Cerys Matthews on setting Dylan Thomas’s poems to music

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/24/cerys-matthews-dylan-thomas-childs-christmas

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Dylan Thomas, whose centenary we will celebrate on Monday, was the most musical of poets. His work is so full of rhythm and melody that one of life’s great pleasures is to read him aloud, feeling those syllables roll around your mouth while the rhythms find their ebb and flow. It is no surprise that his poetry has exerted a special appeal to composers. It was his childhood friend Daniel Jones – a fellow Kardomah boy with whom Dylan would talk “Einstein and Epstein, Stravinsky and Greta Garbo, death and religion, Picasso and girls” – who provided music for the songs in Under Milk Wood as well as dedicating his Fourth Symphony to Dylan’s memory. Stravinsky himself set “Do not go gentle into that good night”. Later, jazz maestro Stan Tracey, composers John Corigliano, Mark Anthony Turnage and many others would be inspired by his work.

I was brought up in Swansea. Our house enjoyed almost the same view over the crescent of Swansea Bay as had Dylan’s childhood home in Cwmdonkin Drive. I knew about Dylan and I read his work. But the idea that I should set his work to music didn’t come until about 10 years ago, when I was living far from Swansea, in South Carolina.

It was Christmas and on our tree was a decoration in the form of a miniature book of Dylan’s story-cum-memoir A Child’s Christmas in Wales. I don’t keep still very often, but I was heavily pregnant at the time and so I sat down and read it from beginning to end. I’d enjoyed it as a youngster, but that day in America, as I joined Dylan in his recollections of Christmases past – “I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was 12 or whether it snowed for 12 days and 12 nights when I was six … ” – it suddenly seemed even more brilliant, capable of evoking Christmas anywhere in the world, no matter where you are from. And as I was reading it, I also thought of Prokofiev’s wonderful children’s story set to music, Peter and the Wolf. I’ve always loved that marriage of music and narration, and I thought then that A Child’s Christmas could, and should, also dance with music.

It has taken a long time for that idea to become a reality, but that Christmas decoration was the start of me falling back in love with Dylan and his work. Since then I’ve read just about everything he wrote, and for the past five years, I’ve been performing little excerpts and readings of poetry live as well as on my radio show. The strange thing is not that I came back to this great work, but why I left it for so long. Especially as my uncle Colin Edwards had done so much to preserve the memory of Dylan.

Colin, who died in 1994, was a radio journalist and documentary film-maker. Less than a decade after Dylan died, aged only 39 in 1953, Colin set about putting together the largest body of interviews on tape about Dylan and recorded conversations with just about anyone who had come into contact with him. He travelled to Czechoslovakia, Italy and Iran, where Dylan had gone to write a film script for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. He interviewed Dylan’s mother, people who had known Dylan when he was a child, close Swansea friends such as the “communist grocer” Bert Trick as well as literary figures such as Robert Lowell. In all, he collected more than 200 hours of tape recordings.

In listening to the tapes, while making a radio programme about them, I felt as if I had access to a lost world; at times, the interviewees gave a hilarious depiction of life in the early 1960s – one young woman confesses to not knowing what the word “lesbian” means, thinking it is a kind of omelette – as well as one that was beautiful and hugely moving. Most of all, they explicitly challenged the two-dimensional, cartoon version of Dylan the womaniser and drinker that was already emerging just a few years after his death. He was never just that and the first-hand testimonies of those who knew him best reveal a much more complicated, and contradictory, man.

So Dylan has always been present in my life and when the time came, it seemed the most natural thing to combine his work with music. It is probably no coincidence that among my other favourite poets both WB Yeats and Robert Burns were collectors of songs. In Welsh, as in Hebrew and Somali, a single word covers both poetry and music. The early Welsh bards would compose their verses at the harp. It was performed poetry from the beginning, so I was never nervous that adding music was the equivalent of drawing a moustache on the Mona Lisa. It was listening to Max Richter’s piece inspired by TS Eliot’s The Waste Land that led me to read the poem for the first time. I wanted to know where the composer was coming from. The two forms feed off each other; when it works, it feels as if you’ve made a new piece of art.

But you have to get it right. You have to have music that works with the rhythm and the feel of the verse. Just as America was important to Dylan’s story, so it has been important to this project, as I began work with composer and arranger Mason Neely, from Chattanooga, Tennessee. I wanted the music for A Child’s Christmas – subtitled “An adventure with orchestra” – to be in keeping with something like the great Bernard Herrmann soundtracks for Hitchcock’s films. It veers towards the classical and is performed by some of the country’s leading players: Catrin Finch on harp, Alice Neary on cello, and David Adams on violin. As a scored piece, with more formal arrangements and composition, it is new level of musical ambition for me. The project will culminate in December 2016 when it will premiere as a Christmas ballet at the Millennium Centre in Cardiff.

The musical settings of the poems are a little less formal. When you are dealing with works such as “Should lanterns shine” – written before he was 20 – or “Fern Hill” or “And death shall have no dominion” you have to be careful about not being too busy with the music. There is one standalone reading with no music, an excerpt from Dylan’s last radio essay, “Laugharne”, written in October 1953 and broadcast on 5 November from Laugharne school hall. In the audience was Dylan’s wife, Caitlin, who received a telegram that evening saying that he was in a coma in New York. He died four days later.

I’ve also adapted Daniel Jones’s tune, itself based on a centuries-old melody, for “The Reverend Eli Jenkins’ Prayer” from Under Milk Wood. It is so simple and poignant, as are the words: “Every morning when I wake/ Dear Lord, a little prayer I make/ O please do keep Thy lovely eye/ On all poor creatures born to die.” And, like all Dylan’s work, it actually improves the longer you live with it. Rereading and relistening is always rewarded with Dylan Thomas. Words and sounds combine to be simultaneously fresh and familiar, as befits a poet and performer who never prefaced his readings with any explanation beyond a simple “I am going to read aloud now.”

• A Child’s Christmas, Poems and Tiger Eggs is released this month, available from earthquakeltd.com. Archive Hour: Cerys Goes Under Milk Wood is on Radio 4 tonight at 8pm. cerysmatthews.co.uk.