That would be the Bonobo pc I imagine. Probably true, Peter, what you say about specific instances. The Serrat /Machado examples were one. Another example I gave was Kavanagh's 'Raglan Road' sung by Van Morrison. Slightly working against my arguments as I like both very much, and think that the poetry is of primary importance to both vocal artists. But even with better examples, and careful commentary, I haven't great faith the discussion will develop much further.
On the classical/popular divide there may be a further distinction but I was thinking of both at once and that their relation to the original poem is not radically different.
Jamie
> On 25 Oct 2016, at 18:22, Peter Riley <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
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> I know there are a number of questions I haven't answered,I,m sorry. I might fish some of them from the upper reaches of my inbox if they,re still there. But I have an awful lot to do at present and a word processor behaving like a demented ape (the small ones with long tails that swing through the tree canopy at great speed and you never know where they'll end up).
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> I shan't join in this revival but I'll say that I doubt if it will get anywhere without some specific examples which everyone knows or can get at. Somebody needs to say "Here's this poem written or spoken and now here is the same poem made into a song. The aesthetic (or semantic?) difference is... and then here's this song which has always been a song and here's its text without the singing... and so on.
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> I don't think Jamie and David are talking about the same kind of song or poetry or music, but I don't know what kinds they are talking about, except I think Jamie means written music which "sets" a pre-existing poem, broadly "classical". David may be talking about singer-songwriter stuff -- I don't know but I don't think his idea of song includes Schönberg. I think my notion of song is broad, and global, but it doesn't include Bob Dylan, who I probably last listened to about 45 years ago.
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> PR
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