Thursday, November 10, 2005
We are the music makers
Fans of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the original film adaptation, will doubtless remember the wonderful line intoned by Gene Wilder aka Willy Wonka “We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.” Fans, moonlighting as Musos will also recall hearing the Wilder sample, on Ex:El a 1991 release by Mancunian electrofathers, 808 State. It is, however, a little know fact that the line is taken, not from Dahl’s writing, but a 1894 poem 'Ode', penned by a Londoner - one Arthur O’ Shaughnessy. Ode was previously set to music by Edward Elgar in his "Opus 69", and also by the composer Zoltán Kodály. The first of nine stanzas is especially memorable:
We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
