New Article Examines the Sonic Media of Lyric Poetry

A recent article by Matthew Kilbane, a lecturer in the English Department, brings together media studies and literary history. Published in PMLA, “Speech-Musical Modernism: Harry Partch’s Lyric Media” reveals the way lyric poetry was understood as specific kind of medium for sound—an "intermedial artifact," Kilbane argues—through a case study of the U.S. composer Harry Partch (1901-1974) and his collaboration with William Butler Yeats (1865-1939).

In the early twentieth century, Yeats dreamed of a “new art” uniting word and music. "Speech-Musical Modernism" shows how Partch’s experiments setting poetry to microtonal music in the 1930s rekindled that dream.  Yeats’s experiments had been relatively low-tech, requiring only a psaltery and the chanting voice. But Partch’s attempts to restore lyric’s music by notating the subtle melodies of speech involved elaborate microtonal scales and the fabrication of new, unique instruments. Built to compete with the phonograph, these “new-old media” pressed lyric to its absolute limit as a medium, clarifying both lyric’s inherent intermediality and its sensitivity to technological change. When Partch, who spent several years as an itinerant “hobo” in the 1930s, transplanted his Yeatsian speech-music to the transient shelters of the Depression-era West and began notating migrant voices, this compositional practice heralded unprecedented possibilities for the literary inscription of speech. Kilbane shows how Partch’s music sounds out the historical materiality of modern lyric practices as they emerge in dynamic negotiation with the history of sound technologies.

This article is drawn from a book project that seeks to establish lyric poetry as a revisionary meeting place for literary and media studies. It was developed in part through collaboration with the Media Studies Graduate Working Groups.

Find the article HERE, in the May 2020 issue of PMLA, and read more about Kilbane and his research HERE. In the 2020-2021 academic year, Kilbane is the Joseph F. Martino Lecturer in Undergraduate Teaching with the Cornell English Department, where he teaches courses on literary machines and ecological writing.

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