piano notes trailing off and Words concluding with a short satis¤ed sigh.
The rest is silence—a silence that makes the very idea of competition be-
tween Words and Music seem foolish. And this, I think, is the thrust of the
Beckett-Feldman collaboration.
It may be argued, of course—and here Kalb has a point—that the depen-
dence on collaboration makes Words and Music a less important work than,
say, Embers, that Beckett is at his best when he lets his own words do all the
work, creating the semantic resonances and ambiguities we have in the com-
plex monologue of a Henry or a Krapp. But if we think of Words and Music
as an experiment, a move, contrary to Beckett’s own purist instincts with
regard to media, to create a new kind of Hörspiel—a Hörspiel that anticipates
such later works as the John Cage Roaratorio—then we need not choose be-
tween Words and Music and Embers—both of them such superb examples of
what Beckett’s ¤rst master, James Joyce, called “soundsense.”
128 Chapter 6