"Words for Music Perhaps and Other Poems" was a volume of W.B. Yeats' work published in 1932, along with one of his greatest poems, Byzantium. The cycle of love poems were written to be spoken or sung to music, but still with the words of the poems as the dominant element in the mixture. The passionate, but sometimes sentimental words finally gained their music in 1960, when the BBC commissioned a new work from Michael Tippett. Tippett had previously written a part song from Yeats' poem Lullaby, took 13 of the poems from "Words for Music Perhaps" and from "A Woman Young and Old" and set them for three speaking voices, and a small chamber ensemble (piano, violin, cello, bass clarinet, trumpet, gong, xylophone)

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