that the phrase quoted £5 is
remember that this phrase was set to notes which GRABBED
CONVERTED its normal conversational movement
exaggerated its but in no
way interfered with that movement. The music simply
emphasises the word movement. Cadence of those sentences.
"popular "

The CATCH song, the song of the catch phrase
is, I think, always technically excellent in the catch
phrase. It is invariably bad art because apart from
the catch phrase, or phrases, it is filled up with
rubbish, inversions, cheap sentiment, bad writing,
inaccuracies and ever outer sort of misfit and abortion.
At any rate it is so far removed from literature and the
domain of the arts that it has no place in this column.

Dante, by contrast, calls a poem "a
composition of words set to music", and whatever we may
think of this definition, and however great a latitude
we allow to the term "music", we must admit that
periodically poetry refreshes itself by a close contact and
union with singings, with music played on an instrument.
"Carmen aerolimn" and the rest of it !

Poetry is apt to decline with a very perceptible slump
after any divorce from music; though after such a slump
the poetry of the written page may undertake new movements
quite as interesting as that of its musical phases.

Music whatever it gain by complexity, is apt to
loose thematic inventiveness when too far separated from
poetry. If we grant that Henry Lawes was the best

song setter in England, we can note also that his music declined from his first song-book to his third, at a rate just proportionate to the decline of the poems he chose. HARRISBAGAN Waller's "Go lovely rose" is perhaps the most perfect poem in his collection and the setting is worthy of the poem.

With Lawes work extant and available there is no excuse for the kind of rubbish produced by pretendedly serious musicians. In Lawes the thing was done right, and one might have supposed his later composers, even if incapable of inventing anything, would at least have tried to preserve the better parts of tradition.

The case is different with the troubadour songs. Provençal has been practically an unknown language tongue, XII th. and it only recently that the musical notation has been deciphered and made decipherable.

Having been called a fool by Mr Arnold Dolmetsch for spending some time copying Lawes music from old books in the British Museum, I discovered that Mr Dolmetsch was in error. Mr Dolmetsch thought there was a modern edition of Lawes. So there had been, Mr Dolmetsch had made it himself, and done the job excellently, but the book was, and still is out of print. The sooner it is reprinted, the better.

The fact that the edition has sold out, is however an excellent symptom of the regwakening to the value of pre-Bach music.

The troubadour music has had less good fortune.
A few tunes are given in an encyclopedia of the French
Conservatoire, set with solid Bach-like harmonization, and
far from their original mood. Aubry has shown enthusiasm
and no great aptitude. Jean Beck has worked as a
conscientious scholar. Walter Rummel in "a series
(Augner and Co.)
called Hesternae Rosae, Serta II. has has achieve three
four
or musical triumphs ( I may say that
the provençal text is accompanied by atrocious translations
to which no sensible reader will pay the least scrap of
attention.).

Both the old English and the Provençal music
become topics of the moment, now that Dolmetsch is playing
his ancient instruments (privately and to the elect, but
with increasing frequency). And that exquisite and
accomplished diseuse Raymonde Collignon is singing the
XII<sup>e</sup> century music, both of the troubadours and
of Adam de la Halle.
authors

If we consider and composers would pay reasonable
attention to the perfect welding of *motz el son* (words
and notes) both in Lawes and in the much earlier masters,
we might agains hear both contemporary and worth
while. Nothing, of course, could be more idiotic than
to suppose (professorially and academically) that the
were fact of a man having lived in 1670, or 1208
constitutes a claim to attention. There were just
as bad poets and musicians in those days as any that

6.

Dolmetsch has shown the existence of music corresponding to
vers libre in the delicate music of Cuperin , but this
Gaelic music is a complete mine of great rhythms , of
rhythms entirely untried in our poetry ; it is full
of every wildness , of every sort of leaping and life , and
of
tragedy and of dancing . It is music before it was
sent to school with the monks ; before the gregorians
cast out all the rhythms which they considered too exciting;
too dangerous to the maintenance of Christian pietism ;
too intimate with the original gods .

William Atheling in " The New Age " points to these
Hebridean melodies as part of the musical treasure of all
time, and is, I think, well justified in so doing. Wagner
drew heavily on the north island as music, especially in
the Flying Dutchman, but you will find in that opera
nothing finer than the lament for Donnan of Eigg.
Kinneth Macleod's music translates some lines of it,
enough to indicate the rhythm as far as words without music
will do so :

Milking cattle on the face of Corravine,

Youth and age on the face of Corravine.

Early puts the sun greeting on Stroa,

Early chanted the birds the beauty of Donnan.

If these snatches do not really show the rhythm, they
at least do not prevent the music from taking its own
magnificent course.

From the way some of the "nebridean music is" sung, I doubt
if even the modern musical notation conveys much idea of
the rhythm, but anyone who has once heard the things
properly sung will be as incapable of forgetting the 'swirl
and turn of it', as they would be unable to forget the
sound of a group of afro-americans chanting. " Ride on !
LawdGeezus-CONK-er-er . Rhode-ahm LawdGeezus-Conqueror . "

This curious rapping over of the rhythm-ends is
common to both the negro and the gael. The performer
whose sole perception of musical movement is the " tick-tick-
tick-tick " of the metronome will probably fail to " get into
it ". 

This gaelic stuff, both from the rocky isles, and
from the flat pasures is never out of sound of the sea,
and the shriek of the seabirds, and the wave-slash
combine in it. .

The two first lines in the Donnan lament, are
the monotony of island life, and the circle of life, and
the rhythm, a long draw on first and seventh syllabá, with
a beat on the ninth :

Milk-ing cattle on the face of CORavine
Youth and age on the face of Coravine .

Early puts the SUN Greet-ing on Stroa--,
Early chant the birds the BEAUTY of Donnan .

9.

I have long held that American culture would become possible when the artists, the universities and the press learned to pull together. In the more restricted terrain it is equally important that the writer and musician should pull together.

If it were only for criticism of vers libre this would be necessary, for the purely literary caste has become so deafened and insensatized by the stock size verse and stock-shape rhythms of The Century and that boiling of magazines, and that generation or was until very recently of papier-mache editors that it is only among musicians that one can find any rhythm-criteria, any perception of vers libre or even vers regulari of when a strong is magnificent or subtle rhythm and when it is merely prose chopped into lengths.

I don't mean to say that Lawes, and the Kennedy-Fraser books, and Rummel's troubadour versions are the only possible sources of inspiration for a new welding of music and poetry; simply, they are three prods, three incentives which have re-emerged here during the last few weeks. The gaelic is one by far the most vigorous; Dolmetsch edition of Lawes is for the moment out of print, but is at any rate in circulation. The troubadour stuuf is still rather arcane; there is, quantitatively, not very much of it, and it still needs great patience and considerably special knowledge to profit by it to any extent. Lawes' music is essentially the same sort of thing. As music it is perhaps a progress. But the poet's work, the joining of the sounds of the words was presumably better done in

10.

Provence than in the England of James I, or of Elizabeth.

The Gaelic stuff is not all fine epic, or
tragedy, there are love-songs which can be utterly
sentimental
Bassan wrecked by singing them in a Victorian,
or pre-Victorian manner. There is at least one dance tune
that would take with any Jash band.

The whole relation of the Gaelic syncopation to
african syncopation should be of great interest both to
writers and musicians