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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