ESC: English Studies in Canada

nique are minor, however, for the work of making each checklist has been well done: that is, the two lists are accurate and comprehensive. Remove the talk of reputation, remove the indiscriminating annotations, and we would be left with two useful library-type listings of major authors. m ich ael collie / York University R. Murray Schafer, ed., Ezra Pound and Music: The Complete Criticism (New York: New Directions, 1977). xiii, 530. $42.00 Ezra Pound and Music brings together all of Pound’s music criticism for the first time. Most of it first appeared in periodicals and journals scattered over a period of 33 years, from 1908 to 1941, and has been rather difficult of access. While almost all of it is listed in Donald Gallup’s Bibliography of Ezra Pound, the notices and reviews that Pound published in the Rapallo weekly II Mare between 1928 and 1941 have not previously been translated from the Italian. Thus Schafer has, for the first time, made it possible for the scholar to assess the gist and coherence of Pound’s views on music with the convenience of a single, unilingual collection. Schafer himself is a musician and composer well qualified to comment on the soundness of Pound’s musicology, and with a long time interest in both Pound’s music and his poetry. Pound himself was, of course, a man of un­ bounded self-confidence whose lack of musical training and inability to carry a tune did not prevent him from composing two operas and publishing both music criticism and music theory. His lack of musical training and imperfect grasp of music history inevitably led him into errors and unsound views. Schafer is careful to point out Pound’s errors and misconceptions, and makes no effort to conceal Pound’s technical incompetence in music. Nonetheless, as a musician and composer, he finds the poet’s view of music theory and music history both perceptive and instructive. Ezra Pound and Music reinforces Pound’s reputation as an inspired ama­ teur, a backwoods polymath whose comparative ignorance permits him to see clearly where others become lost in superambient detail. Specifically, Schafer finds that Pound’s insistence on the primacy of melody over harmony as the determinant of musical form corresponds to the direction that twentiethcentury music has taken. This correct perception derives from Pound’s having come to music with a poet’s sense of form, that is, a narrative, or “throughcomposed ” sense of form. Schafer distinguishes the typical characteristics of musical and literary form in his introduction: 378 Music, as an abstract art, turns inward, seeking its precise definition through self-exploration; its ideas are rotated, superimposed, and extended in an attempt to balance them convincingly. In literature all abstract ideas must be externalized, that is, turned loose to register on nature and society. It is this essential difference that has shaped the principles of form peculiar to each art. Repetition in music is both necessary as a mnemonic aid and desirable as a method of achieving balance. Literature, on the other hand, is through-composed, gaining its coherence through narration, action, and characterization. In many ways the history of avant garde poetry and music in this century can be seen as the result of a cross-fertilization of literature and music, with works like Joyce’s Ulysses and Pound’s Cantos adapting reiterative musical form to literature, and composers like George Antheil, John Cage, and Murray Schafer adapting linear or “ through-composed” literary form to music. At least this is the inference I draw from Schafer’s discussion of Pound’s music criticism. Of course, the analogy of musical and literary form has been much worked by literary critics following broad hints dropped by Joyce, Eliot, and Pound about their own works. The value of Ezra Pound and Music is that the discussion of this cross-fertilization (or corruption, as some would have it) is carried on at a much higher level of abstraction through a poet’s effort to devise a theory of music, and a musician’s com­ mentary on that necessarily amateur effort. However, this book is primarily a collection of Pound’s music criticism, and only secondarily a...