New Information Regarding the Futurist Radio Manifesto

Published March 2011 by Italogramma, the online journal of the Italian Studies Faculty at the Università Eötvös Loránd in Budapest. Article is in English.

Pino Masnata, co-author with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti of the 1933 Futurist Radio Manifesto, wrote a forty-four page explanation of the manuscript in 1935, connecting many ideas expressed in the manifesto to the “new” physics of the twentieth century—Einstein’s Special and General Theories of Relativity, breakthroughs in the understanding of cellular structure, and the development of quantum physics. Masnata’s gloss, archived with the Marinetti Papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, dispenses with the cult of the machine to suggest the “metallization of the body” could result from advances in molecular biology. Masnata distinguishes the new acoustic art of radio from the other arts, positing it as an art of infinite space and time. This article consists of a background and introduction to Masnata’s manuscript, including occasional analysis or interpretation of the significance of the scientific references to the poetry of the Radio Manifesto. A listing of the section headings of the manuscript with a very brief synopsis of each follows at the end.

Musica@ (Nov-Dec. 2010 Anno V, n. 20) Ezra Pound, Poeta e compositore

Translated by Liberato Santoro-Brienza at Trinity College, Dublin

Libraries and individuals interested in ordering the music of Ezra Pound at discount may visit www.ezrapoundmusic.com and follow the information and links for purchasing directly from the publisher.

Lecture "Ezra Pound's Operas," given at the 23rd International Ezra Pound Conference

Libraries and individuals interested in ordering music of Ezra Pound at discount may visit www.ezrapoundmusic.com and follow the information and links for purchasing directly from the publisher.

This transcript from the 2009 evening talk in Rome (in English) includes images and references to audio files. It may be used as a template or learning tool, and will be best enjoyed when accompanied by the audio resources listed at the top of the first page.

Read Kate Molleson's article Opera Mecanique in the January issue of Opera Magazine

Libraries and individuals interested in ordering music of Ezra Pound at discount may visit www.ezrapoundmusic.com and follow the information and links for purchasing directly from the publisher.

Ezra Pound's opera "Le Testament" at Parco della Musica 8 May 2010

http://www.ezrapoundmusic.com

Libraries and individuals interested in ordering music of Ezra Pound at discount may visit www.ezrapoundmusic.com and follow the information and links for purchasing directly from the publisher.

Ezra Pound's music will be performed May 8th, 2010 at 9 PM at the Auditorium at the Parco della Musica in Rome. Tickets are 15 euros and can be bought by phone (Rome) 06-0608 or online
(http://www.auditorium.com/eventi/4952264 ).
Also, please follow the link for Kate Molleson's article "Opera Mecanique" found below.

Great Bass: Undertones of Continuous Influence

published in Performance Research 8.1 (Spring 2003) in a special issue "Voices" edited by Claire MacDonald

Libraries and individuals interested in ordering music of Ezra Pound at discount may visit www.ezrapoundmusic.com and follow the information and links for purchasing directly from the publisher.

This essay proposes a link between Ezra Pound's recovery of voices of the past and his recondite theory of great bass. It briefly introduces Pound's musical settings of texts of Villon, Cavalcanti, Sordello, and Catullus in two complete operas and one unfinished one; reviews Pound's use of music as a form of criticism; and investigates how Pound uses the voice to model his ideas about time, genius, and the continuity of poetic influence. I identify and analyze several examples of Pound's application of great bass in the music and show how that application differs from one opera to the next as Pound, like his contemporary Henry Cowell, theorized the relationship of rhythm to tone through overtone ratios. I argue that Pound adopted the tritone and tritonic ratios as "permanent" symbols for genius and for the potential of a reciprocity between genius that would move fluidly, bi-directionally, through time. Pound used opera to push the allegorical potential of oral performance into a metaphysical dimension: voice is not only free to move from one body to another, in doing so, it escapes mortality.

Singing the Words, Ezra Pound and his Music

Libraries and individuals interested in ordering music of Ezra Pound at discount may visit www.ezrapoundmusic.com and follow the information and links for purchasing directly from the publisher.

A brief history of Ezra Pound's Operas, from the CD liner notes

Ego Scriptor Cantilenae: The Music of Ezra Pound audio CD liner notes
Follow the above link to purchase the audio cd

Libraries and individuals interested in ordering music of Ezra Pound at discount may visit www.ezrapoundmusic.com and follow the information and links for purchasing directly from the publisher.

II A brief history of the operas--Excerpt
copyright 2003 Margaret Fisher

Ezra Pound’s two operas, Le Testament (1920–1921; rev. 1923, 1926, 1931, 1933–1934) and Cavalcanti (1931-1933), approach their subjects with such different structures and contrasting music that these works are from all appearances entirely separate, each with its unique dramatic impulses and concerns, as unrelated as Villon’s Parisian nights to Cavalcanti’s Tuscan days. Pound composed the two operas under very different circumstances as well, making the most of his limited training by working with professional musicians to score the first opera, then scaling the degree of difficulty of the second opera to a level of technical competence he was confident he could achieve on his own. He also wove the discoveries he made in one poet’s work back into the fabric of the other. For example, Pound’s 1912 translations of the poetry of Guido Cavalcanti (c. 1250–1300) prompted his first statements on the role of rhythm in music; his musical settings of the poetry of François Villon (1431-?) provided him a laboratory in which to experiment with rhythm. While setting Villon, he discovered the melodic cell and specific uses for the interval of the octave. These discoveries became the structural building blocks for his opera Cavalcanti.

Pound’s project began with a modest observation in 1919 that in two poems by Villon, and a sonnet by Cavalcanti, the music was already made by the words. Composition of Le Testament began in earnest at the end of 1920 with the help of London concert pianist and vocal coach Agnes Bedford. They finished working in Paris the summer of 1921, turning out a one-act opera for ten soloists, large chorus, and seventeen instrumentalists. Pound was responsible for the work’s artistic and structural shape, its rhythmic emphasis, unusual instrumentation and spare design for the orchestration; Bedford offered technical advice and notated the work in score form.

Late in 1923 Pound engaged the American composer and pianist George Antheil to recalculate the metrical divisions of the opera in “fractional notation,” the time signatures ranging from 1/8 to 25/32, to account for all possible syllabic durations and patterns of sounds in Villon’s words. Antheil had entered Paris in June that year with a reputation as a sensational concert pianist and avant-garde composer. He came in awe of Stravinsky and also to challenge him. Antheil would be the new champion of TIME as the sole and true canvas of music. The rhythmic drive of his Mechanisms, Sonata Sauvage, and Airplane Sonata caused pandemonium at his October 4th Paris debut. To a press voracious for the latest and biggest scandal, Antheil was the new futurist darling. To Marcel Duchamp, Eric Satie and Man Ray, he was the instant hero of their dada world. A month later Antheil premiered two new violin sonatas written for the American concert violinist Olga Rudge. Ezra Pound had requested the sonatas; they were the first of three commissions he arranged to keep Antheil employed in Paris. The second commission to be completed was the re-scoring of the Villon opera.

On the last day of that year Antheil signed off as editor of Pound’s new Le Testament, only to pick it up again the next day to fire this salvo to prospective performers:

“This opera is made out of an entirely new musical technic, a technic, for certain, made of sheer music which upholds its line through inevitable rhythmic locks and new grips...a technic heretofore unknown, owing to the stupidity of the formal musical architects still busy with organizing square bricks in wornout and formal patterns,...a powerful technic that grips musical phrases like the mouths of great poets grip words... [The opera] is written as it sounds! Please do not embarrass us by suddenly developing intelligence.”

Antheil then turned to finish the third commission, a film score for Fernand Léger titled Ballet Mécanique. It would be the final stunning composition of an unrelenting push into new musical territory, unleashed onto Paris as a storm, “streamlined, glistening, cold, often as ‘musically silent’ as interplanetary space, and also often as hot as an electric furnace, but always attempting at least to operate on new principles of construction…” Antheil wrote that he “had possibly gone too far in this matter of reaching out for purely new form” and he beat “a hasty retreat from … the premature fame…” (from Antheil’s autobiography, Bad Boy of Music).

He had certainly let Pound go too far with rhythmic invention. Though wedged among some of the century’s most extraordinary experiments in rhythm and time, Antheil’s transcription of Pound’s rhythms for Le Testament received little comment because the music was unplayable in the 1920s and 30s. Performers were simply unequipped to prepare such music, the difficulties of which exceeded even Stravinsky’s meters. It would be almost 50 years before the 1923 Pound/Antheil score would sound as written!

The audio cd is available through Other Minds Festival, San Francisco: <http://www.otherminds.org/cgi-bin/shop.pl/page=Poundcd.html/SID=1262992699.22958/buy=1>;

A facsimile edition of Ezra Pound’s modernist opera Le Testament

published in Yale University Library Gazette Spring 2006
Please note: the facsimile edition is now available with an audio CD of the complete opera.

Libraries and individuals interested in ordering music of Ezra Pound at discount may visit www.ezrapoundmusic.com and follow the information and links for purchasing directly from the publisher.

The article gives a short history of the music documents in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and an account of the peregrinations of the Gold Score, the 1923 music score of Le Testament named for the color of its cover.

Ezra Pound's Philosophical Opera: Cavalcanti

delivered to the ACLA 2000, New Haven CT

Libraries and individuals interested in ordering music of Ezra Pound at discount may visit www.ezrapoundmusic.com and follow the information and links for purchasing directly from the publisher.

Finding Aid Ezra Pound Music in the Beinecke Library

Libraries and individuals interested in ordering music of Ezra Pound at discount may visit www.ezrapoundmusic.com and follow the information and links for purchasing directly from the publisher.

Finding aid for Le Testament music scores
Work in Progress

Directing the Light Flux, Scripts for Cellular Movement

published in Performance Research 11.1 (2006) in a special issue "Made to Order" edited by Ric Alsopp

The subject of human gesture is traditionally
approached as a signification system, coded by
isolated body movements (spontaneous and
predictable) or varieties of sign language
(learned and unpredictable). In 1976 I wanted to
create a gestural dance technique with
analogies to structures of language. My goal
was a proto-language of the body that could be
precise and modular, like verbal and written
language, yet enjoy the flexibility of shifting
contours and unfixed connotations, as are found
in text sound poetry. The term cellular refers to
the choreographer’s task of simultaneously
tracking and influencing the phenomenon of
movement at the level of neural stimuli passing
from one cluster of body cells to another. The
hyperbole of the term cellular as I have used it
allows for the imagined potential of the
autonomic nervous system to undergo a degree
of voluntary control in the choreography of
movement, to complement the potential
refinement of skills developed through the
somatic nervous system. More practically
speaking, cellular movement is the individual
dancer’s counterpart to the mutable ‘contact
point’ of its predecessor, contact improvisation.
Both approaches to movement have roots in
phenomenology. Cellular movement, making
use of multiple and overlapping scripts for
either a choreographed or improvised event,
tests the nature of the visible world for divisibility
and, in doing so, models a link between
phenomenology and deconstruction in art,