On listening (yet again) to Hamilton

Part of a conversation in a separate blog with two colleagues, Mary and CeCe.

I love cooking, and every afternoon I spend an hour or more in the kitchen making stuff. It's an especial pleasure right now because there's usually produce from the vegetable garden to inspire me.

I'll often listen to an audiobook or a podcast or some music while I cook. This has been particularly wonderful since getting hearing aids a month or so ago. My iphone pumps the story or the program or the music straight into my ears via bluetooth into the hearing aids. The quality is great. The sound seems to be coming from inside my head!

Yesterday I listened (again) to the Hamilton soundtrack. 

I've loved this music for years, and when Jo and I visited New York a few years ago, we spent a ridiculous amount of money getting tickets to see the show live. 

It was worth every cent!

So, as I say, I listened to it all yesterday as I cooked. It's so full of pulsing life, so inventive, and so full of those poetic techniques (including ones that I've learnt just from listening to Mary and reading Mary's response to Scott in our story!) that are really so wonderful but which get killed stone dead in the way they're sometimes treated in English classes.

Each song seems different from its predecessor, drawing on so many different musical traditions (including very contemporary ones, like rap). Here's just one example:

Click on (or copy and paste) the link to hear it:

The vague ghost of a possible idea occurred to me.

Wouldn't a Hamilton-like musical - with (as in our Changing English story) different characters and voices and perspectives, including the voice of a poem - set in an English classroom be a fun thing to do! 

This is, no doubt, a crazy idea, way beyond my capacities. But in this preliminary time when we're just playing around with ideas, it's fun to think about.