Sara Jane Bailes - Beckett and Musicality

BECKETT AND MUSICALITY

Edited by
SARA JANE BAILES
AND
NICHOLAS TILL
University of Sussex, UK

First published 2014 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge
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Copyright 2014 Sara Jane Bailes and Nicholas Till

Sara Jane Bailes and Nicholas Till have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Beckett and musicality / edited by Sara Jane Bailes and Nicholas Till.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4724-0963-8 (hardcover) 1. Beckett, Samuel, 1906-1989 Criticism and interpretation. 2. Music and literature. 3. Music in the theater. I. Bailes, Sara Jane.

II. Till, Nicholas, 1955

ML80.B42B43 2014

780.92dc23

2014015547

ISBN 9781472409638 (hbk)
ISBN 9781315568812 (ebk)

Sara Jane Bailes and Nicholas Till

Franz Michael Maier

Cline Surprenant

Katarzyna Ojrzyska

Brynhildur Boyce

David Foster

Kevin Branigan

Maria Ristani

Thomas Mansell

Paul Rhys

Matthew Goulish

Mary Bryden

Sara Jane Bailes

Christof Migone

Catherine Laws

Sara Jane Bailes is a theatre artist and Reader in Theatre and Performance Studies in the Drama Programme at the University of Sussex. Her scholarly and creative practice focuses on historical and contemporary experimental theatre making. She has directed and performed in many of Becketts shorter works. She publishes and lectures internationally in a variety of live and web-based contexts and mentors young theatre practitioners. Her monograph, Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure (Routledge), was published in 2010.

Brynhildur Boyce has taught at Goldsmiths, University of London and at the University of Iceland. She guest-edited a special issue of Nordic Irish Studies on Samuel Beckett and has published a number of essays on Beckett, including one in Irish Studies Review that won the 2009 British Association for Irish Studies Postgraduate Prize. She completed her PhD at Goldsmiths in 2012 on communication in the radio plays of Samuel Beckett.

Kevin Branigan studied French and English Literatures at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He returned to the French Department to complete his PhD in 2006 as a Government of Ireland Scholar. His thesis was subsequently published as Radio Beckett in 2008 by Peter Lang. In January 2009 he discussed Radio Beckett on RT radios The Arts Show. He currently teaches French at NUI, Maynooth.

Mary Bryden is Professor of French Literature at the University of Reading. Her many books and articles on Beckett include the edited collection Samuel Beckett and Music (Oxford University Press, 1998) and a chapter Reflections on Beckett and Music, with a Case Study: Paul Rhyss Not I in Lois Oppenheim (ed.), Samuel Beckett and the Arts (Garland, 1999). More recently, she has co-edited (with Margaret Topping) Becketts Proust/Deleuzes Proust (Palgrave, 2009), which includes considerations of music.

David Foster is an artist and writer. He gained a PhD at the University of Reading in 2011 for a thesis combining theory and practice-based research in visual and musical aesthetics, centring on a study of the film adaptation of Becketts Comdie. His articles have been published in Screen, the Journal of Beckett Studies, Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourdhui and Studies in European Cinema. His essay The Artist-Photographer and the Problem of Commentary appears in The Reflexive Photographer (MuseumsEtc, 2013), and he recently self-published the first volume in a projected series of photobooks documenting his ongoing project, Detopia.

Matthew Goulish is dramaturge for Every house has a door. His books include 39 Microlectures: In Proximity of Performance (Routledge, 2000), The Brightest Thing in the World: 3 Lectures from the Institute of Failure (Green Lantern, 2012), and Work from Memory: In Response to In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust, a collaboration with the poet Dan Beachy-Quick (Ahsahta, 2012). He teaches writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Catherine Laws is a pianist and musicologist. She is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of York and a Senior Artistic Research Fellow at the Orpheus Institute, Ghent. As a performer, she specializes in contemporary music and performs with two contemporary ensembles, the music theatre group Black Hair, and experimental ensemble [rout]. She has published a range of articles focusing on the musicality of the work of Samuel Beckett and composers responses to his texts and has recently completed a book, Headaches Among the Overtones: Music in Beckett/Beckett in Music for Rodopi Press (2013).

Franz Michael Maier is Privatdozent of Musicology at the Free University Berlin. He is interested in the work of Guido of Arezzo, Beethoven and Marcel Proust, and his main areas of research relate to theory of the elements of music, music in the nineteenth century, and the relation between music and literature. His book Becketts Melodien was published in 2006 (Koenigshausen and Neumann). Among his articles on Beckett and music are Two Versions of Nacht und Trume: What Franz Schubert Tells Us about a Favourite Song of Beckett (Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourdhui 18, 2007); The Idea of Melodic Connection in Samuel Beckett (Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2008) and more recently Samuel Beckett, les douze sons de lEmpereur Hong-t et le silence de lEmpereur Mou which appears in the edited collection, Beckett et la musique (ed. David Lauffer and Genevive Mathon, Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg).

Thomas Mansell was awarded a PhD by Birkbeck, University of London, for his thesis Beckett and Music: Incarnating the Idea (2012). His work has been published in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourdhui, Performance Research, and in the anthology Samuel Becketts Endgame (ed. Mark S. Byron). In 2006 he was co-organizer of the centenary conference Beckett and Company, held at Goldsmiths and Tate Modern. He worked for several years as a ballet pianist, and now teaches piano and cello in London.