it has at least held its own in the strange mimetic competition with
Words, the action of the play lacks dramatic tension. Beckett once
reportedly said to Theodor Adorno that Words and Music “ends un-
equivocally with the victory of the music.” Yet far from proving the
superiority of music as pure sound, liberated from rational ideas and
references, the play con¤nes it to a function very similar to that of a
¤lmic signature score. (“Mediated Quixote” 132)Here Kalb is making some curious assumptions. First, the reference to the
various composers not being “up to the task” implies that the work is really
Beckett’s and that the composer, whoever he or she may be, is merely an ac-
companist.^22 Thus Kalb does not discriminate between John Beckett, a rela-
tive who had done a little composing; Humphrey Searle, a fairly obscure
Romantic serialist who had once studied with Anton Webern; and Morton
Feldman, one of the great avant-garde composers of the century.
For Kalb, Words and Music is, in any case, a “play,” whose “dialogue is
missing half its lines—lines that, the play implies, should match, sentence
for sentence, in musical terms, the speci¤city and subtlety of Beckett’s lan-
guage.” But Beckett said nothing at all about such a “match” or about the
“mimetic competition with Words” that music ostensibly “loses.” In tak-
ing Feldman’s composition to resemble ¤lmic background music, Kalb, like
Worth and other commentators, is assuming that the radio play is a vehicle
for a particular theme—the familiar Beckett theme of the missed opportu-
nity to have loved and been loved (see, for example, Krapp’s Last Tape). But
the fact is that in Words and Music frustrated love becomes, in its turn, the
occasion for an analysis of the relative power of words and music to pro-
duce an emotional charge. And here radio has its ¤eld of action. In Gregory
Whitehead’s words:
If the dreamland/ghostland is the natural habitat for the wireless
imagination, then the material of radio art is not just sound. Radio
happens in sound, but sound is not really what matters about radio.
What does matter is the bisected heart of the in¤nite dreamland/
ghostland.... the radio signal as intimate but untouchable, sensually
charged but technically remote, reaching deep inside but from way out
there.^23Radio sounds are intimate, but from where do they emanate, and to whom
do they belong? When the sound source is thus uncertain, spoken word and
musical sound can achieve a heightened interaction.
Acoustic Art in Beckett’s Radio Plays 121