Chapter 4

Tuning In/Tuning Up: The Communicative Efforts of Words and Music in Samuel Beckett’s Words and Music

Brynhildur Boyce

I

The radiogenic notion of ‘tuning in’ is, this chapter will argue, central to Samuel Beckett’s third play for radio, Words and Music, written in 1961. While the experience of listening to analogue radio – of tuning in, that is, to a particular frequency – supplies the notion, the figure of speech is commonly used to articulate the activity of comprehension within the process of communication. In both cases, the listener must situate the transmission, contextualize the form and ‘tune in’ to the sender’s meaning. This, however, is no mean feat, as communication is the result not of perfect attunement but of two communicators’ efforts to draw near and understand each other, despite having no assurance that they can or do. The philosopher of language Donald Davidson – whose investigation of communication will be central to the argument presented here – states, to this end, that ‘making sense of the utterances and behaviour of others … requires us to find a great deal of reason and truth in them’.1 Furthermore, he suggests that just as such charitable pragmatism at most ‘maximises agreement’, so the method of making sense, or of interpreting, can only ever be ‘one of getting a best fit’.2 This notion of achieving a ‘best fit’ between different communicative ontologies resonates, I would argue, with the radiogenic activity of ‘tuning in’. The former, Davidson tells us, is always temporary, since we continually ‘adjust our theory [of interpretation] to fit the inflow of new information’;3 while the latter, as Steven Connor reminds us, is a similarly volatile process, by which the radio listener ‘repeatedly constitutes his or her relation to the device and [its] transmissions’.4 There is, in other words, a slippage at the heart of this activity, and, by highlighting the inherent misalignment between communicants, the notion of ‘tuning in’ can serve as a reminder that every act of communication involves the effort to overcome this essential incompatibility.

Words and Music presents a decidedly disjunctive communicational situation, which is made immediately obvious through its structure. In a letter to his American publishers Grove Press, Beckett called the play a ‘text–music tandem’,5 and the text does, indeed, appear to be at the fore in this tandem. The eponymous characters of Words and Music are ordered by a figure called Croak to express, first separately and then together, certain subjects of his choosing: ‘love’, ‘age’ and finally ‘the face’. To this end, they gradually develop songs together: thus, Music proposes melodies while Words supplies the lines, and both fine-tune their contributions in a bid to make them fit. Through this interaction, Music and Words attempt to overcome their essential incommensurability and tune in to each other’s form of expression. However, while ostensibly delineating an escalating process of creative cooperation between these characters, the play in fact omits half of that exchange, supplying only the lines spoken by Words (whom Croak calls Joe) while leaving Music (or Bob) a blank. And words, what is more, take the place of a score, providing textual notation in the form of ‘love and soul music’, ‘spreading and subsiding music’ or ‘warmly sentimental’. Beckett, in other words, neither composed the music to be played nor indicated that an existing piece should be used, and thus extended a permanent invitation to a composer – any composer – to give the character of Music expression.6 None of the compositions specifically written for the part should, in extension, be regarded as providing a definitive interpretation of it, since Music remains, in the play, undefined and open-ended.

Much has nevertheless been made of the supposedly authorized status of John Beckett’s composition for the part of Music, which he wrote for the BBC production of Words and Music originally broadcast on 13 November 1962. This status rests, it appears, on the fact that he was the first composer to work on the play and that he happened to be Beckett’s cousin. Katharine Worth thus wonders whether ‘Beckett would be willing to have a character so well established as his Music unstitched and remade [my italics]’, since he and his cousin ‘had no doubt worked closely on Words and Music’.7 Worth’s second assumption, regarding the Becketts’ collaboration, is simply wrong: in 1962, Beckett wrote to the director Alan Schneider that ‘John Beckett has done his music for Words & Music (BBC). No idea yet what he has done, but have full confidence.’8 I would argue that Worth’s first assumption, concerning the authorship of Music, is equally unfounded. It is not Samuel Beckett’s but rather John Beckett’s Music that is well established, existing as it does as both a score and a recording. Some decades later, when Everett Frost was preparing his production of the play, Beckett stated that ‘it would be ‘impossible’ for [Frost] to use the John Beckett score’.9 I would suggest that this was not merely due to the fact that his cousin had, by that point, withdrawn permission to use it. More significantly, the very nature of the play dictates that Music must, in Worth’s words, be ‘remade’ for each production.

I propose three ways in which one might approach Words and Music. One might, firstly, focus entirely on the text, as the only tangible aspect of the work-as-conceived-by-Beckett and the only source of ascertainable information about Music. This may, however, appear to reveal ‘a major weakness in the text: the simplicity of [musical] direction’ and lead to dissatisfaction with Beckett’s apparent ‘naivety … that composers will have an intuitive comprehension of such directions as “soft music worthy of foregoing, great expression”’.10 Received as pure text, however, the play – as linguistic and not musical notation – must naturally deliver a ‘simplistic’ account of Music: indeed, it is this thematically important incommensurability of words and music that necessitates the play’s structurally significant call for a composer’s contribution. An exclusive focus on the text may, on the other hand, lead to the conclusion that Beckett ‘had a clear, if general, idea of the kind of music he wanted’, but this attributes to the words a musical knowledge and compositional ability that they cannot possess.11 It is more common for strictly textual interpretations to view Music not as the sum of its brief directions but as the representative of a metaphysical, Schopenhauerian conception of music, which recognizes the above-mentioned incommensurability. This perspective will be discussed towards the end of this chapter, since it would distract from the structural point being made here. At this stage, suffice it to say that by (necessarily) drawing on a conceptual notion of music, textual analyses ignore the fact that the play was designed to be broadcast on the radio. As a purely textual object it is therefore incomplete, since Music has yet to be not only composed but also performed.

The second possibility is to regard the work as being a co-production between Beckett’s text and a particular composer’s music. Katharine Worth gives an account of the way in which Humphrey Searle’s ‘temperamentally in tune’ music ‘released the meanings’ sought by the text;12 while Everett Frost notes that as ‘the composition of a great artist in his own right, [Morton] Feldman’s score struggles under the collaboration with Beckett’s text … much as, in the play itself, Bob [Music] struggles with Joe [Words]’.13 Such approbation implies that the text may be so perfectly matched by a complementary music as to be completely fulfilled, but this perspective was rejected by Beckett who, as he explained to the BBC producer Donald McWhinnie, approved of John Beckett’s score for its ‘spirit not of reinforcement but of otherness’.14 The notion of a perfect musical match fails, moreover, to acknowledge the inherent incompletion of the work. As a gap that is permanently structured into the play, the character of Music can be neither definitively interpreted nor decisively performed into being, and each production can therefore only make a suggestion about the work but never fully realize it.

This brings us to the third possibility, and the one followed in this chapter, which is to regard Words and Music as consisting of Beckett’s text and a series of Music-shaped, musically undefined gaps. This has the advantage of maintaining, on two levels, the contrary open-endedness of the play. Firstly, by acknowledging both the text’s authority – in the sense that it invites and structurally controls the musical filling of those gaps – and its simultaneous yielding, to a composer, of authorial control within each gap. Secondly, by recognizing that, since those gaps are an integral part of the play, they can never be conclusively filled but must continually be filled anew, from production to production. This is not, however, an unproblematic position, requiring as it does the juggling of mutually exclusive perspectives. The text is both insufficient to, and the only permanent part of, the work. Words and Music exists, if not primarily then certainly most steadfastly, as words on a page, and as such it effectively invites the reader to fill the gaps and complete the dialogue by conceptualizing the absent Music through the utterances of Words. The impulse to focus exclusively on the text is thus unavoidable and possibly even requisite, but it is at the same time inadequate to a full understanding of the play, which requires its performance, that is, the addition to it of music. All discussion of Words and Music’s interaction is, in this context, deeply problematic and can only be conducted from the perspective of the former character. On the one hand, as I will argue, the gaps in the play are crucial to our understanding of it; but on the other, no understanding is possible unless the gaps are – temporarily – filled in a particular production. This contradiction informs the following analysis, the scope of which is deliberately demarcated by the dealings of Words and Music. My interest, in this chapter, is in their disjunctive relation, and while the third character of the play, Croak, may instigate their attempt to tune in to each other, their continued interaction is, as we shall see below, the result of their own efforts. Croak is therefore not a prominent presence in this analysis.

II

Words and Music are, as Words puts it, ‘cooped up’ together, a description loaded with a sense of resented unity or united division, and their problematic co-habitation is confirmed by the ‘loathing’ with which Words speaks to Music, as it is by Croak’s entreaty that they are friends.15 Yet the start of the play is marked not by a lack of interaction, but by interaction of a curiously disconnected kind. Words and Music ‘speak’ at, rather than with, each other: it is as though they are merely going through the conversational motions, separated not so much from each other as from communication itself. Having prepared themselves for Croak’s arrival by ‘tuning up’ – Music in the orchestral sense, Words by rattling off a speech on ‘sloth’ – they have no difficulty in tuning in to what Croak announces as the first ‘theme tonight … love’.16 Words has merely to substitute the word ‘love’ for ‘sloth’ in order to re-use his speech:

WORDS: [Orotund.] Love is of all the passions the most powerful passion and indeed no passion is more powerful than the passion of love. [Clears throat.] This is the mode in which the mind is most strongly affected and indeed in no mode is the mind more strongly affected than in this. [Pause.]

CROAK: Rending sigh. Thump of club.

WORDS: [As before.] By passion we are to understand a movement of the mind pursuing or fleeing real or imagined pleasure or pain. [Clears throat.] Of all –

CROAK: [Anguished.] Oh!

The stale non-specificity of the phrases is betrayed when Words stumbles over the subject matter, returning briefly to ‘sloth’:

WORDS: Of all these movements then and who can number them and they are legion sloth is the … LOVE is the most urgent and indeed by no manner of movement is the soul more urged than by this, to and – [Violent thump of club.]

CROAK: Bob.

WORDS: From.

[Violent thump of club.]

CROAK: Bob! […] Love!

MUSIC: Rap of baton on stand. Soft music worthy of foregoing, great expression […].17

Repetition takes the place of contextually specific expression in the opening section of the play, which is characterized by the kind of disconnection crystallized in the passage above. By transferring his speech wholesale from rehearsal to performance, Words shows himself to engage in no meaningful way with his ostensible ‘theme tonight’, and this detachment is all the more pointed considering that engagement is the very essence of love. Emerging as a fully formed, standardized template, his self-absorbedly circular composition seeks no contact with its audience either. The polished rings of his rhetoric resemble arid exercises in sentence structure rather than attempts to articulate and convey thought, an effect presumably mirrored by Music’s ‘worthy’ rejoinder. This disengagement is mirrored structurally as Words and Music, in accordance with Croak’s strictly alternating focus, deliver their material in separate doses, the one falling silent before the other begins. Croak’s regular shifts in focus, moreover, undermine the force of his reactions, which – as when he utters an ‘[Anguished.] Oh!’ on hearing of ‘real or imagined pleasure or pain’ – come to resemble not the purposeful absorption of meaning so much as knee-jerk mimesis, one empty gesture mirroring another.

After interrupting Words’s rehearsed declamation with a ‘violent thump of [his] club’, Croak calls on Music to express ‘Love’. Greeting the ‘Soft music worthy of foregoing’ with the same thump and ‘[Anguished.] Oh!’ as he did the speech, he then demands that the music be played again, ‘Louder!’18 His reasons for doing so are difficult to gauge. The bombastic music that results – ‘fortissimo, all expression gone’ – may, however, be said to actualize the hollow, inflated quality of the sentiments being proclaimed and to reflect the empty sounds – whether verbal or musical – that here deliver the mere shapes of those sentiments. The characters perpetuate through mechanical repetition the framework of communication, while demonstrating neither the desire to convey meaning nor the desire to grasp it. It is not that they have trouble comprehending one another, but rather that comprehension is irrelevant. What is absent is the impulse towards, and the effort to achieve, understanding, an impulse that must underpin the very process of communication; and since nothing is communicated, it stands to reason that ‘all expression [is] gone’.

Words and Music are given a new theme, that of ‘age’, for which Words’s set speech is of no use and about which he struggles to speak coherently: ‘[Faltering.] Age is … age is when … old age I mean … if that is what my Lord means …’.19 Music, on the other hand, launches directly into ‘Age music’ as he did before with ‘Love music’. Croak’s response is again to ‘violent[ly]’ interrupt their individual efforts, and in a change of tactic he commands them to work together. While this could arguably be for the benefit of Words, that he might be stimulated by Music’s expressiveness, there is another, more methodological explanation for Croak’s decision. If the composer Morton Feldman is to be believed, any direct musical engagement with what he terms a universal concept – such as age – is bound to result in a ‘cliché type of response’: ‘music … has terrific power’, he explained to Everett Frost, but ‘when [it] is universal, it never gets beyond the level of, say, a Shostakovich. It’s freshman universal.’20 Regarded in this light, Music’s response to the theme of age is likely to be formulaic, and it therefore stands to reason that Croak should seek to complicate the concept and thereby enrich its expression, by forcing its interpreters towards a more complex, jointly developed understanding of it. Feldman’s solution, in his composition for the play, was to focus not on the concept of age itself but rather on the ‘technical way of arriving at it’, generating through music – through, for instance, the use of pizzicato – the experiential nature of age that he felt was conveyed, in an equally technical manner, by the ‘halting’ language of Words. It is in precisely this way, as we shall see, that both Music and Words come to express what Feldman calls the ‘quintessence of the material’.

Feldman used the same word to describe the effect of Beckett’s text ‘Neither’, which he felt provided ‘the quintessence, something that just hovered’.21 He further explained that every line of the text – which traces an oscillating movement ‘to and fro’, ‘back and forth’, from ‘self’ to ‘unself’ – is ‘really the same thought said in another way … getting deeper and deeper saturated into the thought’.22 Feldman sought, in his opera Neither, to likewise ‘hold the moment’, using as his compositional methodology what he termed a floating focus, in order to express the thought ‘in another way … through the language of another register, the language of another colour’.23 Returning to Words and Music, the eponymous characters might be said to join forces in the pursuit of the quintessence of age, which lies, it follows, in a focused, technically executed ‘saturation’ in the subject matter. What follows is the painstaking, technical process of articulation, through the medium of song.

Words utters a line to which Music responds – either modifying what Words has just said or anticipating the next line – in accordance with which Words then tries to sing; and gradually, as words are combined with music, a narrative on age emerges.

CROAK: Together. [Pause. Thump.] Together! [Pause. Violent thump.] Together, dogs!

MUSIC: Long la. […]

WORDS: [Trying to sing.] Age is when … to a man …

MUSIC: Improvement of above.

WORDS: [Trying to sing this.] Age is when to a man …

MUSIC: Suggestion for following.

WORDS: [Trying to sing this.] Huddled o’er … the ingle … [Pause. Violent thump. Trying to sing.] Waiting for the hag to put the … pan in the bed …

MUSIC: Improvement of above.

WORDS: [Trying to sing this.] Waiting for the hag to put the pan in the bed.

MUSIC: Suggestion for following.

WORDS: [Trying to sing this.] And bring the … arrowroot … [Pause. Violent thump. As before.] And bring the toddy.24

The orotund, rhetorical, monotonous style of before has been replaced by a faltering, open-ended and dialogic manner. Far from being a vehicle for pre-formed, uncontextualized bombast, the act of utterance has become a means of searching for and shaping the phrases that ring true. As evidence that this is indeed the case, one might point to the complex manner in which old age is here evoked. At a semantic level, it emerges with such precision that ‘arrowroot’, associated in the Victorian period with childhood, becomes in the hands of the nurse-like ‘hag’ a signifier of second infancy.25 The replacement of this porridge by the more age-appropriate toddy only serves to confirm the evocation. The sentence stretches out, what is more, postponing its delivery of meaning, delaying its explanation of the ‘when’ that will describe what ‘age is’, and as such it enacts the endlessness of old age, demonstrating syntactically the way in which time is protracted by the anticipation of an ever-deferred conclusion. The contrast between this comprehensive eloquence and the earlier estranging and estranged rhetoric could not be starker.

It makes no sense, when dealing only with the text, to make any comparable assertion about the substance of Music’s contribution. Many critics have nevertheless attempted just that. Clas Zilliacus thus states that ‘Music … introduces the face theme into the Age song’;26 Shimon Levy maintains that ‘Music … elicits memories through the power of association’;27 and Elissa Guralnick explains that ‘when Joe/Words speaks in sympathy with Croak, he mainly expresses regret and incurable longing – sentiments with which Music accords’.28 These descriptions have no basis in the unspecified ‘improvements’ and ‘suggestions’ – which, to be sure, run the gamut from ‘warm’ to ‘discreet’ – that make up the Music of the text. As Guralnick’s comment makes clear, all the sentiments and actions critically ascribed to Music are in fact transferred from Words: all, that is, apart from one specific action. The text contains numerous directions concerning the different ways in which the music is played – ‘humble’, ‘soft’, ‘fortissimo’ – but only once does it prescribe what is played. Music’s first utterance, after being commanded to interact with Words, is thus specified as being a ‘long la’, a tone with certain highly significant connotations.29 In the solmization system – which in fact takes two quite distinct forms – commonly used to teach music, each note of a seven-tone scale is associated with a particular syllable of the sequence do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti. In some countries, such as Britain, Ireland and Germany, the ‘movable-do’ system is used, in which the syllables are relative designators: ‘do’ corresponds to the tonic, or keynote, on which the scale is based, and thus is C in C major, but D in D major. The note designated by ‘la’ varies accordingly, being A in C major, but B in D major. Conversely, France, Italy and other Latin countries use the ‘fixed-do’ system, in which the syllables are absolute designators: irrespective of the key, ‘do’ is fixed to C and the syllables name the notes, such that ‘la’ is always A. If, as here, the key is unspecified, it is natural to assume that we are in C major, the most neutral of scales and the default example used in music theory, and in this case ‘la’ denotes the note A. In its ‘long la’, Music might therefore be said to be playing ‘A’ for ‘age’.

When ordered to collaborate on this universal concept, Music no longer reacts (solely) to it as a concept, but rather focuses on the ‘technical’ means – both letters and notes – by which it may be reached. By playing ‘la’ Music reverts, in an appropriately musico-linguistic conceit, to the fundamentals to produce a precisely pitched tonal expression of the theme and thus articulates, in a very literal manner, a particular quintessence of age. The non-linguistic speech sound ‘la’ forms, in this way, a meeting place between the verbal and the musical, pointing in one direction to a particular letter, and in the other to a particular note. As though this were a singing lesson, Words is invited to respond in kind, and to conflate words and music by ‘trying to sing’ his first phrase to the same note. It is to just such a ‘long la’, the A note played on an oboe, that an orchestra tunes just before a concert, and the suggestion of convergence thus contained in the note suggests that Words and Music may likewise be able to ‘tune in’ to each other. This is precisely the effect achieved in both the Voices International and the RTÉ productions, in which Morton Feldman’s and Paul Clark’s Music, respectively, play a multi-instrumented A note,30 and in both cases Words responds by singing ‘Age is when …’ on that note.

In a discussion of tuning, which he characterizes as the manual effort to situate a listener and transmitter in ‘the same zone of reception’, Steven Connor observes that ‘at the beginning of Words and Music … the controlling or summoning voice [of Croak] attempts to synchronize the two agencies … who represent words and music’.31 However, while Croak’s command that they perform ‘Together!’ certainly provides the impetus, I would argue that any form of synchronization between Words and Music is due to their own, technical endeavours to enter the ‘same zone’, which is to say, to merge their modes of expression. The most significant aspect of these endeavours, however, is not the result so much as simply the effort made by the two figures to draw near in this way.

Following the line of argument I have been advancing, Words and Music must enter a structure conducive to the transmission of expression – a structure of communication, that is – before they are able to express anything. Only by articulating to each other, it seems, can they locate in themselves a conception of age, and only by interpreting the other’s ideas and engaging with the other’s mode of expression can they stimulate further expression both in each other and in themselves. In this way, they work to dovetail each stage of their contributions before proceeding to the next. Starting, in the passage quoted above, with the ‘la’, Music makes a series of ‘Suggestion[s] for following’ to which Words attempts to sing a phrase, after which Music in turn plays an ‘Improvement of above’, to which Words again tries to sing the same phrase. The object of the improvements is unclear: are they meant to bring Words’s response into line with the original, musical suggestion, or do they perhaps retrospectively adjust that suggestion so that it better corresponds with Words’s interpretation of it?

Further possibilities are suggested by the various compositions written for the play. John Beckett’s ‘improvements’ tend to supply a short, new musical phrase that does not correspond to what Words has just sung, but which he is easily able to follow, and in this way the BBC’s Music makes sure that Words keeps abreast of the musical direction. Each of Paul Clark’s improvements also presents a new melody, which likewise bears no resemblance to what Words has just sung, but unlike John Beckett’s these melodies become increasingly long and complex, and Words is increasingly unable to sing them. Music seems, therefore, deliberately to cleave from and outpace Words in the RTÉ recording. In contrast, Morton Feldman’s improvements repeat the previous suggestion – which Words has sung – but on a different instrument, moving, for instance, from marimba to flute. These instrumental variations serve to demonstrate the infinite expressive possibilities of the same basic refrain, and the effect is to simultaneously confirm and ever so slightly unfix the communion between Music and Words. In the Voices International production, Words and Music are thus essentially on the same wavelength yet not entirely in synch. The effect generated by the textual directions thus varies from production to production, primarily because each compositional decision reverberates through, and shapes anew, the nature of Words and Music’s relation. What may appear straightforward on the page is, in short, anything but that in performance.

Whatever the result of the suggestions and improvements, the (textual) impression given is that Music seeks both to coordinate his and Words’s efforts and to demonstrate that co-ordination. Similarly, after each of Music’s responses Words repeats with more confidence the line he at first sang hesitantly, as though finding in the reply sufficient evidence of Music’s engagement with his phrase: sufficient evidence, that is, that his phrase fulfils the objective of all utterances, namely to have an effect on the listener and provoke interpretation. This apparent reassurance has an immediate, reciprocal effect on Words himself: in sending his line back he extends it slightly, possibly beyond the parameters of the previous musical suggestion, as though wishing to provoke a reaction before continuing. The possible outcomes of this interaction are, however, manifold, as a comparison of the three recordings addressed in this chapter makes clear. In the BBC recording, Words speaks the extended line, for which Music provides a melody, to which, in turn, Words sings the line and then speaks a new extension. The sense of their close and careful cooperation is thus tempered by the fact that they do not merge: Words sets the textual direction, but waits for Music to lead the musical way. In the RTÉ recording, on the other hand, Words tries to sing the extended line to the previous melody, and then tries (without much success) to sing it again to Music’s new suggestion. This version of the situation reflects Eric Prieto’s assumption that ‘Music has now adopted a leading role [… and] Words can only do his best to keep up’ by mistakenly trying to second-guess Music’s decisions.32 Conversely, in the Voices International recording, Words and Music can best be described as co-elaborating the song, by gradually building on each other’s contributions. Thus, Words re-uses and extends the previous melody, and Music endorses that by repeating the phrase, albeit with the kind of instrumental variation described above. In this way, both Words and Music keep the conversational ball incrementally rolling.

MUSIC: Suggestion for following.

WORDS: [Trying to sing this.] She comes in the ashes … [Imploring.] No!

MUSIC: Repeats suggestion.

WORDS: [Trying to sing this.] She comes in the ashes who loved could not be … won or … [Pause.]

MUSIC: Repeats end of previous suggestion.

WORDS: [Trying to sing this.] Or won not loved … [Wearily.] … or some other trouble … [Pause. Trying to sing.] Comes in the ashes like in that old –

MUSIC: Interrupts with improvement of this and brief suggestion.

WORDS: [Trying to sing this.] Comes in the ashes like in that old light … her face … in the ashes … .33

Through this kind of constant, mutual stimulation, they reach out to each other and seek convergence. Mere interaction – as at the start of the play – is not enough: there must be palpable attentiveness and reaction. It might be argued that it is only now, when communicating with an other, that these characters’ utterances have meaning, since it is only now they have meaning to express.

III

Donald Davidson argues that language is a social affair, stating that ‘speaking a language requires that there be an interpreter’,34 since ‘one must always intend to … hav[e] one’s words interpreted’.35 However, and importantly for our present purposes, ‘communication does not demand that any two people speak the same language’.36 Indeed, ‘it is probably the case that no two people actually do speak the same language’, since ‘they don’t … have to mean the same thing by the same words’,37 but ‘if communication succeeds, speaker and hearer must assign the same meaning to the speaker’s words’,38 which is to say, the hearer must assign the speaker’s meaning to the words as uttered by the speaker. ‘The aim of interpretation’, Davidson declares, ‘is not agreement but understanding’;39 meaning emerges from a process of ‘triangulation’:

To understand the speech of another … we must entertain the same propositions, with the same subject matter, and the same concept of truth. Communication depends on each communicator having, and correctly thinking that the other has, the concept of a shared world, an intersubjective world. But the concept of an intersubjective world is the concept of an objective world, a world about which each communicator can have beliefs.40

Our common concept of truth depends not on sameness of belief – since that would be impossible to verify – but on a readiness and ability to understand the other’s belief; and such understanding can only arise when both parties interact with a common object.

Our sense of objectivity is the consequence of [a] sort of triangulation, one that requires two creatures. Each interacts with an object, but what gives each the concept of the way things are objectively is the base line formed between the creatures by language.41

Meaning emerges at the intersection of the speaker’s intention and the hearer’s interpretation and is established anew by the particulars of each communicative situation. Irrespective of whether the communicators are unknown or familiar to one another, each new dialogue triggers a fresh process of triangulation, since ‘truth for a language [is] relative to [both] a time and a speaker’.42 Furthermore, not only is comprehension site-specific, it also continues to evolve during that specific situation as both communicators move along the ‘base line’ towards each other and towards a sense of mutual objectivity. Continually evolving understanding entails a similarly evolving method of interpretation, which Davidson terms a ‘passing theory’, since it consists of equal parts anticipation and modification and is constantly being renewed. We necessarily start with what he calls a ‘prior’ theory of interpretation – an assumption, that is, of how we may understand the speaker – but as the dialogue progresses we alter that theory, ‘revising past interpretations … in the light of new evidence’ and adjusting our current interpretations to try to ‘yield the speaker’s intended interpretation’:43 we adjust, in effect, our interpretation of that intended interpretation. It therefore follows that ‘the longer talk continues the better our theory becomes’, which is to say, the more tailor-made it becomes.44

This might explain why the discourse on love – which, as we have seen, is not at all site-specific – provokes no interpretation and produces no meaning. In contrast, when developing their song on age, Words and Music are effectively building the kind of triangular structure outlined above, in that they interact, on the one hand, with the ‘object’ of age and, on the other, with each other’s understanding of that object. For this mutually beneficial arrangement to continue, each must assume – without for obvious reasons being able to ascertain it – that the other responds in a more or less understandable and more or less complementary way to the shared stimulus. Words and Music’s active engagement with each other’s utterances has thus far been referred to as a process of tuning in. Alternatively, they might be said to be constructing triangulated, passing theories about one another, as evidenced by their suggestions, improvements and attempts to sing, which pattern forth a shifting network of expectation, adjustment and interpretation. Comprehension, in this respect, is a performance between speaker and interpreter, and we might recall that Words and Music are indeed performing – in an immediate sense for Croak – and that the subject of their performance is their communication ‘together’. What is more, as we saw above, each actual performance – which is to say, each production of the play – establishes a new conversational situation and, as the dynamics of the dialogue alter, so the methods, or theories, of interpretation must change. Finally, following Davidson, it does indeed appear to be the case that the longer Words and Music’s ‘talk’ continues, the better their theories of interpretation become. If the ‘Age Song’ demonstrates their struggles to tune in to each other, the ‘Wellhead Song’ with which the play ends arguably displays the fruits of those efforts. It emerges fully formed, and Words and Music seem, in it, to be in a state of attunement.

A bridge is formed between the two songs by Words’s detailed meditation on a woman’s face – the ‘face in the ashes’ with which the ‘Age Song’ concludes – and the ‘Wellhead Song’ issues naturally from this description:

WORDS: … a little colour comes back into the cheeks and the eyes … [Reverently.] … open. [Pause.] Then down a little way … [Pause. Change to poetic tone. Low.]

Then down a little way

Through the trash

To where … towards where …

[Pause.]

MUSIC: Discreet suggestion for above.

WORDS: [Trying to sing this.]

Then down a little way

Through the trash

Towards where …

[Pause.]

MUSIC: Discreet suggestion for following.

WORDS: [Trying to sing this.]

All dark no begging

No giving no words

No sense no need …

[Pause.]

MUSIC: More confident suggestion for following.

WORDS: [Trying to sing this.]

Through the scum

Down a little way

To where one glimpse

Of that wellhead.45

Words and Music appear to have reached a state of equilibrium: they are, as it were, tuned in to the same wavelength. When Words pauses it is not, as before, to obtain stimulation and reassurance but rather, simply, to allow Music to contribute. The ease with which Words attempts to sing, moreover – delivering without hesitation each subsequent section of the poem – indicates that he knows both what to say and, importantly, how to fit it to Music’s proposals. His ‘trying to sing’ seems now to have qualitative rather than ontological implications: there seems no longer to be a question of whether he can sing at all, merely of how well he does it. Likewise, Music has neither to repeat nor to improve his suggestions, his greater confidence suggesting that he too is accurately anticipating Words’s next utterances. This tallies with Davidson’s assertion that, for successful communication to take place, both parties’ passing theories of interpretation must converge, since ‘the speaker must “go on” more or less as the other expects’.46

The close structural correspondence between Words and Music and Davidson’s theories of meaning and understanding may, as argued above, usefully illuminate the play. This illumination culminates in what is, for our purposes, perhaps the most significant element of Davidson’s thinking, namely his lucid articulation of an arrestingly optimistic view of communication, a view that he readily acknowledges is both a choice and, quite simply, necessary. Underlying and facilitating successful communication is something he calls a ‘principle of charity’, which he defines as a means of optimizing understanding by maximizing intelligibility. ‘Charity is forced on us’, he declares; ‘whether we like it or not, if we want to understand others, we must count them right in most matters’.47 Just as the interpreter, to this end, ‘read[s his] own logic into the thoughts of a speaker’,48 so the speaker’s intention – concerning the way he wishes his words to be understood – is to some extent dictated by his belief about the interpreter’s logic in understanding those words.49 In short, Davidson’s principle of charity highlights the way in which we instinctively converge as communicants and emphasizes the good will that leads to and serves to maintain comprehension. In a pragmatic bid to maximize our chances of understanding and being understood, we keep the conversation going by modifying our passing theories in favour of our communicant and in this way work to diminish the gap between us. Everything, it appears, is commensurable, because we wish it so.

IV

Words and Music, however, presents the inherent dichotomy of such a perspective. The dialogic momentum indicated by the sequence ‘WORDS: … MUSIC: … WORDS: …’, for instance, encourages the kind of (text-based) supposition we find in Elissa Guralnick’s analysis of the play: ‘Since conversation implies at least a modicum of mutual understanding, the mere fact that Joe and Bob can talk to one another [suggests that] words have attained the condition of music’ and that the two have converged.50 Such a conclusion, however, is based on a Davidsonian, charitable assumption: only half of the exchange is available to us, and so it is the ‘fact’ of the conversation that is, in fact, implied. A Guralnick-like reader of the play, in other words, interprets generously, compensating for her lack of knowledge about Music by conjecturing a correspondence between the eponymous characters’ ‘talk’ and charitably reading Words’s logic into the utterances – which is to say, the indeterminate improvements and suggestions – of Music. In this, the reader mirrors what Words himself must do. However, if the process of interpretation entails communicators’ pragmatic acceptance of what Davidson calls ‘a best fit’, it follows that they will never fit hand-in-glove, and the more effort they put into tailoring their agreement, the more pronounced will be its slippage. When, at the start of the play, Words and Music are detached and disconnected from the communicative impulse, and thus from each other, their inherent misalignment is of little importance, but this changes as soon as they begin drawing near to one another.

Significantly, it is at the very moment when Words and Music seem to be converging that the material of their union, the ‘Age Poem’, starts to crack open:

Age is when to a man

Huddled o’er the ingle

Shivering for the hag

To put the pan in the bed

And bring the toddy

She comes in the ashes

Who loved could not be won

Or won not loved

Or some other trouble

Comes in the ashes

Like in that old light

The face in the ashes

The old starlight

On the earth again.51

The poem establishes a tangible sense of presence, partly through the vividness of the verbs – ‘huddled’ and ‘shivering’ – and partly through the concrete particularity of ‘the pan’, ‘the bed’ and ‘the face’. At the same time, however, it is riddled with absence. The man derives no warmth from the fire over which he shivers, its burnt-out ashes serving only to make palpable the lack of heat. He is likewise out of synch with the woman with whom, loving and winning in turn, he never quite merges. Her face is doubly removed, on the one hand there in the ashes, like the memory of some long-extinguished passion, and on the other looking down on him with a chilly, distant starlight gaze. This disjunction is reflected in the syntactic void around which the poem revolves, the undefined ‘when’ that, as we saw above, continually delays the delivery of meaning concerning what ‘age is’. Eventually, this elongated metaphor on age recedes even from itself. In his discussion of metaphor, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur stated that any ‘shift from literal to figurative sense [is] a metaphor’ and that to ‘speak by means of metaphor is to say something different ‘through’ some literal meaning’.52 Davidson adds that ‘the literal meaning [of a metaphor is] latent … while the figurative meaning carries the direct load’.53 Here, however, the literal meaning becomes dominant as the poem, increasingly fixated on the face, becomes absorbed in the ashes. Age is hardly expressed ‘through’ these images, for they chiefly express themselves, and when a shift is again made to a metaphoric meaning, what is shown in the starlight is not age but ‘the face’. In attempting to grasp it, in other words, the poem slips past its ostensible subject matter, as though they were irreconcilably misaligned. This fissuring of the word surface serves, finally, to emphasize the glaring gap at the heart of the play, which in turn becomes a stark reminder of the disjunctive relations between all communicants. Such inherent out-of-tuneness, along with the attempts to overcome this essential misalignment, is, finally, writ large in the play’s juxtaposition of its two very different forms of expression, music and words.

V

A discussion of the ontological distinction between words and music, let alone an attempt to define each, is beyond the scope of this chapter. If verbal and musical meaning, however, are agreed to be encoded in essentially different ways, it follows that the characters Music and Words fundamentally lack each other’s codes. A brief example, concerning the ‘long la’ played by Music, should serve to demonstrate this. In the correlation between the letter ‘A’, the speech sound ‘la’ and a tone measured at the frequency of 440Hz, a particular note, as we have seen, can not only be identified but also positioned within a scale pattern, and in this way the verbal and the musical are merged. Yet this equation also demonstrates their separateness, since that which unites them is the very thing that sunders them. ‘A’ is the first letter of the alphabet, but when transposed to the neutral, default key of C it is the sixth note. What is more, it can denote anything from the first to the seventh note of a scale, depending on the particular keynote. Its identity slips, in this way, as it moves from one context to another, and what is revealed, in this rather literal manner, is the incommensurability of music and words. The attempt, as here, to translate the signs of the one by the signs of the other results in slippage: the letters of the alphabet cannot quite tune in, as it were, to the notes of the musical scale. This is not to deny that the two may interact – Words and Music does, after all, trace their efforts to do just this – but merely to suggest that each system may recognize, and yet not fully decipher, the meaning of the other. As such, the pairing of words and music enacts an extreme example of the radical interpretation necessary to, but unable completely to effect, communication.

Words and Music effectively pulls the rug out from under itself in this way, by demonstrating the leap of faith that is made in every act of communication. If Davidson chooses to highlight the ability of communicative good will to maximize communicants’ sense of convergence – which in turn suggests that everything they encounter may ultimately be subsumed within their conceptual schemes – Beckett is more circumspect, pointing towards the gaping obstacles that are ignored in the effort to achieve this convergence. While this may, in relation to Davidson’s optimism, seem a pessimistic position, I would argue that it is merely pragmatic. Words and Music recognizes the gap between different modes of communication; what is more, it acknowledges and delineates the impulse to bridge that gap. For Morton Feldman – whose composition for the part of Music demonstrates just this gapful quality – communication stems not from ‘mutual understanding’ but rather from a situation in which ‘people don’t understand each other … because then … an effort is being made’.54

An awareness of this incommensurability lies behind the most common kind of analysis of the musical aspect of the play, which views Music not as an indeterminate, unknown communicant – nor, indeed, as bodied forth by any of the actual compositions written and performed for the play – but as the representative of a philosophical notion of music: specifically, the notion developed by Arthur Schopenhauer, for whom music is ‘the most direct, intuitive form of access to an underlying reality which is essentially resistant to discursive articulation’.55 This critical approach is typified, on the one hand, by Martin Esslin’s contrast between a ‘verbal [i.e. rational] … [and] a musical (i.e. emotional) stream of consciousness’56 and, on the other, by the opposition Eric Prieto draws between words, ‘which, having a post rem relationship to phenomena, can never fully express them’, and music, which has an ‘ante rem access to unmediated reality’ but ‘cannot … name that which it expresses’.57 Such interpretations build on Schopenhauer’s observation that ‘concepts are the universalia post rem, while music gives the universalia ante rem’.58

As a justification for this line of interpretation, critics of Words and Music tend to point to the influence of Schopenhauer on Beckett’s early prose works, in particular the novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932) – which may be read as an attempt to realize, in literary form, Schopenhauer’s aesthetics of music – and the monograph Proust (1931), in which music is described in Schopenhauerian terms as ‘the Idea itself, unaware of the world of phenomena … ideal and invisible’.59 While such theoretical, textualized analysis certainly recognizes a vital difference between words and music, it nevertheless confers on the latter a singular, ontologically consistent value that is at odds with Beckett’s own understanding of music, an understanding that ranged from the theoretical to a lifelong and deep engagement with the practice of music.60 He played the piano throughout his life and sometimes sang, he tried his hand at composing, and he devoted a great deal of time to listening to musical performances, often comparing different recordings of the same piece. It should therefore be clear, as Catherine Laws points out, that for Beckett, ‘music is not simply “Music” … but rather a huge muddle of musics’.61 The singular value extracted from Schopenhauer’s thinking is also at odds with the way in which Beckett’s use of music developed in his work. A conceptual analysis may suit his early prose, in which music does, indeed, feature as an abstract, idealized entity; but it will not suffice for works calling, as very many of his later plays do, for the incorporation of real, performed music. It must, in short, be unadvisable to extract from Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Proust a textual articulation of music and apply it to a work, written 30 years later, that requires music to be sounded. Certainly, any notion – rejected by Laws – that Words and Music treats Music ‘as a pure idea’, ‘the same in any realization’,62 is directly contradicted both by the open-ended, collaborative nature of the play and by its staging of Words and Music’s perpetual struggle to understand each other.

VI

This discussion of Words and Music opened by arguing against a purely textual interpretation of the play, on the grounds that such a reading will either explain the character of Music away in metaphysical terms or conclude that any compositional realization of it has already been decided by the text. It is with good reason that Stephen Benson asks why ‘critics are content to interpret a play explicitly concerned with [the] relation [of music and the spoken word] without hearing a note of music and to interpret not only its conceptual framework, but also its content’, but the answer is surely not, as Benson concludes, simply that ‘Beckett makes relatively clear the conceptual underpinning of Music, and so allows the part to be read without being heard’.63 That underpinning, as we have seen, is commonly understood in Schopenhauerian terms, terms that lead Benson to view music as ‘an objectifying art, called upon to enact abstract categories of human feeling’.64 However, while Schopenhauer writes that ‘melodies are … like universal concepts’,65 Feldman states that universal music is a cliché, and since it is a Feldman, rather than a Schopenhauer, who is invited to fill the play’s Music-shaped, musically undefined gaps, it seems abundantly clear that an abstract, prescribed notion of music is not what is required. Words and Music exists, of course, as a published text and may legitimately be received as such. Subtitled ‘A Piece for Radio’, however, it is at the same time designed to be performed and so is incomplete until acoustically joined by composed music. I would argue that whatever meaning the play has resides, on the one hand, in the unknowability of Music when the play is silently read and, on the other, in the actual coming together of text and composition. In place of a purely textual interpretation I propose, in brief, this two-fold, continually inconclusive perspective.

It would, for this reason, be to radically misunderstand the play if one were to argue, as Guy Debrock does, that ‘Beckett provides for the music to be in the form of words’ and that his ‘word-gestures [are] by themselves sufficient clues’ to a composer, who ‘“merely” [has] to actualize Beckett’s virtual music’.66 By accepting at face value what Prieto terms the ‘semantic muteness of Music’67 and by giving the last word on the subject to the musical indications of the text, such an interpretation would reduce the play to a stable, fully authorized and thus fully interpretable script. This, however, brushes aside the problematic fact that Music, on the page, is an unknown quantity – whose ‘muteness’ may invite, but ultimately resists, charitable actualization – and, in performance, is an actual, individual participant in an evolving communicative event. More precisely, the character of Music is, at any one moment, the sum total of a particular composition and its particular realization – the specific communicative efforts, in other words, of a composer and a group of musicians – as it encounters and engages with the Words of Beckett’s text. Since this sum total is necessarily different in each such performed encounter, it makes no sense to talk of a static, virtual music. Any discussion of the incommensurability of music and words must instead consider the practical problems of their actual interaction. Everett Frost points out that ‘whenever the score varies, the play varies’.68 I would go further and argue that the play varies even when the score or particular performer remains the same.69 Structurally, Words and Music requires a real act of communication not only to take place, but to continue taking place from production to production, which in turn necessitates new, evolving and passing theories of interpretation from its participants. Words tries to sing in accordance with Music, but, however well he refines his passing theory for one particular dialogic partner, the next will demand of him a new theory. What, in short, is presented by Words and Music is the never stable, never conclusive nature of communication, the slightly-out-of-tune relation between communicants, and their continual, arguably bootless yet always optimistic, struggle to bridge the gap between them.

1 Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford, 1984), p. 153.

2 Ibid., p. 136.

3 Ibid., p. 279.

4 Steven Connor, ‘I Switch Off: Beckett and the Ordeals of Radio’, in Debra Rae Cohen, Michael Coyle and Jane Lewty (eds), Broadcasting Modernism (Gainesville, FL, 2009), p. 289.

5 Clas Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting: A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett for and in Radio and Television (Åbo, 1976), p. 99.

6 This is in contrast to most of his other works in which music is incorporated. His first radio play, All That Fall, thus names the Schubert piece that is heard, while the plays Embers, Ghost Trio and Nacht und Träume specify not only the pieces (by Chopin, Beethoven and Schubert respectively) but even the bars that are to be played. For the ‘threne’ heard in the novel Watt, on the other hand, Beckett himself composed both a rhythmic score and the melody sung by the soprano.

7 Katharine Worth, ‘Words for Music Perhaps’, in Mary Bryden (ed.), Samuel Beckett and Music (Oxford, 1998), pp. 9–20 (p. 12). Worth produced the second English language recording of Words and Music in 1973. Wishing to use one for teaching purposes and unable to borrow the BBC’s recording, she made a production with the Audio-Visual Centre at the University of London, for which she commissioned new music from the British composer Humphrey Searle. Beckett himself suggested that she approach Searle.

8 In Maurice Harmon (ed.), No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider (Cambridge, MA, 1998), p. 122.

9 Everett C. Frost, ‘The Note Man on the Word Man: Morton Feldman on Composing the Music for Samuel Beckett’s Words and Music in The Beckett Festival of Radio Plays’, in Bryden (ed.), Samuel Beckett and Music, pp. 47–55 (p. 47). Frost produced and directed a recording of Words and Music in 1987, for Voices International. This production, which was part of Frost’s ‘Beckett Festival of Radio Plays’ and broadcast in the States on National Public Radio, used new music by the American composer Morton Feldman. Beckett suggested Feldman for the job, having been pleased with Neither, the opera written by the composer to the short text ‘Neither’, provided by Beckett specifically for that purpose.

10 Kevin Branigan, Radio Beckett: Musicality in the Radio Plays of Samuel Beckett (Bern, 2008), p. 229.

11 Eric Prieto, Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative (Lincoln, NE, 2002), p. 199.

12 Worth, ‘Words for Music Perhaps’, pp. 12, 16.

13 Everett C. Frost, ‘Fundamental Sounds: Recording Samuel Beckett’s Radio Plays’, Theatre Journal 43/3 (1991): 361–76 (p. 374).

14 Lois More Overbeck, ‘Audience of Self/Audience of Reader’, Modernism/modernity 18/4 (2011): 721–37 (p. 729).

15 Samuel Beckett, Words and Music, in The Complete Dramatic Works (London, 1986), p. 287.

16 Ibid., p. 288.

17 Ibid.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid., p. 289.

20 Morton Feldman, Morton Feldman Says: Selected Interviews and Lectures 1964–1987, ed. Chris Villars (London, 2006), p. 235. Feldman’s suggestion that the ‘universal’ emotions conveyed by Shostakovich’s music are simplistic and formulaic was perhaps confirmed by Shostakovich’s declaration, at the premiere of his Fifth Symphony in 1937: ‘The theme of my symphony is the making of a man. … In the finale, the tragically tense impulses of the earlier movements are resolved in optimism and the joy of living’ (quoted in Michael Steinberg, The Symphony: A Listener’s Guide (Oxford, 1995), pp. 547–8).

21 Feldman, Morton Feldman Says, p. 75.

22 Ibid., p. 194.

23 Ibid., pp. 76, 194.

24 Beckett, Words and Music, pp. 289–90.

25 Boiled with water or milk to produce a thin porridge, arrowroot was given, as an easily digestible food, to children and invalids in the nineteenth century.

26 Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting, p. 113.

27 Shimon Levy, Samuel Beckett’s Self-Referential Drama: The Sensitive Chaos (Brighton, 2002), p. 91.

28 Elissa S. Guralnick, Sight Unseen: Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard, and Other Contemporary Dramatists on Radio (Athens, OH, 1996), p. 89.

29 Beckett, Words and Music, p. 289.

30 Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), the Irish national broadcaster, recorded and broadcast all of Beckett’s radio plays in 2006 to celebrate the centenary of his birth. Made in association with the theatre company Gare St Lazare Players Ireland, which has specialized in Beckett’s works, these recordings were directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett, with original music by the British composer Paul Clark.

31 Connor, ‘I Switch Off’, p. 289.

32 Prieto, Listening In, p. 225.

33 Beckett, Words and Music, p. 290.

34 Donald Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford, 2001), p. 114.

35 Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, p. 272.

36 Donald Davidson, Truth, Language and History (Oxford, 2005), p. 96.

37 Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, pp. 115, 121.

38 Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, p. 277.

39 Ibid., p. xvii.

40 Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, p. 105.

41 Ibid.

42 Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, p. 131.

43 Davidson, Truth, Language and History, pp. 100, 99.

44 Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, p. 279.

45 Beckett, Words and Music, p. 293.

46 Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, p. 115.

47 Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, p. 197.

48 Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, p. 149.

49 Davidson, Truth, Language and History, p. 122.

50 Guralnick, Sight Unseen, p. 89.

51 Beckett, Words and Music, p. 291.

52 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. Robert Czerny (London, 1986), p. 188.

53 Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, p. 250.

54 Feldman, Morton Feldman Says, p. 59.

55 Andrew Bowie, Music, Philosophy and Modernity (Cambridge, 2007), p. 121.

56 Martin Esslin, Mediations: Essays on Brecht, Beckett and the Media (London, 1980), p. 136.

57 Prieto, Listening In, pp. 216, 227.

58 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman, ed. Christopher Janaway, Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman (Cambridge, 2010), vol. 1, p. 291. Schopenhauer draws on the medieval problem of universals. The concepts of the human mind, which were held to be posterior to the things they represent, were known as universalia post rem, or universals after the thing; while divine ideas – answering to the ideal essences of Plato’s Forms or Ideas – were universalia ante rem, or universals before the thing. Arguing that music possesses a ‘universal language’, Schopenhauer writes that it ‘gives the universalia ante rem’ by ‘provid[ing] the innermost kernel, prior to all form – the heart of things’ (ibid.).

59 Ibid., vol. 1, p. 92; for a critical examination of the ‘muffled’ nature of this supposed influence, see John Pilling, ‘Proust and Schopenhauer: Music and Shadows’, in Mary Bryden (ed.), Samuel Beckett and Music (Oxford, 1998), pp. 173–8.

60 It also ignores Schopenhauer’s sensible warning that, for ‘a man [to] assent with genuine conviction to the explanation of the significance of music here to be given, … he should often listen to music’ (World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, 257).

61 Catherine Laws, ‘Music in Words and Music: Feldman’s Response to Beckett’s Play’, in Angela Moorjani and Carola Viet (eds), Samuel Becket: Endlessness in the Year 2000, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui 11 (Amsterdam and New York, 2001), pp. 279–90 (p. 280).

62 Ibid., p. 279.

63 Stephen Benson, ‘Beckett, Feldman, Joe and Bob: Speaking of Music in Words and Music’, in Suzanne M. Lodato and David Francis Urrow (eds), Essays on Music and the Spoken Word and on Surveying the Field (Amsterdam, 2005), p. 166.

64 Ibid., p. 169.

65 Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, p. 291.

66 Guy Debrock, ‘The Word Man and the Note Man: Morton Feldman and Beckett’s Virtual Music’, in Lois Oppenheim (ed.), Samuel Beckett and the Arts: Music, Visual Arts and Non-Print Media (New York, 1999), pp. 67–82 (pp. 79–80).

67 Prieto, Listening In, p. 218.

68 Everett C. Frost, Preface to Samuel Beckett, ‘All That Fall’ and Other Plays for Radio and Screen (London, 2009), pp. vii–xxiii (p. xi).

69 Morton Feldman’s Music thus appears in two recordings of the play – by Voices International and Westdeutscher Rundfunk (1996) – while Patrick Magee portrayed Words in both the BBC’s and Katherine Worth’s productions. Two very different performances are the result in each case, due to the two very different interactions between the characters.

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