Footnote stuff that you probably know about--
In Fellowes' English Madrigal Verse there are two Donne settings (lute
songs, not madrigals)--
So, so, leave off... by Alfonso Ferrabosco (Jr) 1609.
'Tis true, 'tis day... by William Corkine, 1612.
These both have variants from the printed texts.
There's a CD by Paul Hillier with seven 17th Century Donne songs
including the above two, the other five by Henry Lawes (text no longer
attrib. Donne), John Wilson and John Hilton, thus later C17 and two
anonymous. Unfortunately I don't possess the notes to this CD, having
somehow acquired an illegal copy. There's a similar CD by Paul Agnew.
What's also apparent from Fellowes is that musicians felt free to
adapt, re-write, shorten or simplify poems for use as songs. E.g. "To
ask for all thy love..." by John Dowland, which is not by Donne but is
"in imitation of" Lovers Infinitenesse, recast with much shorter
lines and closer "jingling" rhymes. A kind of formal dumbing-down.
The point, then, (Tim) about the kind of music is that I don't see how
we can deny Jamie's point that the spoken/read poem offers much
greater opportunities for subtle emphases and re-emphases, delicate
sub-textual phasing, disturbances such as enjambement etc. A song
setting of the same poem cannot possibly retrieve all this, it is too
fixed to the temporal dictates of the tune. AS LONG AS the style of
the song is that "lyrical" patterning of repetition and measure,
especially when it is strophic and the same patterns must be enforced
in each verse. I.e., what we think of as normal songs. This
reinforces Denise Riley's distrust of lyric as compared with poetry as
a simplifying and (by melodic felicity) alluring thing.
But not all music or word-setting is like that. E.g there are
Britten's settings of Donne's Holy Sonnets (and of Rimbaud) which
though they must remain each a single, personal or particular reading
of the poem, do not enforce a stylistic diminution.
From what I can remember of Dylan's lyrics or "poems", they're kind
of slogan-based.
Just mopping up
PR
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