[progdirjim(Admin)]

Originally posted by Yesspaz
So even though he was deaf, I don't know that we can suppose he was depressed when he wrote "Ode to Joy." As an opposite example, Igor Stravinsky was not deaf when he wrote the unnerving "The Rite of Spring."

I cannot imagine trying to put "Ode To Joy" to any music, nor can I picture writing that portion of the Ninth, whilst depressed. That does not compute to either my analytical (I'm an engineer), or my artistic (I'm an AMATEUR musician, artist, prose writer and poet) side.

John Lennon was an artists. "The Ballad of John and Yoko," "Revolution," and "Julia" all came out of negative feelings. "I Wanna Hold Your Hand," "Two of Us," and "All You Need Is Love" all came out of positive feelings.

Actually, I think Paul wrote all of your positive examples above. Paul was the happy optimist, John the cynic.

To give an opposite example to the James Joyce (and to prove I too can quote poetry from memory ), here's a poem written from a negative feeling, in this case, melancholy. The famous Robert Frost poem, "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening."
<beautiful poem snipped>
As I was writing that, I was thinking about the "art vs. craft" thing. No one will deny the art in that poem, but the amazing thing to me, having written a few things in my time, is the craft.
Four stanzas, PERFECT iambic pentameter, AABA BBCB CCDC DDDD rhyme scheme. The fourth stanza uses a "no-no" in poetry, repitition, to perfect effect. It destroys the rhyme pattern, but more importantly, it is that last line that makes the whole poem work.

That is indeed a beautiful poem, as is much of Frost's work. A little "trick" to making rhyming schemes work is to pick easy words to rhyme. Sounds obvious, but try coming up with a rhyming scheme using "silver" versus "gold" - even though they are similar "symbolically", picking the right word for A in your rhyme scheme is a key. And this is not meant to trivialize Frost - my best work can't compete with his throwaways.

While I agree with some of the sentiments in this thread that you don't need to know jack about music to like it and love it and appreciate it, I believe, to the core, that a knowledge of craft makes you enjoy music more than you would without knowledge of craft. I liked that Frost poem before I understood how it worked. But I like it even more when I was taught how poetry worked. Same with music.

I would agree with Yesspaz on this one. Knowledge is not necessary for, but it usually will enhance, appreciation.