Interesting note abt the Classical people.
Looking at the scores of, say, Frank Bridge or Stravinski - or even the
wilder shores of avante-garde composers - there's no reason why "classical"
composers could not produce a decent fit for any set of words they wanted
to set to music without, as you say, torturing the syntax.
I wrote my own words this time, and I had to do a little dance fitting the
words to music and vice versa.
Currently I'm adding phrasing, articulation and dynamics. I will produce
the proper article before Christmas.
On Thu, Oct 1, 2015 at 12:09 PM, Andrew Burke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Roger - from my humble experience, I can tell you a tale relating to yr
> question.
>
> Over the years, both jazz composers/singers and classical composers have
> set some of my work to music. The jazz people stuck to the words and the
> structure of the poems, simply hearing the existing rhythms and cadence,
> and adding notes to them. However, the classical people wrote their own
> music and squeezed my lines in to fit, torturing my syntax and making
> little sense of my structure to overlay theirs. Grrrr ... I wasn't happy.
>
> The happiest I've been is for a ballad I wrote as a poem which has been
> sung and recorded by a couple of folksinger/songwriter people. But that was
> an instance where I actually wrote a strict structure, very traditional and
> complete.
>
> If it turns out well and highlights the true values already in the poem,
> nobody should object. But if you wiggle the words around to make it fit,
> then they'd have cause for complaint.
>
> Andrew
>
> On 1 October 2015 at 20:48, Roger Day <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I have de-lurked from my silence in order to ask a question.
> >
> > In my middle-aged madness, I have embarked on a career of composing
> music.
> > For my first piece, I have written some verses and composed some lines -
> > much in the manner of Schubert.
> >
> > I was reading up on Schubert and Goethe, and it appears that the latter
> > deliberately composed poetry to be modified that it could be set to
> music.
> >
> > The question I have is, modulo any copyright concerns, are any modern
> poets
> > out there who would be amenable to such a strategy?
> >
> > How might, say, someone like Prynne react if I did set his poetry to
> music
> > but, along the way, managed to make the poetry serve the music?
> >
> >
> > Is this impossible with modern poets and poetry?
> >
> > Regards Roger
> >
>
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