Composition as Commentary: Voice and Poetry in Electroacoustic Music

Edmund Hunt

What is the role of a spoken or sung text in an electroacoustic composition? Does it represent anachronism, assigning the role of communication to the voice and thereby depriving more abstract electroacoustic material of its rhetorical force? Does the disembodied, electroacoustic voice distance the audience from the communicative power of the words that are heard? Although Simon Emmerson argued that the disembodied human voice in acousmatic music can often seem frustrating, this sense of disembodiment might be turned to the composer’s advantage, as the basis of a methodology for creative practice. In the process of developing a methodology to address questions of text, language, voice, and electroacoustic technology, I created two musical compositions. Both works used the untranslated words of an enigmatic Old English poem, ‘Wulf and Eadwacer’. At first glance, the idea of using a text in an obscure or ancient language that carries little or no semantic meaning for the listeners might raise further questions. Is this a deliberate attempt at obfuscation, hiding the paucity of the composer’s ideas behind a veneer of archaism or even naive exoticism? As my investigation progressed, I began to envisage the process of electroacoustic composition as a type of non-linguistic commentary on a text. Rather than hindering the listener’s understanding of a composition inspired by literature, the electroacoustic voice might help to reveal different interpretations of a text, allowing multiple ideas and identities to be heard.

(15)

(10)

(5)

Wulf and Eadwacer

Lēodum is mīnum swylce him mon lāc gife;

willað hȳ hine āϸecgan, gif hē on ϸrēat cymeð.

Ungelīc is ūs

Wulf is on īege, ic on ōϸerre.

Fæst is ϸæt ēglond, fenne biworpen.

Sindon wælrēowe weras ϸǣr on īge;

willað hȳ hine āϸecgan, gif hē on ϸrēat cymeð.

Ungelīce is ūs.

Wulfes ic mīnes wīdlāstum wēnum dogode;

ϸonne hit wæs rēnig weder and ic reotugu sæt,

ϸonne mec se beaducāfa bōgum bilegde,

wæs mē wyn tō ϸon, wæs mē hwæϸre ēac lāð.

Wulf, mīn Wulf, wēna mē ϸīne

sēoce gedydon, ϸīne seldcymas,

murnende mōd, nāles metelīste.

Gehȳrest ϸū, Ēadwacer? Uncerne earmne hwelp

bireð wulf tō wuda.

ϸæt mon ēaϸe tōslīteð ϸætte nǣfre gesomnad wæs,

uncer giedd geador.

3. Composition as Commentary: Text

The two works presented in this exposition are based on a strange, fragmentary, and enigmatic Old English poem, generally known as Wulf and Eadwacer. The text is preserved in a tenth-century codex which has acquired the name the Exeter Book.1 The opacity of Wulf and Eadwacer is borne out by a quantity of scholarship offering varying interpretations, leading at least one scholar to propose that it is ‘generally acknowledged as the most perplexing poem in the [Old English] language’.2 In the manuscript, the poem does not have a title, and is presented without notes or explanation. It is as though the text begins partway through a (now lost) narrative, or is based on a tale that was ‘familiar to the poet’s audience but unknown to us’.3 Even the manuscript of the Exeter Book is fragmentary. Crossley-Holland has drawn attention to the ways in which the stained, fire damaged manuscript is missing at least seven folios.4 As far as we know, whatever text was preserved in these folios has not survived in any other manuscripts.

The folio on which Wulf and Eadwacer is written is followed by a collection of riddles, many of which seem ambiguous and have numerous possible interpretations. Like Wulf and Eadwacer, most of the riddles are written in the first person. In light of the context in which it is preserved, it has been proposed that Wulf and Eadwacer might be better interpreted as a riddle.5 However, it has also been argued that the ambiguity of Wulf and Eadwacer enhances, rather than limits, its merit as a work of literature.6 To use Eco’s terminology, the poem’s resistance to dogmatic interpretation gives it a high degree of dynamism and ‘openness’, since the recipient of the text must discover and choose from ‘a continuous generation of internal relations’ in order to perceive the work in its totality.7

We can only be certain about a few salient points in the text. Word-endings show that the text is spoken by a woman; it is, in fact, one of the earliest texts in a female voice in English. She is held captive on an island in the marshes. She describes complex emotions: sadness, loneliness, longing, fleeting joy, and hate. The text follows many of the conventions of Old English poetry. Most lines are divided into two half-lines, separated by a caesura. Each half-line contains two stressed syllables and any number of unstressed syllables. Unusually for Old English poems of this period, there is a refrain.

< Previous

Next >

Translation

It is as though someone gave a present to my people;

They want to oppress him if he comes with a troop,

We are apart (we are different/there is a difference between us). [*different possible translations]

Wulf is on an island, I am on another.

That island is secure, surrounded by marshland.

There are cruel men there on the island.

They want to oppress him if he comes with a troop.

We are apart.

I endured far-wandering hopes of my Wulf;