Frisbee sonnet:Fun for choral composers?

Subject: Frisbee sonnet:Fun for choral composers?
From: Mark Cohen
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 04:53 AM

I was listening to some of the late Jan Harmon's beautiful choral works recently, and it occurred to me that many choral pieces are based on short poems. Then I remembered that way back in college I composed my one and only sonnet, which had as its subject one of my major nonacademic activities during freshman year. I wondered if it might make an interesting, if offbeat, setting for a choral arrangement. So here goes. If anyone comes up with something, I'd love to hear it! (Or maybe I've really lost it this time....)

FLAT FLIP FLIES STRAIGHT
(c)1970 Mark Cohen

There's something in the way it loves the air
The way it soars and glides in wingless flight
That makes one think of birds -- and yet, not quite
Like birds. It is unique: do not compare
Its madly whirling grace to anything.
Just watch its curving pathway through the sky
And learn its ways, and practice long, and try
To tame this gaudy denizen of spring.

Oh, plastic is by far too base for you,
Most noble Frisbee! Even teak won't do.
No, nothing but pure gold, so rich and fine
Could but do justice to your lovely line.
They fear it will not fly? Fear not! I say.
I cannot throw the damn thing anyway.

Aloha,
Mark

Subject: RE: Frisbee sonnet:Fun for choral composers?
From: Nigel Parsons
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 04:58 AM

Mark: How can you consider the Art of Frisbee as a non.academic activity?
Love the sonnet!

Subject: RE: Frisbee sonnet:Fun for choral composers?
From: Mark Cohen
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 05:19 AM

Thanks, Nigel. And I agree with your objection in spirit. But, you see, back in the early 70s Princeton hadn't as yet organized a formal division, and there were no course offerings in the catalog, so everything was ad hoc and very unofficial. There was certainly plenty of academic-style controversy: our practice sessions, for example, were often marked by spirited (and occasionally rancorous) debate on the relative merits of the "original" or "basic" vs. the "108 gram" model. Yes, it was a pretty heady time! In fact, some of the scenes in the movie A Beautiful Mind were shot right in the courtyard where we used to have those sessions. I don't remember seeing John Nash there, though.

Aloha,
Mark

Subject: RE: Frisbee sonnet:Fun for choral composers?
From: AllisonA(Animaterra)
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 06:52 AM

Mark, I love it! It's exactly the sort of thing that would be fun to set to music. With your permission I'll copy it and save it for the summer when I'll be looking for something creative to do. No promises, though!

Subject: RE: Frisbee sonnet:Fun for choral composers?
From: Mark Cohen
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 02:09 PM

Permission granted, of course...to anyone who wants to use it.

Aloha,
Mark

Subject: RE: Frisbee sonnet:Fun for choral composers?
From: Stephen L. Rich
Date: 22 Apr 02 - 02:33 PM

Mark -- I don't know any choral composers. I do, however, know a couple of psychiatrists with some openings in thier calendars. :>))

Seriously, that's a wonderful sonnet (a bit twisted, but still wonderful) and a tune did occur to me for it.

Stephen

Subject: RE: Frisbee sonnet:Fun for choral composers?
From: IvanB
Date: 23 Apr 02 - 12:20 AM

In my college days, I lived on the top floor of the oldest dormitory on campus. It had a wonderfully narrow, long hallway, which someone figured would be ideal for playing Frisbee. Since the reg types were far too heavy to be whizzing down the hallway when residents might be coming out of their dorrways at any time, we found that the plastic lid of a three pound coffee can was the ideal size and weight to cover the length of the hallway and yet not be too injurious to anyone who might get in its path.

My budding Frisbee career came to a screeching halt when we hit one of the light fixtures causing the globe to fall off and break. I'll never be convinced it wasn't loose to begin with, but we were ordered to cease and desist. Would that I'd had Mark's sonnet at that time. It might have struck a sympathetic chord in the bureaucrats who decided we could have no more Hall Frisbee matches.

This was in 1959, and probably had a deleterious effect on world coffee futures for some time.

Subject: RE: Frisbee sonnet:Fun for choral composers?
From: GUEST,Roger O'K
Date: 23 Apr 02 - 07:28 AM

Waytago, Mark. And I appreciated your sound posting ;o) on the Mac virus thread.

I spent a year in Germany (as a rather square postgrad studying German) during which I hung out with some US students from Lehigh who gave me my first experiences of both frisbee and dope. Among the keepsakes which they left me when we went our separate ways were a glow-in-the-dark frisbee which is still somewhere in the basement, a Lehigh teeshirt which I still occasionally wear when I'm gardening, and an abiding sense of what the American positive spirit is all about - enjoying what's good rather than picking things over for faults. Don't like what the US under present management is doing in world affairs, but that doesn't mean I'm blindly anti-American or anti-semitic as some people have suggested in other threads.