The Edinburgh Companion to Samuel Beckett and the Arts, 2014

T his chapter attempts to build on previous work on the topic of Beckett and music in a number of interrelated ways: by proposing parallels between how Beckett integrated music into his literary work and his well-known approaches to researching philosophical and literary texts; by exploring recently archived interviews with his musical collaborators, particularly those who were also family members; and by setting these lines of inquiry in a context of broader questions about what, and how, different ways of thinking about music might have signified to Beckett.

Psychology of Music , 2019

Comunicazioni Sociali. Journal of Media, Performing Arts and Cultural Studies, 2014

Among the fundamental models that have most influenced contemporary theatrical practice, Samuel Beckett clearly occupies a prominent place. His example is of paramount importance for the trend towards the conception of performance that favours the actor’s experience of being on stage before the audience at the expense of the narrative and mimetic elements, and of the canonical conventions regarding duration, characters and a plot that has to be unfolded. With a useful comparison with performance art and artists and theatre theorists and an emphasis on Beckett’s true medium of theatrical expression, the body, the essay highlights how prophetic as well as influential Beckett’s radical exploration of the expressive potential of the body on stage, at the limit of “torture”, has been. The argument is developed by following Josett’s Feral’s scheme of three distinctive features of contemporary performance which the author shows are central to Beckett’s theatre: the manipulation of the body, the manipulation of space and the relation between the artist and the audience.

1993

The ever-growing number of studies devoted to Beckett's late drama testifies as much to the fascination these intense visionary pieces exert on viewers as to our awareness that although little is left to tell we have not yet reached the satisfactory level of collective understanding of these enigmatic texts.

Contemporary Literature, 2004

vii + 179 pp. $60. romoting Beckett's later pieces for the stage, screen, and radio can be hard work. These moments of inaction, taking place in fuzzy, gray-lit zones, where sounds are barely audible and, when heard, barely understood-are they really good theater? Uncertainty on this score is one reason, I think, that the production of Beckett's later work has acquired its aura of sacramental mystery. It's a kind of trade-off. What you worship you don't necessarily have to like. The downside is that, as in the solemn reading of Holy Writ, the burden of religious obligation adds its own special weight to the effort to keep one's mind from wandering to pastimes of greater pleasure-like, say, mowing the lawn. Critics have compounded this difficulty of reception by insisting on Beckett's intuitive grasp of any medium, his unerring capacity to find its beating heart and turn it to his artistic advantage. They have insisted on this when, in fact, it's plain for all to see that Beckett makes a mess of it every time. Unerringly, he does not take advantage of what these various media have to offer but rather proceeds like someone just beginning to understand what we all learned long ago. His short plays are talky and uneventful; his television, gray and grainy; his film, black and white and melodramatic. In his earlier work, when Beckett openly broadcast the themes of failure and incompetence, deploying hapless characters and a constancy of acerbic wit, the failure and the art all seemed Contemporary Literature XLV, 4

Music & Letters

The product of a 2009 symposium at the University of Sussex, Beckett and Musicality follows the growing scholarly attention shown to Samuel Beckett’s sonic proclivities since Mary Bryden’s edited collection Samuel Beckett and Music (New York and Oxford, 1998) first appeared. Lois Oppenheim’s Samuel Beckett and the Arts soon followed (New York, 1999), together with Eric Prieto’s Listening In: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative (Lincoln, Nebr., 2002), Daniel Albright’s Beckett and Aesthetics (Cambridge, 2003), and Franz Michael Maier’s German-language monograph Becketts Melodien: Die Musik und die Idee des Zusammenhangs bei Schopenhauer, Proust und Beckett (Würzburg, 2006). More recently, Catherine Laws’s Headaches among the Overtones: Music in Beckett / Beckett in Music (Amsterdam and New York, 2013), and the French-language collection edited by David Lauffer and Geneviève Mathon, Beckett et la musique (Strasbourg, 2014) reflect the significance of Beckett’s impact on music and musicians in addition to the inherent musicality of his own writing. The diverse views and innovative analyses of specific works in this new collection span Beckett’s wide and multi-genre output, while also offering valuable insights into the perspectives of artists and composers who have been inspired by the author. For anybody who has perused his published letters, Beckett’s passion for music is immediately apparent. He was an accomplished amateur pianist, regular concertgoer, erudite critic, and lifelong connoisseur of Beethoven and Schubert (his dislike of Bach we’ll have to forgive). Beckett engaged with music in three main ways. First, by incorporating previously composed or newly commissioned music into his theatre or radio plays (Schubert, Beethoven, John Beckett, Humphrey Searle, Morton Feldman). Second, by way of what Aldous Huxley termed ‘the musicalization of literature’ (later used by various scholars from Werner Wolf to Prieto), Beckett employed musical devices and structures in his works, both on a musematic and a … download link: http://ml.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/gcv097? ijkey=5QQukHOz4BGivdE&keytype=ref

Journal of Art Historiography, Vol. 9 (Dec. 2013), 2013