Between the Lines: Language Games with Orchestra Wellington

Between the Lines is a FREE monthly early-evening chamber music series and book club that brings music and literature into conversation. Presented in the beautiful setting of Ngā Pou Ruahine in Te Matapihi, the series invites audiences to listen, think, and chat. No prior knowledge of music or literature is required, just a curious mind.

Each session will feature carefully selected music and a reading list highlighting the theme of the month. So, arrive solo or bring your book club to Te Matapihi for a new kind of conversation.

This event is FREE to attend, but we ask that you please register via the button below.

Thursday 29 October sees the final instalment of Between the Lines, the musical book club in collaboration with the New Zealand String Quartet and Orchestra Wellington. This week, musicians from Orchestra Wellington will perform Façade, a collaboration between the composer William Walton and poet Edith Sitwell that was first performed in 1923. Sitwell had been assembling the collection of poems that would become Façade for a while, the work resulting from her desire to make a sharp move away from the predominant poetic trends of late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century England. Sitwell explained:

‘At the time I began to write, a change in the direction, imagery, and rhythms in poetry had become necessary, owing to the rhythmical flaccidity, the verbal deadness, the dead and expected patterns, of some of the poetry immediately preceding us.’

Sitwell cited the architect Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret), who said that those living in the ‘Machine Age’ of the early twentieth century, constantly heard new sounds and rhythms in everyday life. As a result of this increased humming, ticking, and roaring, Le Corbusier believed ‘new organs awake in us, another diapason, a new vision.’ The newly ubiquitous hubbub of mechanisation meant that ‘the noise was so round that one believed a change in acoustic functions was taking place.’

Sitwell prioritised rhythm and assonance in her Façade poems, believing that rhythm is ‘one of the principal translators between dream and reality. Rhythm might be described as, to the world of sound, what light is to the world of sight. It shapes and gives new meaning.’ She also intended her poems to be abstract (some reactionary critics labelled them ‘nonsense’ rather than abstract), calling them ‘patterns in sound … in many cases, virtuoso exercises in technique of an extreme difficulty in the same sense as that in which certain studies [for piano] by Liszt are studies in transcendental technique in music.’

Sitwell’s work in Façade had a scientific tilt, consisting of ‘inquiries into the effect on rhythm and on speed in the use of rhymes, assonances, and dissonances, placed at the beginning and in the middle of lines, as well as at the end, and in the most elaborate patterns. I experimented, too, with the effect upon speed of the uses of equivalent syllables – a system that produces great variation.’

William Walton’s music for Façade was not a setting of Sitwell’s verses in the manner of a song. Rather, the music provided a sonic backdrop against which the poetry would be recited. The human voice has an instrumental, even percussive, role. The synchronisation of verse and music is a virtuosic feat, which the performers tested in a private performance at the Sitwells’ London home in January 1922. The following year, on 12 June 1923, came the public premiere, at which Sitwell recited the verse through a megaphone from behind a painted backdrop. In performance, Façade is modernism in action, a brilliant imaginative, kaleidoscopic treatment of language.

Between the Lines series monthly concerts will be held at 5:30pm on the final Thursday of every month from April to October. The dates for the series are:

• Thursday 30 April, 5:30pm – Orchestra Wellington (first session to take place on the Bleachers, ground level) – The Art of Conversation
• Thursday 28 May, 5:30pm – New Zealand String Quartet – Obsession
• Thursday 25 June, 5:30pm – New Zealand String Quartet – Private Lives
• Thursday 30 July, 5:30pm – Orchestra Wellington – The Devil’s Bargain
• Thursday 27 August, 5:30pm – New Zealand String Quartet – Outsider
• Thursday 24 September, 5:30pm – NZSM – Te Kōkī – Theme to be announced
• Thursday 29 October, 5:30pm – Orchestra Wellington – Language Games