The Voice, the Sound

 The demand for originality in the arts is a strange but understandable one. One suspects that before the Romantic era and its idea of the artist-as-hero there was much less demand for it. Expertise? Yes. Technical assurance? Certainly. Medicis or “Princes of the Church” were not interested in originality per se. Nor were the bourgeois patrons who succeeded them. All wanted works within established traditions which would flatter them or advance their projects. Certainly a German prince was happy to employ a musician or composer such as Mozart. They were happy, too, with the idea of a “prodigy” but they were not particularly concerned with the innovative harmonies he (it tended to be a he in those days) might or might not employ.

With the advent of Romanticism, however, roughly 1780 to 1830, the demand for originality began. Extravagant figures such as Paganini, with his prodigious instrumental technique, were more popular than their own compositions seem to justify at this distance. The rumour that he had “done a deal with the Devil” helped. Beethoven, even in his lifetime, was seen as an archetypal romantic figure. The wild hair shown in his many busts seems only to confirm it. Unlike Paganini, Beethoven brought considerable harmonic innovations, the relative dissonances of which were not pleasing to all ears at the time. Although he obviously owed a considerable amount to earlier eighteenth-century figures such as Bach, Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven clearly seemed “original” in a new and important sense. Many lesser-known composers who came immediately after him had trouble disentangling themselves from his shadow. To this extent they seemed less than “original” and were thus less venerated than their inspiration, especially by later generations of listeners, composers and performers. 

As the nineteenth century flourished, the quest for the “romantic” and the “original” developed even further. The piano compositions of Chopin and, later, Liszt (as well as their virtuosic playing) all fed into this demand. Their personal lives, either ill-fated or unorthodox, also contributed. The Hollywood production of films on their lives in the 1950s was the apotheosis of this trend.

In poetry, we have a similar phenomenon with Lord Byron, the aristocratic Romantic poet who died young (or youngish) and was “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. His “scandalous” private life and his obvious talent and fluency all contrived to stamp him as a true romantic hero. His death at Missolonghi while preparing to help the Greeks in their struggle against the Turkish occupation of Greece was also a factor. Strangely, his best-known creation, “Don Juan”, has more in common with Augustan predecessors such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift than it does with other Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. These two, with their Lyrical Ballads of 1798, made genuine innovations. Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” also helped to consolidate the idea of the poet as a romantic, even prophetic figure: “Weave a circle round him thrice / For he on honeydew hath fed / And drunk the milk of paradise”. Coleridge’s addiction to opium, while contributing to the romantic way he was later viewed, did nothing for his poetic output. Wordsworth’s last thirty years were similarly “unromantic”. Keats, of course, fitted the paradigm more neatly, both because of his early death (with all its romantically unfulfilled potential) and his ultra-lyrical style. Blake, with his extremely idiosyncratic personality and his tendency to the visionary, also fitted the new demand for, and appreciation of, what we can loosely call “originality”.

Indeed, Blake foreshadows an interesting dimension of originality as it developed in the twentieth century. His relatively limited, unorthodox and autodidactic education meant that he inevitably wrote more originally, and sometimes more naively, than his better-educated, classically-trained contemporaries. The happy conversion of a limitation into a virtue has been an important dimension of originality ever since. One can see this in American figures as different from each other as the poet William Carlos Williams, and the jazz composer and pianist Thelonious Monk. There are many minor figures who exemplify the American self-educated “crank” tradition but there are also some major ones. The highly original Australian saxophonist Bernie McGann is another example. A good deal of his originality consists in not playing the standard (and often highly technical) riffs used by thousands of other players but using other, often more angular and simple, phrases which are unique to him and which he has long since made his own. All three of these figures and perhaps hundreds (but not thousands) of others have been mythologised by their admirers, regardless of how un- or anti-romantic they may have been in their personal lives. Originality is very hard to detach from romanticism even when we wish to do so.

It is interesting, however, to see how far innovation and originality can be separated. The Modernist innovations in poetry promulgated by Ezra Pound around 1910 were, like those of the Romantics before him, certainly new in contrast to the late Victorian and Georgian poetry which immediately preceded him. As well as looking “forward”, however, to the primacy of the “image” and the importance of “natural” language, Pound also looked backward to the Greek and Latin classics, to the Provencal troubadours and even to classical Chinese poetry. Many, but not all, of the propositions he advocated around this time had already been tried by French poets as far back as Charles Baudelaire. T.S. Eliot, Pound’s friend and contemporary, also acknowledged the example of the French poets Jules Laforgue and Tristan Corbière. For a time the styles of Eliot and Pound had much in common, an observation reinforced by Pound’s invaluable editing of Eliot’s classic, “The Waste Land”. Certainly their poetry around 1910 was an innovation, a fact which can be measured perhaps by how much they changed the nature and size of the audience for poetry. But to what extent was it original? And does it matter if it wasn’t?

“The Waste Land” is, in many ways, a pastiche of a variety of pre-existing texts. Certainly Eliot (with the help of Pound) cut and pasted and integrated them in a way which no one else (not even Pound) could have done. Certainly, it was idiosyncratic, a product of Eliot’s unusually wide education and his personal and spiritual interests. We have a sense of an overall voice (as well as many different composite voices) coming through the whole work. Pound, too, had his own voice—as can be heard most remarkably in his live reading of “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”. There is an American “crankiness” there which reminds us that Pound was also a good friend of William Carlos Williams, despite their obvious political differences. Williams’s readings of his own poems are equally remarkable in a very different, less bombastic (though equally insistent) way. All three poets were highly innovative, and poetry in English after them found it difficult, if not impossible, to return to the status quo ante. Of the three, perhaps Williams was the most original, if only because, unlike Pound and Eliot, he had not been educated in the classics and foreign languages but in medicine. He also saw how local American speech, if suitably intensified, could be raised to the level of poetry, no matter how mundane it might appear on the surface.

All this leads us towards what may well be more important than originality anyway—and that is the poet’s “voice” or the jazz improviser’s “sound”. While the “voice” is clearest in a live recording it is also built into the writing itself by means of syntax and vocabulary. In Williams’s case the syntax was often unorthodox, even rambling; the language was frequently plain but the visual sense very sharp, as was his ear for the American colloquial. Pound and Eliot had internalised a more familiar European rhetoric going back to the ancient Greeks via the Renaissance and Dante and were less inclined to find poetry in what was immediately in front of them (red wheelbarrows and white chickens, for instance). Eliot’s voice became more liturgical as his personal beliefs changed; Pound’s became wilder and more demonic, following his infatuation with the demagogue Mussolini, and his impatience with all things socialistic. 

For the reader (and for the listener) it is this sense of a personal “voice” which matters at least as much as the originality of these three. Each of them has a unique way of looking on the world and a completely personal way of expressing it, despite the commonality of language used and the prior existence of many of the ideas being expressed. To some ears, the verbal and syntactical experiments of their contemporary Gertrude Stein sound more obviously “original” but it is no accident that her experiments have never acquired the relatively large audience held by Pound, Eliot and Williams. 

In the history of jazz, the equivalence of the poet’s voice is the instrumentalist’s “sound”. All the major innovators in jazz from Louis Armstrong to John Coltrane had a distinctive sound on their instrument in addition to using harmonic, melodic and rhythmic devices in strikingly new ways. All these key figures in jazz played with other musicians who were often only slightly less individualistic and who likewise (for the most part) possessed a personal sound. To some extent, such a sound is inevitable for all but the most slavish imitators. One of the complaints by older players about contemporary jazz education has often been that it produces highly accomplished players who lack such a sound. But are all “sounds” equal? Certainly some instrumentalists have managed to create “sounds” without, in any substantial way, changing the direction of the music. In terms of originality, it can sometimes be hard to be certain. Many, if not all, of the harmonic innovations of jazz were prefigured in the “classical” music of Debussy, as well as in the other musical traditions and musical idioms which have fed into jazz at various times (from spirituals, blues and work songs in the early days through to world music influences in more recent years). 

Jazz (like the English language) has always been a “borrowing” phenomenon and a point of intersection between traditions. All this makes the issue of “originality” in jazz even more vexed. And yet, at the same time, any halfway experienced listener to the music can pick up the differences between two early tenor saxophonists like Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young, in a couple of bars. They can also usually be certain whether they’re listening to the man himself or to an imitator (many of whom may have been on the way to finding their own “sound”). It’s not just the fact that Hawkins’s approach was “vertical” and Young’s “linear”; or that Hawkins used a lot of vibrato and Young used very little. Both have a way of approaching the music which seems to stem directly from their own personality: Hawkins, self-confident, direct, assertive; Young, oblique, whimsical and ironic.

A no less interesting problem for “originality” arises from a quick look at two acknowledged masters of jazz, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk. Parker’s innovations (along with colleagues such as Dizzy Gillespie and Bud Powell) grew from an instrumental virtuosity which was not given sufficient room in the swing bands of the late 1930s in which he had grown up. He was also familiar with the classical music of his time (for example that of Stravinsky) and was impatient with the limited harmonic basis of swing. He was, however, securely rooted in the jazz tradition and is reputed, in his adolescence, to have learned many solos of Lester Young by ear from records. His playing (like the compositions of Mozart) continually juxtaposed new elements with more accepted existing elements, thus avoiding a complete and sudden rupture with the past. His sound was not just a function of his virtuosity but of a very sophisticated rhythmic and harmonic conception.

Thelonious Monk, on the other hand, emerged from the “stride” tradition of piano playing. His innovations came not so much from a frustration with the limitations of this style but from his own unusually idiosyncratic personality. Though he played with plenty of other musicians (he was, for instance, the “house pianist” at the famous Minton’s Playhouse where bebop was, arguably, born) Monk was also a more or less self-taught “loner” who discovered things for himself, who gradually in the mid-1940s developed a style of composing and playing which, while recognisably in the jazz tradition, also seemed to be sui generis or in a tradition of one. His unwillingness to copy the obvious dexterity of his friend Bud Powell led critics and listeners to dismiss him as technically inadequate. It took some years before they realised that Monk’s “technique” was exactly what was needed for his unique conception, no more and no less. And that his arpeggio runs, based in his stride origins, were in fact very well executed. 

Fortunately, the choice between these two different sorts of originality is not one that has to be made. Both musicians have been an essential part of the modern jazz tradition and students at contemporary jazz schools are still “growing up” on their compositions and recordings. 

The history of jazz innovation in the twentieth century (and its associated dimension of “originality”) is perhaps simpler than the story for poetry in English over the same period. In jazz there have been four or five clearly defined “stages”; in poetry the matter is more complicated. Certainly, as we have established, Pound and Eliot and the early “High” Modernists were innovative—even if they were often deliberately backward-looking in some other ways. They were very aware of the French Symbolistes but wanted to take art a step “forward” from that and to get rid of some of its associated vagueness and imprecision. Not long after the “Imagist Manifesto”, with which Pound was closely associated, the First World War broke out and “changed everything”. 

The Georgian poetry of the immediate pre-war period in England was inadequate to handle the subject matter which combatant poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon felt compelled to write about. Owen, in his relatively short poetic life-span, used mercilessly direct and expressive language and, in a few poems, introduced into English the systematic use of half-rhyme, an innovation used extensively by many other poets since. Sassoon was equally confronting but more in the excoriating manner of Jonathan Swift. Isaac Rosenberg went back to the free verse of Walt Whitman to find his way of dealing adequately with his subject matter as a private rather than officer in the trenches of the Western Front. Though W.B. Yeats famously refused to include Owen in his Oxford anthology in 1936, the landscape had been permanently changed. All three poets had demonstrated more than enough “originality” for their purpose. 

In France, Guillaume Apollinaire was even more innovative, at least in technical terms. Creator of the term “Surrealism”, Apollinaire (also an art critic) abandoned most traditional punctuation (restricting himself to an initial capital letter at the beginning of each line). He also used “concrete poetry” sometimes, partly as a tribute to his artist friends. Not unconnected with this was the launch of the Dada movement in Zurich in 1915. For some, including their leader, Tristan Tzara, Dadaism was the ultimate originality—to abandon the whole tradition of Western art and start again, unimpeded by its shibboleths. Kurt Schwitters famously recited his “Ur Sonata”, a long poem consisting entirely of nonsense syllables. This “tradition” of “sound poetry” has continued as an avant-garde alternative to “traditional” poetry right through to the present day, most notably in the work of the Canadian poet Christian Bok. The idea of “tradition” in this field of supposed ultra-originality again raises the question of originality for originality’s sake. In the world of the poetic avant-garde, and this would include the American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, originality would seem to be the ultimate value and the yet the tradition is now almost a hundred years old.

This example of ultra-obscurity in poetry seems to lead us back to the issue of communication—not that of the famous “If I wanted to tell you something I’d send a telegram” type, but communication at the deepest level, whether linguistic, as in poetry, or musical, as in jazz. A sense of the poet’s “voice” or the musician’s “sound” is one of the great satisfactions in both art forms. We are being addressed by a “person” who has thought his or her ideas through over a long period of apprenticeship and mature artistic practice. He or she has come from a certain “background”, has a certain temperament, has a certain life experience and from that has something unique (but not entirely without precedent) to tell us. Lester Young used to say that playing a jazz solo was like “telling a story” and there’s little doubt that most effective poems are doing the same thing. Even a haiku can be seen as a story in three parts. Of course, what we’re being told is not a simple thing. It is a work of art which has its own being and of which everyone will have his or her slightly different interpretation. If the work is an unacknowledged carbon copy of what we’ve seen or heard before it will be of little interest. On the other hand, if the work is concerned with nothing much more than its own originality, it will be equally lacking in relevance. 

What we’re really looking for here is the “voice”, the “sound” which makes the work unique and emotionally and intellectually satisfying. Sometimes this will be a single voice reading into a microphone (or speaking to us silently on the page in a sunlit corner); at other times it may be the voice of an instrumental soloist or a composer mediated through the collective performance of a quartet, big band, or even symphony orchestra. Often the poem or the performance will be within a well-established tradition but, typically, it will be pushing at the edges of, or reinvestigating, that tradition. It will be a single or collective voice speaking through it, not just somebody doing something unprecedented and exhibitionistic in the street and “frightening the horses”, as it were. John Lewis, the pianist and leader of the Modern Jazz Quartet, once said: “It is better to be a good copyist than a bad original.” He certainly wasn’t saying this about himself, however. He had one of the most recognisable, if least dramatic, piano styles in jazz. But the point remains. Originality as a virtue can be overestimated. To find his or her unique voice within a tradition is the fate of most artists—and a very congenial one, too, for the audience. The road of a highly original artist like Thelonious Monk (or Bernie McGann) is not an easy one. It is tempting to mythologise it but that temptation should be resisted. 

Among Geoff Page’s books is Bernie McGann: A Life in Jazz. More of his poetry will be appearing
in Quadrant shortly.