children

Piping Down the Valleys Wild

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

From my Parlando outlook, this is a fine choice to start off a look at our twin girls and boys 1920’s poetry anthologies for National Poetry Month. Today it’s a poem by William Blake, a poet still known and rated today, and a poem that includes a child and praise for music inside of it. It’ll make a natural beginning I figured.

After I made that decision, I started to notice a couple of things. The poem began to seem stranger than it somewhat straightforward first reading might suggest. The odd thing I noticed first was the amount of insistent repetition in it. Lyric poetry, and even more so poetry meant to be sung. will often refrain lines, repeat entire verses or sections — look at many a modern charting pop song and you’ll see hooks as repetitious as today’s poem — but it still struck me as odd. The child continues to ask for song. The piper plays it. Immediately, the child asks for the song again. Parents experienced with young children may relate here — insert your own bête noire kids-song ear worm and insatiable toddler — those requests can be cute and dulling at the same time. Blake’s child is laughing at the time of the first request, weeping at the second, Why? Best guess: because the song is over, and they must hear it again. But then the child asks for a third song — perhaps the same one, perhaps not — and they are asking for it without the piper playing the pipe. Since most pipes are wind instruments it’s likely the piper in the poem hasn’t been singing the first two times.*

Combining the child’s responses after the first two requests which the piper has immediately fulfilled (laughing, weeping) the child “wept with joy” after the third go-round.

The picture I get here is joy in repetition, and woe at ending. The child makes one more request: the piper should cease the singing and write this music down. The piper MacGyvers up a pen and ink and gets to scoring.

Piping Down

Simple guitar chords on the chord sheet this time.

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Then we’re told the child vanishes. This shouldn’t surprise us. If we were paying attention, this child appeared to the piper “on a cloud.” This child wasn’t a flesh and blood child — wasn’t one of the potential readers or listeners to the anthology’s contents — it’s a spiritual emanation of childhood.

OK, that’s a little weird, but Blake was a self-confessed visionary, and literary inspiration stories can be peculiar. Just another day at the poetic office for Blake. And as the piper makes his own pen and ink, I thought of one of the things that I found most inspirational in Blake’s life: that despite literary poverty he mastered the means of creating his own poetry, art, and engraved books.

Just after completing my musical version of this, another area of concern came to me. Just how strange did this seem to the children in the 1920s or to their parents who might read this to them if they were younger children?

I was a young child in post-WWII America, and in my time and place, I would have been puzzled. About the only piper I’d have any reference to was The Pied Piper, a page-bound storybook character. Yes, various kinds of musical pipes were extant then, as there would have been in the 1920s, but nothing I would expect in my time to see being played in wild valleys. Blake’s poem was over a century old when the 1920s anthology was made—  maybe late 18th century England had itinerant rural pipers?

As they grew up, the child reader, then or now, would likely understand this is fantasy, even if exactly what Blake was getting at with his fable might be missed. Its value would remain as a set of word-music that speaks to the joy found in music and the arts.

Is anyone trying to guess if this was in the girls’ or boys’ anthology? Male author. The cloud/child is male, the piper is not gendered. Is joy in music a gender role thing? Not really.

wild valley piper 3

Wilderness cumulous-carried spirit children are not a reliable compositional prompt.

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It’s from the introductory section of the “for girls” book. My music is a simple folk music setting: acoustic guitar and bass, and eventually an Irish tin-whistle for piping. The tin-whistle is a played VI.** Two other instruments make a subtle entry in this recording. There’s a quiet electric piano in the piece, played and mixed so low it almost sounds like an overtone of the guitar, and another VI of a small obscure 1940s keyboard instrument, the Solovox that comes in for the next-to-last verse.

The Solovox was an FDR-era monophonic analog keyboard synthesizer, with glowing tubes and a wood-veneer case like a large table radio of the time. I used it for two reasons. If this song floats in fairy-tale time with children appearing and disappearing out of clouds, I thought the piper’s sound could change from the tin whistle to something more mid-20th century as a marker of how the children the anthologies were written for grew and changed. But also, I’ve seen, even briefly played, a particular real Solovox. The mother of alternative voice and keyboard player in this Project Dave Moore had one, and when he was young his mother would play piano and deftly slip one hand over to play melody lines on a Solovox. Dave now has his mother’s example of this old instrument, and has had it fixed so it plays, though with some glitches.

To hear “Piping Down the Valley’s Wild”  you can use the graphical audio player you should see below. Player vanished?  This highlighted link will open a new tab with an audio player. I plan more poems, adapted musical pieces, and observations from The Girls/The Boys Book of Verse  coming up soon.

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*There are methods to do that, where a singer alternates using their breath to sound the instrument and to sing lines of song. And there are bagpipes and the like where the wind comes from a bellows. But the child has asked the piper to drop their pipe and sing, so it stands to reason this is a request for the piper to sing a song with words after playing instrumentally for two renditions. The song then progresses from melody, to sung words, to finally written words — a plausible metaphor for the writing of a poem.

**I explained VI/Virtual Instrument technology last time, but in short it’s playable software that tries to contain all the sounds an actual instrument makes, often by capturing all conceivable notes and many articulations of those notes with a microphone it makers placed on the real instrument.

National Poetry Month 2024

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Earlier this Spring I had an idea for a Parlando Project feature for this year’s National Poetry Month. It was based on something I read in the blog “My Life 100 Years Ago,*”  as blogger Mary Grace McGeehan turned some of her attention to children’s literature. As those interests crossed over for her, I learned there were a paired set of poetry anthologies from a century ago, one first published in 1922, The Girl’s Book of Verse, and the other the following year, The Boy’s Book of Verse.

A reason I’m drawn to poetry is that poets often examine and see things many others would miss. I read of those two titles and was intrigued. Lots of things to examine. One, the books are gendered — unsurprisingly, they only saw to market two volumes then — and being published in the early 1920s they might say a lot about how the anthologists viewed childhood and gender roles at the time that Modernism was starting to become a substantial part of literature in America. And for those targeted boys and girls (and their parents) the world was changing in areas well beyond poetry, music, and the arts. Adult women had just been given the right to vote, and there was increasing belief in expanding women’s roles. Fathers had in some cases returned from America’s first extra-continental wars.**

And there was another reason, I had recently come to see appealing elements in some of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poetry aimed at children as I revisited it. It’s long been a cultural commonplace that Mark Twain and Lewis Carroll are children’s books with layers of understanding, not just fantastical adventures. And in our present culture a great deal of our marketplace is taken up by young-adult books and genres that often have roots in youthful reading: Fantasy and Speculative Fiction for example.

So, what if we step back a century and see what’s there? I found a number of interesting poems in the two books, and my plan was to step up the posting tempo of this blog to at least double time. There’d be writing on what I observed in the books, and the Parlando Project’s combining of literary poetry with original music in various ways and styles would top that off. I started stockpiling some compositions, even recorded initial tracks for a couple. I was realistically readying myself for more activity here than usual to celebrate NPM 2024.

NPM 2024 poster 720

I didn’t know this would be the poster for this year when I started out. Seems appropriate for my plan.

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Great plan.

Great plan, meet life.

I’d already figured what would be the first two pieces of this series. Monday I was going to complete recording the music I had set for the first one. My old-man energy didn’t hold out, and mid-morning recording expectations turned more into an early afternoon plan. Monday afternoon, I grabbed my music to go record, and..

The music stayed on the table. More family distress came home. I haven’t found a way to write about this that feels appropriate to me — and I’ve felt so blessed the past eight years of this Project to have so much time to do the extensive work it entails that I don’t want to be disproportionate in measuring my little change of plans this week against the reasons for distress. Today’s concluding summary: this is an introduction of my original intent, and a public statement that I still have hope for some variation of the plan still coming off for this April Poetry Month here.

My appreciated long-time readers will know to wait — and new visitors: there’s a lot here for those interested in poetry and the various ways it can be combined with music. You might want to search for a poem or poet and see if we’ve already presented it. Over 700 pieces, there’s a lot here — but it’s all over but the footnotes today — and those footnotes are something else this blog picked up from Mary Grace.

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*Her blog started out with a pledge to only read material from 1918, but it has transitioned to an occasional look through stuff that was contemporary a century ago. Lots of considerations of what women in this dynamic time were presented with, often through magazines of the day. This stuff fascinates me. It’s the mundane and commercial mirror to the era when a lot of the poetry I’ve presented was created.

**How about other historically significant issues in this last decade that called itself The Twenties? Social inequality was certainly on some adults’ minds then, but that generally goes unreflected in these middle-class oriented poetry anthologies. I may take a second scan, but the issues of America’s racial caste system are largely ignored, though there is a bizarre Longfellow poem I hope to at least mention in the series (even if I might never figure out how I could perform it). Another thing to think about as we consider these century-old books: the children’s audience here would be inside that Greatest Generation who experienced the Great Depression, the global rise of nationalistic fascism, and eventually an even greater world war and its aftermath. Is there anything here in these poetry books which the authors suggested their mothers should be handing them that helped them through that?

Another Child (“To Any Reader”)

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

When I used a Robert Louis Stevenson poem last July I wasn’t expecting to follow it up with another. When introducing his “Bed in Summer”  then I mentioned that writing poetry for children, as Stevenson was doing in his A Childs Garden of Verses,  seemed to reduce some of the fustian of a lot of Victorian verse.

So, when I happened upon this other example from that collection I was even more struck by the sensibility of this one. Though I had no reason to believe Stevenson was intending visionary poetry, today’s piece could almost fit inside of Blake’s Songs of Innocence  — though it was written a half-a-century after Blake’s death.

another child layout

Here’s one illustrated edition of the book and the original text with Stevenson’s title “To Any Reader”

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What was the author’s intent? I first read it as Stevenson making a pitch that even if the poems in his book might someday seem quaint and old-fashioned, they could still relate to like-experiences of some future another child. Was this canny foresight on Stevenson’s part? Stevenson was only 35 when he published this book, so his own childhood memories should not have been all that outdated as he wrote the material. On the other hand, his childhood nurse (to whom the book is dedicated) raised him on John Bunyan, stories from the Bible, and tales of 17th century Scottish Covenanters. That may have made him aware from a young age that tales from past times could be transmitted to young minds.

I do recall encountering A Child’s Garden of Verses  as a young child in the mid-20th century, though I can’t say for sure where. Did someone read it to me in my pre-literate days? Was it a book from my parents’ library, perhaps a keepsake from their childhoods? Did I run into it while exhausting my tiny Iowa town’s small library children’s section?

I would not have minded if it was old-fashioned, for I was from a young age fascinated with the past. It could have seemed juvenile unless I came upon it very early in my reading years, but most editions were illustrated, and illustrations excited the ekphrastic in this young reader. Yet my recall on this is not that specific, I just remember that I had seen it. I have more recall of reading Stevenson’s Treasure Island  and enjoying that.

Oddly, when I finally looked this week, this is not the lead-off, introductory poem in the book. Instead, it’s the final poem — not the place to make the case to continue reading “To Any Reader”  who just happened onto the book. Instead, in this place, it’s a ghostly envoi, a reminder to the child (or to the adult reading to them) that they, their childhoods, will obsolete themselves.

As I did with Claude McKay a couple of pieces ago, I decided to adapt Stevenson’s words slightly for singing. Some changes were to make it less awkward to separate things into a series of sung verses. A couple of changes just fit better to my non-agile tongue. Most significantly, I devised a repeating coda to drive home a final summary to the listener. One subtle thing I did was a covert attempt to speak to my own child’s specific journey to young adulthood.

Another Child song with chords 1080

Here’s my version. Since I want to emphasize that other child of air, I also retitled the poem.

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An uncomplicated folk-song style setting seemed appropriate. The chords today are simple for the guitarist, though the alt-tuning I used changes the sound of this simple chord progression slightly. You can hear my performance with the graphical audio player below. If you can’t see any player, I also provide this highlighted link which will open a new tab window with its own audio player.

Dusk in Autumn

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I risked taking the charm and playfulness out of Emily Dickinson’s ghost poem last time by trying to puzzle out exactly what she saw. I won’t risk that today. This next poem in our Halloween series was written by a poet, Sara Teasdale, who wrote some complex adult love poems — but with this one she portrayed a child’s wonder. Well, a child with a little taste for tea parties with witches, but still.

Sara Teasdale Smiles

Sara Teasdale. Want to come to my tea party?

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Teasdale was roughly a contemporary in her childhood in St. Louis with T. S. Eliot, but Eliot decamped for Harvard and then Europe — so as far as I’ve been able to find out, the two poets never met. I think Teasdale’s poem requires no further explanation, so I’ll just urge you to listen to it below. And here’s a link to the text of the poem if you’d like to read that.

Another simple musical accompaniment here, this time just some acoustic guitar. You can hear Sara Teasdale’s “Dusk in Autumn”  with a graphic audio player that many will see below. However, there are ways to read this blog that won’t show the player, and I also provide this highlighted link to click, which will allow those who don’t see the player to access the musical performance.

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April Rain Song

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

As we continue our celebration of National Poetry Month, I remind us all that not everything in poetry needs to be heavy business. For example, here’s a poem by American writer Langston Hughes, a man known largely for his poetry that deals frankly with the Afro-American experience, and this poem of his was published in a magazine founded by W. E. B. Du Bois during the famed Harlem Renaissance.

But wait, not only is this a poem about springtime, it’s a children’s poem written for Du Bois’ children’s magazine The Brownies’ Book.  I first learned about this pioneering publication for Afro-American children at the My Life 100 Years Ago  blog, which among other things often covers what was happening with magazines of that era.

Hughes himself wrote today’s poem when he was a teenager, and The Brownies’ Book  was the first publication to publish his poetry. “April Rain Song”  is a charming poem, and in rhythm and poetic tactics it reminds me of Carl Sandburg, a fellow Midwesterner whose writing influenced the young Hughes. Here’s a link to the text of Hughes’ poem if you want to follow along.

The Brownies Book

Check out the high school graduate in far right middle row. Yup, that’s Langston Hughes.

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It’s been April rainy the past two days in my city, so working on making “April Rain Song”  a Parlando Project piece had overcast and setting. Hughes here shows me a mode I sometimes aim for: it’s a nature poem, but specifically set in a city, not in some rural nature. The rain meets sidewalks and street-gutters, not some Eden.

Rain, specifically spring rain, has a strong memory element for me. Perhaps you share this? Outside in rain I’ll often recall other wet spring days, watching from the current distance my child-self walking beside miniature gutter rivers, observing for no particular reason their sweep around last years’ leaves and last winter’s final dusky ice clumps. Or perhaps you recall a particular roof on which fell our general rain? Was Langston Hughes too young yet to have that experience of memory when he wrote this poem? I cannot say, but I have that now, and so I add a bit of wistfulness to his words today.

The player gadget to hear my performance of Hughes’ “April Rain Song”  is below for many of you, but if you don’t have it, this highlighted hyperlink will also play the song I made of it.

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Theme in Yellow

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Carl Sandburg. I get the impression that he’s been filed away as a folksy peculiarity, a 20th century and less-original echo of Walt Whitman, an artist not worth considering these days. Readers of this blog will know I find him otherwise: a first-generation English language Modernist, just as concerned with making it new as anyone else in that movement.

Carl Sandburg guitar kids goats

The young Josh Homme and Kim Deal get lessons from some old flannel-clad grunge guitarist.

 

Here’s a piece using words by Sandburg for Halloween. I’ll note that almost alone among the first-generation Modernists he sometimes writes poems about, perhaps even for, children. “Theme in Yellow”  can serve as both. Of course, since we’re all “obsolete children” the audience isn’t limited to them.

Anyway, it’s a good piece for the holiday that’s about the whimsy of fear and how far from reach we can hold death. Oh, and in our modern America, it’s also about candy, for which the Jack O’ Lantern’s teeth were meant to warn us.

David S Pumpkins

David S. Pumpkins. Any questions?

 

Sandburg’s poem is just slightly old fashioned—the harvest festival aspects of Halloween are now abstracted from most of us, though it was in Sandburg’s personal experience. But we might still dress our stages with straw, and with cobwebs and lanterns, setting our fears as old.

May all your fears be old.

Today’s music has lots of electric guitars (seven tracks, four different guitars) mostly because I’ve been missing their sound. Lots of coordination to get all that traffic running—and I don’t know if I did right by it—but it was fun while I had time to make some noise this afternoon. You can hear the results with the player gadget below, and if you’d like to read Sandburg’s poem while you listen, it can be found here.