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Tuesday 12 May 2020

Impossible words

A love affair without music? Improbable? Impossible? It may come in two forms: music which accompanies the affair or actually expresses it. Thus two people may tomber amoureux to the strains of Roll Out The Barrel or Coca Cola's I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing. Accidental music, you might say. More interesting is intentional music, which foretells or echoes experience.

For me the best combination of tune and sentiment is by Handel:

Where'er you walk, cool gales shall fan the glade,
Trees where you sit, shall crowd into a shade.


Note, no first person singular. One lover wishes this situation - unselfishly - on the other. You feel things will go well.

When VR and I met our musical tastes were still widening. Sinatra's Songs for Swinging Lovers was in the air. Perhaps: I Thought About You:

I peeped through the crack
Looked at the track
One going back to you
And what did I do? I thought about you.


For love affairs are as much about thought as about action.

Now we might prefer Mozart (actually Schikaneder, the librettist):

This something I can not name,
Yet I feel it here like fire burning.


For love often converts badly into words. But it’s better in German.

Or how about Paul Simon?

The rooms were musty, and the pipes were old
All that winter, we shared a cold
Drank all the orange juice that we could hold
I do it for your love.


In Out of Arizona I needed a love quote and turned to Rabbie Burns:

As fair art thou, my bonie lass,
So deep in luve am I;
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry.


Over to you.

2 comments:

  1. And now what shall we do now that Covid19 has put an end to all public singing for now? All those wee, infectious droplets... The sad Skagit Valley Chorale story...

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  2. Marly: Speaking personally (and therefore smugly) I have 32 Gigabytes of music collected over the past sixty years - the equivalent of more than 7000 individual pieces - stored on my computer. There's YouTube, an almost infinite resource of differing free performances of stuff that's both commonplace and rare. And there's 24-hour Radio BBC3 which is devoted almost entirely to the sort of music that races my motor.

    But paling all this into the shadows (and here's where the smugness comes in) I have the ability to create music and to receive individual tuition on expanding my repertoire via the magic of Skype. V, my teacher, could be residing in a bothy in the Outer Hebrides and it wouldn't matter a jot.

    And should music fail there are 50,000 words of my novel Rictangular Lenses waiting for additions, plus a dozen quatrains of iambic pentameter verse about the then and now of my marriage which may - I emphasise the speculative - just qualify as poetry.

    Let me tack on these two sentences which which concluded an earlier re-comment to robin andrea:

    "The main fact I suppose is I could die tomorrow and not feel cheated. The last bit of my life is proving to be a hell of a lot better than the first bit."

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