The history of the Cinque Ports, a confederacy of towns linked together by mutual interests under charters of privileges, is a long one. The genesis of the Ports is much debated. What we do know is that by the twelfth century the original five head ports of Hastings, Romney, Hythe, Dover and Sandwich were joined by Winchelsea and Rye, both of which were given ‘ancient status.’ Expansion was rapid and by the fourteenth century approximately thirty towns across Sussex, Kent and Essex were affiliated with the Ports. Some contemporaries saw them as the most important ports in England and their status as a county, with each head port forming a borough, ensured the Ports played an important role in political matters.

The Crown did not grant the Ports’ charters unconditionally and when the king launched a military or naval campaign he could ask the Cinque Ports to provide fifty-seven ships, each manned by twenty-one men, for fifteen days free of charge. Obviously, the origin and evolution of this ‘ship-service’ has attracted the attention of scholars. More generally, however, naval historians are interested in the overall contribution the Cinque Ports made to Plantagenet and Lancastrian naval operations. In examining the Ports’ role in naval operations over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, historians have not been kind. We are told that while they played a crucial role in Edward I's wars, by the time of Edward III's reign they ceased to be of importance. Such historiographical arguments can be traced back to the nineteenth century. In 1813 John Lyon asserted that by the 1370s the Ports were unable to contribute large numbers of ships to naval operations. A more measured analysis was offered in 1847 by Nicholas Harris Nicolas. Nicolas drew on a wealth of manuscript sources to argue that the Ports played an important part in the naval wars of the Plantagenet kings. Despite the work of Nicolas, the studies that followed continued the naval-decline narrative. In 1892 Montague Burrows traced the start of the decline to the reign of Edward II. In 1900 Ford Maddox Hueffer supported Burrows’ assertion. In 1907 and 1926 Michael Oppenheim argued that during Edward III's reign the Ports’ involvement in naval operations declined markedly.

DURING THE CLIMACTIC final exchange between Sigurd and Brynhild in Morris's adapation of the Sigurðr cycle The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs (1876), after the heroine has been overcome by grief at the hero's betrayal of her, Sigurd attempts to console her with an exhortation to resolute activity. Initially associating the dawning of a new day with the opportunity for optimistic endeavour – ‘Awake, arise, O Brynhild! for the house is smitten through | With the light of the sun awakened, and the hope of deeds to do’ – he subsequently offers himself as the embodiment of an ideal of action that might serve as an antidote to despair: ‘It is I that awake thee, and I give thee the life and the days | For fulfilling the deedful measure, and the cup of the people's praise’ (CW, xii, p. 222). In an image that evokes a heroic Germanic lord providing drink for his retainers, Sigurd implies that the accomplishment of a certain kind of purposeful conduct (the fulfilment of the ‘deedful measure’) for the general good of the community (the cup of the people's praise) is a fundamentally hopeful and valuable approach to life.

As inspiration for this scene, Morris had drawn on the episode in Völsunga saga that depicts the last conversation between Sigurðr and Brynhildr, which in 1869 he had declared to have touched him more than anything he had ever met with in literature: ‘there is nothing wanting in it, nothing forgotten, nothing repeated, nothing overstrained’. Yet, despite the remarkable esteem in which Morris held the episode in the saga, a close inspection reveals that it contains no such invocation to heroic action. When the saga's Sigurðr encourages Brynhildr to rise from her bed, he does not seem motivated by any explicit reason other than perhaps the broad intimation that cheerful behaviour is preferable to misery: ‘vaki þú, Brynhildr! sól skín um allan bainn, ok er arit sofit; hritt af per harmi ok tak gleði’ (VÖL, p. 194). By contrast, in the hero's appeal to Brynhild in Sigurd, Morris appears to offer an entire ethos that has the potential to invigorate life with new meaning and might be described as ‘deedfulness’.

IF MORRIS REJECTED crudeness and ferocity in the saga heroes, he embraced their courageousness. Reflecting in the autumn of 1883 on what had attracted him to the sagas some fifteen years before, he declared that it was ‘the delightful freshness and independence of thought of them, the air of freedom which breathes through them, their worship of courage’. Four years later, in his 1887 lecture ‘The Early Literature of the North – Iceland’, he lauded the medieval Icelanders as a people ‘whose religion was practically courage’, and later, more emphatically, whose ‘real religion was the worship of Courage’ (note the substantiating capitalised ‘C’). These explanations of the bravery that he had discovered in Old Norse works have strongly influenced scholarly accounts of what drew him to Iceland and its literature. E. P. Thompson argues that there ‘can be few more striking examples of the regenerative resources of culture than this renewal of courage and of faith in humanity which was blown from Iceland to William Morris’, while Robert Page Arnot maintains that Morris was ‘powerfully affected by this literature, in which the quality of courage is so highly developed as to make much of contemporary medieval literature appear like bravado’. More recently Waithe has proposed that Morris ‘admired the passionate reserve of the typical saga-hero, and may even have found comfort in the sagas’ stoical view at a time when his marriage was failing’, while Richard Frith has asserted that Morris ‘strove to embody the same qualities of courage and stoicism in his own works – lived as well as written’.

Notwithstanding their influence on scholars, in these retrospective accounts Morris presents a simplified definition of the model of courage that he perceived in the sagas shortly after meeting Eiríkur Magnússon. While there is no doubt that the sagas proved a salient inspiration for him, and that the Icelandic treks he undertook in 1871 and 1873 provided an enigmatic psychic test that helped steel his resolve to forge a more robust path at a difficult time in his personal life, it should be remembered that the man reminiscing in the mid-1880s was in a very different position from the one who began lessons with Eiríkur in the late 1860s.

SCHOLARS WHO HAVE considered the importance of the Icelandic sagas to Morris have frequently acknowledged that his engagement with Old Norse literature was connected to a personal sense of what it meant to be heroic. MacCarthy has asserted that he ‘looked on himself as a quasi-saga hero’, personally identifying with the ‘defiant spirit and unflinching sense of duty of the warriors he read about’ (LOT, p. 291), while Calder has suggested that ‘Morris seems to have felt the need of learning to accept the painful realities of life in the courageous spirit of the men and women of the sagas’ (Introduction to SoK, p. 11). Even Eiríkur Magnússon stressed the affinity between the outlook of the saga heroes and his collaborator: ‘he found on every page an echo of his own buoyant, somewhat masterful mind’ (Preface to TSL, 6, p. xiv).

Though it is evident that Morris found the heroes of Old Norse literature inspiring, what has been less clearly recognised is the extent to which the portrayal of heroism in the sagas differs from what Morris thought he saw in them. In the previous chapter, I showed how, in ‘Gudrun’, he altered the impulse for feud depicted in Laxdæla saga, resulting in the motivations and virtues of his characters becoming fundamentally different from those of their saga counterparts. Yet, even in his translations, which he attempted to render as literally as possible, Morris distorted the portrayal of the Icelandic heroes by attenuating conduct that might appear ruthless, coarse or brutal. This chapter examines this distortion, considering in particular how Morris transformed the performance of masculinity in his translations, and especially how he altered the representation of níð: a form of institutionalised shaming that is regularly portrayed in the sagas but also existed in medieval Iceland itself. It considers what kind of hero Morris wanted to depict, and concludes that his desire to liberate the ethos of the sagas for his own time made it necessary for him to universalise the conception of honour that they portray in order to bring Icelandic morality and his own developing ideal of heroism closer together. While contemporary legislation no doubt restricted his freedom to depict the obscene, to some extent, Morris's devotion to the saga heroes and desire that his audience might appreciate their virtues blinded him to what is inhumane in them.

FOR OVER A CENTURY, scholars have debated the origins of the motet and especially the motet's relationship to another genre, the clausula. A high proportion of motets recorded in the earliest manuscript witnesses dating from around the 1240s exist also in the alternative form of clausulae, which lack any upper-voice text. This presents a chronological conundrum: do motets represent clausulae with added texts, or are clausulae instead motets stripped of their words? The accepted hypothesis remains that advanced in 1898 by Wilhelm Meyer, that motets derived from clausulae. For Meyer, the clausula's liturgical heritage in the established genre of organum lent weight to its precedence, while the process of motet creation – the addition of syllabic text to pre-existing melismas – mimicked the earlier plainchant practice of prosula. Friedrich Ludwig immortalized Meyer's hypothesis in his monumental and still indispensable catalogue of the entire thirteenth-century repertoire by referring to clausulae with related motets as ‘sources’ (‘Quellen’). Nonetheless, several scholars hesitated to accept the invariable priority of clausulae in all cases, and although such expressions of doubt initially met with dispute and resistance, they have had a more favourable reception in recent scholarship.

In 2011, Fred Buttner confirmed Yvonne Rokseth's 1939 suggestion that the unusual collection of forty clausulae with accompanying vernacular motet incipits in the Saint Victor manuscript (StV) in fact represented motet transcriptions. Buttner had previously argued in favour of a motet origin for a clausula controversially identified by William Waite in 1954 as one of twenty-one irregularly notated clausulae that seemed to represent motet transcriptions in the more ‘central’ ‘Notre Dame’ manuscript F. The same clausula-motet family featured also as part of Wolf Frobenius's more wholesale reversal of the conventional ‘clausula-first’ chronology in 1987, motivated by Frobenius's conviction that French motets containing melodic snippets associated with secular vernacular refrains could not derive from liturgical clausulae. Frobenius's provocative article was disregarded in subsequent scholarship, but Franz Korndle has recently offered a more favourable re-evaluation, while acknowledging that Frobenius's grander proposition – extending claims about vernacular motets and refrains to encompass Latin motets with related clausulae – was on the whole too radical.

In Four Quartets T. S. Eliot wrote:

It is this silence, the silence beyond words, the quiet or not so quiet of night and dreams, into which Britten ventures. His Nocturne (1958), the culmination of decades of preoccupation with the nocturnal as a theme, investigates these territories beyond: beyond time, beyond language, beyond waking articulation. In his combination of words and music Britten explores the forests of the night. This works in two ways. Firstly, and most obviously, by the very act of providing musical enhancement of the poetry he has chosen he is helping the words to speak into the silence with a new resonance, to acquire a different identity when combined with music. Britten's text settings are rarely if ever simple augmentation of poetry. His songs represent a series of complex interactions between literature and music, with the result that a new, dynamic form is created that is the product of a marriage of the two genres. Secondly, he reaches into the silence beyond words in his choice of themes, assembling eight poems that together create a musico-literary dramatisation of what happens when our unconscious takes over, and night sounds replace the more mundane noises of the day.

But Nocturne represents far more than mere augmentation of poetry by musical highlighting; Britten's selection and setting of the poems he chooses is a complex act of interpreting the texts – a form of interdisciplinary literary criticism, as well as a creative work in its own right. This chapter examines Britten as literary critic – as poetry anthologist, almost. How is he working with, and perhaps even against, the texts he carefully selects for Nocturne? One way to answer this is to try to retrace his steps as he develops his ideas for the piece. Most music written to set words begins its inspiration with the words themselves. Here Britten began with a theme: night, and a sense of what fascinated him about it. He selected and positioned his texts to suit his purpose, to fulfil his aim and to facilitate the expression of what it was he wanted his music to say. So it goes without saying that to examine these choices and the poems themselves reveals something of his intention.

[Blatt 1r]

BACH [immediately before the beginning of and during the Tagsatzung (Assembly); the morning of Tuesday, December 7]: We must still wait for the current guardian [Leopold Nussbock] and even the widow [Johanna]. [//] If you want to come [back] at 11:30, we might not have to wait. [//]

PETERS [continuing]: I shall give my declaration, since you give me [your] trust that, after considering the existing laws and sparing you vexations, I take upon myself the responsibility to notify the Magistrat about everything [Blatt 1v] concerning the education of your nephew according to the existing regulations! [//] I implore you to go to [Blochlinger's] Institute with me. After that I shall report to you every time about the smallest detail and the changes that are perhaps necessary to be undertaken. // I shall already be finished with her [Johanna] in the most courteous manner. [//] [Blatt 2r] The horrible part lies in the fact that the honorable Magistrat made the matter more difficult than easier for you. //

Better than at the Biber. // Is she beautiful?//

How old is your nephew now? // The young [Joseph Franz Karl] Lobkowitz is 16 years old and is studying the first year of Law with great success. [//] He will be treated like the others. // 6 years of Latin at the Gymnasium do not count. [//]

[Blatt 2v]

BEETHOVEN [writing so as not to be heard]: What is the talk about? [//]

PETERS [replying]: About the annual expense for the boy. Now we have to await the decision. [//] [Blatt 3r] The Magistrat's Councillor is for the inclusion of the mother and said that her earlier [legal] offenses, which I indicated were troublesome, would be viewed entirely as insignificant. [//] He, who has Counsel, also mentioned the beautiful clothes that you gave your nephew, and about which the mother has made pointed remarks. [//] [Blatt 3v] To [Blochlinger's] Institute together? [//]

BERNARD: At an earlier time he wanted to supply his reviews to the Mode-Zeitung; I cut out the first one, and so then he by chance got into the Sammler.

If we browse the biographies of twentieth-century Polish composers, we frequently find that they wrote music for theatrical performances and radio plays. The situation is similar with Witold Lutosławski, who spent several years composing musical illustrations for theatre and radio. However, researchers have not yet discussed this aspect of his creative work in detail. The present essay is intended as a small step toward changing this state of affairs. First, it will examine the social and cultural aspects of Poland's post-war theatre life, describing selected theatrical repertoire featuring Lutosławski's music. Next, the essay will discuss Lutosławski's position at Polish Radio. It will describe the composer's radio plays, explain their current state of preservation and present some theoretical considerations regarding the music Lutosławski created for these kinds of works. Finally, it will investigate the composer's approaches and solutions in selected passages from his works for radio.

In the period that interests us – the middle of the 1940s to the end of the 1950s, when Lutosławski completed the majority of his collaborations with theatres and Polish Radio – a play's music was, as a rule, subservient within the artistic work as a whole. Cues often played the role of a quasi-technical element, ensuring the necessary flow, which made the creators relegate the aesthetic quality of the music to a secondary position. Collaborating with theatres and Polish Radio certainly had a practical benefit for composers: it provided them with an opportunity to earn money that was quite useful, considering that remuneration for their more autonomous creations was frequently modest or entirely absent. Although Lutosławski spoke reluctantly about his ‘functional’ works in his later years, it is nevertheless worth turning some attention to these pieces for at least two reasons. First, the variety and originality of these musical settings testify to the scale of Lutosławski's compositional imagination. Second, these scores, like his film music, constitute a source of knowledge about his early compositional technique and, more specifically, his approach to composing for the theatre and radio.

Theatre Plays

Lutosławski wrote musical settings for theatrical plays over a dozen years, producing fifteen original scores between 1948 and 1960. The scores have survived in manuscript form and are presently kept in several centres.

The originality of Witold Lutosławski's music, and the strong sense of independence the composer manifested throughout his career, make it difficult to define his relationship to the trends, styles and techniques of his time. If we assume that Lutosławski was regarded, especially by foreign observers, as the informal leader of the formation called the ‘Polish School of the 1960s’, it seems a particularly interesting challenge to attempt to determine the potential affinities between his compositional solutions and the devices commonly used in this circle.

At the start it should be noted that the discussion of a ‘Polish School’, a controversial construct that is essentially indefinable in strictly musical terms, usually does not proceed without reference to the concepts of sonorism (sonoryzm) and/or sonoristics (sonorystyka). The first of these terms is commonly used (especially in Poland), and, because of its stylistic connotations, it is sometimes treated almost as a synonym for the ‘Polish School’. On the other hand we have the concept of sonoristics created by the Polish music theorist Józef M. Chomiński (1906–1994) during the mid- 1950s. According to Zbigniew Granat's dictionary definition, sonoristics is a ‘descriptive category for the novel sound qualities of twentieth-century music that … gained structural functions in a composition’. In contrast to the notion of sonorism, which emerged inspired by the writings of Chomiński and is usually used in combination with various qualifiers, sonorystyka is a less restrictive and more inclusive term. It designates a specific compositional technique developed by composers considered as belonging to musical modernism. Chomiński traces an evolution of this technique starting with the achievements of Debussy through the work of Stravinsky and Bartók, representatives of the Second Viennese School (especially Webern), the serial works of Boulez and Stockhausen and electronic music. Despite the fact that Witold Lutosławski declared his distance from any common contemporary musical trends, I will try to prove that the idea of sonoristics might be a useful tool in understanding certain aspects of his music – especially from the 1960s – that are marked by significant technical innovations.

Such an approach requires some substantial clarification, starting with the very definition of sonoristics. Chomiński described sonoristics as a ‘purely sonorous technique’ (technika czysto brzmieniowa), the essence of which is to treat ‘the purely sonorous values as the main means of expression and thus as a structural factor’.

Metaphors are slippery things, at once allusive and elusive. Indeed, metaphors are by their very nature subversive: rather than telling us what something is, they tell us what it is not. Aristotle understood this; as he explains, ‘Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else.’ Nevertheless, metaphors are a part of the language by which we construct the world as we perceive it. They both form our language and creatively transform it. By contrast, symbols seem more stable, more firmly grounded. A symbol can represent an abstract idea in concrete form, an intellectualized image; usually we can ‘see’ a symbol, whereas we can only imagine a metaphor. In the following short chapter, I shall attempt to come to grips with the rhetoric of architecture, looking at the idea of the Temple of Jerusalem as it was expressed in concrete form in Byzantine architecture. The Temple offers a unique perspective, for it survived more as a concept than as a reality. We can see its medieval replications, whereas we can only imagine its original appearance.

Historically, texts about buildings range from the purely descriptive to the vacuously allegorical. Both symbolic and metaphorical language has been used to explicate their physical appearance or to provide them with additional meaning. For the architectural historian, the rhetorical tradition may consequently provide both insights and confusions, for a text may be descriptive, symbolic, or metaphorical – or a combination of all three. The difficulty is to determine which is which. Although the language employed is almost never scientific, with both symbols and metaphors, some sort of resemblance is assumed. But does the application of an allegorical language to architecture automatically signal the replication of meaningful forms?

Symbols and metaphors may be difficult to pin down – both in texts and in buildings. By contrast, although a building may be the passive receptor of applied meanings, its architectural form is fixed and concrete. And although symbols and metaphors may be hard to isolate, their very elusiveness may also be the basis of their power. By definition and etymology, a metaphor transposes or transports its subject. A symbol, on the other hand, represents or associates a subject with something else, something that exists beyond it in time and space.

THE FRONT cover of this book features an image taken from the first issue of the Bulletin musical, a fledgling periodical which launched in October 1918. The publication's stated aim was to ‘collaborate in the distribution of French musical works abroad’, and its appearance in both French- and Spanish-language editions reflects its target of reaching a specifically Latin American readership. The image adorning the cover of the maiden issue depicts Marianne, the national emblem of France, with a lyre attached to her flowing robes, dancing under the sun and scattering pages of musical scores as she goes. On the surface, the image encapsulates the story of wartime musical propaganda, in which music was disseminated nationally and internationally via performance and text in order to promote French culture. But the image only presents part of the story: the scores which Marianne distributes on her travels are – perhaps unsurprisingly – exclusively French, including works by Rameau, Grétry, Méhul, Massenet, d'Indy, and Debussy. Yet, as many of the case studies in this book have demonstrated, French musical propaganda during the war relied heavily on a body of Austro- German works from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These were the works which dominated concert life in particular, and they were the works which the public wanted to hear.

The ‘amnesty’ for Austro-German works classed as ‘universal’ allowed them back onto concert programmes as early as 1915. This represented a return to pre-war traditions and was perhaps a comforting sign that Paris was returning to some sense of ‘normality’; but it also meant that it was always going to be an uphill struggle to counter the influence of Austro-German works against French music. A similar situation was present in music publishing. In attempting to publish rival series of editions of the corpus of works so central to European musical life, the French lagged behind their competitors from across the Rhine, who had been engaged in such endeavour for decades. Whilst a single edition worked on cooperatively by publishers across the country aimed to solve the problem, the scale of the gap soon revealed the impossibility of the collective project: Austro-German publishers had already had plentiful time to both penetrate the French market and cement their reputation internationally.