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Bell Cantos- Ezra Pound Revisited

In 1969, “Improved Sound Limited“ was asked to provide music for a television documentary on Ezra Pound (1885-1982). Until then, my band and I knew Pound as the author of “The Cantos“ and "The Pisan Cantos", and, of course, we knew of his unlucky fate after World War II, on trial for treason, then jailed and ultimately landing in an asylum for 13 years. After reading his poetry we took up another aspect of his work, the music and in particular the one act opera “Le Testament“ (based on Villon) with its musicological foundation. We read with interest Pound’s cryptic theory about “Absolute Rhythm and Great Bass“, and were amazed by the highly individual classification of creative sound into emotional and pattern music. For Pound, only one thing was clear: “the early music starts with the mystery of pattern.“ He put his own music in this category, for example what he wrote for the Villon opera, which was premiered on June 29, 1926 in the Salle Pleyel in Paris with a tiny orchestra and the “Bad Boy of Music“, George Antheil, at the piano. The list of guests on the first night reads like a who’s who: Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Jean Cocteau and Virgil Thomson, who would later write of the event, „“The music was not quite a musician’s music, though it may well be the finest poet’s music since Thomas Campion...“.

Be that as it may, we used a couple of paradigmatic bars from this opera as the basis for our film music, in which we took Pound’s advice to heart: „One must, perhaps, find one’s ideal artist in fragments, never whole and united.“ Thus, we put a melodic quotation at the center of our music, sourced from the work of “Pound the troubadour“, which itself could not deny its affinity to a folk song from the middle ages. „L’homme armé“ provided the inspiration for many works, from Dufay and Josquin to Thierry Pécou and, through Pound, for “Improved Sound Limited“, too, although in the latter case the similarity is distant. We tried to resolve Pound’s thoughts and ideas with the aesthetic of our time, without diminishing the archaic charm (melodic construction based on Greek prosody, in a hypodoric mode).
“Improved Sound Limited“ reveal themselves here as “collectors of uneven numbers“, and constructed this homage to Ezra Pound, to “Pound the poet and the man“, not to Pound the politician, as a mixture of organum and faburden ,with psychedelic sounds and Moog glissandi, bucholic woodwind elegys and mechanical drum beats, from the uneven bars, polyrhythms, changing percussion colours and meditative improvisation.

This work, which was commissioned by Bavarian Radio, or rather by its writers Eva Hesse and Harald Hohenacker, fits into no convenient musical category. It was recorded at Union Studios in Munich (engineer: Thommy Klemmt, additional recording and mix: Jörg Scheuermann). 34 years later we listened to the tapes once again, remastered them carefully and supplemented them “with a little help from our friends“ Johannes Barnikel on keyboards and Norbert Nagel, soprano sax and bass clarinet, in the parts which were not needed for the film but without which the suite in this release would be incomplete. The resulting film music which has its premiere on the accompanying CD we call “Bell Cantos“. For me and my band, this Pound experiment was an important step before deciding to concentrate on classic rock songs, knowing that the apparently easier path is often the more difficult one.

Anyway, take it easy, this Pound of sound!
Axel Linstädt


 

© 2004 IMPROVED SOUND LIMITED