The Green Wave

Sometimes I look at other musicians’ blogs and feel amazed not only by their faithfulness to them but by their ease and candor. Here’s where we played last night, the amp blew, we met a famous singer, there’s a contract in the wind. Then, too, there is in some cases a charming – shall we say – informality with the rules of English usage. But lest you think I’m looking down my nose at this, please believe that I stand in admiration of this fluency that doesn’t concern itself with trifles.

So how about me? What’s the news?

I spent hours last night on a setting for Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s gorgeous sonnet, “How do I love you…?” Fairly quickly I’d developed a melody for the three quatrains, but I’d run into trouble with the couplet which is enjambed to the last quatrain. But with time and that sort of sharp listening you do – which is almost like listening to music playing outside your own head, as though someone were patiently playing this melody and waiting for you to cop onto it – it came.

I realized last night with a thrill of pleasure that I’ve set poems now by WB Yeats, Dylan Thomas, ee cummings, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and now E. B. Browning. Oh, and Keats, though that one is somehow not all it could be, so I won’t commit. I have for years had a line of Donne’s running in melody in my mind, and also a quatrain of Frost’s (bet you can guess which one).

Here’s my dream: to play a whole concert of poems!

If you know of poems you think I should put to music, send along the titles and I’ll set to it. I love a challenge of this kind!

Can you hear it?

All around us, people abide secretly
in their own music –

Orchestras hidden, uncrowded,
in a pocket protector,
string trios discretely whinnying
beneath an earpiece,
solitary singers on their mountains
tucked under a contact lens
or riding in the navel,
you never know –

audible to some extra sense,
even to us forever shut
from the chamber of their mind’s ear.
They do not sing or nod,
beam or prance, but plainly
something conducts them
moment to moment.

Look at the ponytail leap
and swing, or at him there
leading with the belly,
an implicit tango.
Or at that grey-eyed one,
alone but not alone,
barely harnessed to the sidewalk,
an eighth note above the ground.

Kate Chadbourne
16 April 2007