Some thoughts on poetry vs music, which I shared back and forth in dialogues in googleplus:
Singing poetry is strangling the delicacy of poetry by the arrogance of music.
Poetry has its own music inbuilt which manifests in progressive coming back to it and understanding the poetry layers after layers. But when you set the music from outside, the words are forced to play a different role than for which they are intended in poetry, a role of danseuse to an external code and rhythm. Whereas in poetry the words blossom out petals by petals of their meaning levels. This unnatural and forceful appropriation of poetry to serve the logic and codes of music is what I call 'the arrogance of music'. In chanting also the inner world of poetic sensibility is sacrificed to the social formulas and codes of chanting and choir.
Roman Jakobson sees progressive freedom of expression from the stage of phonemes into words to the stage of words set in sentences. But in prose and ordinary functions of language like reporting and narrating, the words are constrained by the denotative function, even though the connotative writes into the sentences more and more spaces of freedom. But in poetic function the language becomes almost self-referential and in one stroke it has become the stage, the player and the performance, all in one. The compulsion of denotation is reduced to the minimum. Roman Jakobson maps this progressive liberation of language in his book, 'Fundamentals of Language'. While discussing the two-fold character of language in the second part, his following words are significant, which play resonance with the Dhvani concepts of Kavya Sastras.:
"Thus in the combination of linguistic units there is an ascending scale of freedom. In the combination of distinctive features into phonemes, the freedom of the individual speaker is zero; the code has already established all the possibilities which may be utilized in the given language. Freedom to combine phonemes into words is circumscribed, it is limited to the marginal situation of wordcoinage. In the forming of sentences out of words the speaker
is less constrained. And finally, in the combination of sentences into utterances, the action of compulsory syntactical rules ceases
and the freedom of any individual speaker to create novel contexts increases substantially, although again the numerous stereotyped
utterances are not to be overlooked."
*
I will like to take one example from Victor Hugo, a line which I like very much - 'L'homme respire, mais l'artiste aspire'. L'homme is man. 'respire' belongs to biology. L'artiste again the name of man in one function. 'aspire' belongs to the field of values - aspiration. Here what function the biology word 'respire' is doing? Man respires. Is it reporting? What use? Yea man respires. What of that? But V Hugo uses the whole first part as a preamble and foregrounding for what he is going to say next, as 'pakaippulam' - contrast background. The whole unit Man respires serves to focus our attention on 'but the artist aspires'. Aspiration is as essential and sine qua non to the artist as respiration is to the man, biological. Where will you point the occurrence of poetry here? In which word? That is why we have to consider that poetry is maximum freedom context of language, which Dhvani says in its own way - Poetry happens after the words are exhausted.
***
Srirangam V Mohanarangan
*
Singing poetry is strangling the delicacy of poetry by the arrogance of music.
Poetry has its own music inbuilt which manifests in progressive coming back to it and understanding the poetry layers after layers. But when you set the music from outside, the words are forced to play a different role than for which they are intended in poetry, a role of danseuse to an external code and rhythm. Whereas in poetry the words blossom out petals by petals of their meaning levels. This unnatural and forceful appropriation of poetry to serve the logic and codes of music is what I call 'the arrogance of music'. In chanting also the inner world of poetic sensibility is sacrificed to the social formulas and codes of chanting and choir.
Roman Jakobson sees progressive freedom of expression from the stage of phonemes into words to the stage of words set in sentences. But in prose and ordinary functions of language like reporting and narrating, the words are constrained by the denotative function, even though the connotative writes into the sentences more and more spaces of freedom. But in poetic function the language becomes almost self-referential and in one stroke it has become the stage, the player and the performance, all in one. The compulsion of denotation is reduced to the minimum. Roman Jakobson maps this progressive liberation of language in his book, 'Fundamentals of Language'. While discussing the two-fold character of language in the second part, his following words are significant, which play resonance with the Dhvani concepts of Kavya Sastras.:
"Thus in the combination of linguistic units there is an ascending scale of freedom. In the combination of distinctive features into phonemes, the freedom of the individual speaker is zero; the code has already established all the possibilities which may be utilized in the given language. Freedom to combine phonemes into words is circumscribed, it is limited to the marginal situation of wordcoinage. In the forming of sentences out of words the speaker
is less constrained. And finally, in the combination of sentences into utterances, the action of compulsory syntactical rules ceases
and the freedom of any individual speaker to create novel contexts increases substantially, although again the numerous stereotyped
utterances are not to be overlooked."
*
I will like to take one example from Victor Hugo, a line which I like very much - 'L'homme respire, mais l'artiste aspire'. L'homme is man. 'respire' belongs to biology. L'artiste again the name of man in one function. 'aspire' belongs to the field of values - aspiration. Here what function the biology word 'respire' is doing? Man respires. Is it reporting? What use? Yea man respires. What of that? But V Hugo uses the whole first part as a preamble and foregrounding for what he is going to say next, as 'pakaippulam' - contrast background. The whole unit Man respires serves to focus our attention on 'but the artist aspires'. Aspiration is as essential and sine qua non to the artist as respiration is to the man, biological. Where will you point the occurrence of poetry here? In which word? That is why we have to consider that poetry is maximum freedom context of language, which Dhvani says in its own way - Poetry happens after the words are exhausted.
***
Srirangam V Mohanarangan
*
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