Foundations of Music as an Art of Heartwarming Publications

“In this paper I hope to open your mind to the foundations of music as an art of heart-warming publications. Langston Hughes helps us relate to the genre of the blues, to a release of sorrow and, how “negro struggles” could be worked through by listening to the blues. John Keats gives us his example of how the night gale’s song represents an unbothered presence that is disconnected from the tragedies of day, afterlife, and moral concerns. Langston Hughes and John Keats both use music as a way to communicate and to understand one another.

The reader should think the value of music as a mental state of solitude through an artistic view and a race-caused view. Each poet shows how they are detached from the everyday world and how they use music to cope.

Jazz is a type of music that is also associated with the blues. This music often is related to sadness and hardship. Hughes’ feeling of being broke and filled with anguish in this poem, could show his reaction to the suffering and the racial issues that were taking place in Harlem throughout the U.S in the 1900s. The gloomy flow of the “Weary Blues”, mainly focuses on the readers capability to relate with the emotions that are released into the poem. The blues is a central feeling that is experienced by everyone at some point. Hughes sings: “Ain’t got nobody but ma self… I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’… And put ma troubles on the shelf…” (Hughes, 20-22). By this stanza the reader can understand his feeling of sorrow but also see the reason to still get through a situation. In journal article: To the Tune of Those Weary Blues: The Influence of the Blues Tradition in Langston Hughes’s Blues Poems, it says, “Hughes’s attitude toward the material itself is evident: “The real Negro blues are as fine as any folk music we have.” He feels that the blues and spirituals are “the two great Negro gifts to American music” … “usually sung by one man or woman alone”; they are “songs folks made up when their hearts hurt… sad funny songs.

Too sad to be funny, and too funny to be sad;” (Tracey, pg.79) This small excerpt gives an example of how the blues give off a feeling of being depressed and hopeless. These feelings that the blues give off will help the reader to be able to comprehend the suffering that black people are facing. In this Tracey feels that most readers of Black literature can tell that Langston Hughes drew upon the blues as the primary source for much of his work, specifically his poetry. With the blues, it often shows an incomplete knowledge of the genre, an inability to explore the blues influence, or they assume that the reader has a deep understanding for the music already. Langston Hughes’s poem “The Weary Blues” uses a lot of different literary devices such as onomatopoeia and assonance to give the poem an intense feeling of despair that allows the reader to feel like they are actually listening to the blues lyrics that follows throughout the poem. In A “”High Tension”” in Langston Hughes’s Musical Verse, it says, “Black musicians, however, frequently drew the wary gaze of the white world, too, something they were keenly aware of. Within their music and the literature that employs their music, white presence is constantly felt, simultaneously revealing its “”fundamental role in structuring black cultural forms”” (Bernard 268) and complicating any formulation of an independent and insular black vernacular culture to form the basis of a black aesthetic. Black music was in many ways shaped by its constant engagement with the unique culture of suspicion and surveillance from which it emerged” (Nielson, pg.167) This excerpt helps the reader understand how black music has been linked to the development of the white culture. Black music has changed completely free of white influence. As a result, this also shows how Hughes music is a kind of resting place for black culture.

Keats uses an artistic approach to contradict fantasy/reality and life/death. In the beginning of “Ode to a Nightingale” the author becomes intrigued by the bird’s peaceful song. The mood that Keats sets is low and depressed but the nightingale’s song brings a state of serenity that allows him to leave reality. Throughout the poem, the song becomes a strong spell that leaves behind the mortal world. In, Hardy’s “”Darkling Thrush””: The “”Nightingale”” Grown Old”, it says, “Asserting that the bird is a symbol of the visionary imagination and that hope of identification with it provides the drive in both poems, Perkins concludes that although the Hardy speaker fails to achieve identification, he does not challenge the Tightness of the bird’s joy. “”The Darkling Thrush,”” Perkins says, “”presents not a speaker who asserts a mournful pessimism as a necessary reflection from the facts of life, but rather one who feels himself to be incapable of seeing whole, being in some way stunted and incomplete”” (Perkins, p. 264) (May, p. 1).He comes to the conclusion that the nightingale’s song has a bigger impact than his own imagination. It seems that it doesn’t take as much effort on his end to finish listening to the nightingale’s song. He clearly wants to stay with the bird, this may show that its song makes him happy, but could also sensor loneliness. The exhilaration of Keats inspiration coordinates with the nightingale’s song and lets the reader vision themselves with the bird in a darkened forest. The uplifting music may indicate the ambiance of dying while intoxicated by the nightingale’s song he forgets about experiencing any pain or disappointment. The nightingale flies away, this frazzles him so much he can’t determine if he’s asleep or awake.

Although, Langston Hughes and John Keats poems both focus in on similar themes. Music being the primary theme, shows how both poets were using music as a coping mechanism to get through times of depression and weariness. Both poems address the universal point of how music is valued in a race-caused environment and an artistic view of struggles. This helps the reader understand music as an emotional way to communicate social problems.”

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