Description
Book SynopsisSamuel Beckett produced some of the most powerful writing – some of the funniest but most devastating – of the twentieth century. He described his plays, prose and poetry as ‘an unnecessary stain on the silence’, but the extraordinary combination of concision and richness in his writing stems from his peculiar sensitivity to the sounds and rhythms of words. Moreover, music forms a part of Beckett’s comic aesthetics of failure: it plays a role in his exploration of the possibilities and failures of the imagination, and the ever-failing attempt to forge a sense of self. No wonder, then, that so many composers have taken inspiration from Beckett, setting his words to music or translating into music the dramatic themes or contexts of his work. Headaches Among the Overtones considers both music in Beckett and Beckett’s significance in contemporary music. In doing so, it explores the relationship between words, music and meaning, examining how comparable philosophical concerns and artistic effects appear in literature and music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Trade ReviewCe livre aborde un champ capital pour l'oeuvre de Beckett [...] Il serait, certes, préférable de lire cet ouvrage en disposant, tout au long, d'un instrument de musique et d'un appareil pour écouter des enregistrements, afin de mieux apprécier les exemples cités, mais l'auteur a bien pris soin de rendre ses analyses parfaitement claires sans qu'un tel accompagnement soit indispensable. - Llewellyn Brown, Les Lettres romanes
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction: Why Beckett and Music? Part 1: Music in Beckett Beckett, Proust, and Music Ideas of Music in Dream of Fair to Middling Women: Beckett and Beethoven 1 Musical Haunting in Beckett’s Ghost Trio: Beckett and Beethoven 2 ‘The fable of one with you in the dark’: The Company of Schubert in All That Fall; Beckett and Schubert 1 Vocality and Imagination in Beckett’s Nacht und Träume: Beckett and Schubert 2 Part 2: Beckett in Music Beckett and Contemporary Music ‘Doing it one way and doing it another way’: Morton Feldman’s Neither ‘Together, dogs!’: Feldman’s Music for Words and Music Beckett in Music Translation: Embodiment and Subjectivity in Richard Barrett’s Ne songe plus à fuir Step by Step: Beckett and Kurtág Beckett Sources and Abbreviations References Image Credits
