Book People Archive

The sound of the word

The world's oral culture goes further back, and had a broader
reach, than its written culture.  Even today, when we're surrounded
by the printed word, the spoken, proclaimed, and sung word has appeal
not matched in printed text.   State of the Union addresses, once
no more than letters written to Congress, are now widely televised
speeches.  Court cases may be argued vigorously with briefs, but the
last words come in the oral argument.  PhD students know that, before
they can get their degree, they have to give an oral presentation and
defense of their thesis.  And certain literary genres, most notably
poetry, are deeply invested in how their text sounds, not just how it
reads on the page.

So it's nice to see that text is now being widely disseminated as *sound*
online.  Some projects, like Wired for Books, have been doing this for years,
of course.  But now there are many more projects with recordings
and podcasts of literary material.  Among the ones mentioned here recently
have been Librivox (librivox.org) and Escape Pod (www.escapepod.org).  I've
also made a few recent book listings that included audio versions, either
because the author included both a text and an audio version of their book
at the same site, or because the author only released an audio version.
(In some cases, authors give over print rights when a book is published,
but retain audio rights.)  I don't expect to make The Online Books Page
a comprehensive source of audio book listings-- I've got other
things that take priority, and there are other sites that cover the
literary audioscape.  But I'm happy to include listings for books
where audio is the primary or a supplementary format provided.

Here at Penn, there's now an archive of free literary audio as well.
At PennSound (http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/) you can hear
contemporary authors read from poetry and prose works, and
download them as short MP3 "singles" for personal, noncommercial
use.  PennSound has cleared the rights for the recordings, which
include not only local readings but recordings donated from
past events.  (One example is the collection of Allen Ginsberg
singing William Blake, from recordings made in 1969.)

When I was digitizing a book of W. B. Yeats' poetry some years ago,
I saw a note that mentioned that lots of people had asked him for
permission to compose songs to his poems, and that Yeats freely granted
it. I don't know how many of these songs survive, but there's
a long and fruitful tradition of performing poetry through music.
It'd be nice to see this material made more widely known.

I've become more personally familiar with this tradition in recent weeks,
as I've started singing with a group that's doing a program made up
entirely of poetry (mostly 19th and 20th century American) set to music
by various 20th century American composers.  The poets include Walt Whitman,
Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings, Carl Sandburg, Emily Dickinson, and H.D. Thoreau,
and they've been set to music by folks randing from Samuel Barber and
Randall Thompson to Philip Glass and Norman Dello Joio.

<shameless_plug> The program will be performed in the Philadelphia
area this week.   See http://vnachoir.org/0506-season-page.html
for concert times, locations, and ticket information. </shameless_plug>.

I'm not sure if any of it will end up online or on CD afterwards (there
are some nontrivial rights-clearing issues involved) but I'll ask.  And
if you meet me in person, I might be game to sing a few poems
to the extent that I remember them.  Or if you collect text
on your own websites, you may be interested in collecting audio
performances, professional or amateur, along with the text.

John