Middeleeuwse standards

a rose, a lily, spring.me, green a flower, cool oil, sweet perfume all that is sweet in this world is not as sweet as you, my love not as sweet as you For as long as people have been singing songs we have been singing songs of love. It is amazing to think how old some of our love songs are. The Song of Solomon - there is romance in the Bible. There is romance in Gilgamesh, of all places. And the amazing thing is that old love can be just as fresh as new love, probably because not much changes over the years in how people long for each other. We long for someone to love, it works or it doesn't. The rest is just variaMons on a very old, very powerful, very human theme. Thinking of how old love songs still have their power reminded me of the way standards work in jazz. A tune known to all travels across years from musician to musician, from singer to singer, as they each put their own twists on how the tune is thought of, and remembered. Out of curiosity, I once listened to a hundred different versions of the Cole Porter song Love For Sale, a song about a woman forced to sell her body for money, in order to see the range of how singers dealt with the seriousness of the subject. From the pure, upbeat seduction of Eartha Kitt's version to the broken down weariness of Billie Holiday - each different version shows a different facet of the meaning of the song, and all the versions are in dialogue with each other. Each version makes all the others deeper. That is the way a musical tradiMon should work. For my piece - standards - I have rewritten the texts to several love songs by the 14th century composer and poet Guillaume de Machaut and then set them to my own music, in the hope that my songs could be in the same kind of dialogue with his