composition

The Top Ten most listened to songs from the first decade of the Parlando Project, part 2

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Returning now to our countdown of the ten most listened to Parlando Project musical pieces, already in progress. Today we pick up at the fourth most-listened-to song.

Number 4 is Jean Toomer’s “Her Lips are Copper Wire.”   I’m in the middle of doing a series on founding Surrealist Paul Éluard, known for his Modernist love poems. Now, I believe Best! And GOAT rankings should remain silly exercises – but as much as I like Éluard and want more English-speakers to be aware of him, it’s entirely possible that the greatest Surrealist love poem is this one, written by this American, Toomer. Musically, I use acoustic guitar and spare piano, a combination I see in several other of this Parlando Top Ten – and there’s what I think is a more successful electric guitar solo at the end here.

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Moving to the podium steps, we have the third-most-popular song in the decade of this Parlando Project, Robert Frost’s “The Aim Was Song.”   This one is an outright electric guitar song. That statement should go double, as I played the synth part that weaves with the guitar using a second guitar with an added MIDI pickup which lets my fretboard fingers work with electrically-generated instrument sounds and control virtual instruments.

Samick Greg Bennett line MIDI pickup guitar

I went to a store to look for a guitar to host the MIDI pickup, seeking the cheapest thing with a neck I liked on their wall of low-end used instruments. This battered Samick fit the bill. The red strap is a string damper, as I don’t want any open string overtones to confuse the MDI signal.

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Runner up in this list of most popular Parlando musical pieces? “Backyard”  by Carl Sandburg.  What a great piece for a late August evening in America. Sandburg, this child of immigrants, listens from his porch as darkness starts to come earlier now in his Chicago, and hears the sounds of other immigrants under a benevolent moon-universe above all borders and clocks. I know I played the synth and string parts here with my little plastic keyboard because those parts use volume and modulation wheels on the keyboard to modify and shape the notes. Vocally I add what I call “inline epigraphs,” little quotes from other songs that I hear echoing with Sandburg’s poem.

Little Plastic Keyboard 2026-Novation Launchkey 25

This Little Plastic Keyboard replaced an even smaller one that I wore out over the decade of this Project. I have a cousin who teaches piano and she’s agast that I put a scribble-strip with the white notes names above the keys. The two wheels to the left of the keys are volume and modulation controller wheels. The Novation MIDI controller is one of the least expensive  currently sold with both of these implemented as real wheels.

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What was the piece with the most listens among the more than 900 audio pieces I’ve published here over the past ten years? Check back soon as I reveal that one in my next post.

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The Top Ten most listened to songs from the first decade of the Parlando Project, part 1

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I can’t let the anniversary month of August go by without doing a summary of what have been the most popular of the more than 900 musical pieces and more than 1,000 posts since the Parlando Project publicly launched in 2016,

I’m going to do this Top Ten in a 6-3-1 format to keep these posts from running too long. Another difference: I tend to talk most about the words we use here and their authors, but the next few posts are going to be more about the music we compose and play as part of this Project. So, let’s not waste any time, on to the countdown.

At position 10 we find pioneering Imagist H.D.’s “The Pool.”   This is a personal favorite of mine, not only for the enigmatic poem that provides the words, but for the early use of an arpeggiator to let me incorporate the – what is it? – mandolin or zither or oud virtual instrument here along with low bowed string riff that I played with a little plastic keyboard or my MIDI guitar. Maybe I should note here that “virtual instruments” (VI) does not mean AI by any definition of the term. They are databases of recorded notes, often with a range of articulations that can be called up instantly and played, just as “real” instruments are played or scored and played.

 

At position 9 we have another set of early Modernist initials: E. E. Cummings’ “Crepuscule (I Will Wade Out).   I had forgotten that Bjork had already set a version of this poem when I did this setting in 2018. The instrumentation chosen is a favorite of mine: acoustic guitar and spare, sustained piano. The way the strings on a small wood box mix with the strings in large hardwood coffin struck with hammers as their overlapping waveforms combine never fails to please me. Here, as I often do, I’m playing single notes on the piano so as not to challenge my nearly non-existent piano skills. The piano is doing what a simple electric bass or solitary low bowed-string part might do in the arrangement.

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At number 8 we get Arthur Rimbaud’s “Eternity.”   I try to mention the influences on this Project from time to time. They are many, and they are strong. They need to be strong because I’m not a “natural” as musician or performer. While I think I have some talent, however simplistic, as creator of musical ideas from the composer’s side, no one is going to pick me as the best choice for a vocalist – and even on “my instrument,” the guitar, I have inconsistent and varying skills. Patti Smith then is one of the influences, partly because she took her poetic vision and then went on will and audacity to become the frontperson in a band. Her championing of Rimbaud led me to consider that poet, and in my setting of “Eternity” I’m sort of emulating the sound of the Patti Smith Group, phrasing the vocal somewhat like she would.

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7 is held down by William Butler Yeats’ “The Stare’s Nest at My Window,”   one of his poems about the Irish Civil War. A few weeks after I presented this poem musically, a man, George Floyd, was killed by callousness and negligence on the part of my city’s police force a few blocks south of where I live, and remembering this Parlando piece, I felt Yeats was speaking to my time and place. Listening to my musical setting now more than five years later, it still evokes that time for me. I can’t remember exactly how I treated the ominous string parts in it to get that sound, – some kind of delay or reverb I think – and the same spare sustained piano playing that I’ve use elsewhere in other pieces chills to the bone here.

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Place 6, “Pied Beauty”  by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Once more listeners seemed to like, or at least try, my writing for bowed orchestral strings. Here the spare strangeness of the parts and the odd note choice, leaping interval, electric guitar solo over the top intends to evoke majesty of rustic nature – but I’m somewhat surprised at this one reaching this level of popularity, as I’m not sure the piece succeeds.

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Free Jazz all over the place

Not that anything in today’s group of songs explicitly references Jazz…

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Last one for today, number 5, returns to a piece that is a favorite of mine and one that I think represents elements of what I do well: Emily Dickinson’s “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark.”   Another piece largely composed with orchestral instrument parts. I fear serious orchestral composers and aficionados think these compositions of mine simpleminded – and furthermore, practical necessity dictates that they are implemented by virtual instruments making up the orchestra, and so no matter how well recorded and implemented these approximations in software are, they lack the full detail of their real counterparts. In my defense, I’ve taken to calling my approach here “Punk Orchestral” – trying with that name to make the point that I’m using the tools, ideas, and opportunities that I have to make what music I can make now, without deferring to the prerequisites of virtuosity and more theoretical knowledge. Let me make this clear as I wrap up today: I recognize my limits, respect those skills and the dedication to practicing and perfecting them that I lack, but I persist in doing what I can with what I can marshal none-the-less.

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At This Minute

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s another new translation of a poem by pioneering French Surrealist Paul Éluard that I made in order to perform it with music. This one, “A La Minute,” which I’ve rendered as “At This Minute,” also lacks the extravagant imagery that one might expect in a poem associated with Surrealism. I hear its language as informal speech, though this could be a mistake – remember I’m far from a fluent French speaker, nor am I an expert on early 20th century France. The only solid objects referred to in the poem are the eye and a more vague “instrument.*” There’s also the pronoun “it” present, and from the poem’s title and inference that may refer to the abstract concept of time.

a la minuteAt this Minute

Éluard’s original French, and my translation to English. That translation may still be a WIP. This morning I was thinking I should revisit the penultimate line.

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What the poem is talking about is elusive. Like the Éluard poem last time, the greater context and situation are left out of the poem, leaving a set of statements about it. At the time I performed the poem – as with “The Naked Truth”  – I had decided that my performer’s subjectivity was going to use my dissatisfaction with my country’s current regime to animate the words. On deeper reflection afterward I’ve begun to think that both of these poems are complicated love poems. Perhaps if this series continues, I’ll write more about Éluard’s complicated love life, but even in the absence of that biographic information I remembered that Éluard is famous in his native France as a great love poet.

Those two frames can become congruent in poetic expression. If one loves one’s country and residents, one can have a complex relationship with its civic actions and outlook. Similarly, the intimate relationships between erotic partners cannot escape political and power questions. If early 20th century, or modern French readers, are expecting a poem about the affairs of love from this poet, they will likely hear it as such. As to the political reading? One thing I often see myself here in America: those women who carry experience with incompetence, reflexive lying, and lack of responsibility from intimate partners see immense resonance in my country’s current leadership. That is not a happy feeling, but it’s a clarifying one.

Éluard had a lifelong political side, and so consciously or unconsciously he may have intended this ambiguity. The poem seems to me to be addressed in hopes that a relationship will change, perhaps with the ending of it. What a speaker in the poem is declaiming then is that they are aware, can clearly see, what is wrong there. It may be a “who do you believe, me or your lying eyes?” situation.

Since I’m accustoming you to link two seemingly disparate worlds when hearing this poem, let me jump now to the music I made for performance. There’s a producer/musician and music theory teacher, Rick Beato, who has a very popular YouTube channel. One of his regular segments is to listen to the top 10 contemporary pop music streaming songs. This sort of thing is red meat for older listeners who eagerly click on those episodes wanting to hear Beato’s declarations of the lack of merit in modern pop music which will include objective reasons for that lack of achievement.** In one recent episode he noticed that many of the streaming hits didn’t “go anywhere” – meaning that they didn’t modulate to new keys, change tempo or time signature, or even change chords very much. Since there is a universe of sophisticated things that a composer or performer can do with all that, there’s value in pointing out the potential of using those musical tactics. But what he doesn’t stop to ask himself (or his audience) is: why might acts make that choice, and are then rewarded with large contemporary audiences for doing so?

Two putative answers that quickly come to mind: we are seeking something that seems stable and comforting – and conversely, we may be quite frustrated by the lack of positive change in our world and want to express that.

There’s a great, complicated, love song made famous by Aretha Franklin, written by Don Convay: “Chain of Fools.”   Lyrically, that song may be a cousin to Éluard’s poem, and the song’s harmony is an interlocking one-chord riff, broken only for a few bars where all the instruments fall away and only voices and handclaps carry on in the same key. Whenever I hear someone make a statement that assumes that harmonic complexity is the key to effective music, I will call Aretha Franklin to testify.

Now I’m not Aretha Franklin – as far as I can determine, no one is  – but my music for “At This Minute”   is based on one chord (Em) with the tiniest movement in how it’s voiced. I built this composition starting with the rhythm, a pair of related and repeated broken chord piano arpeggios expressing that chord, underlaid with a simple bass part I played on my U-Bass.***  To drive home the statis, I plucked my kalimba (thumb piano) right up next to the microphone so that it sounded almost like musical hammer blows.

Rather than performing my translation from Éluard’s French straightforwardly, I decided to improvise repetitions of phrases in it. While it doesn’t sound like ecstatic Afro-American gospel a la Franklin, conceptionally, it’s akin. You can hear that performance with the audio player gadget below. No audio player? It hasn’t said goodbye, but I hope and hope you’ll see this alternative: a highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

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*What is that “instrument?” A clock or watch face perhaps? Or since the poem wants to riff on the eye and seeing – the spider face of Éluard’s poetry is as full of eyes as Emily Dickinson’s is of bees – the instrument could be the instrument of vision, the eye. If one was to create a Surrealist painting to illustrate this poem, both of those instruments should be melded together.

**To Beato’s credit: while he savvily promotes these run-downs (both senses of the word) as disparagement of modern pop music, he’s got a wide enough musical taste to offer praise for things he hears and likes in these top-tens. His grasp of music theory and enthusiasm for how it can be deployed is infectious, and that’s a good thing. As to how good or bad modern pop music is compared to the golden era that (just coincidently) happened when the oh, so, objective evaluator was a young person, I’ll call to the stand Mr. Theodore Sturgeon with his law that “90% of everything is crap.”

***The U-Bass is the size and construction of an ukelele, but with very thick nylon strings meant to be tuned to the same notes and register as a bass guitar (EADG). I love the upright bass, but I can’t afford, store, or play one well-enough – but I have three or four ways to make something like that instrument’s sound, such as today’s U-Bass.

She Visits Her Mother Who Doesn’t Know Her

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

If you’re a long-time reader or listener here, you probably already know that one of the principles of this Project is “Other People’s Stories.” That usually means that the words used here are literary poetry that has reached public domain status. Every so often I do use my own words – but even then, it can still be “Other People’s Stories.”

I mean, it should be clear right at the start that I’m not a daughter whose mother has fallen deep in Alzheimer’s disease. Again, long-timers here may recognize today’s piece is part of a series of sonnets on this topic which have appeared here over the past few years. Yes, these poems are based on real events, some of which I observe, others which I hear some details of second-hand – but either way they are poems, not journalism. The poem may suggest its own details, and I’ll listen.

While I’m talking about guiding principles here, there’s another one: “Music in Differing Styles.” I’ve always had trouble with the common, innocent, “conversation starter” question: “What kind of music do you like?” The idea that I (or even we) should have a ready-to-hand specific genre label for the music we like seems bizarre to me. “Oh, dark post-rock neo-shoegaze emo. How about you?” might keep the conversation rolling, but for an old man like myself who listened to and appreciated a lot of different music over many decades it might better be limited to what kind of music are you enjoying this week or this afternoon. You see, I think that one of music’s strongest elements is the variety of how it expresses itself. Even music I’m not presently in the mood for can be valuable – it might guide me toward musical opposites, and by that highlight the value of that contrasting form of expression.*

The problem here is that I do believe a great many folks have strong musical dislikes in genres or performance articulations. With but a hint that I might fail to meet a listener’s performance expectations, or that I’ve chosen some disliked ways of organizing sounds, some will drop my music from further consideration. I shouldn’t object to this: there’s a glut of music out there, no reason to expend time on unrewarding music. And because I’m audacious, some of my music here may be more than just a hint.

As I compose and play music for the Parlando Project I do hope that some listeners will appreciate some of what I do. I also expect that every potential listener here – yes, every single one – won’t care for a least some of what I present. If I’m composing for acoustic guitar one day, adding cello to that the next: some will like it, some not so much. If I work with synths and arpeggiators, some will like it, others suspect it not organically raised and locally sourced. If I play loud electric lead guitar, some will like it, others will pull the plug. If I avoid my “of subjective quality” singing voice, some will be glad, and then others would prefer that there would be a singer, however rough-hewn. I could wish that this variety of plausible likes was additive, but I think it’s most often subtractive. One “bad” piece where I don’t execute well, or choose the wrong kind of execution, and I may well be excluded from further musical consideration.

Sometimes I think I could “pick a lane” for Parlando Project music, or split my musical expression into a variety of separate projects each with a constrained/predictable musical style – but I haven’t yet done so. In the meantime, I sincerely appreciate those that have stuck with this effort.

Jazzmaster diagram T-Shirt 600

The T-shirt I’m wearing today. The complexity of the Jazzmaster electric guitar’s design doesn’t really like playing into a loud, high-gain amp without being subject to idiomatic artifacts. You can hear some of it’s spring-loaded vibrato bridge and extra string length above the nut and below the bridge resonating and pinging in today’s music.

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So, here’s today’s piece. No acoustic guitars. No singing, just spoken word in half the song. Yes, synths. Yes, loud lead guitar. A couple of notes on the music today: there’s a persistent glitchy riff in this one that’s a happy accident. After successfully playing the digital synth melody that weaves in an out of the piece, I went to play a Mellotron virtual instrument using the same MIDI guitar as a controller, and something went wrong. Instead of the evocative lo-fi sound of a Mellotron’s tape samples, all I got was this stuttering sputter. Staying in creative mode, I just kept playing, producing that line of organized noise you can hear today.**

But it’s not all synths and mistakes one finds in the faults of electronic machinery, there’s a long wordless response to the daughter living with her mother’s chronic dementia expressed with electric guitar at the end of the piece. You can hear it with the audio player below. Have the glitches of brain matter or computer interfacing obscured this player for you? It’s most likely a matter of some ways of reading this blog not showing the graphical audio player. For those in that situation this highlighted link will open a new browser tab with its own audio player then.

 

 

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*I think the same thing is true of the variety of expression in poetry, particularly in the shorter, lyric poem. While I admire the extraordinarily literate who’ve read a thousand novels or have mounted hundreds of full-scale dramatic plays, that much of those things is a heavier lift. A 14-line poem or a 3-minute song is not some sole-authoritarian demand for one’s time.

**I remain too frightened to consider using guitar-controlled MIDI in any kind of live performance. Despite MIDI guitar controllers being decades old technology, only a handful of braver and more skilled musicians have done so.

The modern kings will throttle you to greet the piping voice of artificial birds

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a new Claude McKay poem song setting, “To a Poet,”  completed as part of my concentration on his poetry this February. Somewhat of a “deep cut” in McKay’s poetry, but as sometimes happens when reading a bunch of poems, there was one set of lines that stood out as I read this pioneering Jamaican-American poet’s work. I’ll get to those lines, but first a detour about the music.

Which is something I don’t write much here. The Parlando Project started as a musical idea, though I always thought I’d want to say something about the experience of encountering the poems on the way to making the music, and so this blog. While true engagement with the blog posts here is hard to judge – something made harder by occasional bouts of what appear to be bots skimming (and reskimming) posts here since last autumn – there’s been a satisfying and unrelenting increase in visits to this blog over 10 years. Blogs may no longer be the new-hot, but the visits keep coming. Thank you, readers, and I wish that my personality and situation would allow me to be more attentive to your comments.*  I treasure anyone that spends a little time here.

But the musical pieces, the cause of this all? They get no more listens than they did only a few years into this Project when monthly readership and listening numbers were roughly equal – while presently listeners are maybe 10% of the numbers of readers. I’m realistic about the limitations of my musical expression. I’m about as far from a poptomist composer as could be imagined, and I’ve long feared that not sticking to one style of music creates what used to be called by radio programmers “button pushers” – those who hear one or two songs they strongly dislike and decide to go elsewhere. I understand, people react to music sensually, emotionally, and so a bad experience with music creates a stronger distaste than a duff blog post or the choice of a poem some don’t care for – but my music making reflects my listening, it’s eclectic. I’m committed to musical adventurousness and variety, and so by intent or missteps the music may not always be something you’d choose. I don’t believe I’d enjoy this Project if it was anything else.

But one musical constraint has always been with me: my singing voice and its take it or leave it limitations. Spoken word poetry, even with integrated music, is one thing, and I’ll do that, but some words tell me they expect to be sung, and almost always, that means the singer is me. I’m grateful for the times my long-time LYL bandmate Dave Moore has given me and my listeners a break, and there have been scattered other “guest vocalists” over the decade. Today’s song is different. I wanted to do something (however simplified, as I think simplified music retains powers) more like Art Song, the composed music that features trained singers who express strong melodic contours through skilled techniques, rather than off-the-cuff, I’ll-give-it-a-go, folk-singing.

Go ahead, scroll down and listen to today’s piece setting to music the words of Claude McKay. I’ll wait. And here’s the text of McKay’s poem that was performed with my music.

To a Poet 600

 

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OK, you’re back. Who’s the guest vocalist? The stage name is Felicia. Felicia is a virtual instrument. Readers here may recall what that is, but I think it’s important to reiterate: a VI is often a set of atomized recorded samples of a real “acoustic” instrument, a whole range of notes with articulations expressing a range of colors. Let’s not confuse two-letter-acronyms, VI is not AI as expressed by services like Suno which take an overall text description of the nature of a song and create in one fell swoop the finished melodic lines of the singer (and all their arrangement and accompaniment) by apparently recombining conventional musical materials. If I take a VI of, for example an organ, and invoke it on my computer it won’t play a toccata, early Phillip Glass, or “Rock Lobster,” or anything like those pieces, no matter how I write a run-on requesting sentence about it. It instead needs me to play my MIDI guitar or little plastic keyboard, or inscribe notes on a MIDI piano roll notation. I could (as a very limited keyboardist) invoke arpeggiators or chord and pattern generators to extend what I play or write – but it still feels like composition to me. In contrast, AI like Suno feels like I’m a royal patron asking my musicians for some conventional musical noise to underscore my cultural pretenses, caring only that it be inoffensive.

Another difference: even a despot likely paid their court musicians something. AI? Not so much. The company that sells the Felicia voice VI (Dreamtronics) claims it pays the human singers that it samples to make its products.

Still, I expect this revelation, or its implementation in this piece, will repel some listeners. The spirals inside the ear have their own Uncanny Valley, and I too feel that fearful symmetry. It sounds like a human putting artifice onto itself or an artifice taunting the qualities of human. I put up with it because I had a goal, and my voice could never sing with the VI’s technique, particularly over a longer piece. I played the vocal line on my little plastic keyboard, and typed each syllable as text that the notes would sing. Early vocal VIs were very picky about needing explicit phonetic text, but this one knows much more about the baroque tangles of English pronunciation, yet I still had to tweak some syllables. The program has a range of controls for expression variations – learning how to use them will improve results – but it presents default expressive choices that keep the monotonous spiel of old-school robot speech away.**

Felicia made it much easier to get something that wasn’t fakey bad or unintelligible as older vocal VIs I’ve tried, even as I still felt the need to do work to improve problematic passages. It took me several hours to create the vocal line realization you hear in today’s piece. A trained human singer at the mic could have done it in an hour, even including leeway for retakes and “try it this ways.”

One thing I noticed: even when I had polished up the intelligibility of the VI sung text, the meaning of the words seemed abstracted to me as a listener. Oddly, this is the same thing I sometimes hear as a listener with Art Song, where the composer’s elaborate melodies or the singer’s concentration on demonstrating virtuoso technique make the words vehicles for expressing music more than shared experience. Human vocalists singing Art Song, in their own way, produce their own unsettling Uncanny Valley.

Which may bring up the question, why not just use a real singer? Yes, that would be better. I, who am socially awkward, not able to schedule a time to do my creative work, and heading-up a non-revenue Project can say that would be an ideal, but unlikely, option. Furthermore, in the process of composition I wouldn’t be able to test my musical choices as a limited singer, so there’d likely never be a score for such a singer to follow.***

Will I use a vocal VI again here? Likely, though I don’t think I’ll use it most of the time, or even often. My voice is my voice, and I feel I should use it. Still, I was very happy that I could realize this musical piece. Through the technology of VIs I was also able to play the atomic recombinations of an oboe, a viola da gamba, and a hurdy-gurdy as part of the accompaniment.

OK, so back to Claude McKay’s poem. Like his “When I Have Passed Away”  from earlier this month, McKay’s poem here speaks of posthumous poetic legacy. In the context of this month while using a computer VI to sing his words, I was much taken with the pair of lines in his poem: “The modern kings will throttle you to greet/The piping voice of artificial birds.” Maybe 100-years-ago, a prophetic McKay knew how I’d come to try to make a song of his poem using a voice of artifice under the rule of a disordered king and assorted technological barons.

You’ve already heard that song haven’t you? What, you didn’t obey the words and stop partway for the music? You’re a rebel! An outlaw! A traitor! You have one – no, two – more chances to hear my musical setting of “To a Poet:” with the audio player you should see below, or with this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

 

 

 

*Besides mundane life-chores, these increasing problems are partly from aging, and partly secondary to the folks I share my home and life with. It’s hard for me to devote regular and predictable time to this Project, and when opportunity time comes, my nature is to work on finding new words and creating the musical pieces. For some reason (aging? self-doubt?) it’s increasingly hard for me to make the social small-talk that should be trivial and expected.

**I doubt this variation of expression is heavy duty AI either. For a long time VIs have used a pseudo-random cycle of expression variations as an option in their programs. I didn’t get a sense the VI generally knew from the denotative sense of a word or placement in a sentence or musical phrase to give it a particular kind of invocation.

***A product like this, it seems to me, would be ideal for a composer who doesn’t sing well and who would like to rough out scores before an actual performance, as it might give a better quick approximation than just playing the vocal line’s notes on a piano for instance, just as orchestral composers are increasingly roughing out arrangements on other virtual instruments.

Jazz and reading John Darnielle: Part One, when I make a Jazz noise here

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I’m glad my face ID still recognized me today to write this, since I’m in an unhappy, grumpy mood, and I don’t much like the self I’m in. This mood may be because it’s winter and cold with dark early and late, or because I didn’t get a bike ride in, or because folks with guns and ones with governmental power are doing cruel things for the proximate reason that they’re cruel. Grumpy and unhappy? Perhaps a reasonable response for winter, but is that same mood commensurate to the mass shootings in the news or the treatment of our country and neighbors by the mad king and his gleeful courtiers? I don’t know. Whatever I do (little) or think (enough? too much?) about these things ties me up in this grumpy place. In addition, we have a world of similarly unsatisfied folks to me – but these folks are pointing out that we aren’t thinking or doing enough in various best ways to defeat these horrible acts.*

Since I put my efforts toward music and poetry, I’m not going to charge you with not doing the right things to counter those general evils here. It would feel hypocritical for me to do so. But this dissatisfaction with the world and myself is bleeding over to my work today as well.

Early this morning I posted something on BlueSky about Jazz that could be easily misunderstood. So, I’m taking my chance to get it off my chest here so that I can be misunderstood or make a fool of myself at a greater length. There’s a new documentary that you can rent-to-view for $3 on Amazon: The Best of the Best, Jazz from Detroit.  This is a good film, made for the best reasons. My reaction is not their fault, and you shouldn’t hold it against them. The insightful Ethan Iverson has it right in summing up its value: “not just…a must-watch for fans, but also a superb introduction to jazz for the uninitiated.” But reading an interview with its creators and spending a rewarding 90 minutes watching it today also activated a problem I’m increasingly having with my musical work here. Let me summarize it as quickly as I can.

I feel embarrassingly limited as a musician. That I have a few tricks that I can pull off some of the time on a few different instruments must be balanced against the absence of some foundational skills that should be there. This is the reason that I’ve often taken to calling myself a composer, since my tactic is to create pieces I might play passably well rather than to show my lack of skill in doing musician’s work.**  But “composer” sounds even more presumptuous. I call myself, I think accurately, a “naïve composer.” I know dribs and drabs of musical theory, but again I lack the musical foundation that most anyone who calls themselves a composer would have.

I feel this lack of foundational competence often among musicians, and I’d feel it even more if I was around folks who are composers often enough – and there’s no place I feel it more than when you put “Jazz” in front of musician or composer. Watching Jazz from Detroit,  this fine film, reminds me of that; first because it makes the point that one of Detroit’s strengths as a “punches above its weight” center of Jazz music is that there were teachers in the school system and elsewhere in the city, mentors who helped young players understand and master the fundamentals of that art. These mentors guided folks who made Jazz and music their life and honors them. And it makes another point beside that one: they did this as part of a specific Afro-American urban culture that is not mine.***

Jazz for Detroit Title Screen

The film’s title screen.

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OK, so where does that leave me, particularly at my advanced age? I somehow can’t stop at simply recognizing and honoring that, I’m drawn to dipping into that musical language at times here, even if I can’t speak it fluently, and I’m not sure that is a good thing. Are my efforts, which wouldn’t fool a skilled Jazz musician for a minute, profaning their art? Does even my small audience subtract from the possible audience for more dedicated and skilled musicians? Is this intentionally non-revenue Project undercutting folks who need recompense? Or even: is this self-flagellation boring, and something only someone with my level of privilege would undertake? Am I thinking about any of this too much, or thinking about it not enough? I don’t know.

But here’s what I do know: what I can observe I do. I keep doing this, even if it may be wrong – or guilty of a lesser sin, missing the point.

Here’s a piece of mine from a few years ago about the dedication of an actual Jazz musician, Sonny Rollins. Audio player gadget below, or alternatively, this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*Some of them could be right on what we should be doing – but since they differ, some are likely wrong. All of these voices can’t be Martin Luther King writing from the Birmingham Jail, and there are/were folks then and now that didn’t think he was doing it right either. In our modern age I can’t help but suspect the “everybody to the left of Donald Trump is complicit in this mess” voices as bots.

**Put me in a room of not particularly skilled folk or rock players with my guitar, and on a good day I might fool them for a while at being a musician.

***This isn’t shouted outright in the film, but some of the elders speaking in it are, I believe, trying to make the point that the specifics of their 20th century Jazz-creating Afro-American culture require additional efforts to be valued and maintained.

The “Guild Concerns,” and mine, and yours, around Artificial Intelligence

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I hope the hardy, but smaller, summer readership here has enjoyed this diversion from our usual literary poetry combined with original music subjects. It’s been somewhat difficult to write. Why?

When I run across comments or longer-form writing about artificial intelligence – given my interests, mostly from folks in artistic fields – the feelings and cold convictions I read come in hot. AI gives me a lot of feels too: frustrations, fears, disgusts, distrusts, worries, even amusements at its fails. Yet, earlier in this series I’ve honestly talked about AI features I’ve tried. I wonder if I’m alone in these mixed feelings – if I’m just a wishy-washy old guy who won’t say it plain. For my final installment let me focus on those concerns.*

I’ve referred to some of those “guild concerns” earlier in this series. Let me expand on that. Let’s say you are a professional, semi-professional , or aspiring visual artist, voice talent, translator, editor, writer, composer, musician. AI claims it’s achieved parity with your field’s trades. “No!”  you reply to any such suggestion, for you are informed of all the small things that a master in your field provides that AI, as yet, can’t. But along with that comes the fear that most customers and many consumers of your art may judge as inessential elements you’ve learned to provide and appreciate, that your professional value-add may be judged dispensable. Capital’s royal decision makers may not hear your objections, give them any bottom-line weight. There’s an unavoidable term for a resulting outcome: enshittifacation. Everything then may drop to just above the level that would drive commoners to revolution.

And there’s a tsunami of salt to be poured into artist’s wounds from the use of Large Language Models in current AI. LLMs digest realms of work by artists, almost entirely without compensation to them, and apply pattern and categorization processes to this hoard to make it into reusable parts that can be recombined into other work – work whose ownership has been severed from artists and transferred in part to oligarchical corporations. This injury isn’t speculative. It’s already occurred in titanic amounts to create current LLMs, and ex post facto attempts to get paid for this seizing of work or to prevent future accumulations of scraped up art are being resisted by the AI industry who is seeking government protection for this reuse.**

So, where organized as unions, workers in the arts have attempted to counter this, concerned both as keepers of artistic excellence and as counter-forces seeking to protect incomes for their members. Will this succeed? Who am I to predict, watching ignorant beach-sand techbro armies sweep across the darkling plains amid alarms. But I understand the anger/fear of the artists, endorse it.

But I, myself, am an odd case. Poetry has low capital needs, a loaf of bread, a jug of iced-tea, and a roof, and I’m good to go there – and the renumeration market for poetry is scant. I used to inconstantly chase after giving readings with a couple dozen attendees, or the small paper presses aspiring to three-digit sales. I still admire those things and support them, I just don’t see them as precious scraps to struggle over at this point in my life. With the Parlando Project I most often use other people’s poetry, using and promoting work from dead and/or public domain poets or small excerpts of words from the living. With this Project I can aim for my hundreds of readers or listeners for a piece – a tiny audience in Internet stats, but an appreciable reward by poetry standards. With my music production and distribution here (aided by affordable computer technology) I find that I’m part capitalist and part worker-in-song. And there’s a conflict there.

I’ve already confessed in the series that I sometimes use what is called AI to extend the long-standing feature of computer music arpeggiators, programs that suggest and play patterns of notes on command. Honestly, I don’t feel good about using these – there’s shame mixed in there with the approval I find with my producer’s hat on from the effective results they bring to the finished musical piece.*** It’s not just breast-beating when I confess it feels fraudulent to me to use some computer aided line or expression played with an accomplished verve. A human should do that, and I can’t do that, and yet that part of the ensemble is  there – I’ve allowed it, and its level of success to some listener could be assigned to me. The alternate path I left some time ago was organizing bands of musicians to realize the music I create. I may wonder about that untaken path, but then I consider how dissatisfied those musicians might be at my non-commercial aims, how frustrated or dismayed they would be with my musical naivete, how stressful and ill-fitting it would be for the composer-hat-me to wear the bandleader-hat as well. Yet, those struggles, despite unfitness on my part, may be the necessary dues to engage in musical work. Guild concerns might hand down a harsh judgement on what I’ve done: “If you can’t do that, you shouldn’t do that  –  you’re taking away jobs from skilled tradesmen.”

In this I support the guild with one side of my heart, and yet I could be charged with working against its union shop.

A musical piece from a pair of DVDs issued decades ago that my child and I treasured when we both were younger. I don’t have details about how this music was produced, with what technology, but this is so much better than the trite AI slop illustrations I could have chosen to use instead. The Animusic web site is defunct, and I don’t know how you could still purchase this.

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Full-fledged AI music? The examples I provided in my last post satisfied my curiosity in my quick attempts to see what the current state of the art can do. Even more so than with my frustrations with AI illustrations I discussed in the first part of this series, I’m not tempted to continue to use that level of AI music creation. I don’t have to test my ethics in this: AI generated songs can’t get close enough to what I want, what I intend to communicate. I like playing instruments, and despite my not uncommon artists ability to procrastinate on getting down to composition of new work, once I’m into the process, I find it absorbing. If what results isn’t always a perfect realization of intent, so to it is with AI, and typing a few words into a prompt has no visceral rewards.

As I wrap up this series today, I’ve honestly tried to report my contradictions. If I’ve done anything, it’s my hope that you, my widely curious readership, will use what I’ve written to spur your own considerations of the challenges AI brings to art. I’ve used music as the main example, but literature and many other arts – as well as work that isn’t viewed as artistic – have like dangers, allied concerns.

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*Let me mention that I also share environmental concerns with the energy usage to provide AI. While earlier in this series I wrote that we likely don’t really know what those energy needs are with precision – and our existing general use of ubiquitous computers both saves and costs energy in some balance that’s hard to calculate.

An another issue: brevity keeps me from delving today into the important risk of extended capitalist and or authoritarian control of expression by ceding tools of production to oligarchs.

And lastly, there is a great deal of techbro hype around AI. In some ways it’s encouraging and scary how well it works, and in others it’s risible and scary how badly it works. I don’t mind so much laughing at its limitations in the world of musical art – like the satire in the last post where it created outrageous protest songs that can still sound sonically plausible – but the thought of non-analog safeguards in life-and-death contexts is concerning. It’s already hard enough to hold capital to account for grievous errors and oversights. Giving another level of kings-X granted to the passive voice of “computer error” worries me.

**As I was finishing a draft of this on Saturday I read an egregious example of AI theft from a musical artist. Emily Portman (and others, it appears from the linked news story) had their artistic presence on leading music streaming sites invaded by someone greedy enough to try to steal the widow’s mite that independent artists receive.

***If I was to play advocate in my defense, I could say that the uses I make of these tools are not the same as typing in a few generally descriptive words and having AI generate an entire song (or painting, or story, or essay) such as the song examples I supplied in the last post. I work iteratively with the specifications and adjustments for the patterns – though so do many who work on elaborate prompts for generating entire songs – but I’ve supplied them with the harmonic structure by playing or composing the chords or melodic centers of the resulting pattern to be generated. Those substantive contributions I supply make a case for these uses being collaborative extensions of the human.

I’ve so long used drum machines – and entire accepted genres of music are built around the expectations that they will be used – that using computers to play drumbeats in patterns seems more allowable to my inner ethicist. If I dig deeper, and acknowledge that I know and appreciate the musicianship and sound of a good percussionist, this is inconsistent, but this is my honest emotional report.

Summarizing and speaking here in guild specifics: the composer in myself may feel justified, while the internalized musician’s guild inside my soul still feels shame at my stooping to this.

AI music may be telling us something about how music works for listeners – and we might want to change that

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I had to catch myself editing the last post – as I discussed my use of virtual instruments in place of the actual instruments and the new plausibility of thoroughly AI music, I was tempted to overuse the word “verisimilitude.” Is that really something essential to the art of music? I like the cranky not-quite-real sound of the Mellotron after all. If musical art should be imagination, music itself certainly doesn’t care if the instruments are real – though musicians might, from legitimate guild concerns. Then we moved to having the computer play the instrument, and that too asks about human-displacement – and now we have AI creating songs outright from very generalized prompts. If you’re a composer, a musician, or a listener, this raises questions.

Let’s start by being honest with ourselves as listeners in avid or casual modes: as we pass through life, music becomes a sort of sonic homeplace – a location where something sounds similar to what we’ve heard before, with just enough difference to stave off boredom, just enough new to add the spice of novelty. Some musical ears live in homogenous towns, others in more diverse ones, but we go to music for the effects we’ve learned to appreciate.

Current entirely-AI music exploits this: taking what we know of form and sounds, following its predictability in a way listeners have been known to appreciate, and serving our aural expectations back to us. When they do that, the robots are telling us something about ourselves. As I ended my last post, if we object to AI music, it may be from the romantic feelings we retain for human artists. We want fellow humans to make these sounds with and for us, and our response may rise to disgust when we are tricked. And here’s a problem: it’s getting harder to say you won’t be tricked.

If this is so, what hopes do we have? One: imperfection, at least of a kind. Let me interject here that I’m not talking about the imperfections of boredom, of which there are many. I’m talking about music that may be a bit more haphazard and unpolished. If machines can precision-target our musical comfort-center receptors, then let us distrust that response at least in part.

Commenting reader rmichaelroman has already guessed that might be part of it, mentioning the performance, rough in recording quality and musical finesse, from the LYL Band at an Alternative Prom in someone’s basement years ago.  Even stored on honest recordings – live music, particularly live music that is truly live, with unplanned-out moments, with instruments reveling in their specific bodies, breaths, and vibrations – offers vivid imperfection.

Or too: voices with less talent than intent. I try to not over-burden my listeners with self-made excuses for my singing voice – but for all its limitations, it remains the one I have handy to realize the songs. Would AI be able to duplicate those imperfections? Perhaps, but it’s unlikely to want to.

When music practices and equipment reached points of greater mastery in the 20th century, reaction in the form of purposely avoiding those felicities arose. Midcentury pop music was opposed by the rising Folk revival and by early Rock’n’Roll. Then later, perfected Rock recording technology and improved musicianship found themselves met with Punk and Hip-Hop premised on the idea that a minimum of tech or muso-chops can still make an effective statement. By the way, I believe those technical hierarchies produced worthwhile music, but those that dispensed with them did so too.*

And when I wrote about voices with more intent than talent: for all the romantic imprecision of assigning internal motivation from a separated artistic product, what we believe we understand about why a piece of music was produced has importance. AI-music, however good it is at mimicking the technology and sound of music we like, presently offers only the weakest and least admirable answers to the question of why it was called into existence. To make some money? To make inoffensive sonic décor? To sell drinks to dancers? To show it can be done, as if that “verisimilitude” was the most significant thing about art? Some music I have liked was made for such mundane reasons, but in the future we may find intent more necessary to weigh.

I’ll leave with one more brief metaphor as AI-music reaches a level of musicological competence: we may have come to something analogous to painting’s role as photography entered the realm of visual representation. AI music in artistic hands may eventually seek out flagrantly subjective use of the technology – and music made by humans holding physical objects in real time will increasingly began to value qualities beyond sounding customary and “correct.”

If my energy holds out, there’s at least one more post in this AI series before I return to our regular combinations of literary poetry with original music, this one will address in more detail some of those music things I call “guild concerns.” If you miss the usual Parlando Project fare, there are over 800 examples of that here, so feel free to look around.


I wouldn’t want to call this performance imperfect, but there’s a human unexpectedness to it that satisfies me

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*The 1950’s-early ‘60s folk music revival had elements that I found closely mimicked by the Punk/Indie movement of following years: the DIY convictions, the gumption to form or transform venues and record labels, the opportunities for out-of-the mainstream ideas and sounds to sneak in between the more polished and “professional” acts. Similarly, Hip Hop followed the folk process: use what instruments were at hand, assertion before sounding “correct,” recombining shared culture materials (floating verses and borrowed tunes for the banjo brigades; turntables, cheap drum machines, and samples for Hip-Hop, contemporary social comment for either). Musicologist Ethan Hein said in a BlueSky post that helped spur me to write this series, “You can get across the essential elements of hip-hop and house with buckets (Hein here is referring to overturned buckets used as drums –FH)  and voices. Computers and sound systems are nice to have but inessential. Long after Spotify is gone, people rapping over beats will still be with us.”

700

~ Frank Hudson ~ 5 Comments

I released the 700th Parlando Project audio piece earlier this month. I consider this an extraordinary achievement. I’m unaware that anyone has ever done anything like this* at this scale.

Sometime around 2015 I had an idea: that while poetry and music had long been combined, the ways you could do that hadn’t been fully exploited. I thought of the strains of Modernist poetry that were presumed to be obscure and non-musical, and believed that they had musical elements that would allow those poems to seep into one’s consciousness under the decoration and repetition of music. And I thought too of dusty words safe in their paper alabaster chambers — obsolete poetry, or lesser-known poets — could some of them be asked to come out and sing and dance?

If one would combine these words with music, how could the music illuminate or vivify them? I knew there were answers that’d already been given, so I wanted to try some of the other answers and maybe even find new ones. I knew the traditions of Art Song a bit, admired much of that; but I sometimes felt that Art Song settings and performance styles, while beautiful, didn’t always communicate all a poem’s possible environments and emotions. I knew the old-fashioned mid-century traditions of Jazz and Beatnik poetry pretty well, and despite Rap owing something to those things ancestrally, Rap’s insistent flow of words sometimes seemed more demonstrative than denotative to my ear. Indeed those two traditions, Art Song and Rap, poles apart in cultural associations, often suffered from a similar flaw: they needed to demonstrate talent and skill in the singer or rapper to execute tricky stuff, vocal feats. I’m not against that per se, I just thought there could be more than that.

Musically I was more aligned with two movements, also closer than superficialities might lead one to suspect: “folk music” and what was called variously punk rock, alternative, and indie music. These two musical movements could allow virtuosity, but they didn’t require it. They knew that simple could be as effective as complex, that one could be both simple and distinctive, that expensive equipment and recording perfection wasn’t essential.

I originally thought that the Parlando Project could best be done by other people. I even pitched it as an adlib series of collaborations between various musicians, bands and ensembles with words that might not be overly familiar to them. Sensible radio network people listened and wisely chose not to try this. They were wise because such an effort has opportunity costs, and the results could fail embarrassingly. My idea was not a good bet and would take resources from safer bets.

So, I decided to try another route, one most consistent with my alignments: Do It Yourself. Like hootenannies, sing out, kick out the jams, get in the van, DIY is a way to bypass the might-have-been, the we’re-not-ready, we-haven’t-been-given-permission obstacles. My singing voice didn’t suit Art Song, my less than agile speaking voice didn’t suit Rap.**

Who’d write the music? Mostly, I would. Who’d perform the music? I planned to pitch-in on what I could play as things started out, but later it was often myself playing all the instruments. Who’d select the words and present them? I would. Who’d record the music? Me. Who’d promote this and call proper attention to it? Alas, mostly me.

The result? It got done, however imperfectly. Things that hadn’t even been imagined had realizations that now exist, that others could hear. What was beyond my imagination? How many writers work I’d have meaningful encounters with. Those writers are almost always long dead, yet the work of composing, performing, and recording these combinations with music means I have hours of collaboration with them. The poem I start out with is often not the understood poem I’d write about at the end — and frankly, my understanding sometimes changes after I finish presenting the audio piece to you. We understand poems, if we understand them, with our whole lives.

I’ve learned new things musically out of necessity. I’ve become a somewhat better vocalist. As a recordist, I’ve figured out some things that work well enough. Would the pieces be better if someone more talented in each of these fields did these things? In most cases, yes. But that didn’t seem the choice. The choice seemed to be: nothing, silence, possibilities that remained “how about/what if…” thoughts and nothing else.

Then there’s that last part of the DIY bargain, promoting this Project and bringing it to attention, something that was done badly. I’m a lousy self-promoter. Many artists are. When I get up the courage to do it — which I consistently fail to do — I often do it badly with insufficient skill at figuring out the hook that draws interest. It’s also quite possible that the general idea here: a variety of words (not always “poetry’s greatest hits”) combined with a variety of musical styles has a very narrow appeal. That musical eclecticism, a choice that suits me, I suspect reduces appeal. The listener who might like my simple folk music style examples will not care for the electronic pieces will not like the let’s give it a go live small rock combo stuff, will not care for the “Punk Orchestral” pieces, will not care for the weird drone and minimalist stuff, and so on. I fear it may only take one or two examples someone doesn’t like to end their engagement with the Project. Yet, I can’t help myself, all different kinds of music are always in contrasting discussions in my head.

In summary, as I look over the more than seven years I’ve been doing this, I’m left with pride at what I’ve done. The self-questioning and pitying part of my emotions whispers to me “No one else is astonished. Are you the fool for thinking it astonishing, or are they the fool for not?” The sensible me judges those self-whispers. Replies that a few hundred read or listen on the best days to things that would not exist otherwise. I’ve received kind words from some of you, and if I haven’t replied enough to those messages it’s because I’m so grateful for them I can’t think of adequate words to respond. Some readers and listeners have gone even further and re-blogged or re-posted some of the things from the Parlando Project on your own blogs or on social media, something that’s been important in growing the audience for this.

But still the question sits in my mind on my doubting days: literary poetry and approximately realized indie music are both smallish groups. The combination of the two may not be additive as in my initial hopes, but subtractive. It’s possible I’ve done the most substantial job ever toward a goal inherently of not-much-interest. Or that I’m not good enough at it. Sobeit, it’s what my soul wants to do, and if such doubts try to stay me from doing this, I’ll listen to them and try to continue.

Earlier this month, as this post sat in drafts as I wondered how embarrassing, needy, or self-aggrandizing it was, I saw this quote in a column by someone who I never really knew, though she was technically a co-worker.*** In a final column in a local arts and entertainment paper, The Dispatch,  that was itself folding its tents, long-time local radio host Mary Lucia wrote:

“Ultimately the world owes you nothing, but it’s OK to secretly believe it does.”

How can I tell if that’s true or not? I can’t even tell how I could tell. It’s one of those things that might take more than one lifetime to know. I remember that quote and  I remember the trio of things I wrote above examining myself: “embarrassing, needy, self-aggrandizing.” I may not have enough time in my aging lifetime to find out what is most true in the balance — and any younger person reading this, even you may not have enough time for whatever you bill out to the world. Doubt has value, doubt may keep you from doing something foolish, but as of now, doubt doesn’t tell me what else to do. If I’m a fool, I must do what fools do, or nothing.

The 700th Parlando Project Piece bw

I can’t draw for beans, but I’ve had fun generating illustrations this year using Adobe’s new AI technology that claims it doesn’t use uncompensated work of artists.

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* New here? What’s this?   Words, usually literary poetry from a range of eras, combined with a variety of original music, with posts here discussing my impressions of the poets and poetry as I encountered them in the making of those pieces.

**More than 50 years ago, in my naïve solitude, I imagined a type of music that would use a chorus of rhythmically spoken words to represent music. I even composed a couple of short pieces that I imagined could be performed that way, and eventually a script for a short play that expanded on these ideas. A year or so later, I heard The Last Poets recording and heard something partway like what I had imagined. I looked with admiration at the beginning of Rap, but I honestly have to say that I haven’t kept up with it. Besides my lack of speedy vocal chops, and generational distance from the modern masters of this form, the word-music I hear in my head sounds more like Carl Sandburg and Langston Hughes. I’m just as generationally removed from that latter pair as from today’s rappers, only in another direction. I guess I’m just weird that way.

***She would come to work about the time I was leaving my shift at a radio network, so I knew her more the way ordinary listeners did, as an on-air host.

Four people doing something like what the Parlando Project does

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

You might know this pedant’s complaint: something can’t be “more unique” — because the word unique means the only, singular. If so, what the Parlando Project does then is quasi-unique. I well know that setting literary poems to music isn’t unprecedented, but the way I do it is  a smaller grouping. For reasons (some practical) I’ve taken to using my rough and not always reliable singing voice more often,* and more pieces have simpler arrangements featuring acoustic guitar. In the past couple of months I’ve become aware of four other people, singers and guitarists not totally unlike myself, who have being doing things related to this presentation of music combined with literary poetry.

I ran into Evan Gordon on a guitar-related online forum this year where he introduced himself as working on combining poems with acoustic guitar-centered music, including his version of a passage from Jack Kerouac that I too admire, and which supplied the name to his collection “The Long Long Skies Over New Jersey,”  a short album released this year. Kerouac’s words are there along with Houseman and Yeats and a couple of covers of well-known songs. I rather like Gordon’s poetry settings, and though there’s only three songs taken from literature, the range of the poetic sources he chose to set echoes what this Project does. So, you might well like this too. My favorite in this collection is his setting of Yeats’ “When You Are Old,”  a poem which I too have done.  I (and some other listeners) like my expression of that poem, but Gordon’s is exquisite. You can find Evan Gordon’s “The Long Long Skies Over New Jersey”  on streaming services such as Spotify or Apple Music.

Andrew Merritt introduced himself to me via a comment here at this blog regarding my versions of the classical Chinese Tang Dynasty poets, telling us he’s looked to them for inspiration too. Merritt has a collection that he calls “Twang Dynasty”  where he combines influences from Tang poems with classic American country music. Does that seem far-fetched to you? Well, I can imagine a translated scroll stroked in traditional Chinese calligraphy of Hank Williams lyrics sitting beside those of the Tang classical masters, so I like Merritt’s imagination. His lead-off cut, “Drinking with the Moon”  is Merritt’s version of a Li Bai poem I performed here.  You can hear his work at this link.

In a recent post on Carl Sandburg I tried to make the case that this somewhat deemphasized Modernist poet’s footpaths can be seen all over music in folk and Americana genres. I wrote that Sandburg blazed a path and model for Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Bob Dylan; and as an early American folk music revivalist, he personally allowed a connection between folk songs presented in the raw (not as motifs in fuller orchestrations) with progressive/populist politics and high poetic culture. Sandburg did this not only by performing those songs publicly at his free-verse poetry readings (with a voice and level of guitar skills roughly like my own, not as a concert artiste) but by publishing a pioneering general anthology of American folk song purposely mashed together from around our whole immigrant country and its various sub-cultures with his 1927 The American Songbag.

One problem with The American Songbag  as published is that it appears to be aimed at the musically literate owners of parlor pianos more than guitarists, many of whom are allergic to sheet music.**  So it was with great joy that I heard just this month of a project undertaken during the heights of the Covid pandemic by Stephen Griffith. He sought to record the entire Songbag,  all 315 songs, and to present them, as Sandburg might have sung them himself with just simple voice and acoustic guitar. I eagerly went to his web site to thank him last week, only to find that it had fallen off the web. Given his apparent age in the videos, I hope Griffith is well and still with us, that he’s perhaps just engaged with other things. Luckily, his performances are still available on YouTube at this link — and their unadorned presentation is a treasure chest. Some of the songs in Sandburg’s Songbag  became folk music “standards,” but the versions Sandburg and his collaborators collected ending in 1927 sometimes differ, not just in the folk-process of a few floating or varied verses and lines, but occasionally in entire melodies. I’ve listened to a lot of folk revivalist music over the years, but even though I haven’t made it through all of Griffith’s Songbag  versions, some of the songs I’ve heard there, taken from Sanburg’s anthology, seem new to me. Anyone interested in The Old Weird America owes Stephen Griffith a debt of thanks (well, and Sandburg too).

There’s a fourth example I want to draw your attention to: Joseph Fasano, a man who is doing some other things while also being a poetry-aware person wielding an acoustic guitar. Because of that range of things he’s doing, I’m going to leave him for an additional post to follow.

Here’s one of Giffith’s Songbag performances, a variation of a song I discussed here that my great-grandfather liked in this post.

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*Earlier in the Project I was more likely to use spoken or chanted vocals. I still do this sometimes, depending on the text and what I feel is most effective.

**There are piano lead-sheets for the songs in The American Songbag, but no guitar chords or parts. Many/most folk music associated guitarists and singers learned their repertoire “by ear” from hearing others sing the songs, and those who wanted to notate guitar parts beyond chord sheets were likely to use guitar tablature not treble staff notation. There’s an old joke regarding guitarists as musicians: “Q: How do you make an electric guitarist turn down? A: Put sheet music in front of them.”

While technically possible in a narrow sense, it would have been an impractical task to try to present all 315 American Songbag songs as recordings in 1927. Decades later, after WWII, record collectors created anthology record albums such as the Folkways, Library of Congress, or Harry Smith’s LPs which “taught” old folk songs to new, young players. Sandburg’s existing work helped make this later work interesting — but those recording anthologies relied on dubs from 78 RPM records made a decade or so later than the era Sandburg and his collaborators were working in collecting songs from unrecorded singers.