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Rough Music

Rough Music is a British synonym for charivari, the rural European tradition of shaming a community member by insulting street performance. This collection explores and links two research questions:

• Can poetry develop non-narrative representations of threat and bullying?

• What are the poetic resources of musical form?

These questions are more theoretically explored in the prose monograph Music Lessons.

Rough Music stages action and emotion as a continuous present of threat and bullying, to move past particular narrative detail toward principle and meaning. This search for “pattern” is taken up by the book’s “patterning” of traditional poetic and musical forms, used to develop its themes through such tropes as ventriloquism and the emphatic and containing effects of repetition and rhyme. The role of traditional music in charivari is a cue to investigate musical as well as poetic forms. The collection therefore includes: sonnet, ballad, carol and charm forms, homages to folk tradition, explorations of works by Franz Schubert and Gian Carlo Menotti, poems commissioned by Warwick University and the City of London Festival for setting by composer Sally Beamish, and the libretto of a chamber piece for voice and piano set by Steven Goss and commissioned by Guildford International Festival. Rough Music was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize.