They sent their sonnets off to a newspaper, which printed both. The honest Smith called his “On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below.” Shelley called his “Ozymandias.” Genius may also be knowing how to title a poem.
— Guy Davenport
I am learning to accept that titles are as important as I have always wanted them to be. It seemed like an easy distraction, that one could dream up titles all day for works that would never be started, let alone finished; that a mediocre work could be elevated to the illusion of greatness by a few choice words to flatter the audience’s sensibilities. How many works of art exist as little more than armatures for the finer feelings expressed in the title?
“I thought it would be a waste to condemn it to such anonymity,” said Krzysztof Penderecki of his work originally titled 8’37”. Some works can find a match in subject and surface; others can’t bear the weight of expectations the title imposes upon them. The title finds its purest expression in John Barton Wolgamot’s trilogy: the titles are the Substance which live through the text’s Accident (thus beating Alain Robbe-Grillet by at least 20 years).
For years I laboured under the illusion that disregarding the frippery of the title for the real meat of the work itself was a sign of maturity. It’s a simplistic position. A few years back I heard Helmut Lachenmann praising Morton Feldman’s use of titles and I’ve been reconsidering ever since.
A while ago I finally got to hear Apartment House play Harley Gaber’s masterpiece The Winds Rise in the North live. Afterwards I kept thinking, “what a great title.” The string quintet keens and sighs for two hours, always changing but never deviating from what it first presents itself to be. The title’s a reference to ancient Chinese poetry and Taoism, which invokes a whole other realm of associations, but throughout it all is the evocation of wind, wind as a portent. It may rise to a murmur or a roar, either of which may be imagined at any point in Gaber’s music. A merging of subject and substance, between categories.
