by erasing the references and where they came from. You were very fresh
into the moment, and you didn’t relate it.
(Zimmermann, 1985, 229, quoted in Hirata, 2006, 215)
93

Feldman’s desire to create music in which “everything changes and nothing
changes” also underpins another talk, this time given as part of the Darmstadt
lecture held in July 1986 at the 33rd International Summer Courses for New
Music. Here, Feldman elaborates on his use of repetition by discussing the
influence on his music of Turkish rugs, another form of static, spatial recur-
rence akin to the work of Rothko, Rauschenberg and Cézanne mentioned
above. In a similar way to Kivy’s later discussion of carpets and patterns in
music, Feldman explains that:
Another very interesting man, the father of cybernetics, of the computer,

had a marvelous phrase. Norbert Wiener. “Hardening of the categories.”
You know hardening of the arteries? Hardening of the categories. And
that’s what happens. They get very hard. Which gets us, believe it or not,
to why I use the spelling, more microtonal spelling. The hardening of
the distance, say, between a minor second. When you’re working with a
minor second as long as I’ve been, it’s very wide. I hear a minor second
like a minor third almost. It’s very, very wide. (Laughter). So that percep-
tion of hearing is a very interesting thing. Because, conceptually you are
not hearing it, but perceptually, you might be able to hear it. So it depends
upon how quickly or slowly that note is coming to you, like McEnroe.
I’m sure that he sees that ball coming in slow motion. And that’s the way
I hear that pitch. It’s coming to me very slowly, and there’s a lot of stuff
in there. But I don’t use it conceptually. That’s why I use the double flats.
People think they’re leading tones. I don’t know. Think what you want.
But I use it because I think it’s a very practical way of still having the
focus of the pitch. And after all, what’s a sharp? It’s directional, right?
And a double sharp is more directional. But I didn’t get the idea concep-
tually, I got the idea from Teppiche, from rugs. (Walter already told you
about my interest in Teppiche). But one of the most interesting things
about a beautiful old rug in natural vegetable dyes, is that it has “abrash.”
“Abrash” is that you dye in small quantities. You cannot dye in big bulks
of wool. So it’s the same, but yet it’s not the same. It has a kind of micro-
tonal hue. So when you look at it, it has that kind of marvellous [sic]
shimmer which is that slight gradation.
(Feldman, 1986, quoted in Ozment, 2011, 15)
So, Feldman’s shimmering repetitions are like the patterns in the old rugs that
he so admired, with their “microtonal hue” and “slight gradation” achieved
thought the process of “abrash”; both “the same” and “not the same”; or
rather, the same but ever-changing. His compositions continually play with
this idea of difference in order, paradoxically, to “hold the moment”; no
repeat ever seems the same for the listener. Feldman achieves his “marvellous
shimmer” in a variety of ways, whether it be the abrupt dynamic changes in
the opening pulse of String Quartet No. 2, or the recurring squares that popu-
late the graphic score of Projection 1 for solo cello, which invite the performer
94

to rethink the same image from a number of angles and spatial levels. In both
cases, exact repetitions remain perennially “clothed” in the Deleuzian sense.
As the natural dyes produce minor variations in colour, so the contextual
clothed repetitive patterns of his music produce the “slight gradation” that
ensures that his music holds “the moment with the slightest compositional
methodology”. Deleuzian repetition, where a repeat is never just the same,
manifests itself nowhere better than in Feldman’s music. When Feldman
repeats a chord in a different inversion, or when he simply repeats a note at a
different time and context, these repetitions take on new and powerful affilia-
tions. A repetition is, as we have seen throughout the previous chapters, never
simply an exact repetition, but is instead a much more complex process of
creation and reception.
Another passage further equates the colour patterns of rugs with his
musical aesthetic and demonstrates the ways in which he observes a connec-
tion between his patterns and the technique of “abrash”:
I’m being distracted by a small Turkish village rug of white tile patterns
in a diagonal repeat of large stars in lighter tones of red, green, and
beige. … Everything about the rug’s coloration, and how the stars are
drawn in detail, when the rectangle of a tile is even, how the star is just
sketched (as if drawn more quickly), when a tile is uneven and a little bit
smaller –this, as well as the staggered placement of the pattern, brings
to mind Matisse’s mastery of his seesaw balance between movement and
stasis. Why is it that even asymmetry has to look and sound right? There
is another Anatolian woven object on my floor, which I refer to as the
“Jasper Johns” rug. It is an arcane checkerboard format, with no appar-
ent systematic color design except for a free use of the rug’s colors reiter-
ating its simple pattern. Implied in the glossy pile (though unevenly worn)
of the mountainous Konya region, the older pinks, and lighter blues –
was my first hint that there was something there that I could learn, if
not apply to my music. The color-scale of most nonurban rugs appears
more extensive than it actually is, due to the great variation of shades of
the same color (abrash) –a result of the yarn having been died in small
quantities. As a composer, I respond to this most singular aspect affect-
ing a rug’s coloration and its creation of a monochromatic overall hue.
My music has been influenced mainly by the methods in which color is
used on essentially simple devices. It has made me question the nature of
musical material. What could be used to accommodate, by equally simple
means, musical color? Patterns.
(Feldman quoted in Ozment, 2011, 9)
Orchestration, instrumentation and small timbral changes become pivotal in

Feldman’s aesthetic of repetition and his search to emulate “the great vari-
ation of shades of the same color” found in old rugs. Feldman’s reductive,
repetitive approach, especially in his later work, has sometimes led to him
95

being mislabelled a “Minimalist” composer, a problematic term even for those
within its remit, such as Philip Glass, John Adams, Le Monte Young and
Michael Nyman. But despite its manipulation of small motivic cells, Feldman’s
music occupies a very different world from that of the Minimalists: indeed, he
situated himself within the avant-garde, considering himself a highly experi-
mental composer of complex music to the last.
As Nyman’s seminal text on “Experimental Music”, instilled, however, in
discussion of Feldman’s work, the important cross-pollination of all these
twentieth-century Americans should not be underestimated. As we saw previ-
ously, it may even be possible to locate a common driving force behind all of
these composers. Nyman suggests that the Minimalists actually drew inspir-
ation from European serialism to some extent. He writes:
The origins of this minimal process music lie in serialism. La Monte

Young was attracted by aspects of Webern’s music similar to those that
interested Christian Wolff. He noticed Webern’s tendency to repeat
pitches at the same octave positions throughout a section of a movement,
and saw that while on the surface level this was a “constant variation” it
could also be heard as “stasis, because it uses the same form throughout
the length of the piece … the same information repeated over and over
again”.
(La Monte Young quoted in Nyman, [1974] 1999, 139)
So, perhaps the Americans and Europeans were not as aesthetically divided
as one might think. Feldman was also indebted to the European tradition
and wrote serialist pieces in his formative years of study with Stefan Wolpe.
The silence, lyricism, and repetitive nature of Webern’s music, then, attracted
not only Feldman, but also many of his American peers. Nyman describes
this attraction as oppositional to how Webern was being perceived in more
conservative ways in Europe (Nyman, [1974] 1999, 38). For Feldman, the
reduction of materials led to an approach to composition that again echoes
Goethe’s maxim that the master reveals himself/herself within limits.6 By fix-
ing certain parameters, Feldman’s creativity was pushed to new heights. As
this quiet, slow music hangs static, an infinite sonic world is created. With
this in mind, it becomes even clearer how Kramer’s ideas of “vertical time”
and musical “stasis” are useful to an understanding of Feldman’s extended,
repetitive works.
Both Feldman and Beckett were greatly concerned with the treatment of
time and stasis. As we have seen, Feldman’s music, with its clothed exact repe-
tition, evolves towards extended time as his vast temporal canvasses unravel
like the shimmering gradation of colours on an old Turkish rug, presenting
a sonic world that the listener can inhabit. Ruby Cohn considers Beckett’s
work along similar lines, suggesting that his “plays are unfinal. Rather than
Aristotelian beginning, middle, and end, Beckett’s plays are endless con-
tinua; his protagonists are in the tradition of the Wandering Jew, the Flying
96

Dutchman, the Woman without a Shadow –cursed to endure through time”
(Cohn, 1980, 35). William Barrett believes that the idea of beginnings and end-
ings was no longer the focus for the Modernists, an idea most clearly evident
in James Joyce’s Ulysses, as Bloom, the “Wandering Jew” of Dublin meanders
the streets (Kramer, 1988, 202). While Beckett’s Molloy may have declared
his praise for the “long sonata of the dead” with its “beginning, middle and
end”, his own work clearly contradicts such clear structures (Beckett, [1951]
1994, 31). In fact, Beckett’s writing abounds with abandoned beginnings and
unresolved endings, from the da capos of Godot ([1954] 2006) and Play ([1963]
2006), to the continuity invoked in the final line of The Unnamable ([1953]
1994): “I’ll go on.” Beckett’s works, like the characters within them, perpetu-
ally “go on”. Working according to similar aesthetic beliefs, Feldman also
considers such narratives to be lacking in possibility: he even told Everett
Frost in relation to Words and Music that “[t]‌he whole idea of beginning, mid-
dle, and end … would not help as an emotional structure. And so I dipped
into it all the time. I learned a lot about Beckett by reading his very early study
on ‘Remembrance of Things Past [Beckett’s Proust]’ ” (Feldman quoted in
Frost, in Bryden, 1998, 51).
As we have seen in the previous chapters, Beckett’s obsession with time
manifested itself in fascinating linguistic and structural ways. In Proust ([1931]
1999), for example, Beckett describes time as “that double-headed monster of
damnation and salvation” ([1931] 1999, 11). Indeed, the very concept of time
pervades the work as both symbol and device. Cohn points out the abundance
of clock imagery in Beckett’s texts, from Pozzo’s watch, given to him by his
grandfather (Godot), to Krapp’s silver watch, and the alarm clock belonging
to Clov and Hamm (Endgame) (Cohn, 1980, 38). Such imagery also extends
into productions of his work. The DVD recording of Sarah Leonard’s per-
formance of Neither (Radio Sinfonie Orchester Frankfurt, conducted by
Zoltan Pesko, DVD 1990 issued from 1977 recording, reissued 2011) is a use-
ful example of this. Clocks are employed as a dominant dramatic feature in
this staging, as the static score plays out in real time to a prominent, ticking
timepiece. Cohn believes that, in Beckett’s work, “time becomes the subject of
dramatic dialogue” (Cohn, 1980, 36), in a way similar to the expansive spa-
tial time created by the shimmering repetitions that drive much of Feldman’s
music. From the “inbetween” text of the Trilogy, Malone Dies onwards,
Beckett would abandon any kind of traditional character development or
plot. His non-teleological texts often include characters from previous works,
such as Watt, Molloy or Belacqua. Such repetition of characters and refer-
ences might lead to the notion that Beckett, in one sense, did not compose
individual works, but rather one vast canvass that eternally returns to the same
theme. For Cohn, Happy Days “denies time” (Cohn, 1973, 184) in a way akin
to Feldman’s search for a “vertical temporality”. One is reminded of Walter
Benjamin’s explorations of the “original” in an age of mechanical replication
(Benjamin, [1936] 1973). With such repetition, the very notion of “original”
loses meaning; yet, as Benjamin pointed out, the “original” was always greatly
97

indebted to the copy for survival and success. An icon of a famous painting in
the format of a postcard, for instance, ensures that the art is preserved in the
onlooker’s memory. As we saw previously, the recurrence of theme and char-
acter intertextually in Beckett’s work somewhat negates the idea of “original”,
and in some ways his oeuvre can be seen as a vast, connected canvas.
The reduction of materials, the use of silence and, most of all, the employ-
ment of repetition in their work meant that both artists, Beckett and Feldman,
were charting similar territories in the latter half of the twentieth century.
But initially, the composer’s work was unfamiliar to Beckett, as Knowlson
reminds us:
Beckett did not know Feldman’s work at all when he wrote the text
for him. But, by a strange coincidence, only a few days after posting
“Neither”, and in London by this time, he was listening to Patrick Magee
reading his own For To End Yet Again on BBC Radio 3, when he noticed
that, in the second part of the “Musica Nova” concert that followed the
reading, there was an orchestral piece by Morton Feldman. He listened
to it and found he liked it very much.
(Knowlson, 1996, 632)
Feldman quickly found in Beckett a peer who welcomed contradictions: as

the composer explained, “it’s so universal –that so many people find things in
Beckett to relate to on a very personal and emotional level. That’s one of the
wonderful contradictions in him” (Frost, 1998, 51):
It’s beyond Existentialism, you see, because Existentialism is always look-

ing for a way out, you know. If they feel that God is dead, then long live
humanity. Kind of Camus and Sartre. I mean, there’s always a substitute
to save you in Existentialism. And I feel that Beckett is not involved with
that, because there’s nothing saving him. For example, the opera that we
(it really wasn’t an opera; it was just a poem that I extended into an opera
length) … The subject essentially is: whether you’re in the shadows of
understanding or non-understanding. I mean, finally you’re in the shad-
ows. You’re not going to arrive at any understanding at all; you’re just left
there holding this –the hot potato which is life.
(Feldman quoted in Frost, 1998, 51)
Feldman’s evocation of the “shadows” between “understanding or non-

understanding” provides one of the many points of similarity that exists
between the aesthetics of the two artists. Liminality was very appealing
to both men, who situated their work in the space between conventional
beginnings, endings and dramatic arcs. With reference to the work of Philip
Guston, for instance, Feldman once said that the art is not imprisoned in
a “painting space” but instead inhabits “somewhere in the space between
the canvas and ourselves” (Feldman, 1967, repr. 2000, 76). Thomas DeLio
98

describes Feldman’s work along similar lines, describing the composer as
“revelling in the inbetweeness” (DeLio, 1996, 149). In this “unspeakable
home”, no teleology, development or resolution exists. Derrida described
this liminal space, this threshold between meanings, as Sarah Gendron
writes relating Mallarmé and Derrida: “if one is looking for the meaning
of the Mallarménian text, one should not seek it in the extreme points of
the text: at the beginning or the end. As Derrida might say, the significa-
tion of his text, like the signification of all texts and all words, lies in the
ambiguous space of the ‘in between’: the ‘entre de Mallarmé’ ” (Gendron,
2008, 25).
Other prominent connections between Beckett and Feldman include their
penchant for pushing the listener and performer to their limits. While Not
I ([1972] 2006) might push an actress to emotional turmoil, for example,
Feldman’s extended works require audience members and performers with
both stamina and diligence. Both artists also experimented with aleatoric pro-
cedures, leaving certain parameters open to interpretations (as we’ll see in the
next chapter) in order to include performers and the audience in the construc-
tion of a work. Laws finds, along with Derval Tubridy (2012, 151), that trans-
lation in Beckett bears a similar aesthetic function to the unique forms of
repetition that propel Feldman’s music (Laws, 1996, 211). The composer once
described translation as “a kind of repetition that incorporates difference”,
for instance (Feldman quoted in Tubridy, 2012, 151). He also compared the
repetitious nature of composition to Beckett’s translation of his own writing.
In an interview with Everett Frost, for example, Feldman explains that:
He [Beckett] probably does it in a way that would be very surprising, like

saying it to himself in French and then saying it to himself in English.
I’m quite sure that many times his way of arriving at something could be
absolutely much more clinical, almost pedantically so, than one would
think. But the end results are what we’re involved with here. So, I under-
stand him to some degree as an artist. I know that there is a clinical
approach and then he’s learned how to lose it, or to work with it, or to
change it. I know that he did tell me that he says things over to himself
over and over. I work the same way. I play things or look at things over
and over and over.
Describing his compositional process in more detail, Feldman also explained:
What I do then is, I translate, say something, into a pitchy situation. And
then I do it where it’s more intervallic, and I take the suggestions of that
back into another kind of pitchiness –not the original pitchiness, and
so forth, and so on. Always retranslating and then saying, now let’s do it
with another kind of focus.
(Feldman quoted in Tubridy, 2012, 150)
9

But while the ideas of translation, interactivity, liminality, the reduction of
artistic material and the desire to fold all within a static form of temporal flow
create an aesthetic that draws together the work of Feldman and Beckett, per-
haps the most significant link between the two for this study is the fact that
Feldman also endowed his work with a form of semantic fluidity. As we have
seen in previous chapters, semantic fluidity emerges when words or music are
repeated to such an extent that meaning or signification, typically brought
about through connected affiliations, begin to dissolve. In both Beckett’s
and Feldman’s work, explicit meanings are avoided at all costs, as the artists
instead seek creative forms that express the complex, unresolved nature of the
human condition. The longing, the unanswered questions, the mystery, the
heavy weight of time are all themes favoured by Beckett and Feldman and
both employ repetition to explore them. What is especially interesting is how
musematic, discursive, binary oppositional and exact clothed repetition (our
categories from the previous chapter) can translate from text to instrumental
music, and at the same time maintain this semantic fluidity. While Beckett
found the inspiration for his semantic fluidity in music and music philosophy,
how these ideas get retranslated back into music can be highly revealing.
Neither
Sebastian Claren provides us with a valuable chronology of events around the
Beckett/Feldman collaboration, the composer beginning work on the score in
Spring 1976 and completing it on 30 January 1977 (Claren, 2000, 521–544).
Feldman first met Beckett while the latter was rehearsing Footfalls and That
Time in Berlin on the 20 September 1976 (Knowlson, 1996, 630). Feldman
later recounted the episode to Skempton:
He [Beckett] was very embarrassed –he said to me, after a while:

“Mr Feldman, I don’t like opera”. I said to him, “I don’t blame you!”
Then he said to me “I don’t like my words being set to music”, and I said,
“I’m in complete agreement. In fact it’s very seldom that I’ve used words.
I’ve written a lot of pieces with voice, and they’re wordless”. Then he
looked at me again and said, “But what do you want?” And I said “I have
no idea!” He also asked me why I didn’t use existing material … I said
that I had read them all, that they were pregnable, they didn’t need music.
I said that I was looking for the quintessence, something that just hovered.
(Skempton, 1977, 5)
As Feldman notes, Beckett had little time for opera. His first published work,
the critique Proust ([1931] 1999), went so far as to label the form a corrup-
tion of the Schopenhauerian will, as if by attaching words to “pure music”,
some of its intangible ideal beauty was tarnished (Beckett, [1931] 1999, 92).
But Feldman also disliked opera and rarely set music to texts, something that
makes his work with Beckett even more remarkable (a notable exception was
10

his Four Songs to e. e. cummings written in 1951). Feldman explained his aver-
sion to opera in a conversation with Everett Frost in 1987:
the first thing he [Beckett] said to me was that he hated opera. And so did
I. I mean, I’m not an opera goer; I hardly ever go to the opera. I just don’t
experience what exactly, what is meant theatrically [by opera]. If I would
have to talk about it, because there’s something about, there’s something
in the world of, uh –I wouldn’t want to use a term like prosaic or clichéd,
but it’s something to some degree related.
According to James Knowlson, Feldman then produced a drafted score that

he had written up on some lines from Beckett’s Film ([1964] 2006), before the
author declared that there was but one theme in his life:
“May I write it down?” [asked Feldman]. (Beckett himself takes Feldman’s

music paper and writes down the theme … It reads “To and fro in shadow,
from outer shadow to inner shadow. To and fro, between unattainable self
and unattainable non-self ”) … “It would need a bit of work, wouldn’t it?
Well, if I get any further ideas on it, I’ll send them on to you.”
(Knowlson, 1996, 631)
Knowlson recounts that Beckett did indeed send a card to Feldman’s home
in Buffalo by the end of the month, with the following note attached: “Dear
Morton Feldman. Verso the piece I promised. It was good meeting you. Best.
Samuel Beckett” (Knowlson, 1996, 631). The text, neither, was on the rear
of the postcard. Knowlson reminds us that Beckett never thought of it as
a poem –he actually considered it short prose –and that the text itself was
influenced by his rehearsals in Berlin of the play Footfalls ([1975] 2006), owing
“one striking image to the play on which he was working so intently: ‘unheard
footfalls only sound’ ” (Knowlson, 1996, 632).
Recalling his first encounter with the repetitive libretto, Feldman
describes a perplexed and transitory reaction: “I’m reading it. There’s some-
thing peculiar. I can’t catch it. Finally, I see that every line is really the same
thought said in another way. And yet the continuity acts as if something else
is happening. Nothing else is happening. What you’re doing in an almost
Proustian way is getting deeper and deeper saturated into the thought”
(Feldman, 1985, 185).
Of the 87 words in neither, 60 are unique. Figure 5.1 sets out the frequency
of repetition in the words and phrases. The text itself isn’t as repetitve as other
Beckett texts we have seen, but the subject or theme, however, is. The text is
full of Beckettian oppositional binaries, of the kind we explored in the pre-
vious chapter. The binaries of “to and fro”, “self ” and “unself ”, “back and
forth”, “neared” and “turned away”, all present a state of consciouness that
yearns for explanations, for answers before death, the final “halt for good”. It
10
from 4 4.598
and 4 4.598
gently 3 3.448
the 3 3.448
to 3 3.448
impenetrable 2 2.299
shadow from 2 4.598
for good 2 4.598
neither 2 2.299
turned 2 2.299
shadow 2 2.299
sound 2 2.299
other 2 2.299
self 2 2.299
once 2 2.299
away 2 2.299
good 2 2.299
then 2 2.299
way 2 2.299
for 2 2.299
on 2 2.299
of 2 2.299
Figure 5.1 Analysis of neither text
is a text that explores the nature of self-knowledge, a dialectical subject that

can only be examined through antithesis. The elusiveness of human percep-
tion in the Kantian and Schopenhauerian sense, its flawed and limited cap-
ability, is touched on in the final lines, “unspeakable home”. As Art Lang
writes: “Transformation, then, is not a recovery, but a revealing. The eternal
present exists in the space between the familiar and the unfamiliar. Which is
real? Neither” (Art Land, 1997, liner notes, Neither, Radio Sinfonie Orchester
Frankfurt).
Feldman developed this short text, scrawled on the back of a postcard,
into an hour-long opera for full orchestra and soprano. The work traverses
many terrains, from complex and dense tuttis to fragile and ethereal solo pas-
sages. So far, we have seen how Beckett included a silenced music in his writ-
ing but how does this change when the patterns of repetition are sounded,
when silenced music becomes audible once again? Neither best embodies all
of the tropes discussed thus far.
Feldman does not really depict the words as such, but instead he creates
an equivalent soundworld or landscape of consciousness. Unable to “catch”
the fleeting, ever-morphing recurrences, Feldman realised that Beckett was
effectively repeating the same idea over and over in the libretto: the theme that
he spoke of –the impossibility of knowing the self/unself. It was clear to the
102

composer, then, that a suitable musical response might be to write a score that
reflected this repeated idea. The chords shift gradually but only in subtle ways,
as Feldman’s inversions, instrument swapping and transpositions continually
play out the same concept. The “comings and goings” of Beckett’s aesthetic
are thus reflected in the “to and fro” of Feldman’s musical response. Far from
a standard operatic format, Neither is one act with no characterisation or
drama. Along the lines of Kramer’s ideas on non-teleological music, Feldman
deliberately avoided “continuity” so as to fit the Beckettian aesthetic, as he
remarked to Skempton: “I didn’t want a cause-and-effect continuity, a kind of
glue that would take me from one thought to another. I wanted to treat each
sentence as a world” (Skempton, 1977).
If we return to the modes of analysis outlined in the previous chapters,
we can see some profound intermedial blending occurring. The movement
of the position of the chords in the bars ensures that Feldman maintains
the “unspeakable home” of the piece. The “to and fro” of the changing time
signatures is also an important feature of this Deleuzian repetition. Never
is the music exactly the same, but instead Feldman is offering us a slightly
manipulated version of previous material, whether it be through transpos-
ition, clustering or swapping the accents of the rhythmical patterns. This is
very much like Beckett’s binary oppositional repetition, as seen in the previ-
ous chapter. Where Beckett might use anadiplosis, beginning a sentence with
a repeat of the end of the previous sentence, or manipulate the iambs and
dactyls rhythmically as binary oppositions, here Feldman applies a similar
idea in music. The importance of recurring motifs and note clusters becomes
immediately apparent in the score and for this reason a motivic form of ana-
lysis is chosen rather than a harmonic one. The repetitive parameters that we
applied to Beckett’s work in previous chapters offer insights into Feldman’s
approach, heralding a new kind of intermedial study. As we will see, Feldman’s
response to the text is both a translation, the term he himself used to describe
such Deleuzian repetition, and also an extension of Beckett’s text through
collaboration.7
The static nature of the piece is immediately apparent in the elongated
drone of the wind section (Figure 5.2).
Musematic repetition abounds, as Feldman manipulates certain sonorities
that may at first seem the same. The soprano line, for instance, has three spe-
cific musematic motifs that iterate chosen words alongside other wordless ver-
bal ideas. The first of these vocal ideas (Figure 5.3), which I call V1, occurs
with the first entrance of the soprano just before Feldman’s figure 15.
On the words “To and fro in shadow, from inner to outer shadow”, the first
two lines of Beckett’s text, the soprano repeats a G2 note for each syllable. The
accompaniment here consists of droning elongated static chords in the wind
section, cellos and basses with some interweaving repetitive textures in the
percussion and harp lines. The first five syllables, from “to” to “sha”, all con-
sist of a minim tied to a dotted crotchet, with each bar beginning with a trip-
let crotchet rest. Conversely, this changes on the syllable “dow”, to become a
103
Figure 5.2 Neither, bars 1–12
Figure 5.3 Neither, excerpt from figure 14

104
triplet crotchet rest followed by a crotchet tied to a dotted crotchet. Beginning

just before figure 16, we see this idea over the words “from inner to outer
shadow”, but with the time signatures reflecting a bar of 2$(a crotchet rest
and crotchet G tied to a dotted crotchet in 3* ) (Figure 5.4). This rhythm of the
triplet crotchet rest followed by minim tied to dotted crotchet reappears on all
words, moving between 2$and 3* . Here, repetitive timpani fill in for the lack of
winds. Once again, Feldman employs different instrumentation to add variety
and colour to repetitive material.
A slight variation of V1 occurs around figure 19, for the line “from impene-
trable self to impenetrable unself ”. Here, the rhythmic material changes to fit
the staccato syllables (Figure 5.5)
Feldman again plays with the time signature in the next appearance of V1
in figures 59/60 with the words “the one gleam or the other”. A repeated G2 in
the soprano (Figure 5.6) this time moves from $ 2 to 3$marked by a triplet of a
crotchet rest and minim tied over the bar to a dotted minim.
So the time signatures reflect this “to and fro” in the text, and the penum-
bra of self-knowledge is equally depicted in Feldman’s unclear teleology. The
105
elusive environment of the text is being recreated in the music itself. Feldman’s
music “shimmers” in its stillness, reflecting traits of Kramer’s vertical time
A variation of V1, recurring G♭ notes on the words “beckoned back and
forth and turned away”, occurs at fi gure 41. This time, the V1 in the soprano is
adumbrated by its occurrence in the preceding bars of the cello part. A bar of
2$is divided into a triplet of a crotchet rest and a minim, before the next bar
of 3*features a dotted crotchet. Here (Figure 5.7), the bars are not tied. For
the words “back and forth and” Feldman essentially inserts a palindrome in
the soprano rhythm, like Beckett’s binary anadiplosis, with “and” and “forth”
each in 2$ . The accompanying percussion mirrors this echoing. As Laws (1996,
202) suggests, the “concern is with keeping the piece going; his [Feldman’s]
interest lies with the process of duration extended by means of change and
reiteration”.
At figure 91 the soprano returns with the line “unheard footfalls only
sound”, employing yet a further variation of V1 (Figure 5.8). This time, stac-
cato quavers are followed by staccato crotchets before a longer emphasis on
the word “sound”. Feldman marks out this word “sound” for special repe-
tition, repeating it another two times, but these echoes are pluralised to
“sounds” in elongated musematic fashion (Figure 5.9). The composer empha-
sises the dominance of music over text here by deliberately altering the text,
an aesthetic choice furthered by the obscured rendition of the words by the
high-registered tessitura of the soprano. Significantly, every syllable is set on
the dominant D2 note, as the music metaphorically claims its higher, more
semantically fluid, place in the arts. The line of text “unheard footfalls only
sound” is sounded out three consecutive times from figures 91 to 93, and the
repetition of this line is clearly also due to its reference to footsteps and sound
itself.
Neither, V2
The second main musematic vocal idea is one that first appears at figure 25
(Figure 5.10) and continues through figure 27. Where before the soprano
stuck to one individual note, here a three-note motif is introduced, while the
cello, basses and violas hold static chords.
106
Figure 5.10 Neither, excerpt from figures 25/26
On the word “doors”, we see an F#, G, A♭; three quavers in 3* . The A♭ is

tied into the following bar, which consists of a triplet of a minim and crotchet
rest in 2$, extending the final utterance in a way similar to that of motive V1.
The tied notes, time signatures and the triplet make this idea, which will be
referred to as V2, quite similar to V1, but the occurrence of this three-note
motif on each syllable makes it notably separate and distinct. This motivic
107

development or extension of V1 introduces a neighbour note on either side
of the V1 motif. The metaphor of Feldman’s chromaticism matches Beckett’s
dark subject matter in a way that does seem to imply certain affiliations.
Semantic fluidity cannot always be maintained completely; some meaning
will inevitably be consensually grounded, pinned down rather than left afloat
for the listener to gather. The insistent repetition of this chromatic run of
three pitches soon becomes chant-like against the alternating textures of the
accompaniment. The binary of self/unself in the text is matched by the sopra-
no’s stillness in relation to the other instruments.
An elongation of this V2 rhythm is found on page 30 (Feldman, 1977),
beginning in figure 49 on the word “heedless” (Figure 5.11). Here we have a
bar of 3*consisting of a dotted crotchet on the note F# tied into the next bar
of 2@containing three minims in a triplet on the notes F#, G, A♭ that seem to
“hold the moment”.
The A♭ is tied over into the next bar of 3*with a dotted crotchet. Essentially,
then, this variation inserts an extra syllable marked by the dotted tied crotchet
on the beginning of the V2 idea seen previously on pages 17–19. At figure 63
we can see a wordless variation of the V2 motive, and once more, but this
time elongated, around figure 71. If we recall Feldman’s assertion above that
“by erasing the references and where they came from … [y]‌ou were very fresh
into the moment, and you didn’t relate it”, we can see that, here, such minor
variants can achieve a great deal of change over such vast canvasses of static
material.
Another variation of V2, amounting to a combination of V1 and V2, or in
another way an elongation (like that around fi gure 71) of V2, can be seen six
bars before figure 95, with the words “till at last halt for good” (Figure 5.12).
As we can clearly see, Feldman uses the same rhythmic material, as V1
appears, this time a semibreve triplet rest, before the triplet minim in 2@is tied
over the bar to a dotted crotchet in 3* . The same three-note sequence as the

108

V2 motif recurs here, but now further spread apart (F#, G, A♭). By extend-
ing the words over repeats of three notes instead of single notes, Feldman
enlivens the piece, adding an extra layer of colour, or rather, another “shim-
mer” or shade to the same colour. The repetitive V2 ostinato clashes with the
accompanying atonal textures somewhat reflecting the futility of death, the
“halt for good”.
Neither, V3
The third main soprano musematic motif is the four- note idea seen at
figure 128 (Figure 5.13). Like V1, this idea consists of one note per syllable;
but this time, instead of a repeated single tone, a four-note sequence of notes
repeats after every four syllables, on the rotating note pattern B♭, A♭, A♮, B♮.
On page 71, from figure 129, we see the word “neither” repeated six times
in this high register (Figure 5.14), and then another two times in figure 131.
This is an important moment; and one in which Feldman’s logic departs
from the simple, single utterance offered by Beckett. The last three utter-
ances of the word “neither”, however, break from the four-note sequence and
instead condense the second half into a single bar that is repeated two bars
into figure 131. Like “neither”, the final line –“unspeakable home” –repeats
eight times, beginning on figure 135 (Figure 5.15), bringing the opera to a
close. At a tempo change of 42bpm, Feldman makes the soprano line much
denser and highly melismatic. Significantly, variations of elements of the pre-
vious V1, V2 and V3 motifs can be seen in the changing contours of this
melodic material.
The homophonic texture in the accompaniment further emphasises the
intensity of the soprano’s futile despair in these final moments, while the
interweaving repetitive patterns from V1, V2 and V3 almost approach regu-
larity without ever truly achieving it, and in the end fall apart. Repetitive
textures further emphasise the melismatic soprano’s high, abrasive tessitura.

109
Figure 5.15 Neither, figure 135
In Beckett’s letter cited earlier, he had written in relation to Godot: “I do not

believe that the text of Godot could bear the extensions that any musical
setting would inevitably give it. The piece as a dramatic whole, yes, but not
the verbal detail.” Yet here, Feldman’s music really furthers the longing of
10
Figure 5.16 Neither, figure 46
Beckett’s verbal text –both arts work together in symbiosis to create a work
that offers more than the sum of its parts.
The nine-note interlocking texture

Discursive repetition also features in Feldman’s treatment of Neither in repeti-
tive phrases that recur structurally throughout the work. Acting like a fanfare,
the nine-note wordless motif first appearing around figure 46 (Figure 5.16) is
a particularly memorable discursive repetition that at first glance appears to
be a question followed by an answer, a very Beckettian use of musical theory,
perhaps. But on closer inspection, what these two bars amount to is a rearticu-
lated question. Just like Beckett’s text, Feldman’s music reiterates the question
in numerous ways. He told Frost that “[i]‌t was wordpainting” (Frost, 1998,
54); but of course, in Feldman’s aesthetic word painting was something quite
unique, something more akin to the forms of representation found on the
canvasses of Rothko or Pollock. Just as the questions remain unanswered in
Beckett’s words, so too do they go without response in Feldman’s sounds. The
music responds to, and reflects, the longing and yearning of the human condi-
tion, the theme of the libretto. Non-developmental in nature, Feldman sought
and found a musical parallel to Beckett’s non-specific Schopenhauerian text, a
libretto that leaves any further interpretation open and fluid.
At figure 46, although all instruments are in unison, the phrasing makes
this texture especially alluring. Each instrument has different articulations in
their respective phrasing of the part. The horn and bass clarinet are in unison,
for example, but the horn is phrased in 6s while the bass clarinet moves in 7s.
1

The three trombones are likewise grouped in opposing clusters of 4s, 3s and
5s respectively. Following twelve bars of this texture, Feldman changes the
instrumentation to three trumpets grouped in 6s, 4s and 3s, a cello grouped
in 7s, two violas grouped in 8s and 2s alongside the same contrabassoon
bass stabs. The employment of such articulations and in such a repetitive
interlocking fashion produces a consistent throb from the different timbres.
The lack of accents or dynamics bar the ppp at the start of each system sug-
gests a more fluid voicing where the only emphasis is one of articulation, a
static colour, like that of the painters he so admired. The change or variation
comes about through the different orchestral timbres introduced, an alter-
ation of shade and texture rather than motive or harmony. Here the notes
are repeated, but the instrumentation changes, a common characteristic of
Feldman’s Deleuzian repetition, like Beckett’s exact clothed repeats seen in
the previous chapter.
At figure 48, we see that the cello continues the motif in groups of 7s, while
the only other instrument playing the motif is the solo violin, which changes
its articulations from 2s to 3s, 4s, back to 3s in bar 468, then 5s, back to 2s
in bar 472, then 6s, 3s, 5s, 4s and finally 7s. Significantly, the accompanying
timpani and cymbal rolls remain static and unchanging. Feldman is, by play-
ing the same motif through different instrumental combinations and articula-
tions, essentially looking at the same object from different perspectives. This
parallax effect is reminiscent of Joyce’s Dublin in Ulysses, as the individual
characters view the same events unfolding concurrently from different view-
points in the city. Vertical time and stasis are the real goal here, rather than
any traditional teleological development.
When the soprano re-enters at fi gure 49, with the V2 motif repeating
melodically the line “Heedless of the way, intent on” (Figure 5.17), Feldman
breaks up Beckett’s line; the remainder of the phase, “the one gleam or the
other” (Figure 5.18), appears later on (page 36, fi gure 59), but this time with
the V1 motif. Here, any sort of teleology breaks apart: V2 –an extended vari-
ant of V1 –begins the phrase, reducing down to V1 almost 100 bars later for
the development of the text, in a sense, preventing any semantic continuity.
But does this suggest a disregard of Beckett’s text by the composer; or is he
pulling out something that is lying silenced in the libretto? Is Feldman com-
posing not just with words, but also with that which lies within the “shadows”
between verbal “understanding or non-understanding”?
The three bassoons here provide accompaniment (Figure 5.17). As we can
see, the third bassoon comes in with F♮ held ppp, dying to nothing, and is
quickly joined by the second bassoon on F# at the same dynamic. A clus-
ter is formed by the first bassoon at the end of the bar on the note G. All
three notes are contained in the nine-note interlocking section preceding this.
This nine-note riff becomes refrain-like in Neither, in the Poe-like manner
that we spoke of in Chapter 2. It enlivens the opera with a memorable discur-
sive repetitive melody and texture, somewhat like a ritornello or fanfare. Of
course this is not a tonal melody, but instead a chromatic contour that suits
12
Figure. 5.17 Neither, excerpt from figures 49/50
the libretto well: universal, dark and moving. The refrain thus serves as an
interlude, and practically speaking, it offers a rest for the soprano from the
strenuous demands of the work.
Bassoons follow by playing the same idea again but in a different order: F#
for a bar, then the first bassoon adds its G, while simultaneously the third bas-
soon adds its F♮. The soprano enters with her F#, ensuring a close jar. When
she finishes, there is a bar of silence before she re-enters alone with the V2
motif again. Like in Projection 1, Feldman uses silence here to great effect in
Neither. But while this is happening, violin, viola and cello appear on the ris-
ing part of the soprano notes. The strings play clusters including every single
chromatic note except, C, A and G#. A repetitive texture follows on page 31,
5 bars into fi
gure 50 (Figure 5.19), where parts are shared between the voices –
what I refer to as the shared dialogue section. Each instrument has its note
and that does not change until we return to the interlocking nine-note idea at
figure 52/53.
Here, the solo violin plays double-stop perfect fourths, grouped in 2s, this
time accompanied by its stringed peers –the viola phrased in 3s, third vio-
lin in 4s, and the second violin in 5s. At the same time, this is supported by
13
rhythmic interjections in the percussion –from timpani, consistent repetitive

rolls on the tam tam, and alternate bars of silence and marimba shimmers.
This injection of rhythm provides a build before the return of the nine-note
motif. The vibraphone and piano also play the motif, the piano grouped in
14
6s. The harp is playing in the same bars as the marimba but a triplet later. In
contrast to the first appearance of the nine-note interlocking texture, here the
soprano enters with the V2 motif and light accompaniment, followed by 18
bars of pulsing shared voices for a second time, implying some concordance
in the soundworld. The nine-note texture is on this second discursive, repeti-
tive appearance much lighter and even somewhat consonant on account of
the added perfect fourths in the solo violin.
The nine-note interlocking texture returns for a third time on page 40 at
figure 69 (Figure 5.20). This time, the shared dialogue section, seen earlier, is
combined with the nine-note texture. The soprano sings the motif as a word-
less instrument before returning to a V2 variation, 2 bars before fi gure 71,
also wordless. Semantic fluidity has reached a peak here. Words are no longer
present, as the voice becomes an instrument like any other in the orchestra.
The V2 motif does, however, retain its musematic affiliations gathered from
its previous appearances, though it may now be textless.
Repetitive droning cymbals and gongs in rising fifths accompany this elon-
gated variation of the V2 motif, while the other instrumentation is sparse.
The tuba, harp and D♭ bassoon offer occasional stabs, whereas the violins
and violas accompany the soprano’s A♭ with a clashing A♮, a minor second
15
so characteristic of Feldman. Following this utterance, we don’t go into the

shared dialogue idea as before, but instead we are offered an extended drone
section with wordless soprano variations. The instruments, including the
voice, converse by way of music alone, something Beckett would no doubt
have enjoyed.
Two bars before fi gure 79, the soprano again sings wordless variations of
the V1 motif before the final discursive return of the nine-note interlocking
16
texture at fi
gure 86. All instruments are now playing the motif in unison, each
with their own articulation grouping as before. Coming out of the texture this
fourth and final time, we have a melismatic texture of three horns, three trom-
bones and percussion (4 bars into figure 88 –Figure 5.21). This fits with the
yearning and longing expressed in the libretto, before we enter the insistent
exclamation of “unheard footfalls only sound”, discussed above.
As we have seen, Feldman’s music for Neither displays the use of inter-
spersed motifs and silent space, rhythmic interlocking and manipulations of
accents and time signatures that keep the music going “back and forth” –
depicting those very lines in the libretto and the central theme of the text.
The repetitive nature of the libretto and, in particular, Feldman’s belief that
Beckett reiterates the same idea in various ways, is matched by the music com-
posed: not in a literal way, but by suggestion and the recurrent manipula-
tion of the material. In sum, Neither provides us with a complex example of
music and literature interaction through the employment of semantic fluidity,
achieved through repetition at both the textual and musical levels, even if
the types of repetition do not always coincide. This non-teleological, non-
developmental music achieves stillness through its use of repetition and the
refrain-like nine-note interlocking motif. Feldman’s music is at times static,
17

reflecting the influences of the painters he so admired alongside the ancient
methods of dying wool and weaving rugs. Yet at other times the vast temporal
canvas of the music emphasises the fact that time plays such an important
role in this artform. In terms of intermediality, Feldman’s music cannot be
separated from the libretto. Rather, the words and music have fused together
at such a level that intermedia is established; to tear them apart would detract
from the elusiveness forged by semantic fluidity.
Words and Music

Although we do not know how Beckett reacted to Feldman’s treatment of
his text, it would seem that the writer was not disappointed, for, nearly a dec-
ade later, Feldman was invited to write a new score for Words and Music.
First published in 1962 and broadcast on the BBC Third Programme on
13 November that year, the play featured music by the author’s cousin John
Beckett. The score was subsequently withdrawn, supposedly on the grounds
that John Beckett was never entirely pleased with it –there is no actual evi-
dence to show that Samuel disliked John’s score. Feldman’s score takes a very
different approach to John’s in that the Irish composer provided much more
in the manner of Romantic-tinged textures in response to Beckett’s textual
directions. An archival production by Beckettian Katharine Worth, with
music by Humphrey Searle, was performed for the University of London
Audio-Visual Centre in 1973, but it was not until Everett Frost’s production
in 1985, for the Festival of Radio Plays, that the Beckett/Feldman Words and
Music came about.
The context of the play is vastly different from Neither, as is the result.
The latter is a complex one act anti-opera lasting an hour, versus Words and
Music, which is a radio play with 33 brief snippets of music, each lasting from
as little as a few seconds up to three minutes. This huge difference has much
to do with the fact that Words and Music is intended for radio rather than the
concert hall. The score calls for seven players: two flutes, vibraphone, piano,
violin, viola and cello. Marjorie Perloff called the work an opera (Perloff,
2003), and, though it may be short, it actually does adhere more to an operatic
aesthetic than Neither does; there is drama, emotion, dialogue and character-
isation. But what is particularly innovative about this play and is indicative
of Beckett’s aesthetic involvement in the philosophical relationship between
music and literature is the dramatis personae. The play is set for three charac-
ters, Bob (music), Joe (words) and Croak (the master). The character Bob is
played entirely by instrumental music, whose every utterance is, in this case,
composed by Feldman. A dialogue ensues between Joe and Bob, with a mas-
ter figure, Croak, referred to as “my Lord” by Joe, running the proceedings.
The play has echoes of courtly entertainment as the two “comforts”, words
and music, serve their master by acting out his requests.8
Although Feldman’s approach to the music differs from his previous set-
ting of Beckett’s text, there are nevertheless certain continuities. Deleuzian
18

repetition is again present here, as Feldman repeats material in a transforma-
tive fashion. Laws writes that Feldman’s music gives a:
sense of encountering the material repeatedly but slightly differently each

time –of being taken further into the thought and working at it from dif-
ferent perspectives without conclusion.
Laws (2013, 348)
This “encountering the material repeatedly but slightly differently each time”
is reminiscent of the mechanics of Neither, as Feldman approaches Beckett’s
repetitive texts in a manner that perennially poses queries from different
angles without cadence.
Beckett’s script includes verbal musical descriptions or directions for Bob,
and Feldman’s music, unusually for him, corresponds in a loose way to the
significations of the scripted words, such as “great expression”, “spreading
and subsiding music” and “Love and soul music”. For Feldman, a composer
who avoided expression and traditional notions of “beauty” and melody, as
we have seen, this was a venture not be taken lightly. In fact, it is a testament
to his respect for Beckett that he even agreed to the collaboration. As a result
of these suggestions for expressive music, Feldman wrote uncharacteristic-
ally evocative snippets that connote emotions unlike any of his earlier works,
though still a far cry from consonant, harmonious tonality. This was one of
Feldman’s last works before his death in 1987, and in the remaining two works
that he composed, this emotive quality seemed to prevail. The last, we remem-
ber, was dedicated to the author, entitled For Samuel Beckett.
Words and Music also brings to the fore more Beckettian contradictions.
As we saw previously, Beckett’s sentimental Romantic view of music may
seem contradictory, given his general aesthetic belief that there is “nothing to
express”. Yet here, the author includes directions for “expressive music”. We
must also remember that such contradictions would not have worried him,
and were perhaps the prerogative of the postmodern artist. The Feldman col-
laborations also manifest a change of perspective on Beckett’s part in terms
of musical collaborations. Where earlier, in Proust, he had viewed the pair-
ing of words with music as a corruption, after his work with Mihalovici and
the success of Neither, the author seemed more positive about intermedial
synthesis. Words and Music is a direct result and “metamedial” (Wolf, 2005,
150) dialogue of such an approach. As Stephen Benson points out, both
Feldman and Beckett shared disdain for functional form –the composer fam-
ously declaring that “polyphony sucks” due to its favouring of structure over
sound –while the writer had a distaste for Bach for similar “mechanical” rea-
sons, mainly that form was not in itself a satisfactory teleology (Benson, 2005,
170). Both Beckett’s Joe and Feldman’s Bob, iterate repetitive material that is
close but never exactly the same, a near miss that Brian Ferneyhough refers to
as “slight phrase decoupling” (quoted in Benson, 2005, 175). This decoupling
relates to the phenomenon of Deleuzian musematic repetition that we have
19

been exploring in Beckett and Feldman thus far. Joe, the words character,
parodies functional rhetorical devices in his language; his speech on “sloth” is
virtually identical to that on “love”, with the respective word for the subject
matter only swapped. Joe even slips up and says “sloth” when he means love
at one point; his incantation of the memorised form overbears the content:
“Sloth is of all the passions the most powerful passion and indeed no pas-
sion is more powerful than the passion of sloth, this is the mode in which
the mind is most affected and indeed”
“Love is of all the passions the most powerful passion and indeed no pas-
sion is more powerful than the passion of love”
“Of all these movements then and who can number them and they are
legion sloth is the … LOVE is the most urgent and indeed by no manner
of movement is the soul more urged than by this”.
These words seem tautologous and meaningless, as Joe (words) uses the same
rhetoric to express different subject matter. As we saw in the previous chap-
ter, Shaw believed that literature requires more variation than music does, and
here Joe’s insistent banal ravings simply do not suffice to express such subject
matter. Beckett is deliberately foregrounding the failures of language and the
insincerities of rhetorical devices, including repetition. Werner Wolf points out
the text operates in a self-enclosed manner in this fashion: “the discourse thus
appears to be constructed according to internal self-referential principles rather
than being an attempt at transmitting referential meaning” (Wolf, 2005, 153).
Of course, Beckett had long left the goal of “transmitting referential meaning”
behind, or at least explicit meaning, in his pursuit of semantic fluidity, and
Words and Music displays this aesthetic “metamedially” better than any. The
play offers an unparalleled philosophical debate on the respective artforms.
Beckett once said when discussing the play that “music always wins”
(quoted in Worth, 1998, 16), and certainly in this battle within the play in
which Joe (words) is constantly interrupting Bob (music) and pleading with
him to stop, Joe eventually succumbs and even seems to enjoy the music. At
the end, Joe finally invites music to play before sighing in acceptance. Words
and music eventually collaborate successfully, for the appeasement of Croak,
and perform a song that brings together these discrete mediums, in the Lessing
sense, in a kind of mutual respect. I wouldn’t say music wins necessarily; per-
haps nobody wins in the end, as there is no resolution or “home” reached.
The fact that music finishes the play seems to conform more to standard song
structure, with a musical outro, than it does any distinct victory.
After analysing the textual repetitions in Words and Music, including stage
directions, from a word count of 1,779 there are only 447 unique words. This
yields an especially high ratio of repetitions, c.4:1. Figure 5.22 outlines the
repetitions of words and phrases in Words and Music.
Joe’s tautologous mechanical rhetoric is clearly based on repetition,
as Beckett continues to erode meaning through recurrence. Many of the
120
the 96 5.396
pause 80 4.497
words 53 2.979
of 51 2.867
and 48 2.698
music 42 2.361
to 37 2.08
is 36 2.024
croak 35 1.967
in 32 1.799
this 28 1.574
no 26 1.461
a 21 1.18
or 20 1.124
that 18 1.012
my 18 1.012
as 18 1.012
trying to 17 1.911
to sing 17 1.911
trying 17 0.956
sing 17 0.956
as before 16 1.799
before 16 0.899
thump 16 0.899
love 16 0.899
by 15 0.843
in the 14 1.574
suggestion 13 0.731
with 13 0.731
sing this 12 1.349
my lord 12 1.349
lord 12 0.675
more 12 0.675
soul 12 0.675
all 12 0.675
age 12 0.675
for 12 0.675
club 11 0.618
bob 11 0.618
of club 10 1.124
then 10 0.562
than 10 0.562
violent thump 9 1.012
thump of 9 1.012
a little 9 1.012
violent 9 0.506
little 9 0.506
is the 9 1.012
face 9 0.506
on 9 0.506
the ashes 8 0.899
the face 8 0.899
Figure 5.22 Analysis of Words and Music

12
Figure 5.23 Words and Music, 2 bars
repetitions are indeed due to the practice of learning through mimesis that
Joe displays when repeating the pitched lyrics of the song, “then down a little
way, through the trash”. Other examples of his repetitive language include the
phrase “in the ashes”, which occurs three times in the final song, and “that
clarity of silver”, repeating twice on page 292 (segments 5–6; see Figure 5.23).
In Feldman’s score, his “same but different” approach is clearly evident
again in Words and Music. Much of his music repeats the same ascending
scale pattern, and characteristic minor seconds, but in slightly varied ways.
On the first page, for the direction “As before”, the composer does not merely
replicate the previous segment (no. 5) but he instead writes a new segment
(no. 6) that, in his own way of varying repetition through orchestration, moves
the top melodic idea into the piano part. For segment no. 7, again under the
direction “As before”, Feldman’s Bob is somewhat disobedient, as the com-
poser introduces a new piece of music. In contrast, when Joe (words) is given
the same direction, “As before”, he repeats the words, “My Lord” exactly.
Later on, Bob (music) begins suggesting melodic lines for Joe (words)
to pitch his utterances to. Here, didactic repetition, music teaching words,
12
Figure 5.24 Words and Music, 7 bars
requires repetitive suggestions from Feldman. It would seem that, here, his
“crippled symmetry” (Feldman, 1981, repr. 2000, 134–150) takes a back
seat in place of his respect for Beckett’s requests. For “repeat suggestion”, 2
bars of music are repeated exactly by Feldman (segments 19–20), albeit an
exact clothed repeat at the reception level (segments 19–20; see Figure 5.24).
Feldman, however, adds another 3 bars on to segment 20.
Likewise, in segment 21 under the direction “repeats end of previous sug-
gestion”, Feldman does just this, repeating the added 3 bars at the end of seg-
ment 20. Here, we see that Feldman the collaborator is unafraid to embrace
exact clothed repetition. This eventually leads up to the climactic collabor-
ation where both characters engage in a song. For the directions “statement
with elements already used” (segment 35) and “As before or only slightly var-
ied” (segment 36), Feldman repeats previous motivic musical ideas and closes
the play in contemplative fashion.
So what this means is that, in this radio play itself, we see in collaborative
format the kind of translation that Feldman’s opera employs and, as we shall
see in the next chapter, is also evident in the Beckettian jazz improvisations of
Scott Fields. Joe (words) repeats what Bob (music) suggests and both repeat
themselves extensively. Rather than a composer taking Beckett’s text and writ-
ing music inspired by it, in this case the composer reacts to the musical sugges-
tions of the text and actively becomes a collaborator in the original document.
One might say that the opera is the same kind of collaboration, but we must
remember that in that case Feldman had the initial idea before approach-
ing Beckett, and perhaps, as a result, music is far more dominant in Neither
than it is in Words and Music. Words and Music is much more Beckett than
Feldman due to the limitations that Beckett imposed, even though Feldman’s
contribution is the most successful musical contribution to the play.
Conclusion
Producing an hour of music from nine lines, Feldman’s non-developmental,
non-teleological anti-opera, Neither is one in which an abundance of clothed
repetition renders a static texture full of “to and fro”s, “comings and goings”,
pulse changes, timbral juxtapositions and colour manipulations. Words and
Music, although composed in a much more confined format and operating
on a more literal level, shares a similar concern for semantic fluidity. Like
123

Beckett’s semantic fluidity, Feldman’s music both “comes and goes” and is
never quite the same. The music is free from definite semiotic interpretations.
In the ultimate manifestation of a metamedial dialogue between words and
music, free of semantic shackles, both artforms ride the contour of an asymp-
totic curve, as they approach one another, yet, in the end, reach “neither”.
Just as the “self ” never reaches an explanation as to its existence, so the “back
and forth” of the libretto, static chords and recurring motifs are never fully
resolved, but resound perennially.
Both collaborative pieces embody a twentieth-century turn away from clear
semantics, goals and answers, instead offering the Ivesean “unanswered ques-
tion”. The indefinable becomes acceptable, not in a sublime way, as perhaps
Schopenhauer or the Romantics and Symbolists would have it, but rather in
a manner that reflects the complexity and diversity of modern life. In a world
with as many musics as there are languages, each with its own system, an
acceptance of the unbridgeable gulfs in communication became important to
Feldman. Perhaps the greatest gulf between the composer and Beckett was
that the author was never able to abandon the quest for answers as easily,
and would remain steadfast in search of such a bridge. Feldman seems more
comfortable with the “not knowing” than Beckett did. While Beckett’s works
would become increasingly short and focused exercises in intensity, Feldman’s
music became progressively vast and expansive, as in String Quartet No. 2.
Notes
1 The next chapter explores this Beckettian indeterminacy.
2 Lois Overbeck provides a useful overview of Beckett’s fluctuating stance on musical
collaboration in “Audience of Self/Audience of Reader” (2011)..
3 For more discussion on the evolution of Beckett’s musical quotations, see Maier
(2008).
4 See the contributions by Paddison (2004) and Kivy (2004) in the special issue of
Musicae Scientiae devoted to time.
5 The previous chapters engage with such questions somewhat in terms of Kivy’s
“grasping”.
6 “In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister” (In the limitation, the master)
(Goethe quoted in Wilde, [1891] 1997b, 930).
7 I say “collaboration” in its broadest sense. Both certainly worked alone, and with
little discussion. Yet the result is nevertheless double-authored.
8 Werner Wolf (2005) reads music (Bob) and words (Joe) as the “comforts” of the
master figure.
124
6
Improvising Beckett
Chance, silence and repetition
Ruby Cohn speaks of an “improvisational quality” in Beckett’s writing,

wherein the meticulously crafted texts seem through-composed (Cohn, 1980,
135). The language is self-reflexive, directing itself somewhat in the same way
that Flaubert’s and Joyce’s styles would often mirror word content. Beckett
enjoyed employing number games and permutations in his work, the fam-
ous “sucking-stones” episode in Molloy ([1951] 1994) for instance, in which
the protagonist attempts to logically formulate a method of manoeuvring
through each of the 16 stones in turn from his four pockets. But might such
an “improvisational quality” in the author’s work account for a previously
unexplored reason for so many musicians and composers being attracted to
Beckett?
Perhaps exploring the work of a Beckettian improviser serves our pur-
poses best. Building on several ideas introduced in the previous chapters, it
is possible to develop a theory of improvisatory semantic fluidity that oscil-
lates between, yet transforms, Beckett’s work and the live interpretation of a
jazz performer. This chapter will situate the Beckettian jazz of Chicago-born
composer and improviser Scott Fields, after first investigating Beckett’s own
explorations in indeterminacy. It explores how improvisation and indeter-
minacy might be compared and investigates how a semi-improvised avant-
jazz composition based on Beckett’s Not I transforms the protagonist’s self of
the play. By exploring this “illusion of improvisation” in Beckett’s work and
examining how it has been incorporated in improvised music, this chapter
further investigates the transmedial translation of repetition from musicalised
literature into music itself.
Fields’ Beckettian jazz differs a great deal from Morton Feldman’s
approach to composing music inspired by or using Beckett texts. While
one may find similarities in terms of the freedom given to the performer
of Fields’ and Feldman’s music; Michael Nyman reminds us that Feldman
“had never thought of the graph as an ‘art of improvisation’ but more as
‘a totally abstract sonic adventure’ ” (Nyman, [1974] 1999, 70). Feldman
experimented with innovations in graphic scores early in his career, but
gradually grew weary of abandoning such elements of control, as we saw
in the last chapter.
125
Improvising Beckett 125

Lessness
Beckett experimented with aleatoric methods in the short prose piece Sans
from 1969 (later translated by the author into English as Lessness in 1970
(Beckett, 1995). Lessness builds on the musical repetition of previous short
prose works like Bing from 1966 (English translation by the author as Ping
in 1967) –Cohn called Ping “a tantalizing echolalia” (Cohn, 1973, 256).
The word “white” alone repeats a total of 88 times in this short text, while
“almost” appears 37 times, “ping” 33 times, “light” 31 times, “only” 31 times,
“one” 30 times, so repetition is central to the piece. In fact, out of the 934
words in Ping, only 126 are unique. Unlike the single block of text in Ping,
Lessness is divided into 24 paragraphs. Cohn suggests that the structure of
Lessness mirrors humanity’s obsession with time:
the number of sentences per paragraph stops at seven, the number of

days in a week. The number of paragraphs reaches twenty-four, the num-
ber of hours in a day. The number of different sentences is sixty, the num-
ber of minutes in an hour. But the repetition of the sixty sentences in a
different order suggests the capricious arrangement of passing time.
(Cohn 1973, 263)
Beckett explained that he composed the 60 sentences based on six different

images, and subsequently put all of these into a container from which he ran-
domly picked them out in the order that they appear in the text (Cohn, 1973,
265). Lessness comprises 120 sentences, each sentence repeated in another
position in the second of two sections. Once again, as we saw in Godot, Play
and Molloy, Beckett’s use of the da capo device is evident. The author further
explained the process of composing Lessness to John Pilling as the arran-
ging of 60 sentences “first in one disorder. Then in another” (Knowlson and
Pilling, 1979, 173). Beckett then allocated paragraphs lengths of 3, 4, 5, 6 and
7 sentences in random order to give the final text its structure.
This piece has been well analysed. Susan Brienza and Enoch Brater, for
instance, distinguish the six images that make up Beckett’s sentences as being:
1. the ruins as “true refuge” 2. the endless grey of earth and sky 3. The lit-
tle body 4. The space “all gone from mind” 5. Past tenses combined with
never 6. Future tenses of active verbs and the “figment” sentence about
dawn and dusk.
(Brienza and Brater, 1976, 245)
Once more the Beckettian trope of binary oppositions returns –the “dawn”
and “dusk”, “figment” versus reality. For Brienza and Brater, the “steady
repetition of the images, not on the sequence in which they appear” is of
the utmost importance (Brienza and Brater, 1976, 246). Might this repeti-
tive indeterminacy account for a new attempt by Beckett to find a method
126
126 Improvising Beckett

to “accommodate the mess” (quoted in Cohn, 1980, 96), that he spoke of in
reference to the role of the modern artist; one influenced, perhaps, by Dada
and the chance operations that underpin much of John Cage’s compositions?
Or was Lessness an exploration by Beckett to achieve a timelessness in short
prose through the use of extensive repetition, omission of tensed verbs, con-
nectives and subordinate clauses (Paton, 2009)?
Cohn writes that Beckett explained the aleatoric composition of Lessness as
being “the only ‘honest’ … thing to do” (Beckett quoted in Brienza and Brater,
1976, 246). As the French language had earlier allowed Beckett a stylistic free-
dom in which his creations were liberated from the stranglehold of indigenous
syntax and habit, now aleatoric methods enabled a mode of composition that
produced an “honesty” of chance. During their study of the final published
version of Lessness, however, Brienza and Brater question just how neatly
the text worked out; in fact, the tidy finality of the closing section is, accord-
ing to them, glaring evidence of posthumous tampering. Might Beckett have
doctored the results of chance to some extent in an aesthetic adjustment that
produces the cadence? It certainly seems possible given Brienza and Brater’s
analysis, but such a practice would only maintain Beckett’s persistent faith in
contradictions, a notion itself oxymoronic in nature. The chance procedure
was a means, not an end in itself. The interplay between “chance and choice”
is perhaps another Beckettian binary opposition, manifesting itself again in
Lessness (Brienza and Brater, 1976, 244–258).
A collaborative project based at Trinity College Dublin was developed
in 2002 by Elizabeth Drew (English) and Mads Haahr (Computer Science),
resulting in a website –www.random.org/lessness/ –that enables users to create
new versions of Lessness. Software facilitates random permutations of the sen-
tences and paragraph lengths according to Beckett’s criteria. Their method of
obtaining this randomness comes from software that takes atmospheric noise
as its starting point, an organic, more natural type of indeterminacy than that
used by most computerised programs, according to Drew and Haahr. Beckett
continually documented the human condition, and in Lessness the fact that we
can never predict the next sentence brings with it a strange form of realism.
For Drew and Haahr, Lessness is “a precisely calibrated exercise of indeter-
minacy”, and they emphasise the fact that the published version is only “one
of the 1.9 x 10176 possible arrangements of its sentences” (Drew and Haahr,
2002, 3). Each version should hold equal value, it seems, and Drew and Haahr
feel that Beckett’s use of indeterminacy here highlights “human orientations
towards possibilities over the actual” –the order is of less importance than
the continual repetition of the material: the final product, in other words, is
less important than the process. Recognising Beckett’s goal of creating a work
without “an obvious determinism”, Drew and Haahr write: “[t]‌he absence
of an obvious determinism guiding the flow provides a gap in understanding
that spurs the reader’s interaction with the piece. The sense of patterning in
the chaotic sequence of sentences entices the reader to untangle the random
arrangement and attempt to piece together an elusive storyline” (2002, 2). Yet,
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while we can make our own Lessnesses with the program, we are unlikely to
achieve the finality of the published version without Beckett as editor.
Another interesting feature of the work is the fact that each half of the text
amounts to 769 words, a figure that Matthew May points out is only irredu-
cible to factors other than itself and the number 1.1 Such mathematics would
not have been a coincidence in Beckett’s search for semantic fluidity; the self
is not easily reducible.
This aleatoric work has resonated throughout twentieth-century literature.
For his Ph.D thesis, for example, J. M. Coetzee, another Nobel prize-winning
novelist, used computer software to produce a statistical analysis of Beckett’s
prose. In “Samuel Beckett’s Lessness: An Exercise in Decomposition” (1973,
196), Coetzee, like Drew and Haahr, also identifies repetition as “the basic
principle of construction in Lessness”. Writing in 1973, Coetzee seems
unaware of Beckett’s procedures (having not heard of the conversation with
Cohn): and yet he succeeds in describing how it was composed by decipher-
ing the constituent parts of the text. In his painstaking analysis, he highlights
106 different phrases that range in length from 1 to 12 words occurring on
average 5.7 times, and settles on a count of 166 “lexical items” (1973, 195).
His subsequent realisation that “[w]‌ords 770–1, 538 of the text turn out to be
nothing but words 1–769 in a new order”, lead him to see the text as a “lin-
guistic game rather than linguistic expression” (1973, 195). The Beckettian da
capo is, for Coetzee, a means of cancelling through repetition the initial idea,
a retracing that leaves a significant residue: each contrasting pair of oppos-
itions –whether it be the characters Molloy and Moran, Sam and Watt, or
the temporal regions of dawn and dusk –initially override one another; and
yet in the end, each produces more than an absence, or nothing, reaching
instead towards a higher understanding of the futility of certainty (1973,
198). Coetzee describes Lessness as a work that is “dismissing its own inven-
tion” (1973, 198). With this in mind, Beckett’s aesthetic statement in the Three
Dialogues that “[t]he expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with
which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no
desire to express, together with the obligation to express”, perhaps makes
sense in terms of this dismissal [1949] 1999, 103). Process had become the
centre of Beckett’s aesthetic at this stage in the late 1960s and early 1970s,
a trajectory that, alongside his use of silence and repetition, was echoed in
many corners of modern music.
Silence and indeterminacy

One of the most prominent binary oppositions in Beckett’s aesthetics is
that between sound and silence. The space between the notes is of equal
importance as the notes themselves, something that Beckett was keenly
aware of and is evident from Murphy onwards. These gaps on the page
are what Iain Sinclair refers to when he writes of Kötting’s admiration for
Beckett: “that’s why he loved Beckett: the white spaces” (Sinclair 2015, 51).
128

In Texts for Nothing, Beckett writes that “there is silence and there is not
silence” ([1946] 1995, 115). Just as the “intelligible” and the “inexplicable”
provide a balanced dichotomy, Beckett’s employment of silence is equally
dialectical.2 In his attempt to find a form to “accommodate the mess” of
modern life, the noise of infinite disparity, Beckett’s aesthetic of reduc-
tion and distillation pushes silence to the foreground. Beckett admired
Beethoven’s approach to silence, writing: “Is there any reason why that
terrible materiality of the word surface should not be capable of being
dissolved, like for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses,
of Beethoven’s seventh symphony” (Beckett, 2009, 518). Taking musical
silences as inspiration for an approach to silence was especially apt: Beckett
once even asked Stravinsky for his thoughts on formulating a way of pre-
cisely timing pauses in Waiting for Godot in a manner resembling musical
notation.
A history of silence in music and literature falls outside the scope of this
chapter, but insofar as Beckett’s aleatoric explorations are concerned, the aes-
thetic connections here with John Cage need to be addressed.3 Cage was per-
haps that very composer that Beckett prophesised, or at least yearned for in a
letter to Coister in 1954, when he wrote: “[a]‌nd then what about silence itself,
is it not still waiting for its musician?” (11 March 1954 in Beckett, 2011). Dirk
Van Hulle writes that Lessness “was partly inspired by John Cage and other
experimental music of the 1960s”.4 Perhaps such an influence was not only
aleatoric but also concerned with silence and nothingness. Adorno’s belief
that all art was driving towards silence, that it was moving further into an
obscure esoteric niche, unheard by greater and greater numbers, describes a
modern world in which Beckett was paradoxically well equipped. After all,
Beckett described his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature to James
Knowlson as being “damned to fame”.5 The silence in his work was matched
by his own silence in exegesis of his writing. David Metzer’s article “Modern
Silence” (2006) contextualises a modern turn towards unsound as indicative
of a new perspective on sound’s “intimate relationship” to silence, by analys-
ing its importance to Anton Webern, Luigi Nono and Salvatore Sciarrino; but
Cage was the true pioneer in silence’s apotheosis –while also recognising its
fundamental impossibility (Sciarrino quoted in Metzer, 2006, 332).
In “Experimental Music” (1957, in Cage, 1973), the composer speaks of
sounds in a fashion very similar to Beckett’s notion of “fundamental sounds”.
Written a year after Beckett’s Texts for Nothing (Kim-Cohen, 2011, 2), Cage
recognised the impossibility of pure silence: following his experience in an
anechoic chamber, he realised that a person cannot escape the recurring mur-
murs of their central nervous system and heartbeat even in such a quiet space.
Sounds will go on perennially, as Beckett’s characters do. If any sound is lib-
erated to become music –another Cagean idea –so too might silence, or the
lack of sound, assume a musical role. 4’33’’ is, in a way, the first ambient
composition; the silence invites audiences to listen to the indeterminate ambi-
ent sounds of coughing, ambulances, creaky chairs and so on –creating a
129

composition that is never the same but unique and always asking us to con-
textualise sounds as music.
There is no such thing as pure silence, or “black silence” as Beckett
describes it in The Unnamable (Metzer, 2006, 354). There are, however, many
grey silences. Like Deleuze’s clothed repeats, silence is always filtered through
affiliations and contexts. Silence becomes codified, attached to particular
meanings in its reception, and the listener later decodes such signs –the silence
of horror and tension, for instance. When Beckett described Joyce’s Work in
Progress as not “about something; it is that something itself ” ([1929] 1983a,
27, original emphasis), he was referring to the performative quality of the
work, the sounds produced, the fact that the words themselves reflected the
content and were sufficient in themselves rather than evoking underlying con-
ventional narratives. This liberation of words to be sufficient in themselves,
to become “that something itself ” is very similar to Cage’s ideas on emanci-
pating all sounds from the tyranny of the term “music”. Cage writes, “I have
nothing to say and I’m saying it” (Cage, 1973, 109), while for Beckett “there
is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to
express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express” ([1949]
1999, 103).
While for Pater literature might have aspired to the condition of music,
in the twentieth century literature was, for Ihab Hassan, aspiring to silence
(Hassan quoted in Lodge, 1968, 85). Of course, silence is entirely linked with
the inexplicable aspect of Beckett’s aesthetic, as, for him, to say less is to say
more. In the end, silence is yet another Schopenhauerian Romantic ideal –
never possible yet perennially desired. Like the asymptotic curve between
music and language, or between sameness and uniqueness, silence and sound
represent a Derridean non-limit: one that can never be reached but perpetu-
ally yearned towards (Kim-Cohen, 2011, 20).
Georgio Agamben writes of Glenn Gould’s intuition for knowing what not
to play (Kim-Cohen, 2011, 3). In Cage’s explorations of Zen Buddhism, he
would have come across similar ideas: that true power lies in the volume held
in reserve rather than at full fortissimo, in the crouching tiger rather than in
open attack. Like the Trinity College Dublin Lessness project, it is the possi-
bilities inherent that imbue such power, the affordance of the text. The para-
doxical Cagean notion of turning towards the unintended is exemplified in
the binary opposition between chance and choice discussed in Lessness. Of
course, to intend to un-intend is a contradiction in terms, as to choose to
allow certain parameters a “freedom” merely sets up another set. As men-
tioned above, Beckett told Cohn that this approach was the only “honest”
method, as if chance procedures could remove the aesthetic prejudices of the
author. But does using a different method of organisation render sincerity?
What truth exists in randomness? On the one hand, what is commonly under-
stood as a “truth”, that the universe is “organised chaos”, might fit nicely
with Beckett’s claim: yet on the other hand, such a decision is simply another
aesthetic choice and no more “honest” than any other. In the Decay of Lying
130

([1891] 1997b), Oscar Wilde lamented the contemporary focus on realism
rather than the imaginative, and here Beckett seems to equate deconstructing
the author, a kind of Barthesian removal of self, with verisimilitude. Beckett,
we remember, turned to writing in French for similar reasons –to escape the
stranglehold of prescribed style that had been engrained in him within the
English or Hiberno-English tongue.
There are, of course, huge differences in Cage’s and Beckett’s respective
aesthetics. Perhaps the most salient is that Cage seemed more comfortable
with unknowing. Stephen Benson (2012, 227) suggests that although Beckett
wrote tirelessly about the subject, he seemed to yearn for answers at times –
if not in his work, in life. Cage, on the other hand, maintained a kind of
Keatsian “negative capability”, a peaceful understanding that one could
not understand everything, and one was never going to possess the facul-
ties for such understanding. Benson puts it well when he writes: “an unlikely
duo, so the story goes, because Beckett knew too much, although he was a
quick unlearner, while Cage was too comfortable in his apparent unknowing”
(2012, 227).
The final section of Cage’s “Experimental Music” resembles something
Beckett could have written, as does “Lecture on Nothing”. Cage writes:
Where do we go from here? Towards theatre. That art more than music
resembles nature. We have eyes as well as ears, and it is our business while
we are alive to use them.
And what is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not deal-
ing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the
form of paradox: a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play.
This play, however, is an affirmation of life –not an attempt to bring
order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a
way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once
one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its
own accord.
(Cage, [1957] 1973, 227, 5)
Here, Cage imagines a theatre of “purposeful purposelessness”, and who bet-

ter to achieve it than Beckett. Indeed, as Emilie Morin has pointed out, inde-
terminacy has grown popular in contemporary British theatre from Sarah
Kane to Martin Crimp and Tim Crouch (Morin, 2011, 71). The idea that such
a method invokes the chaos of nature, acting as an affirmation of life, reminds
us of Beckett’s perpetual portrayal of the repetitious nature of life, and the
cyclical daily routine of the human condition.
These ideas take on another layer when we consider how attractive
Beckett’s texts have been to improvisers. But how can we compare or con-
trast aleatoric or indeterminate music with improvisation? What differen-
tiates the two is, I suggest, really a question of timing –at what point in
the compositional process the choices are made. In aleatoric music, the
13

composition sets the parameters within which certain processes will play
out, while in improvised music the choices are made in real time during
the performance/composition. Limits are set beforehand in improvisation
too, of course, whether they are deliberate or not. The style in which a per-
former is participating, for instance, will set up a certain set of parame-
ters. Fred Frith might approach a guitar instrumental improvisation with
no idea whatsoever how it will play out, without a single note pre-planned
or composed, and yet the end result will undeniably resemble a Fred Frith
sound. Such parameters are the result of learning, an individual’s aesthetic,
their taste, their physiology, their instrument, their capability to listen and
respond, and, of course, their musical intuition. The type of improvisation
I am referring to here, rather than blues or traditional jazz improvisation
over composed heads (the tune), changes, chord structures, or even any
kind of tonality, is of the free improvising school. Derek Bailey preferred
the term “non-idiomatic improvisation”, but inevitably his own style also
became itself an idiom fairly quickly. All is eventually codified and com-
modified in the market of cultural capital.
Repetition has a complex relationship with improvisation: on the one
hand, a repeated phrase, or idea can emphasise a particular aesthetic intent,
but on the other hand, it runs the risk of negating the very idea of improvisa-
tion itself. The guitarist, improviser and composer Elliott Sharp once joked
that no improvisation can ever be fully free unless the performers suffer from
amnesia.6 Within any musical context there are certain aesthetic parameters
that a musician must negotiate, and improvisation of any kind has such lim-
its. Whether it be the knowledge of specific scales that work well over certain
changes or chord progressions, or just a particular sound or technique that an
improviser is drawn to through experience, all improvisation has an “anxiety
of influence”, a system of expectations, and can therefore never be “free”;
repetition is always present.
Many modern musics appear under the rubric of “improvisa-
tion”. Bailey’s landmark lateral survey of various improvised musics,
Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music (1980), includes studies of
Indian music, Flamenco, Baroque, Organ, Rock and Jazz, reminding us
that the first music ever produced had to have been an improvised utter-
ance –Mithen’s singing Neanderthals or not. Traditional standard-based
jazz improvisation, whereby a musician plays “over changes”, or solos
over chord progressions employing suitable scales, is very different to
what developed during the 1960s to become termed “free improvisation”.
Musicians such as Cecil Taylor, Bailey, Frith, Evan Parker and Anthony
Braxton all contributed to a new aesthetic of improvisation, a music com-
posed entirely in the moment and unchained by harmony, a move beyond
Ornette Coleman’s so called “free jazz” that was still bound to structure and
tune.7 A major institution in this regard was the Art Ensemble of Chicago
and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM)
in Chicago. In the UK, the improvising network centred around the group
132

AMM, and key pioneers like Keith Rowe, Gavin Bryars, Bailey and Eddie
Prévost. Free improvisation exemplified a meeting point for art music and
popular music at this time, as followers of Cage, Stockhausen, La Monte
Young, Cornelius Cardew, Henry Cowell, rock and jazz all found com-
mon experimental ground. Later musicians, including Morton Feldman,
Elliot Sharp, John Zorn and Pauline Oliveros, began to experiment with
new ways of combining composition and improvisation. Scott Fields, the
musician and composer on whom I will concentrate in this chapter, was,
growing up in Chicago, greatly influenced by the vibrant scene propagated
by AACM.
We have spoken of the illusion of improvisation, the employment of alea-
toric devices and the almost through-composed features of Beckett’s writing,
but what happens when an improviser takes Beckett’s texts as inspiration for
their own instrumental music and improvisations? And what does Beckett
have to do with jazz? The two might seem unlikely bedfellows initially, but
aligned with the fact that he became hugely influential on modern music,
Beckett also translated two pioneering jazz-related pieces in 1934 for Nancy
Cunard’s anthology Negro. The two jazz texts were “The Best Negro Jazz
Orchestra”, a survey by early jazz critic Robert Goffin, and a poem by Ernst
Moerman entitled “Louis Armstrong”.8
Scott Fields, a Chicago-born avantjazz guitarist, now based in Cologne,
has composed two albums based entirely around Beckett texts, Beckett (2007)
and Samuel (2009). Together the two albums offer instrumental interpret-
ations of Breath, Play, Come and Go, What Where, Rockaby, Not I, Ghost
Trio and Eh Joe. Fields approaches the Beckett plays seeking structure for his
semi-improvised compositions and each setting incorporates the repetition,
word painting and character of the original text.
Fields is active in a number of musical projects including his acoustic
guitar duo with Elliott Sharp, his freetet, his string quartet and octet, a duo
with Matthias Schubert, and his early music–modern music fusion group
counterpart:counterpart, with lutenist Stephen Rath, New Music flautist
Angelika Sheridan and early music flautist Norbert Rodenkirchen. Fields
has led over 24 recordings and has appeared on many others, including
collaborations with Tortoise’s Jeff Parker. These two Beckett albums fea-
ture a quartet named the The Scott Fields Ensemble, consisting of drum-
mer John Hollenbeck, cellist Scott Roller and tenor saxophonist Matthias
Schubert.
Fields is a composer and improviser predominantly occupied with ways of
organising improvisation into structures. His musical language has developed
to include the post-tonal, non-linear scales of Professor Stephen Dembski,
with whom Fields has studied and performed, since meeting him at the
University of Wisconsin. If we analyse one text, Not I ([1972] 2006), compar-
ing Beckett’s text and Fields’ instrumental interpretation of the piece, incorp-
orating improvisational sections, it will enable us to explore these questions
further.
13
Figure 6.1 The Scott Fields Ensemble –photo credit: Stefan Strasser
Beckett’s Not I
Not I foreshadows many of the qualities described in Ill Seen Ill Said. The per-
sonal pronoun is avoided at all costs, as the protagonist’s sense of self is always
left ambiguous. The emphasis on sound in the work is foregrounded, as a sin-
gle “mouth alone” utters the text alongside a mysterious listener, the Auditor.
Aurality is paramount, leading Enoch Brater to refer to the play as “not eye”
(Brater, 1975, 50). The Auditor has often been removed from stage produc-
tions, many directors, including Beckett himself, deeming it too difficult to
execute successfully. Clarity is once again eroded as Beckett’s cyclical repeats
reflect the “maddening”, seemingly automatic or spasmodic utterances of a
woman who has undergone a significant traumatic event. This untold event at
“Croker’s Acres” sparks a logorrhoea wherein the woman replays and repeats
the trauma, much in the same way that Freudian psychoanalysis documents
patients’ negative cyclical repetitions (repetition compulsion) (Freud, 1961).
We see the word “unintelligible” once again, this time in Beckett’s stage direc-
tion for an acousmatic voice at the opening of the play. The voice must reflect
the “unintelligible” as the curtain rises and falls.
As “the mouth alone” yearns for silence, the repetitive trauma disallows
any respite. Right from the beginning we can see an epistrophe repeat with
“into this world … this world”. Local musematic repeats at the start include
“before its time” and “tiny little thing” with its anaphoric variant “tiny little
girl”. In many cases Beckett interpolates a word in-between two repeats, often
with the recurrence emphasised with an apostrophe. The word “imagine” is
134

used seven times in this way, perhaps a particularly Hiberno-English collo-
quial choice in such exclamatory form:
“Imagine!” in between repeats –“what position she was in … imagine!..

what a position she was in!”
“not suffering … imagine! ... not suffering!”
“words were coming … imagine! ... words were coming”
“no idea … what she was saying … imagine! ... no idea what she was
saying!”
“no idea what she’s saying … imagine! ... no idea what she’s saying!”
(occurring twice)
“her lips moving … imagine! ... her lips moving!”
“now can’t stop … imagine! … can’t stop the stream”
The phrases “all right”, “ha!” and “so it reasoned” are also used to similar effect:
“nothing she could tell? … all right … nothing she could tell”
“so far … ha! ... so far”
“that April morning … so it reasoned ... that April morning”
“April morning” repeats another two times in the text as a sentence itself and
another time with the musematic development to “all that early April morn-
ing light”, making it repeat a total of five times throughout.
Other musematic local repeats9 include:
“which had first occurred to her” recurring later as “first occurred to her”
“it can’t go on” appearing later as “can’t go on”
“all silent as the grave” and “sweet silent as the grave”
Position remains important. Often sentences end with the same words
repeated in consecutive sentences:
“when suddenly she felt … gradually she felt”

“admit hers alone … her voice alone”
But we also witness mirror images as the words are swapped, the rhetorical
device of chiasmus: “so that not only she had … had she … not only had she”.
Binary oppositions
In terms of binary oppositional repeats in Not I, the Beckettian trope of day
and night is again present here. In the “April morning light” the woman “found
herself in the dark”. Likewise, we see the familiar comings and goings: “a ray
of light came and went ... came and went”. Of particular interest in Not I
is the dichotomy of screams and silence. As we saw earlier, Beckett’s use of
135

silence is key to his aesthetic and nowhere is it more apparent than in this play.
The two are always coupled, as silence follows the outburst of scream, as the
tormented woman listens in vain for any response:
scream … [Screams.] … then listen … [Silence.] … scream again …

[Screams again.] … then listen again … [Silence.] … no … spared that …
all silent as the grave
Discursive repetitions
Many of the discursive repeated phrases, those repetitions acting on a struc-
tural level recurring throughout the text, are also exact clothed repeats of
sentences. It should be remembered that these categories of repetition can and
do overlap with one another:
“all the time the buzzing” occurring four times

“always winter some strange reason” three times
“brought up as she had been to believe” two times
“God is love” three times
“sudden flash” eight times
“steady stream” three times
“tiny little thing” three times
“once or twice a year” three times
“nothing but the larks” three times
“so on” nine times, including one following another consecutively and
beginning a sentence –“so on … so on it reasoned”
Discursive repeats also occur over groups of sentences:
“what? … seventy? … good God!” occurs twice

“what? … the buzzing? … yes” occurs seven times
“what? … who? no! she!” occurs five times, each time signalling a move-
ment that follows a pause. On the fifth and final occurrence “she!” is
followed by another, this time shouted as “SHE!”. All instances are
exact clothed except for this final musematic variant.
Figure 6.2 (first page of analysis) sets out the repeated words and phrases in
Not I. This analysis does not include the stage directions for laughs, screams
and silences, instead only including the scripted verbal text. Of the word
count of 2,329 words, only 534 are unique, reflecting a repeat rate of 4.36:1.
In considering the performative nature of Not I, we must remember that it
is a play, and is therefore, primarily intended to be performed. It immediately
becomes clear that the abundant repetition is even more striking on the stage
than on the page, an aspect that becomes further apparent in Scott Fields’
recorded performance of Not I explored below.
136
the 122 5.238

she 73 3.134
in 51 2.19
on 46 1.975
all 44 1.889
to 44 1.889
not 42 1.803
no 39 1.675
what 37 1.589
that 37 1.589
of 37 1.589
and 35 1.503
her 35 1.503
it 32 1.374
so 31 1.331
a 30 1.288
in the 24 2.061
then 23 0.988
had 23 0.988
or 23 0.988
- 23 0.988
but 22 0.945
was 22 0.945
as 22 0.945
could 18 0.773
this 17 0.73
something 16 0.687
time 16 0.687
for 16 0.687
buzzing 15 0.644
the buzzing 14 1.202
nothing 14 0.601
after 14 0.601
long 14 0.601
she was 13 1.116
like 13 0.558
yes 13 0.558
at 13 0.558
she had 12 1.03
stop 12 0.515
any 12 0.515
out 11 0.472
up 11 0.472
all that 10 0.859
sudden 10 0.429
back 10 0.429
oh 10 0.429
be 10 0.429
oh long after 9 1.159
long after 9 0.773
she could 9 0.773
imagine 9 0.386
Figure 6.2 Page 1 of Not I analysis

137

Due to production delays in London, Not I was premiered in the Lincoln
Center, New York on 22 November 1972. Beckett allowed his friend, director
Alan Schneider, the right to perform it with actress Jessica Tandy. In their
correspondence at the time, Beckett suggests to Schneider that the audience
should “share her [the protagonist’s] bewilderment”.10 Beckett encouraged the
director to emphasise the fast-paced unintelligible panic of the woman rather
than overthink the plot. He writes to Schneider: “All I know is in the text …
I hear it [Not I] breathless, urgent, feverish, rhythmic, panting along, with-
out undue concern with intelligibility … [to be a]ddressed less to the under-
standing than to the nerves of the audience”.11 Beckett’s semantic fluidity
in theatre works here as a means of eroding and dissolving meaning rather
than the repetition reinforcing meaning. Here we also see Beckett speaking of
his will for the words to act more like unsettling, high-tempo sounds than as
clear intelligible language. The actress chosen by Beckett to perform the play,
and who is generally acknowledged to have given the definitive performance,
is Billie Whitelaw. She first performed the play at the Royal Court Theatre,
London on 16 January 1973 under the author’s direction. A filmed version
of this production was recorded on 13 February 1975. Where Tandy had
employed a teleprompter as an aid, Whitelaw instead memorised the lines
and focused entirely on the unsettling elements that the director desired. If
we compare Whitelaw’s filmed performance to the cinematic staging of Neil
Jordan’s Not I, featuring Julianne Moore from the 2000 Beckett on Film pro-
duction, a number of differences arise. Such is the nature of performance.
Interpretation and artistic directions lead to significantly altered zones. The
text of the play is extremely precise, allowing for no improvisation –the illu-
sion of it yes, lending it a through-composed quality. Yet nuances do differ
from actress to actress.
First, Whitelaw sits in darkness, with her face painted black, as the camera
zooms in on the “mouth alone”, murmuring below her breath before the first
audible words arise. Moore, on the other hand, arrives at the chair in full view,
in a lit room; a visible young woman, far from the old Irish crone that the
play supposedly portrays –Whitelaw’s English accent of course also negates
this. Whitelaw’s delivery is far more rhythmical than Moore’s, sounding like
a stream of frantic schizophrenic stuttering. Whitelaw is faster and her excla-
mations are more dramatically emphasised, the result of incessant tongue-
twisting, and even though she holds the instructed pauses of silence for longer
than Moore, she still manages to finish earlier –in my analysis, Whitelaw’s
performance from the opening word “out” to the closing word “up” takes
11 minutes 42 seconds; Moore’s, on the other hand, takes 12 minutes 33 sec-
onds, a difference of 51 seconds. As a result, Whitelaw’s performance does
produce more of an air of panic and menace –thus unnerving the audience.
Fields’ 200bpm is actually quite close in tempo to Whitelaw’s delivery.
Beckett, as was mentioned earlier, was known to bring a metronome to
rehearsals; but Whitelaw’s performance does fluctuate in places, possibly
deliberately gaining pace along with the increasing panic. Fields’ recording
138
Figure 6.3 Billie Whitelaw in Not I
of Not I amounts to some thirty minutes, however, on account of the added

solo interludes –“a real test of endurance”12 as the composer puts it. This is
significantly shortened for live performance, however.
Without the words being sounded in Fields’ Not I, the speaker is silenced
almost completely; her frantic utterances take the form of a repetitive dis-
sonant music that repeats exact pitch and duration rather than words alone.
Where Whitelaw and Moore might vary a word’s inflection, Fields scores
words to recur as close to each other as possible. The voice remains as residue.
At a further level of abstraction, a text influenced by musical ideas becomes
music alone in adaptation. Fields’ score takes its form from a text instead of
a text taking its form from music, the more common phenomenon within
Scher’s three categories of word and music relations –music in literature,
music and literature, and literature in music. Fields’ approach reflects the lat-
ter of these categories, literature in music, but his is a literature in music that
is actually more complex given Beckett’s musicality; instead, it is more like
literature (music in literature) in music. This is a more complex layering of
phenomena than the music in literature of, say, Joyce’s attempt at a fugue in
the “Sirens” episode of Ulysses. The text of the translator, Beckett, is further
translated into instrumental music, without the vocal that Feldman had.
Fields’ score follows the directions, words and characterisation meticu-
lously, paralleling, for the most part, Beckett’s text rather than any kind of
Eisensteinian cognitive dissonance or counterpoint. The solo interludes are
the exception to this, and it is interesting that Fields expresses regret regarding
139
Figure 6.4 Julianne Moore in Not I
this decision.13 Another major departure is the fact that he didn’t score it for
a solo instrument, instead utilising the full “Beckett” ensemble that plays on
both albums –John Hollenbeck, Scott Roller, Matthias Schubert and him-
self. Given the presence of the quartet, however, it does make sense that each
exhibits in turn their own expression of frantic nervous energy following the
“movement” indicated after the four points of pause in the play. For the audi-
ence, it may seem that the woman is spouting out intuitively while thinking,
a through-composed verbal improvisation, an entirely illusionary interpret-
ation. Fields presents a mix of improvised and composed elements, all tied to
Beckett’s words.
Fields’ Not I is scored for four voices, a quartet of tenor saxophone, elec-
tric guitar, cello and drums: perhaps Not 1 or even Not 4 might have been
a more playful but apt title. Instead of a solitary woman we hear a tenor
line sounding the rhythms of the words, but without any of their remaining
semantic content alongside three accompanying improvisers. In this regard
Fields’ approach is a further extension of Beckett’s semantic fluidity: now we
have none of the word content, beyond their musical interpretation by Fields
and the less tangible residue of their musical incarnation. Instead of many
fragmented selves, the three other musicians comment on the urtext or ground
bass of the tenor line. Fields chooses to omit the first few lines of the text
and begins at the sentence “to make a ball”. When I asked him about this in
a Skype interview, he suggested that this was “most likely a mistake”,14 some-
thing I find difficult to accept given the meticulous care and attention to detail
of the text that the score reflects. In my view, it was most likely an editing
decision due to the length of the piece, a practice that Fields continues in live
140

performance, as we will see. From here on, each note in the melody line cor-
responds directly to each and every word of the text. In setting each phrase,
Fields assigns a number of beats that then form the pattern of time signa-
tures. The first sentence “to make a ball” is scored in 4$, while the second
bar changes to 5$ for the sentence “a few steps then stop”. Fields inserts a
crotchet rest in place of the ellipses between sentences in Beckett’s text. In bar
4, the line “then on” is written in 3$ in order to accommodate a crotchet rest,
and this practice continues throughout. As a result, Fields’ score reflects the
same staccato quality as Beckett’s text.
Beckett’s words act as musical directions in Fields’ score. At bar 6, for the line
“stop and stare again”, a stop sign is introduced in the three lower parts. This
sign recurs each time the word “stop” recurs, and indicates (according to the
legend at the top of the piece) that the musicians “lay out” or stop playing sud-
denly. The instruments not carrying the melody line are to improvise through-
out, and following such pauses they are to resume improvising at the arrows, the
first of which occurs at bar 7 in the guitar and cello lines. This binary of structure
and improvisation is what defines Fields’ style of music, and finding ways to
bring form to improvisation is an ongoing obsession for the composer.
Following the first occurrence of the “what? … who? ... no! ... she!” discursive
phrase (bars 14–17), in place of the movement indicated in the stage directions,
Fields’ score introduces a seven-bar improvisatory interlude. The melody line
returns to the text in 7$at the line “found herself in the dark” (bar 25). Interlude
sections appear at each occurrence of this discursive phrase but extend to vary-
ing lengths of time. The second time is from bar 254 to bar 330, the third from
bars 590 to 659, the fourth from bars 761 to 821 (moving between solo tenor and
written parts). Do Fields’ series of interludes adhere to Beckett’s directions that
each movement become less perceptible? As the directions tell us:
Movement: this consists in simple sideways raising of arms from sides

and their falling back, in a gesture of helpless compassion. It lessens with
each recurrence till scarcely perceptible at third. There is just enough
pause to contain it as MOUTH recovers from vehement refusal to relin-
quish third person.
There is no interlude following the fifth appearance of the phrase, in line with
the stage directions; instead we are given a crescendo fade and a bar pause (bar
900) before returning to the text. When I asked Fields about these improvised
interludes, he explained his slight regret regarding the decision as follows:
In Not I, there are four pauses in the script. Since I had four musicians
that gave them all a chance to lead on it. I slightly regret the way I handled
that, because the way it’s written, it’s really meant as a kind of breather,
I think, for the actress, so she makes it through the monologue. And it
might be meant as relief for the audience, even though that doesn’t seem
very much like Beckett to give them a break. So I think it’s really for her.
14
Figure 6.5 Fields’ Not I, page 1
But I instructed the musicians to try and keep up the pace of the music
rather than feel like a pause, and I sort of regret that. I don’t think I really
got it right. I especially regret it because they kept dropping the energy
during those sections and I would stop them and make them do it right,
but they may have been right.
142

On the fourth interlude, Fields explained that at the time he had also wanted
the tenor solo to continue for longer, but physical limits of the recording ses-
sion made this impossible –the players had been playing non-stop for over
four hours:
I would like to have had him [Matthias Schubert] solo for a longer time
but the problem was that he’d been playing through-composed music at
220 beats a minute for, by the time it was over, 26 minutes. But we didn’t
do it in a continuous take, so by the time he got to his solo, he had been
playing at 200 beats a minute for 4 hours.
In any case, Fields’ interludes are by no means less perceptible towards the
end, as Beckett had directed. Does this aesthetic decision on the part of
Fields represent an unfaithful manifestation of the text? It seems that Fields
was straddling the conventions of two media with very different expecta-
tions, jazz improvisers on the one hand and a meticulous text for theatre
on the other. In dealing with the practicalities of performance, Fields was
forced to make certain compromises. The silence of the play is not as pre-
sent in Fields’ Not I, but the frantic unnerving quality is perhaps stronger
as a result.
At over thirty minutes long, the recorded version of Not I presents stamina
challenges for both players and listeners. Fields explains: “for live perform-
ance, I’ve cut out about 300 bars of Not I. So it’s maybe 20 minutes instead of
30.” In live formats, Eh Joe is also shorter than the recorded version. Fields
is less extreme in what he will inflict on his performers and listeners than
Beckett, then –or indeed than Morton Feldman.
It is clear from the very beginning that Fields recognises and follows the
repetitive nature of Beckett’s work. On what attracted him to Beckett he
explains:
His [Beckett’s] writing is so stylised, so formal. He does use pauses in

ways that I thought I could fill them … there’s room to occupy and a
good reason to do it. You’re not just inserting sounds because you want
a chance to play.
In terms of setting any of the writers I have set, I look for rhythm and
repetition. The first playwright I set was David Mamet. Rhythmically he’s
great. He uses a lot of speech patterns that I’m familiar with because he
grew up near where I did in Chicago, just a couple of miles south from
me in the city. But still his writing is not at all naturalistic; the beats are
really great. The same goes for Charles Bukowski; he uses a lot of repeti-
tion and rhythmically he’s really great as well. So, I wasn’t really thinking
thematically; it’s really just based on repeated phrases and the rhythmic
material, and with Beckett it’s nice that he had so many short plays …
I tried to set Pinter but it didn’t work for me. It’s sort of the opposite to
rhythmic and stylised.
143

Repeated words are repeated as the same pitch and duration:
If a word is repeated, of course, I would use the same pitch and rhyth-
mic value. So that means a phrase would be the same. But I also look for
rhymes. Now this doesn’t occur so much in Not I, but for the Bukowski
poems I might make them into a musical rhyme like a third or fourth, or
if it’s a near rhyme it might be a flat five or something like that … within
my tonal sets I make up these rules too.
In bar 4, the line “then on”, is written in 3$as a D followed by a B and crot-
chet rest. Bar 7 contains a similar phrase –“so on” –and this word “on” is
also a B. This holds for all discursive and musematic repeats throughout the
piece, indicating the meticulous lengths that Fields underwent in the compos-
ition of the melody line. Debussy set Baudelaire’s “Harmonie du soir” in a
somewhat similar fashion, but with the added dimension of transposition. As
Dora A. Hanninen (2012, 279) writes, “Shaping each line of text into distinct
musical phrase, Debussy matches structural line repetition in the text with lit-
eral, transposed, or modified melodic repetition in the voice.”
Fields employs word painting on a number of occasions. Even though the
words may not be sung, some of their inevitable semantic content is evoked
and repeated. When a word indicates a sound, the instruments attempt to rec-
reate it. The word “buzzing” in bar 29 includes the melody moving to the cello
line for that single word, while the guitar and drums must stop.
Likewise, in bar 557 we see the phrase “dull roar” reflected by a crescendo
followed by the descending glissando line that matches “like falls”, evoking a
waterfall sound in the drums. In bar 843, for the line “half the vowels wrong”,
the saxophone is instructed to vary the vowel sound applied to the written
melody. In bar 338 the same instruction to “vary vowel sound” occurs at the
word “vowel”, but at the word “sounds” the three lower instruments play
staccato flickering notes. This occurs almost every time the word “sound”
appears in the text, as in bars 180, 181, 334, 477, 478 and 538. The laughs
indicated in the stage directions are scored as cello scrapes, as in bars 70 and
72. Likewise the screams are scored as high-pitched, loud saxophone cries,
as in bars 185 and 189. Here, the players are expected to imitate such sounds
as for the buzzing mentioned above. The silences that follow these screams
in the text are written as full bar-length pauses for all instruments. Where
Beckett had yearned for specific periods of silence in his texts –we remem-
ber his appeal to Stravinsky for such a method –Fields scores such a distinct
pause. The freedom that Fields offers the players in this aspect of word paint-
ing is also reminiscent of the power with which Cage endowed his perform-
ers. The players have the words on the score accompanying each of their
parts when performing, and Fields desires that they individually respond to
the words affecting the notes.
Dynamics in the music also reflect punctuation in the text; for instance, in
bar 390 the exclamation mark at “her lips moving!” includes an fff dynamic
14
Figure 6.6 Fields’ Not I, page 2

145

mark. For the word “sounds”, a flickering staccato is indicated, leaving
a certain amount of interpretative freedom open to the instrumentalists
to employ rhythmic scraping or flutter-tongue techniques, for instance.
Any sentence ending in a question mark is given an upward inflection in
the score.
The word “God” is deliberately written as a dominant chord. In bar 674, a
“sudden flash” is represented by the flashy technique of a multiphonic in the
tenor. Fields emphasises the importance of interpretative engagement with
the text in performance:
You have to adjust to him [the tenor] because of the structure of the
piece. You’re improvising almost entirely in the beginning. And then as
phrases recur, the musicians will one at a time play this phrase with the
tenor player, even though it’s not a matching phrase. But it’s one that
will repeat. And so, after the tenor solo, every phrase in the piece has
recurred a number of times. And so everyone is playing written music
by the end.
You really have to be able to read the tenor part while improvising, and
my instructions are to improvise in a way that makes it unclear whether
you are improvising or reading along badly.
The Beckettian “illusion of improvisation” has here been translated by Fields

into improvised music that at times attempts to feign being scored, for the player
to sound like they are “reading along badly”. To return to the concepts of
Deleuzian repetition discussed in previous chapters, the improvised explorations
offered by Fields’ repetitions of Beckett’s texts are Deleuzian in nature. Adrian
Parr writes that ‘in terms of discovery and experimentation; it [Deleuzian repe-
tition] allows new experiences, affects and expressions to emerge” (Parr, 2005,
223.) Far from tautology then, perhaps through Beckett, Fields finds “a form
that accommodates the mess”, as his Deleuzian exploration of Beckett’s world
manifests itself as this complex music. (Beckett quoted in Cohn, 1980, 96).
Fields’ improvisational structures somewhat echo Beckett’s concern with alea-
tory methodology in the composition of Lessness. Improvisation more widely
might be seen as a distinct move beyond such notions of denotative expression,
as are the slurred words of John Martyn or the low vocal mix in Shoegaze
music. If there is no content per se in improvisation –besides the dialogue of
tradition and creation, between notes and other notes, with no narrative or pre-
planned content at all, only intuitive Bergsonian response, a conversation, even
with oneself –how does Fields’ music interact with the “self” in Beckett’s work?
Improvisation is often equated with self-realiation, an idea backed up by recent
research into the creative activity in the brain during such a practice. A project
led by Charles Limb, for instance, involved getting jazz pianists to improvise
while inside an fMRI scanner. The resultant scans clearly showed that the same
parts of the brain that relate to self-consciousness and the willingness to take
risks and make mistakes in the frontal lobe lit up whilst improvising (Limb,
146

2010). On the other hand, others speak of losing oneself as the true pull of
improvising. As John M. Carvalho writes:
The improviser must give musical sense to a form that comes with few
cues about how to take it. Again, this frees the improviser from habits,
good and bad, and from remembered history of improvisations on the
standard forms, and it challenges the improviser to lose herself in the
form and experiment with provisional solutions to the problems posed
by the form.
(Carvalho, 2010, 289)
Though Carvalho here speaks of the kind of improvisation in modal jazz

from the late 1950s through the 1960s, including Miles Davis’ seminal Kind
of Blue (1959) and In a Silent Way (1969), this idea of an improviser losing
his-or herself certainly persists in descriptions of the phenomenon by artists
themselves. Indeed, as an improviser myself, the energy that such quick deci-
sions require means that all else is necessarily sidelined. The best improvisers
react instantly and don’t even seem to make conscious decisions. Carvalho
writes further: “In the repetitive drone of the rhythm, he precisely loses his
Ego, his Self, and identifies with a principle of selection that guides him to
his goal, more entelechy than telos, and that goal is what we hear as melody”
(Carvalho, 2010, 289). Quoting Frederic Rzewski, Carvalho equates this self-
realisation, while improvising over the repetitive backgrounds of modal jazz,
with Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts:
The pleasure that accompanies these improvisations, “a state of percep-

tion in which one seems to be outside oneself, or to be in more than one
place at the same time”, is precisely the ecstasy, the jouissance, associated
with the death drive. The improviser realizes this pleasure in herself and
her listeners and realizes in this jouissance, drawing on a form of repeti-
tion modelled on this drive.
(Carvalho, 2010, 289)
Both Beckett and Feldman’s concern for the self and the human condition
is therefore brought to another level in Fields’ Beckettian jazz when we con-
sider this connection between selflessness and improvisation. The title of
the piece explored above, Not I, is of course particularly apt in this regard.
Beckett avoids the personal pronoun in an exegesis of a frantic, unsettled self
while Fields quarters this self into an even less tangible and silent entity. The
“loss” associated with jouissance, which Carvalho relates to improvisation,
perhaps provides a further loss of the negated self, the protagonist’s self in
Fields’ Not I.
147

Notes
1 See http://matthewemay.com/doubling-down-on-lessness/ [accessed 25 March
2013].
2 For more on Beckett’s use of silence, see Bryden (1998).
3 There is extensive literature on the matter; see for instance Susan Sontag,
“Aesthetics of Silence” ([1967] 1994), David Metzer, “Modern Silence” (2006),
Mary Bryden, “Beckett and the Sound of Silence” (1998).
4 Dirk Van Hulle, “Sans”, in The Literary Encyclopaedia, 1 March 2004, www.liten-
cyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=2307 [accessed 25 March 13].
5 Knowlson’s biography of Beckett is entitled Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel
Beckett (1996).
6 Elliott Sharp interviewed by Joe Gore, in “Where Order Meets Chaos”, in Guitar
Player Vol. 3, no. 1, January 1997.
7 Other pivotal free jazz musicians include Albert Ayler, Sun Ra and Pharoah
Sanders.
8 These were reprinted in 2000 in Beckett in Black and Red, edited by Alan Friedman.
9 Please refer to my taxonomy of repetition in Chapter 4.
10 Beckett, letter to Alan Schneider 16 October, 72, quoted in Harmon (2000, 283).
11 Ibid.
12 Fields, quoted in liner notes to Samuel (2009, 7).
13 This and all following Fields quotes are from an interview I conducted with him
on 12 September 2012.
14 See www.ted.com/talks/charles_limb_your_brain_on_improv.html [accessed 13
August 2013].
148
Conclusions
Beckett is a rarity in that his innovative use of music is primarily at the philo-
sophical level, and is therefore not always explicitly visible, or audible. In cre-
ating a semantic fluidity in prose that resonates an intangible, non-explicit
meaning, his later work can be read in a manner similar to music. In Beckett’s
later prose, we are not engaging with a plot wherein a piece of music is men-
tioned, or in which a sonata sparks a memory for the protagonist. Instead, the
prose itself has been composed under the influence of music. Such a struc-
tural use of music ensures that the musical elements will always, however, be
metaphorical in nature: a written text is not composed according to melody or
vertical intervals, it is not informed by textures or harmonies, and it cannot be
varied through instrumentation or volume when read silently. Repetition and
silence can be employed transmedially and indeed provide the salient factors
of such a prose style. Where Beckett differs from many of the other musically
influenced writers, then, is that his very style of writing –the composition –is
musically infused with repetitions and silences as well as music philosophy,
while others may refer to mere surface devices.
Beckett achieved a semantic fluidity in his work through the employment
of repetition informed by a Schopenhauerian philosophy of music, but in
the end the Romantic application of musical devices to his work will always
remain metaphorical. Like the themes and subject matter that Beckett’s work
repetitively explores, the author’s musical prose could never fully reach the
condition of music. Music and literature strive towards one another without
ever truly converging, as though tracing an endless asymptotic curve. The
philosophical intangibility of music is also a literal intangibility, unreachable
through words alone. Such a yearning and longing between the artforms is
echoed in the longing of Beckett’s characters, his expression of the human
condition and in the author’s application of musical ideas. This futility is not
to be regarded negatively however: such a Beckettian “failure” is, in a very
real sense, the whole point of his musico-literary exercise. The Derridean lim-
inal space is where both Beckett and, as we have seen, Feldman operate: in
between meanings, space and time itself. Although Beckett’s semantic fluid-
ity displays musical qualities, a certain degree of meaning remains as resi-
due: words will always hold a certain amount of affiliated and snowballed
149
Conclusions 149
meaning. In Molloy, Beckett writes: “the words I heard were sounds … free
of all meaning” (Beckett, [1951] 1994, 50). And yet, in truth, there is always
some meaning as the author later concedes: although these words are free of
explicit definition, they are nevertheless “sounds unencumbered with precise
meaning” (Beckett, [1951] 1994, 50).
Though Beckett explores various musical devices such as the da capo repeat
in Play ([1963] 2006), he can “never get there”, argues Paul Lawley in relation
to the musical qualities of the work (Lawley, 1984, 25). For him, these musical
qualities have:
the effect of pushing the language to the borders of abstraction. On the

first run-through the heads’ speculations about the nature and mean-
ing of their present state do seem, despite the specified tonelessness of
delivery and uniform tempo, evidence of “how the mind works still to
be sure!” (p. 18), but in the repeat our sense of this diminishes dras-
tically: everything now seems fixed, absolutely cyclic, and our already
considerable awareness of words as opaque blocks or aural artillery is
made even more acute than it was during the initial run-through. What
we are witnessing is not a quest for “truth” (of whatever kind) but a fran-
tic struggle for survival against the light. Yet although for the heads the
words they speak are stone-dead, entirely without semantic “charge” (the
toneless delivery seems to confirm this), for the audience the words can
never empty themselves entirely of meaning –even second time round.
The Play tends towards the condition of music but, as far as we are
concerned, can never get there. For the heads communication is never a
concern, since each is apparently oblivious of the presence of the others.
(Lawley, 1984, 25)
Beckettian contradictions abound in various ways, from his changing position

on instrumental music being used in his work, to the ways in which composers
are encouraged to set his words. Perhaps this is part of the postmodern condi-
tion as Laws would have it, but lying at the core of the matter is the fact that
Beckett is an artist, and for art to be interesting (according to him), contradic-
tions are necessary. A Schopenhauerian approach would suggest that artists
could bypass and transgress such contradictions and offer greater insights
through such juxtapositions. A poet should never have to explain or show his
or her licence (here we can recall the pedantry of Baricelli’s criticism of the
Four Quartets in Chapter 1). The fact that Beckett was an avant-garde author
with a predilection for Romantic music and its philosophies might confuse
some, but such a clash was more generally a part of Modernism, a binary
illustrated earlier through reference to Picasso’s inclusion of a bull from the
oldest cave drawing in Europe in Guernica (1937). Beckett was far from alone
in this Romanticism. Hans Werner Henze and Helmut Lachenmann were
modern European composers who also looked to the Romantics for their
inspiration rather than to the Darmstadt School or Boulez.
150
150 Conclusions
In the end, the semantic fluidity created during Beckett’s search for a way
of unwording the word achieves an intangible universality, itself a repetitive
theme in his oeuvre. Just like the theme of winter and silence that resonates
in his favourite Winterreise (1828), this Schubertian longing in Beckett’s
work challenges the reader to “make sense who may” (Beckett, 1983, 476).
Discussing What Where ([1983] 2006), White suggests that while the play
might posit that nothing else is happening (“Time passes. That is all”), in fact
“this representation of passing time is its most disturbing feature” (White,
2008, 194). Rather than a representation of specifics, the refrain of passing
time is a thematic reiteration of semantic fluidity, a leitmotif particularly
befitting the temporal unravelling of words through music.
Play is an example of da capo form, like Godot and Lessness, as previously
mentioned; but it also exemplifies Beckett’s obsession with failure. The repeats
are directed to decrease in volume and speed alongside diminishing lighting in
order to highlight the play’s primary theme of degradation. As Martin Esslin
writes of Play:
These three parts are repeated, and the play ends, as it began, with the
Chorus. But, Beckett explained, there must be a clear progression by
which each subsection is both faster and softer than the preceding one.
(Esslin quoted in Cohn, 1980, 125)
Such inferiority in imitation –the notion that we lose something with each
repeat –echoes Plato’s views on the lesser nature of mimesis, but also the
erosion of meaning in semantic fluidity. What it also shows is that Deleuzian
discursive repetition, positive transformation, can also be used to emphasise
failure. The famous line from Worstward Ho (1983c) is itself, aptly enough,
as if in Flaubertian or Joycean style-mirroring-content, a fine example of
Beckettian anaphora and epistrophe: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try
Again. Fail again. Fail better” (Worstward Ho, 1983c).1
All of these traits in Beckett’s work have attracted and influenced so
many contemporary composers. Beckett’s curious mixture of Romantic and
Modernist ideals was highly influential on both contemporary and subse-
quent artists. György Kurtág is perhaps, after Feldman (himself a strong
advocate of Sibelius, we must remember), the composer who works most
closely with Beckett’s aesthetic, and continually demonstrates the author’s
influence in his reduction of materials, short fragmentary compositions and
his setting of Beckett’s last poem in “What Is the Word?” (1990–91). Earl Kim
is another highly Beckettian composer, having composed minimal, quiet and
reductive music to a great many Beckett texts including …dead calm… (1961)
and Now and Then (1981). Other noteworthy Beckettians are Richard Barrett
and Michael Finnissey, whose approaches to Beckett are from another side,
instead drawing inspiration for complex compositions like Barrett’s stirrings
(2001), based on Stirrings Still (Beckett, [1988] 1995), and Finnissey’s Enough
(2001).
15
Conclusions 151
By exploring two very different musicians, from very different genres,
backgrounds and aesthetics, we saw just how important both repetition and
silence are in modern music. Feldman and Fields offer two contrasting types
of Beckettian music, yet both display a focus on transmedial repetition. While
Feldman’s works inhabit Scher’s “music and literature” category, Fields’
instrumentals fall within the category of “literature in music”, or even perhaps
“literature (music in literature) in music”, as mentioned in Chapter 6. Both
composers, like Beckett, employ musematic, discursive, binary and clothed
exact repetition throughout their work. Both translate the repetitive qual-
ities of Beckett’s texts into music. Feldman famously grew tired of allowing
much indeterminacy in his work and his exacting, precise work has, as we have
seen, much in common with Beckett’s own aesthetic, not least his serialist-like
precision of movement and gesture (Film, 1964, for instance), and structure
(Quad, 1981; That Time, 1976), as White would have it. Fields, on the other
hand, creates structures for his improvisations, but these are interspersed with
lengthy and meticulously composed sections. Taken together, Fields’ and
Feldman’s music is certainly repeating Beckett in the Deleuzian sense –“in
terms of discovery and experimentation; it allows new experiences, affects and
expressions to emerge” (Parr, 2005, 223).
Like Beckett, in his employment of semantic fluidity Feldman plays with
the “to and fro”s, exploring the grand themes of time, stasis and waiting in
ways similar to Beckett’s investigations in Godot, That Time and many other
works throughout his career. Feldman’s music is also, like Beckett’s later prose,
free from explicit, definite meanings. Instead of trying to reinforce a particu-
lar interpretation, Feldman keeps the hermeneutics open. The “self ” moves
perennially “back and forth” through recurring, unresolved motives that, like
the artforms themselves, reach “neither”.
If we return to Lawrence Kramer’s suggestion in Chapter 1 that “a poem
and a composition may converge on a structural rhythm: that a shared pat-
tern of unfolding can act as an interpretive framework for the explicit dimen-
sion of both works” (Kramer, 1984, 10), it becomes clear that the Beckettian
music of both Feldman and Fields correspond to his thesis. A “shared pat-
tern of unfolding” succinctly describes how both composers translate trans-
medial repetition into music: Fields allows a certain amount of improvisation
within the structure, while Feldman meticulously scores every note. As Calvin
S. Brown, Peter Kivy, Heinrich Schenker and Lawrence Kramer suggest,
repetition is central to musical discourse and Beckett’s texts certainly enable
a special kind of convergence as a result. Repeating Beckett’s repeats yields
multi-layered music. In Beckett’s repetitive texts, Fields discovers “a form that
accommodates the mess”, a structure from which to improvise.
As we saw in Chapter 5, Feldman also responded to contemporary paint-
ers such as Rothko, Guston and Rauschenberg. Beckett, too, had a keen
eye for the visual arts, collecting works by Jack Yeats and Giacometti, for
instance. Might semantic fluidity also translate into visual art? Further study
might explore aspects of stasis and semantic fluidity in Rothko perhaps.
152
152 Conclusions
Certainly, in Gustavo Alberto Garcia Vaca’s neither2 (front cover) the “inner
to outer shadow” of the text is clearly depicted, but in a very different man-
ner to Feldman’s approach. Lois Oppenheim’s The Painted Word: Samuel
Beckett’s Dialogue with Art (2000) and edited collection Samuel Beckett and
the Arts: Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media (1999) offer insights into
this visual impact of Beckett’s work.
Fields’ and Feldman’s translations of Beckett’s texts are far beyond tau-
tologies. As we have seen, they employ the inherent repetition of the author’s
works in creative and imaginative ways. Theirs is a positive Deleuzian repe-
tition. Beyond Beckett, of course, the dialogue between “original” and
“copy” continues, having troubled philosophers and artists for millennia.
For Plato, the imitation was always inherently inferior, whereas Aristotle saw
such repetition in a more positive light, linking it to the most fundamental
example: human reproduction. DNA tells us that we are all, for the most part
at least, copies of our ancestors.3 In this sense, evolution can be considered a
kind of Deleuzian repetition. Biology repeats but with subtle improvements,
alterations and differences occurring slowly over vast canvasses of time.
Nietzsche built on the Greek idea of the Eternal Return, while Kierkegaard
was greatly concerned with doubles, recognising early the impossibility of
exact repetition. Benjamin taught us that the original is, like exact repeti-
tion, a kind of myth in itself. In many ways, our idea of the original is itself
a reproduction. A painting is often a representation, an interpretative copy
of what it depicts: a kind of reproduction. A film, even documentary film, is
always the interpretation of its director; fundamentally its light is caught and
copied by the lens. Erich Auerbach’s seminal Mimesis ([1946] 2003) explores,
with great insight, the representation of realism in literature in a manner that
highlights the fact that such copying of the real world was not simply a nine-
teenth-century phenomenon like pictorialism, but instead goes back much
further in time.
Consider the perennial and often irritating documentation of the tourist
or concert-goer. The camera provides the means of copying the original for
one’s own memento –looking and hearing through the device is seemingly of
more importance than doing so without it. Whether acting as memory aid,
proof of “presence”, or as means of undergoing a kind of Wordsworthian
“emotions recollected in tranquillity” ([1800] 1971), it is clear that ubiquitous
technology, the recording “equipment” (Heidegger, [1953] 1996, 15: 97) is now
an extension of our being, a part of our involvement in the world.
Yet in contemporary society we still place the greatest weight on the “ori-
ginal”. An original Picasso might sell for millions, and yet a high-quality print
will be worth no more than a few pounds. Warhol and Hirst might factory-
print multiple works, but these “originals” are still awarded higher economic
value than a well-made “copy”. When Warhol placed quotidian objects in the
context of art galleries in an attempt to alter our perception of such objects,
he was interrogating such assumptions concerning copies and repetition, as
did Duchamp’s ready-mades. A can of soup might be ubiquitous, but every
153
Conclusions 153
time we see it on canvas, it does something to the original itself. The original
is altered by repetition.
In Borges’ famous story about the fictional character Pierre Menard, the
protagonist attempts to unlearn what history and culture 1602–1918 might
have taught him, in order to go about the seemingly impossible task of com-
posing the Quixote word for word with the “original”. Borges writes:
Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is
easy enough –he wanted to compose the Quixote. Nor, surely, need one
be obliged to note that his goal was never a mechanical transcription of
the original; he had no intention of copying it. His admirable ambition
was to produce a number of pages which coincided –word for word and
line for line –with those of Miguel de Cervantes.
(Borges, [1939] 1998b, 91)
In the end, Menard achieves his goal and indeed his Quixote outshines that
of Cervantes. Though Harold Bloom informs us that Menard could never
have avoided the “anxiety of influence” of the intervening years, the pages
that he produces, although seemingly exact repetitions, are, in fact, positive
Deleuzian clothed repeats. Furthermore, the original is altered and improved
by such imitation, as deep study is focused on the original text (Benjamin). In
this light, might musical translations of the kind we have explored also offer
this new outlook on the “original”?
Tom Philips’ Humanent: A Treated Victorian Novel (2016) finds new mater-
ial latent in W. H. Mallock’s novel The Human Document (1892), and this idea
of finding new works within existing ones further calls into question the prob-
lem of authorship and “original”.
Cortázar’s Hopcotch (Spanish 1963, English [1966] 1987) was indebted to
Mallarmé’s early experiments while the “book in a box” concept pioneered by
Marc Saportha’s in Composition No. 1 ([1962] 2011) and B. S. Johnson’s The
Unfortunates ([1969] 1999), incorporated loose pages, and thereby deconstructed
traditional narrative sequences in a manner fitting the digital age –Composition
No. 1 has now been re-imagined as an app that randomly shuffles pages.
Burroughs’ cut-ups, influencing Bowie, Cobain and Radiohead, to name a
few, brought chance procedures to the mainstream, while internet hypertexts
and contemporary video games are providing ways for the reader to self-con-
struct narrative through interactive choices. The initial limitations of memory
in the technology was one practical reason for loops and leitmotifs, but in
modern gaming, developers are using repetition in explorative ways –take
the interactive stems in games like Red Dead Redemption (2010), for instance,
in which a vast array of loops in a single key interweave in conjunction with
certain choices and actions in the gameplay. In a way, the player can become
the composer or conductor of his or her own soundworld.
We must repeat to practice, to learn an instrument, a sports technique, a
language, indeed to become proficient at any endeavour –10,000 hours or not,
154
154 Conclusions
as Malcolm Gladwell (2008) would have it. Our lives are dominated by routine
and ritual, from birth to death and after (Sir Thomas Browne’s seminal text
“Hydriotaphia: Urne Burial” ([1658 1968) comes to mind). T. S. Eliot dis-
cussed the important dialogue between the canon and originality in his fam-
ous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” ([1919] 2005), positing that
in order for an artist to innovate and create something worthwhile, he or she
must first engage with what has gone before. An artist does not reinvent the
wheel, and if they did, there would be no audience there to understand it, no
network, as the listener would have nothing to compare it with, and wouldn’t
have learned the aesthetic criteria at hand. With innovations, there is, for this
reason, often a period of acclimatisation; consider the relative silence between
J. S. Bach’s death in 1750 and Mendelssohn’s revival with the St Matthew
Passion in 1829, which was the first major performance of the work outside
Leipzig.
Repetition is, as Fink points out, around us everywhere in modern life.
With 3D printing, perhaps soon we will have the facility to replicate and repeat
physical objects in our homes as easily as they are presented on television.
There are also the implications of repetition in viral video on YouTube: how
does such vast repetition of experience affect how music is consumed in the
modern world? And how do streaming sites like Spotify impact reception? If
a piece of music is repeated ad infinitum on a playlist in an office, for instance,
how does a listener’s perception of said music alter as a result?
The repetitive krautrock of Neu!, Can and Faust did much for destigma-
tising repetition in popular culture, a music that links the ambient music of
Brian Eno, 1990s rave culture, David Bowie’s Berlin years, the minimalism
of Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham, and the avantrock experimentalism
of Sonic Youth. Simon Reynolds’ study of normalised anachronism and
atemporality in contemporary pop music, Retromania (2011), highlights the
prevalence of another kind of repetition, one that encompasses nostalgia and
longing for past styles. If we go beyond the modernist baggage of the “new”,
how will repetition continue to shape modern music? Repetition was perhaps
never more prominent in music than it is today; the stigma that it once had is
certainly no more. No longer is it kept “secret” as Snead described; repetition
is ubiquitous but also everything is up for grabs, an “infinite music” of pos-
sibility (Harper, 2011). We are now in a more Aristotelian period of music
than a Platonic one.
Aristotle saw metaphors as didactic tools that, through contrasting separ-
ate artforms, enabled new insight and could thus “teach us something new”
(Prieto, 2002a, 23). Going forward in Word and Music Studies, it is imperative
that we keep this in mind. We must avoid the pedantry of trying to pin down
metaphors for their supposed correctness, as many in the field have futilely
done. Outdated methodologies must be abandoned and the focus must move
forward towards deeper investigations. As we remember Webern’s suggestion
that repetition is itself a form of variation, we must not repeat the mistakes in
the field and instead vary the methodology in new and exciting ways.
15
Conclusions 155
Notes
1 Glitch music highlights this failure through repetition in another way, by delib-
erately emphasising the scratches and bumps in samples of electronic music. By
focusing on what would traditionally be hidden or removed, a fetishisation occurs
wherein the glitches themselves become pleasant and are, in the end, like any other
musical sound. Such a practice is reminiscent of similar aesthetics in noise music, as
we saw in Chapter 2.
2 See chamanvision.com [accessed 7 August 2017].
3 Whether these are degraded or inferior copies is another question –evolution would
seem to negate such an idea –though it is certainly the case in current cloning
technology.
156
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Discography
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169
Index
Page numbers in italic refer to figures in the text.
Abbate, Carolyn 48–9, 72 Austen, Jane 13

Abbott, Helen 22, 47 authenticity 35, 44; see also originality
“abrash” 93, 94 authorship 42, 153
abstraction 23, 138, 149 avant-garde movement 9; Beckett 12, 54,
absurdity 72, 84n4 149; Feldman 88, 95
Adams, John 95
Adorno, Theodor 18–19, 23, 36, 70, 71, Babbitt, Irving 8, 32n3
90, 128 Bach, J. S. 16–17, 118, 154
African American/black music 36, 40, Bailey, Derek 43, 131
51n7 Baricelli, J. P. 30, 149
Agamben, Giorgio 129 Baroque music 17
Albright, Daniel 6, 7, 19, 22, 55, 72, 84 Barrett, Richard 86, 150
aleatoric methods 4–5, 130–1, 153; Barrett, William 96
Beckett 84, 98, 125, 126, 127, Barry, Gerald 86–7
128, 145 Barthes, Roland 20, 28, 37, 48, 58, 130
alliteration 2, 46 Bartok, Béla 37
AMM group 132 Batman 12
anadiplosis, rhetorical device 77, 79, Baudelaire, Charles 25, 143
102, 105 BBC Third Programme 117
analogy, musical 24, 29, 31 Beats group 2
anaphora 2, 47, 48, 81, 133, 150 Beckett, Gerald 55
animation films 18 Beckett, John 55, 87, 117
apophenia 43 Beckett, Samuel, background 55–6
Aristotle 30, 35, 152, 154 Beckett, Samuel, collaborations 86–8;
art, avant-garde 9, 12 and Feldman 4, 5n2, 86–123, 89, 90,
art, modern 88, 151–2 97–9; and Fields, Scott 5, 122, 132,
art, Renaissance 9 135, 137–42, 151; Words and Music
Art Ensemble of Chicago 131 22, 56, 87, 88, 96, 117–23; see also
art installations 33, 34 Neither (Beckett and Feldman); Not I
art music 15, 16–17, 33, 37, 41, 132; (Beckett)
Ireland 53, 54 Beckett, Samuel, influences 2, 59,
arts, visual 7–8, 19, 151 101; influence on music and
Association for the Advancement of composers 86, 132, 148, 150, 151;
Creative Musicians (AACM) 131, 132 Irish literature and music 3, 4;
Attali, Jacques 35 see also Joyce, James, influence on
“attributive screens” 26, 27, 28, 71 Beckett; Schopenhauerian
Auerbach, Erich 152 philosophy
170
170 Index
Beckett, Samuel, music and Symphony No. 5 37; Symphony No. 7
musicalisation 2, 6, 42, 53–65, 99, 37, 70, 128
151–2; Adorno on 70, 71; aleatoric Begbie, Jeremy 38–9, 50
methods 84, 98, 125, 126, 127, 128, Benjamin, Walter 96, 152
145; avant-garde movement 12, 54, Benson, Stephen 22, 118, 130
149; and Cage 5, 84, 86, 129–30; Beowulf 10, 46
indeterminacy 86, 124, 125, 126–7, Bergson, Henri 50, 90
130, 138; innovation 83, 117, 148; jazz Berio, Luciano 86
4–5, 122, 124, 132, 146; Modernism Berkeley, George 35
60, 72, 149, 150; Romanticism 3, Berlioz, Hector 18
68, 118, 148, 149, 150; see also Bernhart, Walter 22
improvisation Best, David 39
Beckett, Samuel, themes see silence; binaries 11–12, 57, 64, 130, 140, 149;
stasis; time; waiting self/unself binary 100–1, 107;
Beckett, Samuel, works: ...dead calm... see also “intelligible”/“inexplicable”
150; All That Fall 9, 85n11, 87; “Best binary
Negro Jazz Orchestra” 132; Breath binary oppositional repetition 99,
132; Cascando 87, 88; Come and Go 127, 134–5, 151; Ill Seen Ill Said 73,
132; Company 77; Dream of Fair to 78, 79, 80; Lessness 125, 126, 129;
Middling Women 58, 59; Eh Joe 132, Neither 100, 102; Worstward Ho 81,
142; Endgame 96; Film 100; Footfalls 82–3
100; Four Quartets 149; Ghost Trio Birtwistle, Harrison, The Minotaur 17
56, 87, 132; Happy Days 96; Krapp’s Bloom, Harold 38, 48, 153
Last Tape 83, 87; Molloy 81, 83, 96, Bond, James 12
124, 125, 149; More Pricks and Kicks boredom see redundancy, in music
58; Murphy 4, 51, 58, 59–65, 83, 127; Borges, Jorge Luis 153
Nacht und Träume 56, 87; Nohow On “Boundaries” conference (RMA) 22
77; Now and Then 150; Ping/Bing 125; Bourne, Jason 12
Play 57, 96, 125, 132, 149, 150; Proust Bowie, David 153, 154
5n2, 14, 57, 69, 96, 99, 118; Rockaby Brahms, Johannes 38
62–3, 132; Stirrings Still 150; Texts for Branca, Glenn 41, 154
Nothing 128; That Time 15, 74, 151; Brater, Enoch 125, 126, 133
Three Dialogues 127; Trilogy 4, 59, 96; Braxton, Anthony 131
Unnamable 83, 86, 96, 129; “Walking Breatnach, Mary 22, 47
Out” 58; Watt 15, 58–9, 86; “What Is Brienza, Susan 125, 126
the Word” 150; What Where 132, 150; Broch, Hermann, Death of Virgil 20
“Whoroscope” notebook 58; see also Brown, Calvin S. 21, 22–3, 29, 48–50, 151
Ill Seen Ill Said (Beckett); Lessness Brown, Earle 88
(Beckett); Neither (Beckett and Bruckner, Anton 11
Feldman); Not I (Beckett); Waiting Bryars, Gavin 132
for Godot (Beckett); Worstward Ho Bryden, Mary 22, 55, 58
(Beckett) Budd, Malcolm 70–1
Beckett, Samuel, writing methods and Buddhism 68, 129
language: French language 12–13, Bukowski, Charles 142, 143
98, 126, 130; originality 61, 96–7, Burroughs, William 2, 153
152–3; pattern in literature 56, 59,
81, 101, 126–7, 142; see also binaries; Cage, John: 4’33” 88, 128–9;
human condition; Lessness (Beckett); and Beckett 5, 84, 86, 129–30;
Schopenhauerian philosophy; improvisation 44–5, 132;
semantic fluidity indeterminacy 86, 88, 130; modern
Beckett on Film production 137 music 41, 43–4, 88, 126, 130, 132,
Beethoven, Ludwig van: Piano Sonata in 143; silence 63, 88, 128–9
F minor 26; Piano Trio No. 1 56, 87; Calder, John 87
17
Index 171
Cale, John 41 dance music 41
Can, band 154 Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio 58
canons 37 Dark Side of the Rainbow 43
Carvalho, John M. 146 Darmstadt lecture 93
Cervantes, Miguel de 153 Darwinism 35, 68
Cézanne, Paul 90, 93 Davis, Miles 146
chance procedures see aleatoric methods Davis, Thomas 3
chansons, sixteenth century 18 Dayan, Peter 14, 22, 24, 28–9, 57
characterisation 96, 102, 117, 138 de-essentialization 31
Chatham, Rhys 52n14, 154 De Quincey, Thomas 27
chiasmus 64, 134 Debussy, Claude 143
Chopin, Frédéric 28 Dedalus, Stephen 12, 13, 45, 53
chords, inverted 92, 94 Deleuzian repetition 3, 34–6, 42, 48, 72,
Christianity 36 92, 150; and difference 34, 36, 38–9,
circles 36 45; exact clothed repetition 35, 73–4,
Claren, Sebastian 99–110 92–3, 153; Feldman 91, 92–3, 94, 151,
Cline, Nels 42 152; Fields 145, 151, 152; Neither 102,
clocks 96 111; Words and Music 117–18, 119
Cobain, Kurt 153 Dembski, Stephen 132
Coester, Edouard 87 Derrida, Jacques 20, 28, 45, 98, 148
Coetzee, J. M. 127 Descartes, René 61
Cohn, Ruby 51, 61, 95, 96, 124, 125, 126 development, and repetition 40–1
Coleman, Ornette 44, 131 difference 10, 33, 34–5, 50; and
collaborations, musical 86–8, 99–110, Deleuzian repetition 34, 36, 38–9, 45;
117–18, 122, 123; see also Feldman, Feldman 93, 98
Morton; Fields, Scott; Neither discursive repetition 40, 73, 99, 135, 150,
(Beckett and Feldman); Words and 151; Ill Seen Ill Said 74, 78, 80, 81;
Music (Beckett and Feldman) Neither 110, 111, 114
Colleen 42 dissonance, cognitive 9, 31, 38, 138
Coltrane, John 41 Donizetti, Gaetano 18
commodification 35, 44 Doppelgangers 34
compositional process 50, 98–9, 126, Drew, Elizabeth and Haahr, Mads 126
130–1 drumming, African 15, 41
computer software 126–7 Duchamp, Marcel 152
Cone, Edward T. 24–5, 50 duckrabbit, Wittgensteinian 39
Connor, Stephen 83 Dujardin, Édouard 11
Conrad, Tony 41 dynamics 43, 143–5
consciousness 11, 12, 18, 34, 35, 54, 145
contradiction 68, 73, 97, 118; Lessness echoes 33, 47, 59, 105; Ill Seen Ill Said
126, 129; Schopenhauerian philosophy 72, 74, 77
70–1, 149 Edinburgh, University of 22
contrafacta 17 Egk, Werner 87
contrapuntal texture 30, 50–1 Einselreferenz 10
copies 35, 70, 152–3, 155n3 Einstein, Albert 68
Cortázar, Julio, Hopscotch 50, 153 Eisenstein, Sergei 9, 31, 38
cuckoos 17 Eliot, T. S. 20, 26, 30, 38, 54, 154
Cunard, Nancy 132 emotion 14, 41, 69, 70, 71, 118
cut-ups 2, 15, 153 Enlightenment 1, 6, 7, 10–11
Eno, Brian 45, 154
da capo form 17, 57, 96, 125, 127, 149, 150 epistrophe 2, 59, 64, 74, 81, 133, 150
da Sousa Correa, Delia 22 Esslin, Martin 84n4, 150
Dadaism 126 “eternal return” 34, 36, 152
Dahlhaus, Carl 38, 50 evolution 35, 43, 68, 152, 155n3
172
172 Index
exact clothed repetition 62, 99, 111, 122, Frith, Fred 43, 131
135, 151; Deleuzian repetition 35, Frith, Simon 44
73–4, 92–3, 153; Feldman 90, 94, 95; Frost, Everett 98, 100, 110, 117
Ill Seen Ill Said 73–4, 75, 76, 79 Frye, Northrop 29
Existentialism 97 fugues 3, 24, 29, 37, 51, 53, 138
experience 27, 34, 48, 50, 71–2, 89, 90–1
expression 11; in literature 70, 127, Galilei, Vincenzo 18
129; in music 41, 53, 118, 145; self- gamelan, Balinese 15, 41
expression 16, 69; see also meaning Gendron, Sarah 35, 36, 77, 92, 98
Genette, Gérard 50, 92
failure 148, 150, 155n1; “failing better” Geworfenheit (Heidegger) 83
42, 45, 81, 84; of language 70, 79, 119 Giacometti, Antonio 86, 151
Faust, band 154 Ginsberg, Allen, “Howl” 47
Feldman, Morton 86–123; Deleuzian Gladwell, Malcolm 154
repetition 90, 91, 92–3, 94, 95, 151, Glass, Philip 40, 41, 86, 95
152; difference 93, 98; graphic scores glitch music 155n1
88–9, 124; human condition 110, 146; Goehr, Lydia 54
improvisation 124, 132; indeterminacy Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 18, 83, 95
88, 89, 151; instrumentation 94, Goffin, Robert 132
104, 110–11, 114; interpretation 98, Gontarski, S. E. 77
123, 151; listening/hearing 91–2, 93; Gorbman, Claudia 17
modern art 88, 95, 151–2; motifs 90, Gormley, Anthony 33, 34
92; opera 5n2, 88, 99–100; painting 18, Gould, Glenn 129
88, 89–90, 97, 110; pattern in music 88, Greeks, Ancient 1, 6, 7–8, 10, 36, 152
93–4, 102, 108, 121, 151; Projection 1 Greenberg, Clement 8–9, 31
88–9, 93–4, 112; rhythm 104, 107, 113, Grove’s Dictionary of Music and
142–3; Romanticism 88, 117; semantic Musicians 53
fluidity 86, 92, 99, 151; “shimmering” Guston, Philip 90, 97, 151
93, 95, 96, 105, 108; silence 89, 90;
stasis 4, 90, 92, 94, 95, 151; String Hanninen, Dora A. 143
Quartet No. 2 89–90, 92, 93–4, 123; Hassan, Ihab 129
time 4, 83, 89, 90–2, 95, 151; see also Heaney, Seamus 16, 46
Neither (Beckett and Feldman); Words hearing see listening/hearing
and Music (Beckett and Feldman) Hegarty, Paul 42, 43, 44, 83
Ferguson, Samuel 3 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 34
Ferneyhough, Brian 86, 118–19 Heisenberg principle 68
Festival of Radio Plays 117 Hendrix, Jimi, “Machine Gun” 18
Fields, Scott 124; and Beckett 5, 122, Henebry, Richard 54
132, 135, 137–42, 151; Deleuzian Henze, Hans Werner 149
repetition 145, 151, 152; improvisation Heraclitus 33
122, 151; interpretation 132, 137, 139; Hess, Hermann, The Glass Bead Game 20
painting 132, 143; pattern in music Higgins, Dick 9
140, 142, 151; see also Not I (Beckett) Hindu philosophy 36
film 9–10, 11, 18, 137, 152; film music 9, Historically Informed Performance
14, 17, 31, 38 (HIP) 49
Fink, Robert 33, 154 Hollinger, Heinze 86
Finnissey, Michael, Enough 150 Homer 10
Flaubert, Gustave 77, 124, 150 homonyms 73, 77
Fletcher, John 58 human condition 83, 84, 99, 126, 130,
folk music, traditional 53, 54 148; Feldman 110, 146; Human
Fortner, Wolfgang 86 Condition (Magritte) 67
Foster, Roy 12 Humanism 18
French language 13, 98, 126, 130 Husserl, Edmund 34
Frisell, Bill 42 Huxley, Aldous 2, 11, 26
173
Index 173
identity 34, 35 Jameson, Frederic 35
Ill Seen Ill Said (Beckett) 4, 51, 72–81, Jaws, film 17, 38
133; binary oppositional repetition jazz 41, 45, 49, 131–2; avantjazz 5, 124;
73, 78, 79, 80; discursive repetition Beckett 4–5, 122, 124, 132, 146; free
74, 78, 80, 81; echoes 72, 74, 77; 44, 131, 132; improvisation 5, 131,
exact clothed repetition 73–4, 75, 142, 145–6
76, 79; improvisation 77, 81; motifs Johnson, B. S., The Unfortunates 153
72–3, 77, 78; musematic repetition Jordan, Neil 137
73–8, 79, 81 jouissance 37, 146
images: Beckett’s 90, 96, 125, 134; Joyce, James: Finnegans Wake 3, 50, 53,
intermediality 18, 19, 31, 39, 47 68; language/writing style 13, 77, 124,
improvisation 45, 124–46; Beckett 77, 81, 129, 150; Modernism 12, 60, 96; “The
122, 130–2; Cage 44–5, 132; Feldman Dead” 13, 14, 53; Work in Progress 68,
91, 124, 132; Fields 5, 122, 132, 151; 129; see also Ulysses (Joyce)
jazz 5, 131, 142, 145–6; noise music Joyce, James, influence on Beckett 38,
43, 44; see also Not I (Beckett) 59, 73, 80, 150; and music 53, 68, 129;
indeterminacy 124, 126–33; Beckett 86, Ulysses 77, 111
124, 125, 126–7, 130, 138; Cage 86, 88, Joyce, James, and music 50–1, 53, 54, 68,
130; Feldman 88, 89, 151 129; fugue 3, 24, 29, 51, 53, 138
innovation 11, 22, 31, 36, 41–2, 124, 154; Judaism 36
Beckett 83, 117, 148
Institute of Musical Research (IMR) 22 K2, Molekular Terrorism 43
instrumental music 18, 24, 58, 87, 117, Kant, Immanuel 34, 66–7, 101
132, 138 Katz, Ruth 38
instrumentation 38, 148; Feldman 94, Keats, John 11, 16, 28, 32n18, 130
104, 110–11, 114 Kierkegaard, Søren 34, 36, 48, 152
“intelligible”/“inexplicable” binary: Kim, Earl 86, 150
Beckett 53, 57, 69–70, 83, 85n10; Kivy, Peter 8, 15–16, 39, 43, 50, 93, 151
Murphy 5, 51; Not I 133, 137; Klee, Paul 19
Schopenhauerian philosophy 53, 66, Kline, Franz 88
72, 85n10 knowing/unknowing 130
intention 8, 45, 58, 131 knowledge, prior 27
intermediality 6, 7, 8–10, 20, 22, 27, Knowlson, James 55, 56, 59, 72, 97, 100
33–51; intermedial images 18, 19, Kötting, Andrew 127
31, 39, 47; Lessing 18–19, 20, 24, 91, Kramer, Jonathan 90–2, 95, 102, 105
119; and poetry 8, 16, 19–20, 24–6, Kramer, Lawrence 21, 24–5, 151
29; Prieto, Eric 11, 12, 24, 29–32; Kuonios, John, Kotz, Sonja A. and
see also Feldman, Morton; Fields, Holcomb, Philip J. 51
Scott; Lessness (Beckett); music Kurtág, György 86, 150
and literature; music in literature;
Neither (Beckett and Feldman); Not I Lachenmann, Helmut 149
(Beckett); painting; Words and Music Lang, Art 101
(Beckett and Feldman) language: English 13, 46, 130, 134;
International Association for Word and failure of 70, 79, 119; French 13, 98,
Music Studies (WMA) 21–2, 29 126, 130; Joyce 13, 77, 124, 129, 150;
International Summer Courses for New music and literature 1–2, 6, 13, 20,
Music, 33rd 93 72; “unword” 12, 13, 77, 150; see also
interpretation 14, 26, 39, 48, 67, 152; binaries; Ill Seen Ill Said (Beckett);
Feldman 98, 123, 151; Fields 132, 137, semantic fluidity; Words and Music
139; in literature 17, 18, 39, 110; in (Beckett and Feldman)
music 18, 27, 43, 98, 123, 124; Not I Laocoön 7, 8–9
137, 139 Latartara, John 35, 43
Irish culture 1, 3, 4, 6 Lauffer, David and Mathon,
Ives, Charles 123 Geneviève 55
174
174 Index
Lawley, Paul 149 Merzbow 42, 43, 44
Laws, Catherine 22, 55, 70, 149; on metaphor, musical 4, 29–30, 57, 58–65
Feldman 89, 90, 98, 105, 118 metronomes 56, 137
Leibniz, Gottfried 69 Metzer, David 128
leitmotifs 38, 62, 73, 150, 153 Metzidakis, Stamos 48
Lessing, Gotthold: classification 3, 6, Meyer, Leonard B. 38, 50
7–8, 10, 38, 53, 91; intermediality Middleton, Richard 40, 42, 73
18–19, 20, 24, 91, 119; Nacheinander Mihalovici, Marcel 87
and Nebeneinander 8, 19, 32n2, 53 mimesis 19, 121, 150, 152
Lessness (Beckett) 4–5, 125–7, 128, minimalism 33, 40–1, 95, 154
129–30, 145, 150 mirrors 12, 31, 64
Limb, Charles 145 mistakes, jazz 45
liminality 97–8, 148 Mithen, Steven 49
listening/hearing 13–14, 15–16, 23, 25, mobility, of music 24, 29
50, 59, 68; Feldman 91–2, 93; and Modernism 36, 50, 54, 150; Beckett 60,
repetition 17, 34, 38–9, 43 72, 149, 150; Joyce 12, 60, 96; music
Liszt, Franz 18, 25 and literature 2, 6, 11–12, 19–20, 27,
literature 1; expression in 70, 127, 129; 53, 54; music in literature 60, 72, 149;
interpretation in 17, 18, 39, 110; repetition 2, 41, 154; Schopenhauerian
literature in music 24, 138, 151; philosophy 12, 20
repetition in 2, 20, 46–7, 48–9; rhythm Moerman, Ernst, “Louis
10, 24–5, 26, 41, 47–8, 62; see also Armstrong” 132
music and literature Monk, Meredith 90
Literature and Music Research Group, Monteverdi, Claudio 17, 32n12
Open University 22 Moore, Julianne 137–8, 139
loop music 41–3, 83, 153 Moore, Thomas, Irish Melodies 3, 13
Low, band 42 Morin, Emilie 130
Lyotard, Jean-François 6 Mothersbaugh, Mark 17
motifs 33, 35, 37, 38, 62; Feldman 90, 92;
McClary, Susan 8 Ill Seen Ill Said 72–3, 77, 78; Neither
McCormack, John 53 (V1) 102, 107, 108, 115–16; Neither
MacGreevy, Thomas 55–6 (V2) 105, 106–7, 108, 111, 112, 114;
madrigals 18 Neither (V3) 110, 111, 113, 114
Magee, Bryan 66 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, The Magic
Magritte, René, The Human Condition 67 Flute 17
Mahler, Gustav 11, 17 musematic repetition 40, 79, 99, 102,
Maier, Franz Michael 9, 55 118, 151; Ill Seen Ill Said 73–8, 79, 81;
Mallarmé, Stéphane 20, 47, 98, 153 Not I 133, 134
Mallock, W. H. 153 music: as an art form 1; interpretation
Mamet, David 142 18, 27, 43, 98, 123, 124; meaning 25,
Mangan, James Clarence 3 31, 57, 84, 151; mobility 24, 29; and
Mann, Thomas 20 repetition 151; and silence 151
Margulis, Elizabeth Hellmuth 38 music, absolute 18, 19, 84n2
Martyn, John 145 music, antiphonal 37, 51n7
Marx, Groucho 30 music, diegetic 13–14
Matisse, Henri 94 music, experimental 40–5, 95, 128,
May, Matthew 127 130, 132
meaning: musical 25, 31, 57, 84, 151; music, modern 54, 154; Beckett’s
and repetition 45, 121; and semantic influence on 86, 132, 148, 150, 151;
fluidity 99, 148–9; see also expression Cage, John 41, 43–4, 88, 126, 130,
medieval times 6 132, 143; and technology 41–2, 83,
“melopoetics” 21, 26, 29–30 85n11, 153, 154; see also Feldman,
memory 23, 34, 35, 46, 131, 153 Morton; Fields, Scott; improvisation;
Mercier, Vivian 55, 57 repetition; silence
175
Index 175
music, programme 11, 18, 24, 28 137, 139; screams 134, 135, 143; self
music, pure 68, 84n2, 87, 99 145, 146; semantic fluidity 137, 139,
music, sensual 59 143; silence 133, 134–5, 137, 142, 143
music, tonal 37 noumenon and phenomenon 66–7, 69
music, vertical 90–1, 92 Noveller 42
music and literature 1–2, 4, 6–32, 53–65, novels 13, 26–7, 50, 58, 83
148, 151; language 1–2, 6, 13, 20, number games 124
72; Modernism 2, 6, 11–12, 19–20, Nyman, Michael 40, 86, 95, 124
27, 53, 54; and poetry 8, 16, 19–20,
24–6, 29; see also Feldman, Morton; O’Hara, J. D. 57
Fields, Scott; intermediality; Lessness Ockelford, Adam 38
(Beckett); literature; Neither (Beckett Oliveros, Pauline 132
and Feldman); Not I (Beckett); Words One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
and Music (Beckett and Feldman) (Kesey) 61
“Music and Literature” panel (RMA) 22 onomatopoeia 17
music in literature 138, 151; da capo opera 3, 17, 20, 48, 57, 117; Beckett and
form 17, 57, 96, 125, 127, 149, 150; Feldman 5n2, 88, 99; see also Neither
and Modernism 53, 54, 60, 72; (Beckett and Feldman)
musicalisation 2, 4, 10, 11, 26–7; Oppenheim, Lois 55, 152
repetition 15, 61–3 oppositional repetition see binary
musicality/“musical” 1–2, 10, 15, 23–4, oppositional repetition
27, 28, 29; Beckett 5, 56, 57; see also oral tradition 10
music in literature originality 37, 38, 61, 96–7, 152–3, 154;
see also authenticity
Nacheinander and Nebeneinander 8, 19, ostrich tuning 41, 52n14
32n2, 53 Ovid 53
narrators, multiple 26
nationalism, cultural 54 Paddison, Max 50, 90
Nattiez, Jean-Jacques 14, 22 painting 8–9, 19, 32n2, 67–8, 152;
“negative capability” 28, 32n18, 130 Feldman 18, 88, 89–90, 97, 110; Fields
Negus, Keith 42 132, 143; word painting 17, 18, 77,
Neither (Beckett and Feldman) 110, 132, 143
5n2, 88, 96, 99–117, 122; binary Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da 17
oppositional repetition 100, 102; palindromes 105
Deleuzian repetition 102, 111; Parker, Evan 131
discursive repetition 110, 111, 114; Parker, Jeff 132
instrumentation 104, 110–11, 114; paronomasia 64
pattern in music 102, 108; rhythm 104, Parr, Adrian 35, 45, 145
107, 113; Schopenhauerian philosophy Partch, Harry 42
101, 110; semantic fluidity 105, 107, Pass, Joe 45
114, 116–18; “shimmering” 105, 108; “passive synthesis” 34
stasis 102, 111; see also motifs Pater, Walter 1, 11, 18, 57, 129
Neu!, band 154 pattern in literature 56, 59, 81, 101,
Nietzsche, Friedrich 34, 36, 152 126–7, 142
Nobel Prize for Literature 128 pattern in music 15–16, 25, 39, 43;
noise, atmospheric 126 Feldman 88, 93–4, 102, 108, 121, 151;
noise music 42–4, 83 Fields 140, 142, 151
nostalgia 154 Pavement 42
Not I (Beckett) 56, 98, 124, 132, 133–46; Perloff, Marjorie 117
and Fields, Scott 135, 137–42; Philip Glass Ensemble 41
improvisation 137, 139, 140–2, 145–6; Philips, John J. H. 86
“intelligible”/“inexplicable” binary Philips, Tom 153
133, 137; interpretation 137, 139; photography 11
musematic repetition 133, 134; rhythm Picasso, Pablo, Guernica 12, 19–20, 149
176
176 Index
pictorialism 18 45, 121; Modernism 2, 41, 154; in
Pinget, Robert 11 music 2, 37–40, 48–51, 86, 143, 151;
Pinter, Harold 142 music in literature 15, 61–3; poetry 10,
Plato 11, 33, 35, 68, 150, 152, 154 46; ratios 74, 81, 82, 119; technology
Poe, Edgar Allen, “The Raven” 46–7 153, 154; see also binary oppositional
poetry: and music 8, 16, 19–20, 24–6, repetition; Deleuzian repetition;
29; and repetition 10, 46; rhythm 10, discursive repetition; musematic
24–5, 26, 47–8 repetition; pattern in literature;
Polanyi, Michael 25 pattern in music
Pollock, Jackson 88, 110 repetition, didactic 39, 43, 121
Pope, Alexander, Dunciad 46 repetition, transmedial 2–5, 15, 23, 33,
postmodernism 8, 37, 68, 70, 149 124, 148, 151
poststructuralism 8, 20 reproduction, human 152
Potter, Keith 40, 41 reproduction, mass 35
Pound, Ezra 19, 20, 54 rests, musical 64, 70
practice, repetition for 153–4 Reynolds, Roger 86
Prado, Maryjo 56 Reynolds, Simon 154
Prévost, Eddie 132 rhetorical devices 48, 64, 77, 119, 134
Prieto, Eric 22, 83; on Beckett 54–5, 59, rhyme 10, 46–7, 143
71; intermediality 11, 12, 24, 29–32 rhythm: drumming 15, 41; Feldman 104,
printing, 3D 154 107, 113, 142–3; in literature 41, 62;
process music 23, 40, 91, 95 Not I 137, 139; poetry 10, 24–5, 26,
Proust, Marcel 2, 14, 20, 48; see also 47–8
Beckett, Samuel, works riffs 40, 90, 111
pseudomorphosis 19 Riley, Terry 40, 41, 52n12, 91
psychoanalysis: Freudian 11, 34, 35, 133; rock music 40, 41, 44, 132
Lacanian 146 rocking 61, 62, 63
purpose/purposeless 130 Rolland, Romain 20
Roller, Scott 132, 139
questions, unanswered 72, 99, 110 Romanticism 1, 2, 11, 13, 16, 57; Beckett
3, 68, 71, 118, 148, 149, 150; Feldman
Rabinowitz, Peter 26, 27, 71 88, 117; Schopenhauer 68, 71, 129
Radiohead 153 Rose, Tricia 36
Rajewsky, Irina O. 10 Rothko, Mark 88, 89–90, 93, 110, 151
randomness/chance 45, 125, 126, routine 130, 154
129, 153 Rowe, Keith 132
ratios, of repetition 74, 81, 82, 119 Royal Musical Association (RMA) 22
Rauschenberg, Robert 88, 93, 151 rugs, Turkish 93–4, 95, 117
realism 11–12, 126, 129–30, 152 Russolo, Luigi 42
reality 18, 66, 67–8, 69, 70 Rzewski, Frederic 91, 146
recording technology 41–4, 85n11, 152;
loop music 41–3, 83, 153 sameness 8, 34, 38–9, 50, 93, 129
Red Dead Redemption, game 153 Sand, George 28
redundancy, in music 50, 89 Saportha, Marc, Composition No. 1 153
Reed, Lou, “The Ostrich” 41 Saussure, Ferdinand de 20, 45
refrains 2, 46–7, 111 Schenker, Heinrich 15, 18, 37, 151
Reich, Steve 37, 40, 41, 91 Scher, Steven Paul 22, 23–4, 27, 29–30,
Reid, Alec 4, 20 138, 151
religion 16–17 Schneider, Alan 137
Renaissance 9, 17, 18 Schopenhauerian philosophy 1, 11, 12,
repeats, cutting of 15–16 18; Beckett 2, 53–4, 57, 66–73, 87, 99;
repetition: intermediality 33–51, 148; contradiction 70–1, 149; “intelligible”/
listening/hearing 17, 34, 38–9, 43; in “inexplicable” 53, 66, 72, 85n10;
literature 2, 20, 46–7, 48–9; meaning Modernism 12, 20; Murphy 4, 59;
17
Index 177
Neither 101, 110; reality 66, 67–8, 69, Stravinsky, Igor 19, 23, 128
70; Romanticism 68, 71, 129; semantic structuralism 20, 58
fluidity 72, 86, 148 structure, deep 25, 26, 31, 34
Schubert, Franz 18, 56, 58, 87, 150 surprise 31, 43
scores, graphic 88–9, 124 Swift, Jonathan 80
Scott Fields Ensemble 132, 133, 139, 142 Symbolism 1, 2, 6, 11, 28, 71; refrains
screams 7, 134, 135, 143 2, 47
sculpture 7, 8, 33, 91 Synge, J. M. 3, 53
Searle, Humphrey 117
self 145, 146, 151; self/unself binary Tagg, Philip 34
100–1, 107 Tandy, Jessica 137
semantic fluidity 2–3, 4, 5; Beckett Taylor, Cecil 131
15, 58, 66–84, 99, 124, 127, 148–50; technology, musical 41–2, 83, 85n11,
Feldman 86, 92, 99, 151; and 153, 154
meaning 99, 148–9; Neither 105, 107, theatre 50, 83–4, 130, 137
114, 116–17; Not I 137, 139, 143; Theatre of Eternal Music 41
Schopenhauerian philosophy 72, 86, themes 20, 47, 73, 84, 99, 100, 150; That
148; Words and Music 119, 122 Time 15, 32n10; see also silence; stasis;
semantic satiation/saturation 3, 51 time
serialism 40, 41, 52n12, 95 Thomas, Dylan, “Do not go gentle into
shadow 88, 97, 100, 101, 102, 104, 111 that good night” 47
Shakespeare, William 21, 39, 47, 49 Thuringus, Joachim 17–18
Sharp, Elliott 131, 132 Tilbury, John 86
Shaw, George Bernard 3, 20, 48, 53, Till, Nicholas and Bailes, Sara-Jane 55
65n1, 72, 119 time 8, 24, 32n2, 35, 38, 48, 50; Beckett
Shelley, Percy Bysshe 9 83, 89, 95–7, 125, 126, 150; Feldman
“shimmering” 93, 95, 96, 105, 108 83, 89, 90–2, 95, 151; images 90, 96
Shoegaze music 145 time, extended 4, 95
silence: Beckett 5, 63–4, 70, 87, 127–9, time, vertical 91, 95, 105, 111
148; Cage 63, 88, 128–9; Feldman tone 38, 149
89, 90; in music 86, 128, 151; Neither Tonmalerei 18
101, 112, 113; Not I 133, 134–5, 137, Toynbee, Jason 42
142, 143 transformation 2, 9, 24, 35, 37, 101, 150
Sinclair, Iain 127 translation 4, 18, 86, 90, 98–9, 102
Skempton, Howard 89, 99, 102 transmediality 10; transmedial repetition
Small, Christopher 36 2–5, 15, 23, 33, 124, 148, 151
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein 25 transposition 10, 102, 143
Smog 42 trios 37
Snead, James A. 36, 154 Tubridy, Derval 98
sonata form 15, 37, 49, 96
Sonic Youth 154 Ulysses (Joyce) 12, 50, 60, 96; fugue
spatialisation 19, 23 3, 24, 29, 51, 53, 138; influence on
Spielmann, Yvonne 9–10 Beckett 77, 111
spirals 36, 37 understanding 23, 48, 130;
Spotify 154 understanding/non-understanding 39,
stage directions 58, 83, 133, 140 57, 97, 111
stasis 4; Feldman 90, 92, 94, 95, 151;
Neither 102, 111, 116–17 Vaca, Gustavo Alberto Garcia 152
Stein, Gertrude 2 value 31, 42–3, 49
Stein, Leonard 52n12 Van Hulle, Dirk 128
Steiner, George 20, 82 variation 23, 89, 94, 95, 154
Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy 27 Velvet Underground 41
Stockhausen, Karlheinz 132 vertical music composition 90–1, 92
Strauss, Richard 8 Vicentino, Nicola 18
178
178 Index
Virgil 7–8 Wolpe, Stefan 95
Vivaldi, Antonio, Nulla in Mundo pax Wong, Dustin 42
sincera (RV 630) 17 Word and Music Association Forum
(WMAF) 22
Wagner, Richard 1, 11, 13–14, 38, 71; Word and Music Studies 1, 3, 21–32,
Gesamtkunstwerk 6, 8, 32n3; and 33, 154; see also music and literature;
Shaw, George Bernard 53, 65n1 music in literature
waiting 4, 151 word painting 17, 18, 77, 110, 132,
Waiting for Godot (Beckett) 87, 109, 125, 143, 152
128, 151; da capo form 57, 96, 150 Words and Music (Beckett and Feldman)
Warburton, Dan 40 22, 56, 87, 88, 96, 117–23
Warhol, Andy 41, 152 Wordsworth, William 26, 152
Webern, Anton 40–1, 60, 88, 95, 128, 154 Worstward Ho (Beckett) 36, 42, 77, 81–2,
Welsh, John P. 88–9 83, 150
Western music 15, 36, 37 Worth, Katharine 117
White, Harry 3, 22, 54, 60, 150, 151
Whitelaw, Billie 137–8 Yeats, Jack 151
Wiener, Norbert 93 Yeats, W. B. 3, 16, 46, 53, 59, 80
Wilde, Oscar 12, 13–14, 39, 129–30 Young, La Monte 40, 41, 95, 132
Williams, John 17
Wimsatt, W. K. Jr. and Beardsley, Zimmerman, Walter 92
Monroe C. 58 Žižek, Slavoj 27
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 20, 28, 39 Zorn, John 132
Wolf, Werner 2, 22, 26–7, 33, 119 Zukofsky, Louis 20
Wolff, Christian 88, 95 zygonic theory 38

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Samuel Beckett, Repetition and

Music abounds in twentieth-​century Irish literature. Whether it be the “thought-​

Samuel Beckett, Repetition and

First published 2018

For Holly and Daisy

1 Music and literature 6

2 Repetition in music and literature 33

3 Musico-​literary interaction in modern Ireland and the

4 Beckett’s semantic fluidity: repetition in the later work 66

5 Beckett and Feldman: time, repetition and the liminal space 86

6 Improvising Beckett: chance, silence and repetition 124

4.1 The Human Condition (1933) –​René Magritte © ADAGP,

Music and literature 7

At the same time he raised to the stars

8 Music and literature

Music and literature 9

The history of avant-​garde painting is that of a progressive surrender to

Such foregrounding of materials occurs in Beckett’s All That Fall ([1957]

Intermedia therefore is a formal category of exchange. It signifies an

10 Music and literature

Intermedial references are thus to be understood as meaning-​constitu-

Music and literature interaction

Music and literature 11

12 Music and literature

Music and literature 13

Music and the literary diegesis

Music can also provide a dramatic backdrop, or afford an intense experience

14 Music and literature

The significance of music in Proust’s magnum opus was of particular interest

Music as structural device in literature

Music and literature 15

repetition is the means of grasping pattern; but, by definition, pattern is

Clearly modern music transgresses such boundaries as loops, cut-​ups, DAWs

16 Music and literature

Come away, O human child!

The sounding of text

Music and literature 17

18 Music and literature

Music and literature 19

Much of the interdisciplinary practice of the twentieth century is indebted

20 Music and literature

Music and literature 21

The growth of Word and Music Studies

22 Music and literature

Music and literature 23

24 Music and literature

Any discourse that hopes to embrace both arts must, so to speak, be

Music and literature 25

A complementarity in the roles the two arts assign to their connotative

26 Music and literature

Music and literature 27

As far as textual evidence is concerned, Tristram Shandy does not contain

28 Music and literature

[m]‌usic and literature … as defined by each other in an argument whose

Dayan praises the “musical” writing of Barthes and Derrida, something

the presence of rain in Chopin’s music … The existence of literature, as

In other words, whether or not the composer intended a specific motif to

Music and literature 29

Music abounds in twentieth-century Irish literature. Whether it be the “thought-

3 Musico-literary interaction in modern Ireland and the

4.1 The Human Condition (1933) –René Magritte © ADAGP,

The history of avant-garde painting is that of a progressive surrender to

Intermedial references are thus to be understood as meaning-constitu-

Clearly modern music transgresses such boundaries as loops, cut-ups, DAWs

These five points, a quasi-self-help list of aphorisms or mantras for the

Maggots half-form’d in rhyme exactly meet,

[t]‌he repeat-marks often found in sonata-form … are often ignored in pre-

Ireland in the early twentieth century was a hive of musico-literary invention.

Here, Gottfried Leibniz’s notion of a grand order of things –there being a

1. Exact clothed repetitions –these are recurrences of the “same” material,