William Blake’s The Chimney Sweeper from Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience recorded in Tucson Arizona. Link above to YouTube. Click on picture for another link to Blake’s work.

Recently been short of breath.  So did the best I could for now.

Hope you enjoy them.

Enjoyed this song? Grab the MP3 (just the song with flute and cello added) for just 99 cents!

The album “Ode on a Grecian Urn” now includes Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale.” Click here to link to lulu.com. It’s also available at amazon.com in the Ode to a Grecian Urn II album.

Thanks for your support.

So here’s a preview of the first two verses:

Ode to a Nightingalepreview2

Here’s the first two lines again but different:

FirstlinereviseOdeNight

I’ve been playing with violin, viola, cello and flute which all sound good, but I keep coming back to the bare bones creation. What can I say!

Thank you,  John for this beautiful poem. I hope you like what I’m doing with it.

Ode to a Nightingale is finally pulling together.  I’m getting very close to beginning the recording process.  My first reaction to putting this great work to music was a bit overwhelming. But patient, inching progress has led to something I think will be very nice and fitting of the great sentiments.

My favorite part: “Was it a vision or a waking dream? Fled is that music-do I wake or sleep?”  (The very last lines)

Of course I love the whole poem. I hope you will like what I’m doing with it.

One guitar, three voices and some bass at the end.

My hope is that the music fits the poem and that I’ve done well enough for now with this first version. It’s been a long time coming!

[podcast]http://www.michaelemmanuel.com/uploads/WaitingBurroughs.mp3[/podcast]

Here’s something I hope you’ll enjoy while I work on Waiting(Burroughs) and Song of Wandering Aengus(Yeats)

I especially like the harmonizing at the end!

Rumors form an Aeolian Harp
Henry David Thoreau

There is a vale which none hath seen,
Where foot of man has never been,
Such as here lives with toil and strife,
An anxious and a sinful life.

There every virtue has its birth,
Ere it descends upon the earth,
And thither every deed returns,
Which in the generous bosom burns.

There love is warm, and youth is young,
And poetry is yet unsung.
For Virtue still adventures there,
And freely breathes her native air.

And ever, if you hearken well,
You still may hear its vesper bell,
And tread of high-souled men go by,
Their thoughts conversing with the sky

John Burroughs

I’m still working on the final version of John Burroughs poem “Waiting.” So far there is guitar and three voices  a la Crosby, Stills and Nash or so I’ve been told! Yet I thought that was a great compliment!

This poem interested me in that I feel Burroughs has connected with an eternal truth which is in essence:  what is mine shall come to me.  In it he seems to say accept who you are and from that acceptance your life will unfold as it should and all that is required will come in it’s perfect time.  He points toward the natural synchronicity of nature and life and the co-ordination of the inner and outer expressions of life.

Burroughs was a nature enthusiast and writer along the lines of Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman.

In the words of his biographer Edward Renehan, Burroughs’s special identity was less that of a scientific naturalist than that of  “a literary naturalist with a duty to record his own unique perceptions of the natural world.” (from Wikipedia)

It is a great honor and joy to conect with these great writers through music. I hope I serve the ideas they brought to light in a way that enhances and enlivens the written words.

Here’s the poem.  Waiting by John Burroughs

John Burroughs Association

Songs of mine that are related to these ideas:  From the Morning Sun CD: Morning Sun,  Love’s Song from the Forest, Love Only Comes. From the SINGular mOMent CD:  Butterfly

The lulu edition of MOrning Sun has an axtra bonus track:  “Rumors from an Aeolian Harp” by Henry David Thoreau. Check it out!

Michael recording "Little Angels, Dust Your Wings".

Here I am in the studio recreating a   recording   session. Hey, it’s a bedroom studio without all the nice stuff that “real” recording studio has. I’m working on Little Angels Dust Your Wings.  It’s…tada….finished!

Earlier in the day I was looking for some CDs to record on and I found a long lost song called At the Door.  Also on the hard drive is the full version of La Belle Dame sans Merci poetry written by John Keats.

So it’s been a full day. I came home from work with 50 CD-Rs! Hooray!

SO aside from a few machine malfunctions (my DAT headphone jack is useless) and I broke a tape in it this evening.

While working on this post I’ve been listening to Parazona and onlinewithandrea on Blog Talk Radio. Tomorrow I’m Andrea’s guest.

Hooray!

All’s well that ends well.

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