1 Samuel Beckett, Words and Music, Play, Eh Joe / Paroles et musique, Comédie, Dis Joe, introduction by Jean-Jacques Mayoux, French version by Samuel Beckett, Paris, Aubier-Flammarion, 1972, p. 176. All references to this book are taken from this edition.

2 John Minihan, Samuel Beckett: Photographs, London, Secker & Warburg, 1995.

3 Mary Bryden, “Beckett and the Sound of Silence”, in Samuel Beckett and Music, Mary Bryden (ed.), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 37.

4 In a study entitled “Proust and Schopenhauer: Music and Shadows”, in Samuel Beckett and Music, John Pilling appraises Beckett’s treatment of the philosopher’s conception of music in the last pages of Proust: “Much of Proust borrows from Schopenhauer, whether tacitly or by acknowledgment, and expresses the philosophy of The World as Will with little or no distortion. But this is not the case in the coda, and it remains a moot point whether Beckett was simply working from a fallible memory, or whether his own developing creative vision […] was beginning to generate its own refractory music” (p. 177-178).

5 Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit [1931], London, Calder and Boyars, 1970, p. 91.

6 Pochades Radiophoniques / Rough for Radio II was written in 1961, published in 1975, and translated and broadcast in 1976.

7 See Katharine Worth, “Words for Music Perhaps”, in Samuel Beckett and Music, p. 12.

8 See Everett C. Frost, “The Note Man and the Word Man”, in Samuel Beckett and Music, p. 47: “In the 1980s, Soundscape, Inc. began, and Voices International, with myself as Project Director, completed a project to create the first American productions intended for national broadcast of all of Samuel Beckett’s radio plays. The Beckett Festival of Radio Plays, with productions of all five of Beckett’s radio plays, was not completed and broadcast until the spring of 1989”.

9 Ibid.

10 “Morton Feldman’s Words and Music”, http://www.themodernword.com/beckett/beckett_feldman_wam.html.

11 Vivian Mercier, Beckett / Beckett, London, Souvenir Press, 1990, p. 155.

12 Eugene Webb, The Plays of Samuel Beckett, London, Peter Owen, 1972, p. 102.

13 Clas Zilliacus, Beckett and Broadcasting: A Study of the Works of Samuel Beckett for and in Radio and Television, Åbo, Åbo Akademi, 1976, p. 105-106.

14 John Fletcher, Samuel Beckett’s Art, London, Chatto & Windus, 1967, p. 76.

15 Jean-Jacques Mayoux, introduction to Samuel Beckett, Words and Music… (our translation), p. 109: “drame dans une tête […], extraordinaire dialogue entre ce qui constitue peut-être deux principes de notre nature”.

16 Ibid., p. 106-107: “Les trois personnages me paraissent représenter un moi éclaté où Croak, dominant […] représenterait le principe de personnalité […]. Croak cherche instinctivement à rassembler son moi déchiré, à ramener ensemble et vers lui ceux qu’il appelle ‘Mes réconforts’”.

17 Catherine Laws, “Music in Words and Music: Feldman’s Response to Beckett’s Play”, Samuel Beckett Today / Aujourd’hui, vol. 11, 2001, Samuel Beckett: Endlessness in the Year 2000 / Fin sans fin en l’an 2000, Angela B. Moorjani, Carola Veit (eds.), p. 279.

18 Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with George Duthuit, p. 103.

19 Catherine Laws, “Music in Words and Music…”, p. 279-280. Catherine Laws however contests the Schopenhauerian interpretation of Music in the play: “Beckett was himself a musician […] interested in the minutiae of note patterns, melodies and harmonies. For someone like this, music is not simply ‘Music’, an indivisible higher idea, but rather a huge muddle of musics […] It is a world in which meaning is still endlessly contested, differentiated and constantly changing, not a world of absolute transcendence, immutable and essential. This dissatisfaction with the simple reading of Music in Schopenhauerian terms is also supported by Beckett’s complex treatment of music, language and meaning in other works from Dream of Fair to Middling Women onwards” (ibid., p. 280).

20 The first of the two poems was published as “Song” in the Collected Poems of 1984.

21 Stefan-Brook Grant, Samuel Beckett’s Radio Plays: Music of the Absurd, Chapter IV, http://samuel-beckett.net/ch4.html.

22 Reporting a 1973 conversation with Samuel Beckett, Charles Juliet recalls: “Il me répète que l’ouïe prend de plus en plus d’importance par rapport à l’œil” (Rencontre avec Samuel Beckett, Paris, Fata Morgana, 1986; quoted by Katharine Worth, “Words for Music Perhaps”, p. 25: “He told me again and again that hearing was taking the upper hand on seeing” (our translation)).

23 Jean-Jacques Mayoux, introduction to Samuel Beckett, Words and Music…, p. 99: “Quand en 1956 la BBC demanda à Beckett une pièce pour la radio […] son esprit intensément technicien se voyait offrir les possibilités d’une technique nouvelle; fût-il assorti de mots usés, voilà que se présentait un nouveau langage plein de possibilités: le langage des sons et des bruits”.

24 Israel Shenker’s interview with Beckett, in Samuel Beckett: The Critical Heritage, Lawrence Graver, Raymond Federman (eds.), London – Boston, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979, p. 148; quoted by Catherine Laws, “Morton Feldman’s Neither: A Musical Translation of Beckett’s Text”, in Samuel Beckett and Music, p. 68.

25 Harry White, “‘Something is Taking its Course’; Dramatic Exactitude and the Paradigm of Serialism in Samuel Beckett”, in Samuel Beckett and Music, p. 165.

26 Edith Fournier, “Marcel Mihalovici and Samuel Beckett: Musicians of Return”, in Samuel Beckett and Music, p. 133.

27 Catherine Laws, “Music in Words and Music…”, p. 280.

28 Mary Bryden, “Beckett and the Sound of Silence”, p. 32.

29 Stefan-Brook Grant, Samuel Beckett’s Radio Plays…, Chapter IV, http://samuel-beckett.net/ch4.html.

30 Vivian Mercier, Beckett / Beckett, p. 158.

31 The play was recorded in March 1987 in the studios of RCA in New York, with David Warrilow, as Words and Alvin Epstein as Croak. Nils Vigeland directed the musicians from his Bowery Ensemble: the score was composed for a piano, a vibraphone, percussion, two flutes, two violins and a cello. The rehearsal, recording and mixdown were supervised by Morton Feldman himself. For years, only the 1994 production of Words and Music was available on Auvidis Montaigne, with the Ensemble Recherche performing Music, and Omar Ebrahim and Stephen Lind as Croak and Words. Recently, Evergreen Review has released the original 1987 production (Pacifica Radio Archive – Voices International, 1988).

32 Hans-Peter Jahn describes the effect of Morton Feldman’s music in the following way: “A light-flooded glitter of sound… […] everything in motion without ever freezing despite the constantly repetitive variation patterns… permanent, unobtrusive change according to illogical, even irrational decisions… a steady flow whose random waves release glittering, shimmering, glowing reflections that rise from deep bottom… perhaps like the surface of a body of water offering no resistance to its natural breathing? […] Feldman’s music demands a concentration born of listening. A kind of free fall into the primordial districts of mental activity as distinct from intellectual presence or rational understanding of the musical events set in the river of time” (“Isn’t Morton Beckett… Samuel Feldman…?”, http://www.cnvill.net/mfjahn.htm).

33 Samuel Beckett and Morton Feldman met in Berlin in 1976. Feldman had been commissioned a work for the Rome Opera. Beckett told him that he did not like opera, and neither did Feldman. Their collaboration on Neither started from that agreement.

34 Catherine Laws, “Music in Words and Music…”, p. 281.

35 Everett C. Frost, “The Note Man and the Word Man”, p. 48.

36 Ibid., p. 47.

37 Ibid., p. 52.

38 Catherine Laws, “Music in Words and Music…”, p. 281.

39 Iannis Xenakis, Formalized Music; Thought and Mathematics in Composition, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1971.

40 A flute, or indeed any instrument, sounds differently in low, medium, or high register: the distribution of overtones changes with the pitch height.

41 In “The Note Man and the Word Man”, p. 55, Morton Feldman explains to Everett C. Frost that “the tune, so to speak, goes through different metamorphoses all the time. And what happens at the end is I just burst out with a little more sensual harmony, nothing to interrupt the flute line, and then the modulation takes it away from just the repeating of the thing in different ways over and over again. It gives you a new – it adds to the leap. The emotional leap – the modulation, which you’re going to hear. I modulate three times in just a minute, which is unheard of. It sounds great so you take it for granted, but you don’t know the difficulty, technically, how to do it. It’s very, very difficult”.

42 Ibid., p. 51.

43 Catherine Laws, “Morton Feldman’s Neither…”, p. 82. The quotation is from Morton Feldman, “The Anxiety of Art”, in Give My Regards to Eighth Street: Collected Writings of Morton Feldman, B. H. Friedman (ed.), Cambridge, Exact Change, 2000, p. 32.

44 Samuel Beckett, quoted by Katharine Worth, “Words for Music Perhaps”, p. 16.

45 Everett C. Frost, “The Note Man and the Word Man”, p. 52.