Song From the Sound of Music Shakespeare

¶ … Song from the Sound of Music

Shakespeare began the story of Twelfth Night with the line "If music be the food of love play on." Though, in the play, the Duke of Illyria, Orsino, asks for a surfeit of music in the hope that an overkill of love will help him overcome his infatuation for Olivia (Shakespeare, 1.1, 1-18), the line has now become immortalized as audiences have tended to read a wealth of meaning into it. The popularity of the oft-quoted line is hardly surprising given experiential knowledge of music as one of the greatest pleasures of life. Indeed, music sensitizes and heightens all kinds of emotions and moods, ranging from the sentimental, philosophical, and maudlin to the sensual, ecstatic and peppy. But more than anything, the real power of music lies in soothing the soul by enabling a sense of connection to a universal consciousness. The title song of The Sound of Music captures this basic essence of the power of music in its lyrics, music and overall harmonious sound composition.

In many ways, the biggest and most grandiose composer of music is Mother Nature herself. This is a self-evident, elementary truth given the soothing effects of the sound of the waves and the ocean breeze; the melodious chirping of the birds; the tinkling of streams and brooks; and all the sounds of the night. Even the tempestuous fury of a storm resembles an orchestra taking the notes of a music composition to a fever pitch. In fact, it can be said that the very fundamentals of music are drawn from nature or universal consciousness, since the scale of nature includes everything from the universal and sub-atomic to human behavior and consciousness (Wikipedia, 2004).

It is this link of music to nature, in all its glory, that the opening lines of The Prelude and The Sound of Music establishes: "The hills are alive / with the sound of music / with songs they have sung / for a thousand years / the hills fill my heart / with the sound of music / my heart wants to sing every song it hears." The words here are so evocative that even a city dweller living among concrete structures, smog and the raucous sounds of traffic and human babble gets transposed to a very different realm.

The ability of the lyrics to actually capture the imagination of the listener and transpose her or him to another plane altogether, results in also creating a wistful nostalgia, and longing to experience the communion with nature that the song goes on to describe: "My heart wants to beat / like the wings of the birds / that rise from the lake to the trees / my heart wants to sigh like a chime that flies / from a church on a breeze / to laugh like a brook when it trips and falls / over stones on its way / to sing through the night / like a lark who is learning to pray."

The Prelude and The Sound of Music, thus, succeeds in expressing the undeniable ability of nature to arouse all manner of positive human emotions, thereby establishing an essential connection or oneness of human kind to an eternal universal consciousness and truth that is far older and wiser than all the material progress of human civilization. In fact, listening to the song today arouses a sense of alarm that currently human kind is running the risk of destroying that very connection with all the environmental damage, which is taking place. Consider, for example, the threat posed to the Amazon Rain Forest, which is also commonly referred to as 'the lungs of the earth.' Containing around 30% of all the world's known plant and animal species, the Amazon Rain Forest is perhaps one of the most threatened environments on earth, with 16% of the region already deforested and more being destroyed every year (People & the Planet, 2003).

If care is not taken to preserve the delicate, ecological balance of nature, humanity will lose more than just a rich source of food and material. It will lose a source of spiritual and emotional comfort and healing. Indeed, the final lines of The Prelude and The Sound of Music talks about exactly this aspect of the relationship between nature and human needs: "I go to the hills / when my heart is lonely / I know I will hear / what I've heard before / My heart will be blessed / with the sound of music / and I'll sing once more."

Though technically, The Prelude and The Sound of Music falls under the genre of songs, it can well stand on its own merits as a poem as well. The lyrics are so central to the message and the rhythm and meter so simple, that it hardly needs any music accompaniment. "The poet sits...looking at his unorganized, confused outpouring and begins to wonder how to make it sensible to himself and the reader. And so he begins to structure; a change here, a movement there, seeking to craft his vision into an art form. And he discovers rhythm and the picture of a sound." (Goodwin, 1998)

Nature has always been a source of inspiration for poets, songwriters, artists, and musicians. The charm, classical and universal appeal of The Prelude and The Sound of Music lies in the fact that it has so very successfully managed to capture the rhythm and the picture of sound of nature. It is for this reason that the composition is both a song and a poem. Perhaps, it can be said that all poems can be converted into song but the converse does not always hold true.