‘Scoured and Cleansed’

doi:10.1017/9781108614719.005

Chapter 4 - ‘Scoured and Cleansed’

Ezra Pound and Musical Composition

from Part I - Pound’s Texts

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 October 2019

Josh Epstein

Edited by

Mark Byron

Show author details

Mark Byron: Affiliation:
University of Sydney

Book contents

Get access

Summary

What does ‘an opera of mankind’ sound like? It depends on what mankind sounds like, and what sounds the ‘prose’ prevents us from hearing. For Francois Villon, on whom Pound based his first opera, it sounded like the brothel, the street, the tavern, the sounds of ‘theft, murder, whoring, and praying’ and the rhythms of everyday language. It is of no small importance that Pound’s primary musical curator is R. Murray Schafer, the Canadian composer who edited Ezra Pound and Music (1977), and who helped Pound prepare Le Testament for a revival radio performance. In The Soundscape (1993), Schafer reads many of the sounds in Pound’s Cantos – the sea, the woodcutter and the machine. In establishing a new cultural-scientific-aesthetic ‘interdiscipline’ of soundscape design, Schafer found that Pound, for whom all disciplines were interdisciplines, exemplified this tendency in poetry.

Keywords

acoustic field aural culture soundscape Great Bass François Villon Guido Cavalcanti musical score

Type: Chapter
Information: The New Ezra Pound Studies , pp. 57 - 71

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108614719.005 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2019

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Adams, Stephen J., ‘Are the Cantos a Fugue?’ University of Toronto Quarterly 45.1 (1975), 67–74.CrossRef Google Scholar

Adorno, Theodor, ‘The Function of Counterpoint in New Music’, in Sound Figures, trans. Rodney Livingstone, 123–44 (1959; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).Google Scholar

Albright, Daniel, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).Google Scholar

Bucknell, Brad, Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce, and Stein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).Google Scholar

Dunn, Margaret, ‘Eine Kleine Wortmusik: The Marriage of Poetry and Music in the Pisan Cantos’, Perspectives on Contemporary Literature 13 (1987), 101–9.Google Scholar

Epstein, Josh, Sublime Noise: Musical Culture and the Modernist Writer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).CrossRef Google Scholar

Feldman, Matthew, ‘Pound and Radio Treason: An Empirical Reassessment’, in Broadcasting in the Modernist Era, ed. Feldman, Henry Mead and Tonning, Erik, 213–44 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015).Google Scholar

Fisher, Margaret, Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments, 1931–1933 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).Google Scholar

Gunning, Tom, ‘The Cinema of Attraction: Early Film, its Spectator, and the Avant-Garde’, Wide Angle 8.3–4 (1986), 63–70.Google Scholar

Halliday, Sam, Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).Google Scholar

Hardy, Thomas ‘The Darkling Thrush’ (1900), in Selected Poems, ed. Mezey, Robert, 33–4 (London: Penguin, 1998).Google Scholar

Hughes, Robert, and Fisher, Margaret, Cavalcanti: A Perspective on the Music of Ezra Pound (Emeryville: Second Evening Art, 2003).Google Scholar

Kane, Brian, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).Google Scholar

Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).Google Scholar

Klein, Scott ‘“Like coins out of circulation”: Reframing Ezra Pound’s Le Testament’, in The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts, ed. Preda, Roxana, 334–46 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).Google Scholar

Moody, A. David, Ezra Pound, Poet, Vol. II: The Epic Years, 1921–1939, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).Google Scholar

Pound, Ezra, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960).Google Scholar

Pound, Ezra, Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony (New York: Da Capo Press, 1968).Google Scholar

Pound, Ezra, Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism, ed. Schafer, R. Murray (New York: New Directions, 1977).Google Scholar

Pound, Ezra, Guide to Kulchur (New York: New Directions, 1970).Google Scholar

Pound, Ezra, ‘A Retrospect’, in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. Eliot, T. S., 3–14 (New York: New Directions, 1954).Google Scholar

Pound, Ezra, Le Testament: ‘Paroles de Villon’, ed. Fisher, Margaret and Hughes, Robert (Emeryville: Second Evening Art, 2008).Google Scholar

Saint-Amour, Paul, ‘Ulysses Pianola’, PMLA 130.1 (2015), 15–36.Google Scholar

Schafer, R. Murray, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of Our World (Rochester: Destiny Books, 1993).Google Scholar

Sitwell, Edith, ‘Ezra Pound’, in An Examination of Ezra Pound, ed. Russell, Peter, 37–65 (New York: Gordian, 1973).Google Scholar

Stauder, Ellen Keck, ‘“Without an Ear of His Own”: Pound’s Janequin in Canto 75’, Quaderni di Palazzo Serra 15 (2008), 257–77.Google Scholar

Thompson, Emily, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2004).Google Scholar