Musical score
Poetry imagines there’s a future
A premiere of a new piece of music for choirs, based on poems from young people across Devon has been specially commissioned for the EXEtreme Imagination Children and Young Peoples Literature Festival.
The performance involving five Exeter school choirs will focus on the poems selected from a competition and will be performed on Thursday 4 November at 7pm at the Northcott Theatre.
Composer, Jonathan Lee had the idea to send out a poetry competition to all schools in Devon, the winning entries of which would be set to music for amassed school choirs to perform. The theme for the competition was ‘Imagine There’s a Future’, drew over 200 entries with poems ranging from areas such as tropical fish, stars, moons, David Beckham’s football kit, pain au chocolate in Paris, robots, Hi-Tec jeans to darker subjects like war, cancer and a sick and dying world. Jonathan Lee who graduated in 2007 from Exeter with a PhD in composition, reviewed the poems and knew straight away that some would suit being set to music. Lee said ‘I was even composing as I read they just seemed alive with music from the start and sitting at my piano, the music came quickly. I had great fun setting the poem about imagining you are a Tiger…’where would you go? Courageous in orange and black…’
He added, ‘One of my favourites is where the writer imagines that they are the moon, looking down on earth and seeing all the spaceships flying by, stars shining in his eye, ending with ‘I would live as long as I liked, and die when I feel it’s right.’ A profound poem.’
Eighteen poems have been set to music, with eighteen being read, some with a musical underscore. Each choir will performs some poems by themselves and some poems with other choirs. Lee has written a special introduction where he also writes the text that aims to encapsulate the hopes, fears and dreams of many of the children who have written poems for the event. Some of the poems are likely to induce laughter, tears and there will be elements of surprise as many of the poems will make the audience stop and think. There are warnings about how we are treating the earth and one another.
School choirs from St Luke’s School, Manor Primary, Plymtree Church of England, Primary, Bickleigh on Exe Primary and St Sidwell’s Church of England Primary will perform at the Northcott Theatre. Altogether 36 poems were selected for the event.
Faye Vickery from St Sidwell’s School provides an example of the calibre and issues raised by many of the young people who entered the poetry competition:
‘I Wish I May, I Wish I Might’
In my future life
I wish I may,
I wish I might,
Be a star for all the nights.
I’d shoot from the burning sun,
Taking the darkness with me.
Then I’d sit with all my siblings,
Spreading rays of light.
In my future life
I wish I may,
I wish I might,
Be a star for all the nights.
Date: 3 November 2010
