AS I MENTIONED, I am going to adapt a few of the poems from Chamber Music into songs. I'm not trying for any great art here, or to sound like anything specific, and I am not going to be doing these with any brilliant compositional techniques in mind. Instead, the whole point is to engage Joyce's text in a participatory way. I have found, in my years of doing theater, that you don't really understand a play until you have performed it; there is something about inhabiting a text for a period of time, in a really active way, that uncovers the structure of the script, and some of its nuances, in a way that simply reading the play or seeing it performed doesn't offer.
Perhaps something similar is true of poetry, and, anyway, I like to write little songs, and Joyce imagined these poems as songs, so why not? I don't know how many of these poems I'll adapt. A few, maybe more.
None of Joyce's poems in Chamber Music have names, just numbers. This one is V, and I have adapted it into a round. Here are the words:
Lean out of the window,
Goldenhair,
I hear you singing
A merry air.
My book was closed,
I read no more,
Watching the fire dance
On the floor.
I have left my book,
I have left my room,
For I heard you singing
Through the gloom.
Singing and singing
A merry air,
Lean out of the window,
Goldenhair.
LISTEN TO "V":
DOWNLOAD "V."
More Plastic Paddy
Perhaps something similar is true of poetry, and, anyway, I like to write little songs, and Joyce imagined these poems as songs, so why not? I don't know how many of these poems I'll adapt. A few, maybe more.
None of Joyce's poems in Chamber Music have names, just numbers. This one is V, and I have adapted it into a round. Here are the words:
Lean out of the window,
Goldenhair,
I hear you singing
A merry air.
My book was closed,
I read no more,
Watching the fire dance
On the floor.
I have left my book,
I have left my room,
For I heard you singing
Through the gloom.
Singing and singing
A merry air,
Lean out of the window,
Goldenhair.
LISTEN TO "V":
DOWNLOAD "V."
More Plastic Paddy
0 Response to "PLASTIC PADDY: THE IRISH AMERICAN PROJECT | CHAMBER MUSIC: V"