Just come back from Anne’s concert band Christmas Concert where the guests were expected to form a choir. I was ok with this even if it came as a bit of a surprise. We sang some ABBA medleys. I noted two things.
Firstly ABBA’s lead singers were girls who could sing higher notes than I can. Secondly as I stood there staring at the lyrics I realised how sad some of the songs were. ABBA produced some fantastic songs written in the main by the two guys in the band and I pictured in my mind the girls seeing new songs that would become huge hits for the first time and wondering what they thought of them.
This made me think of the whole subject of poetry. That’s what these songs are. Poems written to a tune (or the other way around). A couple of weeks ago Anne and I went to a “Classics with Coffee” morning at the Blue Room in the Lawns. We had a pleasant morning listening to a pianist and, separately, a poet. It struck me at the time that listening to others read out their own poetry doesn’t do it for me. I have to be able to sit there staring at the words on the page, just like I did this morning with the ABBA songs. Now this isn’t to say that I wouldn’t sit there listening to a poet I liked read out their own material but it would definitely be enhanced if I had the words there in front of me.
That is all.