For years my friend Daniel Morganstern has peppered our conversations with quotations from his mother's poems. I finally asked him to send me some of her poems with the hope of finding one or two that I could set to music. I was really pleased that I found five.
It is difficult finding poems to set to music because many of poems I like are complete within themselves, and they simply don't need music. And then there are poems that sound like they were written with the idea of music not far away. Milly Morganstern's poems are full of musical suggestions, so setting them was remarkably easy.
I felt, in a way, like I was getting to know Danny's mother through setting her poems. I did meet her briefly once, around 40 years ago. But I was very young (twenty), and she was my grown-up friend's mother. Milly Morganstern (1913-2000) was, according to Danny, a great pianist and a person with excellent musical instincts. I tried to imagine how she might have heard her poems as songs, and had a wonderful time doing so.
You can see the music on this page of the IMSLP, and you can listen to them here.
1 comment:
Congratulations on moving forward in your work. A small question of stance, please. The score available from IMSLP carries no copyright notice, while the Petrucci page does, noting your choice of Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 which asserts control over attribution and no commercial use without your approval. How is it that the score itself is not similarly noted? Should it be?
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