The Sims of the Outer world are seriously into music and poetry, and they start early. They have schools for toddlers where there’s easily as much singing as talking, and even a lot of the talking is in rhyme. There is a toddler song for absolutely everything.

As they grow, even if they are not musicians, they try to have music going on around them. An Outer Sim old enough to drive will, upon getting into their car, immediately turn on the radio.

Then they’ll complain that there is too little music and too many commercials; yet even the commercials have music in them. I don’t know if an Outer Sim will even buy a product that’s advertised without music.

They sing when they bathe. (So do we, if we have enough musical skill – the difference is that they sing whether or not they’re any good at it.)

One of their most popular computer programs is one that lets them share movies. But of those movies, again, a great many are of people singing or making music. Outer Sims are especially pleased when they find a music video that includes the lyrics (the poem that goes with the music.)

This business about lyrics requires more explanation. Outer Sim vocal music can be very pretty even if you don’t understand the words – as is likely to be the case with opera or classical choral music, or anything sung in Gaelic; although the criticism “I can’t even understand the words” is more often applied to popular music. In what’s probably the most demanding form of their vocal music, words per se appear to be optional; listen to how Ella Fitzgerald does it. →

(I’ve steered this introduction around specifically to songs because song is my favorite of all the innumerable forms of Outer Sim music. For the record, there are also ragas, jigs, slow airs, symphonies, marches… and of course there are innumerable forms of song, also. On the page of Janet’s & my favorites, the links will be mostly to Outer Sim “popular” music, which in form is very close to our own.)

Poetry,

conversely, is vocal music without tunes or instruments. I do not yet understand any of the Outer Sim languages (and there are hundreds of them!) well enough to appreciate the very subtle things that a good poet can do with words. So, the “Poetry” section of this site will probably always lag far behind the “Music” section. There is, however, one modern American poet that I particularly like and am looking forward to sharing with Janet: Kahlil Gibran.