The Waste Land

T.S. Eliot is one of my two most favorite poets of all time. I've shared before my least favorite poet, but today I'd like to share with you something I love more than anything.

I did my Master's Thesis on a creative retelling of The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, which as I get older, becomes more and more of a reality to me (I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled, after all). I tore that poem to bits and incorporated almost every corner of my psyche into that presentation. Things like the Ballad of Bucky the Bear and a rabbit hole *of limited consequence are parts of that, as well as Caedmon's Hymn, which I still hope to get performed someday.

But using Prufrock was really just a test run for a much larger, more ridiculous project, which I'd wanted to explore for a long time. 20 years ago I read The Waste Land for the first time and I thought to myself, "this is a symphony. This really needs to be a symphony." Somewhere in the aether of my old school programs and materials there's a little book with a copy of The Waste Land covered in pencil marks denoting solo sections, key relationships, and melodic ideas. I don't know where that book is, but it'd be interesting to compare with this, which I just completed during my isolation (see previous post- I guess this should be filed under #4)

All told, The Waste Land symphony runs around an hour and fifteen minutes, for large orchestra, choir and soloist. And it will never get performed. My next project is to make as beautiful a computer-generated performance of this piece as I can, for my peace of mind. Then, maybe I can lay it to rest. Of course, the corpse might begin to sprout, if I'm not careful.