Dear Poundians,
Here is a simpler version for the listserv format. Alternately, please
visit the website: <www.ezrapoundmusic.com>
I hope Vol I of this series, released in July, has added to your
enjoyment of /The Cantos/.
Vol II is now available as an e-book. Both books can be read on your
computer (recommended) or tablet.
All best wishes,
Margaret Fisher
*Second Evening Art Publishing**
Studies in the Music of Ezra Pound:
Duration Rhyme and Great Bass*
*/New!/ Volume II: /The Transparency of Ezra Pound's Great Ba//s//s
/****$ 9.99*
The basic premise of Pound's theory of great bass was daunting in
its austerity, but not particularly revolutionary: rhythm is the
fundamental element that determines artistic form in poetry and
music. Pound went on, however, to make claims for a great bass
beyond rhythm. He wrote about it as a trait that could identify
genius in the person and in the work of art. A person endowed with
great bass had a sense of "proportional frequency" and "perfect" or
"absolute" rhythm. With such abstruse parameters, Pound's great bass
has resisted analysis.
This e-book examines great bass as a theory of rhythm and rhythmic
influence against the backdrop ofseminal works on harmony from
medieval times to the twentieth century: Dante, Franco of Cologne,
Thomas Campion, Jean-Phillipe Rameau, Hermann von Helmholtz, Arnold
Schoenberg and Henry Cowell, among others. In this setting, Pound's
great bass joins thelong-standing practical and theoretical inquiry
concerning the bass part and bass function in music, itself part of
a larger ongoing investigation of human perception informed by
musical cognition.
The total number of contributions to the science of harmony in our
century is three...Schoenberg's Harmonielehre, Schenker's
Harmonielehre, and Pound's Treatise. This grouping may seem unusual,
for the former two are carefully worked out philosophizings by
musicians of great reputation, while Pound's Treatiseis a scramble
of jottings on a subject about which he could be expected to have
only the vaguest notions. But they are the right notions, and that
is why I signaled it as an important text, . . . R. Murrray Schafer,
/Ezra Pound and Music
/<http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00EBXO1WK>
*Volume I: /The Echo of Villon in Ezra Pound's Music and Poetry,
Toward a Theory of Duration Rhyme/$5.00
* **
The principal essay of this e-book of essays about Pound's music
identifies the duration rhyme as a metrical construct of musical
proportion within Pound's/Cantos/. Using computer-assisted models,
the author demonstrates how Pound applied the relative temporal
durations of elements in his poems---vowels, syllables, words,
phrases and verse lines---and the precise proportions that result
from those relations to arrive at his great bass of a new poetic
based on time durations and informed by music.
<http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DQHJ0JQ>
Margaret Fisheris author of /Ezra Pound's Radio Operas, The BBC
Experiments/ (1931-1933) (The MIT Press, winner of the 2002 Ezra
Pound Society Prize), /The Recovery of Ezra Pound's Third Opera/:
Collis O Heliconii, /Settings of Poems by Catullus and Sappho/, and
/The Echo of Villon in Ezra Pound's Music and Poetry, Toward a
Theory of Duration Rhyme/. With Robert Hughes, she co-edited The
Complete Music of Ezra Pound, a series of five volumes with engraved
music scores for Second Evening Art Publishing. In 2008 she received
the prestigious Rome Prize for work on early Italian Radio, Futurist
Radio and a translation of /Radia/, Pino Masnata's posthumously
published /Gloss of the 1933 Futurist Radio Manifesto/, with
Fisher's Introduction and Notes (Second Evening Art, 2012).
These ebooks are designed to be read with ebook reader software for
tablets and computers. Many ebook readers can be downloaded for free.
Second Evening Art Publishing
1420 45th Street #16
Emeryville CA 94608
www.ezrapoundmusic.com
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