The Beacon, Hastings, 30 April 2019

Hastings Philharmonic has launched an exciting new venture this spring which brought an enthusiastic gathering together at The Beacon for an evening of Poetry and Music. Under the banner of The Challenge of Change musician Marcio da Silva and poet Antony Mair approached the concept of change – but did so from very different perspectives.

The five musical items were drawn from the full range of Western classical music, starting in the modal world of Gregorian Chant and evolving through polyphony and classical harmony to the fractured discords of Luciano Berio. The focus was primarily on the way musical structure has changed over the centuries. While the notes and the voices remain essentially the same, the way the scores are organised becomes increasingly complex and demanding upon both the singers and the audience.  Hastings Philharmonic Chamber Choir, singing unaccompanied, demonstrated with considerable skill the intricacies of the writing as well as its emotional impact.

For the poets, change was a matter of content rather than form. The eight poets involved had been asked to draw on something from the canon and to use this alongside some of their own work to highlight different perspectives of change. The content itself was fascinating, ranging across having a baby, the menopause, ending a relationship, coming out to growing old. What may have been surprising was the apparent lack of any relationship to changes in the structure of verse over the last five hundred years as reflected in the music. The only item which could really be considered to be from the canon was Tennyson’s The Lady of Shallot, and even this was gently dismissed as old-fashioned. Though the content of many of the poems was engaging – Robin Houghton on menopause being particularly so, and Judith Shaw’s ending of relationships – it was difficult to assess how the poems worked as poems without seeing them on the page. As virtually everything, with the exception of Sandy Andrews’ Japanese verses, seemed to be in free verse, there was little sense of how poetry itself has changed in the way that music certainly has.

As an opening gambit this was a splendid evening and one worth repeating, if only to investigate more deeply the strong connections between music and verse, and perhaps the way in which poetic form affects musical structure.