Speech formation

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Speech formation (also: creative speech) was developed jointly by Rudolf Steiner and Marie Steiner and gives decisive impulses for a new artistic and spiritual approach to speech.

The double endangering of the "word" in the consciousness-soul age

„The "word" is exposed to danger in two directions, which can come from the development of the consciousness soul. It serves the purpose of communication in social life, and it serves the purpose of communicating what has been logically and intellectually recognised. On both sides the "word" loses its own validity. It must adapt itself to the "meaning" it is supposed to express. It must make us forget how there is a reality in the tone, in the sound, and in the shaping of the sound itself. The beauty, the radiance of the vowel, the characteristic of the consonant is lost from the language. The vowel becomes soul-less, the consonant spiritless. And so language steps completely out of the sphere from which it originates, out of the sphere of the spiritual. It becomes the servant of intellectual-knowledge, and of spirit-fleeing social life. It is completely torn out of the sphere of art.

True spiritual vision falls instinctively into the "experience of the word". It learns to feel for the soul-borne sounding of the vowel and the spiritually powerful painting of the consonant. It gains an understanding of the secret of the development of language. This secret consists in the fact that divine-spiritual beings were once able to speak to the human soul through the word, whereas now this word serves only for communication in the physical world.

One needs an enthusiasm inflamed by this spiritual insight in order to return the word to its sphere. Marie von Sivers developed this enthusiasm. And so her personality brought to the anthroposophical movement the possibility of cultivating the word and word-forming artistically. In addition to the activity of communicating from the spiritual world, the cultivation of the art of recitation and declamation grew, which now increasingly formed an important part of the events that took place within the anthroposophical work.“ (Lit.:GA 28, p. 438f)

Recitation and declamation

„In the last few decades, this recitation and declamation has increasingly run into a special preference for the shaping of the meaning contained in words. Pointing out the literal content is what has come more and more to the fore. Our time will have little understanding for such a treatment as was characteristic of Goethe, who stood there like a music conductor with a baton and even rehearsed his dramas with his actors for the shaping of language. This shaping of language, this formality that lies behind the literal content, is basically what alone can inspire the real poet as an artist. It must be emphasised again and again that Schiller, when he set about creating any poetry out of an inner urge, first had an indefinite melody, something melodious one might say, as the content of his soul. A musical element floated through his soul, and then came the literal content, which was in a sense only destined to take up what was the main thing for the true poet as an artist: the musical element of the soul. That is what it is all about: on the one hand, this musical element, which, of course, if it remained at that, would be mere music, and that which is the picturesque on the other hand, to which we must return in the declamatory-recitative art. To say something according to its prosaic content is not what poetry is actually for. Poetry as an art is actually there to shape the prosaic content, to transfuse it into beat, rhythm, melodious theme, into that which lies behind the prosaic content. We would probably be less "blessed" with all kinds of poetry if we did not live in the unartistic age of the present, in which neither in painting, for example, nor in sculpture, nor even in poetry and its recitative-declamatory rendition would this actually artistic element be seen.

When one looks at the actual means of expression of poetry, which is then here a means of expression of the recitative-declamatory, one is naturally referred to language. Language carries within it an element of thought and an element of will. The thought element tends towards the prosaic. It becomes the expression of conviction. It becomes the expression of that which conventional coexistence or social coexistence with other people demands. Just as culture progresses, and the expression of conviction, the expression of the conventional-social must penetrate more and more into language in the progress of culture, the more unpoetic, unartistic language becomes. And the poet must first of all struggle with language in order to transform it into an artistic form, into that which is language itself.

Language - I have emphasised this in the course of my anthroposophical writing - has in itself a vocal character which is essentially experienced by the human being through his inner being. That which we experience in the outer world and experience inwardly is expressed in the vocal. That which we, in a certain way, objectively depict of processes, of essential forms of the outer world, is expressed in the consonantal of language. This vocal and consonantal quality of language is naturally present in the most diverse ways in the various languages, and it is precisely in the way in which languages vocalise or consonate that it becomes apparent to what extent they themselves develop more or less artistically as languages. Today, some languages, through the course of their development, gradually acquire an unartistic character, lapse into an unartistic decadence. And when the poet now sets about shaping the language, it is a question for him of repeating this process of language-formation himself on a higher level, of meeting something in the shaping of his verses, in the treatment of rhyme, in the treatment of alliteration - we shall hear about all this in samples and then have to speak about it - which is related to this process of language-formation. The poet is urged by his intuitive-instinctive faculty, where it is a matter of expressing the inner, to resort to vocalisation; one will have an accumulation of vowels. And when the poet has to form the exterior, he will resort to consonantising. There will be an accumulation of one or the other element, depending on whether the inner or the outer is to be expressed. The reciter and declamator must follow this, for in this way he will be able to recreate that rhythm of inwardness and outwardness. It is this shaping of language, the highlighting of that which lies in the artistic treatment of language, that will be most important in the re-shaping of the art of recitation and declamation.“ (Lit.:GA 281, p. 100ff)

Literature
References to the work of Rudolf Steiner follow Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works (CW or GA), Rudolf Steiner Verlag, Dornach/Switzerland, unless otherwise stated.
Email: verlag@steinerverlag.com URL: www.steinerverlag.com.
Index to the Complete Works of Rudolf Steiner - Aelzina Books
A complete list by Volume Number and a full list of known English translations you may also find at Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works
Rudolf Steiner Archive - The largest online collection of Rudolf Steiner's books, lectures and articles in English.
Rudolf Steiner Audio - Recorded and Read by Dale Brunsvold
steinerbooks.org - Anthroposophic Press Inc. (USA)
Rudolf Steiner Handbook - Christian Karl's proven standard work for orientation in Rudolf Steiner's Collected Works for free download as PDF.
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