Poetry Is Music

We have had a pretty busy summer this year, and we haven't had very much time for blogging. We started the summer with a camping trip on the beach with my best friend and his sister. Rebecca and I also went on a camping trip with our grandparents and cousins.We've also done a whole bunch of other activities this summer. One of these activities was a concert at which Natalie Merchant was promoting her new album Leave Your Sleep. I really liked this concert because all of the songs were poems set to music, and we have been doing poetry in my homeschool composition class and at home. It is very interesting how this form of songs works, and because it is very interesting how she used certain instruments for certain parts of the songs.

The songs on this album were of a collection of poems either by children, for children, or of children and turned into music. Some of the poetry that she used was The Dancing Bear by Albert Bigelow Paine, Bleezer's Ice-Cream by Jack Prelutsky, and The Sleepy Giant by Charles E. Carryl. All of the songs came with a short biography about the poets. There were some bad reviews about the concert that we read before we went. People were complaining that the concert was more like a poetry lecture as opposed to a concert. However, I found these people she talked about very interesting. One of the most interesting was Albert Bigelow Paine, who was a close friend of Mark Twain, and he eventually wrote his biography.

I really like how Natalie Merchant turned these poems into music because poetry is meant to sound like music. Music is essentially made up of rhythm and sound, and poetry is exactly the same. Just last week, we were doing limericks in my homeschool composition class, and Mrs. Pittman was talking to us about how rhythm is part of poetry by the way things are accented. The week before that, we were doing haikus which all have the same rhythm made up of the same number of syllables per line: 5 syllables, 7 syllables, and then 5 syllables again. Shakespeare's poetry and stories are good examples of using rhythm in poetry because they were all written in iambic pentameter. Iambic Pentameter is a form of rhythm which alternates using 5 stressed and unstressed syllables per line. These forms of poetry are only three examples of the many ways that rhythm turns poetry into music.

It was also very interesting which instruments she used for the album. At the concert there was a clarinet, a bass clarinet, a saxophone, a violin, a cello, a double bass, a tuba, two guitars, drums, and a keyboard. Some of these instruments she only used in certain parts of the songs. For example, in the song, The Peppery Man, whenever she said "The Peppery Man," one of the guitarists would echo it in an unnaturally low voice while the double bass player played three or four notes on the tuba making it sound hilarious. I know this sounds confusing, but all of the people on the stage were able to play multiple instruments and some sang back up. It was also really funny what was said by Natalie in between songs. During the beginning of the second song, the speakers started making a weird static sound which they called, "The dragonfly in the Dodge Theater air-conditioning system." 

I am also impressed by this album because it took her only six and a half years to turn all 26 poems into songs. I hope this post explains what we have been doing this summer, and that poetry is music. I can't wait until Natalie Merchant's next concert here.