Waiting For Music E-Book

Simon Mundy

• Herausgeber: Renard Press
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 54

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Waiting for Music is the fifth collection of poetry from the acclaimed writer Simon Mundy. A great champion of the arts, his relationships with musicians, visual artists and dancers are the main driving force behind his poetry, and this book sets out a playlist that stems from music, visual art and dance – from Brahms' late piano works to a scene for soprano and dancers, written to be set by Roxanna Panufnik, that was inspired by a 16th century picture in the National Gallery. Published after a year spent waiting for music to appear on our landscape once more, Waiting for Music collects the voices of an array of composers, cultures and forms, set against backdrops ranging from Valparaiso to the Veneto, and celebrates the sounds and stages that have been missing from our lives this silent year.

Leseprobe

Waiting for Music

simon mundy

renard press

Renard Press Ltd

124 City Road

London EC1V 2NX

United Kingdom

[email protected]

020 8050 2928

www.renardpress.com

Waiting for Music first published by Renard Press Ltd in 2021

Text © Simon Mundy, 2021

Cover design by Will Dady

Simon Mundy asserts his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Renard Press is proud to be a climate positive publisher, removing more carbon from the air than we emit and planting a small forest. For more information see renardpress.com/eco.

All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced, used to train artificial intelligence systems or models, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise – without the prior permission of the publisher.

EU Authorised Representative: Easy Access System Europe – Mustamäe tee 50, 10621 Tallinn, Estonia, [email protected].

contents

Notes on the Poems

Waiting for Music

Brahms

Concerto Grosso

Fantasias

Putting in to Valparaiso

Four Italian Reflections

Some Songs

Scrolling…

Final Lover

Winter Treachery

Singel Revisited

Llandian

Angel Match

Match Report

Seven Poems

Night Train from Ulaanbaatar

Interlude

Venetian Serenade

Epilogue I

Victorian Waltz

Postscript

notes on the poems

I have been close to musicians, visual artists and dancers all my life. This century those relationships have become the main impetus for my poetry, often dictating subject, shape, voice and length. This book intersperses these substantial segments with individual unrelated poems. These notes explain the context of the sequences and movements written at the request of composers, performers, artists and choreographers.

Brahms – Poems to Accompany Op. 117–119

This sequence stems from a conversation with the pianist and composer David Owen Norris about the rhapsodies and intermezzi for solo piano written by Brahms in his late fifties. Although he never said as much, it is felt that Brahms wrote each of them as a reminiscence of a woman he had loved but never partnered. David suggested I write some short poems on a similar theme, drawing on my own life, but taking their atmosphere directly from Brahms’ pieces, to be read at a recital or set to new music.

Concerto grosso – After Corelli’s Op. 6, No. 4 in D Major

Every year at the auditions for the European Union Baroque Orchestra it was the tradition for the tutors to give a concert. As a trustee of the orchestra I was also asked to perform when I took part in the coaching in 2012. As a poet who cannot play an instrument, it seemed the best thing to do was to write a piece that mirrored the rhythms and style of one of the works the participants had been learning. The simultaneous voices roughly match the way the solo group interlocks with the tutti group in Corelli’s astonishing concerto. It was duly performed by me and the double-bass coach, Maggie Urqhart, in Echternach, Luxembourg.

Fantasias

As well as the rhapsodies and intermezzi, Brahms wrote several pieces called ‘Fantasia’. Mine are unrelated to particular works (or even composers), but the freedom of the form and its exploration of imaginings and tangential thoughts is much the same.

Putting in to Valparaiso

In 2014 I had the chance to go to Chile for the first time. My father was born and grew up in Valparaiso, but ran away to sea at the age of fourteen in 1932, soon after his parents died. He never went back, though he is commemorated on the family memorial there. The Chilean National Library in Santiago was incredibly welcoming, and let me spend a morning in its writers’ room examining Pablo Neruda’s manuscripts. The next day I visited his house in Valparaiso.

Some Songs

The composer Adrian Williams asked me to write some lines that could be set to short songs, as if they were taken from a Shakespeare play – like the many settings of the verses from The Tempest.

Scrolling…

This poem was written for Supernova, an internet project of the international contemporary arts network Auropolis, based in Belgrade. Every few weeks between October 2008 and October 2009 I added more segments online, and it became a poetic commentary on the year. It was performed live by me with improvised music by violinist Manja Ristic and cellist Ivana Grahovac at three venues in Belgrade in December 2009.

Llandian

A few years ago the Royal Ballet’s chief choreographer, Wayne McGregor, suggested that I work with one of the company’s emerging dancer–choreographers, Nathalie Harrison, to create an experimental poetry and dance piece. She asked me to write a substantial poem reflecting on the story of London as a city, from prehistoric times to the present day. It had to contain enough scenography for her to create movement, as if the words were music. In the end production time couldn’t be found, so only these words remain.

Angel Match

In 2015 Cecilia McDowall was commissioned to write a short cycle called Angel Songs, and complained to me that nobody wrote fast poems about angels. It seemed to me that a football match between angels, fallen and unfallen, was the answer. It was given its first performance by Gillian Keith at that year’s Presteigne Festival. This is followed by a longer version, Match Report.

Seven Poems for Blood Orange’s Exhibition in Brussels

Curated by Debra Welch and Sarah Simmonds, the visual arts collective, Blood Orange, was given the bare space of an old factory belonging to the Société Mutuelle pour Artistes in Brussels for a weekend of installations on the 19th and 20th of October 2012. They asked me to select some of the works to write about.

Venetian Serenade

This was conceived as a scena for soprano (Clare McCaldin), dance company and small baroque orchestra, to be set by Roxanna Panufnik and played by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. It was inspired by a 16th-century picture in the National Gallery in London by Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo – of Mary Magdalene, in theory, but with the Venetian lagoon in the background. I moved the scene forward a couple of centuries and made it secular: a woman waiting for her lover at dusk in a small piazza, the woman narrating, all the other characters dancing. Sadly, the scene has not yet materialised.