From Shakespeare to Frost

Ducknik and Plotnik saw Macbeth on Friday night and a new musical called Fly By Night Saturday. In Macbeth everybody gets slaughtered, in the musical nobody does. Both shows invoke the supernatural, with a gaggle of old witches leading Macbeth to his own ambitious madness, while a gypsy fortune teller comes up with the best melody in Fly By Night. Damned if she doesn't pull that little riff right out of her crystal ball.



Plottie wants that crystal ball. He's usually pretty good himself at pinpointing the spot in the ether where the graceful melody lies, but some magical hardware would make the proposition a lot less iffy.

People often wonder where a composer finds his music -- after all, there are only so many notes and so many ways to put them together, and people have been using these Western scales for at least 500 years. How can there be anything new?

Same with words -- how can there be any new poems? Or screenplays? Or blogs?

OK, blogs don't count. Most people just copy each other.

But maybe that's what songwriters and poets do too. There are no new melodies, but there are an infinite amount of unique voices to sing them. Everytime a new voice intersects with melody, that melody becomes new too.

Everyone sees the world a little differently. That's why poets can use the same old nouns and verbs to show us a slightly different path.

This was written in 1916.

The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

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