On Mon, 23 Nov 1998, Ted Boucher wrote:
 
> I know that Pound copied some of Arnaud's work, with musical
> notation--did he attempt to set the works to music, or had
> Arnaud made musical notations?
> I am particularly interested in finding  any information on
> the methods that Pound might have used for finding and using
> melodies.
 
Ted--
 
I've done quite a bit of work in this area, so I can point you in a few
directions.  EP's work on Arnaut Daniel was early.  He did find the two
extant Daniel melodies (though they had previously been published by a
scholar named Restori), and he used them in a collection of nine
troubadour songs, composed by his friend Walter Rummel, called _Hesternae
Rosae_.
 
> I am a composer, and am developing a system for teaching
> creative skills to songwriters and lyricists.  I rely heavily
> on ideas similar to those that Pound had expressed concerning
> the relationship between  musical and poetic meters.
 
Pound's ideas about music for poetry are scattered.  The obvious place to
begin is _EP and Music_, edited by Murray Schafer, and there is an
important essay on music in the "I Gather the Limbs of Osiris" sequence.
There are also the recordings of EP's opera _Testament of Francois Villon_
(the score is unpublished--MS at the Beinecke at Yale).
 
> I have developed a satisfactory methodology for generating
> and assigning melodies to rhythmic meter, but it is based on
> a minimalist theory (which is very well suited to the needs
> of contemporary songwriters), and I am extremely curious as
> to how Pound delt with this question.
 
It's interesting that you mention minimalism, since EP's ideas and the
music he composed are certainly minimalist.  In a different way, George
Antheil's experimental music of the 1920s stands in the historical line
that points to the so-called minimalism of recent years (Glass, Adams,
Riley, Part et al).  You may be interested in my recent article on the
music of Pound's operas in _Literary Modernism and the Occult Tradition_,
edited by Leon Surette & Demetres Tryphonopoulos.
 
                                Stephen Adams
                                Department of English
                                University of Western Ontario
                                London, Canada  N6A-3K7
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