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Sung Poems:
The Incantatory Voice

Between the human voice employed as a musical instrument and everyday speech, lies a continuum of infinite variations and modulations. Within that continuum chanting can be said to lie somewhere midpoint between speech and song, whereas intoning and reciting are somewhat closer to spoken words.

Speaking in a way that turns ordinary words into an incantation has been practiced since time immemorial, perhaps even with the dawn of language itself; for just as all cultures have developed speech as a vehicle for communication, so all cultures have music, which is the most likely impetus to the genesis of language.

If I have brought the idea of the magical effect of sound with my subtitle “the incantatory voice” it is not to lull (although the lullaby is perhaps one of the most subtle of incantations), but rather to bring to the foreground the power that the musical recitation of words can have.

In exploring the role of delivery — of oral articulation — and its relationship to poetry, “music” and the perception of the “musical” will be meant not necessarily in the sense of melodious, but rather as the art of combining or manipulating sounds. Given that the topic centres precisely on those qualities of the human voice that cannot be transposed to the written page, the approach will perforce need to be an impressionistic one, but we do have at hand some distinct categories to signpost the song-speech continuum, the dirge, for example, when perceived as a mode, is simultaneously a (poetic) genre and a style of delivery. Such signposts, however, need to be treated with caution. They not only shift pending the culture and time under consideration, they can evoke very different things to different people.

Our whirlwind tour of sung poems will trace three written traditions back to their oral roots, interspersed by and followed with some modern-day examples from oral traditions where the written word has played little or no role whatsoever. And here we must pause to remember that many traditions, including Aboriginal Australia, have no poetry in the sense of spoken verse, their poetic traditions take form uniquely in song.

Along the way various aspect of the nature and development of poetry will surface, enabling us to pause upon some salient features.

As with all comparative approaches, the aim is to discern similarities and differences with the hope that these will inform us as to our own preconceptions and literary parochialism; as Kandinky wrote in a letter of 1931 “Intelligent people become always more intelligent, until the day they end up finding themselves very stupid.” Something of the sort has occurred in relation to our habitual reliance on the written word. Our tendency to regard poems as texts has lead to the formation of deep ruts that sees them as containing a quasi-hermetic meaning rather than delivering meaning through the intermediary of sound. Recalling the poem as song — as infused with breath — will momentarily allow us to move out of the ruts, after all, a song is never a text insofar as it automatically brings to mind a marked oral delivery rather than its written notation.

The earliest traditions of which we have written records all point to a use of language that is somehow charged as differing from everyday language, elsewhere I suggested that pattern is a key defining feature of poetry: i.e. the artful use of repetition at all levels of language, both formally, in the patterning of sound and words, and in the patters of meaning, through syntax and semantic parallelism for example.

The ritual use of language in a sacred or profane context requires that the language be somehow differentiated from everyday speech. A simple parallel example can be drawn from a linguistic study of the Buin language of the Bougainville islands. Noting how language retains much of its magical force in a society where spirits and ghosts take an interest in human activity, Don Laycock writes: “there are many times when ordinary language is inappropriate. One such time is in hunting; if the animal hears its name called, it will hide and not be found. So avoidance names are used” (Laycock 1969) thus the eel is called driftwood, and all freshwater fish ‘swaying from side to side’. In a different context Oromuri, the spirit who carries away the souls of the dead, is called mara ekenua which translates into great spirit. But it is “the poetic epithets and synonyms used in the songs” that form the largest category of substitute names, and, as Laycock notes, “the synonyms usually occur in poetic form ... as well as poetic meaning” (p. 4) Among the many examples given, the epithet for pig (Buin urgito) is striking since it coincides with the Homeric “the tusked one” (kompena in Buin.) Most conspicuous is the systematic addition of a two-syllable suffix to the first or last two-syllable root-word of the ordinary term to created a four-syllable word “suitable for use in song.”(p.6) Personal and place names are the most susceptible to such a systematic transformation, perhaps, Laycok suggest, in order to avoid undue attention from the spirits.

If this gives us a clue into the development of a poetic register in terms of vocabulary, an example from a different quarter will illustrate the delivery in song-form. The Italian ethnographer Ernesto De Martino, in his 1958 book Morte e pianto rituale, describes how a woman was called to the post office to find a telegram announcing that her husband had been killed in combat. On returning to her village she stood before the house of her mother-in-law, with whom she had never got on particularly well, and began to sing. Rather than a ritual announcement of her husband’s death, she voices her concern that she will now be thrown out by her mother-in-law, and recalls why she cannot return to her own family. The song, and the delivery of its content in a sung lament, is a powerful reminder that in times of crisis language must transmit not only a message but also the full emotional outpouring of the human heart whilst keeping them under restraint. The ensuing call and answer singing of the two women staves off the grieving of a husband and a son in order to resolve a real problem of tension and survival. Finally the older woman reassures her daughter-in-law that she can remain and tells her to stop her public display.

Sumerian, Greek, and Chinese poetic traditions affords us a glimpse into that world where writing was a thing newly discovered. All three traditions (to which could be added Ancient Egypt, Vedic India, and other cultures that developed their own writing system) indicate that poetry and music were closely interrelated in the ancient world. Although we cannot always determine to what extent or how certain compositions were accompanied by music, some are specifically designated as such; the Sumerian balag, ersema, and tigi are named at the end of compositions and refer to various types of drums and/or harps (scholars are still uncertain if the balag belongs to the former or latter instrument) (see Michalowski 1996, & Black, Cunningham et al. 2004). The oldest known example of musical instructions/notation is a fragment from Nippur dated from the Old Babylonian period (2000-1600 BC), which gives musical instructions for the tuning and accompaniment of a hymn with a stringed instrument. Other compositions are specifically referred to as “song” even if we classify them as epic, and are tempted to equate them to prose narrative (Guterbock 1951).

That in Hittite there is a word which means to chant or intone, as distinct from singing and its inflected form for singers (with indications that the latter implies a performance usually accompanied by music), would set singing apart as practiced by a professionally trained individual. When the two terms are used together, chanting is used “in the context of choral accompaniment of singing or recitation in ritual performance.” (Melchert 1998) And the Sumerian poet-king Shulgi, for example, specifically instructs that the singers conduct the scribe to read out his royal poems to them so that they might learn and make his “songs shine forth like silver in its ore.” (Klein 1981)

When Homer describes a bard reciting epic tales, as he does in the opening book of the Odyssey, it is to the accompaniment of a lyre that the bard sings. Although it is not disputed that in Archaic Greece that was the case, the issue of the performance of the Homeric epics in classical times (from the 6^th Century B.C.) is a thornier business. The newly arisen professional rhapsode recited epic poems at specific festival/contests without a musical instrument but with a staff, which was somehow significant to the performance, but whether it was used to beat out a rhythm or for swaying to and fro as is implied in the Iliad in book 3 (l. 218 ff.) where Menelaus’s oratorical prowess is described, is difficult to tell. As West notes in his article on “The Singing of Homer and the Modes of Early Greek Music”

“The musical writers take no notice of rhapsodes at all, and no one associates them with singing in any specific mode. But some differentiation from speech-melody may have been maintained.”(West 1981)

Of interest is the distinct melodic accents inherited from Indo-European times, and which disappeared sometime around the 3^rd Century AD from Greek, Latin, and sometime earlier from Sanskrit. Dionysius of Halicarnassus describes the accents in some detail as distinct differences of musical pitch in pronouncing the syllables of a word. “It is possible” West writes “that the practice of ‘singing’ texts by disposing the syllables over a limited set of fixed notes according to their accents was also Indo-European. This is the traditional method of singing the hymn of the ?gveda, in use to this day.”(ibid. p. 115) After noting that the Vedic tradition lies further back than Homer, and that although the pitch accents disappeared from Sanskrit, West goes on to say that they have been preserved by “scrupulous oral instruction” and are marked in the texts.

That some Greek meters might be based on Vedic or Indo-European proto-types, and the role of singing in the formation of such meters, lie outside the scope of this present paper, suffice to say that there is some fascinating material leading to precisely those conclusions (see Klein 2002, Nagy 2004, West 1973 & 1988).

The earliest Chinese material also points to a close relationship between music, and poetry. Although the tradition that Confucius personally culled the 300 odd poems that form the Shi Jing 詩經 or Classic of Poetry, out of some 3000 pieces that were housed in the royal archives of Chu is not supported, the likelihood that whoever grouped the poems did have access to extensive feudal ‘state’ archives is not an unlikely scenario.

The oldest material in the collection, approximately the last 40 poems, dates back to the early Western Zhou dynasty (1045-771 BC) and as with about two thirds of the material in the Shi Jing consists of pieces that were performed in a ceremonial setting: as Shaughnessy shows in his essay “From Liturgy to Literature” (Shaughnessy 1997) this last group of poems were originally sung to the accompaniment of music at sacrifices to the gods and ancestral spirits of the royal house of the Zhou and to commemorate the defeat of the Shang.

With the various present-day oral cultures, or cultures where the adoption of writing is a recent event, a wealth of martial continues to come to light through ethnographic studies and sound recording. The work of Parry and Lord on the nature of oral composition among the bards of ex-Yugoslavia from the 1930s and 50s and its application to the Homeric question of single or multiple authorship, has challenged many presuppositions. The recent re-release of Albert B. Lord’s 1960 The Singer of Tales with an accompanying CD-Rom of the texts and sound recording enables one to hear the voices singing both accompanied and un-accompanied by music, as well as the occasional recited piece, one of which is composed upon request.

Although it is a fine-line there is a definite difference between a composition which is recited and one which is sung, but there are also moments when the shift of voice need not move towards the musical; rather the opposite, when words take over to such an extent that they lose meaning but gain another power.

Ted Hughes’s Inner Music, a short prose piece that was originally written as an introduction to an anthology, recounts a singular experience related to his adaptation of Senaca’s Oedipus for Peter Brook:

Two or three days before the opening night, Peter Brook lined up the entire cast on stage (thirty-six altogether) and asked them to declaim the play, from where they stood, without moving a limb, at double speed, in very loud, flat, Dalek-like voices–i.e., without any expressive inflection whatsoever. The purpose of this exercise was to shake them out of any vocal mannerism that might have become fixed, and mechanical, during the very long rehearsal. But the results where unexpected.
The actors set off, full tilt. And within minutes, I realized I was undergoing a new, extraordinary verbal experience. The play, in fact, had become utterly verbal, in an unfamiliar but overpowering way. Without the visual distraction of actors acting, and without the cerebral distraction of voices interpreting, but a speed which demanded the utmost concentration of attention, the words began to happen in a depth where their meaning were liberated and magnified. We were all packed inside a hurtling rocket that had shed every material circumstance and was now travelling on in pure sound. It is difficult to describe or to know just what was going on, but everybody felt it. The field of electrical power became nearly unbearable. One of the actors fainted, and a stage hand sitting in the front row also fainted. When it was over Peter Brook and I looked at each other in astonishment. (Hughes 1994)

Here our preconception no longer seem to hold, this is neither song nor recitation, but something else. Hughes goes on to wonder if Shakespeare’s plays might not have been delivered in such a manner, and if one recalls Cicero’s remarks about how Demosthenes cured his stammering and improved his oratorical delivery “and with pebbles inserted into his mouth, he grew accustomed to declaim, at the top of his lungs, many verses on a single breath” (De Or. 1.61.261 tr. in Daitz 1991) the mind begins to reel.

Perhaps we need to reconsider our initial standpoint, and return to the continuum of speech-song. As Dionysius of Halicarnassus noted “the distinction between speech, including oratorical delivery, and music is one of degree, not of kind: speech has melody and rhythm, just like music.” (Devine and Stephens 1991)

If at the musical extreme of our continuum we have the human voice as musical instrument (without words or at least not recognizable words), might we not place at the other extreme language without music, this would shift the continuum, placing ordinary speech more towards music. But is such a flat, expressionless, delivery a place for poetry, in one sense, as Ted Hughes notes after the passage I quoted, at times such a delivery is not warranted or even desired, but its incantatory power does bring home the fact that it does invoke something. Especially, perhaps, in our age where so much of the range of human voice is shunned.

A Greek papyrus with verses set to musical notation of the early second century AD, has shed new light on what a musical evening in the Early Roman Empire might have been like (Johnson 2000). The fragment joins other of the same era and type that seems to have belonged to professional Greek troupes of travelling musicians, which were organized into worldwide guilds. Apart for the fact that such fragments show verses that we would have expected to be spoken set to music and sung, this particular fragment, now at Yale, shows just how “florid and dramatic” such performances were: “At one point the singing even seems to imitate, by a wild plunge into the bass, the shift of voice characteristic of spirit possession.” (ibid. p. 58 & 59)

As always, we need to be careful in envisioning the past, a parallel example is to be found in how many classical Greco-Roman sculptures bear signs that originally they were painted in the most garish primary colours.

Closer at hand, David Perkins’ essay “How the Romantics Recited Poetry” highlights some of the historical transitions in the styles of recitation by analysing some of the many manuals of elocution published between 1760 and 1830, as well as first hand reports of how Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and other poets of the period chanted or recited their poetry. The picture is one where “Romantic recitation was far more musical than we now conceive.” (Perkins 1991). If we can only rely on written reports of the “energetic and impassioned” recitation of pre-audio-recording days, with the poets of the twentieth century we can hear a wide variety of delivery, from the burlesque style of E. E. Cummings, to Alan Ginsberg’s mesmerizing incantation of “Howl,” in general, however, the move has been away from anything that might seem stagy or somehow manipulated.

The fear of seeming somehow affected, coupled with the idea that a poem is to be read rather than heard, has meant that modern poetry has moved further away from the sung delivery to which it probably owes its origin, yet song is still everywhere, more so than ever perhaps with the advent of the I-pod, but that is another story. For now I would like to finish with a reminder that among the Australian Aborigines some myths can be spoken in prose, employing everyday speech — told in everyday circumstances, but on the sacred ground, the selfsame myth must be sung and acted out in a series of dances(Berndt and Berndt 1988).

BIBLIOGRAPHY back to top

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