Mew Zick Ann Dwerds; Heresy and Alchemy in Sound and Meaning
    
    'The question is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many different things' (Carroll) Alice's question provokes the reason for this paper and also uncovers the history of a prejudice, perhaps one of the most common and ancient of prejudices we might acknowledge. We think, we learn and we communicate through words - indeed we explicitly place our reasoning and belief structures in words - and yet the greatest writers demonstrate repeatedly that language as communication is at best ambiguous and at worst thoroughly unreliable. If we ever agreed about the meaning of Shakespeare, he would surely no longer interest us; politicians and legal practitioners understand the professional benefit of the inherent ambiguity of language and use it to their own professional advantage; from Descartes to Chomsky, words have been ruthlessly scrutinized as harbingers of knowledge, with the result that there is evidently an increasing perplexity about the nature and meaning of words. …meaning is a very complicated thing. A dictionary doesn't come close to defining any word. It only gives hints that you can use as an intelligent human. (Chomsky 1992)
    
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    If meaning is complicated, language is in reality a mystery, and to approach meaning it may demand knowledge of context, subtext, semantics and subtleties reflecting the customs and practices of the society and even of the individual concerned. And then there are the different registers of spoken and written language: actors know how a spoken inflection may alter or even reverse a meaning seen on the page. Chomsky goes on to demonstrate that even at the level of ostensibly the simplest definition, language is always elusive or ambiguous. Much music also exists in the same roughly analogous registers of sound and score. If you really try to give a precise characterization of a word like "house" or "chase," you'll find it's remarkably intricate. (Chomsky 1992) Despite this inherent imprecision and ambiguity, our linguistic behavioural prejudice frames a certain attitude to faith, where we may find ancient words and texts often guarded as inviolable in their meaning and used as almost solid objects or even weapons to punish the faithless. Heresy - that most ancient of crimes of dissention or denial of dogma - still remains as a final threat or solution for many world religions which base their faith on ancient writings, through authoritative ownership of its meaning. This irrational prejudice towards language as the fount of meaning and truth has led to some very dramatic events in the history of the sung word:
    
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    when medieval Christian composers began to notate music for the first time a thousand years ago, the new complexity of their polyphony allegedly threatened to distract devout congregations from the religious text they adorned, which eventually led to the issue of Papal edicts and threats of excommunication or worse. In the Renaissance, Monteverdi (1605) wrote passionately against the contemporary practice of textual abstraction, when he advocated that the word be the master of the melody, not its slave. After two more centuries of argument, written music moved away from religious control, finally and perhaps for the first time significantly losing its dependency or servility towards the word. This emancipation formed the basis for classical music and the creation – perhaps for the first time in human history - of abstract, large-scale instrumental and orchestral structures typical to the Classical era. The Romantic era continued championing the abstraction of music over the word but reinterpreted the argument through an intellectual debate over the supremacy between absolute and programmatic music. This partially explains the diametrically opposed factions that grew in the second half of the nineteenth century either in support of Brahms or Wagner as heir apparent to Beethoven. In turn this argument spilled over into the last century with composers such as Stockhausen (1955) discovering a need for a
    
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    constant redefinition of the nature of purity in relation electronic music and serially controlled structures. Paradoxically, both the explanation and justification of this puritanical quest necessitated many thousands of pages of words written by him and others in justification. In another context, the hierarchical nature of theatre has led to a different set of prejudices regarding music and words: opera and musical theatre has variously been dominated through history by composers, or librettists, or singers, or designers or directors according to fashion. This continuum of emphatic change is probably healthy for the survival of any collaborative medium and reflects fundamental changes in society’s needs and preoccupations. Yet the current way that singers learn their roles is through a series of experts in singing, coaching, diction, movement, acting and finally at the hands of a conductor and a director. The employed opera and musical singer today is the recipient of the most detailed instruction of what, when, how, where and why they sing. It is almost as if none might be trusted to find their own voice, but merely be required to replicate the multitude of meanings that specialists dictate. This lamentably low creative or meaningful status of the performer was notably celebrated by Rossini in a letter of 1851:
    
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    The good singer should be nothing but an able interpreter of the ideas of the master, the composer…in short, the composer and the poet are the only true creators. In Rossini’s time composers (often doubling as directors themselves) routinely worked with singers; composers are noticeably absent from the list of experts above with whom singers are expected to study today. Rossini surely could not have imagined the demise of the live composer in favour of the dead that characterises classical music today, any more than the demise of the composer’s authority itself. His comment infers a greater structural simplicity in creator-performer hierarchy than exists today, and in fact his scores allow enormous freedom of taste and expression for solo singer knowledgeable of the style. In the twentieth century Performative Theory began to redress the balance of authority and meaning, acknowledging what most blues and jazz musicians always knew, that you can't be a performer without being a creator: I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession, let alone two years or ten years. If you can, then it ain't music, it's close order drill or exercise or yodelling or something, not music. Billie Holiday's heartfelt and widely quoted comment from 50 years ago seems quaint and unjustifiable in today's industrialised, globalised
    
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    musical theatre, where singers are groomed and fitted to existing production requirements which are designed to repeat perhaps for years in any international city. This industrialisation of music underlies a crucial change in attitude, a challenge to inherited definitions of music, theatre and contemporary performance practice. Her sentiments also reflect the twentieth century’s most dubious gift to music: the advent, popularity and ubiquity of recordings. Live performance is continuously having to match the expectations of a public increasingly dependent for reference on fixed, iconic recording in terms of volume, perfection, purity, reliability, portability and predictability, few of which adjectives could be said to describe or relate to a performance by Billie Holiday herself. At the same time as many academics have decided to resort to the performance itself for analytical comprehension, through this counter-move the romantic veneration of the score has been replaced by the public’s acceptance of the recording as music per se: in the same u-turn which called on voices to imitate instruments to bring about the vocalise, the live concert is expected to emulate the recording, which apparently is an implied improvement on the original. Live music today is regularly judged by the standards of recorded music. In classical music performative theory and practice has comparatively recently gone some way to address an inherited moribund fixation from the
    
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    score as a holy relic and remind us of the life-giving breath of the performer. The performative argument as to the residence of meaning may be represented as this: language, like music or any other semiotic system, means nothing without a context, i.e. there is no absolute meaning which can be found on any page. Language and sound may however be endowed with meaning when it is spoken or performed, and the repetition of a performance (the act of which does not require or denote a public presence, and indeed may be conscious or subconscious) refines and endows more levels of meaning and even a concept of truth. This might even result in ambiguity or contradiction of semantic meaning, at no expense to the original intention, which otherwise remains theoretical. The objective meaning remains larger than and encompassing the sum of every conceivable performance, which is seen as a subjective but temporarily accessible interpretation. As regards the performing arts, the ultimate harbinger of communication is the actor, singer, dancer or musician; they represent the coal-face or the interface between the public and the otherwise mute and abstracted book form. Subjective meaning in this equation is ephemeral, whilst objective meaning remains abstract. Absolute meaning appears to be at best theoretical.
    
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    The concept has been pushed even further by Dr. E. Bryon in her Integrative Performance Theory, who incidentally traces early examples of this practice to Stanislavsky: There are two main ways in which the performer has appeared in the history of opera. The first is as a depicter of the perfect organisation of the text. They have consequently been instructed not to get in the way of the words or the music and to let these flow through them. In these instances the performer becomes a vessel, or a puppet to the composer and librettist, or (as in more modern times) to the director. The texts, or the direction of the texts, were assumed to hold the meaning and the performer’s job was to be a vehicle for that meaning which they were encouraged to depict. The second role of the performer is similar to an attraction in a circus show. In this role the performer defies gravity with feats of high notes or clever ornamentation; the meaning is in the very novelty of the act. In these eras, the critics traditionally blame the singer for becoming unruly and ruining the sacred drama. Integrative Performance Theory offers a third alternative to the performer, neither slave nor puppet but instead the breath of life, the flame of illumination, the hub of interdisciplinary meaning: an individual, responsible, articulate and skilled response to a variety of stimuli.
    
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    Theatre itself, in the word-dominated form English has imbibed since at least the influence of Shakespeare, has often flirted with extra-verbal and non-verbal theatrical structures. But the traditional attitude to the dominance of the word is still prevalent: in London’s Globe Theatre today, visitors to the museum learn that the objective of music in any production is to clarify the understanding of the text. In this aesthetic of theatre practice it seems authority and meaning lies wholly in the written word through the writer - or if he is dead through the director - and music is neither countenanced nor tolerated as an independent or collaborative signifier. It is a situation analogous to the heretical threat the church authorities articulated a thousand years before. It seems that the authority of the word remains safely supreme, which is even more paradoxical given the ambiguity and deliberate paradox which underlines Shakespeare’s fecund and multi-layered language, ultimately dependent on the crucial interplay between a performer’s interaction with a live and responsive audience. An alternative view is represented by the famous experimentation of Peter Brook and Ted Hughes, inventing new international languages in Orghast. This occurred in the 1960’s almost in parallel with Dario Fo's resurrection of apparently nonsense language in Grammelot, a tradition rescued from the street-wise Comedia del'Arte oral tradition, conceived at
    
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    the time of a repressive social structure and the censorial and deadly Inquisition, bent on the discovery and prosecution of heresy. The twentieth century also formalised many non-verbal theatrical forms including physical theatre, dance theatre and music theatre, which now all may be said to inhabit the centre ground rather than littering the periphery as they did a generation ago. Samuel Beckett, as have others since, wrote plays which completely avoided the spoken word, such as Quad. Music and theatre here may be seen to be sharing and interchanging across their centre-ground; in John Cage's roughly contemporary Theatre Piece, the performers devise their own text. In the contemporary worlds of theatre and music theatre the residence of meaning is as interchangeable as the traditional creative roles: composers are writing theatre works, writers are composing music and singers and actors are considered co-creators, often acting as composers and writers. Within this ethos, meaning is at least potentially created collectively through collaboration and collective ownership of material. The autocratic and egotistic excesses of our decadent romantic inheritance, the pursuit of the notion of artistic or creative genius and the suffocating concept of the masterpiece might in this way be replaced by a recognition of the inherent value of creativity and the indivisible results of collaborative processes which recognise and celebrate inherent connectivity within diversity rather
    
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    than division. This is a form of artistic heresy for those whom still consider themselves the inheritors of - for example - a Wagnerian or Brechtian aesthetic, but it may yet help to breathe a new life through the performing arts which in the twentieth century became increasingly confused with historical preservation, heritage and commodity merchandising. Trans-disciplinary functions, the plurality of roles and multi-tasking is by no means new: Shakespeare was probably an actor, the majority of composers in history have also been performers, and many writers have been actors. Famous singers still write their own words; the ancient Greeks did not differentiate between words, music and dance, the organically combined functions of their dramatic chorus; children still instinctively sing words to music and dance at the same time. It is only perhaps since the industrial revolution that our society has divided and sequestered our knowledge-base into hermetically sealed, compartmentalised specialisms, often maintained by professional protectivism. In contrast to the Renaissance, contemporary knowledge is often classified as marking the differences between things rather than illuminating their inherent connection and interdependence. Alchemy allows us to perceive a different perspective: Science seeks to find order in things and determine their cause; alchemy is more comfortable with disorder and is not concerned with
    
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    causality. Rather than seeking the differences between things, alchemy searches for their connections, Relatedness, not causality, is alchemy’s focus. (Miller, 2004: 124) Composers also have access to a living tradition which sidesteps the pitfalls and gesturing of writer/composer hierarchies which inherently contest for the residence of meaning. St. John cannot have been correct when he wrote that in the beginning was the word, because the voice must have sounded long before the word was discovered. It might be logical to deduce that non-verbal song predated verbal song: this may be witnessed by any parent of a pre-verbal child where the voice as an instrument occurs years before the voice of speech. It is arguable whether expression or communication is the baby’s objective, and whether the difference is discernable. Our earliest primary evidence of non-verbal song is unfortunately lost in the mists of antiquity and oral folk tradition. More recently such syllables as fa-la-la and fol-de-rol supplanted words and in madrigal-balletts these syllables were sung, to accompany dance - possibly by the same singers. In the early days of publishing, vocal music was frequently not ascribed to any text as in Example 1 by 1559 by Tasso, where a modern editor has suggested rudimentary scat singing syllables appropriate for the era:
    
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    EXAMPLE 1 Giovanni Maria Tasso 1559 untitled, no words Of course, even within textual song, there have always been moments when the musical content supplants the linguistic meaning. For instance, in the extended melismata first notated a thousand years ago by Leonin and Perotin, later on by such as Handel, Bellini and Mozart; Example 2 is from Haydn’s last opera, written in 1791: L’anima del filosofo, ossia Orfeo ed Euridice. The word Italian word crudeltá is extended through 8 bars on the last syllable, momentarily at least quite beyond any semantic context for the listener.
    
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    EXAMPLE 2: Haydn L’anima del filosofo, ossia Orfeo ed Euridice. The tradition of the romantic vocalise was made famous by Gounod, Rachmaninov and Ravel, amongst others. This vocal emulation of an instrumental sound through a single vowel was a reversal of the flowering of science and technology in the Renaissance where new instruments were created and developed to emulate certain characteristics of the voice, which was considered the supreme instrument. However, the vocalise seems less important in terms of the consequences of the creation in the last century of scat-singing and its descendant forms of be-bop, doo-wop, rap and hip hop, through such as Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Cleo Laine and Bobby McFerrin.
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    It would seem that jazz, contemporary music and theatre have struggled in various ways to create a new relationship between music and text, and at least challenged assumptions about authority and the residence of meaning. And yet, despite their siblings greatest efforts precedents, opera and musical theatre have remained for the most part stubbornly traditional in their textual alliance with writers and poets, seeking meaning primarily through language adorned, intensified or at best illuminated by music. Opera audiences now even expect to read the sung text in surtitles whilst they simultaneously hear it - even if it is in their own language. The practice is widespread despite reports by scientists that different sides of the brain are utilised in following verbal meaning and music, and that their parallel use usually and radically emphasises one at the expense of the other. Such audiences are complicit in the belief that they are themselves enslaved to meaning through text. In retaliation, some more modern opera composers have created libretti in dead languages - Philip Glass in Ancient Egyptian (Akhnaten), Stravinsky (Oedipus Rex) and John Buller (The Bacchae) in Latin - purposefully to avoid such literary enslavement. Other composers have risked more fundamental structural breaks with tradition, such as Ligeti in whose Le Grand Macabre a Bacchanalian simultaneity, spectacle and surrealism replace lucidity, and Berio whose Un Re en Ascolto is an
    
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    assemblage of texts by Italo Calvino, W. H. Auden, Friedrich Einsiedel and Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter based on Shakespeare’s Tempest. Such practices indicate alternative attitudes to the residence of meaning in a form which potentially fuses and confuses word and music, but their rarity reflects the established, conservative preference to familiar, known practices. As small as this gesture towards change may be in opera, I know of no parallel in musical theatre, which remains almost entirely locked into traditional and conservative relationships between music and words, no doubt in part because of the expense involved and the expectations of a targeted mass public. Even the ubiquitous works of Stephen Sondheim - as original and individual as his creations are - rarely if ever move beyond the traditional relationships of words-as-meaning and thus meaning-set-tomusic. In the light of the willingness of theatre and music to engage with such a fundamental creative question, such conservatism in the world of the musical exacerbates the aesthetic and academic chasms which separate the forms, and belittle the musical's own claim to contemporary relevance. This may be one of the reasons why so many dramatists and theatre professionals disparage the musicals populist and frivolous propensity, even at the expense of the multifaceted virtuosity of many of its performers. Its attempts to deal
    
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    with real social issues such as racism, health and politics may seem like tokenism if the theatrical language remains essentially naive or conservative. Sir Peter Hall may have had that in mind when he said that he had almost never worked in musicals because they trivialize, sentimentalise and patronise their audience. A parallel may be seen with developments - or a lack of them - in popular film. Mass popularity and large box office successes (and failures) rarely go hand in hand with the structural and aesthetic overhauls that result from artistic innovation. Opera Seria, fabulously popular and internationally remunerative for its stars in eighteenth century Europe, took many decades before it finally admitted it was tired, clichéd, worn out and outmoded. The only related area which has thoroughly reinvented its relationship with language is through contemporary classical composers such as Cage, Berio and Ligeti who have contributed much to the definition of music theatre itself. Cage’s 4'33" is as well known or better known than most twentieth century philosophical statements, and was a precursor to conceptual art. But it is also a theatrical statement: it postulates that all sound may be taken as music, but also infers that all performance is essentially theatrical, including the hallowed concert hall. Incidentally concert halls became stuffy and hallowed - as did opera theatres - when they
    
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    remained faithful to the aesthetic of their repertoire which became essentially museum-based. Part of the shock of an opera such as Berg’s Wozzeck must have originally been derived from witnessing the visual degradation and debauchery enacted on stage from within the decadent opulence of a Viennese opera house in front of its bourgeoise and bejewelled audience. This retro-performative stance is clearly demonstrated in classical musicians who even today may be found masquerading in nineteenth century full formal dress. This practice was begun in past centuries when musicians wished to wear the same clothes as their audience, to minimise the distance between performer and audience. Tradition, blindly followed, turned some musicians into something distant and ostensibly superior in class, betraying that initial impulse towards egalitarianism. Without this context fashionable accusations of elitism or class may appear to have some substance. Cage’s special theatrical language is apparent in all his compositions. His song A Flower makes this audible and visual, by the absence of text for the singer and absence of access to a keyboard for the pianist, who is instructed to play with the piano lid closed. Cathy Berberian’s Stripsody is a light-hearted entertainment – rare enough qualities for twentieth century monodrama. Taking as a starting point
    
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    all the notated onomatopoeia of the Marvel and Superman comics, it presents a visual and aural feast, a cornucopia of meaning in the hands of a performer: either serious trivia or trivial seriousness, in the tradition of Cocteau and Satie. Berio’s spare text for Sequenza III was written by Markus Kutter and composed for his then wife, the same Cathy Berberian: give me a few words for a woman to sing a truth allowing us to build a house without worrying before night comes... The composer describes how he deconstructed his text variously for compositional and structural purposes into: 1) sounds or groups of sounds phonetically notated
    2) sounds or groups of sounds as pronounced in context:
    
    /gi/as in give, /wo/ as in woman, /tho/ as in without, /co/ as in comes, etc
    3) words conventionally written and uttered: give me a few words, etc
    
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    A listener to the work would note that these three parameters share a continuum: text and sound become woven together through the emotional roller-coaster of the fully notated emotional drama - the performers implicit inner journey - the direction for which is notated both as a physical as well as vocal instruction. Berio notates 137 different adjectives into a duration of approximately eight minutes (e.g. wistful, serene, urgent etc); the opening walking on stage is accompanied by a notated muttering repeating the following vowels rapidly in random order (to, /co/, us, for, be); and fingerclicking is notated as a part of the score. The effect is of entering the mind of the performer, at the point before language becomes possible, before the filters which permit thought, understanding and communication to function. This is perhaps the same stream of consciousness that James Joyce tried to articulate in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake a generation before. The listener is made privy to the noise which fills the human mind which we politely try to avoid mentioning or demonstrating in public. Or perhaps we only became aware of it, conscious of this incessant neurotic presence, since Freud and his elucidation of the unconscious. Sequenza III makes an illuminating comparison to Beckett’s Not I. It was written just six years before, for Billie Whitelaw - for many years the
    
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    actress most associated with his work, as was Cathy Berberian to Berio at the same time. Not I is a monologue for a character known only as mouth, and later television productions showed only that part of her anatomy in close-up for the works duration. Beckett’s instructions are simpler than the notes that explain the sophisticated and original notation system which adorns Berio’s score. The only additions to the words in Beckett’s text are the ubiquitous dots replacing full stops and commas, along with question marks and dashes. There are no complete sentences but neither are words reduced into Berio’s phonemes. However, the shear intensity of compressing these 4,477 words into a duration of about 13 minutes reduces both the grammatical and semantic functions of language in the same way that Berio’s fragmention never allows us to hear his own comparatively coherent text. Both works are landmarks of their time, infused with layers of meaning, but through textual ascendancy. Beckett explains that a gesture of helpless compassion... lessens with each recurrence till scarcely perceptible…There is just enough pause to contain it as MOUTH recovers from vehement refusal to relinquish third person. Despite the simpler notation Beckett uses, this work demands similar vocal resources from an actress singer as does Sequenza III, and the effect is remarkably and mesmerisingly similar:
    
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    . something she had to–. . . what? . . the buzzing? . . yes . . . all the time the buzzing . . . dull roar . . . in the skull . . . and the beam . . . ferreting around . . . painless . . . so far . . . ha! . . so far . . . then thinking . . . oh long after . . . sudden flash . . .[Not I] Those who saw and heard Billie Whitelaw’s extraordinary first performances acknowledge the power of the work owed much to her discovery of both the music and the dramaturgy implicit in the text. Berio’s more sophisticated score seems at first sight to offer less creative freedom of interpretation, but the reality is the opposite: the score was only completed after Cathy recorded it. The score is performative, echoing and annotating one specific and important performance not merely an abstract representation of an idealised performance, which is the formal tradition of a score. Berio could not have written the fragmented, vocal tour-de-force without the full creative compliance of Cathy, just as Beckett’s unfinished, black and white phrases were given life and blood (and dare I say meaning?) by Billie Whitelaw. Both are musical scores, both are dramatic texts, both are dramaturgically complete monologues, with equal emphasis on musical and dramatic content. One was written by a composer, the other by an author. Neither would have been possible without the specific original performer, but nevertheless hundreds of vastly different performers and
    
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    interpretations have followed. In both cases, authority and the residence of meaning lie within the hands of the performers, and the score may be seen as a tribute to the original performers, not the vessel of truth bestowed by an all-powerful genius. Collaboration and sharing of creative process and material have replaced iconography. My final example is Lament is from Songs Between Words, a collection of 24 cappella songs for one or more voices without text. In common with all the songs in the set, it has an inferred drama, and was intended for dramatic presentation, individually and authoritatively devised by the singer. The impulse to write came from talking to many singers I have worked with, who often feel there is only room to precisely serve the complex demands of many contemporary virtuoso scores. The series were conceived as a way of reasserting the appropriation of ownership of material for the singer. A second impulse grew from the experience in living abroad and how language localises a song, creating another layer of communication problems for singers and public in other countries. The response from the several singers who have worked on them, is that there is a sense of liberation both for singer and audience: the music is far from abstract, as the names of each song imply, but the variety of ways in which the music may be interpreted or endowed with meaning allows each singer to invest their
    
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    own creative energy to the full. The work becomes theirs as they assimilate it, and although the same material is sung in each performance, each performer creates a journey and a meaning which is personal and unique. The score has a clear dramaturgical shape and content, but the act of contextualisation by the singer renders a unique meaning.
    
    Example 3: Paul Barker Lament (Songs Between Words)
    
    The series was designed as a sketch for a full-length stage work I am currently writing, again without text. It does try to redefine a new position between the triangle of words/meaning/music. Or perhaps it just rejects the triangle. In common with operatic tradition the work has defined characters and a narrative, but there is not a word articulated for ninety minutes. The score of Nye Tand, Eh? contains a detailed synopsis which I imagined as I wrote it, but it remains a suggestion, not the definitive version – a concept I actively reject. In consequence, any presentation of the work can redefine its dramatic objectives. The work is scored for seven singer-actors and the work
    
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    may be presented either a cappella or with an optional full orchestra. The title is a phonetic transcription of Night and Day, two opposites which affect greatly the protagonists.
    
    Summary The ancient hierarchical dispute between words and music and the inferred quest for authorial meaning represents a hegemony which is triangulated by performative theory and the authority of the performer. Music and words - or sounds - exhibit essentially an interdisciplinary relationship through performance which essentially results in song. For many commentators, such as Basarab Nicolescu, the successful alliance between two disciplines creates a powerful, independent entity, which may not again be reduced. Song precisely represents that alchemy in that it contains more than the sum of its parts. The concept is most simply reflected in this mathematical equation: 1+1=3 This formula neatly summarises the potential uniqueness of any artform which sets out to be multi-disciplinary, such as music-theatre, opera, musical theatre, dance-theatre and multi-media: they become valued as more
    
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    than the sum of their parts. To this extent the formula is additive, reflecting the number of disciplines which become fused: 1+1+1=4 Yet this relationship is not automatic, and I can remember many desultory occasions witnessing performances which claim to be multidisciplinary but merely present diverse media in parallel, without consideration of their ability to conjoin and blossom through alchemy. They may be represented by the rational and predictable equation 1 + 1 = 2, which does not appear to engage or provoke curiosity. Irrational formulae are often used as the basis for advanced mathematical research, and are often used to create important practical applications. Music is an amalgam of both rational and irrational disciplines, and is a useful model for the cohabitation between modes of logical and irrational thought without conflict. Although conflict may result in the proprietorial pursuit or ownership of meaning from creators, performers and analysts, it might now be considered important to question the assumption that either language or music alone should be the accepted conduit for that meaning. The performer’s role extends to the author, and vice versa. But their position is triangulated by the audience. The physical and pregnant gap which separates the performer from the audience is the final place of
    
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    illumination, a symbol of the electric impulse which sparks across the synapses in our mind, and as ephemeral and fragile as a candle flame. Illumination from this perspective is a transient experience, even if the effect may last a lifetime. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (AKA Lewis Carroll) was by profession a mathematician, despite his more famous literary association. Alice's question above is not given an answer, but followed by another question. The original conversation quoted above, has both a prelude and postlude. Humpty Dumpty’s final reply to Alice’s question is yet another question, and continues the debate between creators, performers and analysts of music and words ad infinitum: `When I use a word', Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.' `The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.' `The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master - that's all.'
    
    NB This paper was originally given performatively in conjunction with the singer-actress Frances M. Lynch and has been modified and expanded to conform to printed requirements.
    
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    Works Cited: Barker, Paul Nye Tand, Eh? (Opera n preparation) Barker, Paul Lament from Songs between Words CD: Quindecim QP 134, 2004 Beckett Quad Collected Shorter Plays 1957-1984, Grove Press, 1984 Beckett Not I (1972) Collected Shorter Plays 1957-1984, Grove Press, 1984 Berberian, Cathy Stripsody 1966 Berg, Alban Wozzeck 1925 Berio, Luciano Sequenza III 1966 Berio, Luciano Un Re en Ascolto 1984 Bryon E. Dr The integrative performance theory: an anti-hermeneutic approach for opera. PhD University Of Monash, Australia 1999 Buller, John The Bacchae 1992 Cage, John 4’33” Peter’s Edition 1952 Cage, John A Flower Peter’s Edition 1950 Cage, John Theatre Piece Peter’s Edition 1960 Carroll, Lewis Through the Looking Glass London Macmillan 1872 Chomsky, Noam Syntactic Structures Mouton 's-Gravenhage, Holland 1957 Chomsky, Noam, interviewed by Naomi F. Chase as recipient of the Killian Faculty Achievement Award, MIT, 1992 (Published online by ZNet,
    
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    http://www.zmag.org/weluser.htm) Descartes, Rene Meditation II, Paris 1641 Glass, Philip Akhnaten 1987 Hall, Peter interviewed on Sunday, BBC1, October 9, 2005 Haydn, Joseph L’anima del filosofo, ossia Orfeo ed Euridice 1791 Joyce, James Ulysses 1922 Joyce, James Finnegans Wake 1939 Ligeti, György Le Grand Macabre 1978 Miller, J. The Transcendent Function: Jung's Model of Psychological Growth Through Dialogue with the Unconscious SUNY Press 2004 Monteverdi, Claudio Quinto Libro de Madrigali : Introduction [Fifth Book of Madrigals] Venice 1605 Nicolescu, Basarab quoted in a talk at the International Congress "Universities' Responsibilities to Society ", International Association of Universities, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, November 1214, 1997 Rossini, Giachomo Letter to his Friend Guidicini 1851 Smith, A.C.H. Orghast at Persepolis Viking Press 1972 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, Die Reihe Vol 1 1955 Stravinsky, Igor Oedipus Rex 1927/8
    
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    Tasso, Giovanni Maria: Duo c.1559
    
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