Chapter 3

Music and Metamusic in Beckett’s Early Plays for Radio¹

Katarzyna Ojrzyńska

Advocating an emotional rather than an intellectual approach to his theatre, Beckett once wrote the following famous words to Jessica Tandy about Not I: ‘I hope the piece may work on the nerves of the audience, not its intellect’.² Thus, it seems logical that in his works the Irish dramatist endeavoured to achieve a certain effect of musicality, for, as Katharine Worth puts it simply, ‘music must affect the emotional imagination of the listener in some way’.³ Beckett frequently stressed the importance of the orchestration of various sounds and voices in his plays. One of the most representative examples of this idea can be found in a well-known statement made in a letter to Alan Schneider in which the playwright contends: ‘My work is a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible, and I accept responsibility for nothing else’.⁴ Although this comment was made specifically with reference to Endgame, it seems equally relevant to other dramatic works by Beckett whose musicality has interested numerous contemporary critics.

It should be stressed that although Beckett developed his own minimalist, but at the same time diverse, language of theatre, departing significantly from the domination of the word on stage, he strongly objected to the Wagnerian synthesis of the arts, advocating already in the early 1950s that ‘a theatre [should be] reduced to its own means, speech and acting, without painting, without music, without embellishments’.⁵ On another occasion, in a letter to his American publisher, Barney Rosset, dated 27 August 1957, he firmly states: ‘If we can’t keep our genres more or less distinct, or extricate them from the confusion that has them where they are, we might as well go home and lie down.’⁶ In the light of his views, Beckett turned to music as the most abstract of arts, since it displays a great degree of ‘formal autonomy and unworldly self-sufficiency’.⁷ Furthermore, it is conspicuous that the dramatist frequently used music in its purest theatrical form, in the fashion postulated by Jerzy Grotowski, who pursued his vision of the anti-eclectic and anti-synthetic poor theatre ‘stripped of all that is not essential to it, reveal[ing] to us not only the backbone of the medium, but also the deep riches which lie in the very nature of the art-form’.⁸ Beckett, of course, does not go as far as to eliminate ‘music (live or recorded) not produced by the actors’⁹ from his plays, yet he frequently employed the concept of the stage, screen or radio performance ‘becom[ing] music through the orchestration of voices and clashing objects’,¹⁰ which is apparent in the musical quality of a number of his works written for various media.

What deserves particular attention is the way in which this area of Beckett’s interests finds expression in his early radio plays, or, as Beckett called them, ‘radio texts’ – works created for the medium whose ephemeral, auditory nature shares properties with the experience of music.¹¹ Written in the 1950s, All That Fall and Embers retain certain elements of a stylized realistic convention and traditional plot and thus differ significantly from Beckett’s later experiments with the arts of radio, theatre and film. What distinguishes these works in terms of musicality is their carefully organized rhythmical structure, the effective use of concrete musical scores intricately woven into their plots and, above all, their metamusical dimension, which renders the plays similar to polyphonic musical compositions orchestrated by the characters. Although the idea of orchestration can be found in a number of Beckett’s works for the stage and film, it is his early radio plays that most comprehensively explore the notion of creativity and artistic control over the acoustic matter in musical terms, by drawing the listener’s attention to the role of the protagonists as artists who give an aesthetic shape to their own and the audience’s auditory experience.

According to James Knowlson, in his work as a director Beckett frequently used musical terms such as ‘piano’, ‘fortissimo’, ‘andante’, ‘allegro’, ‘da capo’, ‘cadenza’.¹² Furthermore, actors who worked with Beckett and his texts often compare the plays to musical scores, rehearsals to being conducted or themselves to musical instruments.¹³ Interestingly, the presence of the figure of an artist as a conductor, a peculiar alter ego of the author, can be easily traced in many of Beckett’s radio plays, such as Words and Music, Cascando or Rough for Radio I, as well as in his works for the stage. The earliest texts in which the dramatist investigates this idea most fully are the two radio dramas discussed in this chapter.

All That Fall

Mrs Rooney, the protagonist of Beckett’s first play for radio, All That Fall (1956), occupies a special position amongst the orchestrating figures in Beckett’s work, since, contrary to the prevalent tendency among his characters to brood incessantly over the past and continuously to ‘revolv[e] it all [in their] poor mind[s]’,¹⁴ most of the time she seems closely focused upon the ‘here and now’. Relying on her direct everyday experience, she mediates this to the listeners in a musical form, demonstrating an apparently substantial degree of control over the presented acoustic material.

All That Fall is based on a fairly simple plot line. The protagonist, an old and decrepit Irish woman, walks to the nearby railway station to meet her husband and together they return home. Structurally sometimes compared to a sonata,¹⁵ the drama can be divided into three ‘movements’, which Martin Esslin defines as: ‘Maddy Rooney’s anabasis, her wait at the station, her and Dan’s katabasis’,¹⁶ understood both in kinetic terms as three phases of the physical journey and as parts of a musical composition. With regards to the metamusical dimension of the play, these movements may be seen as denoting the protagonist’s diminishing orchestrating power. Gradually, Mrs Rooney’s role in the radio drama changes, as, towards the end of her journey, she relinquishes the position of a conductor orchestrating the sounds of the play and accepts the role of an orchestrated subject. In this respect, the closing, katabatic movement can be compared to the final descent from the podium of the conductor – as Mrs Rooney yields to her husband’s authority. It is conspicuous that, while such a reversal of power relations can be observed in a number of Beckett’s plays, most notably in the case of Pozzo and Lucky in Waiting for Godot, in All That Fall this change is communicated in metamusical terms.

It should be stressed that Maddy plays the role of an orchestrator in a subjective sense. In the first production of the play for the BBC in 1957, having consulted with Beckett over the issue, the producer Donald McWhinnie used stylized sounds of nature in the play so as to suggest that it presents an image of reality filtered through Mrs Rooney’s consciousness.¹⁷ Consequently, the sounds evoked by Maddy Rooney can be interpreted both from a ‘psychoacoustic perspective’¹⁸ as a reflection of an individual aural landscape, and in artistic terms as an instance of creative self-fashioning through transforming one’s acoustic experience into a musical score.

Although, as I hope to demonstrate, towards the end of the play it seems much diminished, Mrs Rooney’s command over her acoustic environment, strongly present in the first movement of the drama, is most evident in the use of animal sounds. The play opens with ‘Rural sounds. Sheep, bird, cow, cock, severally, then together. Silence.’¹⁹ What seems striking about these sounds is not only their intended artificial quality, but also the order of their occurrence. Filtered through Maddy Rooney’s consciousness, the sounds are arranged in a fashion resembling an orchestra’s tuning before playing the opening bars of a composition under the conductor’s baton. This may be interpreted as either an illustration of the mechanisms of Mrs Rooney’s attention, which she at first focuses on separate sounds, or as an indication of her using more conscious orchestrating measures. The latter idea is made even more explicit in the third movement of the play. Proposing a feminist reading and referring to the play’s protagonist, Sarah Bryant-Bertail observes:

Later on her way back home from the station with her husband, it is Maddy herself who names the animals, this time in an apparent effort to bring them back to life: ‘All is still. No living soul in sight … The wind – (brief wind) – scarcely stirs the leaves and the birds – (brief chirp) – are tired of singing. The cows – (brief moo) – and sheep (brief baa) – ruminate in silence. The dogs (brief bark) are hushed and the hens (brief cackle) – sprawl torpid in the dusk …’ (43–44). This passage is comical in effect, a parody of the voice of God/the Author on the day of creation. Here is an instance where the hierarchical values are reversed, because Maddy is reviving the living creatures even as she describes them dying out.²⁰

The passage discussed also reinforces a similarity between Maddy Rooney and the traditional depictions of Death in a danse macabre which underscores her role as the orchestrator. If we consider the nature of the medium for which the play was written, Maddy is the figure of authority who decides about life and death, since the existence of the characters and their world in a radio text depends on them being heard by the audience.

In fact, the play seems replete with allusions to the motif of the dance of death, which always recur in connection with the protagonist. One may, for instance, point to the use of Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ string quartet both at the beginning and towards the end of Mrs Rooney’s journey to and from the railway station, ‘serving the play as both overture and coda’.²¹ The main theme of the string quartet used in All That Fall perfectly conforms to the acoustic image of the suburban area deeply troubled with death and decay that is presented. The miserable condition of the Boghill community is most evident in the numerous complaints made by the neighbours the protagonist meets on her way to the railway station concerning their own poor health or the death and physical decay of their relatives. The idea of deterioration is further reinforced by the unreliability of the various means of transport they use, which all break down or fail, and the general atmosphere of the place stinking of rotten leaves like ‘a dead dog’.²² It is also conspicuous that, passing next to the building from which the music comes, Mrs Rooney murmurs Schubert’s melody to the rhythm established by her shuffling feet. In this way, she reinforces the theme of decay, expresses her sympathy for the woman inside the house and becomes a chanting messenger or even an incarnation of Death, reminding Boghill denizens of their unavoidable fate, which can be inferred from their successive conversations: for instance, when Mr Slocum enquires, ‘Are you going in my direction?’, she answers: ‘I am, Mr Slocum, we all are’.²³ The melody of Schubert’s piece, which the protagonist murmurs in the opening of the play, may thus be seen as Mrs Rooney’s attribute, an equivalent of the musical instruments with which the figure of Death was traditionally presented in images of the danse macabre.

Certain allusions to the dance of death and the similarity between Mrs Rooney and Death are also discernible in the scene in which the protagonist meets Miss Fitt, a self-centred and neurotic spinster, who spends most of the time ‘alone with [her] Maker’.²⁴ Physically a direct opposite of the considerably overweight Mrs Rooney, Miss Fitt is a thin and bony creature concerned more with heavenly existence than with earthly bondage and the issues troubling other people, in this way paradoxically contradicting the ideal of Christian charity. Miss Fitt’s humming of the hymn ‘Lead, Kindly Light’ brings her into a mood of religious contemplation and distances her from everyday chores. Yet it is also an expression of fake piousness protecting the spinster from any interference from the outside that would distract her from the alternative reality she has created. The protagonist ingeniously mocks Miss Fitt also when she joins in her song. The flimsy humming is now overpowered by forceful singing (here Beckett uses the musical term ‘forte’²⁵). Mrs Rooney’s disdain, however, consists not only in the tone of her voice but also in the uttered words, as she chooses to verbalize only those fragments of the hymn that concern the miserable condition of human existence and to introduce slight changes to the lyrics: ‘… the encircling gloo-oom … tum tum on me. [Forte.] The night is dark and I am far from ho-ome, tum tum –’,²⁶ thus bringing the outraged spinster back down to earth. Furthermore, the protagonist reminds her companion that the hymn was chanted on the Titanic, which, owing to the scale of the catastrophe, serves as a direct reference to the wretched condition of Boghill’s inhabitants, all of whom seem to be inevitably heading for extinction. This is also yet another allusion to the danse macabre, which has its roots in the legend of the Three Living and Three Dead, in which the latter inform the former about their unavoidable fate. Consequently, through the allusions to the dance of death motif, Beckett places emphasis on the position of Mrs Rooney as the orchestrator of life perceived as a journey towards death. It should be stressed at this point that human existence, as depicted in the Beckettian oeuvre, pertains to what Heidegger defines as ‘being towards death’ (Sein-zum-Tode). Presented sometimes literally (Act Without Words I) as thrown into the world (Geworfenheit),²⁷ the characters are offered very few stable points of reference or certainty, apart from the fact that eventually they will all die. Therefore, the figure of Mrs Rooney as an orchestrator in All That Fall additionally underscores the existentialist dimension of the play, in which living is tantamount to a long and painful process of dying.

At the same time, Beckett seems to mock the connection between his protagonist and Death in a crude, naturalistic way. Again alluding to the ‘Death and the Maiden’ theme in music and visual arts, the play explores the idea of the erotic lure of Death²⁸ in a grotesque fashion when the decrepit, gargantuan Mrs Rooney encourages the aged Mr Slocum to ‘unlace [her] behind the hedge’.²⁹ Although Mr Slocum apparently resists the temptation, this does not undermine Mrs Rooney’s position of power, which is most manifest in the way she orchestrates the acoustic dimension of the play.

In musical terms, what serves as the backbone of the composition of the first movement of the play is the sound of Mrs Rooney’s tired footfalls, which creates a peculiar melody of deterioration and exhaustion. Beckett wrote to his friend, Nancy Cunard: ‘in the dead of t’other night got a nice gruesome idea full of cartwheels and dragging feet and puffing and panting which may or may not lead to something’.³⁰ These sounds gave rise to All That Fall and constitute the core of its rhythmical structure, which, according to Donald McWhinnie, was amplified by the use of four animal sounds at the beginning of the play ‘correspond[ing] exactly to the four-in-a-bar metre of Mrs. Rooney’s walk to the station and back, which is the percussive accompaniment to the play’.³¹ The idea of using this particular acoustic element as a skeleton to support the whole musical composition of the drama can be observed in a number of the playwright’s later works such as Footfalls and Quad. One may suspect that it resulted from Beckett’s being ‘an attentive and courteous listener’,³² an observation that can be applied to both human relationships and his ability to absorb sounds from the environment. The shuffling quality of the steps marks Mrs Rooney’s locomotive deterioration and her progress, or rather regress, towards the final stasis. As Mary Bryden maintains, ‘the friction of feet is important, for it provides a constant reminder of the cost or effort of that movement, thus endowing an aerial play with a solidity of earth-bound resonance’,³³ as if bringing the characters closer to the ground and, simultaneously, to the grave.

In the third movement of the play, the percussive thread becomes amplified by the blind Mr Rooney, who joins his wife on her homeward journey, and is further enhanced by the tapping and thudding noises he produces with his cane. These sounds alert the listener to the notion of visual impairment, which Beckett endows with a particular meaning, especially in his radio plays, due to the specificity of the medium which deprives the audience of the possibility to confront the sounds they hear with visual equivalents. For Worth, this also lends to the subjective and oneiric character of the dramatic piece: ‘Beckett’s handling of blindness takes us into a much more dream-like territory. The blind man’s stick tapping the way in All That Fall contributes to a strange melody in which human voices, animal sounds, and the music of Schubert create the atmosphere of an inner landscape’.³⁴ Instead of gaining access to the objective world inhabited by the Beckettian characters, the audience set out on a peculiar journey into the reality subjectively experienced by the protagonist.

Unlike the numerous others of Beckett’s characters who are frequently presented as isolated and mostly focused on their past, Mrs Rooney does not seem alienated from her surrounding reality. She immerses herself in the sounds of the world and the melody of her own gait by means of which she orchestrates her own acoustic experience. She uses her body as a tool, an instrument that controls and complements the sounds she distils from her environment. The organization of the sonic texture of the play is therefore presented as a creative act and a symbol of control over life. This is why Mrs Rooney seems so desperate to manifest her presence at the railway station. After remaining silent for a moment, she announces: ‘Do not imagine, because I am silent, that I am not present, and alive’³⁵ and later tries to outshout the noise of the train.³⁶ However, this form of reasserting her orchestrating power in fact anticipates her renunciation of her position of control in the third movement of the play.

In order to analyse the change in the power relations that takes place in All That Fall, let us return to the acoustic motif of the tapping of the stick. The sound reinforces the intrusive presence of Mr Rooney, accentuating his domineering position in the relationship with his wife. Although, as Jeff Porter observes, Maddy ‘is the acoustic centre of the play, both a maker of sound and its hearer and, as such, enjoys an unusual degree of agency for a Beckett character’,³⁷ she is not necessarily the one who holds power. As a matter of fact, acting as a vigorous and bawdy orchestrator in the first movement of the play, Mrs Rooney is degraded to a submissive position once she is accompanied by her husband, which is most evident in her desperate pleas: ‘Put your arm round me … Be nice to me!’³⁸ It is also conspicuous that Dan Rooney’s short and frequently sharp comments provide a counterpoint to the lengthy sequences delivered by his wife. Consequently, these curt answers as well as the sound of the thudding stick in the third movement of the play can be associated with the notions of disciplining and curtailing the physical and verbal excess associated with the figure of Mrs Rooney, conspicuous in her talkativeness as well as the references to her overweight body and erotic desires. Dan Rooney, by contrast, serves as a proponent of emotional detachment and erotic moderation.

As a result, when seen from a metamusical perspective, the stick is no longer simply a symbol of impairment, for its sound gives an impression of a metronome that coordinates the moves of the couple. In this way, from a conductor orchestrating the rural sounds in the opening of the drama, Mrs Rooney later turns into an orchestrated subject or an instrument, while the object that should serve as a sign of Mr Rooney’s physical incapacity and weakness eventually turns into a baton – an attribute of a conductor’s power. With this in mind, the earlier-mentioned scene where Mrs Rooney orders the elements of nature that she previously orchestrated to fall silent may be seen as an act in which she ultimately renounces the position of the conductor.

Embers

The instrumentation or orchestration of sounds in order to compose a coherent musical piece by the protagonist, who in this way imitates the creative process of the dramatist, contributes to a peculiar metamusical effect which may also be found in Beckett’s later radio play Embers (1957). Although the drama can be successfully compared to a musical score, it seems that the plot resembles even more closely the act of composing or rehearsing a musical work for a ghostly radiophonic trio. As an artist, Henry is the only character in Embers whose ‘being there’ can be ascertained due to the background noises he produces, namely the sounds of his boots on the shingle. Apart from the truly spectral father, whose physical presence is questioned even by Ada, the existence of the remaining two characters cannot be verified in any other way than on the basis of their voices which, like most other sounds, seem to be evoked by the protagonist. The absence of noises resulting from, for instance, the movement and other ‘symptoms’ of physicality of the dramatis personae as well as the awkward quality of the voice of Henry’s wife, which remains ‘Low remote … throughout’,³⁹ have led most critics to interpret the ‘acousmatic’⁴⁰ play as Henry’s ‘soulscape’ or ‘skullscape’⁴¹ of sounds orchestrated by the protagonist himself.

The sonic element that most often manifests itself as independent of Henry’s will is the constant rhythmical background accompaniment of the sea. At the same time, more than being an element of the objective reality experienced by the audience, the sea is part of Henry’s soulscape. For the protagonist, it belongs to the domain of dreams and retrospections, for ‘the sound is so strange, so unlike the sound of the sea, that if you didn’t see what it was you wouldn’t know what it was’.⁴² The soothing quality of the sound of waves beating against the shore introduces a dreamy atmosphere to the play, bringing it closer to the oneiric and retrospective That Time (1974–6). The steady musical background of the sea can be compared to a lullaby that offers Henry access to his memories, which he uses as raw material that needs to be harnessed and aestheticized to be transformed into a musical composition. This is most conspicuous in the passage in which Henry temporarily gains control over the acoustic elements that constitute his vision. In the scene where the protagonist recalls a series of Ada’s reprimands, the volume of the sea is increased and serves as an accompaniment to the dialogue of the characters, which underscores Henry’s orchestrating agency:

ADA: … Don’t stand there thinking about it. [Pause.] Don’t stand there staring.

[Pause…] Don’t wet your good boots. [Pause.]

HENRY: Don’t, don’t ….

…

ADA: [Twenty years earlier, imploring.] Don’t! Don’t!

HENRY: [Ditto, urgent.] Darling!

ADA: [Ditto, more feebly.] Don’t!

HENRY: [Ditto, exultantly.] Darling!⁴³

The waves become increasingly rough and loud towards the end of their duet when the listener hears the amplified cry of Ada and the waves, which James Jesson reads in purely sexual terms as Henry’s ‘sexual triumph’ over his partner⁴⁴ rather than an amusing marital farce. More importantly, though, the fragment proposes a rare moment when the protagonist is able to control the incessant roll of the sea, which here seems subjected to his artistic vision. In terms of metamusicality, the excerpt illustrates Henry’s attempt to orchestrate the sounds in his head into a musical form similar to a comic operetta, which accentuates his desire for artistic control over the acousmatic environment.

Another measure taken by Henry to give proper acoustic shape to the hum of the sea is presented towards the end of the play. He announces: ‘Thuds, I want thuds! … Not this … [Pause.] … sucking!’⁴⁵ and demonstrates the quality of the sound that he wishes to obtain to serve as the percussive background for his musical piece by dashing two big stones together. This primitive gesture suggests not so much imitating nature but harnessing it and using it for artistic aims. It may be seen as a creative act that goes beyond representation towards human creativity. This supports the interpretation of the protagonist as the author’s alter ego. As a director Beckett was often meticulous about the acoustic quality of his plays, as for instance in the cases of Not I and Footfalls, and sometimes resorted to demonstration. Lawrence Shainberg recalls that during the 1980 production of Endgame at the Riverside Studios, Beckett had a clear idea of how Nagg should knock on the lid of Nell’s dustbin at the beginning of the play: ‘Beckett demonstrated the sound he wanted using his bony knuckle on the lid, and after Mandell had tried it six or seven times – not “Tap, tap, tap, tap,” or “Tap … tap … tap … tap,” but “tap, tap … tap, tap” – appeared to be satisfied’.⁴⁶ Such satisfaction is not, however, granted to the main character of Embers.

Since his struggle with the sound of the ebb and flow of the sea most of the time results in failure, Henry evokes alternative sonic elements that could serve as a rhythmical backbone of his piece: the drip, which proves unsuccessful due to its association with water, as well as the beat of horse hooves and of a ruler. Interestingly, Henry perceives an intrinsic bond between the hooves and the temporal aspect of human existence when he ponders the possibility of training a horse to ‘mark time with its four legs’.⁴⁷ The sound seems to be related to the passage of time as opposed to the character’s absorption in the past. Yet even the hooves are not totally disconnected from the evoked memories of the years gone by. Like in Yeats’s play Purgatory, the sound is closely associated with the troubling images of the past, namely with the haunting scene in which Henry recalls his daughter, Addie, riding a horse, concluding with a climactic and truly ghastly ‘wail amplified to paroxysm’⁴⁸ uttered to the rising tempo marked by a galloping horse. A similar musical and emotional escalation takes place when a moment earlier the girl participates in piano lessons.

Comparable to the relationship between the conductor and the orchestra, the connection between artist and artistic material which does not easily lend itself to creative control or appropriation corresponds to the relationship between Henry and his daughter. In the two subsequent retrospections, rhythmical and hard sounds, similar to those produced by Henry with the stones, are connected with Addie and the leisure-time activities she is involved in but apparently does not enjoy. At first, we hear the girl performing one of Chopin’s waltzes to the accompaniment of her music master beating time with a cylindrical ruler. Despite her effort, Addie repeatedly makes the same error by playing the lower note E instead of F. In the subsequent retrospection, the girl is riding a horse and the sound of the ruler is replaced with the beat of hooves, which again imposes a certain disciplining rhythm upon her. Reflecting the status of the family, the activities aim at her gradual introduction into society where demonstrating impeccable manners plays a crucial role. Thus, the acoustic elements communicate the idea of civilizing the child, appropriating her body and mind to certain norms. In the artistic sense, Addie is shapeless matter which needs to be given proper contour: Beckett conveys this in a musical fashion. The scenes under discussion can also be read as a metamusical, self-ironic commentary on the artist’s, in this case Henry’s, struggle for control, coherence and perfection. Much like his artistic creation – the story of Bolton that incessantly meanders away from its conclusion – Addie resists any framework one tries to impose on her; she escapes the attempts of orchestrating her behaviour, tending towards chaos, acoustically discernible in her loud paroxysmal wail. In metamusical terms, she is an insubordinate musician who rebels against the conductor whose directions she is unwilling or unable to follow.

In a way, Henry alludes to the stereotypical figure of a conductor as a despot, while his connection with the women whose voices he attempts to orchestrate can be compared to the patriarchal nineteenth-century concept of a musical ‘marriage … with the orchestra in the role of wife, and the conductor as husband’.⁴⁹ Due to Addie’s rebellious nature, so defined a relationship is bound to fail in the play, which seems to be typical of more contemporary conductor–orchestra relations. As Barbara Pollack explains, ‘as the 20th century progressed, it became more common for conductors to project their own personalities and fantasies onto the orchestra, and the musicians, in turn, projected theirs back onto the conductor’.⁵⁰ This observation seems equally relevant to Henry’s relationship with his wife, especially at the end of the play, when he implores her to continue her story: ‘Drive on, drive on! … Keep on, keep on!’⁵¹ Yet, when after a while Ada announces that she has nothing more to say, Henry seems powerless and unable to prevent her departure.

With regard to the metamusical dimension of the play, it is crucial to notice that in the play Henry also acts as a self-orchestrator. This is most conspicuous in the opening of the drama, when he urges himself to move and thus produce specific sounds with exclamations: ‘On. [Sea. Voice louder.] On! [He moves on. Boots on shingle. As he goes.] Stop. [Boots on shingle. As he goes, louder.] Stop! [He halts. Sea a little louder.] Down. [Sea. Voice louder.] Down! [Slither of shingle as he sits…]’.⁵² Not unlike Mrs Rooney, Henry uses his body as a tool that may help him to realize his artistic vision. His inner compulsion to create forces him to expose himself physically to the sound of the waves – an element stimulating him to pursue his creative endeavour.

In some respects, one may notice certain parallels between the protagonist of Embers and the Irish Cuchulain as presented in Yeats’s dramatic oeuvre. Margaret Harper observes that

In general, the Cuchulain plays feature female characters … who are associated with water, shorelines and the borders of territories, including the borders between the living and the dead. This hero is noticeably surrounded by the water … So Cuchulain is, I think, islanded. … In other words, the myth of Cuchulain, as interpreted by Yeats, is about being caught in a failed definition, floating in indefiniteness, with the problem of completion perpetually deferred.⁵³

Although Henry hardly resembles the heroic figure of the legendary Irish warrior from Yeats’s plays, the metaphor used by Harper seems highly relevant to the spiritual condition of Beckett’s protagonist seen as a liminal figure suspended between reality and the world of his memories, between dreams and phantasmagorias and between the world of the living and the realm of the dead. Not unlike Cuchulain, Beckett’s protagonist attempts to combat the waves, which in the play are clearly associated with the female element.⁵⁴ To achieve this aim he resorts to artistic activity.

In fact, Henry’s creative striving for control over the acoustic environment of the play is most visible in the tension between him and the sea. Lawley argues that ‘Beckett is well aware of the traditional connections of the sea with creativity. [Therefore, it can be] regarded, though in a harshly ironic light, as a major element in the creative process. For without his sea Henry would presumably have no need to create.’⁵⁵ The protagonist seeks inspiration from the sounds of nature, which, however, need to be artistically refashioned to be a part of his composition. Similar to Cuchulain in Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well, the main character of Embers may either surrender to the lure of passivity or actively participate in shaping his fate as an artist and a conductor, somewhat similar to the Irish warrior in his struggle with his ghostly orchestra. Finally, like a conductor, isolated on a podium, he seems equally ‘islanded’ as Yeats’s hero. Surrounded by the unruly sounds, he seems engaged in never-ending artistic strife.

This notion of loneliness is strongly underscored in the final part of the play, when, apart from the beat of the waves, all the voices evoked by Henry fall silent and the protagonist loses his creative control over them. At the beginning of his final story, the main character in vain tries to evoke the ghostly Ada and the sound of the hooves. Nor does the sea obey his last order: ‘Not a sound’,⁵⁶ which could bring the orchestrated musical piece to a close. What Henry is left with is the unfinished story of Bolton, which serves as the opening and coda of his musical piece and as a memoir of his failure as an orchestrator to bring it to a proper conclusion. Having returned to dull, everyday reality, he can only wait for another spark of creative inspiration, which will allow him to ‘Fail again. Fail better’, to use Beckett’s famous words from Worstward Ho.⁵⁷

Metamusic in Other Plays by Beckett

The metamusical motif of orchestration also recurs in Beckett’s later plays for radio. In a similar vein as in Embers, in Cascando (1961) Beckett focuses on the idea of an unfinished musical narrative which troubles the protagonist. In his attempt to bring the story of Woburn, possibly his alter ego, to an end, the Opener orchestrates the sounds of the Voice and the Music into a coherent acoustic piece. Although the protagonist seems largely successful in his endeavours and towards the end the two sonic elements are harmoniously combined ‘as though they had linked their arms’,⁵⁸ the play is left open ended as if in anticipation of a finale that never takes place.

It needs to be emphasized that the Opener holds a substantial degree of control over his acoustic environment, which can be seen as a projection of his own psyche. The acoustic matter seems to be subjected to his conductorial will, which he several times comments on with satisfaction: ‘Good’.⁵⁹ This is unusual for Beckettian characters, whose orchestrating attempts are notoriously bound to failure. Such is, for instance, the case of Words and Music (1961), which illustrates in acoustic terms the decline of the orchestrating power of the character named Croak. At first presented as a royal figure of authority, who conducts his orchestra (Music) and soloist (Words) in an authoritarian way and is addressed by them in a humble fashion, at the end of the drama he seems unable to perform his function any longer and lets his orchestrating attribute – a club – fall to the ground. Although Words and Music eventually achieve a certain harmony, Croak renounces his power and leaves to the sound of shuffling slippers, either too overwhelmed by the achieved effect, which instead of comfort brings him pain, or perhaps unwilling to finish his work, for fear that completion would amount to silence and creative emptiness. After his departure, Words tries to take over the role of the orchestrator and implores Music to continue its performance. The achieved effect is far from satisfactory, and Words concludes with a deep sigh.

What sheds further light on the play are Beckett’s own words to Katharine Worth regarding Words and Music: ‘Music always wins’,⁶⁰ alluding to the complex power relations between Words and Music in this radio drama. From the very beginning the relationship between these two ‘characters’ seems tense. This is most conspicuous in the way they interrupt each other’s performances either with the orchestra’s chaotic tuning or the soloist’s groans and verbal protestations. In the end Music prevails, as it sets the tune of the final performance and thus prompts Words’s singing. In fact, it appears it is Music that holds the real orchestrating power over both Croak’s emotions and the soloist’s performance and in this way manifests its supremacy over the verbal order.

Finally, I want to turn to the metamusical tension between the conductor and the insubordinate acoustic matter which is particularly noticeable in some of Beckett’s works for the stage, such as Not I (1972) and Footfalls (1975). In both plays the concept of self-orchestration is explored. In the case of Footfalls, Beckett again alludes to the notion of conducting/composing by means of adjusting the acoustic material to the percussive line of the protagonist’s gait. The protagonist orchestrates the sound of her own movement and speech and complements the musical piece with a contrapuntal melody line in the form of words delivered by her mother, whose voice May possibly hears only in her head.

In Not I, in which it is possible to see Mouth and Auditor as representative of two aspects of one personality, Beckett again recycles the idea of tension between the conductor and the orchestrated subject. While Mouth occupies the upstage position, the mysterious figure of Auditor, clothed in loose black djellaba, remains in the background. Most critical interpretations of the play seem to be based on the assumption that Auditor serves as ‘a physical representation of an internal force that is developing clearly in dialogue’,⁶¹ in which (s)he silently participates. Yet it needs to be stressed that the attempts to exert pressure on Mouth by the mysterious figure are also conveyed in a metamusical fashion and, as in the case of Embers, result in the ultimate failure. The effects of the possible communication between the characters are conspicuous in the violent refusal of Mouth to perform her monologue in the first person. The aggressive exclamation ‘… what?.. who?.. no!.. she!..’⁶² is followed by Auditor’s gesture that ‘consists in simple sideways raising of arms from sides and their falling back’.⁶³ Although Beckett specified in his stage directions that the raising of arms aims to communicate ‘helpless compassion’,⁶⁴ it is also reminiscent of a conductor’s gesture indicating a crescendo. In the context of the play, it may be seen as an expression of a wish to increase the intensity of the internal struggle within the orchestrated character, which will eventually lead to relinquishing the third person. After each failed attempt to sustain the moment of doubt and thus control Mouth’s performance, Auditor’s gesture ‘lessens … till scarcely perceptible at [the] third [repetition]’.⁶⁵ As in the case of the sea in Embers, after the conductor’s failure, the ‘unorchestrable’ sounds do not cease but continue their unruly existence. In fact, by carrying on with her monologue, Mouth paradoxically reaffirms her creative identity, since the chaotic form of her speech, which seems almost literally dismembered by the character’s teeth, creates a new, musical rather than narrative quality with its hypnotic flow and numerous echoes.

Conclusion

To recapitulate, analysis of the metamusical dimension of Beckett’s early plays for radio sheds light both on the power relations between the characters and on the nature of the creative process of composing and conducting. Not unlike many of Beckett’s plays for the stage, the radio texts discussed can be read both as musical scores and works about orchestrating, combining sound and voice together into well-arranged pieces of music. Still, this metamusical dimension seems most evident in the dramas written for a medium that operates exclusively with sound. Relying solely on the sonic experience, Beckett’s early radio plays provide a self-ironic commentary on the playwright’s own process of writing, understood as parallel to composing. In a broader sense, they address the notions of individuality and subjectivity in experiencing the world as well as the idea of human creative propensity. In the end, this seems to inspire Beckett’s characters to give musical shape to their experience, transforming it into a work of art.

¹ This chapter is a revised and expanded version of ‘O muzyce i metamuzyce we wczesnych słuchowiskach Samuela Becketta’, Tekstualia 20/1 (2010): 89–101. I am very grateful to Sara Jane Bailes and Nicholas Till for their helpful comments on the previous version of the chapter.

² Quoted in Enoch Brater, ‘The I in Beckett’s Not I’, Twentieth Century Literature 20/3 (1974): 189–200 (p. 200).

³ Katharine Worth, ‘Words for Music Perhaps’, in Mary Bryden (ed.), Samuel Beckett and Music (Oxford, 1998), pp. 9–20 (p. 11).

⁴ Samuel Beckett to Alan Schneider, 29 Dec. 1957, in No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, ed. Maurice Harmon (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1998), p. 24.

⁵ Samuel Beckett to Georges Duthuit, 3 Jan. 1951, in George Craig et al. (eds), The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 2: 1941–1956 (Cambridge, 2011), p. 218.

⁶ Quoted in Clas Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting (Åbo, 1976), p. 3.

⁷ Thomas Mansell, ‘Different Music: Beckett’s Theatrical Conduct’, in Marius Buning et al. (eds), Historicising Beckett: Issues of Performance, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 15 (Amsterdam and New York, 2005), pp. 225–39 (p. 227).

⁸ Jerzy Grotowski, Towards a Poor Theatre (New York, 1968), p. 21.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ James Jesson, ‘“White World. Not a Sound”: Beckett’s Radioactive Text in Embers’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 51/1 (2009): 47–65 (p. 47); Everett C. Frost, ‘A “Fresh Go” for the Skull’, in Lois Oppenheim (ed.), Directing Beckett (Michigan, 1997), p. 191.

¹² James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London, 1996), p. 665.

¹³ Cf. Irena Jun, interview by Antoni Libera, in Linda Ben-Zvi (ed.), Women in Beckett (Urbana and Chicago, 1990), pp. 47–50 (p. 48); Mary Bryden, ‘Beckett and the Sound of Silence’, in (ed.), Samuel Beckett and Music, pp. 21–46 (p. 44).

¹⁴ Samuel Beckett, Footfalls, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London, 1986), p. 400.

¹⁵ Kevin Branigan, Radio Beckett: Musicality in the Radio Plays of Samuel Beckett (Bern, 2008), p. 96.

¹⁶ Quoted in Frost, ‘A “Fresh Go” for the Skull’, p. 190.

¹⁷ Jeff Porter, ‘Samuel Beckett and the Radiophonic Body: Beckett and the BBC’, Modern Drama 53/4 (2010): 431–46 (pp. 440–41); Frost, ‘A “Fresh Go” for the Skull’, p. 196.

¹⁸ Frost, ‘A “Fresh Go” for the Skull’, p. 197.

¹⁹ Samuel Beckett, All That Fall, in The Complete Dramatic Works, p. 172.

²⁰ Sarah Bryant-Bertail, ‘The True-Real Woman: Maddy Rooney as Picara in All That Fall’, available at <http://archive.today/Gnjvi>.

²¹ Porter, ‘Samuel Beckett and the Radiophonic Body’, p. 435.

²² Beckett, All That Fall, p. 196; for a more detailed discussion of the notion of decay in the play, see Katarzyna Ojrzyńska, ‘The Journey through the Dying World of Boghill in Samuel Beckett’s Play All That Fall’, in Magdalena Cieślak and Agnieszka Rasmus (eds), Images of the City (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 284–93.

²³ Beckett, All That Fall, p. 177.

²⁴ Ibid., p. 182.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 184.

²⁶ Ibid. The original is ‘Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,/Lead Thou me on!/The night is dark, and I am far from home,/Lead Thou me on!’ (Lyra Apostolica (Derby and London, 1837), p. 28).

²⁷ Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Bodmin, 2001).

²⁸ See, for instance, Niklaus Manuel Deutsch’s painting Death and the Maiden (1517).

²⁹ Beckett, All That Fall, p. 177.

³⁰ Quoted in Knowlson, Damned to Fame, p. 428 (my italics).

³¹ Quoted in Frost, ‘A “Fresh Go” for the Skull’, p. 193. Frost, on the other hand, confesses: ‘Try as I might, I could find no four-in-a-bar metre of Mrs. Rooney’s walk to the station and back as a structural principle of the play’ (ibid., p. 193).

³² Bryden, ‘Beckett and the Sound of Silence’, p. 24.

³³ Ibid., p. 36.

³⁴ Katharine Worth, ‘Beckett and the Radio Medium’, in John Drakakis (ed.), British Radio Drama (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 191–217 (p. 193).

³⁵ Beckett, All That Fall, p. 185.

³⁶ Ibid., p. 187.

³⁷ Porter, ‘Samuel Beckett and the Radiophonic Body’, p. 435.

³⁸ Beckett, All That Fall, p. 197.

³⁹ Samuel Beckett, Embers, in Complete Dramatic Works, p. 257.

⁴⁰ Porter, ‘Samuel Beckett and the Radiophonic Body’, p. 437. Porter borrows the term from Michel Chion, who in Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen defines the acousmatic voice as one that ‘creates a mystery of the nature of its source, its properties and its powers, given that causal listening cannot supply complete information about the sound’s nature and the events taking place’ (quoted ibid., pp. 437–8).

⁴¹ Marjorie Perloff, ‘The Silence that is not Silence: Acoustic Art in Samuel Beckett’s Embers’, in Lois Oppenheim (ed.), Samuel Beckett and the Visual Arts: Music, Visual Arts, and Non-Print Media (New York, 1998), pp. 247–68.

⁴² Beckett, Embers, p. 253.

⁴³ Ibid., pp. 259–60.

⁴⁴ Jesson, ‘“White World. Not a Sound”‘, p. 53.

⁴⁵ Beckett, Embers, pp. 260–61.

⁴⁶ Lawrence Shainberg, ‘Exorcizing Beckett’, available at <http://www.samuel-beckett.net/ShainExor1.html>, p. 3.

⁴⁷ Beckett, Embers, p. 257.

⁴⁸ Ibid., p. 259.

⁴⁹ Barbara Pollack, ‘The Effective Conductor: A Matter of Communication and Personality’, in Glenn Daniel Wilson (ed.), Psychology and Performing Arts (Amsterdam, 1991), pp. 155–64 (p. 157).

⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 156.

⁵¹ Beckett, Embers, p. 262.

⁵² Ibid., p. 253.

⁵³ Margaret Harper, ‘Yeats’s Wild West: Cuchulain and the Cowboy’ (plenary lecture presented at the DUCIS conference ‘A New Ireland? Representations of History Past and Present in Literature and Culture’, Falun, 3–4 Nov. 2011).

⁵⁴ When Henry exclaims: ‘Listen to it! … Lips and claws! … Get away from it! Where it couldn’t get at me!’ (Beckett, Embers, p. 258), the personified sea acquires a specifically female bodily shape.

⁵⁵ Paul Lawley, ‘Embers: An Interpretation’, available at <http://www.english.fsu.edu/jobs/num06/jobs06.htm>.

⁵⁶ Beckett, Embers, p. 254.

⁵⁷ Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (London, 1987), p. 7.

⁵⁸ Samuel Beckett, Cascando, in Complete Dramatic Works, p. 303.

⁵⁹ Ibid., pp. 301, 303.

⁶⁰ Katharine Worth, ‘Words for Music Perhaps’, p. 210.

⁶¹ Stanley E. Gontarski, The Intent of Undoing in Samuel Beckett’s Dramatic Texts (Bloomington, IN, 1985).

⁶² Samuel Beckett, Not I, in Complete Dramatic Works, pp. 377, 379, 381–2.

⁶³ Ibid., p. 375.

⁶⁴ Ibid.

⁶⁵ Ibid.