Musical Shakespeare

William Shakespeare’s legacy goes even further then we imagined. His influence has spread as far as the soundtrack of our lives, the music that has hit the charts since the fifties of the 20th century to nowadays. 

“ Sweet and noble lad, be not aggrieved!”, “brotherhood for young Christian men!” to be thanked “over and again”: don't they  sound curiously similar in meaning to “Young man, there's no need to feel down” and “It's fun to stay at the Y.M.C.A.” (Young Men’s Christian Association), from the renowned song by The Village People?! Doesn’t “Into the well, I cast a humble pray’r” remind us of Carly Rae’s “I threw a wish in the well”, the first line of “Call Me Maybe”? 

Erik Dridriksen’s Pop Sonnets. Shakespearean spins to your favorite songs. Philadelphia, Quirk Books, 2015, highlights the relationship between Shakespeare and our everyday life. These hundred poems belong to a collection, he explains, whose circulation has been limited to a group of professionals – musicians, songwriters, producers -, who made them the starting point for their compositions. Besides the Bard’s celebrated 154 sonnets first published in 1608, “his complete oeuvre was far larger… These sonnets survived by being passed down orally… In 1743, Sir Kirk de Edin began transcribing these sonnets… His work went largely unnoticed, however, until Columbia record executive Robert Lorre discovered the manuscripts in 1951 and began using the sonnets as the foundation for new singles”, Dridriksen writes in the Introduction. “The volume you hold is a selection of these lesser-known sonnets, along with the titles of the songs they helped spark”. 

Like the more famous older sonnets, this collection is divided in groups according to the theme - love, despair, time and mortality, rogues, rascals and wanton women, and ballads of heroes. The interpreters of the songs they inspired are as varied as Frank Sinatra and The Clash, Will Smith and Johnny Cash, the Beatles and Lorde… 

To read a selection of the sonnets you can visit the Dridriksen's site  or follow his Twitter account, where every Thursday he posts a sonnet inviting the followers to guess which song it was a model for… or you can buy the book, whose cover photo is posted above. 





What? “By” Erik Dridriksen makes you dubious about authorship? And, well, the publisher presents the book as “a collection of 100 classic pop songs reimagined as Shakespearean sonnets”. And you can't find any trace of Sir Kirk de Edin who first transcribed these sonnets, of Columbia record (the actual record label is Columbia records) and Robert Lorre, all mentioned in the Introduction? 

Your doubts are well founded: the sonnets have been “reimagined” by the witty “software engineer, musician, sonneteer and trivia enthusiast” Erik Didriksen who, using syntax, pronouns, lexicon and a poetic form associated to Shakespeare and his age, has created a fun and pleasant work. 

In each sonnet the first two lines and the last two contain key-words, present also in the modern song and a hint for guessing which one it is. 

“Shakespeare’s plays were intended for performance... why do we   believe his sonnets were intended solely for the page?”.                                                      

A visit to the National Gallery, London

When I've had the opportunity to spend whole months in London, visits to the National Gallery were part of my weekly routine. Watching the artworks of the European and world painters was an ever new emotion. 

Credits: National Gallery London 2013 March, by Morio - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons. From Wikipedia.National Gallery

Today, if you want a first approach to the collection of masters from the 13th to the 20th century housed in the gallery in Trafalgar Square, but you're not on the spot, you can take an online tour and explore the paintings A to Z. The names go from Leonardo to a number of artists of the Italian Renaissance, from Caravaggio to the Dutch and to many others. So many that it's useless to try to make a list here.

Needless to say that watching a painting on a computer screen is in no way comparable to the emotion one experiences standing in front of the real artwork. 

Halfway beetwen the internet surfing and the in-presence experience is the film. Next Monday, November 23rd, you'll have the opportunity  to watch Frederick Wiseman's documentary film National Gallery  in streaming. 

Credits: IMDB, Internet Movie Database

When watching a film the spectator is caught as if he was there, in the story. In  fictional films ideas, emotions and feelings are played by actors, here it is the paintings that play ideas and feelings, 

narrate stories and convey meanings and emotions. 

Where to see the film: MYmovies.it. You'll have to register for free and follow the instructions. 
When: 2015, Monday, November 23rd.
Time: 21:00 GMT+1.

Happy holidays, happy 2015

Happy Christmas holidays and happy 2015.

This year you're not going to listen to a Christmas carol, but watch a Big Bang Theory Christmas episode :) :

Look Back in Anger, by John Osborne, 1956

Highlights from Look Back in Anger.

A film version of the play.

Human rights, freedom of the press, freedom of speech: John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644

John Milton (1608-1674) was born into a Puritan family, he supported Cromwell’s government and in 1649 he was appointed Secretary for Foreign Languages (he had studied Latin, Greek, and Italian).

After the fall of Charles I, censorship had been abolished, but it had been soon reintroduced after a number of libels and pamphlets were published, whose content was disturbing also for the Puritans. The Licensing Act, 1643, restored preventive censorship (that is, before) the book was published.

Milton’s argumentations were not accepted at that time, but they would become part of the reflection on the human rights later.

                

Note on the title – "… Areopagitikos [was] a speech written by the Athenian orator Isocrates in the 5th century BC. (The Areopagus is a hill in Athens, the site of real and legendary tribunals, and was the name of a council whose power Isocrates hoped to restore)". From: http://tinyurl.com/b4cajc

Reading from: Areopagitica, 1644

I deny not, but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church and Commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how Books demean themselves as well as men; and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors. For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men [1]. And yet, on the other hand, unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a man as kill a good book. Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life. ‘Tis true, no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not oft recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations fare the worse. […]

As therefore the state of man now is; what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian. […]

Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.

[1] Reference to a Greek myth in which the teeth of a dead dragon, planted in the ground, give birth to great warriors.

A Valentine's Day love song

It's ok for everyone, the English- speaking ones and the French :)

Gallant

From: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gallant

Gallant: "a young man of fashion", a ladies' man, "a man who enjoys being with and giving attention to women", "a man who shows a marked fondness for the company of women or is especially attentive to women".