This blog piece follows on from last week's post dated 5th June titled 'Toads On a Tapestry: Libretto for a Magna Carta Cantata'
The characters in Strauss’s Capriccio spend most of the time singing about whether the words they are singing are more important than the music they are singing them to. I think they might be missing the point. If poetry is music for the human voice (someone said that), then poetry plus music is Two Musics, and Two Musics is more than music, and more than poetry, and is, in fact Something Else.
Just what the Something Else is, is a bit of a poser. How can two (to begin with) creative people, a composer and a poet, work to the utmost of their personal creativity together, and without compromise? How can the end product then be performed with a creativity equal to the composer’s and the poet’s, and all three things not get in each other’s way, or be, in any way, diminished; in fact, add each to each, to make, really, Something Else Plus One?
The composer is not merely putting music to words; the poet is not merely writing words to (or for) music; the performers are not merely singing poems or wordifying music. I think the three-headed beast that rears its head in the concert is not a mongrel, but a pedigree, born of (and in) a three-stringed knot of noise.
The most pleasing thing is, that none of the three may hold control of this beast, with their vanity or their efforts. It will always become that Something Else. That it is a lesson in humility and community is a conclusion I came to sitting in the dark listening to my poetry, and David Knotts’ music, being performed as A Work, all together, in St Mary’s, Faversham, on Saturday (6th June).
‘Toads on a Tapestry’ is a cantata for choirs, brass bands, singing soloists, a harpsichord, a harp, children, drums of all sorts, stamping, and a selection of strings, woodwind and percussion, in celebration of Faversham’s copy of the Magna Carta: 800 years. As I listened, the thing was all mine and not at all mine: and what was no longer mine, which was somehow everything, had become my contribution to something for everyone. By being not mine, or the composer’s, or the performers’ entirely, it was given to the people who came to listen. It is a strange experience, and a wholly good one. The huge turnout bore witness to that community spirit: they seemed to know it was for them.
To return to the ego and the ‘painful vigils’, the emotion and the critical eye, is harder now. It might be Wromantic, but somehow now it seems, by comparison, even a little Wrong.
John Gallas was born in 1950 in Wellington, New Zealand. He came to England in 1971 to study Old Icelandic at Oxford, and stayed. He has worked for many years as a teacher with the Leicestershire Behaviour Support Team. He has published ten collections of poetry with Carcanet Press and edited the anthology of world poetry The Song Atlas (2002). Swims like a fish, cycles like a windmill.
www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk
www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk
The Carcanet Blog Sale
With every blogpost we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors.
With every blogpost we offer 25% off a Carcanet title, or titles by a particular author or group of authors.
For the next two weeks, we're giving you 25% off John Gallas' Fresh Air and the Story of Molecule
