Can One Read "A"-24?

 "A"-24 is the final section of Louis Zukofsky's magnificent (say I) and lengthy poem "A". It is much the longest section--240 pages in the edition I have, published by the University of California Press in 1978. What prompts the question of whether one can read it is not its length, however, but its form. It's a score for a musical piece, composed by his wife Celia, with five elements. 

One element, taken from various pieces G. F. Handel wrote for harpsichord,  is rendered in actual musical notation. The other four are excerpts from Zukofsky's writing, arranged in lines under the Handel harpsichord score and to be spoken in cadence with the Handel pieces. One line uses excerpts from Zukofsky's critical essays, a second draws on his play Arise, Arise, a third has passages from his fiction, and the fourth and final part is from "A" itself.

So "A"-24 could be read as one reads a score--only a score is not the music, exactly, but instructions for a performance. When musicians with the necessary competencies and the required instruments read the score and play it, that performance is what registers upon us as "music." So running one's eyes over the pages of "A"-24 does not seem to place the reader in the presence of "A"-24, if you see what I mean. 

I did read it, in a way, adopting the strategy of reading the critical essay line right through from beginning to end, then the play lines the same way, and so on with the other two...but I  lost the effect of simultaneity, of course, which seems to be a key condition of the form: that you are getting four sides of Zukofsky at once. In short, you cannot read "A"-24 and feel like you have, indeed, read it because you have to hear it.

But how in the world are you going to hear it? Rarely as Pericles, Zukofsky's favorite Shakesperean play, is performed, you may actually come across a performance during your lifetime, but what are the odds your local community theater will present "A"-24? According to Z-Site: A Companion to the Works of Louis Zukofsky (https://z-site.net/notes-to-a/a-24/), it "has been performed a number of times," but the most recent occasion they record was in 2009. 

PennSound has two recordings from 1978, featuring Steve Benson, Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Kit Robinson, and Barrett Watten, with Bob Perelman on piano, and one can only be grateful they exist, but they are not of particularly high fidelity. Something captured with really good microphones and nice stereo separation would be helpful, so that you could follow (if you wanted) one of the lines the way one can follow (for example) the viola when hearing a string quartet. The 1978 recordings provide an often-pleasing and not unmusical babble, but one wishes for more definition in the sound.

I tried some home experiments, using an mp3 of the "Passecaille" from Handel's Harpichord Suite No. 7, but I can't say the results were what I hoped. Matching up the parts to the music was difficult because different performers take different approaches to playing Handel's repeats, so getting a performance that lined up exactly with Celia Zukofsky's score was a bridge too far.

A carefully recorded performance would certainly be a gift to Zukofsky-philes everywhere, and there must be at least a few thousand of us.