We are the music makers
and we are the dreamers of dreams
I can always very clearly remember the voice - of Willy Wonka, as it turned out - and the mellow bass, and the cyclic transformed piano, a tune that I can effortlessly reproduce at any time. We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams. I first heard it when I was listening to Aphex Twin's We Are the Music Makers, from his Selected Ambient Works 85-92, a tape I had just bought from a small underground music shop in Varna, in the first days of my university studies there, in 1997.

It was only years after, while researching 19th century English poems for my Literature classes, that I found out about Arthur O'Shaughnessy's Ode. The poem was written in 1874 and is by far O'Shaughnessy's most influential piece. It was translated to music by Sir Edward Elgar in 1912, and later spoken by Willie Wonka in the 1971 kids film Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. It was from here that the crazy British DJ and producer, Aphex Twin, obtained the voice sample he used in his ambient piece, created sometime in the late 1980s. The song was the vessel that carried the Ode through time to reach me.

This is a tune that will every so often pop up in my mind and I will start humming it. Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-tam-ta-tam-tam-tam. We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams. I feel inspired by this simple sentence, uttered by a naive child. It always brings me confidence, reassures me that creation is omniscient.

It appears this tune, this line of poem, this film character's utterance, has been inspiring to many artists. The sentence has been used in no less than 30 music pieces or films, and has even appeared in advertisements - perhaps surprisingly, in computer commercials. There is also a band and an album (another band's) by the name We Are the Music Makers.

This is an example of a cross-media remix: originally a text, it was made into a song, then spoken in film, then mixed in a large number of musical pieces of various styles and featured on adverts, T-shirts, logos, graffiti walls etc.

REFERENCES:
Aphex Twin's piece: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vlcn-xrV27s
The scene from the film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R15AS5LIJWI
The Author: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_O%27Shaughnessy
Some usages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_the_Music_Makers