Certainly any of the better pastoral pieces provide lovely background music to Swann's works. Among my favorites are
Holst's Egdon Heath ;
Vaughn Williams' Lark Ascending, and portions of
Smetana's Moldau.
Without in any manner denying the beauty of all of these pieces, however, I feel that no pastoral piece is more appropriate for complementing Swann's words than
Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe
simply because it expresses the same sexual longing and uncertainty that typifies so much of Swann's work--and matters are resolved for the young man in question by an older woman, as in so many of his narratives (he then goes and shares his new-found knowledge with his true love, again very much like Swann).
I remember the day I was first introduced to Thomas Burnett Swann's writings. It was September 15th, 1978; Fayaway and I spent the entire day in Griffith Park, during the course of which we took turns reading aloud to one another Swann's Green Phoenix. We then went and joined the Tree People--folks who want to enjoy the concerts at the Greek Theatre without paying, and with this goal in mind, clamber up into the branches of a friendly pine or oak and view the concert from their improvised crows' nests. The performer that night was Barry Manilow, who had for some time been one of Fay's favorite singers; he was supporting his album
Even Now
, and it has since been one of my all-time favorite albums. And because of the conflation of that concert and our reading Swann together, and my first exposure to his work, this album and Swann fit perfectly together for me. Barry's sentimentality complements that of Swann very nicely.
As John Clute points out, the sense of belatedness--the feeling that the best has passed, and that time has left one behind--is central to Swann's work. The central motif of his work is the struggle between time passing and the desire that time cease fleeting and stay put! This gives his work an overwhelming sense of belatedness, as John Clute points out--the feeling that the best has passed, and that time is moving us forward into an ever worsening future. One feels that longing for things past, for the beauty of the days of yore, in Ravel's Pavane for a Dead Princess. Moving, stirring, and sorrowful without being melancholy--one feels sorry for the princess, but also sorry for oneself that those days, so beautifully portrayed here, are so far removed from our own.
John Denver's connection with nature was deep and everlasting, as many of his songs reveal. He celebrates the beautiful and pastoral in the wilderness, as in his songs on Spirit, I Want to Live, and Windsong.
I have often been tempted to pen a tale of a songster such as him encountering a Not-World and being allowed to head back to civilization only on the condition that he keep his discovery a secret--a secret he reveals only in his subsequent tunes. Denver treated nature as a lover, as revelation, and as a home, as do many of Swann's protagonists, and for that reason I find his music a fit background to Swann's works.
There are a number of reasons that I find Jethro Tull's music to be a fitting backdrop for Swann's writing. First is the common pagan milieu, though Swann's is generally classical, while Jethro Tull's is set in rural England. Following from this connection is the band's emphasis on dalliance under the open sky, as in "Acres Wild" from Heavy Horses, and "Velvet Green" from Songs from the Wood ("Hunting Girl" from that last album features a woman whose behavior reminds me of Arachne Dobbins in The Not-World or Saffron from The Forest of Forever--apparently not to Swann's liking, but there's no disputing taste). Swann too portrayed many an al fresco fling in his works, though usually in climes more mild than Britannia's. It is one of the things that I find endearing about both the band and the author, and Fay and I take inspiration from them whenever the opportunity presents itself.
Like Swann, Jethro Tull's lyrics note the passing of the old ways--whether they be pagan or merely the natural aging process of the individual; the sense of belatedness is palpable in many of the band's tunes, such as "Living in the Past," "Skating Away on the Thin Ice of a New Day," and "Thick as a Brick"--all available on Original Masters. This seeming preoccupation with the past is balanced by such tunes as "Too Old to Rock 'n' Roll, Too Young to Die"--and the members of the band are themselves proof of the same (even if, during their "Dinosaurs of Rock and Roll" tour, they entered and exited the stage on wheelchairs, crutches, and stretchers).
Swann's writings are what I like to call "thoughtfully sentimental"--pensive and emotional at the same time, and informed by a deeper awareness of our place in the cosmos and the brevity of life, without despairing or promoting negative existentialism. For a number of years, KNX-FM, a radio station in Southern California, had the same sort of mood--relaxed, without eating lotuses; informed and political, without being shrill. Fay and I would listen to that station while reading Swann (though not while reading aloud); we were very sad to see it disappear in 1983 and then again, after a brief resurgence, in 1988. Now, thanks to my efforts to gather together videos of the songs that were played on KNX-FM on a playlist at youtube, we can listen to the station and read Swann again today! The first video is "House at Pooh Corner" by Kenny Loggins, a song inspired by the same books that led Swann to include bears as characters in nearly every one of his longer works.
Though I have tried to meld my enjoyment of Swann's works with that of the Incredible String Band, I have so far not met with success: though both phenomena are infused with the pagan sensibilities that arose out of the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, Swann's is informed by his reaction to Puritanical currents in American thought, while The String Band's music is a rejection not merely of a current, but of the river, the bed through which it flows, and time itself. As such, I find that their works, enjoyed in close temporal proximity, do not speak to one another.
Notwithstanding, Mike Heron was inspired by Swann's Wolfwinter to pen the tune "Ithkos." Since the webpage on which I found this information is now defunct, I have cut & pasted the relevant information below. The original page was located here,
and it can be accessed at this page of the Internet Archive:
Hard Rope And Silken Twine
Ithkos - the lyrics are influenced by the novel 'Wolfwinter' by Thomas Burnett Swann, this from Nick:
I've just been rereading the interesting but rather forgotten Floridan fantasy novelist Thomas Burnett Swann (1928-76), who in a brief, intense career curtailed by cancer published 18 novels and a number of superior shorter tales, mostly set in classical or near eastern antiquity, and nearly all centring on ancient prehuman species - dryads, fauns, centaurs, and the like - surviving in small pockets of wildwood. The quality of his novels got very variable after 1968 or so when he took up writing full-time and started knocking them out at a rate of two or three a year; but one of his best is Wolfwinter, whose first and only edition was as a Ballantine paperback dated November 1972. It's a strange historical fantasy about a member of Sappho's circle who becomes pregnant after a fling with a satyr, is then married off to a Greek merchant from southern Italy, and has to save her half-human child by fleeing with it into the wilds, where she gets caught up in a war between the forest halflings and a sinister alliance of ghost-men and wolves, before eventually metamorphosing into the local Sibyl. The novel won the Phoenix Award for Fantasy in 1973.
Why, the glazed looks say, is he telling us this? Well, Swann's novel opens on Lesbos, and bells start ringing in the second paragraph with the phrase "bark-brown eyes" (a recurrent image, as it turns out). There's a reference on the second page to the heroine's attempt "to flush my cheeks with carmine". On page 3, a character jokes about dedicating her virginity in perpetuity to "Artemis, the chaste huntress". By the time we hit the bottom of page 3, guns really start smoking: there's a festival of Aphrodite, in which we meet the line "The temple of Aphrodite was sweet with sandarac" (3), closely followed by "The air was salt-fresh from the Aegean and pungent from the resin of torches" (4). On p. 19, a merchant is introduced "whose ships carry my father's grain from the hinterlands of the Black Sea to Lesbos, Miletus, and then to Sybaris" - among whose "fluted columns" (32) the whole second chapter take place (and which, incidentally, the heroine bears great scorn, though not in those exact words...).
Later chapters go off in a different direction from Mike's song and haven't been so visibly used, but they do clear up a couple of things that have long puzzled me. One is that you can't sail out from Sardis, as it's 80 miles inland; but Sardis turns up on p. 66 of Wolfwinter in a list of cities ("Athens. Miletus. Sardis.") where the other two are both ports, and a reader who knew his Lydian mode better than his Lydian geography could be more than forgiven for assuming Sardis was likewise. The other is the name Ithkos itself, which isn't a real Greek name and has no obvious etymology; but Swann's novel has a major supporting character called Iskos, who comes of ancient near eastern stock and whose name is evidently supposed to sound like a generic but unspecified ancient language. This is evidently why Mike adapted it for his hero, who may be either Greek or Lydian.
As'll be clear from all this, the actual storyline of the song owes nothing to the novel beyond the idea of a merchant trading between Lesbos and Sybaris; the debts are entirely on the level of phrases, images, and names. Nevertheless, Swann's novel is clearly the principal source for the most striking touches of historical and lyrical detail - apart from "Ithkos wipes his mouth and drops the wineskin", which is wonderful and very novelistic but seems entirely Mike's own.
Thomas Burnett Swann died on May 5, 1976. Apart from a small-press omnibus of his minotaur trilogy, his novels have never been reprinted. He never knew about the ISB song.
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