Poetry and music

The great lyric poets of the English language wrote — and, I hope, are still writing — words which have their own melodic quality, cadences which lure composers to add music to them. Shakespeare, Herrick, Blake, Tennyson, Burns, Yeats have been set to music by numerous composers, creating a lasting heritage of English song. A smaller but intriguing category is poetry that is not turned into song but is spoken to music. Grand master of this compositional genre is Jim Parker.

‘I was an orchestral oboe player,’ he says, ‘but I was always wanting to get away from that and do something a bit more creative so I joined the Barrow Poets, as an oboist and possibly to do some arranging. It developed from there when I started composing music specially for them. There were other groups of poets and musicians around, like the Scaffold, Roger McGough’s band, but they were writing songs. We set poems to music but we  didn’t really do songs because none of us could claim to have been a singer.’

In 1974, as a result of this, he was asked to write music for some poems by John Betjeman, to be read by the poet himself. And the fruit of that collaboration was the wonderful Banana Blush. ‘I didn’t think Betjeman could sing,’ remembers Parker, ‘so what I did was to write music that accompanies the words. Very often you could in fact put the words to the tune, although usually they’re not going on at quite the same time. Before I started I went and got a record from the local library of him reading his poetry, so that I got to know the quality of his voice and the style of his delivery. It’s a really individual sound, very warm and mellifluous. And he was so good at it; he knew exactly what he was doing and he spoke melodically.