Gertrude Stein’s perceptual, process-oriented writing and poetics have played an influential, below-the-radar role in twentieth- and twenty-first-century “new music” (not really new anymore), that is, musical composition associated with avant garde, experimental, or contemporary traditions in North America and Europe. Bonnie Marranca has claimed that “the performance art and new opera/music theater lines begin with the influence of her work for the stage.” This may be somewhat exaggerated, but there’s no question that Stein’s writing has exerted a powerful gravitational pull on the post-war performance scene in the United States. John Cage composed some of his earliest pieces as musical settings of Stein’s work (the now-lost Three Songs for Voice and Piano (1933), also Living Room Music (1940)) and repeatedly mentions Stein in his writing, as does Morton Feldman, whose early piano compositions and graphic scores required players to make conscious choices of notes or chords during performance. Stein’s modernist orientation toward vernacular American language and its rhythms has appealed, not only to Cage and Feldman, but also to Virgil Thomson, Gerald Berners, Al Carmines, Ned Rorem, Robert Winslow, and others through the post-war period and beyond. Several of the original musical settings for Stein’s early plays that I have commissioned as part of the Radio Free Stein project, such as those by Olive Shakur and Sam Shalabi, are informed by the blending of jazz and other popular musical genres with the American post-Cage tradition. (And there is much to say about Stein’s poetics in relation to song, free jazz, and “out” performance more generally.)
I often describe Radio Free Stein’s musical settings as radio melodramas. This use of the term melodrama refers, in the first instance, to an eighteenth-century composite genre that integrates the performance of spoken words with musical accompaniment in a manner that nevertheless keeps them separate (the words are not sung). Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Pygmalion is often considered the first of these works in which music prepares for or subtends speech. While this form makes an appearance in classical European opera (such as Beethoven’s Fidelio), it takes distinctive shape in modernist opera and music theater in the technique of sprechstimme as differently used by Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Kurt Weill. In the United States, Robert Ashley has gone farthest in exploring this form: Ashley’s textually dense work uses complex notation to mark pitch and tempo, at the same time that it encourages and investigates the speaker’s own speech styles and patterns of intonation. Radio Free Stein’s commitment to forms of melodrama is a consequence of its focus on Stein’s language. We have insisted on intelligibilty in the delivery of speech and language, even when, for example, operatic singing or contrapuntal layering might otherwise threaten it. If, in classical melodrama, music plays a supporting role for declamation, in modernist settings we may hear more reciprocal, mutually implicating relations between speech and music: music contains (and fails to contain) speech, speech contains (and fails to contain) music, while composition explores and deconstructs such relations of affective containment and catastrophe.
When Stein’s lesser-known plays have been staged, it has almost always been in conjunction with music, despite her wish expressed in Everybody’s Autobiography: “As yet they have not done any of mine without music to help them. They could though and it would be interesting.” This raises a basic question: Why is there such a prevalence of musical interpretations of Stein’s plays? The composer Samuel Vriezen offers one answer in discussing the difference between a “cut” and a “slice” of time in Stein’s first play What Happened. I can hint at the issues involved by invoking Virgil Thomson’s observation that Stein’s poetry “need[s] musical reinforcement,” which he immediately corrects: “I do not mean that her writing lacks music; I mean that it likes music.” This formulation implies several claims at the same time: that Stein’s writing is somehow helped by music; that it is somehow like music (Thomson suggests that “Much of it, in fact, lies closer to musical timings than to speech timings”); and, finally, that Stein’s writing is not the same as music. Some of the kinds of sense that Stein’s writing makes are musical, a musicality related to the intonational contours that give her sentences meaning. Steven Meyer has suggested that intonation “provides a compositional landscape for grammar, and thereby provides grammatical constructions with determinate significance,” one of a number of critics who have paid attention to the crucial role for intonation in reading Stein. If I have enlisted composers in the Radio Free Stein project to understand her early plays, it is precisely because musicality helps us understand Stein’s writing in its affective movement between linguistic and intonational sense-making.
Excerpted and adapted from the prologue to Adam J. Frank’s Radio Free Stein: Gertrude Stein’s Parlor Plays (Northwestern University Press, 2025).
