Folk Song from the Montayna Province, and An die Musik

 Welcome to the Carrier Bag, a podcast about the life, work, and influence of Ursula K. Le Guin. I'm your host, Stentor Danielson (they/them).

In this episode I'll be talking about Le Guin's first two published works. "Folk Song from the Montayna Province" is a short poem published in the Fall 1959 issue of the Prairie Poet, and "An die Musik" is a short story published in 1961 in the Western Humanities Review. She was not paid for either of them, so they predate her career as a professional writer. They were both republished in the Library of America collection The Complete Orsinia, which is the easiest place to find them today.

Both of these works are set in the first major fictional world that Le Guin created, the central European country of Orsinia. I'll have a lot more to say about Orsinia when we get to the publication of her story collection Orsinian Tales and her novel Malafrena. For now, we can say that Orsinia is a quasi-realist setting. Though the actual country doesn't exist, it's the kind of place that could exist, and its fictional history is directly tied to the real historical events of central and eastern Europe. It's a setting that allows Le Guin to be flexible with details of things like geography and local historical figures, while remaining within the parameters of the "real world." In this way you can compare it to something like Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, Thomas Hardy's Wessex, or H.P. Lovecraft's Arkham.

The "Folk Song" is very short, so I'll read it in full:

The circles widen and widen
Of light from the white sun.
O neither wife nor maiden,
   Why do you go alone?

Farther the hawk and farther
Over the hills in the sun.
I go, neither maid nor mother,
   Alone, alone, alone.

The meter of the poem is just irregular enough that I can't assign a single name to it, but the dominant feel comes from a mix of trochees (BUM bum) and dactyls (BUM bum bum). Thinking of this as a piece of music, the dactyls make me want to set it in a triple meter, like 6/8 time. That turns the trochees into a swing feel, with the stressed syllable taking up two beats and the unstressed one. 6/8 time is common in a number of European folk music styles, such as jigs, polkas, tarantella, barcarolles, loures, as well as classical music that is trying to evoke folk music or a pastoral setting.

[demonstrate]

The protagonist of the poem is a woman, described as "neither wife nor maiden," "neither maid nor mother." I think the initial temptation is to see those expressions and think of the classic triad of female roles, maiden-mother-crone, and infer from that that the protagonist is a crone, or an old woman. But I don't think that's right. For one thing, at the time she wrote this, Le Guin was about 30 years old, and was just a few years into being a wife and mother. So it seems unlikely that she was pondering what it means to be an old woman.

Here's a different approach. Mother and wife are socially prescribed roles. However individuals might feel about them, society does insist on pushing women into them. And so maiden is a role defined by motherhood and wifehood, or specifically the lack thereof, not *yet* a mother or wife, making it likewise a socially defined role. The protagonist of the poem is outside these roles. She's her own thing. She's alone because society hasn't prescribed a role for her. The narrators of the first stanza speak with the voice of society, not knowing where she's going. In response, she simply confirms what they've noted, that she goes alone, making her own path.

The other important thing that I note is that both stanzas use a lot of nature imagery in the first two lines. The protagonist's situation is presented in the context of the spreading sunlight, before we even meet her. And she responds by talking about the hawk flying over the landscape as a guide or model for her own travel outside the bounds of human society.

The nature imagery stands out in the context of the worldbuilding that lies behind it. I will argue, across the course of considering her different Orsinian works, that one of her major concerns was thinking about what it means to belong to a place or a land. So the protagonist is leaving society with no explanation, but she's still accepted by the land. She still belongs in the land even if she doesn't fit either of the categories society has available for her.

Finally, consider that this is written as a folk song. This reincorporates the story back into the society. This isn't a counter-cultural woman's individual self-expression. It's presented as a thing that would be sung over and over by people in community, over the years until its exact author had been forgotten. Le Guin seems to be saying that cultures are aware of their own limits. Cultural products express the tensions that arise within the demands and practices of that culture. A culture that sets certain roles for women can still think about people who go outside those roles. No culture is totalizing. A very appropriate sentiment for the daughter of an anthropologist.

These themes arise again in Le Guin's first published short story, "An die Musik." This story was published in 1961 in the Western Humanities Review, and was also unpaid. Incidentally, the publishing world is different these days, so please don't write or make art or whatever for "exposure" just because Ursula Le Guin started her career that way.

"An die Musik" is the story of Ladislas Gaye, a clerk at a ball bearing factory whose real passion is music. We first meet him as he has an interview with music producer Otto Egorin. Egorin thinks Gaye has a lot of talent, but he is skeptical that he will ever be able to finish his magnum opus, a setting for Mass involving a whole bunch of pieces. Egorin recommends that he either dump his day to day responsibilities, like supporting his wife, children, and bedridden mother, so that he will have more time to work on his music, or give up his ambitions to write a Mass and focus on shorter stand-alone songs. Gaye doesn't like either of those options, and Egorin finds himself wondering whether music is really meaningful given the state of the world. The story is set in 1938 in central Europe, and we readers know very well what will come of the conference between Hitler and Chamberlain that is referenced in the news during the story.

Gaye walks home with his son Vasli, and has to deal with nagging from his wife about his responsibilities at home, including disciplining Vasli for joining some neighborhood boys in torturing a cat. The cat is a minor incident here, but we'll see cats crop up regularly in Le Guin's work. Gaye then heads out to teach an evening piano lesson. On the way, he has a breakthrough about how to arrange a song that had been troubling him, but after teaching his lesson and being shooed out of the conservatory by the janitor, he can't remember it anymore. He struggles for a while to recapture his inspiration, until he finally realizes that the music he was thinking of already exists -- it's the song "An die Musik," written over a century earlier by Franz Schubert, specifically as sung by Lotte Lehmann. This leads to a realization about the role of music in the world. To quote from the story:

"Music will not save us, Otto Egorin had said. Not you, or me, or her, the big golden-voiced woman who had no children and wanted none; not Lehmann who sang the song; not Schubert who had written it and was a hundred years dead. What good is music? None, Gaye thought, and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, 'You are irrelevant'; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, 'Listen.' For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky."

The song "An die Musik" was composed by Franz Schubert in 1817 based on a poem by his friend Franz von Schober. Schubert's own struggling artist biography has certain similarities with Gaye's. He specialized in the kind of songs that Egorin suggested that Gaye work on, and famously left his final symphony incomplete -- now known as the "Unfinished Symphony" -- just as Gaye fears to do with his Mass. Near the end of his life, Schubert asked to hear a performance of Beethoven's String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131 -- about which he remarked "After this, what is left for us to write?" This is a sentiment Gaye seems to share about Schubert's own work. Egorin actually taunts Gaye with the comparison early in the story, saying "Schubert didn't wonder why God had created him. To write music, of course." In the introduction to the Library of America Orsinia collection, Le Guin mentions that she sent a copy of the story to the singer Lotte Lehmann and received a very nice reply which she has unfortunately since lost. But I'm a geographer, not a musicologist, so I'll leave that thread to others to follow up on.

The title of "An die Musik" translates as "To Music," and it is a hymn in praise of music. Le Guin's story of the same name is similarly meta -- a piece of art about the nature of art, about what it means to make art in a world full of problems and practical demands. It would be easy to simply read this story as autobiographical. Here we have a writer struggling to find time to work on her art in between the demands of marriage and motherhood, wondering if she'll ever produce any great works, and so she writes about that experience, ending with a hopeful programmatic statement of her views on art. But there's a lot more going on than just that.

This story has five principal characters: Ladislas Gaye, his son Vasli, his unnamed wife, Otto Egorin, and Egorin's wife Egorina, who is the golden-voiced singer referred to in the quote. We can divide it roughly into two halves, based on whose third-person limited point of view is being used. We begin the story from Egorin's point of view. That means that we initially see Gaye, our protagonist, from the outside. His work and struggles are framed through a voice that represents the wider society's views on art. Either Gaye should become a real artist, dispensing with his mundane responsibilities in order to follow his passion and create something great. Or he should concede to the reality of life and write only what is practical to fit in to his remaining free time. Egorin challenges him to justify the value of music in the troubled world.

In the second half of the story, we are let in to Gaye's point of view, as he wrestles with the questions posed by society through Egorin. We get to see what it's like to be an artist trapped between these competing demands. And we see him come to a place not of defeat nor of triumph, but of acceptance -- music is what it is, not serving anyone, and what matters is that *somebody* wrote "An die Musik," even if it's Franz Schubert, not Ladislas Gaye. This is an ending that foreshadows what draws Le Guin to Taoism, a topic we'll have plenty of opportunity to consider as we go through her works.

Gender matters in this story. The story is told through the points of view of two men, Gaye and Egorin, one of whom is -- insofar as we read the story as autobiographical -- Le Guin's stand-in. Le Guin has said that when she began writing, her models were mostly male authors writing about men, and so she didn't know how to write without using a male point of view. I think this is an oversimplification -- after all, we just saw that her very first published poem is from a woman's viewpoint. But in broad strokes it's true, and "An die Musik" can certainly stand alongside more famous works like The Dispossessed and A Wizard of Earthsea as an illustration of Le Guin's reliance on male narrators in her earlier work.

Both of the major female characters are presented in a negative light, as foils for the male characters' ponderings on music. Let's start with Gaye's wife. She is presented as a nag, giving him a hard time about his responsibilities in the home, frustrating his desire to focus on his music. She is one-dimensional in a way that almost makes me want to try re-writing the story from her point of view, along the lines of Tehanu or Lavinia, just to give her some respect. After all, she's not wrong that he has responsibilities to his family that he shouldn't ignore.

The other major female character is Egorina, Egorin's wife, a talented singer who he acts as a manager for. She is presented as shallow and superficial, and Egorin pats himself on the back for saving her from singing in less classy venues. She is charmed by Vasli, but has no children of her own (which the story presents in a negative light -- she's selfishly focused on her career, as a counterpoint to Gaye's large and demanding family). She excitedly tells Egorin and Gaye that Vasli loves chocolate. On the walk home, Vasli seems put off by the superficiality of her interest in him, asking his father "Do people not like chocolate?"

The asterisk to put by these sexist portrayals of the two female characters is that we're seeing them through the eyes of their husbands. We could read the story as showing us two views of sexism expressed by men. Egorin thinks his wife is a valuable possession for his business, but too flighty to be trusted with her own decisions. Gaye sees his wife as a nag and a drag. That being said, Le Guin was still the one who chose to write a story about two men having sexist thoughts about their wives. Her feminist awakening is still some way off.

It's also worth looking at the geography of this story. It's set in the city of Foranoy, which Le Guin's map of Orsinia shows to be at the opposite end of the country from Montayna Province, in the far east rather than the far west. It's a large enough city to have a music conservatory where Gaye studied, but small enough to frustrate Egorin's ambitions and leave seats unfilled at the concerts he arranges. Egorina is even more disdainful of the city's provincialism.

The city itself is divided by the Ras River into the northern Old City and the southern New City. The Old City is poor and crumbling, while the New City is rich and modern. Our first description of the Old City comes from Egorina, who begs her husband to take her to a bigger and more cosmopolitan city, saying "I can feel myself beginning to look like all those huge empty stone houses across the river, all eyes, staring, staring, staring, like skulls! Why don't they tear them down if nobody lives in them?"

Egorina's assessment of the Old City is of a piece with her overall attitude, which is shallow and irreverent. Old architecture holds no interest for her, looking like empty skulls that should be torn down to make Foranoy more clean and modern and comfortable for her. This matches her shallow attitude toward children that I described before. And it matches another troubling outburst that is the last we hear from her. As Gaye is leaving, he hears Egorina say "Jesus! what do I care what that little Jew says?" It's a gross bit of anti-Christianity by way of antisemitism, condemning Jesus for being Jewish, and spoken on the eve of the Nazi invasions. What it tells us about Egorina is her irreverance and disdain for tradition, just after we heard Gaye spill his heart out about his musical setting for Mass.

We might guess from the contrast in religious sentiment that Gaye and Egorina would differ in their opinions of the Old City. And in fact our first scene in Gaye's point of view finds him pausing on the bridge, suspended in a liminal space between the modern south and his home in the north, basking in the wind and sun over the river as he enjoys the validation that he got from Egorin's compliments. Yet he sadly can't stay on the bridge, and must return to his home, where domestic responsibilities crowd in on him.

Gaye returns to the bridge that night, and has first revelation. Headed south to his lesson in the New City, he realizes how his song should be written. But after the lesson, as he struggles to recall his ideas, the bridge offers him no help. "The wind was strong and cold now, the sky empty, the river black as oil under the arches of the bridge." He returns home to the Old City to puzzle over the composition, and it's there that he realizes he was thinking of Schubert's "An die Musik."

That's all I have to say about these two pieces for now. Doing this episode has been quite a journey for me, as I had read this poem and story before, but never took the time to see how much could be dug out of them. So imagine what we'll see when we get to Le Guin's more mature and acclaimed work. Join me next time as we look at her first professional publication, the short story "April in Paris."