Accompanied Voices

Poets have been inspired by music for centuries, but with the arrival of recordings and the possibility of repeated listening there was an extraordinary upsurge in verse about specific pieces, particular composers. There followed a century of pithy, perceptive responses, fascinating to the poetry lover, delightful to the music lover, and irresistible to those who are both. John Greening's new anthology draws especially on this exciting hoard of forgotten material. ACCOMPANIED VOICES is a unique book: not only is it a highly readable anthology of some of the most memorable and accessible international writing about classical music, and a moving commentary by one set of practising artists on the work of another. It is also something of a guide in verse to the great composers. There have been several anthologies of 'music poems', but never one which follows the story of western music through from the Renaissance to the twenty-first century, a fact which gives John Greening's 250-pages an encyclopaedic value. This is in effect a chronological guide to the major composers of the last four hundred years, written in the language which comes closest to music itself - poetry. Readers unaccustomed to poetry anthologies will find in ACCOMPANIED VOICES the same pleasure that they might find in simply putting on a CD and listening. Every page brings something to arrest or transport and an there is extraordinary diversity of response. Ancedote, epiphany, portrait, meditation...but many of these poets offer intellectual insights too and even critiques - there is far more variety here than any straightforward music essay can manage. But readers who feel that they do not know enough about classical music will find that these poems, while informing them, move beyond the mere names of composers and their works, reaching for more universal concerns. . JOHN GREENING is a poet and received a Cholmondeley Award in 2008. He is also a Hawthornden Fellow and a Fellow of the English Association. He has published studies of the Poets of the First World War, Yeats, Hardy, Edward Thomas and Elizabethan Love Poets.