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Poetry and Operatic voice
A Rhapsodist revival
Musical voice/Vocal music: this is the topic Juliana Snapper and poet Tony Howson set out to explore in a discussion recorded to mark the release of Howson’s poetry collection, Love, Hate and Fragility (Dionysus Press, 2026).
Both artists reflect on how voice and performance can transform meaning. The conversation moves from the language of a poem on paper to its emotional resonance when voiced, culminating in a striking live interpretation of “The Weeping Working Man” from Tony Howson’s latest poetry collection.
Historically, poetry and music seem to have emerged hand in hand. Poetry was first recited orally and thus passed down through tradition long before it was written down. And the same was true of music. This original connection, predating writing, is the ancient evidence of the Rhapsodist — or more generally and previously, of the Aoidos : poetry is song. When written poetry became dominant, this connection did not weaken: to this day, many poems have been set to music, and much music has drawn inspiration from poems.
But the apparent connection between poetry and music has been taken for granted rather than questioned. In particular, the musicality of speech has been accepted without much scrutiny, while the highly debatable notion that music is a language — just as a written language is — has been widely accepted.
Vocal music — and especially the use of the voice in opera — has been excessively conceived and executed as a form of written composition, even though the musical voice immediately engages the performers’ bodies and is fundamentally the dual physical reality of their voices in action and the ears that echo them.
Since, in the realm of living language — that is, speech itself —, no signified entity can be reduced to its written signifier, it is important to rethink the original connection between poetic voice and vocal music.
After Juliana Snapper sets out to explore this topic with poet Tony Howson, she elaborates an operatic interpretation of one of his poem, being joined by recording engineer Pieter Snapper (piano) and Esra Kınıklı Snapper (percussion).