Music and Poetry

I went to the community choir concert today to watch my roommate sing and the CSC concert choir sang a set of songs by Eric Whitacre composed from poems of E.E. Cummings. What I found really interesting about this is the crossover between poetry and music. Just for interest, here is a picture of E.E. Cummings:

And here’s a picture of the composer Eric Whitacre:

So Whitacre combined five of E.E. Cummings’s poems into a composition entitled The City and the Sea. The poems he combined were: 1) i walked the boulevard, 2) the moon is hiding in her hair, 3) maggie and millie and molly and may, 4) as is the sea marvelous, and 5) little man in a hurry. if you want to see what these poems are, they are all on Whitacre’s website at http://ericwhitacre.com/music-catalog/satb-choral/the-city-and-the-sea.

Anyway, I thought that this guy composed five movements out of poetry. I think this would be a good example for students to understand how poetry can be transferred over into every day life. Maybe having the students listen to some of these movements will make them realize how others can connect to poetry. And these movements are also pretty recent. The composer says on his website that he might be working on some more.

Basically, I just thought that this was pretty cool when I saw the poetry in the program for the concert, I thought I would look into this more and share my thoughts. 🙂

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