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WD_360/ 2007
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 4 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25.6 x 17.7 | | Size (mm): | 650 x 450 | | Catalog #: | WD_0360 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
so much depends
XXII
1 so much depends
2 upon
3 a red wheel
4 barrow
5 glazed with rain
6 water
7 beside the white
8 chickens
Original text: William Carlos Williams, Spring and All ([Paris]: Contact, 1923): 78. PS 3545 .I544S7 1970 Victoria College Library - First publication date: 1923
Online text copyright © 2005, Ian Lancashire for the Department of English, University of Toronto.
-rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/2316.html
William Carlos Williams -
Dr. William Carlos Williams (sometimes known as WCW) (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963), was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism.
Poetry:
Williams' most anthologized poem is "The Red Wheelbarrow," considered an example of the Imagist movement's style and principles (see also "This Is Just To Say"). However, Williams, like his associate Ezra Pound, had long ago rejected the imagist movement by the time this poem was published as part of Spring and All in 1923. Williams is more strongly associated with the American Modernist movement in literature, and saw his poetic project as a distinctly American one; he sought to renew language through the fresh, raw idiom that grew out of America's cultural and social heterogeneity, at the same time freeing it from what he saw as the worn-out language of British and European culture.
Williams tried to invent an entirely fresh form, an American form of poetry whose subject matter was centered on everyday circumstances of life and the lives of common people. He then came up with the concept of the variable foot evolved from years of visual and auditory sampling of his world from the first person perspective as a part of the day in the life as a physician. The variable foot is rooted within the multi-faceted American Idiom. This discovery was a part of his keen observation of how radio and newspaper influenced how people communicated and represents the "machine of words" (as he described a poem on one occasion) just as the mechanistic motions of a city can become a consciousness. Williams didn’t use traditional meter in most of his poems. His correspondence with Hilda Doolittle also exposed him to the relationship of sapphic rhythms to the inner voice of poetic truth:
"The stars about the beautiful moon again hide their radiant shapes, when she is full and shines at her brightest on all the earth"– Sappho.
This is to be contrasted with a poem from Pictures from Brueghel titled "Shadows":
"Shadows cast by the street light
under the stars,
the head is tilted back,
the long shadow of the legs
presumes a world taken for granted
on which the cricket trills"
The breaks in the poem search out a natural pause spoken in the American idiom that is also reflective of rhythms found within jazz sounds that also touch upon Sapphic harmony. Williams never stopped searching for the perfect line. He experimented with different types of lines and eventually found the "stepped triadic line", a long line which is divided into three segments. This line is used in Paterson and in poems like "To Elsie" and "The Ivy Crown." Here again one of Williams' aims is to show the truly American (i.e., opposed to European traditions) rhythm which is unnoticed but present in everyday American language.
-en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Carlos_Williams
Steve Reich
Desert Music, The (1984)
for amplified chorus (27), and orchestra
Text: William Carlos Williams (E)
4(II,III,IV=picc).4(II,III,IV=corA).
4(II,III,IV=bcl).4(IV=dbn)—4.4
(I=picc.tpt ad lib).3.1—timp(2players=rototoms).
perc(7):medium tam-t/maracas/sticks/2BD/2glsp/
2xyl/2vib/2marimba—2pft(4players)—
strings(12.12.9.9.6) (voices and woodwinds amplified)
-www.stevereich.com/
The Desert Music (1982-84)
"...Later, in the New Testament, Jesus goes to the desert to cofront his visions, to overcome his temptations, to struggle with the devil, to fight madness - and you find this idea in the stories of Paul Bowles in our time. The desert is associated with hallucinations and insanity. It threatens one's normal thinking." — Steve Reich in conversation with Jonathan Cott
The Idea of the Desert: "...Finally, there is another desert that is central to The Desert Music: White Sands and Alamagordo in New Mexico, where weapons of the most intense and sophisticated sort are constantly being develloped and tested. Hidden away from the eyes of the rest of the world are these infernal machines that could lead to the destruction of the planet - and it is to this possibility that the words of William Carlos Williams, which I set in the third movement, refer ('Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them or perish'). So it was these images that particularly struck me, though they seem to be ingrained in people's thinking generally when the idea of the desert comes to mind." Steve Reich in conversation with Jonathan Cott
Music and Text: "...All pieces with texts - operas, cantatas, whatever - have, in my opinion, to work first simply as pieces of music that one listens to with eyes closed, without understanding a word. Otherwise, they're not musically successful, they're dead 'settings'." Steve Reich in conversation with Jonathan Cott
Totally wide awake: "...You know, some critics of my earlier pieces thought I was intending to create some kind of 'hypnotic' or 'trance' music. And I always thought, 'No, no, no, I want you to be wide awake and hear details you've never heard before!' People listen to things any way they wish, of course, and I don't have anything to say about it, even if I have written the pieces. But I actually prefer the music to be heard by somebody who's totally wide awake, hearing more than he or she usually does, rather than by someone who's just spaced-out and receiving a lot of ephemeral impressions." Steve Reich in conversation with Jonathan Cott
It leaves language behind: "...One has to be in relative stillness to hear things in detail. All meditative practices are based on some sort of silence - inner and outer. Williams says: 'We half closed/our eyes' - you're closing your eyes to hear more intently. And Williams continues: 'We do not/hear it through out eyes./It is not/aflute note either, it is the relation/of a flute note to a drum.' And then, suddenly, the eyes are open, 'I am wide/awake.' He sort of reaches out and grabs you: 'The mind/is listening.' At which point the chorus sings 'dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee...' It goes into something completely non-verbal, it leaves language behind." Steve Reich in conversation with Jonathan Cott
"...Pulsation and vocalise, pure sound. 'I am wide/awake. The mind/is listening.' And off you go into pulsation. Words come to an end, and musical communication takes over." Steve Reich in conversation with Jonathan Cott
Constant ambiguity: "...Listening to umm-pah.pah, umm-pah-pah over and over again is intolerable and, indeed, a mistake. So if you want to write music that is repetitive in any literal sense, you have to work to keep a lightness and constant ambiguity with regard to where the stresses and where the beginnings and endings are." Steve Reich in conversation with Jonathan Cott
"The desert becomes a paradise when it is accepted as a desert. The desert can never be anything but a desert if we are trying to escape it." Thomas Merton
Selection and ordering of notes: "...You know, of course, that the notes on the piano keyboard aren't all there are - there's a continuity of vibration from the lowest to the highest sounds we can hear. Slowly, over more than a thousand years, out of this complete continuity of vibration from low to high, musicians in the West have evolved the selection and ordering of notes we find on the keyboard and in all our other instruments. These notes, and the harmonic system we have used to order them, struck me as a light radiating out of the dark infinitude of available vibrations. And when listening in particular to two pieces - Handel's Water Music and Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress - I used to get a vision of a kind of barge of light, floating down a river in very dark surroundings, in complete darkness." Steve Reich in conversation with Jonathan Cott
A ship of light: "...You see, I understand that human conversations are, in a sense, the light - a kind of conveyance in which we ride, in which we live, and without which we die. And the human construct that we call our music is merely a conversation - something we've all evolved together, and which rests on no final or ultimate laws. And it sails, in my mind, like a ship of light down an endlessly dark corridor, preserving itself as long as it can. And no more and no less." Steve Reich in conversation with Jonathan Cott
"Contemplation is the highest and most paradoxical form of self realization, attained by apparent self-annihilation." Thomas Merton
"...In the scoring of The Desert Music I wanted to use all the orchestral instruments to play the repeating interlocking melodic patterns found in much of my earlier music." Steve Reich, The Desert Music: Notes by the composer
"...While composing the last part of the slow movement during the summer of 1983 in a small town in Vermont, the local fire siren went off. I thought to myself, 'that's it,' and resolved to put a siren in the last part of the movement. After some reflection I decided that instead of a mechanical or electrical siren, the violas, which were not playing at that time, could play glissandos which, with contact microphones attached, would rise and fall over the entire orchestra and chorus." The Desert Music: Notes by the composer
"You do not go into the desert to find yourself but to lose yourself." Permutation by Ralph Lichtensteiger and Edmond Jabčs
-www.lichtensteiger.de/desert_music.html
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