Gertrude Stein Aloud

Welcome to Gertrude Stein Aloud, a website of audio recordings of four prose pieces by the Modernist American writer, Gertrude Stein. I am a performer who has been reading Gertrude Stein’s writings aloud for many years, and exploring the performative nature of her prose writing. Her extraordinary explorations with language are a challenge to an actor, such as myself, who was trained to interpret literary images so that an audience will discover meaning. But with Stein, meaning often comes from the visceral and aural experience of the spoken word. These audio performances have been informed by research into Stein’s life and analyses of her writings. Beyond that, I abandoned myself to the pleasure of the musicality in Stein’s rhythms, her repetitions of consonants and vowels, the dramatic weight of her monosyllabic sentences, and the humor of her word play and her non-sequiturs.

The short novel, IDA, contains the most narrative of the four pieces, relating the story of a continually abandoned young girl who creates a twin and a new identity. The story is told through the voice of a narrator, thus lending the writing to what initially became a performed narration for stage. There is also a story told in a much earlier work, the word portrait, Miss Furr and Miss Skeene, but that piece delves more deeply into rhythm with word and sonic repetitions as a means of furthering the narrative. I approached these texts as musical compositions, examining rhythmic changes, noting consonant repetitions that affect tempo, and exploring the echoing of vowels that inform inflection, pitch, and subtle emotional shifts. The composer, Linda Dusman, collaborated with me on these two pieces, composing sonic and music scores as a way of supporting the readings and further exploring the inherent musicality in the writing.

The two word portraits, Matisse and Picasso, are without narrative, and are read unaccompanied so that the density of the repetitive imagery moves along revealing not only character elements of these painters, but Stein’s feelings toward each of them.

For scholars of Stein and Modernism, I offer these recordings as another form in which to consider her prose and for use with students who may struggle to read her writings. I wish to bring pleasure to current readers of Stein and to entice others to begin reading her works.

Wendy Salkind
January 2011