ABSTRACT
Sensitivity to music registers as an ordinary part of William Carlos Williams’s awareness, and such is also true in his letters, which indicate that listening to and discussing music, live or recorded, was a regular activity for him. Williams’s poems also treat serious interest in a range of music—from the “old-fashioned” to the modern and atonal—as a normal and vital part of twentieth-century life even for those who are not active musicians. In a 2003 interview, Glasgow poet Tom Leonard refers to a “fence” between “[T.S.] Eliot, and all the other elitists hiding behind notions of decaying European culture,” and Williams, whom Leonard identifies with an outward-looking, anti-elitist modernism that he cites as enduringly valuable and influential. The main source poem for the lines Reich sets is, in fact, “The Orchestra,” included in Williams’s 1954 collection The Desert Music, rather than the 1951 poem that lends its title to Williams’s volume.
