The summer I turned nineteen, I had a job in a restaurant
known for its “singing waiters and waitresses.” We were all conservatory
refugees, trying to earn next year’s tuition, and I was the piano player.
Mainly, I was Shopping Mall Music—show tunes, jazz standards, Old Favorites
like “Clair de Lune” or Pachabel, to soften the ticket price for prime rib.
Every day, two hours at lunch and from five until closing, I noodled around
familiar melodies, put together medleys (“Moonlight in Vermont” to “Moon River”
to “Lazy River”), or stylized requests. My first triumph came late on a night
when a large table, very loud and very jolly, requested “The Sheik of Araby.”
I’d never heard of it, nor was the song to be found in the fat, frayed Fake
Book I consulted discreetly in the ladies’ room. So I rode the long vowels in C
minor (“Oh—the SHEEK-and-2-and-3, of
Ar-a-BEE-and-2-and-3), repeated the
phrase in several other keys, tossed in a showy glissando, and pocketed a
fifty-dollar tip. They were deep in their cups.
My
public trial by saturation also involved another sort of ear training.
Periodically, a waitress would put down her tray and prop “The Man I Love” or
Puccini on the rack of the grand (“Transpose this down a third,” she might say
without a wink). There was never time to rehearse—ketchup bottles and salt
shakers needed filling between shifts—and “Un bel di” might not have been in
your repertoire at age nineteen, any more than “The Sheik of Araby.” Like
skydiving or high-stakes poker, with sight reading—the first sighting of the
thing—you’re playing the odds, relying as much on your ear as on your eye, and
crucially, on a prior knowledge of patterns.
Ear
training is learning how to duplicate both any sounds you hear and any
as-yet-unheard sounds indicated on the score. Perfect pitch is only a small
advantage—what matters more is relative
pitch, the intervals between notes, so one’s instinctive aim is true. For an
accompanist, there’s even more to calibrate—rhythm and harmony, for instance,
since you are the whole orchestra. Confronting an unfamiliar score, the eye
needs to zoom ahead, using the current sounds to predict the next cluster of
sounds, locating markers of confirmation or redirection; the fingers simply
follow with their split-second translation. It only works if you can narrow the
range of choices at each given moment. This means you need to have already
tutored the instincts that now must leap into action—to have already learned what chords are
encompassed by any given key and their most likely sequence.
Being
overheard, and the relentless ongoing pulse, are large and stressful
differences, but in fact, reading anything at all employs the same brain work,
the same rapid-fire reliance on deeply learned patterns, which are either fulfilled
or resisted. When what we read is written not in musical notation but in words,
those patterns are embedded in the syntax of the language. Writers who employ
them with wit and surprise, with satisfying musical structure, with clarity of
purpose and subtlety of meaning, provide us one of the greatest satisfactions
of the literary arts. And the art most attentive to pattern of every kind is
poetry.
The
following pages investigate some of the ways a poet composes with and against
and inside the syntactical patterns available in English. The opening chapter
identifies the most common patterns and their musical arrangement in passages
from Robert Frost and Maeve Brennan. Chapter 2 examines, in free verse poems by
Stanley Kunitz and D. H. Lawrence, how choices for meaning and music multiply
exponentially when poetic line, with its own myriad choices, either reinforces
or complicates the sentence. In chapter 3, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 dramatizes
the powerful balance of meter and phrase, and the next three chapters track the
way phrase destabilizes meter in Philip Larkin, structures the relaxed
accentual verse of Elizabeth Bishop, and propels the syllabic lines of Donald
Justice. Completing the circle, the final chapter returns to Lawrence, free
verse, and syntactical patterns that score a narrative.
One
of my touchstones throughout is Robert Frost, who had some sly and pithy things
to say about these matters, and I recommend going directly to the source.
Another touchstone is Robert Jourdain, whose analysis of music, using analogs
borrowed from linguistics, provided helpful lenses for poetry, which
incorporates both fields. For more about language acquisition, Steven Pinker
provides an excellent introduction. And at the back of this book there is a
glossary of the terms I use to talk concretely about meter and phrase, line and
syntax—names for the parts. With poetry as with music, the first step toward
mastery is recognition.
