Dream Theater and T. S, Eliot: An Essay

T. S. Eliot and Dream Theater: Echoing the Eternal Music

"Hm."

That's what my girlfriend thinks of progressive metal.

Dream Theater is a progressive metal band, specializing in abrupt key/tempo changes, a symphonic and sometimes bombastic tendency in their composition, melodic vocals, and individual member virtuosity. The five members of Dream Theater combine their disciplines (guitar, drums, vocals, keyboard, and bass guitar) to create a sometimes frantic, sometimes silky-smooth polyphonic frenzy. On their 2005 album Octavarium, Dream Theater trek farther along on the sonic trail they have blazed for themselves by composing a 24-minute epic of the same name. This piece consists of five movements of individual emotional quality that when presented as whole serve the listener with a five-course dinner of multi-faceted music.

"Was that all one song?"

Dream Theater is not unique in the attitude toward the suite to express a deeper, more elaborate sense of meaning. T. S. Eliot gave his definitive effort with "The Waste Land", also a five-movement piece that uses varied moods and themes to express a large-scale picture. The similarities between the two works do not stop here, however. "Octavarium" and "The Waste Land," on closer inspection, seem to be attempting an expression of similar states of humanity as a whole. Both Dream Theater's "octavarium" motif and T. S. Eliot's "wasteland" are literary devices used to express fatalism in regards to the human condition as it grows steadily toward empty repetition and efficiency through conformity. In this way, T. S. Eliot and Dream Theater similarly entrap their audience in their respective symbols for socialized humanity, the wasteland and the octavarium.

"The Waste Land's" impact when it was published in 1922 was considered phenomenal in part because it was an abstract poem that treated itself like a suite of music (Publishes 1). The work trades the traditional method of using concrete plot and/or themes for an abstract presentation of multiple symbols all working together to make one impression on the reader. As David Perkins, an English and American literature professor at Harvard writes of the "mad medley's" first fans, "admirers were challenged to account for their feeling of coherence in a poem without continuity of setting, style, speaking voice, or plot. The poem, they presently said, was organized like music" (Perkins 76).

The poem utilizes three main themes that reccur throughout the entire work to convey the concept of the wasteland: the theme of the "wasteland" itself (to represent the defeated, conformist state of humanity), the "water theme" (to represent salvation from the wasteland), and the metropolitan theme (to represent the masses who are stuck in the figurative wasteland). Perkins sees a similarity between the presentation of themes in "The Waste Land" and that of a post-Wagnerian suite: "As the themes return in a new context, they bring with them suggestions and associations from former contexts and become progressively denser nodes of connotation and feeling" (77).

Where T.S. Eliot's piece has a music-like effect, Dream Theater's "Octavarium" is, in fact, a piece of music. In the context of music, Dream Theater is allowed to convey themes on two levels: both lyrical themes and melodic motifs. Dream Theater's piece has three main melodic themes that reccur throughout: the main theme (presented early-on and touched back upon at the end), the melancholy theme (played initially by a solitary flute at the beginning of the first movement) and the optimistic theme (played first at the end of the second movement on Rudress' squeaky-clean synthesizer).

"Octavarium" deals with non-conformity to social norms with the lyrical symbol of the octavarium. The octavarium is a word which functions as a Latin neologism: "octave", meaning the concept of a musical octave, and "-arium", used to denote a place where something is held (Octavarium 1). The arrangement of notes on the eight-step musical scale has a bottom note, "1", and a top note, "8". The top "8" can be expressed as the "1" of a higher scale (the distance between 1 and 8 is called an octave), beginning the 8-step scale anew. This symbolic "octavarium" is used to describe the band's experience of being engulfed in their music careers and the human experience in general. Humanity, Dream Theater argues, suffers an inescapable, cyclic fate that has been predetermined for them by their society, just as the band personally feels trapped by their music careers (pressures from fans to produce output that meets their expectations, pressure to maintain an artistic and commerical level of success, etc.) The fate varies from person to person, but its universality does not.

The pieces go through similar cycles of emotion and theme. Both begin their first movements calmly: Dream Theater's introduction consists of a soft, atmospheric synthesizer playing chords beneath a melodic, seemingly wandering lap steel guitar lead, while Eliot's piece begins with sets of chant-like rhyming lines describing a melancholy spring scene. This rhythm, Perkins writes, "Seemed to be continuing in the eighth line with 'Summer surprised us'. But suddenly an altogether different voice was heard, that of Marie" (Perkins, 75-76). The pieces take a darker turn as Dream Theater's synthesizer gets spookier, corresponding with Eliot's turn from rhyme and rhythm into the haunting free-verse style that dominates the piece. The pieces proceed to unveil their main themes. In "Octavarium," it is presented with the main melodic theme, thundered in by the entire band sans vocals. In "The Waste Land," the line "What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?" (33) introduces the desolation theme to the audience.

Octavarium proceeds in its first movement to introduce lyrics about the will to take a non-conformist stance toward social norms. The first words, sung over only a strumming acoustic guitar, emerge: "I never wanted to become someone like him so secure / Content to live each day just like the last." The lyrics first give a narrative of the protagonist's decision to pursue the life that is right for him before they tell of his subsequent desire to be like everyone else: "So suddenly / the only thing / I wanted / To become / To be someone just like him".

Eliot describes a theme of non-conformity by using his "metropolitan" theme to symbolize the will of the masses. In the poem, the narrator observes a huge crowd of people traveling across London Bridge. He then sees someone he recognizes on the bridge and begins to attempt a conversation of odd pleasantries from afar, but to no avail. The narrator ends up cursing his friend and giving up on the discourse at the end of the movement: "Hypocrite reader! –my double! –my brother!" (86).

These words usher the beginning of the second movement. Octavarium kicks in with the whole band in a funky, wandering groove that changes the scene from the protagonist's testimony of his non-conformist tendencies to a scene at a doctor's office. The protagonist asks the doctor to cure him "from a state of catatonic sleep", but in the end, the doctor provides no cure for him, despite his pleas for assistance: "Medicate me […] / can't you stop what's happening?"

Eliot changes his piece into a narrative at this point too, depicting at first a surreal scene with a woman who seems to be the speaker's significant other. She asks the narrator questions he cannot answer, eventually growing frustrated with his silence: "Do / You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember / Nothing?" (37). The scene then changes to an almost comical conversation between two housewives concerning one of the women's husbands returning from the military, and outlining the social expectancies of such a return: "he wants a good time / And if you don't give it him, there's others will" (39). Like Dream Theater's plea to the doctor, Eliot uses these and other situations as commentary on the social expectations people are burdened with.

Both artists go deeper into the heart of their message of entrapment in the third and fourth movements. At the end of Octavarium's second movement, the optimistic synthesizer lead kicks in, and the whole band intensifies as the piece increases tempo. This optimistic segment eventually darkens into the third movement's sinister wave of virtuosic, instrumental fury, which finally reaches a plateau as the vocalist begins the verses of the third movement. These verses are packed with references to Dream Theater's musical influences, which get interrupted by a refrain that narrates the band's entrapment in the octavarium (here, the term expresses the unavoidable influence of other musicians on their personal octavarium, their immersion in their life of music). The sentiment of this movement is culminated in the lines, "scream without a sound […] / stumbling all around / only to find I've come full circle".

The instrumental insanity resumes, as carefully orchestrated musical nonsense leads to the fourth movement, where the dangers of the Octavarium are expressed: "Tortured insanity, a smothering hell / try to escape but to no avail". The threat of entrapment makes itself universal with the lines, "When you finally start living, it becomes too late", and the threat turns into reality with the barked words, "Trapped inside this Octavarium".

Just as Dream Theater intensifies in these third and fourth movements, Eliot begins his third movement, called "The Fire Sermon", in which dark, often revolting images (like "A rat crept […] dragging its slimy belly on the bank") (41) give the reader a similar sense of danger. Although T. S. Eliot's constant literary allusion occurs throughout his piece, its use in this movement bears similarity to the allusory technique used by Dream Theater to describe their "full circle". In Eliot's fourth movement, he makes the threat of the wasteland a reality with his passage on the death of Phlebas, who dies by drowning. Phlebas' death is peculiar because he died at the hand of water, the object of desire of wanderers in the wasteland.

The pieces conclude in their fifth movements. The desert imagery becomes more prevalent in Eliot's narrative of wanderers in the geographical waste land. The narrator remarks, "If there were water we should stop and drink / Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think" and goes on to say of the wasteland, "Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit" (47), relaying that the symbolic desolation stems from the absence of free will. The poem then takes a turn for optimism when a rain begins. This rain proves to be harmful, however, as cities are told to have disintegrated beneath it: "London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down," "the Prince of Aquitaine of the ruined tower" (51, 91). The crumbling of the cities of those who have conformed proclaims the wasteland as the victor in humanity's struggle against it.

Dream Theater's octavarium seems to come out on top at the end of their piece as well. The narrator admits to its triumph in the final movement by stating the phenomena's effects as fact, saying, "We move in circles […] / A perfect sphere, colliding with our fate / the story ends where it began."

The simultaneous defeat of humanity in both pieces at the hands of the octavarium and the wasteland echo each other in one last respect: their endings. After each piece's emotional surrender to the powers that be, they fade into a heartbeat: in "Octavarium," a throbbing, electronic pulse of the ending note fades the piece into silence, and in "The Waste Land," a repeated Sanskrit word ("Shantih", which means "the peace that passeth understanding") gives the poem a fade-out effect.

"Octavarium" and "The Waste Land" utilize impressionistic techniques to solidify abstract concepts in their audience's minds. Although "Octavarium" features very sophisticated composition and theme development, "The Waste Land" may more easily be interpreted as "high art" than the output of a metal band. As a Rhapsody.com music critic states,

"Dream Theater's 2005 release, their tenth full-length since the group formed in the mid-1980s, may boil down to synth-heavy, 12-sided-dice nerd metal, but that's not the worst thing in the world. There's always ritual murder, and you have to listen to something on the way to Laser Tag" (McGuirk 1).

Despite the conflict between progressive rock sympathizers and those with no taste, the pieces, for those who can appreciate both, are like-minded works that function as appeals to resist conformity aimed at the masses that consume them.

Works Cited

Dream Theater. "Octavarium." Octavarium. Atlantic, 2005.

"Eliot Publishes The Waste Land, 1922." DISCovering World History. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Discovering Collection. Gale. Kirksville Sr High School. 14 Feb. 2008 <http://find.galegroup.com/>.

Eliot, T. S. "The Waste Land" and other Poems. Ed. Helen Vendler New York: Penguin, 1998.

McGuirk, Mike. Free Music: Octavarium by Dream Theater. Residence. 23 February 2008 <http://www .rhapsody.com/dreamtheater/octavarium>.

"Octavarium." Wikipedia. 21 February 2008. Residence. 23 February 2008. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Octavarium>

Perkins, David. "T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land: The Chief Example of Modernist Poetry." American Modernism. Ed. Scott Barbour. San Diego: Greenhaven, 2000. 72-81.