legacy

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.

At Day-Close in November

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

See, just as my son predicted, we’re back with more old dead poets, this time English poet Thomas Hardy. Today’s poem sort of pairs-up with Dave Moore’s piece from last time. Dave directly addressed youth in his song in the context of the cycle of generations, with the newer ones sure they’ve figured out something the old generation hasn’t—which is sort of true, at least enough to allow them the audacity to change things.

Hardy, in this fall poem written late in his life, isn’t so sure, but then Hardy never is. In the Hardy poems I’ve presented he’s very aware of the cycles of things, and he barely accepts that those eternal circles could have any inclined plane to their returning paths.

Thomas Hardy close up

That’s a prodigious cookie duster you got there Mr. Hardy.

Here’s the full text of Hardy’s “At Day-Close in November”  if you’d like to follow along as I discuss how I experienced it.

Since we’ve done so many autumn poems this year, we can see Hardy checking in with some perennial fall poem tropes: shorter days, birds leaving, colored and falling leaves. Hardy, whose late career overlapped the Imagists, is immediate and unfussy with his images in a modern manner. The one personified natural image in it: the waving evergreens like waltzers, is still not too far from one used by pioneering Imagist Richard Aldington. Note to, there’s not a single interior emotional term used here. To sense what the poet/speaker is feeling we need to take in the images and events.

The second stanza increases the originality, even while using colored and falling leaves. The light-yellow beach tree leaves floating in the air are like relics of the sun in a gray noontime. And as some old guys will recognize Hardy is saying they are also like inter-ocular “floaters,” tiny clouds that develop in the fluid of some aging eyes and drift across vision. The final two lines tell us that the poet/speaker is old enough that he planted trees in his youth that are now tall enough to block the sky in places. There’s some parallelism here: the leaves, like specks in his vision, block some of the sky like the trees he planted in youth do also. The former is transitory, moving, changing, the later seemingly less so.

The last stanza adds some children, who also are moving through the scene. Here the poem does resort to a internal term, though not an emotional one: the children we’re told “conceive” that those tall trees must have always been there (something the poet/speaker knows is not so—I set those damn trees in the ground myself is the implied thought). So those trees are not permanent things, and so like the leaves, like clouds in an old man’s eye after all.

I at first encountered the last line as puzzling, even awkward sounding. There seems to be two versions of the text. The one I found first and used has the last line as: “That none will in time be seen.” Others seem to have it as “A time when none will be seen.” The second version is less awkward and has a parallelism with it’s preceding line “A time when no tall trees grew here.” I had trouble singing that first version, I might have used the second one if I’d seen it before the performance. But now I’m thinking that the awkwardness, even the sense that the poem has ended on a “What’d he say?” note, may have value.

This line’s “none” has a hazy antecedent. I think we’re to first think it’s the children, who are unaware of the transient nature of themselves (something the poet/speaker knows and they don’t). But in the sentence it appears in, the statement can be referring to the trees (which the poet/speaker knows weren’t there until he planted them) that are not permanent.

In what ways are the trees not permanent? Well the poet/speaker is old, he may expect he will not see either those children or the trees he planted for many more autumns. Nor are the trees permanent to the children, rambling through in play. They will grow up, perhaps not stay there, or be at work inside and not outside in the fall air by the trees. I know little about Hardy’s particular English countryside, but is he even foreseeing a modern future where the trees will be cut down for progress? And by extension, is Hardy, taking as is his wont the long view, saying that any work he did in his long life will be forgotten by those children?

Musically, Benjamin Britten has set this poem to music. I listened to two performances which reminded me the problems I sometimes have with art song settings of poetry as a listener: a complex melody makes it hard to inhabit the words with humanity and feeling, and therefore obscures their meaning and makes everything empty decoration. I persisted and found a couple where the singers somewhat overcame these issues with Britten’s setting. Here’s the best one I’ve found so far.


Of the performances I’ve heard so far, Mark Wilde is best able to illuminate the words through Britten’s filigree.

Now of course I don’t mean to knock the skills of Britten as a composer. I could claim that I write music that has a wider variety in some sense, but let’s be serious: I don’t have 1% of Britten’s musical knowledge, or the knowledge of any other reasonably well-known “serious” composer. And as a singer I have trouble rendering even simpler melodies and for this reason I don’t try to write art-song style settings because I have no one handy to sing them.

So, what’d I do instead with my music for this Hardy poem? A rock band with three cranked-up Telecasters wailing away. I suggest you listen to it loud too. The player gadget is below.

Adelaide Crapsey, A Ghost Story

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

We’re a couple of weeks past Halloween, but let’s finish out our series on American poet Adelaide Crapsey with a ghost story about two families. Perhaps you don’t believe in ghosts? That’s OK. In this story one family believes in ghosts and the other one doesn’t.

As we learned yesterday, a young scholar and writer of poetry, Adelaide Crapsey was struck down just days after she turned 36 in 1914 by tuberculosis. Though greatly weakened by her illness, she had worked on organizing a book-length collection of her poems in her final year, including a section introducing examples of a new poetic form she had created.

Alas, she didn’t seem to have a publisher when she died. It’s uncertain who knew about the poems she’d selected. Adelaide had a strong belief in self-reliance and not burdening her friends and family, and so for as long as possible she’d kept the news of her grave diagnosis from them, and some of the poems in her manuscript (such as the ones used in our last post) spoke frankly about her illness, pain, and thoughts on mortality.

adelaide crapsey grave

A grave marker that doesn’t burden you either. She ended her collection of poems: “Wouldst thou find my ashes? Look/In the pages of my book”

There were some external reasons for this desire not to burden her family. Her father, Algernon Crapsey* had been a prominent Episcopal priest in Rochester New York, one who had practiced a ministry to the poor and other disadvantaged portions of the Gilded Age. Adelaide’s father came to believe that certain spiritual beliefs of his church were not only of doubtful accuracy, but that taken on faith they would hinder service to the poor. Once he decided he was right about this, he wouldn’t shut up about it either. He preached it, he wrote articles and books about this: if you believe in miracles and heavenly rewards you are all too likely to not feel the need to make your own miracles by action here and now, in this life, on this Earth.

This put his church in a bind. Here was a churchman who was known for manifest good works around the state of New York, a Christian hero of a sort—but who was also vocally opposed to church doctrine.

So it was that a few years before Adelaide Crapsey died that a committee of investigators from the Episcopal diocese came to the parsonage where Adelaide had grown up to question her father on these matters. Her father was out, doing those good works. Her mother was worn-out from dealing with this all. Adelaide, like any good PK,** stepped in as hostess. The story is told that she served them tea and kept them graciously talking as the tea went down.

Oh, and she had spiked the tea with rum. It was said the investigators inquisitorial rigor suffered a decline during their wait.

But Adelaide’s father would not keep quiet. He eventually met with a church trial for heresy.***  He claimed the heresy of the church not serving the poor as Jesus commanded was far greater than any they could charge him with over supernatural events, but the church’s hierarchy convicted him. Maybe he wasn’t a heretic who believed in different gods or another heavenly host, but it just wouldn’t do to be a priest of their church who didn’t profess the right beliefs.

No burning at the stake though, he was just written out of his job and the church. The family had to leave the parsonage where they had lived for decades for a house some supporters found for them elsewhere in town.

Adelaide, like her family, didn’t believe in heaven and hell. And now she was dead, and as her poem had put it, her mouth was now part of the quiet as with falling snow and the hour before dawn.

In another part of the same town, there was a successful architect, Claude Bragdon. What kind of architect? Do you know the names of Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, or Buckminster Fuller? Claude Bragdon was that type, committed to artistic principles, in his case to a religious and mystical level. Indeed, he had a strong side-interest in Theosophy, a 19th century unified field theory of spiritualism and hermetic knowledge. He had known the Crapsey family and Adelaide at least somewhat. Adelaide had taken his mystical bent in stride, calling him “cube man” due to his fascination with the hypercube (which I think may be related to Buckminster Fuller’s theories about the geometric nature of the universe).

Claude_Bragdon

“The geometry of innocence flesh on the bone/Causes Galileo’s math book to be thrown” Claude Bragdon sings the Tombstone Blues.

Claude Bragdon had not been married long when Adelaide Crapsey died. His new wife, Eugénie had never met Adelaide. One day, in that silent time of the hour before the dawn, something happened. Here’s how he described it in his autobiography:

One morning in the summer of 1915 I was awakened by my wife Eugénie, who asked me if I knew anyone by the name of Adelaide. I told her that Mrs. Algernon Crapsey’s name was Adelaide, and it had also been that of her daughter, who had died a short time before. “Take me to see Mrs. Crapsey,’ said Eugénie, ‘because I was awakened by the sound of her name, repeated over and over: Adelaide! Adelaide!’ “

Now if a chill runs up and down your spine to hear this, the architect and his wife may have taken it more calmly. Not only were spirit voices and mediumship part and parcel of Theosophy, Eugénie was a “Delphic Woman” in her husband’s estimation, one who used automatic writing to take down sayings and messages from the ether.****  And so now Eugénie’s automatic writing sessions became peppered with messages from the late Adelaide Crapsey. With a little interpretation, the messages seemed to be referring to the poems, the book-length collection Adelaide had been working on.

Book negotiations have been known to get complicated, and I haven’t read all the source materials for this story*****  but somehow the husband and wife mystic family convinced the social-gospel materialist family to go through the late Adelaide Crapsey’s effects, and retrieve the manuscript. I can see this scene written in Mulder and Scully dialog.

Claude came out of the Arts and Crafts movement, so buildings weren’t his only art. He also ran a small press for books on his theories and other Theosophical works. He became the book designer and publisher that introduced the world to Adelaide Crapsey the poet and determined ghost.

What became of Adelaide’s ghostly voice? It didn’t do a book tour or poetry readings—pity that, it would have pipped Tupac’s hologram by nearly a century and spiced up the valves of many a bookstore. The final automatic writing messages thanked the Bragdons for their efforts and assured everyone that the other side was a fine and happy place where she didn’t miss living at all. Just so much “Bread and butter notes” from the beyond.

At this point the man with the skinny tie and narrow lapel suit should step forward from the shadows and wrap things up, but where’s today’s audio piece?

Well, I did say that Claude Bragdon had many artistic interests. One of his friends was Alfred Stieglitz, the pioneering art photographer who was connected to another famous photographer Edward Steichen, a friend and brother-in-law of Carl Sandburg. Either through that connection, or Sandburg’s strong early interest in short poems created with concrete images rather than abstract words, or some Great Lakes leftist linkage between Adelaide’s social gospel preaching progressive father and the Milwaukee and Chicago based socialist Sandburg (maybe more than one of the above?) made Carl Sandburg aware of Adelaide Crapsey’s poetry and story, and he wrote a passionate elegy for her.

Here’s my performance of that poem of Sandburg’s, available with the player below. No player visible? Then use this highlighted hyperlink to play the piece. The full text of Sandburg’s poem is here if you’d like to read along.

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*I should have warned you: as elsewhere in this story, the 19th century names are full-flavored.  If Lemony Snicket reads this, let it be known that I will defend my intellectual property to the upmost here!

**PK, “Preacher’s Kid.” As a class, they have an opportunity to grow up with an interest in philosophy, ethics and words, but also with a childhood were the expectation to be good and the desire to rebel have to be balanced from a too-early age. Alternative reader here Dave Moore and my wife are both PKs.

***The story of Adelaide’s father Algernon Crapsey sounds eerily similar to a tale from The Sixties and another Episcopal clergyman (a bishop no less!) James Pike.  Pike was also committed to social change and questioning of religious dogma and was threatened with an ecclesiastical trial for heresy. Coincidentally, Pike eventually worked with a medium to try to contact his dead son.

****We now use Twitter. Much better. But are those odd messages we read from bots or….the other side!

*****Two women have worked to discover and catalog much of what is now known about Adelaide Crapsey’s life and work and are the prime source for much of what I know: Karen Alkalay-Gut who has written a biography of Crapsey Alone in the Dawn and Susan Sutton Smith who has written about the Crapsey and Bragdon families’ associated papers and published the Complete Poems and Collected Letters of Adelaide Crapsey.

Mr Nelson

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

It often takes a while to know who has died.

When Prince died a year ago, the shock-wave for fans was breath-taking, the air went out of the room, and for each of them there was something that went missing when they got the word: the promise of new music, a memory of concert or a night of dancing, a period of their youth now seemingly past all reliving, and probably a dozen or more other private things.

If it seemed impossible that Prince had died, it was because it was impossible that he had lived. About him it could be said that he could dance like James Brown, sing like Marvin Gaye, play guitar like Jimi Hendrix, write a song like Curtis Mayfield—and arrange it all, and play it all, and record it all for himself or other artists. He was the most astonishingly broad musical artist of our time.

And he did this over and over, for decades, to the point that no one could ever really keep up with all he did. I suspect the longer time we now have will allow us to discover, in his work, things that are still overlooked, ideas that he had that somehow weren’t understood, things we skipped over because we thought Prince should be doing something else.

Tonight, as I write this, I’m struck by one other thing: has there been enough recognition that Prince was in the vanguard of bringing women instrumentalists into the context of the rock band? Let’s propose a rock band gender integration variation of the Bechdel Test: name a successful band with two prominent women instrumentalists before The Revolution that wasn’t a “all-girl band.1” Every example that comes to mind (and it’s not like there are hundreds of them) stops the count of women players at one. I can think of only two 2, and neither achieved a modicum of the cultural prominence of Prince’s band.

Prince and the Revolution

It’s a little known fact that Prince was about two feet taller than the rest of the Revolution.

 

And he did it again performing with his late career power trio, 3rdEyeGirl.

That’s just a part of his career of course—but please, this isn’t some kind of rote identity politics thing, or merely a piece of trivia like “Name a band with two left-handed Canadians?”. This is half the human race!

With the Parlando Project I get to audaciously tackle the work of a lot of great writers. I use their words unashamedly and try to find something I can relate to you about their work. For some reason, perhaps because Prince Rogers Nelson embarrasses me as musician, I’ve been hesitant to post this episode, and to share this modest musical piece The LYL Band wrote and performed about his leaving.

But I’m going to do it anyway. The best parts of this piece “Mr. Nelson”  are the work of Dave Moore: most of the words and the electronic piano part. Footnotes at the end of this post for the obsessives. The audio player for “Mr. Nelson” is right below this. You can dance if you want to.

 

 

 

County Joe MacDonald and his All Star BandJoy of Cooking

Guy in the middle isn’t Prince.                  Joy of Cooking, pioneers.

 
1 I exclude the “all-girl band” not to denigrate the talents of those who performed in them, or because a band somehow needs men to be valid, but because however intended, the result in the 20th Century cultural context was seen largely for its novelty value.

2 The two bands I can think of: Joy of Cooking and the Country Joe MacDonald led “Paris Sessions” era All-Star Band.