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On Oct 26, 2016, at 7:13 AM, Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:Since Jonson's come up, might as well throw a couple of settings of his poems into the mix. "Have you seen but a white lily..." is from one of the poems in the Ode to Charis, set by Johnson. "To Celia" ("Drink to me only with thine eyes") is anonymous. There are dozens of recordings of each on youtube.-----Original Message-----
From: Judy Prince <[log in to unmask] class="">
Sent: Oct 26, 2016 4:42 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Donne's Taxonomy and Wyatt's Lute.Thanks, Jaime,Good to hear/see this linked combo of music and poetry.Bear with me, my inner editor resists her work this morning.The intro music, a limited-range frenetic staccato, followed by the simple legato that accompanies the sung words, met my previous critical criterion that ANY music accompanying poetry will need to be simple or the result will be laughable. Since the entire piece given here went super-simple, it could not in the first instance provide glorious music, and in the second place, it could not let the poem be its whole beautiful eventful intricate self. Since music can't 'match' the many different poetic structures, it introduces or interrupts with its own 'feeling' and structures. Sadly, in this instance, the music at no point reached depth, the sung words, therefore, buried my dear poets' words which on the page or spoken can so profoundly touch the reader/hearer. Even more sadly, the melodramatic actions (stage 'business') of baritone Finley, trying to fill the cracks of lacking music and distorted-from-poetic-structures'-words -- of course failed.<[log in to unmask]>On 25 October 2016 at 23:06, Jaime Robles <[log in to unmask]> wrote:As an FYI, the Donne aria was just an event I thought people might find interesting, like the Campion song. I wasn’t trying to prove some imagined point. I enjoy Donne and find him both musical and lyrical, in spirit if not sonically.
Best wishes,Jaime______________________________QS: Let’s return to poetics.JR: When did we leave?—From the conversation between Quinta Slef and Joan Retallack, The Poethical WagerOn Oct 25, 2016, at 2:42 PM, David Bircumshaw <000005b0d06ee449-dmarc-[log in to unmask] > wrote:While Lady Mary Sidney's or Emilia Lanier's 'The Tempest' was possibly the world's first musical , in collaboration with the composer Robert Johnson (NB not Bind Willie McTell) and four of its song settings do survive.From the sidelines here, and without pretense to scholarship, my understanding is that Donne's 'Hymn to God the Father' was the one poem of his set to music at his request and that it was very much a congregational song.George Herbert was reputedly as able a composer (a lutenist) as he was a poet and the destruction of his scores in the Civil War may have been one of the greatest cultural losses of that time.
Pelham Humfrey made a setting of it (which I love) in 1688 but I'm not sure if it bore much resemblance to the Dean of St Paul's anthem.On 25 October 2016 at 21:59, Jaime Robles <[log in to unmask]> wrote:And here is John Adams’ setting of John Donne’s Batter My Heart, Three Person’d God: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlUHKHLk_VU This at the end of the first act of the opera Dr Atomic, baritone Gerald Finley portrays Oppenheimer on the eve before the definitive test of the bomb.
Best wishes,Jaime______________________________QS: Let’s return to poetics.JR: When did we leave?—From the conversation between Quinta Slef and Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wagerhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d7mT0sk2DE
Youtube of a John Cooper setting of Campion. (performed in the bathroom!)
If anyone finds a recording of John Cooper's The Message, do share it!
--David Joseph BircumshawThe Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
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