It’s music Friday, where we set canonical poetry to music!
Today’s selection in known to most people whether they read poetry or not. Other than Dylan Thomas’s own reading of “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” this poem’s most famous recitation is by none other than the comedic giant, Rodney Dangerfield, in his movie Back to School. It is truly the film’s high point, rivaled only by his tremendous “Triple Lindy” dive, which propelled the diving team to victory.
And finally, given the famous line “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” which is repeated four times in the villanelle form, I felt like a Rage Against the Machine sample was in order.
As usual, the voice is from murph.ai and I made the music in GarageBand.
Have a great Friday!
hese productions continue to fascinate me, but they also frustrate me. To my severely compromised ears, stuffed with transistors and plastic, the recitation of the poems often seems "buried" by the musical accompaniment. The mix seems to foreground the music placing the words in the background. And, as a result, much of the poem is literally unintelligible to me. Even when I have the text of a poem in front of me, I can't always distinguish the words I'm supposed to hear as indicated by text. I "lose" my place and have to wait for something I do hear sufficiently for understanding to find where we are in the poem. Again, I'm half-deaf and rely on limited electronics to amplify sound, so maybe "normal" people with undamaged ears don't have the same difficulties I'm having. But I thought you might want to know one listener's experience.