Ern Malley: the musical

From
www.abc.net.au:

Ernest Lalor "Ern" Malley (April 14, 1918 - July 23, 1943) is one of the best-known names in the history of Australian poetry. Malley was born in Liverpool in 1918 and migrated to Australia as a child with his parents and his older sister, Ethel. His father died in 1920, and after his mother died in 1933, Malley lived alone in Sydney while working as an insurance salesman.

After his death in May 1943 at the age of 25 from "Graves' Disease," his sister Ethel, found a pile of unpublished poems among his belongings, sent them to Max Harris, a 22-year-old avant garde poet and critic in Adelaide, who in 1940 had started a modernist magazine called Angry Penguins. Harris read the poems and thought that he had just discovered a poet in the same class as W. H. Auden or Dylan Thomas.

But there was a small catch. Ern Malley's collection of 17 poems under the title The Darkening Ecliptic was an elaborate hoax perpetrated by poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart on the pretentious, overbearing Max Harris.

Ern Malley never existed.

McAuley and Stewart lifted words and phrases from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, a Collected Shakespeare and a Dictionary of Quotations, opening the books at random, choosing words and phrase haphazardly, weaving them into nonsensical sentences, misquoting them, making false allusions, and deliberately perpetrating bad verse and awkward rhymes.

Australia of 1943 loved this joke. Ern Malley was on the front pages for weeks. Harris was humiliated, and Angry Penguins soon folded. (Ern Mally was also the subject of Peter Carey's novel: My Life as a Fake.

And now for the musical.

At the University of Melbourne, composers at the Faculty of Music have been taking the poems and creating musical works. Their latest project is Ern Malley. 11 songs have been composed for voice and piano, some for baritone and some for soprano, all new.

And, since, it was a hoax and written by two people who didn't want to be acknowledged, there is no copyright issue involved.

Read more: http://www.abc.net.au/centralvic/stories/s1879885.htm