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 There are also the recordings of EP's opera _Testament of Francois Villon_ (the score is unpublished--MS at the Beinecke at Yale).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 [log in to unmask]