Tarantella

Poetry is surely meant to be like verbal music. Words that resonate, even when the intricacies of language and the actual words used or the poet's feeling for them, are beyond your intellectual comprehension. I don't know exactly what was in Tchaikovsky's head when he wrote Romeo & Juliet or the 1812. There was a harmonious cacophany there - a chaotic passion - that, to this day, resonates with emotions in my own life, and undoubtedly with everyone else's life, too. It doesn't matter exactly what the poet, composer or artist was thinking or feeling; what matters, surely, in any art form, is finding the theme or melody that we all understand at the deepest level. We can all write commentaries on our everyday life and it isn't poetry. Poetry, that much abused work of art, is music put into words....This beautiful poem by Hillaire Belloc is one of my favourites, not only because I have loved the Pyrenees, but also because of the definite music in the rhythmical pattern of such brilliant words:

Tarantella

Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
And the tedding and the spreading
Of the straw for a bedding,
And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees,
And the wine that tasted of the tar?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers
(Under the vine of the dark verandah)?
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda,
Do you remember an Inn?
And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteeers
Who hadn't got a penny,
And who weren't paying any,
And the hammer at the doors and the Din?
And the Hip! Hop! Hap!
Of the clap
Of the hands to the twirl and the swirl
Of the girl gone chancing,
Glancing,
Dancing,
Backing and advancing,
Snapping of a clapper to the spin
Out and in ---
And the Ting, Tong, Tang, of the Guitar.
Do you remember an Inn,
Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?

Never more;
Miranda,
Never more.
Only the high peaks hoar:
And Aragon a torrent at the door.
No sound
In the walls of the Halls where falls
The tread
Of the feet of the dead to the ground
No sound:
But the boom
Of the far Waterfall like Doom.

Music and Words

"Music," wrote Beethoven, "is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.”

Often it seems that there are emotions and experiences beyond emotions, for which we have not yet found sufficient vocabulary. Music, like the sense of smell, is instant. Before words, before reading and letters, we experience directly through our more immediate senses of hearing and touch and smell. Words require another step...and, in some ways, a step away from that initial understanding and empathy.

Words divide and words bring together. It often seems that the greatest possible gift would be the ability to translate, immediately, into words those experiences/senses that we all share and so rarely find the means to express. What quest! What an adventure!

"Notes on Sex, Love and Music" Excerpt from "Getting Real" by Cheryl Hilliard

We seem to be so afraid of silence. We are always rushing to fill up gaps in conversations, bombarding ourselves in elevators, office buildings, and on phone lines with the noise that passes for music today. On a vibratory level, I feel that much of this so-called “music” can be damaging. It also has lyrics that are senseless and add nothing to the quality of life.
Much of today’s music is the vomitous by-product of bodies, hearts and minds fed on food that isn’t real. It produces chaotic thinking and attraction to the ugly and superficial in life. No matter how many minds agree to this garbage, it is garbage. The emperor has no clothes.
Because these sounds are so pervasive, most children grow up never hearing the beauty that music can be. How sad not to know that sounds that have moved people through time.