Music about fighting

In 2006, I entered a competition for a piece of writing in Easy-Read English -- the adaptation of language for people with learning difficulties.  My entry didn't get anywhere in the competition, and, not seeing any other market for it, I let it stay in the depths of filespace. 

Recently, however, I came across an opportunity to revamp it.  The Up-Goer Five Text Editor enables you to type text using only the 1000 commonest words in English.  I copied my 2006 piece into Up-Goer Five, and was told immediately that many of my words fell outside that thousand.

The list of prescribed words is indeed an amazing one.  Block, blonde, and blood are in it, all in a row, but not sing, clap, or war.  Does anyone know how far Up-Goer Five matches the vocabulary used by practitioners of Easy-Read?  Where I didn't find synonyms, I set about excising passages rather than writing longer explanations. This operation shortened the thing from 674 words to 479.

The result is below (and on Up-goer Five here).  Easy-Read and the constraints of Up-Goer Five can be likened to txtspk, Twitterspeak, and the Victorians' telegramese -- adaptations of English for a particular purpose, and most unlikely to be the future of English prose.  But constraints can be stimulating.  Think of the 14 lines of the sonnet!

I must give credit where credit is due.  My coming across Up-goer Five was thanks to Dixe Wills' article in the Christian magazine Third way.


MUSIC ABOUT FIGHTING

We are working on a big piece of music.  It is by Mr Britten.

We start working on it in the cold.  The music seems strange.  Parts of it are not what we expect.  We go wrong.

I look over my music book on trains.  We are getting there.

As we get closer to the date, we work harder.  One evening, we try the music with the band and the kids. We go wrong in new ways.  Is it because we are not used to the band?

I ride home very fast.  The music feels like the ride.  It is under control.

Then we try again, in another building.  The stars join us for the first time.  I go wrong in more new ways.  The ride home is shorter.

On the date, we try the music in the afternoon.  Many of us come by car.  They are late because of road works.  I go wrong in parts of the music that were all right before.  The music feels much harder now.

The time comes.

We give the music sitting down to begin with.  The music starts quietly, with deep notes and bells and us.  We get through the first part and don't go too wrong.  But by the end of the second part we have gone wrong in places.

The music has six parts.  The last part is the hardest.  We know we have gone wrong in many places already.  Can we get through this hard part?

We struggle.  We know we are struggling.  Lots of people have come to hear us.  Do they know we are struggling?  Will we have to stop?  The man waves his stick to lead us.  His waves get bigger and clearer.

The music ends as it began.  It ends quietly with bells and us.

After our last note the man puts his stick down.   Then everyone is silent for a long time.  The music has made us all want to be silent.

Then someone makes a noise with their hands.  The noise means "We like the music."  Then others join in.  They make a loud noise with their hands for several minutes.  The stars lean forward.  Leaning forward means "Thank you for liking us." The kids and the band and the small band all lean forward.  And we too get asked to lean.  Thank you for liking us.

We walk off the raised floor.  My wife comes to meet me with a friend of ours.  They tell me how much they liked the music.

Other people are saying the same thing to their friends.  They did not notice we were struggling.

We know we were struggling.  We know we could have done it better.  But the music has worked.  It was beautiful.  It has made people think about what fighting is like.

Listen to Mr Britten's music if you can!

Three more music poems

Yes, I've no excuse for blogging these, except that I've been at work all this bank holiday.

The first dates from 2004, and was published in the 2007 Ver Prize anthology from Ver Poets of St Albans.


TWO SETTINGS OF A.E. HOUSMAN

Vaughan Williams. An upland slope
as steep as team can plough,
a cloud of gulls, a hillside's
sliding shadow.

Butterworth. The sport along
the river-shore, the flow;
and slow chords match the silence
of old film, now.

The second is one of the earliest poems of mine to be be still getting much of an outing, having been first published in the Durham student magazine Palatinate in May 1977.


MAGNIFICAT IN B MINOR BY THOMAS TERTIUS NOBLE (1867-1953)

Banks of black cloud climbed up the sky;
the cathedral became Noah's Ark:
the striking afternoon sun held her straight
against the boomy dark.

But, down in the body ecclesiastic,
something was rotten and soft:
there were intrigues in the vestry that year,
and A CORPSE IN THE ORGAN-LOFT.



Finally, a sonnet -- one of several I wrote for Radio 3's sonnet competition in the autumn of 2001, though I was allowed to enter only one, and this was not it. It was published in Perimeter 11, 2003.

It's not evocatively musical, as the other two poems in the blog try to be. It namechecks Britten. The Radio 3 indiscretion mentioned in ll. 5-8 was triggered by Britten's Gemini variations. Social mores and Radio 3's presentation style have both changed since 1989; the word awesome has changed its meaning since 2001. But I think it's still the case that a loved one's privacy is not yours to dispense with.


OUT

Wilfred Pickles bade Britain Goodneet. The red
light closed. Out at Moorside Edge, sporting no light,
the mast faithfully relayed the way he said
the word. The shock, under the wartime night.

Buoyed up by Britten, one presenter on
Radio Three announced another as
not his twin but his companion,
in '89. The red light stopped. There was

an awesome silence. Out, brief candle; out,
damned spot; an outing and a half! Judas went
out; and it was night. Light out, from twent-
y years of seance failed. Lamps going out

all over Europe. More than going out.
Out, fallen out, down and out; a rout, a rout.