Songs Of The Wandering Aengus: A Song History
"Songs Of The Wandering Aengus," in DAD tuning, is one of the 24 titles in Deborah "DJ" Hamouris's Indian Summer, a collection for standard mountain dulcimer that mixes her own compositions with traditional music.[1] On her own website, Hamouris gives the title in the singular, as "Song of the Wandering Aengus," both in the book's table of contents and among its tablature samples, where it comes with an audio clip.[2] Hamouris is a mountain dulcimer teacher, performer and songwriter who leads the Berkeley Dulcimer Orchestra, and her recordings include The Green Man (2012), made with her folk duo the DulciMates.[3] Her page for that album names the duo as Hamouris and Buffalo and says the album includes a reading of W. B. Yeats's poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus" with solo dulcimer accompaniment.[4][5] The sources consulted here do not say who composed the book's melody, when Hamouris arranged it, or whether it is the same music heard behind the album's reading.[1][2][4]
Winslow Homer, Leaping Trout, watercolor over graphite, 1889. Shown for its subject; it has no connection to the dulcimer piece.
As background on the poem itself, rather than on the dulcimer piece: Yeats included "The Song of Wandering Aengus" in his collection The Wind Among the Reeds,[5] one of his early books of verse, published in 1899.[6] In his notes to the collection, Yeats explained that a Greek folk song had prompted the poem, although he had Ireland and its spirits in mind as he wrote it.[5]
Sources
- DulcimerDownloads: "Deborah Hamouris - Indian Summer".
- DJ Hamouris: "Indian Summer: Music & Reflections by Deborah “DJ” Hamouris".
- DJ Hamouris: "My Story".
- DJ Hamouris: "The Green Man by The DulciMates".
- Project Gutenberg: "The Wind Among the Reeds by W. B. Yeats".
- Britannica: "William Butler Yeats".
- Image: Winslow Homer, Leaping Trout, watercolor over graphite, 1889. The Cleveland Museum of Art.