1
The son and I spent the better part of a phone conversation arguing about the meaning of allegro. The argument itself proceeded at a pace one might score as “allegro” in that it was lovely, angular, and filled with sharp edges that neither of us wished to soften. It is a pleasure to argue about language with my son, as it is a pleasure to argue about meaning with anyone who is genuinely interested in thinking— who finds thinking to be incredibly pleasureable, and that pleasurable to be incommensurable.
Despite our disagreements, the son and I concluded something unrelated to either of our contentions, namely, that allegro is a word used to describe a relationship between an object and its surroundings— it exists in relation to others. An atom alone in the universe cannot be allegro; there is no way to measure the movement of an atom without the presence of others atoms.
2
In music, allegro is a tempo marking used to indicate that the performer should play faster, more quickly, brightly. In ballet, it indicates brisk and lively movement. The definition is the denotation—the cold, hard bone of the word laid out before us on the table. Connotation is what clings to it, what hides inside the word; the sticky opportunities to add dimension and volume to a word—to make it shine differently after being modified by the addition of new objects.
Simply, connotation is a commonly understood cultural or emotional association that any given word or phrase carries, in addition to its explicit or literal meaning, which is its denotation. Playing the denoted meaning against the connoted meaning creates tension in poems. Poets can rely on connotations in order to inflect the way a poem touches or ruffles us, or defamiliarizing the world as we know it. When leveraged and played in relation to other words, a powerful connotation can infect a poem without explicitly declaring itself.
3
The simple stricture of "Vivaldi" by Stuart Dybek can tempt the reader into overlooking its elegance. The simple part is the motion: it begins by making a promise, then adding a qualification, then shifting into interrogative meditation before finishing with a rephrasing.
Dybek opens with the promise that he is going to tell us about meeting Vivaldi. He begins by describing a scene from a 19th century novel before breaking into a new stanza with a "no" — an uncapitalized qualification, an amendment that returns to the promise. (But it returns to the promise without starting a new sentence, and this insistence on expanding duration is notable; there is something he decided here, something that meant to distinguish between a "No" and a "no").
In the second stanza, immediately after the “no,” Dybek tells us about a winter night around a city subway, or maybe a train.. More specifically, he lists the sounds of that winter night—the violin, the drunks wassailing, the implied echo of strings meeting metal on tracks. And there is a milk truck, which is a time-piece: it tells what time this is happening, maybe in Dybek's childhood, or the childhood of his parents, maybe in a book he has read in a scene he imagines.
And then Dybek drops an ellipsis to indicate a thought trailing off, a thought wandering alone down the tracks as the speaker turns to the reader and begins asking questions. "Has it never been so…?" The fourth stanza is made entirely from questions. Question after question. Addressed directly to you or me or the one simulataneously overhearing and listening and reading. It is the longest stanza in the poem (5 lines to the 3 and 4 of other stanzas). It wants to know where sound begins.
I think I mentioned Dybek finishes musically, which is to say, he finishes with a rephrasing and a defamiliarized image.
[SON: The musical term for this isn’t “rephrasing” mom. You’re referring to the basic structure of harmony, and the way pieces reach toward closure by returning to themes.]
Fine. Let's look at the first line of the first stanza and compare it to the first line of the final stanza:
When I met Vivaldi it was dark,
When I closed my eyes,
Both are written in past tense to describe a moment that was present to the speaker. Both occupy the space that is the promise of meeting Vivaldi.
What do we know about baroque composer Antonio Vivaldi? Although he composed for multiple instruments, the only two instruments we know he was officially trained to play included the violin and the harpsichord. Again, first stanza:
When I met Vivaldi it was dark,
a ragman lashed at his horse's bells
And second stanza:
When I closed my eyes,
less than a ghost,
Vivaldi cupped a mouth harp
like a match against the wind.
What else do we know about Antonio Vivaldi? On September 18, 1693, Vivaldi was tonsured as a monk, and on March 23, 1703, he was consecrated. For his hair color Vivaldi was nicknamed the "red monk". Vivaldi never played a mouth harp. In fact, mouth harp is a word associated with the blues harmonica. Dybek ends on this very specific blues harmonica in the mouth of Vivaldi.
4
SON: Your allegro is not my allegro.
ME: There is no single allegro.
SON: Right. We can speak about a general allegro-like aura but the composer imagines (and scores) an allegro to mean one thing—- a thing that exists in his mind—-- and the pianist then interprets that allegro in relation to other notes and tempo markings. So, for example, I think Shostakovich’s allegro is different from Vivaldi’s, and that difference is only learned by studying the body of their work.
ME: This is true for poetry as well. The implicit associations that poets hold in relation to a certain word—- take “home” for example, or “tenderness” —- often emerge by studying their use of that word across poems, and determining how tightly they hold the word, which is to say, how rigid and fixed it is in their mind.
SON: So we agree that everyone's allegro is different, and this difference is what makes a performance unique. A conductor like Sergiu Celibidache has a very particular way of interpreting the way an allegro relates to what surrounds it in a symphony. My allegro, or the one I use as a composer —-my private allegro, if you will—- starts to change a little when I learn a new piece, and I get close to another allegro, a Beethoven allegro, for example. Even if I don’t realize it, I can’t go back to the private allegro I held before learning to play Beethoven’s.
ME: The anxiety of allegro influence!
SON: No, mom. Not anxiety—it’s just the way music works. Everything you hear and play changes what you can imagine hearing and playing and composing.
ME: Poetry is the same. That’s why reading poetry is how we learn to write poetry, or how the possibilities of our poetics expand. I’m thinking about the subterreanean intertextuality of these influences, these things we have heard or read and thus carry forward. I’m thinking about how it holds the capacity for humor and subversion. Just as defamiliarization (or "making the familiar strange") relies on subverting expectations, parody relies on tradition, on the words and scores of others, in order to refashion meaning. Intertextual references reach into a shared past and attempt to re-vision it in the present; a reference is a nod to influence.
5
“The Allegro” is a flash fiction of a piano piece composed by Erik Satie when he was 18. Dated September 9, 1884, it's his earliest known composition. "The Allegro" is also the first place in which Satie signed his name as "Erik" instead of "Éric". Satie was serving time in what he called the "penitentiary" of the Paris Conservatoire in 1884, and finding his creative energy sapped. It was on a summer holiday visit to his hometown of Honfleur, on the coast of Normandy, that Satie wrote his first "known" piece, and the only music he'd ever compose in his hometown. The upbeat and earnest optimism of the Allegro won't characterize Satie's later compositions, which are more whimsical, melancholic, and biting. But even from the start, Satie's appetite for quotation shaped his music. Allegro quotes the popular song, Ma Normandie (1836) by Frédéric Bérat. There is even a bit of the refrain—- whose lyrics are "J'irai revoir ma Normandie" ("I long to see my Normandy") — tucked into the middle of the piece.
In a sense, Satie’s Allegro is also the first piece in which he displays his penchant for quotation as part of the composition. The son and I have talked about quotations in music and poetry at length. I leave my quotations of those conversations for another day.
6
SON: Don’t forget that we’re talking about tempo markings here: we’re talking about duration and the space between silence and sound. That’s Cage, right? The tempo-marking tells the performer how to play it. Play it quickly, briskly, brightly.
7
I’ve taught the “Allegro” by Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer many times—-because readers always find something new in it.
Basically, my thinking about this poem focuses lightly on structure, but takes more interest in Tranströmer’s use of language. We can notice the simple couplets, the sparsity of adjectives, the way in which these formal choices create a sort of dark, quiet room for the poem.
The speaker begins by telling us that he is playing Haydn–"I play Haydn after a dark day"–and then he does this wild thing that poets do, namely, he creates an unforgettable word in order to defy the given world. To push that little world to its limits.
"I push the hands deep into my haydnpockets," Tranströmer writes, and thus does he turn away from the emperor's demands. It is an act of private, intimate protest rather than a public gesture. You can't play a song on a piano with your hands in your pockets. By pushing these two words together, the poet gives us an attitude, a way of being, a way of describing how playing Hadyn is an intimate ecstasy.
Tranströmer titled this poem after a tempo-marking in Haydn. By giving us this marking, we may find ourselves wondering which piano sonata he is playing, which particular allegro.
The allegro has its own history as the first section or part of a sonata. To have an allegro was a must for classical composers. But to have hadynpockets is to be someone who knows Transtomer's personal allegro: it is to know the neologism he created to resist the lure of kings.
8
SON: Composer Erik Satie didn’t use conventional tempo markings in his pieces. In fact, that short “Allegro” may have been his only allegro, and it was as a title.
ME: Why?
SON: He wanted to defy everything that the Conservatory stood upon for its authority. Unlike many of you adults who like to think you’re avant-garde, Satie was the real deal. He delegitimized himself and constantly refused respectability. He was performing his radicalism— he lived it. He lived with his rats and didn’t give a damn. I respect him for that.
ME: You say he didn’t give a damn, but I think he was quite pissed.
SON: I mean he didn’t care enough to try and fit in. He would never have accepted the sorts of things you all do for money. Playing in a Cabaret bar, to him, was part of being free.
ME: I, too, was nineteen once.
9
francine j. harris’ “Sonata in F Major, K.183: Allegro” is a stunning engagement of Scarlatti’s composition as played by Daria van den Bercken. The relationship between the music, the rain, the presence of Scarlatti in the sounds:
the women, who step in the street and yell
to anyone they loved once and it sounds like prelude if
Scarlatti hadn’t moved to Madrid
It’s hard not to get tongue-tied at the beauty of the enjambment here, and harris’ use of the field to drop into the relationship between Scarlatti’s composition and the streets experienced in Madrid. How “it sounds like prelude if”—and the line breaks on the conditional—-where the use of prelude is uncanny, it torques time in the poem, it reverses the motion of the women in the street somehow. The conditional continues:
would he have moved the notes diatonically as the rain falls up
a rood. ascends the scaffolding. It’s impossible to read The Street
The magic of a harris poem is this feeling that the space and the moment is becoming a book or a text, and here the speaker is reading “The Street” and the movement of the notes bears kinship with the strange reversal of the women’s calls of love. Such an arfully crafted composition, this poem.
10
My editor told me straight away I’d shown I had a nose for news. He was getting a bit irritated because all the documentary life-stories were so alike. However hard life might have been for the person in question on the other side, however respectable the reasons for his flight, there had gradually developed a stereotype story—-looked at journalistically—-that did violence to my editor’s professional instincts. And now we had a rather special case: this young man who, without any fuss, simply wanted to get something out of life, who hadn’t found what he wanted on the other side, and had got out. At last we had, not a tragedy, but an intriguing allegro, a fine specimen of the picaresque. We’d simply never come across anything so flatly hedonistic before. What more natural than to invite this young man to join the paper?
- Martin Walser, “A German Mosaic”
This is only time I have seen “allegro” used to designate a mode of the picaresque—-a literary genre rather than a way of playing it.
11
W. H. Auden’s “Words and Music" deserves a read in its entirety. I pass it quietly to you, for the insight on meter and composition.
From the same page in my notebook: Igor Stravinsky said an allegro usually involved several movements "of which one confers upon the whole work its symphonic quality namely, the symphonic allegro, generally placed at the opening of the work and intended to justify its name by fulfilling the requirements of a certain musical dialectic." On this view, the most critical part of the dialectic is in the development, which occurs at the center—and this is what Stravinsky took as "the symphonic allegro" (a.k.a. "the sonata-allegro").
12
In her Charles Haskins Lecture for 2001, titled “A Life of Learning”, Helen Vendler uses John Milton’s “L’Allegro” to make a point about judgement in literature:
From the time I was very young I continually asked myself, as I read through the works of poets, why some texts seemed so much more accomplished and moving than others. Why was Milton's "L'Allegro" more satisfactory than his "On the Death of a fair Infant dying of a Cough?" I believed, and still do, that anyone literate in poetry could see that the one was superior to the other. (Those who suppose there are no criteria for such judgments merely expose their own incapacity.) Still, to clarify to oneself and then to others, in a reasonable and explicit way, the imaginative novelty of a poem and to give evidence of its technical skill isn't an easy task. I've been brought to mute frustration by it when I know intuitively that something is present in the poem that I haven't yet been able to isolate or name or describe or solve. In chapter 12 of Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad remarks on "that mysterious, almost miraculous, power of producing striking effects by means impos- sible ofdetection which is the lastword ofthe highest art." I wanted, hardly knowing how, to detect the means of that power.
13
Finally, there is this qualified allegro used by Susan Sontag in her catalogue description of a similarly titled exhibition “In Memory of Their Feelings”— about the world created by Merce Cunningham and John Cage, and the endless physical dialogue which took shape between them. Allegro vivace.
