Samual Beckett

So looking around on the Internet for Samuel Beckett articles and snippets I found something I found interesting. At the end of class on Monday Dr. Sexson said that Beckett experiments with going silent, rhythmic ebbing and flowing of language, which made me think of music. Even, though I'm not done with Beckett's Three Novels, I haven't been reminded of rhythm or music yet. But I found a place where "there have been several works of music inspired by the works of Beckett, particularly works of contemporary classical."


I found this site The Modern Word, Samuel Beckett Apmonia
The main website is here http://www.themodernword.com/

It also has links to it's other major pages about
Samuel Beckett: Apmonia
Jorge Luis Borges: The Garden of Forking Paths
Umberto Eco: Porta Ludovica
Gabriel García Márquez: Macondo
James Joyce: The Brazen Head
Franz Kafka: Das Schloss
Thomas Pynchon: Spermatikos Logos

Samuel Beckett, who coined the term "Apmonia,'' meaning the irrational heart, from Murphy

One small part of the site on Samuel Beckett looks at music inspired by Beckett, one composer, Luciano Berio, Italy's master of the avant-garde, Berio utilized fragments of Beckett's The Unnamable in his postmodern masterpiece. I downloaded a song from Berio: Sinfonia, an album inspired by Beckett, and in listening I figured out why. It is dark, empty, but compelling. (HELP Rio, I can't figure our how to get it from itunes to my blog)


"The libretto is just as complex as the music. Using the self-reflexive monologue from Beckett's The Unnamable as a basic pattern, dozens of other textual threads are shuttled through the narrative loom to form a dazzling tapestry of language in all its forms. Fragments of German, Yuletide solfège, snippets of song, radical slogans, clichés from the classical music crowd, gobbles and grunts, and perhaps most striking of all, the insistent command to "Keep going!" -- all rise and fall in a babelogue carried along by the music, punctuated by orchestral gestures that just as often provide ironic counterpoint as they do illustration."


***just as I finished typing this up I thought the website sounded really familiar, and appearantly Dr. Sexson had already alerted it to my attention about the second week of class, I had just forgotten, here was the link originally in my post titled, "interesting and helpful links":http://www.themodernword.com/Joyce/joyce_works_fw.html