Beckett biographer James Knowlson recalls how he visited the ailing playwright in Paris. The hospital Beckett had been attending had given him a course of injections for vitamin deficiency. Strictly no alcohol was permitted during Beckett's course of treatment. Knowlson, knowing Beckett's great love for whiskey, remarked "that must be a bit of a bitch, Sam".
There followed (irony intended) a Pinteresque pause. Beckett eventually replied "No Jim. It's not a bit of a bitch. It is a bugger of a bastard of a bitch".
It is a bugger of a bastard of a bitch that of the several works of music inspired by the works of Beckett, the vast majority of them are contemporary classical. Nothing wrong with contemporary classical per se (well, not much anyway) but you do feel that this really is a lost opportunity for the more imaginative end of the post-rock brigade. You can only wonder what Tortoise or Sigur Rós or any amount of Krautrockers could do with Beckett's work.
Within the contemporary classical genre, your main Beckett man would be Morton Feldman. The American composer's experiments with the use of chance in his compositions greatly inspired John Cage (he of 4 minutes, 33 seconds fame) who in turn is a fundamental building block for the post-rock genre.
Feldman is interesting in that, before he delved into the works of Beckett, he had written a number of pieces inspired by Mark Rothko - most notably Rothko Chapel. Feldman met Beckett in Berlin in 1976 and they went on to collaborate together on a number of projects. The best known of these is the opera Neither with words by Beckett.
This really was an inter-disciplinary meeting of minds. All you have to consider is that Feldman was frequently deemed controversial and revolutionary and was obsessed with the movements of blocks of sound through musical space to understand why he got on so famously with Beckett.
Feldman dispenses with the need for melody and harmony - as they are traditionally understood - and he wasn't one for worrying about the length of a composition. Some of his works last for over six hours. It was good to see the National Concert Hall put on Feldman's String Quartet No. 2 last week as part of the Beckett celebrations. And anyone from a popular music background who went to the five-hour plus performance would be have been pleasantly surprised by the mere €5 admission charge. Mindful of the nature and length of the music, the NCH encouraged audience members to enter and leave the performance at their own discretion - something which popular music promoters could learn from when they put on some over-priced unlistenable rubbish in their venues.
Feldman apart, even a cursory glance reveals much music out there which has been directly inspired by Beckett's works. There's Gyula Csapo's self-explanatory Krapp's Last Tape; John J.H. Phillips's The Thing One Has To Listen To, which is an electroacoustical piece based on The Unnameable; Antonio Giacometti's musical reworkings of Happy Days and Watt. All of these, though, are within the same, often difficult, genre.
Such is the oft-neglected influence of Beckett on modern music that Philip Glass has often remarked that minimalism was born when he began writing music to accompany the texts of Samuel Beckett in Paris in the early 1960s.
"When I started working with Beckett's plays," Glass has said, "the language of music I had wasn't appropriate to his plays. The very first of the minimalist pieces, as people call them, were written to go with Beckett. I did about 10 scores - Endgame, Company, Mercier and Camier, The Lost Ones and some adaptations of little novels. We were friends of his and he would give us permission to do these pieces. He didn't like music in his plays, but he allowed it in my case. I developed a very pristine, reductive language that worked beautifully with his pieces. And that became the language that I began to use for my own ensemble."
The man who didn't like music in his plays still managed to help change the course of modern music.
