The Dreamers of Dreams

It's a concert week, as it almost always is for me in the week before Thanksgiving, and so I've reached the most challenging part of the month for me in terms of meeting my writing goals. Fortunately, my work schedule is such that yesterday and today were the only days that I had both work and rehearsal, so it won't be as bad as it has been some years.

The piece we're singing this quarter is The Music Makers by Edward Elgar, whom general audiences mostly know for a little ditty called Pomp and Circumstance. I've sung The Music Makers once before, several years ago. It's all right, but it will never be one of my favorites. Musically, it's bit swoopy late-romantic for my tastes, although parts of it are quite beautiful, and others are fun to sing. Probably the most interesting thing about it is the lyrics. It's a setting of the 1873 poem "Ode" by Arthur O'Shaughnessy, which you can read in its entirely here. Most of you will know the first lines, because they're famously quoted in the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (which I have actually never seen), but the rest of the poem is less familiar, and it's rarely reprinted in its entirely. Wikipedia claims it's the origin of the phrase "movers and shakers". There are some neat things about it as a poem -- I like the shifting rhyme scheme -- but it also feels like it hits the theme of the creative man's burden a little hard. So overall I'm not sure how I feel about it. However, the music suits the lyrics well, so on that level I quite enjoy it.