Ezra Pound: Poet

by A. David Moody

  Two of the lesser songs, Ythier’s ‘Mort, j’appelle’ and the Gallant’s ‘Je renye amours’, were sung by the tenor Yves Tinayre to Olga Rudge’s solo violin in the course of an Antheil–Rudge concert at the Salle Pleyel on 8 July 1924. Those two songs were engraved and printed for ‘private circulation only’ in 1926, with a note that ‘The violin accompaniment was written for the concert and makes no attempt to condense or to represent the orchestration intended for use in the opera’. The measures were indeed greatly simplified.

  Pound’s next move was to plan a ‘by invitation’ concert performance. He mentioned to Agnes Bedford at the end of November 1925 that he was ‘thinking of cutting up Villon for concert’, with Tinayre as Heaulmière, one other male voice, and violin and harpsichord accompaniment. Around the turn of the year he was ‘having another fit of work (bordering on insanity)’ on Le Testament, and was excitedly reporting his discovery that a ⅝ bar ‘seems to be MY nacherl measure’. He thought that that was what he must have been hunting for through Antheil’s ‘indubitably earnest endeavour to ascertain the duration of the notes’, and now that he had found it Antheil’s fractional notation seemed to him excessive, a ‘hypercalculus’ which would drive a singer to take ‘refuge in the comparative simplicity of Einstein’s hexagonal theorem of the indivisibility of abstract space by french mutton’. The ⅝ bar seemed ‘to fit a good deal of the Heaulmière’, and to throw the emphasis where he wanted it, on the front of the bar; and ‘for the earlier numbers’ it was ‘the GREAT LIGHT’. 5 By March 1926 the seven or eight numbers selected for ‘the June show’—among them Heaulmière, Bozo, ‘Père Noé’, and ‘Frères humains’—had been ‘tentatively at least, laid out largely in ⅝’. And that was how it was performed, for an audience of three hundred or so guests in the Salle Pleyel at 9.15 in the evening of 29 June 1926. ‘Paroles de Villon’, read the invitation from ‘M. et Mme. Ezra Pound’, ‘Arias and fragments from an opera…Musique par Ezra Pound’. Yves Tinayre, who sang most of the arias, wore a shawl over his head and assumed a cracked old woman’s voice for La Heaulmière. Robert Maitland, a ‘REAL BASS barrel tone’, sang Bozo. Olga Rudge’s violin provided the main accompaniment, except for ‘Père Noé’ where a harpsichord and trombones contributed to the row and Pound himself played a kettle-drum. For Bozo there were the two drunken trombones (or ‘bumbones’). ‘Frères humains’ was sung as a duet in two-part harmony accompanied by the ensemble. It was all very very far from the opera as Pound had conceived and composed it in 1923, but ‘At any rate’, he told Agnes Bedford, ‘have now got a notation that is practicable & that seems right’.

  Many years later, in 1951 or thereabouts, Pound told Peter Russell that the Antheil score was ‘a curiosity, due to inexperience and Antheil’s total ignorance of language and articulation of same’. Possibly he should have added that he himself had been carrying to its extreme his idea of reproducing the virtù, the very vibrations of Villon’s voice. After all he did not have, could not have had, an absolute knowledge of how Villon’s language of fifteenth-century Paris had been pronounced. In spite of that, and in spite also of his readiness to simplify the notation in order to make the opera playable, it is the 1923 version that is now being performed and recognized as a wholly original and significant invention in twentieth-century music. R. Murray Schafer, the Canadian composer and musicologist, called it ‘an unduplicated little masterpiece of musical composition’; and in 2003 Richard Taruskin the Stravinsky scholar wrote in the New York Times that it ‘constitutes Ezra Pound’s slim sound claim to musical immortality’.

  Antheil celebrated Pound’s music in 1924 as ‘a grand liberation’ from ‘the developments of music during the last three or four hundred years’. An article in the Paris Times of 29 June 1924, evidently inspired if not actually written by one or the other of them, was more specific, proclaiming Pound’s ‘renovation of XVth century music’, and declaring boldly that his opera ‘has abolished harmony’. The laws of harmony in modern Western music lay down which notes may follow, or not follow, a given other note. Pound abolished those laws by declaring that as a matter of fact any note could follow any other note provided that the correct time-interval between them was observed. In The Treatise on Harmony (1924) he remarked that ‘the element grossly omitted from all treatises on harmony’, until that moment, was ‘the element of time…of the time-interval that must elapse between one sound and another if the two sounds are to produce a pleasing consonance or an interesting relation’. He then laid down his new, liberating axiom:

  A SOUND OF ANY PITCH, or ANY COMBINATION OF SUCH SOUNDS, MAY BE FOLLOWED BY A SOUND OF ANY OTHER PITCH, OR ANY OTHER COMBINATION OF SUCH SOUNDS, providing the time interval between them is properly gauged; and this is true for ANY SERIES OF SOUNDS, CHORDS OR ARPEGGIOS.

  Because of this insight and what lies behind it Pound’s slight and informal treatise is, in the judgement of R. Murray Schafer, one of ‘the three contributions to the science of harmony’ in the first half of the twentieth century, the other two being Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre and Schenker’s Harmonielehre. Like Schenker, Schafer observed, Pound was ‘retrieving an ancient conception of musical composition’ in emphasizing the horizontal progression as against the vertical and relatively static, post-Bach conception of harmony which, in Pound’s uncompromising phrase, made music ‘like steam ascending from a morass’. ‘No modern book’, Schafer wrote, ‘so cogently forces us to see harmony as a study in movement.’ At the same time, as Margaret Fisher notes, unlike Schoenberg whose ‘12-tone system’ imposed ‘rigid rules of intervallic patterning for atonal construction’, Pound, ‘by allowing for any sequence of pitches’, was creating ‘an open system that could and did accommodate older music techniques as well as newer methods’.

  The openness and freedom of Pound’s system depended upon the proper gauging of ‘time intervals’; and that in turn depended upon the ear’s ability to hear a note’s time or duration as well as its pitch. A sounded note is measurable as so many vibrations per second, bass notes being of lower and slower frequencies, treble of higher and faster frequencies; moreover, what is heard as pitch actually arises from the vibrations of the note. As the vibrations are rhythmic and the basis of rhythm, and as the specific timing or rhythm of the note determines its pitch, it can be said that pitch is primarily rhythm. Back in 1910 Pound had asserted that ‘music is…pure rhythm; rhythm and nothing else, for the variation of pitch is the variation in rhythms of the individual notes, and harmony the blending of these varied rhythms’. In 1933 he would advise Mary Barnard that ‘the difficulty in WRITING music…is in the RHYTHM NOT in pitch…[in] the DURATION of the note’. That of course was why he had had Antheil re-notate Le Testament, to register as precisely as possible the durations and rhythms of Villon’s words.

  Pound’s theory and practice become still more innovative and challenging when the overtones of notes are brought into play, and the physics and mathematics of the science of acoustics have to be invoked to explain the development which he termed ‘Great Bass’. This, according to Robert Hughes, was ‘a logical idea whose time had come’, and which Pound came to by following through the implications of his first axiom. Along with abolishing the established sense of harmony he abolished the well-established custom of composing within the range of a particular key, as in Mozart’s Sonata in C major (K545) or Stravinsky’s Symphony in C (1940). In its place he proposed a new form of composition based on taking a fundamental bass note and observing the range of frequencies or ‘overtones’ generated from it. ‘In its simplest operation’, Hughes and Fisher explain,

  Great Bass posits a lowest common denominator (below the hearing range of sixteen cycles per second) which in its multiplication determines and governs the principal elements of musical composition—rhythm, harmony, and structure, and to some extent, melody.

  The theory is founded upon ‘the natural divisions of sound waves into tones and their overtones’, and upon the organic ratios or proportions in t
he relations of tone and overtones. It assumes that all the elements of a composition have a natural relation to each other within their ‘relationship to a fundamental rhythmic base’. If then a composer ‘employs a chord that does not belong to the family of ratios of the work’s “great bass”, the music will “brace and strain” against an anticipation of…a chord that is within the multiplication of Great Bass’—and which of course may be deliberately withheld, as in ‘Dame du ciel’.

  ‘Let us say that music is a composition of frequencies’, wrote Pound in his Treatise, getting down to the simplest, most basic and universal truth of music, and implying thereby some far-reaching and not at all simple consequences. The frequencies are the given, just there in the sounds things naturally make when struck or stroked or otherwise sounded. For them to be composed into some kind of harmony takes an ear which can distinguish one sound very precisely from another and a mind which can combine distinct sounds according to their natural relations. Pound would go on to speculate that it should be possible to bring into harmony all the noises thrown up in a factory or machine-shop, if only their diverse frequencies were accurately measured and the appropriate time-intervals observed; and this, he suggested, would make a positive difference to the physical and mental health of the workers. A harmonious composition of frequencies, after all, is made up of measured energies organized and given direction in accord with their natural rhythms, moving energies which are at once in and of the natural world and in and of the mind. It is that which would make music, as Pound thought, ‘perhaps the bridge between consciousness and the unthinking sentient or even insentient universe’. So he could write of the ‘order-giving vibrations’ of the mind that ‘is close on the vital universe’; and say that ‘The magic of music is in its effect on volition’. He would have found support for these ideas in the ‘treatise on music’ in Li Ki, the ancient Chinese book of rites and ceremonies, which stated that music is both the expression and the cause of harmonies within the individual, and in all relations from those between individuals up to those between the state and heaven. In line with that, as Michael Ingham has observed, Pound’s theory of Great Bass with its ‘prescription for just organic proportion is…resonant with the Confucian idea that the central tone from which all others are measured, if ill chosen, will foment chaos in society, and, if correctly chosen, stimulate order and harmony’.

  Perhaps it needs to be re-emphasized following those ideal conceptions that Pound’s idea of harmony is concerned with moving energies, not with static states. So far as harmony implies coherence with wholeness or completeness these qualities are to be looked for, as in the ongoing process of the Cosmos, in the actual ordering and composing of the music, and of the individual being, and of the state. In the light of his new theory we have to learn to think of the composing as a process and not as aspiring to a perfected final state. Its wholeness will be in its inclusiveness, in how much of the totality of a given world can be brought into harmony; and harmony here is another term for the coherence of moving energies (vibrations) in their just relations. Its end, to which there is no end, is to bring the mind and the mind’s little world into accord with the Cosmos in its process.

  Back in 1917 Pound had written of the importance of ‘main form’ or ‘major form’ in musical composition, and that idea has proved helpful in grasping how in his cantos the disparate details are generated by a ‘main concept’ and are held together by their relations and interactions. The theory of Great Bass may be seen as a more technical, more purely musical development of the idea, with a fundamental tone in the place of ‘a central main concept’, and with the overtones in their just interrelations and interactions in place of the disparate but interrelating ‘details’ or ‘materials’. Does this more developed theory apply equally to the cantos? It would be a possibility, given that pure music and the music of words are alike compositions of vibrant energies in process. But is there in a canto that basis, that fundamental word or verbal rhythm, from which all else flows? It is at the least a possibility worth looking out for.

  Year 1 of a new era: kaleidoscope

  ‘Honoured Progenitor’, Pound began a letter to his father in February 1921, while in his relaxed mood at Saint-Raphaël, ‘The proof that I know something about economics lies in the fact that I lead considerably more of a life than Rockefeller and Morgan…& do extremely little that I wdnt do if I had a ballance equal to theirs.’

  In Paris he rejoiced in the sense that ‘nobody seems to feel responsible for anyone else’s taste’. ‘Even I’, he wrote in his ‘Paris Letter’ dated ‘September, 1921’, with a nod to how differently he had felt and behaved in London, ‘Even I have not tried to improve any one’s mind since I got here.’

  His sense of his liberties extended to not feeling at all responsible for Joyce and Lewis and Eliot. In May 1921 he wrote in a letter to John Quinn, ‘I can’t go on valeting for Lewis as I was ready to do while he was under stress of Military necessity.’ Nor could he be expected ‘to support him in a bid for the British picture market’, any more than he could be expected ‘to enthuse over Eliot’s becoming a Times reviewer’. And Joyce was altogether ‘off my hands’, being now very well looked after by Miss Weaver and other patrons and helpers.

  Pound would not have been himself though if he had not continued to care about others and about the state of the world. He exercised his freedom to please himself quite dutifully.

  He had not given up on saving Eliot from his bank. He went on doing what he could to get Lewis into the revived Little Review and to set up contacts which might lead to exhibitions of his work. Lewis thanked him by asking to be left alone. Joyce expected him to be as busy as ever about getting his, Joyce’s, work published, as Pound reported to Dorothy in August 1921. At this moment it was the French translation of Portrait of the Artist. Joyce was ‘again fairly well, very so from his humour’, and ‘longly conversational last evening, re greeks, Newman, eyes, french and german languages etc.’ In the following summer, however, he was suffering from painful iritis and Pound arranged for Dr Louis Berman, the endocrinologist, who was just then in Paris, to examine him. Berman had ‘Joyce’s head X-rayed [and] found three dental abcesses under the diseased eye’, and warned that he could go blind if they weren’t fixed at once. Joyce, though, put off having his teeth attended to, saying ‘he wanted “two months complete rest first”’. Pound gave up, reflecting, as a Confucian, that it ‘is J.J.’s head, and…his own affair’.

  In the same letter to Dorothy in August 1921, in the midst of asking her to thank the now sadly neglected Allen Upward for sending a copy of his just published autobiography, and the mentions of how his opera was coming on and what this person and that had said about it, and the report of his conversation with Joyce, etc., Pound took time out to give a thought to Miss Weaver’s ‘solitary life’ and his fear that she might be ‘giving out under the strain’ of it. Do have her to tea, he urged Dorothy, and introduce her to Agnes Bedford when she returned to London, and ‘O.S. also might assist’. Just the exchange of a few words occasionally might do her good—‘No use in having her go melancholy mad, after all her nobilities and utilities’.

  Pound went over to London early in October, about the 8th or 9th, and stayed for eight days with Olivia Shakespear in Brunswick Gardens. On Monday the 10th he wrote back to Dorothy in Paris, ‘Pried up the edge of the tragic veil yesterday and felt justified in coming over. | Hope you aren’t worrying.’ Whose the ‘tragic veil’, and why Dorothy might worry, I do not know. He may have gone over to see what he could do for Mrs Bride Gould-Adams (née Scratton), with whom he had shared the wish ‘to build a dream over the world’ in his early years in London, and who was trapped in a bad marriage. She would be with him in Paris and Verona in 1922, and in 1923 he would agree to be cited as co-respondent to enable her to obtain a divorce. During his week in London Pound invited Ford and Stella to lunch on the Friday; went up to Oxford to see Yeats, whom he found ‘somnolent’, on the Thursday; and o
n the Wednesday evening saw Eliot, who had been ‘at last ordered away for three months’ of complete rest and appeared ‘rejuvinated at prospect’. On the Tuesday he had attempted, in a hotel infested by British undercover police, to persuade Sinn Fein’s Arthur Griffith to found the new Irish Free State upon Douglas’s Social Credit, and had been told, ‘can’t move ’em with a cold thing like economics’.

  Eliot’s nerves were bad, or so ‘a nerve specialist’ had told him when consulted about his ‘feeling very nervous and shaky’ and having ‘very little self-control’—apparently he had ‘greatly overdrawn [his] nervous energy’. ‘Tom has had a rather serious breakdown’, was how Vivien put it to Scofield Thayer, adding that she had ‘not nearly finished [her] own nervous breakdown yet’. About the end of Pound’s week in London Eliot went down with Vivien to Margate, the seaside resort on the north Kent coast, and stayed there for a month at the Albemarle Hotel, Cliftonville. Though advised to write nothing, he did do ‘a rough draft of part of part III’ of the long poem he was struggling to finish. Then he went on to Lausanne, on the way spending a few days in Paris where he saw Pound on 18 November, and leaving Vivien there at the Hôtel du Pas-de-Calais. In Lausanne Dr Roger Vittoz, the ‘best mental specialist in Europe’, confirmed that his ‘nerves’ were ‘a very mild affair, due, not to overwork, but to an aboulie and emotional derangement which has been a lifelong affliction’. Eliot particularly marked the ‘paragraph concerning “Aboulie”, want of will’, in his copy of Dr Vittoz’s book, Traitement des psychonévroses par la rééducation du contrôle cérébral (1911; 3rd edn., Paris, 1921). The diagnosis relieved his anxiety that there might be something wrong with his mind, and the re-educative exercises left him feeling well enough to work on his long poem. When he left Lausanne on 2 January 1922 he had drafts for the whole work ready to show to Pound in Paris. There he rejoined Vivien, who was in quite a bad way on her own account, and stayed on for a fortnight, this time in Hôtel Bon Lafontaine in the same street as Hôtel du Pas-de-Calais.