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tunes for kipling verses

06 Jul 11 - 03:37 PM (#3182587)
Subject: tunes for kipling verses
From: GUEST,mg

http://www.kipling.org.uk/settings1.htm
click here

Do we know this Leslie Fish? She seems to have put more tunes to verses than Bellamy.

I need to look at this more closely...I know I have heard WP of Seattle do one...I think Beaches of Lukkannan..I know Gordon Bok has at least one and I am not sure he is in database. Some tunes are so obvious and I am not sure they are in there..we'll duck and we'll dive like little tin turtles for example. In Lowestoft a boat was laid...maybe they are in there.

But I would encourage people to be submitting and saving MP3s etc. mg

06 Jul 11 - 03:53 PM (#3182594)
Subject: RE: tunes for kipling verses
From: Joe Offer

Well, Leslie Fish has a Website, http://lesliefish.com/. I got her confused with Vietnam War folklorist Lydia Fish who's a horse of a different color. Searching Mudcat for Leslie Fish will bring up all sorts of interesting information I hadn't noticed before. What I see of Leslie, reminds me of Sadie Damascus of the San Francisco Folk Music Club.

-Joe-

06 Jul 11 - 08:19 PM (#3182728)
Subject: RE: tunes for kipling verses
From: Joe_F

She is well known in filk & anarchist circles. She has done a lot of things I like (songs of her own as well as settings of Kipling), but, like Kipling himself, is occasionally embarrassing (she doesn't know how to pronounce Rimini, Lalage, or catechise).

07 Jul 11 - 03:16 AM (#3182880)
Subject: RE: tunes for kipling verses
From: Artful Codger

Here (click), courtesy of Google Books, is the score of Elgar's song cycle, Four Songs from "The Fringe of the Fleet", the four songs being
  1. "The Lowestoft Boat"
  2. "Fate's Discourtesy" (Kipling: intro to "Patrols I" = "A Song in Storm")
  3. "Submarines" (Kipling: "Tin Fish" = closing of the section "Four Nightmares", article "Submarines I")
  4. "The [Mine] Sweepers"
The original poems can be found in Kipling's book Sea Warfare (1916), a collection of articles he first published in London newspapers in three series. The first series was titled "The Fringe of the Fleet" and consisted of six articles. Excellent notes on the poems may be found in the Reader's Guide section of the Kipling Society site. The poems are also reprinted separately in the score, but I haven't checked whether they have been altered there in any significant way.

Wikipedia has an interesting article (click) on this song cycle. According to it, Elgar later added a fifth song to the cycle: "Inside the Bar", with words by Sir Gilbert Parker. At the end of the year of their first performance (1917), Elgar learned that Kipling objected to the songs being performed in music-halls. How ironic, considering the sources and inspiration for so much of his material.

07 Jul 11 - 05:45 AM (#3182952)
Subject: RE: tunes for kipling verses
From: davyr

It's been said that Kipling, although no musician himself, often had a tune he was already familiar with in his head when he was writing certain verses (e.g. "Run of the Downs" fitting perfectly to "Floral Dance", as noticed and performed by Peter Bellamy).

"Brown Bess", Kipling's hymn of praise to the famous British Army musket, fits very nicely to the Morris tune "Swaggering Boney" - just a coincidence, or was Kipling aware of the connection between his subject matter and the dance tune celebrating the defeat of Napoleon?

P.S. Can I claim this as Steamfolk, seeing as the alternative title for the Morris dance "Swaggering Boney" is "Travel by Steam"?