Sung Poetry: God of the Harvest

What happens when one decides to flat-out sing some poetry?

I had been reading a bit about the Greek poet Sappho, and was amazed to learn that singing poetry was all the rage back in the ancient world. Poetry today is still largely a written form, but apparently history paints a bit different picture: poets like Sappho were more like the indie singer-songwriters of today, taking their works and their lyres to the ancient village version of open mic night, and performing their works to the crowd with accompaniment.

When I read this back in August, I got really excited about it. For a while now I have been rather unsatisfied with my industry standard two-rhyming-verses-then-chorus-verse-bridge-chorus-chorus method of songwriting. For one, I was beginning to feel that the forced rhyme was stifling the impact of what I wanted to say, and two, it’s something EVERYBODY does. Pick a song, any song, off the radio and I will bet you my earnings next month they follow a very similar cookbook recipe for song structure.

I’ve been wanting to ask: where is the ingenuity??

Classical composers weren’t so limited, even when crafting folk songs or lieds. Why should we be?

Hence my experiment. 🙃

https://steemit.com/poetry/@heatherthebard/god-of-the-harvest

I ‘felt’ like the poem wanted to be in D minor, and I wish I had more to say about that except I just went with the flow. Spontaneous composition. Probably won’t sing it the same way twice, haha.

But in a way, I kind of like that. It feels... freer, somehow... Similar to listening to prophetic musicians in church circles do their thing... The words just happen and the music just happens and it’s beautiful! 💕