Fixed Forms

It is striking that some of the most elaborate temporal sound organisations have features in common with independent poetic and musical cultures. These are the so-called ‘fixed’ forms. The Sapphic stanza invented in Greece in the seventh century BC, the sextine invented in Provence by Arnaut Daniel in the twelfth century, the Malay pantun, the so-called “school fugue”, the stereotyped duets of many species of birds, etc., are all examples. Not that each one is completely identical in the metrics of languages that are foreign to each other, but very similar patterns are adopted by very different languages. To take only the example of the quatrain invented by Sappho (3 hendecasyllables and an adonic, (i.e. 3 lines of 11 syllables followed by a line of 5), its proportional analogy with the stanza used by Lamartine in his famous Lac (3 alexandrines followed by a hexasyllable) is quite striking. In accordance with the approach I have taken in this essay, I am applying the same ear and the same analytical procedures to these organisations, whatever their field, postulating that one or more common patterns may have generated them outside of any direct influence, and thus help to explain their analogies. If I have allowed myself to bring animal signals and music closer together, it goes without saying that I will allow myself even more easily to consider that from the purely sonic point of view, poetry and music can be subjected to the same investigation. This analytical bias, reducing poetries to forms, is particularly permissible in the case of fixed forms.