Invite eSignature Form Myself

Perhaps not "lesser known", but I've been using keyboard shortcuts for years under "Settings": This probably comes from my vim background, but inside gmail, I almost never use the mouse. Instead:While viewing a list of threads (i.e. Inbox, All Mail, Drafts, search results, etc.):c to compose a new mailj and k to move the cursor down and upx to select/deselect the current thread that's pointed to by the cursore to archive all threads that have been selected [Enter] to go into the thread pointed to by the cursor"g i" to go to my Inbox"g a" to go to All Mail"g d" to go to DraftsWhile inside a thread:n and p to browse down and up messages inside a thread (move the cursor up and down)a to reply all (or r to reply individually, but that's rare) to the message currently pointed to by the cursorf to forward the message that's pointed to by the cursoru to go back to the previous thread list view, which could be your Inbox, All Mail, Drafts, etc. This is the same as the back button: s to toggle through the stars on the message currently pointed to by the cursorIn case you're wondering, the "cursor" is the very thin vertical blue line visible to the left of the third thread in this picture:Other useful shortcuts:/ to make the search bar active"* u" to select all unread emails"* n" to deselect all emailsShift+i to mark all selected emails as readShift+u to mark all selected emails as unreadWhile inside a thread, Shift+u will bring you back to the previous thread list view and marking the current thread as unread. I do this a lot to keep important threads at the top of my inbox.And that's basically all I ever do in gmail. It can be painful to learn at first, but just start with the very basics: j, k, and [Enter] to browse through your inbox. Within a month or two, you'll be zipping through your inbox like Usain Bolt through the 200m.Full list: http://support.google.com/mail/b...Edit: David Craige mentioned a very useful Google Labs add-on under "Settings --> Labs": a [Send & Archive] buttonAnd another useful add-on:

Gmail offers many tools for us organize our inbox, such as folders, labels, and even tabs, which in turn saves time when we want to look for some particular mails.Labels are a simple way to categorize our messages. For eg : When a mail comes from friends we can label them as friends and if a mail comes from work, we can label them as work. So next time if we want to check those mails, we dont have to look through our entire inbox. We can just click on the respective labels they belong to. And from there the mail we want to look into.Steps to create and tag mails with LabelsGo to Create new label option on your left menu bar. (You may have to click on More to show this button)Then enter the name of the label you want to create.Then click on create.Then go to the mail you want to add the label toClick on the label button and choose the label you want to applyOn your left menu bar you will see a new category has come up having the label name you just created.When you click on it, it will show the mails to which the label is added to

Let me interject some humor into this discussion. This is one of several amusing stories of interactions I’ve had with police over the years. I take you back to 3 July 1976. I was 19 years old, a sophomore in college, home for summer break. One of my buddies (let’s call him D) had joined the Army and was home on leave from Ft. Campbell, KY. He was also thoughtful enough to bring with him a few hundred dollars worth of fireworks, most of which were totally illegal in Pennsylvania, and probably everywhere else too. It was awesome.Myself, D and two other friends (we’ll call them H and M) decided to celebrate the 4th of July weekend with a camping trip to Pymatuning State Park, which conveniently, was very close to the Ohio state line where the drinking age in bars was still 19 at the time. Ah, the 70’s. Of course, the bars in Ohio only served disgusting 3.2% alcohol beer, to those under 21, but the horrible beer was a small price to pay for the incredible fun that was to be had. It was 4th of July weekend, the weather was beautiful, and we also happened to have a gallon of Old Granddad whiskey that M had managed to get hold of as well. It was really shaping up to be a great weekend.There was one particular bar in Andover, OH called the Causeway Inn, that my friends and I really liked. This place was always jumping, was close to the campground where we were staying, had really good bands from the Pittsburgh and Cleveland areas, and was always packed with single women.Four 19 year old guys on summer vacation, massive amounts of fireworks, beer, whiskey, 4th of July, lots of testosterone… what could go wrong?We set up camp, grilled some hot dogs, tested out some fireworks, drank some whiskey and then set out for the Causeway Inn. We had a huge, late 60’s station wagon that H had borrowed from his dad’s used car lot. And, to make sure to push the entertainment envelope just a bit further, we brought along the whiskey and the fireworks as well.Our evening at the Causeway Inn flew by in what seemed like an instant. God, we had so much fun back in those days… Anyway, we left the bar sometime after last call at 0200 and in our infinite wisdom we decided to take some back roads so we could set off various roman candles, bottle rockets and other assorted fireworks from the car.We drove merrily along our way, laughing hysterically while throwing firecrackers, M80s and shooting bottle rockets out of the car. Not too long into our adventure I happened to look back and noticed a car following us a few hundred feet back without its headlights on. Not good. I was just about to announce this unsettling observation when the red lights came on. Shit. It was the Ohio State Patrol and we were being pulled over.I was in the back seat, driver’s side with M beside me. H was driving and D was in the front passenger seat. As fate would have it, the instant the red lights came on M had lit the fuse of a roman candle. The plan was to hold it out the window as it launched colored balls of fire into the sky and at mailboxes. Of course we panicked and M tried to put out the fuse with his fingers, causing him to get burned and drop the roman candle onto the floor of the car. We didn’t know if this thing was going to explode or what, so we all held our hands over our ears including H, who was driving.The roman candle ignited and blasted a red fireball up under the front seat between D’s feet. The car immediately filled with dense white smoke which billowed out the windows. About once every second another ball of fire would blast up under the front seat, lighting up the smoke-filled interior of the car. We could barely see. The station wagon weaved back and forth as H tried to steer with one knee, braking with the other foot while holding his ears. Thankfully we were only going about 25 mph and we managed to pull to the side of the road and stop at about the same time the roman candle ran out of fire balls. I was rather happy that no explosion occurred!We sat silently waiting as two OHP officers approached, one on each side, and shined their flashlights into our still smoke filled car. One looked in the driver’s side window and asked “Are you guys idiots, or what?” He told H, who was driving, to get out of the car. In the front passenger seat D, who was wearing some kind of goofy civil war era military cap also opened his door and started getting out. The second officer said “Not you, General Custer!” In retrospect, that was quite amusing.As H accompanied the first OHP officer to the patrol car, the other officer continued examining our gun powder infused station wagon. The smoke had cleared enough that he could see along with the fireworks, the half-empty bottle of whiskey laying on the floor. I thought for sure we were screwed. Then he said “I don’t see that whiskey.” We sat motionless trying to process this information. He repeated “I do not see that whiskey!” I finally understood his obvious meaning and I emptied the bottle out the window into the gravel. Next, he collected our remaining fireworks.In the meantime, the first officer returned with H, who got back behind the wheel of our car. As the second OHP officer took our fireworks back to the patrol car, the first officer leaned into the car and said “Get the hell out of here and don’t let me catch you in Ohio again!” To which we politely replied “Yes sir!” As we drove off I could swear I saw the OHP officers in their car laughing at the absurdity of this whole situation.We returned to the safety of our camp site, where we roasted some more hot dogs, made some s’mores and processed the nights events.I thought those OHP officers were really decent guys. They could have thrown the book at us, but they didn’t, for which I am very grateful. But keep in mind that this was the 70’s and the world was a very different place back then. Oh, the stories I could tell you…

Scaringly difficult subject to write about, and surely, just as ambivalent. I possess no expertise on poetry nor on music, only what a curious & interested mind gathers over these past few years. Hastily point out mistakes or any others short-comings & fallacies.I will be quick to mention Milton, perhaps a little of Eliot, and lastly, Ezra Pound. The effect & connection between music and poetry has definitively varied throughout history. Sung epos & folklore songs, Provençal & Troubadour poetry,... roughly speaking, and this is my observation, the first wedge between the two has been made when poetry became much more erudite, soaked in words-meaning, and forgot the musical rhythms little behind, not that I value one over another.-- Anyway, 19. & 20. century welcomed the revival of the two, and again established connections. French symbolism, Modernism & new musical techniques ( revolution of style both in literature & music, the avant-garde was united across all fields ). Of course, one of the issues is how much of modern poetry can be marked as "narrative" in the obvious sense. The elements of music is such a vague term indeed…To start off with a quotation from Poe`s The Poetic Principle:Contenting myself with the certainty that Music, in its various modes of metre, rhythm and rhyme, is of so vast a moment in Poetry as never to be wisely rejected - is so vitally important an adjunct, that he is simply silly who declines its assistance, I will not now pause to maintain its absolute essentiality. It is in Music perhaps that the soul most nearly attains the great end for which, when inspired by the Poetic Sentiment, it struggles - the creation of supernal Beauty. It may be, indeed, that here this sublime end is, now and then, attained in fact. We are often made to feel, with a shivering delight, that from an earthly harp are stricken notes which cannot have been unfamiliar to the angels. And thus there can be little doubt that in the union of Poetry with Music in its popular sense, we shall find the widest field for the Poetic development. The old Bards and Minnesingers had advantages which we do not possess - and Thomas Moore, singing his own songs, was, in the most legitimate manner, perfecting them as poems.&A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by having, for its object, an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained; romance presenting perceptible images with definite, poetry with definite sensations, to which end music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.And to finish, a section from a letter to James R. Lowell:I am profoundly excited by music and by some poems - those of Tennyson especially - whom with Keats, Shelley, Coleridge (occasionally) and a few others of like thought and expression, I regard as the sole poets. Music is the perfection of the soul or idea of Poetry. The vagueness of exultation aroused by a sweet air which should be strictly indefinite and never too strongly suggestive is precisely what we should aim at in poetry. Affectation which is thus no blemishMustek and Poetry have ever been acknowledg'd Sisters.  As Poetry is the harmony of Words, so Mustek is that of Notes...  Sure they are most excellent when they are join 'd.   Blest pair of Sirens, pledges of Heav'ns joy,  Sphere-born harmonious Sisters, Voice, and Vers,  Wed your divine sounds, and mixt power employ  Dead things with inbreath'd sense able to pierceMilton could have very well be a musician, -his father was-, and his music appeared in print from time to time, one notable contribution was Fair Orian in collection of madrigals in Honour of queen Elizabeth, The Triumphs of Oriana.He was a close friend with a composer Henry Lawes, and the two collaborated on The Masque of Comus, 1634.There is also a distinction to be made between Greek & Roman musica practica, which was performed & sung, and the Pythagorean musica speculativa, theoretical & mathematical understanding, — changed to Christianised harmonia mundi during the Renaissance revival ). Harmonica mundi can definitely be encountered in Milton`s early poetry, At solemn music, Ad Patrem, & passages from 'Arcades', Comus, and 'On the Morning of Christ's Nativity'.From At solemn music:“ … disproportioned sinJarred against nature's chime, and with harsh dinBroke the fair music that all creatures madeTo their great Lord.”See how disproportioned resonates with Pythagorean proportions, and it became disproportioned with the Original Sin and the fall from Eden. The reconciliation between the Classical/Pagan & Christian aesthetics and tradition was one of the foremost issues of early Milton. A passage from On the Morning of Christ's Nativity';The lonely mountains o’er, And the resounding shore, A voice of weeping heard and loud lament; Edgèd with poplar pale, From haunted spring, and dale The parting Genius is with sighing sent; With flower-inwoven tresses torn The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets mourn.From Paradise Lost:Celestial voices to the midnight air [...]With heavenly touch of instrumental soundsIn full harmonic number joined, their songsDivide the night, and lift our thoughts to heaven.& in Hell:Their song was partial, but the harmony(What could it less when spirits immortal sing?)Suspended hell, and took with ravishment The thronging audience.Partial music of fallen Angels & Broken music of man. And Book V:Mystical dance, which yonder starry sphereOf planets and of fixed in all her wheelsResembles nearest, mazes intricate,Eccentric, intervolved, yet regularThen most, when most irregular they seem;And in their motions harmony divineSo smooths her charming tones, that God's own earListens delighted.A quick stop with T.S. Eliot and modernism before Pound.Modernism was a turbulent period, literature was chasing music, music was chasing language, and both were born out of impulse to restore expressivity & eloquence that the formality has lost. An important shift has happened, there is no absolute, right or left, right is not the opposite of left, ocean does not kill the fire.Poe & French symbolism played a pivotal role, and I am not confident nor do I know enough to speak about French climate and the effects of Poe in the second half of the 19. century here.Just as literature changed, so did music. Even the so called more traditional composers, like Ravel, are less formulaic and more abrupt, not to mention the likes of Stravinsky. What is very intriguing to me is how well does modern art produce tensions despite the loss of totality & coherence, and how idiosyncratic arbitration took over without losing the profound and human effect of tensity. In this sense, music was not longer a music in musical forms, but rather that of consciousness and its fragmentation.The seeming homelessness of arts in the period is a precondition of the changes that occurred, and this is what T. Hardy called the ache of modernism. There are no happy ends, formulaic tragedies ethically victorious, nor obvious redemption ( debatable, Last part of The Waste Land is an example ). The widening canyon of separation & inability of pristine connectivity is a precondition of the age, and in itself, its product - Postmodernism, a headless human still digging in a graveyard of modernity, seeking hopelessly for a regenerative bone & praying not to find it - he would have to leave. This is why modernism has no green heritage, only skeletons. In Joyce`s terms, Scrupulous meanness. Even the Hegelian aesthetics “in the suspension of equilibrium lies the tendency to return to a condition of equilibrium”, even musical form through dissonance to consonance, is depleted. If one here remembers the quotes from Poe and his posture of indefinitiveness, how it went from his to symbolism and from there to modernism, acclaiming the suggestive aspect.One of the drives of modernism was to thrust poetry back from the street, or jungle, to the sublime, the rightful place, to perform the duties it deserves. The restoration called for a path through prickly subjects, even ironic and laughable, like Prufrock`s underwhelming question, but it manages to pass exactly due to that vagueness, and we sense it as our own.Perhaps all this has been rather imprecise, let me speak about Eliot.So, while poetry attempts to convey something beyond what can be conveyed in prose rhythms, it remains, all the same, one person talking to another; and this is just as true if you sing it, for singing is another way of talking. The immediacy of poetry to conversation is not a matter on which we can lay down exact laws. Every revolution in poetry is apt to be, and sometimes to announce itself to be a return to common speech.... The music of poetry, then, must be a music latent in the common speech of its time.The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism: “Poetry begins, I dare say, with a savage beating a drum in a jungle, and it retains that essential of percussion and rhythm” - like music.Fairly, music of poetry may differ from music of music, an awkward saying that while musical elements are important for analysis, but the musical elements in poetry categorically & theoretically & applicably differ from those that we apply to music per se.'From Poe to Valery´, essay:Poetry, of different kinds, may be said to range from that in which the attention of the reader is directed primarily to the sound, to that in which it is directed primarily to the sense. With the former kind, the sense may be apprehended almost unconsciously; with the latter kind - at these two extremes - it is the sound, of the operation of which upon us we are unconscious. But, with either type, sound and sense must cooperate; in even the most purely incantatory poem, the dictionary meaning of the words cannot be disregarded with impunity.Precisely, from The music of Poetry;[m]y purpose here is to insist that a 'musical poem' is a poem which has a musical pattern of sound and a musical pattern of the secondary meanings of the words that compose it, and that these two patterns are indissoluble and one.Simply a level beside the denotation of words. In`The Music of Poetry´ another inspect of this climate is presented:The music of a word is, so to speak, at a point of intersection: it arises from its relation first to the words immediately preceding and following it, and indefinitely to the rest of its context; and from another relation, that of its immediate meaning in that context to all the other meanings which it has had in other contexts, to its greater or less wealth of association.Which can be directly linked to his writings On Dante:In English poetry words have a kind of opacity which is part of their beauty. I do not mean that the beauty of English poetry is what is called mere 'verbal beauty'. It is rather that words have associations, and the groups of words in association have associations, which is a kind of local self-consciousness, because they are the growth of a particular civilization.As many words, music ferries such a rich history of meanings, definitions, and relations that is difficult to analyse the impact. Music in one of the Archetypes, and they are hard to contain. Music is a structure separate of understanding, insofar as it escapes the restraints of conventional meanings. The Music of Poetry is, if one takes a leap of imagination, an objective correlative, if I dare expand the term. If I use a line from D. Davie; "It is language which happens through the speaker and not the speaker who expresses himself through language.”-— Can this also be said about music, when it comes to early Eliot?In an 'Aspects of Rhythm and Rhyme in Eliot's Early Poems', J. Chalker, in sum, `The Use “the steadiness and predictability of musical rhythm” is to produce psychological reassurance in the midst of emotional disturbance.´—Such irony, after reading Prufrock, if I thinks solemnly of rhythm, I would say it conveys anything but the reassurance and predictability, yes, the irony that is serves as a distraction from emotional disturbances, and in this fact lays reassurance.Quite enough of Eliot…Ezra Pound!''The idea that music and poetry can be separated,'' he wrote, ''is an idea current in ages of degradation and decadence when both arts are in the hands of lazy imbeciles.''Opera Le Testament De Villon:He started at least two unfinished operas, Cavalcanti and COLLIS O HELICONII.( Two short recordings of the latter can be found here )Rhythm & Music, “the hardest quality of a man's style to counterfeit”.In his three essays about Music in Transatlantic Review, he strongly focuses & advocates time and time-intervals, arguing:“A sound of any pitch, or any combination of such sounds, may be followed by a sound, or any combination of sounds, providing the time interval between them is properly gauged; and this is true for any series of sounds, chords, or arpeggios”Emphasization of space and rhythm was, by space - `space in between concise images - in juxtaposition´ - one of prime concerns of Imagisme. Reader`s interaction is needed to form a connection between them. ( A short answer about In A Station of the Metro ) Another short poem, Alba:As cool as the pale wet leaves  of lily-of-the-valleyShe lay beside me in the dawn.Pound˙s poetry, rhythm & music was always more about reaction than explanation, which, I think, anyone who has read him can agree, and that might very well be the only thing on which we can agree. Therefore Poetry & Music are two in one to achieving this reaction.I will briefly present his own attempt to compose a work based on his own poem, Sestina Altaforte (1909 )Loquitur: En Bertrans de Born.Dante Alighieri put this man in hell for that he was a stirrer-up of strife.Eccovi!Judge ye!Have I dug him up again?The scene in at his castle, Altaforte. "Papiols" is his jongleur."The Leopard," the device of Richard (Cúur de Lion).IDamn it all! all this our South stinks peace.You whoreson dog, Papiols, come! Let's to music!I have no life save when the swords clash.But ah! when I see the standards gold, vair, purple, opposingAnd the broad fields beneath them turn crimson,Then howl I my heart nigh mad with rejoicing.IIIn hot summer have I great rejoicingWhen the tempests kill the earth's foul peace,And the lightnings from black heav'n flash crimson,And the fierce thunders roar me their musicAnd the winds shriek through the clouds mad, opposing,And through all the riven skies God's swords clash.IIIHell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!And the shrill neighs of destriers in battle rejoicing,Spiked breast to spiked breast opposing!Better one hour's stour than a year's peaceWith fat boards, bawds, wine and frail music!Bah! there's no wine like the blood's crimson!IVAnd I love to see the sun rise blood-crimson.And I watch his spears through the dark clashAnd it fills all my heart with rejoicingAnd pries wide my mouth with fast musicWhen I see him so scorn and defy peace,His lone might 'gainst all darkness opposing.VThe man who fears war and squats opposingMy words for stour, hath no blood of crimsonBut is fit only to rot in womanish peaceFar from where worth's won and the swords clashFor the death of such sluts I go rejoicing;Yea, I fill all the air with my music.VIPapiols, Papiols, to the music!There's no sound like to swords swords opposing,No cry like the battle's rejoicingWhen our elbows and swords drip the crimsonAnd our charges 'gainst "The Leopard's" rush clash.May God damn for ever all who cry "Peace!"VIIAnd let the music of the swords make them crimson!Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash!Hell blot black for always the thought "Peace!"As a remainder, poem’s speaker is the Gascon nobleman and war-loving troubadour Bertran de Born, who lived in the second half of the twelfth century. There is no way Pound would have wrote the poem in 1914, even 1913, with its pro-war orientation, but in the end, it is a traditional subject of epic.If one isolates the ending words of each stanza:peace – music – clash – opposing – crimson – rejoicing [Stanza I]rejoicing – peace – crimson – music – opposing – clash [Stanza II]clash – rejoicing – opposing – peace – music – crimson [Stanza III]crimson – clash – rejoicing – music – peace – opposing [Stanza IV]opposing – crimson – peace – clash – rejoicing – music [Stanza V]music – opposing – rejoicing – crimson – clash – Peace [Stanza VI]crimson – clash – Peace [Envoi]Not to get into a detailed analysis of this one poem and its technical mastery of Anglo-Saxon metre & alliteration, more famous in his translation The Seafarer.“The phrases are short (two to six small, quick bars), often similar but generally asymmetric, and impetuous with anapest driven leaps, creating an almost flickering quality. The sestina form, however, is used for purely structural function. There is no attempt at word painting or at a sonic/cognitive equivalent. The music matches the original poem, one note or chord per syllable, through the third line of the second sestet. From this point musical irregularities gradually encroach upon the monosyllabic relationship with the text. His formal method was to assign one or two extremely brief music segments (each segment consisting of a different chord, or two or three chords with or without a unison note) as a “sonic signifier” to identify each line of Altaforte’s six end words. When the end word appeared in its new position in the following sestet its sonic signifier would appear as a recognizable determinant. . . .“Remembering category #4 concerning “Criticism via music” in Pound’s essay “Date Line,” we can reflect upon the interpretive insights given us when Pound interrelates music and verse.2 As can be seen above, the temptation to read “Damn it all!” as a colloquial emphatic anapest is dissuaded by Pound’s more pungent cretic ( – ˘– ), giving equal emphasis to “Damn-all.” At the end of the line a spondee (two quarter notes) gives accentuation to “stinks peace,” correcting a tendency to slight “stinks” as a moderately unstressed syllable if giving “South stinks peace” the quite natural reading of a cretic. Similarly, in line six of the same stanza, “heart nigh mad” might be rendered a cretic, yet Pound’s musical setting as three stressed syllables heightens the emotional pitch of the poem by raising the tension on “nigh.” . . .“Under the influence of Antheil’s constantly changing time signatures and note durations[applied to the opera Le Testament] the solo violin sestina utilizes a constant shifting of the number of microbeats per bar from 1/4 to 21/32, with a frequency of triple and quintuple meters presaging the metric simplification of his music over the next two years. Yet Pound’s notation is not secure enough to avoid frequent miscalculations of the note lengths versus the time signatures.“A chordal piece with almost no single notes, frequently using triple- and quadruple-stops with one to three open strings, it repeatedly necessitates the use of “broken chords” or arpeggiation. The result is often a scratchy, disjointed, leaping quality as the player prepares the fingers to approach each new multiple stop. Yet the “breaking” of the chord also favors a clarification of the harmony by lessening the biting dissonance to produce a more consonant sound, often focusing on open fifths or, in arpeggiation, the sweetened effect of an incomplete major seventh chord. Although aesthetically clarified by a few interpretive markings (bowings, accents, staccati, glissandi, sordino, string specification), technically the piece is filled with impracticalities: jagged, wide leaps; constant multiple stops; and some extremely difficult quadruple- stops, which at best render the work barely playable, if not unplayable. (These challenging famous last words often eventually offer an extremely good performance!)” . . . ( Sestina Altaforte” Ezra Pound sets his poem to music )Aforementioned unfinished COLLIS O HELICONII;HYMN TO APHRODITEAphrodite subtle of soul and deathless,  Daughter of God, weaver of wiles, I pray thee Neither with care, dread Mistress, nor with anguish Slay thou my spirit.   But in pity hasten, come now if ever!  From afar, of old, when my voice implored thee,  Thou hast deigned to listen leaving the golden House of thy father  With thy chariot yoked, and with doves that drew thee Fair and fleet around the dark earth from heaven,  Dipping vibrant wings down the azure distance Through the mid ether:   Very swift they came; and thou gracious Vision Leaned with face that smiled in immortal beauty,  Leaned to me and asked, “What misfortune threatened?”  Why I had called thee?   “What my frenzied heart craved in utter yearning,  Whom its wild desire would persuade to passion?  What disdainful charms madly worshipped, slight thee?  Who wrongs thee, Sappho?   “She that fain would fly, she shall quickly follow She that now rejects, yet with gifts shall woo thee,  She that heeds thee not, soon shall love to madness,  Love thee, the loth one.”( John Myers O’Hara translation 1910, which Pound recommended )Scenario/librettoPound described his third opera as half-finished (GK 368). A libretto, two arias, and three instrumental works are the sum of materials we have to inform the staging of the opera Collis O Heliconii. Pound’s libretto refers only to the Catullus poem (see my comments and transcription of Pound’s libretto, COLLIS xvi–xix; 102–111). The joining of the opera’s central aria in Latin—Catullus’ carmen 61—and a secondary aria in Greek—Sappho’s “Poikilothron”—continued the pairing of languages heard in the second opera Cavalcanti (Italian and Provençal). The composer’s principal motivation for relating the Latin and Greek poems in an opera was to anchor modern English lyrics in the Greek rhythms while demonstrating how a grasp of Latin will refine a poet’s style.The four key actions of Sappho’s Poem 1 are Sappho’s invocation to the goddess Aphrodite; the goddess’s descent from heaven; Aphrodite’s direct address to Sappho regarding her dominance over human will; and Sappho’s invitation to Aphrodite to take action side by side to reverse an unrequited love.The relationship of the Sappho invocation to the Catullan poem, which is widely accepted as an epithalamium, is not an obvious one. But even if we overlook recent scholarship that depicts carmen 61 as a lampoon of an epithalamium, we can find structural resemblances between the two poems. Sappho’s poem provides an authorial match to Catullus’ carmen 61: each poet inserts her- or himself into the poem; each writes in a way that distances the poet as author from the passions written about; and each poem includes a theme of same-sex preference. It was Henry Wharton who first introduced the English reader to Sappho’s love for a female and possibly Theodor Bergk who earlier had done the same for the German reader (Williamson 51–52).2For contrast and drama in his opera, Pound would develop the literary relationship between Sappho and Catullus. He had named them in his 1929 essay “How to Read” as among the essential canon of authors "who actually invented something" (LE 27). In 1934, Pound praised Catullus for his treatment of sapphics: “. . . the only man who has ever mastered the lady’s metre” (ABCR 47). He published the essay “Date Line” the same year, claiming that the musical setting of a poet’s words was a fourth form of criticism (LE 74). Had Pound’s attempts at setting the two poets’ words to music led him to these declarations?Pound’s preference was for us to hear the two poets’ words in the original language, their rhythms and styles brought directly to our ear through the music—the successful formula he had used to dramatize the Cavalcanti–Sordello literary relationship in his second opera. Pound’s pairing of Sappho’s 1 with Catullus 61 removes Sappho from the sphere of influence of Ovid, where most readers became acquainted with her through reading the Heroides. The opera was to place her Latin legacy clearly on the side of Catullus. For more on this, see COLLIS, chapter V, “Sappho.”SapphicsEzra Pound's holograph score of his setting of Sappho Poem 1 from his 3rd opera,Collis O Heliconii.Shown: Introduction to End of Stanza 1 with sapphic stanza and transcription of Pound's lyrics added in red.Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (YCAL 53, Box 46/1015)Reprinted by permission, Second Evening Art. All rights reserved.Pound’s musical events in the Poikilothron convey a feeling for the meter through quantity and syllabic durations. Only the first stanza (see music score above) corresponds wholly to the sapphic stanza as defined by the Alexandrian grammarian Hephaestion (2nd century A.D.). Here is the sapphic meter as it has come down to us from Hephaestion’s manual of Greek meters, the Enchiridion:– ˘ – x – ˘˘ – ˘ – x– ˘ – x – ˘˘ – ˘ – x– ˘ – x – ˘˘ – ˘ – x– ˘˘ – –[The x represents an “anceps” in which the syllable can be short or long.]O’Hara, too, conformed only his first stanza to the Hephaestion sapphic. He maintained the feeling of sapphics through quantity (eleven syllables in the first three lines, five in the fourth), through a liberal use of the choriambic foot – ˘˘ – (though not always in the Hephaestion choriambic position), and through sounds in English that evoke the Greek sounds. Pound follows suit in the music (see the entry on Stanza 4 below).Musical InfluencesWhen Pound approached the setting of a Greek poem accompanied by lyre, he did not attempt to imitate ancient Greek music. Though he had acquired vol. 1 of the Lavignac Encyclopedia of Music which features Maurice Emmanuel’s entry on Greek music, he relied on this text more for its relevance to poetic meter than for compositional ideas.He lent Mary Barnard his own volume, recommending it as the preferred source for understanding how to write sapphics in American English using Emmanuel’s system of musical forms and strategies (Barnard, 56, 58).For his melodies, Pound looked beyond Greece, east to Indonesia. Pound turned his attention to the Javanese scale as had Claude Debussy, but distanced himself from the composer, lamenting that Debussy had turned to composing ‘mush.’3 Debussy had been influenced by performances of the Javanese gamelan at the Paris Exposition of 1889. Access to information about and recordings of world music were random and haphazard, the nascent field of ethnomusicology being represented by only a few key individuals until well into the 1950s.The specific source for Pound’s approach to the Sappho aria, however, is traceable to the Austrian Erich von Hornbostel, one of the earliest musicologists to make field recordings of the music of Indonesia. Hornbostel reported his findings in “Phonographierte Melodien aus Madagaskar und Indonesien” in 1909. Pound most probably learned of him from his friend, the American concert pianist Katherine Heyman, who mentioned Hornbostel in her 1921 bookThe Relation of Ultramodern to Archaic Music (58).4 On July 7, 1924, Pound programmed an arrangement of a Hornbostel Javanese transcription for solo violin, played by Olga Rudge in Paris.5Pound’s Musical Strategy: Modality and TonalityTo the ear accustomed to a diatonic scale, the intervals of Pound’s unusual scale join with the rhythms “to cut a shape in time” (Barnard, 55). Pound’s single accidental of C# in his scale for the Poikilothron aria resembles the transcriptions of Sumatran music compiled by von Hornbostel at the turn of the century.Pound employs six tones —A, C#, D, E, F, (G)—and avoids B altogether. The use of five tones only in stanzas one through four creates a sense of modal music, i.e., a type of scale that is sui generis, where each tone has equal weight, rather than tonal, which is a hierarchical system of music with a central pitch to which the other pitches relate. In modal music the notes do not function as harmony. Only in the fifth stanza does Pound introduce the G to create the sense of a musical key with the stable relationships of the fourth between D and G, and the already present fifth between D and A. The six-tone scale, with certain features acting like a diatonic scale which has seven tones, implies the key of D minor. B is simply avoided and the C# serves as a raised “seventh” step which wants to resolve to D.When the tritone sounds between G and C#, the composer moves from modal to tonal music. In Stanza six, he resumes modality.The contours of Pound’s melodies arise from the qualities of spoken word in the poem—supplication, solicitation, question, demand, and judgment—, the intervallic movement expanding and subsiding with the emotion. The composer brings forward the contours of Sappho’s words through timbre, dissonance, tritone, and accent. Guided by the belief that he can recover the form apart from the formulaic metrics passed down by tradition, he does not attempt to recover ancient Greek melody, but presents new composition as his fifth form of criticism (LE 74–75).Stanza 4: Inner form in Sappho’s Poikilothron:In stanza four, Sappho’s rhetorical devices lead to a highly structured colloquy between the poetess and goddess, even as the language remains colloquial. The composer strives to make this duality salient—structural formality/linguistic familiarity—not only to transmit Sappho to a modern audience but to promote his own interest in Sappho as a mortal poet conversant with the gods.At stanza four we find rhyming patterns in the syllables: otti deute / kotti deute. Here, Pound foregrounds Sappho’s word play by striking the repeating hard surfaces of her Greek consonants—t, d, p, k—against his neo-Sumatran scale, the strangeness of the scale serving to inflect each sound. Sappho’s voice rings out, resonant and striking in her Poundian afterlife, with none of the Ovidian invention and melodrama qualifying her poetic achievement.Stanza 4, lines 3–4, bars 45–49“You asked, what pray tell have I suffered and why pray tell do I call?”Following three breathy vowels on the same pitch, “e-re ot-”, the consonant load of the syllables, “ti”–“dau”–“te”–“pe”–“pon”–“tha,” meets each of the descending pitches with percussive impact. The final syllable pepontha (“have I suffered”) hits the bottom of the singer’s tessitura on A,an octave and a minor sixth below “e-re ot-.” The word kotti (“and what”) rebounds one octave higher on the A, then C# and A again,before a second leap downward to the low A. There follows a third and lesser rebound and descent. The word melodykalemmi (“do I call”), broken by a sixteenth rest, gives the illusion that all is settling down. Pound delivers the last syllable “-mi” on the less-than-resolute e to end the stanza (supported by an A in the violin).Stanza 5: the tritone in Pound’s aria Poikilothron:The Music Column of Make It New 2.1 discussed Pound’s use of the interval of the tritone to insert a critical marker indicating genius within the music. In the Sappho aria, we might expect that when Sappho refers to herself in the poem’s fifth stanza (“kotti moi”), Pound will employ the tritone, and he does not disappoint. He makes the tonality of the tritone salient by preceding it with modality in the preceding four stanzas and in the subsequent sixth stanza.What Pound said:“The more Greek a man knows the better his English cadence is likely to be, and the greater richness, variety, height, precision, colour of his criteria; the greater the variety of his ideas and memories of what verbal melody can be and should be; and the finer his perception of all verbal sounds whatsoever.”(Ezra Pound. “Dust upon Hellas.” Time and Tide XV.45 [November 10, 1934]: 1429–1430).“Greek seems to me a storehouse of wonderful rhythms, possibly impracticable rhythms. If you don’t read it and if you can’t read Latin translations from it, it can’t be helped. Most English translations are hopeless. The best are in prose.”(Ezra Pound. Letter to Iris Barry. July 1916. L 87).( SAPPHO IN POUND’S THIRD OPERA, COLLIS O HELICONII )I would still say that Pound`s musical interest & experimentation ( Classical Greek and Latin, 11th- and 12th-century troubadours like Arnaut Daniel and Gaucelm Faidi, French trouvères like Guillaume le Vinier, and their 14th- and 15th-century heirs like Dante, Cavalcanti and Villon ) were an extended branch, or outgrowth, of his colossal studies in versification. The sound, not semantics!Arthur Daniel, if Pound were asked to give a name of his idea forerunner of whom he said: “when the Provençal [language] was growing weary, and it was to be seen if it could last, and [he] tried to make almost a new language, or at least to enlarge the Langue d’Oc, and make new things possible” —Make it new! The famous motto.OBLIGATORY listening, a different reading of Sestina Altaforte. If you do not hear the music, Sir, God help thee…So, how does understanding of music impact poetry? — Some say intrinsic, and some have not given it a thought or two. Same goes with criticism & analysis.