The Composer The Poet and Film Scores

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PHOENIXOLOGY


A true poet, wrote film-maker Jean Cocteau in 1932, must die several times in order to be reborn. This is what Salvadore Dali meant by phoenixology. Such a poet is on a long and arduous journey; the journey’s goal is a raising of his spirit to a union with the beyond where his works, his opus, really originates. Put another way, the poet’s work is a manifestation of an inner reality, his inner reality, a looking within and a finding God standing within him, mighty, powerful and self-subsisting. In this sense the poet is an intermediary between the world and God; he is a chronicler of the mysteries of existence. Such a poet’s motivation comes from an ennui, an audacity not to play by the old rules and “that spirit of creation which is the highest form of the spirit of contradiction.”1 He uses a language which few speak and few understand. He is the servant of that language, of an unknown Force that lives within him and from Which he transmits messages. The composer of film scores has many commonalities with this poet. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Arthur Evans, Jean Cocteau and His Films of Orphic Identity, The Art Alliance Press, London, 1977, p.145.

I rose from the dead so many times
right back to ’62 October when
we all sat on the eve of destruction
in that Cuban missile crisis;
and especially back in May ’80
when that leaven leavened
my world of being and began
to furnish the power through which
this poetic art was made manifest;1
and, say, ’92, when the phoenix
found a burgeoning poetic life
beyond the ennui and the heart’s
thin soil and rapaciously made
its season in my fevered dreams.2

1 My first two poems came during the winter months of 1980: June to August, after I was stabilized on lithium.
2 Roger White, “Notes on Erosion,” The Witness of Pebbles, 1981, p.70.

Ron Price
4 August 2000
 

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A little note in recognition of John Barry's work writing music scores for film:

EXPRESSING YOUR LIFE IN WORDS

After thirty years of writing music scores for movies, he still wakes up and wants to do better, to get the better sound, the right mix, to lift the audiences higher. He’s never satisfied, always working, continually being renewed by the process and the result. -Ron Price,A summary of the story of John Barry, composer, as presented on Music for Movies, ABC TV, 27 December 1995, 11:00 pm.

If I could put Your life to music
what a sound I’d make to tell
the story to the heart they’d cry
with tears of joy, clear as a bell.

If I could paint Your days on canvas
what beauty would they find,
would lift their faces and their eyes
to some Paradise so kind.

If I could sculpt Your life somehow
and carve it in these stones,
I’d place the soul of all Your days,
in the chink of people’s bones.

But I do not enjoy these skills at all;
my game is all with words
and there just is no way for me
to express Your life in surds.

But I will go on trying;
until the words do end.
Such wondrous vision down so deep
and Mount Everest to send

me to the heights of bliss,
as well as exhaustion’s pit,
to help me keep on going strong
when I’d just like to sit and quit.

Ron Price
27 December 1995
 
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