Poem 22: I’m past the age of Mozart

I’m past the age of Mozart when he died.
I’ve yet to write my stuff, although I’ve tried.
Forty one symphonies tucked deep in brain
Await the light of day to give me fame
And shoot Immortal Me afar and wide.

The pile of masterpieces still denied,
Sit there because my mind is old and dried
And won’t produce the notes to light my name.
I’m past the age of Mozart when he died.

When I saw what Bach wrote I could’ve cried,
Each week he tossed out music in his stride.
Shakespeare snuffed it before his sixties came;
And Austen churned out books, yet lived as Jane.
Ah! Most creative artists that I’ve spied
All passed the age of Mozart when he died.

To hear the poem read aloud click HERE.

935. An invisible epidemic

Octavia Pankhurst Gorring-Wilson had a mission in life. It was a calling; a vocation, if you wish. Octavia Pankhurst Gorring-Wilson was one of those relatively rare beings: a feminist musicologist. Her mission in life was to get banned every skerrick of music written in sonata form.

There was good reason for it. For too long Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and most composers since, had got away with blue murder. Not murder exactly; but they had disguised their misogynist bigotries in veils of invisibility.

Everything in sonata form – sonatas themselves, and most symphonies, concertos… – all followed the same course: they were designed for patriarchal subjugation and domestication of the feminine.

This may need a little explaining, but Octavia Pankhurst Gorring-Wilson delighted in explaining. A sonata has two tunes; each in its own key. The first tune is masculine and the second tune is feminine. BUT by the end of the sonata the feminine tune is in the same key as the male tune. The SHE has been vanquished. The female has been made to sing in the same key as the male. She has been made to stand henceforth at the kitchen sink. She has been cruelly subjugated by these composers who don’t and didn’t give a tiddlywink about women’s issues, but walk roughshod over the aspirations of half of society.

Octavia Pankhurst Gorring-Wilson was all for banning ALL music and starting again. Good luck, Octavia.

To listen to the story being read click HERE!