Prasmė legiruota garsu: poezija kaip muzika

GIEDRIUS ALKAUSKAS Vilnius University Research areas: modular forms, number theory, flows, differential geometry; natural-science aspects of musicology, late Danish, British, and Russian musical Romanticism. DOI: doi.org/10.35321/al183-15 MEANING ALLOYED WITH SOUND: POETRY AS MUSIC 1. (HARMONIC) PROGRESSION AROUND THE (CIRCLE OF) FIFTHS aė už visišs zv̌iršžesnys lakštingales bāsas: Pilnas, skarūdus, griaudūngas, ir, teip sakyt, skalsūs: Skūmba ūžia par krūmus, ir wūs kiteip mainos, Ir wūs dūsžion intsmānga – lyg Lietuvos dāinos. Antanas Baranauskas This text is devoted to the body of poetry, which is at the same time also the body of music—from foundation to branching; not to a mixture of two arts, but to an alloy; not to the interweaving of foliage, but to the gathering of roots¹ Even a glance through volumes I–XX of the journal “Lietuvos muzikologija” would reveal quite a few articles devoted to language or poetry (see the bibliography). For example, Kamilė Rupeikaitė’s study “The Peculiarities of Identifying Musical Instruments in Lithuanian Translations of Holy Scripture” (2007, vol. 8). Here poetry and music intersect, even ethnomusicology. The old archetypal Lithuanian consciousness permeates every person born here through and through. You cannot escape it or deny it, even if sometimes it seems to someone that they have succeeded. Here is the paradox (Geda 1998: 151): Baranauskas is a relic of a very old northern religion. And yet we are speaking of a Catholic bishop! Consciousness cannot be eradicated so easily. Only parts of it—even such essential ones as the mother tongue—may perhaps be removed somewhat more easily. ¹ Root is a word indicating synthesis and a path upward. When carrying out an analysis, one then descends through roots; at least that is the word linguistic intuition would dictate. Įžvalgos / Insights 331 GIEDRIUS ALKAUSKAS Representatives of all confessions (including the old northern ones) in both Lithuanias should meet to acknowledge that the struggle between Catholics and Reformers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a miracle for Lithuanian identity. Although the giant stature of Jonas Bretkūnas has long shone like the dawn, Rupeikaitė’s text gives us still more evidence of it (p. 91): On the last page of the Psalter, Bretkūnas provides a list of the musical instruments known to him, also indicating their German names <…>. Bretkūnas’s translation is particularly significant because it is the first written source to mention certain Lithuanian instruments—kanklės, pipes <…>. Thus his work initiated not only the history of Lithuanian Bible translations but also that of musical instruments. Bretkūnas’s language is exceptionally poetic, unmatched until Donelaitis. But the article also discusses nominal poetry in places. For example, Valančius translated all 150 psalms of the Old Testament into the Samogitian dialect and published them in Tilžė in 1869. Later he versified them as “canticles” and published them there again in 1872. Thus began the Lithuanian history of poetic interpretations of this biblical book. In the rhymed translation, Valančius wrote the line (Ps 98: 6) as follows: Wožragius trubus Wieszpatem puskiet. Quoting the author (p. 93): [Here] the specific name “wožragis” [the name of a horn instrument] is used. Considering the unrhymed version [of this psalm], it is likely that Valančius, for the sake of rhyme, exchanged the name ožragis applied to the shofar [a Hebrew ritual instrument made from an animal horn] with trubu [chacocra, a silver trumpet]². Indeed, all the linguistic, cultural, historical, and religious cross-sections of music are deeply moving. Even in the first known notated music, the so-called Hurrian songs (1400 BC, Mesopotamia), the musical explanations are given in the unrelated Akkadian language. And what about the poetic layers of music! Rupeikaitė mentions Ruigys, Kavaliauskas, Baranauskas, Rubšys, Kuršaitis, Skvireckas, Bible translations (and translations of instrument names) into Polish and Russian, as well as the celebrated Dutch Calvinist Statenbijbel (1637). In 1993 I attended the unveiling of the Baranauskas monument in Anykščiai. Saulius Šaltenis and Sigitas Geda were there as well (hereafter S. G.). This is what Šaltenis writes about it (Geda 1998: 145): A multitude of clever speeches and Sigitas’s quiet, difficult-to-describe laughter (a calm gaiety mixed with sadness and bitterness) at that progress in Lithuanian poetry, when people believe that writers write ever better and better, know ever more, are more intelligent than they were a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago, and scratch their pens across the page. It would seem that all those who have encountered Gilgamesh, Dante, or Hafiz must reject the absurd idea of linear progress. But is that why poetry may be necessary for composers? At least it was for me, since I was constantly oppressed by the thought—perhaps this is some form of retrogression, to be intoxicated by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, but not ² Typographical error: not rhyme, but rhythm. 332 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXIII Prasmė legiruota garsu: poezija kaip muzika from Karlheinz Stockhausen? Poetry answered—no. Granville Bantock, Mikhail Glinka, Heinrich Schütz, and Johannes Ockeghem are not retrogression at all. And yet to this day many modernists are impressed by the musical autism of the Darmstadt School. My opinion is very severe, I agree. Rytis Mažulis (Paliauka, Mažulis 2011) speaks more moderately about the balance between tradition and innovation, poetry and engineering. But why this digression about Baranauskas? Because not all of “Lietuvos muzikologija” devoted to poetry and music is equally substantial. For example, Vita Česnuleviūtė’s “Music in Alfonso Nyka-Niliūnas’s ‘Diary Fragments’ and ‘Symphony of Loss’: An Intermedial Dialogue” (2005, vol. 6). The author has collected many musical passages from Nyka-Niliūnas’s diary. But the thoughts quoted from other authors are often rather trivial, like Monsieur Triquet’s couplets³, sometimes overstrained, like that curious Mozart chord⁴, frequently speculative, like “Songs of the Western Slavs”⁵, and in places plainly incorrect, like Schoenberg’s prophecy about the coming hegemony of serialism⁶. For example, on page 46 the author appeals to the research of musicologist Mieczysław Tomaszewski: In examining the relationship between word and music, Tomaszewski distinguishes four categories, one of which he calls “the immanent musicalization of a literary work.” It can be understood in three ways: as a weakening of semantic precision and a strengthening of the phonics of the word and of pure expression (for example, in Kurt Schwitters’s “phonetic poems”); as the use of musical devices—refrain, leitmotif, and so on (for example, the poems of T. S. Eliot); and as an intensification of the mood of reflected reality through euphony and eurhythmy (for example, Symbolist poetry). Here the red warning light flares up. What do Schwitters, Eliot, and the Symbolists have to do with it? The shepherds’ thought, the shamans’ agrammatisms, the three-part sutartinės are built from precisely such bricks. These are elementary things, primary elements, threads, from the very beginning ³ Pyotr I. Tchaikovsky’s anti-perfectionist (and therefore captivating) style—when he wanted to, he wrote complex, even brutal music (Morozov’s oath scene in “The Oprichnik”). But if something fell into his heart, he would also use some banality. That is why Triquet’s couplets from “Eugene Onegin” or the pastorale in “The Queen of Spades” are so enchanting: naïve elegance! ⁴ In his famous “Harmony” (Schoenberg 1997), Arnold Schoenberg took a vertical cross-section (p. 324) of the score of Mozart’s 40th (g-minor) Symphony and jokingly called that sonority “the Mozart chord.” Of course, cutting a score vertically at a fast-tempo passage can produce any number of strange, unaesthetic combinations. ⁵ “Songs of the Western Slavs,” translated in 1835 by Aleksandr Pushkin from the anonymous French collection “La Guzla” of 1827; the latter was Prosper Mérimée’s literary hoax. ⁶ He would be surprised to learn that minimalism came instead. Įžvalgos / Insights 333 GIEDRIUS ALKAUSKAS driven into the intricacies of verbal art. The compass should simply be turned not toward the bookcase but toward intuition. The world’s languages vary in their degree of inflection from analytic to polysynthetic. There is also the hypothetical category of oligosynthesis, although not a single such language has been attested. The author, drawing on Boris Katz’s book “Musical Keys of Russian Poetry” (1997), speaks of vertical montage and polytonality in poetry; the roles of keys are played by verb tenses. By such a definition, François Villon (Villon 1998) also used an extremely complex vertical montage. But this is just as theoretical a category in poetry as oligosynthesis is in linguistics. And musical keys are connected with verb tenses only in the sense that no one connects keys with any other grammatical elements at all. In truth, in my own work as a composer I have encountered an externally similar phenomenon. In Juozas Erlickas’s poem “Melody,” several lines consist of sequences of notes; for example, fa do mi la do si. I wrote a song for this text in the keys of F-sharp minor and G minor⁷. The names of the notes in the poem are sung on those same notes, and the melody then modulates to the keys of A minor or C major. This is very common in the melos of Romanticism. But here we have neither verb tenses nor polytonality. And yet a connection between poetry and vertical montage does exist. In cinema, Sergei Eisenstein was the first to substantiate it (1925, “Battleship Potemkin”). Music for the director’s next, already sound, film “Alexander Nevsky” (1938) was composed by Sergei Prokofiev (opus 78). Now, in S. G.’s “Restoration of Babylon” (p. 86), we find the title of a poem: The Šėpos Theater: a mystery-misery about Saint Alexander Bevietis (music from S. Prokofiev’s opera “Alik from the Neva”). Here I will also mention a separate topic related to the connection under discussion, namely Bronius Kutavičius. No fewer than four articles in the monograph (MCT 2014) are devoted to it: (Stonytė 2014), (Gaidamavičiūtė 2014), (Mikėš 2014), (Nakienė 2014). Mikėš identifies the following as one of the seven reasons for the special Kutavičius–S. G. connection: Kutavičius’s inclination toward language, his fascination with texts and words; the spontaneous attraction of Geda’s poetry toward musicalization, the musical quality of the text. The composer himself: Sigitas’s texts do not resist music; indeed, they were born for it. Landsbergytė’s text (2010) also concerns this connection. A few more striking examples. Feliksas Bajoras: the oratorio “Raising the Bell,” verses by Jonas Strielkūnas, the opera “The Lamb of God,” S. G.’s libretto. Mindaugas Urbaitis, using S. G.’s words: the musical “The Singing and Dancing Little Girl’s Viever­sėlis” and “Socrates Converses with the Winds” for choir. According to the composer, he commissioned the words for this work himself; later the title appeared on a collection compiled by the Poet himself. ⁷ The album “Into the Field of Dreams and Magic” (2011), available at pakartot.lt and youtube.com. 334 Acta Linguistica LXXXIII Prasmė legiruota garsu: poezija kaip muzika 2. REFLECTIONS ON THE SCALES This seraph-band, each waved his hand, No voice did they impart – No voice; but oh! the silence sank Like music on my heart. Samuel Taylor Coleridge “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” I am only reflecting—not weighing. Alloying and ligature are terms used in smithing. One metal’s alloy within another. This changes their shared properties: the limits of phase transitions, conductivity, hardness, elasticity, color, and resistance to corrosion and oxidation. The terms are also widely used in jewelry. Thus, in art. But is it appropriate to use foreign bodies in the title of an article about poetry? After all, smithing intrudes into a distant domain. In general: is it meaningful to transfer the criteria of one sphere of knowledge into others? Are invasions of aesthetics meaningful? Painless interventions of the arts? Measuring a worldview with an unprintable measure? Certainly not. And yet this is not easy to understand. For creators with only one prominent talent, it is even harder. I will put it more categorically: one great talent sinks you. After all, Greek talanton means weight, balance. Scales! When the different sides weigh a great deal but neither tips downward. And the word equilibrium itself already points to remelting. If this were merely a juggling act with an etymon, it would be somewhat easier. But it is not easier. With only one scale, you cannot measure anything, except perhaps the distance to the bottom. Yet for some reason certain people measure. They measure everything. What is more, a single great talent probably does not even exist. Because great things are alloyed by something else, however small. Perhaps only a particular sensitivity to something beyond greatness, but it still alloys. I agree, this is a subjective rule. But when all the inputs do not fit, something, as we know, is removed. As was once said: if there is a rule, exceptions merely confirm it. A well-known formula. But are there rules without exceptions? Of course there are! Such as this: Theorem. The rule exceptions merely confirm the rule has no exceptions. Proof. Assume the contrary: the statement is false. Then the rule under consideration has at least one exception: there exists some rule having an exception that does not confirm the rule at all. Then there is no rule either. Contradiction. Quod Erat Demonstrandum. Thus I would very much like someone to find an exception to the Lithuanian rule one great talent is accompanied by an alloying (albeit miniature) talent. And if someone does find one, the rule will remain. For I do not understand: why is it that in some fields of creativity, say, physics and Įžvalgos / Insights 335 GIEDRIUS ALKAUSKAS literature, as nowhere else, are there so many minds in which zones of insensibility coalesce into conglomerates almost impossible for neural connections to overcome? But that is a separate conversation. Without balance, having mastered only one scale, it is very easy to present the local as the global, the microcosm as the macrocosm, and the relative as the absolute. If there is nothing to lean on, Baron Münchhausen is summoned. Such is my question: can there be quality poetics without music alloyed into it? Precisely alloyed—not mixed in, not diffused. So that it would bring the flow into relief and hide the seam. A melody flowing in like life itself, rather than like some exclusive inclusion (S. G.): It raised the poisoned earth And calls life to breathe, The great melody of the world, Melody, your sister, She is the sister of the universe and of you, The sister of people and glaciers, Our ancestors breathed through her, And while you live, breathe through her too. Anything can be mixed up. What mixes, and what does not mix. But fusion requires scales. It requires talanton. It is not for nothing that the coin called a talent, like a medal, has two sides8. But how can meaning be found among differences? Rimvydas Stankevičius, presenting his book “Through Bodies” (October 5, 2020), said: Have you heard anything from the trees and birds? The answer: yes. What is meant is nonverbal language, the subtle connections of this world. In reality, everything is one. There is a common context into which we enter. Yes, true, we are not always in that denominator. A piano has a pedal legato. When you press it, everything connects. Every person has such a pedal, only it is not always pressed. The search for meaning has been and will be the principal engine of human life, even if meaning is artificial (an engine must do work, after all). Thus the alloying in the title of this article is tautologically joined to Stankevičius’s legato by the word I join (It. lego). We cannot avoid searching for meaning even if we want to, because that is the evolutionary mechanism. Neural impulses travel from receptors to the brain because information is being gathered in this way. But even after putting it all together, there is sometimes insufficient data. Then interpretation takes place in the centers of thought, filling in empty gaps that explain what is available. Otherwise everything would be meaningless. In cognitive psychology, the gestalt principles of grouping are well known: proximity, similarity, symmetry, good continuation, and common fate. The last is ⁸ The etymology of the word medal is unclear. According to one of the most likely versions, the word derives from the Latin medialis, that is, middle. If so, its Lithuanian relative would then be medis (Sabaliauskas 1994: 213), and the statement a medal has two sides, while a tree is round becomes paradoxical. Flat and round seem to melt into one another in language. 336 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXIII Prasmė legiruota garsu: poezija kaip muzika most important to hearing. Indeed, the ear receives various vibrations of the air. Depending on frequency, different places on the basilar membrane vibrate (IPO 1987). According to common fate (the same vibrato, onset and offset times, sound envelope), the brain puts a certain bundle of frequencies into a separate box and decides: this is one thing. But how does poetry emerge here? What is it all for? As an introduction to questions such as these about meaning and integration: Are receptors fused with synapses? Yes. The CNS not only interprets signals but also sends them back to the receptors. Thus the aforementioned oscillation of the basilar membrane, corresponding to the resonant frequency, is amplified—the amplitude increases and the frequency becomes more distinct. Sound and meaning? Yes. Onomatopoeia. More than that—the animals that were unable to perceive the geometry of space, the tensions and risks of the moment, from sounds did not survive. An echo preceding the sound conveys the same quantity of data to a machine as a supersonic echo, but such information is almost undecipherable to life. Form and content? Yes. Polonaise. Sarabande. Music for string quartet. Variations on the tati-tati⁹ theme. How much can be heard merely by knowing the title, solely from the verbalization of sonorous information. Relative and absolute? Yes. The horizontal (and relative) dimension of a musical score is time, while the vertical (and absolute) dimension is frequency, which further divides into subdimensions perceived absolutely (key) and relatively (mode). But here is the thing: in Béla Bartók’s “Mikrokosmos,” Book II, piece 62, “Parallel Motion of Minor Sixths,” the second voice uses precisely such sixths: the first voice is transposed not diatonically (which would be usual), but chromatically. And it becomes unclear: which voice is the first? Where is the key, and where the mode? Thus the relative and the absolute melt together. This strange fusion of categories has long fascinated me¹⁰. But there is something stranger still: the horizontal dimension, time, is measured in seconds. The vertical dimension, frequency, is measured in hertz. Thus, in inverted seconds¹¹. So the absolute vertical is like an inverted relative horizontal. At least that is how it works mathematically. And perhaps not only mathematically. Body and spirit? ⁹ Tati-tati (Russian маму-маму, English chopsticks)—works for piano four hands. Piano primo plays a simple musical sentence f g f g e a e a d h d h c C c C, while piano secondo places it in very different contexts: mazurka, funeral march, waltz, carillon music, and so on. Such works have been composed by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Aleksandr P. Borodin, Anatoly K. Lyadov, César A. Cui, and Ferenc Liszt. ¹⁰ “Muzikos barai” 2014, No. 7–8, pp. 2–7. ¹¹ Hz=s⁻¹. Įžvalgos / Insights 337 GIEDRIUS ALKAUSKAS Yes. Such is the Christological formulation of Chalcedonian Christianity, which not only joins these two categories but also identifies mixture with alloy, and two with both two and one. Here it is: the divine and human natures of the Savior do not pass into one another, are unmixed, each is whole and undivided, but at the same time they are inseparable from one another. This is scientifically impossible, but nonscientifically possible. Theology is not topology, and vice versa. As if to reassure us: do not worry if the meaning of life has not yet become incarnate. It has just happened. Even within one consciousness it is possible to unite what is impossible. Say, in Baranauskas’s consciousness. And people longing for that impossibility continue to appear together with S. G.: And I had come, I heard Donelaitis, Baranauskas said to me, barely in chant: Wherever you may be, whatever you may do, son, Aušrinė rises And the sun and moon—belong to the nations from Lithuania. But music can also be discerned in the synergy-antagonism of body and spirit. The Word’s becoming flesh is the Messiah’s first coming (John 1: 14). Now, in J. R. R. Tolkien’s mythology (Tolkien 1999), at the dawn of the world the harmony of the music played by the Ainur, descendants of the one god Ilúvatar, resounds through the world (the first book of The Silmarillion, “Ainulindalë”). But the cleverest of them, Melkor, gradually began to nurture thoughts of his own. Once matured, he wove them into the common music. Thus dissonance was born. Tolkien’s language is extraordinarily poetic (the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void), and “Ainulindalë” sounds like the Book of Genesis translated into sound. Music and poetry? Yes! Music and poetry are joined by… poetry. The kind that Baranauskas himself would regard as poetry. After all, it is said: Wißi wandenei tek ing Iures, o tacżiau Iures ne tampa pilnefnes. Ing tą więtą, ifch kur attekeia, wel nutek [Kosnadieia: I, 7] [The Book of Ecclesiastes, Bretkūnas’s 1586 translation] Disconnect any tributary and the confluence diminishes. If only temporarily, for hygiene, prevention, or diagnosis, this is sometimes even necessary. But just as all six SPHONC elements are necessary for life,¹² without each of which life dies, so poetry can be, but cannot be only prose, only confessions, declarations, polemic, Marxism, cynicism, psychiatry, pathology, nonsense, and puns. It can, but it cannot be only feminism, only antifeminism, or only (anti)masculinism. It has long been known: although very difficult, these combine directly into humanism. Thus, having thoroughly ¹² Sulfur, phosphorus, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon. 338 Acta Linguistica LXXXIII Prasmė legiruota garsu: poezija kaip muzika having fragmented it (when necessary, and even when unnecessary), it is better to join it together again. For this purpose, the two talanton sides are given: The beauty of heaven and earth begins to join into one, In the symphony the top and bottom disappear. For true confessional poetry, like a true confession, is not acquaintance or admission, but belief. Not seeing, but revelation. If the inverted sky is earth, then the inside-out inside-out is still inside-out¹³, because these are only surfaces. 3. FUSIONS AND CONTACTS Wanderers in that happy valley, Through two luminous windows, saw Spirits moving musically To a lute’s well-tunèd law. Edgar Allan Poe, „The haunted palace“ If music is organized sounds, and literature is organized meanings, then it is obvious: poetry is their intersection. Unfortunately, I do not know what poetry is. Here each person establishes the boundaries with a personal definition. And, hopefully, with a radius greater than the one by which they define themselves. This is no pun: more often than you expect, those circles coincide when they should not. The laws of compassion, ancient experiences, common memory, humility, and faith attest to this. Or, more simply, the law of love for all manifestations of life. That life which, at at least one point in one of the spacetime trajectories of its existence, shifted toward the Creator at least once by the length of a grasshopper’s smallest leap. But who is this Creator? Here is my definition of Him. The definition of poetry¹⁴. I believe: I define myself with a greater radius than in creativity. One can move without effort only by gravitating, that is, downward. Falling begins only upon being born. But there are days—not abstract ones, but marked on calendars—into which one enters as into a special resonance, like the shadow of that other life (Fyodor Dostoevsky’s idiot, L. N. Myshkin, said that there are days when everything is a thousand times more intense than usual). But if there is a shadow, something casts it. Thus all efforts to catch such a day are a struggle against gravity. ¹³ A word used by Daukantas as well, undeservedly forgotten. ¹⁴ For comparison (Geda 1998: 67): “If you inserted here such a term as God-seeking, I would stumble over it. But I cared about finding God in poetry.” Įžvalgos / Insights 339 GIEDRIUS ALKAUSKAS It is known that there are creator-geniuses in whom this resonance is exceptionally strong from birth. At times they can move away from the point toward which they will nevertheless inevitably fall someday. But one can orbit. Physically, one is still falling, but does not draw nearer, and sometimes even moves away. You catch sight of the world with different eyes, in a different light. Like an infant—with no implanted evaluations and comparisons, attitudes and truths. Even all four words (also readable as vertical, level, upright, straight) suggest not only the path itself but also an external coordinate system. What comes from Man (that is, universal laws)—yes¹⁵, but what is not from man¹⁶, the infant does not bring with it. The approach to the primordial observer, to primordial, even beginningless states, the catching of shadows from that other world, proceeds with knowledge of the goal but not of the direction. To have longing, but not expectation. That, I think, is poetry. So why am I speaking about music in a journal of Lithuanian studies? Before highlighting the essential commonalities between music and poetry, one must immediately distinguish: The core of poetry is language and its semantics; that of music is vertical structure and its change. Commonality. Both the terminology and the phenomena of the two arts sometimes convert directly, with nonessential differences, into one another. Metre – Metre. In music, their variety is, of course, greater. Even such metres as 5/4, although considered compound (5=3+2, or 5=2+3), are fundamental. Here are several examples. Modest P. Mussorgsky wrote the words for some of his songs himself. He created the song “Svetlaya Savishna” after being shaken by a scene in the street (a beggar asks a young girl to love him). Here is the song’s first stanza: My light Savishna, clear little falcon, Love me, foolish one, Cuddle me, wretched one! Oh, my falcon, clear little falcon, Little light Savishna, light Ivanovna, Do not disdain my naked, naked, Hapless lot! A strict five-syllable choriambic-dactylic metre. Whether the lines flow evenly when not accompanied by music, not accompanied by music—I do not know, because one generally hears the lines already in music. Another example, nuanced somewhat differently, is Galitsky’s food ¹⁵ (Geda 1998: 66): “Coordinates are necessary; they do not let you drive off to the side. Let us say, Binkis, then Villon, Dante, let us say, ancient Babylonian or ancient Jewish poetry, Egyptian, ancient Greek poetry or modern poetry, let us say, Trakl, Bobrowski or Rilke, whom I translated. These points of reference mean a great deal to me.” ¹⁶ R. Stankevičius (2020) “Through the Bodies” (p. 31): It seems to me— / I have already been a soul, / Leaving the body for eternity— / But not the human being.” 340 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXIII Prasmė legiruota garsu: poezija kaip muzika scene from Borodin’s opera “Prince Igor” in the extended version (Mariinsky Theatre, conductor Valery Gergiev). The composer’s own words: The army has been defeated, Igor has been taken prisoner, did you hear? The Khan is coming against you, threatening you with disaster, understood? What are you to do now, what will you begin, what is to be done here? You have no prince, how can you be without a prince, is that possible? The same choriambic-dactylic metre, only with a caesura at the end of each line. In musical terms, two quarter-note rests. In this scene, the rests are no different from the sung passages. But how the lines sound when read separately—I will never know. Note – Phoneme. Beat division – Syllable. Beat – Foot. Here the differences are more arithmetic. For example, a single note often lasts longer than one beat division, even across several beats. A phoneme will not be longer than a syllable, except in all ag ramatical, alogical or absurdly logical, graphic, and other purposeful cases (S. G.): Flocks of little fish wept / Even the sun closed its eyes, / And a crayfish too rolls along / A—pure tear. On the other hand, a syllable consists of at most 6 phonemes (the underworld vaults echo); a beat division may consist of 32 or more notes. Cadence – Cadencįja. Syncopation – Sinkopis. Instrumentation – Instrumentuotė. The words are the same, but the meanings have shifted. A very interesting topic is the musical equivalents of syllabic versification and stanza. Differences. The matter of music’s backbone, that is, its vertical structure, needs to be explained. First of all, this is harmony and polyphony. Thus, in Nikolai A. Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera “The Snow Maiden” (the text of Alexander N. Ostrovsky’s drama), the Shrovetide Morena (baritone) sings the following incantation: MASLENITSA The red summer will pass, The bathing fires will burn out. The yellow autumn too will pass With snow, with a haystack, and with a brotherhood feast. Darkness, dark nights, See Karachun off. The frosty season will come, Osven—call the carol. Through blizzards with snowdrifts The day will arrive, the Night will wane. From a puddle, from an ice crust, A tussock with hens will drink. Then wait for me again. A wondrous cycle of recurrence. Everything that ends will begin. Or, as Bretkūnas’s preacher would say, What is, what has happened? That is only what will happen afterward. What is, what has been done? That is only what will be done afterward. And nothing new will happen beneath the Sun. Įžvalgos / Insights 341 GIEDRIUS ALKAUSKAS And how many colours change in music, all the moods of cosmogonic festivals and seasonal work. Only one oddity: Morena sings her entire part on a single note (the C of the first octave). Emotional nuances are provided only by harmony and timbres. But the harmony of monophonic melodies too is affected by vertical structure. Without delving into the problem itself, it is enough to say that in the nineteenth century Hermann von Helmholtz demonstrated that consonance–dissonance is only partly determined by the ratios of the frequencies of fundamental tones. The quality of the consonance of a timbre or timbres also depends on the level of the summed roughness curves. Many commonalities of the two arts remain unmentioned. Let us say, the linguistically related sonata and sonnet (but no cantata has a corresponding cantet of a sung genre). Graphic poetry and graphic scores also have similarities: neither can be heard. In this respect, graphic scores are even more natural. After all, Kutavičius’s “Magic Sanskrit Circle” sounds, whereas the lines in the graphic poetry anthology “Pictures of Letters” often cannot even be voiced. The operatic analogue would be a poem or epic. Ballad, idyll, ode, pastorale, elegy, and lament would likewise be similar. A larger form in music (symphony, concerto, dance suite, sonata allegro) has no more precise analogues in poetry, where differently rationalized forms or genres are more common: triolet, rondo, lai, crown of sonnets (a braid of fifteen sonnets of 14 lines each, when the last is composed of the first fourteen). Rhymed free verse (where, according to Juozapas Girdzijauskas, rhyme acts like a magnet) might correspond to the repetition of an ever-denser melody (Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians,” Antanas Rekašius’s “Music for Strings”). Well, parodies, stylizations, neoclassicism, neo-baroque, and neo-romanticism are already phenomena common to both arts. Another topic is humour. Music has journalistic, cabaret, fairground, opera buffa-type humour. More than that: Dmitri Kabalevsky’s “The Comedians’ Gallop” merely recreates a circus atmosphere, the mandolin scene in Prokofiev’s ballet “Romeo and Juliet” is already strangely comic because of its unexpected change of style, while Heinrich I. F. Biber’s “Sonata representativa” is seriously funny. Yet the art of music still does not unite with the essential centres of humour. Nothing resembling “visible laughter for the world and invisible tears” (in Gogol’s words), as found in Dostoevsky’s “Demons,” Gogol’s own “Dead Souls,” Dainius Žičkus’s “The Adventures of Šmaravėjus,” S. G.’s “Rubaiyat in Memory of Santvaras,” and the little dramas in the book “The Singing and Dancing Girl’s Lark,” Villon’s “Testament,” or Erlickas’s “Fragments from the Manuscripts of Helen Blinkevicienė,” can exist in music. Such is the incontestable privilege of language as communion. A very broad untouched topic is that of poet-composers: Hildegard of Bingen, Guillaume de Machaut, Antanas Baranauskas, Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Robert Burns, Arrigo Boito, Robert L. Stevenson, Arnold Bax, Jim Morrison, Juozas Erlickas (and onward). 342 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXIII Prasmė legiruota garsu: poezija kaip muzika Another matter: direct musical allusions in contemporary Lithuanian poetry. The poem “Singer Serenade” in Giedrė Kazlauskaitė’s book “Singerstraum”; the section titles in Kęstutis Navakas’s book “From the Life of Mustard and Horseradish” Hymns and Laments; Mazurkas and Polonaises; Symphonies and Oratorios; Appendix. Two Little Roosters (unfortunately, the titles are attached rather randomly); Artūras Valionis’s books “From the Notes,” “Pi-minor”; the cycle Dixieland in Ramūnas Kasparavičius’s poetry collection (Parts: 16 measures for drum; A capella; Trombone; Clarinet; Bass; Trumpet; Coda) (and further on). Another matter: in Lithuania there are poets who deeply understand classical music: Agnė Žagrakalytė, Ramutė Skučaitė, Rimvydas Stankevičius, Gintaras Bleizgys, and others. Yet one is extraordinarily perplexed as soon as one touches this community: why so few?! After all, Donelaitis constructed harpsichords. One explanation for such amusia is musical Romanticism and its vacuum in nineteenth-century Lithuania. Specifically, Romanticism connected with language: romances, operas, even symphonic poems. But what is it really like?.. Something is simply unsettling, strange, and stranger still. 4. CHAPTER FROM THE POEM WAYKITOIA WIESZPATIA Whatever the rules in music—instrumentation, voice leading, polyphony, harmony (diatonic, late Romantic, or dodecaphonic)—they are like rules in a game. But there are also games without rules. Thus, the clash between Judith and Holofernes rarely ends as it ended17; in parallel universes Judith would usually remain headless. But if the game is played according to rules, its outcome is unpredictable. The same is said another way: “any structure is erected only upon the foundation of form.” Grammar, lexicon, phonetics, syntax, and semantics compel one to seek solutions that do not violate form. The latter, deviating from the desired content only formally (for example, through phonization), offer a further path. In art, of course, this has been so for thousands of years. After all, poets often do not know where the text will carry them. But for that purpose each uses their own catapult. Mine is language given form. One simply has to knock at language’s door for a long time before it opens. And if one can turn left and backward, thicken or break off, solder on or repaint—then this is no longer deep memory, but some kind of pipe (not necessarily by the Neris, though it may be one). In the poem presented, one strictly obeys such a fusion of form and content suggested by musical hearing: 17 Between Glinka and the Mighty Handful came one of the strangest Russian operas, Alexander N. Serov’s “Judith” (1863). Įžvalgos / Insights 343 GIEDRIUS ALKAUSKAS i) a stanza in six lines of dactylic metre; ii) the number of stressed syllables in the lines: 3 2 1 3 3 2; iii) rhyme scheme ABCBAC; iv) the 2nd and 5th lines always contain an internal rhyme or aradication; v) content is never sacrificed for form. Three Visions of Germanaric by the Skirvytė: the Wolf, the Falcon, and the Boar (361 m) King Germanaric, having enslaved the Heruli, Visigoths, Venedi, and Aesti, ruling all Oium from the Baltic to the Black Seas, killed himself at the age of 110, unable to reconcile himself to the end of his glory: the Huns, like an unstoppable terror, were surging from the Urals [According to Jordanes’s “De origine actibusque Getarum,” 551 AD] i) The Gothic script was created by Bishop Ulfilas: otherwise—a little wolf. ii) The Hungarian national bird is the mythical Turul, the noble falcon; monarchs who ruled the country from the twelfth century onward trace their lineage to Attila the Hun. iii) Tacitus notes that the Aesti used to wear little boar statues; these totems were their only weapons. I. THE WOLF (in the Ostrogothic element) Where the mouths of the evening rivers are bitten by the sea, a path and highway cross—having surrounded the luminous boats, the Gothic king. The howling enclosure—the Galindians, a wall crumbling in the wastes. The young one cuts itself against the wall: rust into the shining vessel! acids into the milk! What does not rust—that is what the reaper avenges, thrusting in the fang of death. 344 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXIII Prasmė legiruota garsu: poezija kaip muzika Pour out the white, like dirt? the wolf does not soil where it carries—it makes the womb spacious. Only, as though a ghost had waved, it sprouts forth again. Here the clod crumbles into sand, whatever has been opened—leafs. The waning moon thins. II. THE FALCON (the Hunnic scourge) The Urals, shodding the sky, guard a fearful cage. Whoever does not fly—howls: the falcon hammers metal, drags on armour. It feels the fire that heats the heart like an ox feels the plough. The wind does not know how to be a slave—having scattered the echo of the howl, it flies into the blizzard. The freezing oak’s paws open a lair for the beast. Swallows circle in a chain, drive out the wind... and foreign hymns snap. The underworld’s springs pierce the heartless space, silence: a roof is surely not demolished by one who does not see the foundations! The waxing moon rises. Įžvalgos / Insights 345 GIEDRIUS ALKAUSKAS III. THE BOAR (the Baltic prophecy) The salt sea fades. Thus the sea overcomes our seas. Steam overcomes hail, oak—the enduring bronze, grows—a spear. Tribes flash... only the boar digs up the root even at night. Before lightning has time to strike, it ploughs the land from Courland to Warmia all over. In the Gothic thickets it finds the shining amber letters of dawn. The feasts of the darkening Baltic—skulls howl when it crushes the shore of Gotland. It gathers the river into a handful of collapsed levers, boats. “What flows flows toward death”—the clear full moons foretell the offering. Commentary Amianus MarcellinusAmianus Marcellinus (died c. 395), a Roman historian of Greek origin and continuator of the works of Germanaric (the Gothic name *áirmanareiks, died c. 376), more modestly describes the domains of the Gothic Greuthungian king than Jordanes (sixth century). The latter, although a scholar—only an amateur, and himself a Goth (and therefore often biased)—presents the history of his people and the Huns on the basis of the authentic, now-lost works of Cassiodorus (died 585) and Priscus of Panium (written around 449); the latter was a diplomat of the Eastern Roman emperor Theodosius II at the Hunnic court. Tacitus himself mentions the Goths in Germania (98), where, it is known, they are mentioned for the first time and clearly. Jordanes traces the Ostrogothic emperor Theodoric the Great (*þiudareiks, Thiudareiks; died 526) back to Germanaric. The Greuthungi and Tervingi (third and fourth centuries) were later, by common agreement, identified with the Ostrogoths and Visigoths (fifth and sixth centuries). Gotland, Gdansk 346 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXIII Prasmė legiruota garsu: poezija kaip muzika (Gothiscandza, the lower Vistula, the Vistula Lagoon) testify to the Gothic ancestral homeland. The fall of the Western Roman Empire and the beginning of the rule of the Germanic man from the Scirian tribe, Odoacer (476) and the latter’s murder, carried out by Theodoric (493)—far too powerful a drama even for royal visions beside the Skirvytė. The Quedlinburg Annals (written from 1008 to 1030) recount the history of the Liudolfing dynasty of the Holy Roman Emperors, describe Dietrich (Theodoric) the Goth, Attila the Hun (died 453), as well as the successful baptism of the Yotvingian ruler Bruno of Querfurt, carried out on Lithuania’s border (1009), Netimeras, and Bruno’s own death. What is this if not the genuine, historical interconnectedness of the Goths, Huns, and Aesti? Let a wolf represent these peoples in the visions, like Wulfila (died 383), a falcon—the companion of nomads; a boar. Sovius’s myth reveals much about the boar’s significance for us. The Grutingai are etymologically “beast-men” (Proto-Germanic *greutą, English grit, Lithuanian gruodas), while the Tervingai are “tree-men” (Proto-Germanic *trewą, English tree, Lithuanian derva). Historians agree that these were the original living environments of these related peoples: coastal gravel or gravelly steppes for the Grutingai, and the forest’s hidden places for the Tervingai. Thus the crumbling of the gurvuoliai is a bad sign for the Goths! As for the Huns—the waxing of the moon. For this is what Priscus of Panium relates: “as was customary, during the honeymoon, after the wedding, Attila drank strong drink mixed with honey for an entire month, until he suffocated.” The shining amber letters of dawn for the Goths after the fall of the Hunnic Empire are, of course, that amber for which Cassiodorus, writing in Theodoric’s name, sent a letter to the Aesti and gave thanks (one of the first mentions of the Aesti in sources after Tacitus). But the Romantics’ imagination weaves still more threads from these times of the great migration of peoples into Lithuania’s fabric. Thus, according to D. Poška (Letter to Joachim Lelewel and Ksawery Boguš, 1818), Truly I say, Odoacer, Kęstutis and Algirdas spoke Swedish and did not speak, unless where from? So too Mindaugas, Vytautas, Jogaila, Władysław, always spoke in the Lithuanian tongue. T. Narbut’s History of the Lithuanian Nation, volume 2 (1837), contains a chapter entitled “The Hun Invasion of Europe, the Subsequent Fate of the Peoples of the Lithuanian Tribe in the East and South,” in which all the aforementioned lords are described. Moreover, concerning the Germanaric tribe: “The Grutingai built a fortress, known to this day by the name of Grutinga, that is, Kretinga” (1995 edition, p. 294). The Akmena (a gravelly river!) flows through Kretinga, later called the Danė (an exceedingly archaic hydronym, associated with the Indo-European proto-language; for example, Ossetian don—river). And Narbut again (concerning the Nemunas Delta): “on the left, a branch called Skirwith, meanders westward, Skirvytė, which means the arrival of the Sciri.” Sciri, like Odoacer. And as if someone had pressed the legato pedal. Once again, worlds connect! 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Gedos poeziją): akustinio ir grafinio teksto interpretacija. – Lietuvos muzikologija 3, 6–16. Įžvalgos / Insights 349 GIEDRIUS ALKAUSKAS Villon François 1999: Rinktinė poezija, G. Dručkūtė (pažodinis vertimas, paaiškinimai), S. Geda (vertimas), Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjunga. Įteikta 2020 m. lapkričio 26 d. GIEDRIUS ALKAUSKAS Vilniaus universitetas, Informatikos institutas Naugarduko g. 24, LT-03225 Vilnius, Lietuva [email protected] 350 Acta Linguistica Lithuanica LXXXIII