"IT'S the future. Since nobody reads any more, setting literature to music is a subversive way of getting poetry to the punters. Sound has always been central to Irish artists. If Joyce were alive today he'd be sampling music."
The former avant-garde art terrorist with the Virgin Prunes, Gavin Friday, is currently preparing a trip-hop interpretation of Patrick McCabe's short story, - which was in turn inspired by Friday's Shag Tobacco album. After the experiment with McCabe, he's off to take part in a project of jazz musician and producer, Hal Wilner's that will set different soundscapes to Edgar Allen Poe's poems and short stories. Then it's on to a one-man musical extravaganza of the life and work of his hero, Oscar Wilde. Far from being a once-off phenomenon, Friday is convinced that literary/musical collaborations of the sort he's involved in are here to stay.
Well the musicians would say that, wouldn't they? But what would W.B. Yeats make of the new CD of his poems set to music, Now And In Time To Be, which features artists like Sinead Lohan, The Cranberries, Van Morrison, Christy Moore, Shane Mac Gowan and Loreena Mc Kennitt?
Writer, avid student of Anglo-Irish literature and regular presenter of BBC Radio 3's excellent The Sunday Feature series, Ann Mann is more experienced than most when it comes to examining the dynamics behind the relationship between poetry and music. She has broadcast a variety of programmes about Irish writers and music. She can correct the misapprehension, being put about by some, that Yeats didn't like his poetry contaminated by melody
He publicly expressed his dislike of Michael Warlock's [a composer who set Yeats to music in the early 19205] treatment of his poems but, later on," she stresses, "privately, he had a change of mind. There's also the volume he called Poems For Music, Perhaps, which I set to music without any fuss or bother. Yeats, himself, at the end of lectures he gave on the art and craft of poetry, had Florence Farr sing his poems accompanied by a psaltery."
Dr Declan Kiberd, of University College Dublin and author of Inventing Ire/and, is in no doubt that William Butler would have approved of the latest attempt to translate his words into a more contemporary idiom. "Yeats wanted to be the pop musician of his day," he claims. "He was walking through the countryside one time with Douglas Hyde when they came upon a group of hay makers singing one of Hyde's songs, oblivious that the composer was in their midst. That was Yeats's ultimate aim: to get back to the anonymity of pure folk tradition. And what were folk songs but the pop tunes of their time?"
There ha5 always been an incestuous relationship between music and literature. Natalie Merchant chose to sing Wilfred Owen's classic anti-war Anthem For Doomed Youth to a bastardised reggae beat on 10,000 Maniacs' first record. Joni Mitchell has revamped Yeats's poem, Second Coming, under the guise of Slouch in g Towards Bethlehem. Elvis Costello performed a rousing version of another Yeats poem, A Drunken Man's Praises Of Sobriety. Mike Scott has imaginatively adapted Yeats's The Stolen Child, a remixed version of which can be heard on Now And In Time To Be, which was produced by Michael Tuft for the Grapevine label.
Purists might disapprove of poems mixing with music but pets rarely do. Sean Tyrrell's critically-acclaimed debut album Cry Of A Dreamer included four texts, among them a wildly surreal rendition of Louis MacNiece's No Go. His new album, The Orchard will continue with the same mixture of word and note. Steeped in the infinite, well of, traditional Irish melodies, Sean is fortunate in that his application of a sean nos free-form style to his instrumentation means that he can adapt his playing to suit less conventional poetic metre.
"When I read verses a tune immediately suggests itself," he says."I can't imagine The Song Of Wandering Aenghus being spoken other than the way that I sing it. I used to do a thing called the Braemoor Hare. It was always perceived as a jolly hunting cry. When I came to the chorus `No more through the green fields of `Cady I'll. run' I would stretch it out as if it were the moan of the hare. A very fine guitarist said to me. `You can't do that, Sean'. I replied, `Why not? What's musically right or wrong?'
"Poems necessitate that I don't get involved in strict beats and chords," he elaborates. "They would only put the words into a straight-jacket. I don't care what suffers, be it the rhythm or the tonal quality, so long as it gets the message across. I'll half-sing and speak, even. You can get carried away with the idea of soul to the detriment of the meaning. For me, the utterance is paramount."
Sinead Lohan agrees. She was in the unique position of never having covered someone else's song, nor had she adapted a poem to music, until she did her version of Yeats's The Fish on Now And In Time To Be. "I was reluctant, initially, and a bit worried that I. wouldn't be able to do it," she says. "I tried another poem and it didn't work at all. Then when the pressure was off, it all happened very easily. I didn't want to do any intricate chord changes that might detract from the words. The string quartet ebbed and flowed like the opening lines. And I just sang it as it was."
ON the same collection, The Cafe Orchestra teamed up with Shane MacGowan to deliver a rip-roaring version of An Irish Airman Foresees His Death. As Michael Flynn of the Cafe Orchestra explains, MacGowan recorded his bit in London and they received it by tape in Dublin. "We were very conscious that when two different facets of the arts come together the individual parts can be greater than the sum of the whole," he reflects. "I don't mean to sound too immodest, but by the time we'd finished, everything about my appreciation of the poem was heightened. It was as if it started out in black and white and then burst into glorious Technicolor. It taught me that poetry as well as music needs to be heard."
The Canadian multi-instrumentalist Loreena McKennitt has converted texts as diverse as St John Of The Cross's Dark Night Of The Soul; from 15th-century Spain, to Lord Alfred Tennyson's The Lady Of Shalott. "I try to recreate the historical and geographical landscapes of the poem to enhance the sentiment inherent in the piece," she says.
"From a pragmatic point of view I like it when the battle is half-done; I don't fancy myself ash a great lyric writer. Plus when you have somebody else's voice in there instead of your own, it causes the meanings to multiply. The collaboration of media is an art-form in itself, I think."
Her belief that something involuntary about the way we listen to music makes poetry more accessible in this form is reiterated by Sean Tyrrell. "There's no doubt whatsoever that music can bring clarity to a poem," he asserts. "It's to do with our education. Most of us learned poetry in the most awful way. It turned us off for life. Going into all the technicalities of, metre and so on when all we needed to do was read and listen, like the child, to what the poet was saying."
