Editing Edward Lear (section)

===Composer and musician===
[[File:Lear 1887.jpg|thumb|upright|Lear in 1887, a year before his death. His arm was bent as he was holding his cat, [[Foss (cat)|Foss]], who leapt away.]]
Lear primarily played the piano, but he also played the accordion, flute, and small guitar.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Lodge |first1=Sara |title=Inventing Edward Lear |date=2019 |publisher=Harvard University Press |isbn=978-0-674-98905-4 |page=22 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=6yuBDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA22 |language=en}}</ref> He composed music for many Romantic and Victorian poems, but was known mostly for his many musical settings of Tennyson's poetry. He published four settings in 1853, five in 1859, and three in 1860. Lear's were the only musical settings that Tennyson approved of. Lear also composed music for many of his nonsense songs, including "The Owl and the Pussy-Cat", but only two of the scores have survived, the music for "The Courtship of the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bò" and "The Pelican Chorus". While he never played professionally, he did perform his own nonsense songs and his settings of others' poetry at countless social gatherings, sometimes adding his own lyrics (as with the song "The Nervous Family"), and sometimes replacing serious lyrics with nursery rhymes.<ref>Noakes, Vivien. ''Edward Lear: The Life of a Wanderer'', Revised Edition, pp. 99–100, 2004, {{ISBN|9780750937443}}</ref>