Transgression as transcendence : essayistic poetics in selected works by Dmitri Shostakovich and Joseph Vella

Abstract

For someone with an interest in music, the word ‘improvisatory’ immediately allies itself to jazz and its unpredictable yet compelling rhythms – largely displaced and syncopated; those rhythms that will not stay still, will not be told what to door where to go. Imparting a quasi-chaotic sense, these rhythms can be accused of all imaginable vices but one: they will never cause one to be bored. Jazz rhythms seem to have emerged as a reaction to the predictability of traditional versification. The randomness, the seemingly unstructured patterns, which become the yardstick by which poetry started to be measured: it was all there, in jazz rhythms. There is never a dull moment with jazz rhythms. (On the ramifi cations of dullness Alexander Pope had already launched the project with The Dunciad, lest we forget.) They are natural rhythms dictating the pace at which the poet directs his syntax and the musician his phrases.