A number of years ago I stumbled across a book by Douglas Hofstadter, the brilliant and precocious author of Gödel, Escher, Bach - this later tome entitled Le ton beau de Marot. The work is essentially about the nature of language, meaning, understanding, and ultimately artificial intelligence - the usual stuff he's interested in. However it uses as a departure point the quest to translate a little poem by the 16th century French poet Clément Marot. I'm afraid I lost patience with the book after a couple of hundred pages, but I remained charmed and fascinated by the little 'cigar-shaped poem' as he calls it, and ultimately had the notion to set it to music.
As I am a 'gentleman' composer, that is I write for my own pleasure and not on a regular basis, and don't have a firmly evolved personal style, this proved exceedingly difficult, in particular realizing all the little notes of the piano part, as I was largely developing a harmonic language from scratch. Finally, when after many months and countless hours of experimentation and rehashing I at last settled on a more or less finished form, I found myself the proud papa of... about 100 seconds of music.
It dawned upon me only then that there's not really a lot to do with a single song of less than two minutes' duration, and so I gradually resigned myself to the idea that I would have to write a few more to go with it. By that time my great friend and colleague, the pianist Amy Lin, had relocated to Strasbourg, France, and was good enough to bring me at some point a paperback collection of Marot's poems. And therein, to my great pleasure, I found any number of incredibly charming and delightful verses, and very amenable to lyrical setting, many of them in fact being actually written to be sung, though the original music is lost.
From these I settled on three more poems to adapt, and fortunately their setting proved at least somewhat less arduous than the first - on a per second basis at any rate. This gave me in due time a set of four, which I in turn realized wasn't quite finished as it was quite impossible to go directly from the tragic first song to what is now the very facetious third; but reopening the collection I happily fell upon another verse I love perhaps the best of all, and which fit nicely as the second song - and thus arrived at the final form. (Unless of course I decide to add some more at a later date. But in that case I will have rewritten this essay, so you won't have read that last sentence... which is incidentally an example of exactly the sort of circular paradox that permeates Hofstadter's books.)
As I am essentially a chameleon as a composer, the style of these songs is almost entirely a function of the poetry, and is thus decidedly 'French', even if I am not and can't particularly imagine deploying this idiom in another context.