A Dream Within a Dream
By Edgar Allan Poe
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
Prelude
A Prelude is an instrumental music genre that began to be composed in the fifteenth century. But, in fact, preludes are older than that because they have their roots in an old intuitive practice that musicians made (and still make today) for tuning up, warming up their fingers, or just improvising. Most preludes are based on a brief instrumental piece, usually played on a keyboard or a string instrument.
The word prelude comes from the Latin noun praeudium, which means “introduction”, as preludes were often used as a preface for larger musical works. The first preludes were composed for organ, harpsichord -piano´s main ancestor-, lute, and many other string instruments.
In the early eighteenth century, Johann Sebastian Bach made preludes popular. In his famous work “The Well - Tempered Clavier” Bach composed 24 preludes as prefaces for a more complex instrumental piece, the Fugue.
Strongly influenced by Bach, many nineteenth century composers such as Chopin, Rachmaninov and Debussy felt attracted to this genre, and gave the prelude a new relevance as an independent concert piece, freeing it from its original introductory purpose.
In the twentieth century, musicians developed the potential of preludes as descriptive and ambient music. Many minimalist composers such as Philipp Glass, Yann Tiersen and the Argentinean Gustavo Santaolalla, used these features to compose memorable film scores.
Composing preludes became a tradition for academic music composers worldwide; the developement of this genre still continuous in our times.