Forms, Frames and Fermata

When it comes to English poetry, Shakespeare is the best partially because he operated in a world of forms. Rhymes, rhythms, syntax, length...everything had to fit into this context, and within this framework he still expressed. His poems are musical because like music he has a finite number of notes, certain keys and definite line lengths. (Once you get beyond 16th notes in a music setting faster than a moderate tempo, you're basically asking people to fake it.)

I do not operate in that world of forms. I operate with free verse. (Shameless self-promotion:my poetry. Forms make me a better poet, but they are not my specialty.

It really takes more than mere practice, but the reason forms help so much is because they force you into wordplay, into understanding how you structure things, they teach you how to dance around words, to taste on your tongue the movement, feel the cadence as it drips by. It's not just sonnets. Sestinas, haiku, limericks...being given a box and transforming it. A canvas has edges, a finite space to create in. Master painters work within a frame. Master poets do the same.

A bedroom becomes your room when you express yourself within the confines of that room: a picture here, books there, stuffed animals...repaint the walls blue and gold or black and pink! But if you had no walls, no ceiling, you could not make it your own. It would merely stretch endlessly.

This is the service of forms to the free verse poet. It gives you a canvas, a space in which to operate and transform according to definitive rules. No matter what you do, blue and red will always make purple. Picasso may have been a cubist and rebelled against traditional rules of art, but he could not change this underlying rule. Neither can the poet change how language operates, and like Picasso, even the boldest among us must learn to operate on a canvas.

With that said, I want to talk about music for a second. Music operates in a world of rules beyond anything imaginable. Famed Briton Stephen Fry said he realized that words could be musical when he first heard Oscar Wilde's writings, and as a poet, I know how to love wordplay. Despite that, however, you cannot with words find a fermata over a note and simply pause on a sound. There are no crescendo and decrescendo. There are no moderate tempos and lively tempos, 70 beats per minute to 120 beats per minute, on the written page. It is merely according to the interpretation of the reader. A good writer might be able to structure his language accordingly, to imbue the pace of his writing with the excitement necessary to build to an exclamation point. (As an aside, this is why I love many of the romance languages in written form: the fact that a Spanish exclamation starts with an upside down exclamation point "¡" tells the reader how to read the sentence.)

But music--music!--operates in forms. It has keys in minors and majors and scales within keys, octaves and intervals, harmony and dischord, heterophony and homophony. Even non-Western music has forms in which to operate: the middle eastern makam, the Indian raga, Chinese pentatone (as you can imagine, five sounds, not our seven). And it is these forms that are such a clear reflection of our culture, of what we love.

Western music operates in triads, groupings of three notes that reflect medieval theology and the emergence of mass literacy recognizing the Trinity. During the Renaissance, you saw a move from heterophony and independent polyphony to homophony. Now, I love Renaissance music. Polyphony is gorgeous, but hard to follow. What we like and what we dislike are often matters of taste. One will like the meter-centric composition of hip hop, whereas others will love the soaring, flowing melodies of Andrew Lloyd Weber, and some will love the melodic intensity of Bach chorales.

What we can do, however, is judge music as better or worse cross-culturally. Music may not be a universal language (like language, it is defined according to its culture, constantly morphing--one who reads Western scales cannot necessarily read the Indian ragas, just as one who reads English cannot necessarily read Sanskrit), but it does have a universal function. Because music is built into a culture and finds its roots in that culture's philosophy, it follows that music is a reflection of a culture's understanding of truth.

Now, if we believe for a moment that the world has a certain order to it--and whether you're a theist or not, this is rather difficult to deny, given gravity and DNA and magnetism and the water cycle and heat dissipation and ionic bonds--then music which best reflects the order of things will be the best music. Gothic architecture is often philosophically praised because it is naturally elevating to the human spirit, draws the eyes upward to the heavens, regardless of its function as theology. I mean here to be talking of abstracts.

If Christianity is true, then the artistic offspring of its core philosophy will be more beautiful than lesser attempts at seeking the truth. For all my cynicism, I do believe that people, no matter how evil, are ultimately questing after what is true. People who do despicable acts do so out of a sincere interest or belief in their own righteousness. Hitler was an evil man, and deserves whatever punishment he finds in eternity. But I do believe that he honestly felt that the Aryan race was the ultimate realization of evolution, that the extermination of political and philosophical opponents (as well as the eugenics programs) was for the good of the German people, and that claiming a European sphere of influence dominated by Germany was a noble goal, albeit a selfish one for his own ends. I merely speak here about what Hitler believed, no matter how flawed he was.

So my great faith in humanity comes down to comparing cultural philosophies. C.S. Lewis observed that all religions share elements of the truth. Of course, he went on to argue that Christianity was the fullest realization of all these little truths into the one True Myth while discarding the wrong, but my point here is that cultural philosophies all have their merits. The fact that certain Indian ragas cannot be used except during funerals, and some cannot be used in the summer, is a recognition that "there is a time to every purpose under Heaven." Every cultural institution has its values. This is why it's more than okay to like various musical disciplines. Michael loves traditional Japanese music despite it not being Western music.

Can we judge the value of art? Absolutely. Working within a framework is the natural consequence of an ordered world. That which is closest to the truth is the most beautiful to the human soul, for we seek truth. Is Western music the best in the world? I don't know the answer to that question. It's a broad thing to say "Western" music because that includes so much--the joy of the Celts, the somber liturgies of the Slavs, the romanticism of the Germans. What I do know is that mere enjoyment is not criteria for judgment. I do know that there is an order to the world, that humans quest after what is true, and that God is a god of order, a god of divine logic (Greek: logos, i.e. The Word, that is Christ). To see his reflection in music is to see as in a mirror darkly. But there is the darkness of midnight and the darkness of the clouded noon-day sun. Would that the daylight is what we judge and deign to choose.

Perhaps this is why Beethoven's 5th symphony is the most widely performed and most frequently recorded piece of music in the world--in all cultures where it has been disseminated, it has taken hold for something within it, within the order of intervals and the key changes and the orchestration of various instrumental voices--because there is something true and good in the music of Beethoven. This is why Bach wrote laus deo (or was it Mozart?). Music can and should be enjoyed. It also can and should be judged according to its benefit for our souls, the truth it reveals.

Every art has a form. God, the ultimate artist, has imbued the world with laws. His own infiniteness has spawned a measurable universe. God, who could have worked his majesty across an endless canvas, has crafted rules in which to operate. This is the function forms. This is why poetry cannot be music, though it can be musical. And this is why even I, the free verse poet, will always come back to forms, will always search through music.

A general PS:
This does not just apply to music, poetry and visual art. Every artistic presentation has a canvas, limitations. An actor must utilize the body he is given, the capabilities of his voice, to express. He does so within the confines of a camera's range of vision (for film acting) or within the stage. Every art form has limitations, and our job is to fill to the edges--or to successfully leave certain parts unfilled, negative space, to preserve the beauty of what is there. (This is done a lot with Chinese art scrolls.) The vocal musician also has a certain range, and of course has all the rules of his musical discipline to follow.