“What am I doing in writing to you? trying to photograph perfume.” (Clarice Lispector, Água Viva, trans. Stefan Tobler, 1973)
When we talk about the roles of making and taking in art, we have to contend with the overhang in imperfectly overlapping definitions of the words contained in each camp. “Creator” can substitute for “composer,” “author,” “artist”... But a performer is also an artist, and a creator. Some performing artists are composers, but plenty are not. All of the above create or perform for an audience, but they are also audiences themselves as part of their creation.
Furthermore, while we might understand the interplay of transmission and reception along an axis in which the creator emits and the audience receives, the line between each side is blurry. Interacting with previously created material is a crucial element to making art. This may be ineffable inspiration or a technical lineage, but it’s also, very often, overtly a response to or a reconfiguration of a previous work. The majority of my practice as a classical singer is spent reading and interpreting music by composers which sets words by poets which are themselves often innately or explicitly referential and ekphrastic. What I am doing is joining a multidirectional and multidimensional chain of influence and interpretation.
A poet draws upon their memories, influences and sensations to write a text. The resulting poem is a limited glimpse into something larger: limited by the imperfection of translating a human impulse to language, limited by the simultaneous changeability and rigidity of words, limited by time and place, by the look of the words on the page, by their method of delivery. And more. The text is at once the poet’s creation and something beyond the poet. The poem takes on a beingness and therefore authority of its own. A reader takes in the poem – the poem impresses itself upon them.
In short, we have the following succession:
a) a slice of personal infinity → poet → poem → reader
But in reading the poem, the reader exerts a change on the poem through their interpretation of it, whether willfully or accidentally (and usually both). The words on the page that we for the sake of convenience treat as objective and solid regain a permeability and infinity. The unqualified impulse captured through the lens of meticulously chosen words is merely a flicker, impossibly temporary and fleeting. The poem is meant to solidify, but the very “imperfection” of words allows supposedly rigid matter to remain constantly evolving. Words are not merely avatars of other things and sensations: they are their own interested players. They set off their own senses or sensations in the reader’s body and contain their own histories. Words are dynamic matter that melt into a new flexibility when they’re shared. And so, we have to amend our chain:
b) reader → poem
In this scenario, any act of reading is an incidental act of creation. That creation is a view of the poetic material’s encoded multiverse which narrows and personalizes it, but it’s also, paradoxically, closer in quality to the broader, nebulous knot of references and senses the poem is meant to distill into understandable signals, because it’s temporary, multisensory, evolving. It joins up to the pre-existing rhizome of memories and associations in the reader. When it’s subsequently inscribed as an essay, a critical analysis, a complementary artwork, etc, a new slice of human experience is petrified into a new series of signs meant to be legible to its audience. A composer takes in a poem as its audience. They translate the poem through their conception of it viscerally in that instant, then particularly and technically. They act upon the poem both incidentally and then through their own creation process, transforming it into a specific musical text and encoding – imposing – their reading(s) through their own limited, delimiting signals. If we return to the reversed chain (b) reader → poem above, the act of composition is contained in that reversal onto the poem. We can also envision this as a continuation of our initial simplified chain:
c) poet → poem → composer reader → musical score → score reader
Poet → poem and composer → score are similar processes of composition: an attempt to notate and as such fix the ineffable into a shorthand for interpreters. But the following is also taking place:
d) poem ← composer reader → score
To some extent, the action upon the poem is effectively the same as the one towards the score. In reading – in the sense of interpreting – the poem, the composer begins the work of creating the score that uses and [re]interprets it. Or, composing the score is a reading of the poem. But they are also literally opposite processes: one of inhalation, one of exhalation.
The score itself becomes, like the poem, an entity related to and separate from the composer, and it begins to exert some power reading back onto the poetry semi-independently of the composer’s vision. The signals that make it up are legible orders to the trained eye, but their power of exactitude is finite, no matter how detail-oriented and controlling the notation. Furthermore, the score is not music. If music is the composer’s goal, the score is a statement of intent. If the words in a poem can’t fully account for and control the sensory reactions and correspondences they elicit in their audience, the panoply of indicative markings meant to encode a specific aural-temporal experience can’t account for an infinity of physical performance details, as well as how they’re understood by the audience.
But I’ve elided something in this last sentence: I am presupposing that music is meant to be heard even if some approximation – or perhaps its recipe – can be represented as symbols, and that poetry exists on the page outside of the realities of durational performance. That’s simply not the case. Poetry as it is written on the page is only a portion of poetic tradition and experience. Much classical and traditional storytelling, and by extension, poetry was and is meant to be delivered orally. Even within the written medium, a large number of poetic tools and tactics are built on [sometimes implicit] sound: rhyme scheme, meter, assonance, alliteration, euphony, onomatopoeia, etc…
In the guise of songs, we hear poetry being performed constantly, and the poet performer is hardly a difficult concept to grasp, but we don’t necessarily analyze what goes into the performance of poetry, or how performance transforms text. How our experience of a text in song is intrinsically shaped by its aural particularities, and by its performer or performers.
The performer occupies an ambiguous space between the false dichotomy of artistic emission-reception that underlines the unfixed and conversational nature of each extreme. If one soloist performs their own poetry to their own music, the progression of inspiration, creation and delivery seems relatively integrated, mirroring the poet → poem → reader chain above as poet/composer/performer → song → audience. Of course, this still contains the complicating factor of the reader, now a listener. Furthermore, the elements of the song each interact with and change one another. The text is not merely an incomplete stand-in for the song, nor is the music when devoid of words. Finally, the piece performed is a different beast from the theoretical one contained in sheet music or a chart.
When each part of the creation progression is carried out by a different person, the dimensions of interpretation and mutation grow exponentially. For the sake of simplicity, let’s imagine a vocal/piano setting of a poem. We now have to contend with the following minimum progression:
e) poet → poem → composer → score → pianist → performance → audience
poet → poem → composer → score → vocalist → performance → audience
As before, the arrows aren’t monodirectional. Just as the composer-reader creates their own work through their understanding of the poem, each performer-reader creates their own version of the musical piece and the poem in each interpretation. This is itself re-transfigured by the audience, who by extension change the music as score artifact and the original poem. Their reading influence radiates through each layer of the creation chain.
Noticeably absent in my messy web of influence is human interaction. I’ve only spoken of the relation between creator and object, and object and audience. That is: human → art and art → human interchange. This doesn’t factor in a huge percentage of both the creation and reception processes. Each person influences the others beyond their work in the particular art at hand. There is the possibility or inevitability of direct collaboration between the poet, composer and performers, even the audience. But even when a work and an interpretation aren’t explicitly obtained collaboratively, the people involved are also personae to be known, read and understood. These phenomena are fundamental components in the confused and complementary processes making, transmitting and receiving a work, and as such impossible to cast aside, but I won’t delve into them specifically here.
I’m concerned with the “additionals” contained in the individual players which they bring both to constructing and to reading works, and the human-made extras encoded to art artifacts that come to light once they are experienced and analyzed. Turning a human impulse into legible signals is an act of compromise that sets off an avalanche of ensuing compromises. All of these revolve around opposite impossibilities: no set of symbols is profound enough to contain all the complexities and dimensions of a human experience, and no set is narrow enough to be devoid of unintended complexity.
The imperfection of this translation process makes simultaneous readers and co-authors of all of us. Earlier, I mentioned the blurry aureoles that occur from trying to superimpose different definitions of creators and audiences that all have different shapes and sizes. Very quickly, that blur eradicates discrete notions of creator and receiver altogether.