Beckett Chamber Music Series 2018 Programme

The most significant fact about radio drama is also the most obvious one: you can't see it. In this respect it
resembles music as much as it does its theatrical predecessor. At a concert you see the music being performed,
but you don't see the music itself. Considered as the verbal artform closest to music, radio drama approaches
this invisibility as an opportunity, not an obstacle to be overcome. All of Samuel Beckett's radio plays are
radiophonic in this sense: Words and Music consummately so. In the concert performance of it you see the
performers creating it, but not more of the drama than possible on radio. It is structured on Schopenhauer’s
principle that:
It is an accidental circumstance that [the human voice] serves for the communication of concepts, and incidentally, of
course, music can make use of this circumstance in order to enter into a relationship with poetry. But it must never
make this the main thing. ... The words are and remain for the music a foreign extra of secondary value, as the effect
of tones is incomparably more powerful, more infallible, and more rapid than that of the words. If these are
incorporated into music, therefore, they must of course occupy only an entirely secondary position, and adapt
themselves completely to it....
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea (Vol II, Ch. 39 "On the Metaphysics of Music”)
The play dramatizes the initially reluctant efforts of two characters personifying Words (called Joe) and Music
(Bob) to co-operate under the duress of Croak, their imperious, though ineffectual, club-wielding master — an
old man seeking erotic satisfaction from their collaboration. Despite themselves, Bob and Joe are drawn into
working together and create an emotional climax that neither could have achieved alone. In Words and Music,
music is an enabling dramatic force momentarily drawing an initially reluctant, resistant, words out of his
unfeeling pedantic banalities into a feelingful realm of passionate discourse.
The play originated as a BBC commission given to John Beckett — a respected composer and conductor as well
as a programmer in the BBC Music Department — to collaborate with his cousin Samuel Beckett on a drama
written specifically for the radio. Sadly, John Beckett's music was withdrawn soon after the play's premiere
broadcasts in November 1962: because music is not merely 'setting' a verbal text as if it were a jewel but an
actual character, half of the play is written by a composer. A composer other than the intended one results in
a different play, and the play remained unproduceable until 1986 when Samuel Beckett agreed to allow the
commissioning of a new score for an American premiere, suggesting Morton Feldman as the composer.
Feldman accepted with characteristic enthusiasm and genuine, almost awkward, humility. He had previously
set "Neither" — Beckett's very short text — into a very long composition for the Rome Opera, which Beckett
liked very much.
The affinity between the two artists is evident even in the first awkward encounter between the word man and
the note man in Berlin in 1976 — as compiled from versions told by Morton Feldman to several people,
including myself: