Poet, Seán Street, whose lyrics are being set to music for Composeher by Cecilia McDowall, discusses the relationship between words and music in their work, Angel of the Battlefield.
Reflecting on the relationship between composer, poet and subject further into the Composeher project, there are, it seems to me, some points to discuss relating to that relationship, and the synergy between words and music. For me, a text written specifically to be set is not the same as a piece of writing designed to be placed on a page and read silently. This is a unique kind of partnership and one that, over the course of a number of collaborations, I feel that Cecilia and I have been able to develop and refine into a hybrid that is, in fact, a partnership between composer, writer and subject. This is particularly true where that subject is a human being, a person from history – as in the case of Edith Cavell (Standing as I do before God) and Rosalind Franklin (Photo 51). In both these examples, words spoken or written by the subject have been incorporated into the text, blending with my own words and then melded through the magic fluid of the music. There is a good example of this in Angel of the Battlefield, in which Clara Barton and I share reflections, as here, in the second section, (the italics are Clara’s words):
‘It’s not hard to be an angel,
you just need bread, water, a sense
of what it means to be mortal.
You must never so much as think whether
you like it or not, whether it is bearable or not;
you must never think of anything except
the need, and how to meet it.
An angel can guess how it feels
when the unknowing bullet strikes, the thirst
gnaws and there’s no direction home,
when exhaustion surmounts even fear.’
This raises an issue: on the page it’s clear which are Clara’s words and which are mine, because the physical appearance of the text shows the reader who is ‘speaking’ at any one time. When the composer sets the words, she has the capacity to change emphasis, however subtly, between these parts of the text; in Standing as I do before God, Cecilia gave Edith Cavell a voice that set her in a kind of sonic spotlight for instance, and in an earlier collaboration, Shipping Forecast, the actual words of the forecast itself were spoken solo by a member of the choir. Attribution only becomes a problem when the words are read out loud, without the context that the performance offers. Within the frame of the music, the words are sounds and, on the page, they become an experience in their own right, interpreted by the eye and the brain. When they are read to be heard, unless the reader is extremely skilled, it becomes harder to work out who is ‘speaking’ because you can’t hear italics. This came to me forcibly when a recent radio broadcast of Standing as I do before God placed Cecilia’s piece behind a reading of the text. Apart from the fact that, for me, this negated the whole purpose, it blurred uncomfortably the boundaries within the writing. As I listened, even I found it hard to remember which were Edith’s words, and which mine! One might say that this makes the interpretation a success, but on the other hand it can lead to some awkward confusions. Listening to the spoken word makes for complex comparisons with reading silently, and it should, I think, always be clear when one writer is quoting another. I remember the poet, Paul Farley, once saying, rather amusingly, that when reading text containing italics in public, he had sometimes wondered whether one should lean slightly to one side!
For the audience experiencing the finished musical work, none of this matters and, after all, we come back to the fact that the text is created in this instance as a vehicle for the music; the writer gives the words to the composer, the composer gives text, transformed by her music, to the performers and the performers pass the complete work to the listener. That is how it should be. No one (I hope) will sit as part of an audience and try to work out when it is Street speaking and when Clara Barton. All creative egos become subsumed into the whole. Of course, the one person who has no say in this partnership is the subject his or herself. We all have a responsibility, therefore, to be true. Just as I write my words having absorbed the rhythms of the words I have been bequeathed, I hope the finished text blends meanings and intentions, moving towards a complimentary new form in which the spirit of the subject is carried forward.