Skip to main content

Lyric Poetry in Music

One of our research imperatives is to compose music pieces that express the 5 features of lyric poetry that we’ve selected to work on.

When Slow Bear describes hearing music in my poems, he is talking about my tonal inclinations and the sense of rhythm when I am delivering the texts. When he adapts a piece of my poetry into a musical composition, what happens is that he composes melodies based on the imagery that the text instills in them and also my audio recording of the text, which makes this an expression of his own and not a literal translation.

What links music and poetry is an under-sound or an under-song. In every poet’s voice there is a register to which it’s tuned. That’s about the real equivalent, a sense of everything tuned to a certain musical register. According to Liam O’Flynn, an Irish uilleann piper who collaborated a lot with the poet Seamus Heaney, “if you take Shakespeare’s sonnets they are pitched at a certain level. If you take Milton he’s pitched at another level. Milton is an organ. Emily Dickinson is a violin. Yeats is trumpets I suppose!”.

At the heart of our collaboration is the notion that poetry and music are two methods of expression which are very intimate and there’s a lot of intuition and instinct involved which is being proved by us daily.

The music visualisations composed by Slow Bear are used either as soundtracks to the film-poems or as live music accompaniment during our poetry-in-performance shows.

Together with Slow Bear, we have created various collaborative works. Here are a few examples:

 

Marina Kazakova "A Silver Star" | Ostello Bello, Milano

***I see you from afar,a silver star,a figure in a scarf,serious and nonchalant!I am flying up the stairs, passing through cars and stares,landing into your arms -wild and stunned.I imagine all of your gesturesand how you’ll be saying words and expressions,and how all the people around youwill dare to be themselves.And then I thinkhow serenely you’ll be walking towards the park, where we hire a blue boat,how patient you are preparing to embark, how perfectly reasonable you are, and yet how your being calm is always unexpected to me.By mid-lake we become remote, we see noone, we are as detached as a Tolstoy’s novel or the Hermitage. By the end of my dream, I think we shall have to spend one autumn in Siberia some day:yards and yards of fresh snowflakes, of snowlace,of snowsilk, and all seems to be washed and ironed under the Siberian silver stars.I see you from afar,my silver star…#kNOwHateInMilano#kNOwHateinItalia

Gepostet von Knowhate am Samstag, 23. März 2019