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The Moaning Piano: The Sound of Piano in The Weary Blues

Xinyu Liu

Abstract


The Weary Blues is a representative poem from Langston Hughes collection of poems of the same nameThe Weary Blues
published in 1926. In The Weary Blues, except from the narrator and the performer who is singing, the piano which could not speak by
itself, was given a feeling and became to the third voice in this poem. But the moaning piano undergoes a process of being narrated, so that
the text of the piano does not dissipate until the end of the performance. The moaning piano, as an emotional externalization of the narrator
and the singer, is a catharsis for the existential plight of the black community. Starting from the narrated process of the performance in The
Weary Blues, this essay represents how the textual piano sound is retained and transcends the limitations of time, and allowing the reader to
perceive this unheard sound.

Keywords


The piano sound; Narration; The Reader

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References


[1] Bernstein, Charles, ed. Close listening: Poetry and the performed word. Oxford University Press, 1998.

[2] Cheryl A. Wall. A Note on The Weary Blues. Lenox Avenue: A Journal of Interarts Inquiry 3 (1997): ii-vi.

[3] Huang, Hao. Enter the Blues: Jazz Poems by Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown. Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) (2011): 9-44.

[4] Hughes, Langston. The weary blues. Knopf, 2015.

[5] . The Big Sea: An autobiography. 1940.New York: Hill and Wang, 1993.Print.

[6] . Jazz: Its Yesterday, Today, and Its Potential Tomorrow Christopher C. De Santis, ed. Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender. Essays on Race, Politics and Culture, 1942-62. Chicago: 1995. 212-13. Print.

[7] Tracy, Steven C. To the Tune of Those Weary Blues: The Influence of the Blues Tradition in Langston Hughess Blues Poems. Melus 8.3

(1981): 73-98.

[8] Miller, R. Baxter. The Art and Language of Langston Hughes. Lexington, KY: U of Kentucky P, 1989. Print.

[9] See, Sam. Spectacles in Color: The Primitive Drag of Langston Hughes. PMLA 124.3 (2009): 798-816.

[10] Wolf, Werner. The musicalization of fiction: A study in the theory and history of intermediality. Vol. 35. Rodopi, 1999.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.70711/rcha.v2i9.5597

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