The Modern Student’s Guide
to Catullus was performed live at the 1992 annual Classical Association
of New England meeting and at Vermont Latin Day in 1993. Recording
Catullus’ poems as songs began as an effort to create with
modern students that effect the originals may have had on Roman
audiences. It is successful to the degree that it focuses attention
back onto the Latin, rather than the translation. After all,
it was an American poet who said that poetry was what was lost
in translation. The recordings found here facilitate discussion
and exploration of the poems by,
The purpose of the current music
industry seems to be to fix adolescents in a permanent state
of adolescence. Lyric expression, in the best classical tradition,
served more as a means by which the artist wrote himself back
into harmony with his world.
The following pages provide
a song-by-song description of The Modern Student’s Guide
to Catullus. Lead your students in this resuscitation of Latin
(a dead language’s equivalent of recitation). Who knows,
maybe Catullus will in some way be able to lead a resuscitation
of the "Classical" Muse in our own music industry.
In perpetuum,
Ray Koehler
Curator, Museum of Lyric
