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The Meaning of Speech Melody for Leoš Janáček 1

2004; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/01411890490884454

1547-7304

Paul Christiansen,

Literature, Musicology, and Cultural Analysis

Abstract Very little has been written about the personal meaning that speech melody had for Janáček, who recorded speech contours in musical notation in an attempt to pursue what Milan Kundera has called the "search for the vanished present." In notating his dying daughter Olga's final utterances, Janáček hoped to preserve her presence, to take solace in the notion that, in some way, she still lived with him. This article contextualizes and reexamines the issue of speech melody within the larger arena of language as music, presents Olga's speech melodies, and discusses their personal significance for Janáček. Notes 1 For their thoughtful suggestions and insights, I would like to thank Michael Beckerman, Christopher Reynolds, and Jonathan Pearl. I am also grateful to D. Kern Holoman for his careful reading of an earlier draft of this article. 2 Benedetto Croce, The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General, trans. Colin Lyas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 163. 3 Ibid., 160. 4 These notebooks are housed in the Janáček Archive at the Moravian Museum in Brno, Czech Republic. In this article, I will use the Czech word nápěvek/nápěvky (meaning something like "little tune") to refer to specific utterances, in order to avoid confusion with the general term "speech melody" as a synonym for "speech intonation." 5 Janáček, cited in Jaromír Nečas, et al., Nejstarší zvukové záznamy moravského a slovenského lidového zpěvu [The Oldest Recordings of Moravian and Slovak Folksong] (Brno: Gnosis, 1998), 107. 6 Herbert Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, vol. 1 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1868), 214. 7 Max Brod, from Sternenhimmel (Munich, 1923), as quoted in Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn, eds., Musik-Konzepte 7: Leoš Janáček (Munich: Johannesdruck Hans Pribil KG, 1979), 41 [my translation]. 8 Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts, trans. Linda Asher (New York: HarperCollins, 1995). 9 Ibid., 138. 10 Milan Kundera, Kniha smíchu a zapomnění [The Book of Laughter and Forgetting] (Toronto: Sixty-Eight Publishers, 1981). 11 Expanding on Croce's concept of the individual as linguistic artist, Edward Sapir saw language as a sort of collective work of art, constantly shaped and reshaped throughout time by countless sculptors: "A truly deep symbolism, for instance, does not depend on the verbal associations of a particular language but rests securely on an intuitive basis that underlies all linguistic expression. The artist's 'intuition,' to use Croce's term, is immediately fashioned out of a generalized human experience" (Edward Sapir, "The Status of Linguistics as a Science," Language 5 [1929], 207–214). 12 Janáček, "Moravany! Morawaan!" Janáček's Uncollected Essays on Music, trans. and ed. Mirka Zemanová (London, New York: Marion Boyars, 1989), 39–44. 13 Ibid., 42. 14 Ibid., 40. 15 Swiss inventor Mathias Hipp's chronometer, accurate to thousandths of a second, was used by Janáček to measure very short lengths of time. The Hipp chronoscope readings that he notated with his speech melodies and his citations of German experimental psychologists form part of the basis for many of his theoretical propositions. Janáček reports that the German town name "Morawaan" was pronounced by the station agent 0.386 seconds shorter than the Czech name "Moravany." 16 In the 1890s, he collaborated variously with ethnographers František Bartoš, Františka Kyselková, and Hynek Bim. 17 The pamphlet was published in the spring of 1906 and was titled "Sbíráme českou národní píseň na Moravě a ve Slezsku" [How to Collect Czech National Folksong in Moravia and Silesia]. 18 This appears in a 1924 feuilleton by Janáček for Lidové noviny, as quoted in Jan Racek et al., eds., Fejetony z Lidových novin [Feuilletons from Lidové noviny] (Brno: Krajské nakladatelství v Brně, 1958), 98. 19 Ibid., 98. 20 Ibid., 101. Italics are Janáček's own. 21 Ibid., 91–92, from the article "Rozhraní mluvy a zpěvu" in Hlídka 23/4 (1906). The same impetus that motivated Janáček's unrealized intention to create a dictionary that would serve as a repository of Czech speech melody for posterity has driven current efforts to preserve the world's dying languages under the auspices of the Rosetta Project www.rosettaproject.com/live. 22 The actual situation is more complicated than a simple assertion that all of Janáček's nápěvky are or are not "authentic" examples of spoken Czech. For more on this, see Paul Christiansen, "Sounds of the Soul": Leoš Janáček's Conception of Speech Melody (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Davis, 2002). 23 JK52, Janáček Archive, Moravian Museum, Brno, Czech Republic. The abbreviation "JK" stands for Janáčkova knihovna (Janáček's library). 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 JK 58, Janáček Archive. 27 Jaroslav Hurt, "O deklamaci hudební," Živé slovo 1/1 (April 1920), 11–12 (JK 138) [my translation]. 28 Janáček, letter to Moravská revue (6 March 1899), Essays, 38. In a recent article on Monteverdi and the development of a language for the theater, Mauro Calcagno cites Vincenzo Galilei's 1581 Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music, in which Galilei exhorts composers to attend theater performances and pay close attention to the actor's manner of speaking and how context affects individual linguistic manifestations (" 'Imitar col canto chi parla': Monteverdi and the Creation of a Language for Musical Theater," Journal of the American Musicological Society 55/3 [Fall 2002], 383–431). Calcagno's article examines Monteverdi's operas from a semiotic and linguistic point of view (making reference to contemporary linguistics theories of speech intonation that can illuminate musical text settings that are not isomorphic) and asserts "[i]n his operas, however, Monteverdi not only elevates the imitation of speech (what he called oratione) to an unprecedented, and perhaps still unsurpassed, level of sophistication, but in so doing, he also achieves large scale dramatic results, which affect our interpretation of the works as a whole" (p. 392). This is true just as much for Janáček, although in imitating speech he was not as limited as Monteverdi was to diatonic intervals and fairly regular rhythmic units (Janáček often used alternating triplets and duplets to support natural word accent). Of course, in actual performance of Monteverdi's operas, liberties were indeed taken with the score, and the final result was often more speechlike than the score would indicate. 29 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Essai sur l'origine des langues [Essay on the Origin of Languages] (Paris: A. Braik, 1983) and Herbert Spencer, Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative, vol. 1 (London: Williams and Norgate, 1868), 214–224. 30 Following a handful of exploratory studies published in the mid-twentieth century, experimental research on intonation and prosody started in earnest in the 1980s and has continued steadily ever since: for example, Duncan B. Gardiner, Intonation and Music: The Semantics of Czech Prosody (Bloomington, IN: Physsardt Publications, 1980); Alan Cruttenden, Intonation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Johan't Hart, Rene Collier, and Antonie Cohen, A Perceptual Study of Intonation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Xuejing Sun, The Determination, Analysis, and Synthesis of Fundamental Frequency (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 2002). 31 Leo Treitler, "The 'Unwritten' and 'Written Transmission' of Medieval Chant and the Start-Up of Musical Notation," Journal of Musicology 10 (Spring 1992), 131–191. 32 Ibid., 144. Of course, the melodic formulas in chant are specific to that idiom and do not necessarily resemble their counterparts in actual speech intonation; nevertheless, the connection between melody and text remains a matter of considerable scholarly interest. 33 This is the year that he began collecting nápěvky in notebooks. 34 Milena Černohorská, "K problematice vzniku Janáčkovy theorie nápěvků." [On the Question of the Provenance of Janáček's Theory of Speech Melody] Časopis moravshého muzea 42 (1957): 165–177. 35 Janáček, Fejetony z Lidových novin, 83. 36 Ibid., 84. 37 The terms Pastorkyňa and Jenůfa are used interchangeably and both refer to the opera Jenůfa: její pastorkyňa [Jenůfa: Her Stepdaughter]. 38 An account of this scene is given in Marie Trkanová, U Janáčků podle vyprávění Marie Stejskalové [At the Janáčeks' according to the account of Marie Stejskalová], reprint of 1959 edition (Brno: Šimon Ryšavý nakladatelství, 1998), 70. 39 It appears in folder Z 25 of the Janáček Archive of the Moravian Museum in Brno, Czech Republic. Pages 1 and 3 are reproduced in Trkanová, U Janáčků, plates 11–12. 40 In his correspondence, Janáček usually writes clearly, but in notes to himself the hand is much more difficult to read. 41 The phrases tend to center on one pitch, with small deviations of a minor second of up to a minor third up or down, indicating more or less prominent syllables. Olga's most emphatic phrase ("I don't want to die, I want to live!") has an interval drop of a tritone. These pitch contours are typical for spoken Czech, and the rhythmic patterns conform to those of some northern Moravian dialects. It is not clear that Olga, having grown up in southern Moravian Brno, would have spoken in isometric syllables, but it is not out of the question. For more on this issue, see Duncan Gardiner, Intonation and Music, and Neil Bermel, Register Variation and Language Standards in Czech (Munich: Lincom-Europa, 2000). 42 The elegy was revised in 1904 and first performed on December 28, 1930, by Brno Radio under the baton of Břetislav Bakala. 43 Jaroslav Vogel, Leos Janáček: Život a dílo, reprint of 1963 edition (Prague: Academia, 1997), 79 [my translation]. 44 Leoš Janáček, "Smetana's Daughter," Janáček's Uncollected Essays, 55–56. 45 A number of studies on parent reactions to the death of a child have noted the tendency of a grieving parent to try to preserve some record of the actual death of his or her child. For more on parents confronting the death of a child, see, for instance, Colin Murray Parkes, "Coping with Loss: Bereavement in Adult Life," British Medical Journal 316 (1998), 856–859; Sherrie Kamm and Brian Vandenberg, "Grief Communication, Grief Reactions and Marital Satisfaction in Bereaved Parents," Death Studies 25 (2001), 569–582; and Judith Cook, Adjustment of Parents Following the Death of a Child from a Terminal Illness (Ph.D. diss., The Ohio State University, 1982). 46 He did not limit himself to notebooks, however; he wrote nápěvky on newpaper and magazine pages, strips of paper, in the margins of letters and books, and even on his shirt cuffs. 47 From Janáček's interview in Literární svět (8 March 1928) as quoted in Janáček ve vzpomínkách a dopisech [Janáček in Letters and Reminiscences], ed. Bohumír Štědroň (Prague: Topičova edice, 1946), 138 [my translation]. (The year 1879 appears to be an error, as the earliest nápěvky we have are from 1897.) Had Janáček not died two months previously, he might have had more to say at the International Convention for Folk Art in Prague in October 1928, where he was planning to speak on the subject of what comes of the notation of human speech. See letter 56 in Zdeněk Mišurec, ed. Leoš Janáček: Korespondence a studie [Leoš Janáček: Correspondence and Studies] (Prague: Academia, 2002), 77. 48 This has a number of similarities with a neurological disorder known as aphasia; people with this condition are unable to comprehend the lexical or semantic meaning of words, but compensate for this with an uncanny ability to ascertain meaning in language—often quite accurately—through a heightened sensibility for the emotional cues conveyed by the melody and rhythms of speech. Oliver Sacks addresses this condition in Chapter 9 of his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (London: Duckworth, 1985), 89–93. Aphasics perceive and respond to the emotional charge embedded in the intonation of spoken language; they usually can tell when a person is lying because they are not deceived by the words they do not understand. There is no evidence that Janáček suffered from this disorder, but it does appear that he had a particularly acute sensitivity to speech intonation. 49 See Reich's piece for string quartet and tape Different Trains (1988) and Oliveros's electronic trio improvisation based on recorded words and phrases, Automatic Inscription of Speech Melody (2000).