Assorted comments

[James A. Landau <JJJRLandau@netscape.com>]

On Sat, 28 Feb 2009 07:15:57 Zulu minus 0500 "Shapiro, Fred" fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU asked:

> <snip>
>I recently read that the lyrics of Leonard Cohen's 1967
>song "Suzanne" appeared earlier as a poem in a 1966 book of his.  Are
>there other examples of well-known song lyrics that appeared earlier
>as poems?  I am not talking about well-known poems that were also made
>into songs, but rather about texts that are usually thought of as
>songs but were actually first poems.

Many composers have written musical settings for poems.  A well-known example is Schiller’s “An die Freude” (“Ode to Joy”) which everybody thinks of as part of Beethoven's 9th Symphony (meeting your requirement of "texts that are usually thought of as songs"), written nearly 40 years later.  Wikipedia adds:

     Less famous musical settings of the poem include:
     Johann Gottlieb Naumann (1786)
     Christian Gottfried Körner (1786)
     Johann Friedrich Reichardt (1796)
     Johann Friedrich Hugo von Dalberg (1799)
     Franz Schubert's song "An die Freude" D 189 (1815), for voice and piano
     Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1865), for solo singers, choir and orchestra in a Russian translation
     "Seid umschlungen, Millionen!" (1892), waltz by Johann Strauss II

Any musical librarian could give you numerous other examples.

The Jewish liturgy provides numerous examples, as many of the hymns (“piyyutim”) in the prayerbook were originally written as poems and acquired tunes “b’Sinai” (cantor’s jargon for “we don’t know when the tune originated”).  There is for example “Adon Olam” which I have heard sung to tunes as various as “Ode to Joy”, “The Prettiest Girl I ever saw”, and the University of Michigan fight song.   An applicant for cantor at our synagogue got his tryout the day the rabbi announced our softball team had won the Men’s Club softball league.  To the congregation’s delight, he managed to fit “Adon Olam” to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”  He didn’t get the job, and the cantor who did started the minhag of singing that hymn to “Under the Boardwalk”.

The Jewish liturgy also has complete cantillation for no fewer than seven books of the Old Testament (the Torah, Esther, and Lamentations).

Christian liturgies provide similar examples, such as the Catholic Mass, which has been set to music by several famous composers.  Also there is the Christmas carol “O Little Town of Bethlehem” which was written by Phillips Brooks and later set to music by his choir director Lewis Redner.

(If you’re a glutton for punishment, I’ll be happy to inflict on you the filksong I wrote to the tune of “Suzanne”.)


On Sat, Feb 28, 2009 at 8:33 AM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:

> What did the American colonials call the English marines?  This may
> go back to before the Revolution, to the 1740 War of Jenkins' Ear,
> when Americans joined the British expedition in the Caribbean.

The colonials called the British marines “marines”.  At the time a “marine” (small “m”) meant a sea-going fighting man whose position in battle was to fire muskets or rifles at the enemy.

The US Marines started out that way.  However, in the War with Tripoli, the US Army was not present, so the Marines were called on to help with the land offensive, which is the “shores of Tripoli” in the Marine Hymn.  Also the practice of using musketry in naval actions died out by the end of the Civil War, but for various reasons the US Marines stayed in existence and morphed into land soldiers (and later aviators) who still were part of the Department of the Navy.


On  Sat, 28 Feb 2009 15:07:10 Zulu minus 0600  "Cohen, Gerald Leonard" gcohen at MST.EDU wrote:

>JIm has porbably already explained this, but I forget: What exactly
>does BASDV, AYIFF, etc. mean?

1.      I did not explain.
2.      You don’t want to know.

           James A. Landau
           test engineer
           Northrop-Grumman Information Technology
           8025 Black Horse Pike, Suite 300
           West Atlantic City NJ 08232 USA
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