Playing and Working
In my early compositions I seldom used vocabulary elements that suggested folk or popular music traditions. Then in the late 70s I set some texts that playfully incorporated vernacular language, and I followed suit musically. Since then I have incorporated vernacular materials whenever I felt that doing so helped create artistic results that I liked and that suited the situation. For me, the possibility of including “lowbrow” materials provides opportunities for stimulating, playful twists of language.
In Sin and Syntax Constance Hale calls “the pop, the vernacular, and the mongrel tongues” the most playful forms of language. She writes that “the highbrow and the lowbrow define the exciting edges of prose...the middlebrow dooms it to mediocrity.” For me, playing with mixtures of highbrow and lowbrow musical and verbal languages helps make composing more enjoyable. As a composer and writer I am driven by an obsessive desire to “get things right.” This often makes composing painstaking labor, and, to balance that, while I work I also try to maintain some sense of play.
Every device there is in language is there to be used if you will. Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes, and the twistings and convolutions of words, the inventions and contrivances, are all part of the joy that is part of the painful, voluntary work.—Dylan Thomas