A Waking Dream: A Note on the Musical Composition of Keats' Ode to a Nightingale [Kirchner]

Ode to a Nightingale presents some difficult complexities in its composition. We are never quite sure about the chronology of the poem. Keats seems to weave in and out of the dream world, as well as ending where he began in the first stanza. Christi and I considered writing music for each stanza and then mixing up the songs out of order, but this didn’t work well at all. Even if the “time” of the poem is malleable, Keats’ words and lines are introduced for a reason. Instead, we decided to change our method of composing music altogether. We instead decided to create a musical quilt of thematic ideas rather than a stilted collection of songs. Like a recurring dream, Ode to a Nightingale consists of recurring characters and themes throughout the poem. Some of these themes and motifs are:

The Nightingale herself
Longing for escape/ drunken bliss
Sickness/palsy
Love of death
Darkness
The bell
Ruth

Themes should not be relegated to one stanza or song in this case. Instead, we decided that the entire piece should function like a collection of motifs rather than individual melodic sections. Even when new motifs are introduced, they are haunted by other images and characters in the poem. This changes the stability of the music. Listeners are repeatedly set off balance as melodic ideas fade in and out of the piece. This is not to say that our interpretation of Ode to a Nightingale lacks melody. In fact, the piece itself is highly melodic and follows a similar compositional structure to 18th century Sonata form.

The difference lies in the repetition of ideas and the contrapuntal voicing of the piano and violin. Two instruments are kind of lame when you think of the enormous palette Keats used to write the Nightingale poem. What we hope to achieve is to use the intimacy of these instruments as an interpretation of the narrator’s loneliness and loss in the poem. At first, we thought it might be interesting to have one instrument be the narrator and the other instrument the Nightingale, but the poem does not allow for this uniform characterization.

“Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy”

At times the narrator becomes the bird and hopes to “fly to thee” and form “wings of Poesy.” One could argue that the narrator never achieves his desire to become the bird, but to do this would undercut the importance of desire and dreaming in the poem. If the Nightingale is a dream, than he is an object of the narrator’s imagination. Therefore, we cannot and should not separate these two characters. So how do we address the nightingale in the music? Christi and I decided to create our central theme around the bird, and let this theme infect each and every stanza in a different way. Sometimes Keats directly addresses the Nightingale, and other times the bird is less apparent in the poem. Since every stanza includes a new musical idea, we can actually let the Nightingale change the direction of the theme in positive or negative ways depending on the stanza.