Parlando Project

A video about “Stage Fright,” or then about being a public artist

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I just spent a half-hour watching this video recommended to me by a stranger elsewhere online. I knew. and still know nothing, about the man who talks here, despite a documentary being made about him a few years back.

Why did it hold my attention, even though it’s partly about that documentary and a career I don’t know? Well, he’s an engaging talker, and the interviewer here too is excellent, but that wouldn’t be determinative. One of this project’s mottos is “Other People’s Stories,” but obviously in a world of current billions and more than a millennium of poetry to consider, I’m going to ignore or pass by most people’s stories. Maybe it’s his age and his obvious engagement with art, while being old enough to be my father? I’m old. I’m still engaged in this Project. Old people still facing that situation may be the link that connected me.

As someone who currently rarely performs live in a room of listeners, the subject of “stage fright” isn’t a pressing issue for me. The early parts of this interview do speak to that issue, reminding us that it is not a unique, shameful, issue — but one that is rather common among performers. No, it’s not so much stage fright that I myself am most interested in. Rather, I’ve been increasingly promotional with the more than 650 audio pieces and accompanying posts that have accumulated here over the past six years. I frankly feel a mix of unseemly self-interest and objective self-delusion as I do that. These acts of promotion are still novel enough for me that I can, for now, press on past those feelings. And since it’s been harder to create more pieces, or as complete a realization in them of what this Project tries to do, this task — which embarrasses me — allows me to think I’d doing something in place of that.

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What I find is the deeper message then of this man’s account is that there is an element in art — subject, yes, to the clouding of our egos and neurotic urges — that is beyond ourselves. More than 20 minutes in, in what becomes the conclusion of the interview’s story arc — the thing everything before has been building to — Seymour Bernstein articulates that place.*

Can we visit that place consciously, acknowledge that we want to abide there at least a little while?

For an audio piece, here’s one of the early pieces of this project I’m most proud of, another older man of music speaking about that art. Weston Noble, spoke this about music at his retirement, and I wove his words into some original music. You can hear it with the player gadget below, or with this highlighted link.

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*So, should I give it to you in pull quote form, a TL:DNR assistance to the harried reader who doesn’t have time for the half-hour interview? I debated this, but decided that no, it would lack impact without the build of the story telling itself by the method of it’s telling. I decided, you might be too likely to shrug, and the precept would roll off your consciousness. And earlier in the interview Bernstein makes another recommendation that may be valuable to writers and composers: that a balance of re-creation and creation is helpful.

Trifles–I Know What Stillness Is

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I made it! This is the 500th audio piece presented here as the Parlando Project since it began in the summer of 2016. In the month of December I’ll write more about what the work for this project has been like, and what I think I’ve learned. I’ll also share with you, my valued audience, what I plan to do going forward in some upcoming posts, but let’s get onto presenting today’s piece based on a small portion of Susan Glaspell’s pioneering American play about pioneer women and their isolation.

I’ve long wanted to do something with a text from Susan Glaspell since she’s partly responsible for this project so often dealing with the beginnings of Modernism in the first two decades of the 20th Century. In America, I think we have a cultural tendency to forget our pioneers, to think of them as imperfect, “beta test” versions of what we consider to be the current and vital expressions of art. We owe them some gratitude, an obligation, but it turns out that looking at first attempts, first intentions, can reveal insights we’ve forgotten, potentially useful tactics we set aside. That said, there’s coincidence in wanting to point out Glaspell’s work here, I’m related to her in one of those fractal-branched family trees; and elderly relatives I once knew, now dead, knew her as a living person, a person with roots in Iowa along the Mississippi River, a place that was home for some time to my people.

Susan Glaspell at the keyboard

Susan Glaspell at the keys. Can’t have a Modernist American theater unless someone writes some plays!

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In a previous post I’ve noted that some figures important to American Modernism came from that mid-river region. Carl Sandburg, the forgotten Imagist with dirty fingernails was one. Glaspell was another, not just forgotten as a Modernist, but forgotten as a prime-mover in Modernist American drama. You see, she and her husband had a wild idea while living in an artist’s colony on the East Coast: plays that reflected the “make it new” ethos, radical social analysis, and the symbolic undercurrent that European dramatists were exploring. The theater she organized in 1915, The Provincetown Players, was nothing less than the CBGBs of independent and experimental American theater.

The one-act play that supplies today’s text is her ground-breaking “Trifles.*”   It’s now remembered largely as a primary piece of feminist drama, rightfully so, and that outlook might see it as a piece of the social-realist school. There are good reasons for that. Recent scholarship has uncovered that Glaspell, as a young journalist, had covered a murder trial in Indianola Iowa with parallels to the story of “Trifles.”

But the Provincetown group wasn’t just about plays about issues, or gritty realism in opposition to melodramatic fantasy, gaslight adventures, and blithe romances. Modernist poets were also playwrights and actors in the group. “Trifles”  isn’t a verse drama, it isn’t a choral poem, but it’s also not unaware of those forms of dramatic expression. In the play’s language, Glaspell uses extraordinary compression, objects representing feelings not explicitly told, and long arias of extravagant emotional expression are conspicuously absent. I’ve never heard it called such, but it’s not outrageous to call “Trifles”  an Imagist play. In today’s presentation, which I call “I Know What Stillness Is”  I have extracted a section of dialog near the end of the play between two women incidentally drawn into a murder site investigation. One, Mrs. Hale,** a neighbor of the murder suspect, speaks first; the second speaker, Mrs. Peters, is the wife of the sheriff leading the investigation.

Original NYC production of Trifles

Picture of the original New York production of “Trifles.” The woman playing Mrs. Peters at the far left is Marjorie Vonnegut. Yes, she married into that Vonnegut family. So it goes…

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In my presentation, as per the ways of the Parlando Project, I want to combine music and words in some useful way that illuminates the piece. So, while not rewriting, I removed some sections of dialog, slightly compressing the scene, and added one subtle use of refrain not in the original text.***  If I was a bel canto singer perhaps I’d think of making this an opera, but instead I’ve kept the dialog spoken word, but by setting this to music I want you to hear the dialectical conversation the two women are having as one would listen to it sung. Does this work? Maybe, and that’s what I wanted to try.

One challenge I had in completing this given our pandemic isolation and my lack of collaborative resources was how to perform the two women’s voices, and I broke through that issue by finding and using recorded voices from a reading of the entire text of the play collected by Librivox. In the performance I used, the part of Mrs. Hale is played by Elizabeth Klett, and the part of Mrs. Peters by Arielle Lipshaw. The whole play is performed and is available here, but it’s a reading of the entire 1916 script, which includes Glaspell’s extensive stage directions which are read interspersed with the dialog.

I could go on about the things expressed in the play, the remarkably early and clear-eyed feminist analysis contained in it, but I thought my audio piece does well enough in portraying the sense of isolation that rural women of the time faced (and to some modern degree face again in our current pandemic.) There is an extensive overview of things others have noted in the “Trifles”  Wikipedia page.  Before leaving you to listen to our 500th audio piece I thought I’d say instead something about the music I composed for this. It’s an orchestral strings score with a female vocalese part, all of which I played via my MIDI guitar interface and little plastic keyboard. Musical mavens will note that I use simple musical devices in my orchestral stuff, and if I was high falutin I might call myself a Minimalist composer—but frankly, when exploring composition I’m naïve enough to find the simple musical materials produce results that I still find moving and effective.

500!

I started this project thinking I might get to a nice big number of pieces combining various words with original music, like maybe 100, or dare I dream, 200. Thanks for reading and listening along the way!

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Since this is the 500th piece, I decided to provide a bonus today for those that would like to listen more distinctly to the music I’ve composed by also providing a separate version without the dialog, just the instrumental music. The version with Glaspell’s words performed in a way to suggest the word-music in them, “I Know What Stillness Is,”   has a player gadget below. If you don’t see the player gadget, this highlighted phrase is a link that may work to allow you to hear it.

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And here’s the version with only the instruments and the wordless singer, and its highlighted hyperlink alternative, in case you don’t see the player below.

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*Glaspell later transferred the script into a short story which was titled “A Jury of Her Peers”  and the piece is therefore known under two titles. Much later (in that year that read the same upside down and right side up: 1961) the somewhat revised and extended script became an episode of the TV anthology show Alfred Hitchcock Presents under the “Jury of Her Peers”  title. In titling my excerpt and attempted recasting of the piece with yet a third title, I think I’m following a tradition.

**The part of Mrs. Hale was also played by Susan Glaspell in the play’s first production in Provincetown.

***The entire original script is available at this highlighted link. The section of dialog I used begins near the end of page 26 of this script.

A pleasing increase in our readership and then some oddities in our stats

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Well before we break the suspense and reveal the most liked and listened to piece of this concluded summer, let me say just a bit about overall listenership and readership. Both are up to historic heights this summer. When this project officially launched a bit over four years ago listens of the audio pieces (which are also available as podcasts, even though our typical sub-5 minute “just the musical piece” format is not the norm for that talkative format) were listened to at a rate substantially greater than the page view stats for the blog posts. This may indicate that podcast listeners are more prone to sample new and little-known podcasts than blog readers, how older blogs with more posts and links get ranked in search engines, or it could say something about how folks like you may have changed how you consume content. Go figure. Then in the middle of last year, Spotify unilaterally stopped distributing the Parlando podcast audio, which apparently was because they decided that our format is unsuitable for their purposes. Not a big thing, as they were never more than 15% or so of our audio listens, and if you would like to hear Parlando Project audio in a podcast reader, most other podcast services, including Apple’s still carry our audio—but around the same time blog page views started to take off, and this spring and summer were the best yet. Then in August something odd started happening with listens to the audio pieces. I’m not sure what it is, or if it represents “real” listeners or something else, but unique listens to the audio in both August and September nearly tripled the average month earlier in the year, and September still has a week left!

Blog page views per monthaudio downloads per month

More people reading this blog, more people listening to the audio pieces. Thanks!

One thing that gratifies me when I look at the stats is that there are people listening to the old audio pieces all the time, and a great deal of the blog readership seems to come from folks finding a particular post, often one that is several years old, from a web search. It’s not uncommon that the most visited post in a day or week’s report is an older one. If literature was the news that stays news, the web hasn’t changed that. Another thing that gratifies me is all the listeners and readers from outside the U.S., which is one reason why I spend less time on current American politics than many other blogs do.

But those listens bring me to an issue in determining what is the most liked and listened to piece this past summer.

I said it was complicated. A number of older pieces got significant listenership this summer: Jean Toomer’s superb love poem “Her Lips are Copper Wire,”  William Blake’s parable “A Poison Tree,”  and Carl Sandburg’s summer neighborhood hymn “Back Yard.”  “Back Yard”  was nearly a repeat visitor this summer’s Top Ten by the audio listening stats. But then I noticed ¾ of it’s summer listens were from Washington state—a fine part of our country, but how had Sandburg or my performance spiked in interest there? Odd that. 90% of “A Poison Tree” listeners this summer were from Great Britain. OK, Blake is more revered in his home country. But there was an even more runaway oddity in the Summer 2020 listenership: Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “Pied Beauty,” an audio piece from last fall, got nearly twice the listens as most of the pieces you’ve seen so far in our Top Ten. I’d be calling it our most popular—and then I noticed: all but two of it’s listens were from Malaysia. The listens didn’t come in one big bunch, they were spread out almost equally between June, July, and August.

It looked like someone caring enough to game the system. Now I like Hopkins and what I did with his poem, and if this just happened out of genuine love for the poem or my performance, I thank that possible someone for their enthusiasm. As the listens for “Inversnaid”  this summer show, whoever that was isn’t alone in liking to hear Hopkins done the Parlando way.

So, decisions of the judges are final, and there will be another poem that will be named tomorrow as the most liked and listened to piece this past summer.

But here are player gadgets for those “golden oldies” to listen to why you wait.

“Her Lips are Copper Wire”

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“A Poison Tree”

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“Back Yard”

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And yes, “Pied Beauty”

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Thanks for reading and listening. While this is a time consuming and non-revenue project, I try to make it worth your attention. So, to see that these encounters with various words and various music have been worth that to you is what keeps it going.

Birds Busking

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

This project doesn’t operate by some master plan, but it does operate keeping in mind a number of principles. I want to explore various ways to combine words with music. There’s a long tradition of setting poetry to music as Art Song or Lieder. While elaborate melodic contours can sometimes detract from the expression of the text, I have no objection to that tradition, just a feeling that there are other approaches.*  I want to vary the music used, as much as my resources and skills allow. I would like the texts to vary in expression as well, so much so that even though this project started with the help of a fellow poet and musician, Dave Moore, it doesn’t use our own poetry or writing for text to connect with music much here. I like to honor “Poetry’s Greatest Hits” but I also like to go crate digging for overlooked writers and poems. And unlike most of the modern web, this blog and this project isn’t out to sell you anything. I’m well past my sell-by date as an indie music act.

I’ve been at this for around five years and presenting things here at this blog for nearly four. Today’s piece makes the 450th combination of various words with various music. My current expectation is to continue this project to the 500th piece. The audience continues to grow, which is gratifying and motivating, but this project takes a tremendous amount of effort. How can one weigh these things? My own subjective feeling right now is that the continued amount of effort involved would make more sense with a larger audience than I’ve been able to attract, even now as this thing nears its fourth-year anniversary.

Parlando 450 Chagall

the 450th audio piece since we launched in August 2016

 

There are ways that might increase that audience that are somewhat known. Most of them have costs in money, time, focus, and complexity that are daunting to me.**  The introverted, heads-down composer, researcher, writer, and musician for whom those efforts would be undertaken is likely incapable of sustaining that and continuing to do as much creative work as this project has become accustomed to. Other than the rewards of perseverance, much of the growth that motivated me in the past few years has been due to the efforts of readers and listeners to spread the word. If you’ve done this, even a little bit by telling a friend or linking a piece, particularly on those social networks that I don’t have time to participate in, thank you!

I should reach 500 pieces sometime later this year. I continue to think on these things and what to do about this project as I continue to work on new pieces.

Today’s piece violates that principle of featuring other writers. I may bend that way a bit more in the coming weeks than in the past, as I have a few pieces I wrote that I want to present. But it does speak to my thoughts today about this project at piece #450. “Birds Busking”  is about that music offered every morning by those exiled dinosaurs. Oh, they have hopes too, if not actual open musical instrument cases with a few bills salted inside. Maybe some territorial claim, mating opportunities, or commiserating calls to like birds-of-a-feather. But one can think, as poets do as they continue, that they might sing anyway.

Birds Busking

I may have invented a word (“eached”) in the 12th line.

 

How many poets have listened to that birdsong? I cannot count and neither can you. The countlessness of that is magnificent! The wonder of all those poets and all that music is what this project is about. And so I write and post this new piece here this morning, tenaciously.

The player to hear “Birds Busking”  is below.

 

 

 

 

*In fact I enjoy Art Song, and just because the style has its characteristics doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its worth. But I can’t sing elaborate melodies successfully (my tune bucket’s got a hole in it). Similarly, I think hip hop can do remarkable things, but the fast rap flow is something my voice can’t quite hack.

**I’m not even good at following up and acknowledging your comments on these pieces. It’s not something you said! I’m just writing another piece of music, or recording it, or researching or looking for a new poet or poem.

Heartened

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

We are over half-way through Black History month and I’ve mostly spoken obliquely about it. I think that’s my nature. As poet I’m often doomed to reader response that they just don’t get it, and that bothers me, because in my mind I’m intending to link disparate things because I think that’s powerful. But in intending to do that, I make myself obscure—and painfully, some fine people who’ve heard or read my work think that’s my intent or my error.

So, when I speak about one of my discoveries, a law I think is strangely comforting: “All Artists Fail,” I’m speaking from personal experience. You may think, that’s not true about famous artist X or highly revered artist Y, but it is. Even those that are—for a time or for a long time—popular, many will not hear of them, many will not care for their work when exposed to it, and even those that are treasured and ranked highly, how many will understand what they are trying to do sufficiently? Some? Perhaps. Many? One hopes. All? Never. It’s good to aim for the some and honorable to hope for the many. Be prepared for the never-all however. Sequester or armor yourself against that or be prepared to take comfort in it.

That’s part of why this project has a principle of “Other People’s Stories.” More than 90% of the time the words I’m presenting and talking about here are not mine. Trying to encounter those words a couple times a week with an open heart and whatever limitations or strengths I have is the goal. I’ve done that here over the 420 audio pieces and the over 500 posts in the last few years.

The great majority of those that I present here are now dead, many long so. As my son points out to me, mostly white men too. One needs to interrogate the past to form the future. I have a culture I inherited. One that spoke English, was based in the middle of the U.S., and was as blinkered as any. Everyone inherits a culture. It’s inevitable, as inevitable as “All Artists Fail.” What do you draw from it for strength and inspiration, what do you oppose, what do you seek to add?

What can you find in what is not you? All those things. The future is not made of one heart alone, no matter how perfect, it’s made of many hearts. Good art can tear open our boney-caged chests and let us glimpse the beautiful glistening ooze within all of us: Chinese, African, Irish, English, indigenous, immigrant, and on and on. It’s right and wrong—yes, in some proportion, inside all of us—but it’s always beating as music and poetry does.

Long dead CIS white man Phillip Sidney wrote “Fool, said my Muse to me, ‘Look in thy heart, and write.” That can work. That can fail. My muse said, “Look in another’s heart, and no matter how dim your vision inside that swooshing pump, write there.”

More new audio pieces soon. But I was heartened today by a post over on the Yip Abides blog linking to a post from a couple of years ago here. Bob Roman has some very nice things to say about what’s attempted with the Parlando Project, things that reminded me why I do this. He also recomends that the archives here have a lot for those who’d like to find something different any day. The particular piece he linked to had Jimi Hendrix’s SciFi parable about an alien scout-ship dealing with observing life on the “Third Stone from the Sun.”  The alien gets it wrong, or sees that we get it wrong: the prime Earth species is a bird, not us warm blooded mammals.

The most popular Parlando piece for Fall 2019 is…

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

We’ve reached the top of our seasonal top 10 covering the pieces you most liked and listened to over the past three months, but before I reveal the top piece, let me cover one other area.

I know from growth in the audience that some of you are new to the Parlando Project. Because of that, every so often I should explain what this project does. We take words, mostly poetry, mostly other peoples’ words, not our own, and combine them with music we write and perform ourselves. Sometimes we sing the words, sometimes we don’t, sometimes we split the difference somehow.

By intent the poetry we use and the music we create for it varies. Most texts are used under public domain rules.*  What kind of music do we use? I try to make it a whole lot of different. I’ve never been able to answer the simple-sounding question “What kind of music do you like?” because the idea of liking one kind of music is just not in me. So be aware that you may run into music here that you don’t care for, either because of our limitations as musicians or your own tastes and expectations—and that may happen right after a piece you liked. The same applies to the words we use. There are over 400 examples of what we do here in our archives, so you can move on and look at another one anytime. If you wonder if we’ve presented a poem or author, search here and see.

OK, so who sits atop our Autumn 2019 hit parade? William Shakespeare that’s who. That’s no surprise considering that it’s his Sonnet 73 which begins “That time of year thou mayest in me behold” (but which I’ve always thought of as “Bare Ruined Choirs”  for its most famous image)—one of the longest-famed “autumn of one’s years” poems in English.

Shakespeare Sonnets1609 edition Title Page

Let England Shake-Speares. The title page of the first printing.

 

I wrote at some length about my experience of the poem in my original post here, but I’ll reiterate only one point: even though this poem resonates with many older people and older lovers in particular, it was written by a man in his early 30s. Consider all the exegesis of Shakespeare’s sonnets that seek to tweeze out his sexuality, incidents to fill out his biography, or the identity of the fair youth, the dark lady, or “who really wrote Shakespeare,” and consider that they were written after all by an actor and a famously prolific creator of opposite and varied characters. I too want to invest those sonnets with his experience, to believe that this great artist is letting me see his heart. How much is intentionally or unintentionally “real,” and how much is a good illusion? We may never know, but we have the art none-the-less.

Here’s the player to hear my performance of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 “Bare Ruined Choirs.”  And a sincere thank you for listening and reading this fall. I hope that some of the pieces we’ve presented have pleased you and illuminated some matter or another.

 

*This means that the poetry is usually from before 1924. I happen to like (and have grown to like even more via this project) a good deal of early 20th century Modernist poetry, but we’ll jump around to older stuff than that too. While we’ve done many of “Poetry’s Greatest Hits” over the years, I’ll use lesser-known poets and poems when they strike me as interesting.

Doubt Brings Autumn

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Today’s post includes the 400th audio piece since this blog officially launched in August of 2016. For such round numbers it seems appropriate to use a representative selection, but then the Parlando Project’s aesthetic is to avoid formula. So, the text for today “Doubt Brings Autumn”  is from my own poem. Long-time readers/listeners here know that’s not my usual practice.

When I started the Parlando Project I hoped to create 100 to 120 of these combinations of various music with various words. The music would test my limits as a musician and composer, and the words would be focused on “Other Peoples’ Stories,” an emphasis on other writers and artists rather than my own life.*

I had no idea how enriching it would be to encounter the work I would turn to, looking not just at “Poetry’s Greatest Hits” but also at the lesser-known poems and poets. That choice made around four years ago largely by intuition and confoundedness still seems to be the right one.

I started with some pieces already done, and some already expected. Not nearly 100, but once this project ignited it was hard to put the fire out. Now at 400, the natural urge is to press on to 500.**

One key to keeping this process going and to avoid the formulaic is to introduce random or coincidental elements into the making of these things. One favorite toy of mine to play with is to intentionally seek out and explore misinterpretations of sentences. Syntax and context is a slippery thing after all, why not have some fun with it? Until last month I didn’t know what to call this kind of language play, when it suddenly occurred to me where I must have picked this concept up.

There was once a great comic duo called Burns and Allen, whose career spanned the later vaudeville stages to radio to early television. The act’s trick was for George Burns, the straight man, to report some mundane event or judgement and for the comic, his wife Gracie Allen, to then find some confounding misinterpretation of that statement. Hilarity ensued, as any attempt to put the Dada spring-snakes back into the can was met by more sproinging twisting of the otherwise obvious meaning.

Poetic license: I couldn’t find any short clips of the classic double act, but the concept extends to this scene

 

 

That realization led me to name this kind of language play a “Gracie.”

“Doubt Brings Autumn”  began with a Gracie. A blog I read regularly written by an Iowan, Paul Deaton, had in series discussed the seasonal cycle of his food garden and an orchard he works at over the past year. His posts, as well as alternative voice and keyboardist here Dave Moore’s garden probably led me to use more stuff related to gardens this past year. In one post this fall Deaton remarked that frost and even some snow had come and that “If there is any doubt, autumn has definitely arrived.”

We all know what Paul meant, but if one takes this as a Gracie, it could just as clearly mean that doubt, even in small doses, causes, brings on, autumn. That became the germ, the seed, of this poem.

It’s been through a number of versions and revisions, and I revised it yet again slightly this morning after the performance you’ll hear was recorded, but the idea, inherent in both Paul’s life (he’s contemplating retirement) and mine (I’m “retired” but working near-constantly on this project, my “garden”) was a rich one. Our doubts, our questions about how to continue and react to our own seasons, are they cause or effect?

Doubt Brings Autumn

This is the current version with a small change in the next to last line

 

The last line works not just from its sound but gains also from another accident of English. The words unraveling and raveling are not opposites, each form of the word means the same—but raveling is the rarer word and subconsciously adds a paradoxical element that winter could  intensify instead of relaxing and untangling our unanswered questions, our doubts.

Another note on this poem in process: when I read an earlier version an accomplished poet whose work I respect reacted to the pun for frost and Frost***  with dismay. All poems and poets work from their own sensibilities, but mine steadfastly believes that humor, even the coincidental humor of Gracies and puns is unavoidable in the human condition. That other poet’s reaction was likely right, in that many (who knows, maybe most) will find the mood broken by that move in my poem. I do wish I didn’t confound them, but I somehow must.

Musically, I’ve finally been able to play fiddle rather than violin on a piece using the MIDI interface on my guitar. The sound of largo bow work is lovely, but so too are many folk traditions which saw away more insistently. The player to hear “Doubt Brings Autumn”  is below, and thanks to all that read and listen here!

 

 

 

*This insight came from a review of a book of Kevin FitzPatrick’s poems, where the reviewer seemed surprised and delighted to find many poems there “with other people in them.” “Why should this be rare?” I asked myself. In a musical metaphor I’d remark that I love solo acoustic guitar—just one set of hands and six strings—but what if all music or even all guitar music was only that or even mostly that? So much we would be missing!

**If I’m able to reach that number, I think that would be a good time to reassess the effort and focus it takes to do this project. If you’d like to help encourage this effort, the best thing you can do is spread the word. I have (too?) little inclination to promote this project on social media or even face-to-face. But even if I had that useful skill, I wouldn’t have time to do it.

***In my awkward defense, I pointed out that Robert Frost likely intended to pun on his own name in his magnificent “October”  where the endangered garden grapes have already suffered a leaf-wide incursion of burning frost.

And the most liked/listened to piece this fall was…

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

What makes for a “hit” in the small province of the Internet that is yours and mine?

We started off the countdown of the most liked and listened to audio pieces here this past fall by talking about the variety of poets and writers that we use for words. Yes, we present well-known poems and poets work, and yes, we like to go further and look at the poets that other poets were influenced by or admired. Sometimes we go yet farther down into the unclaimed storage locker of history, to the obscurities that you likely won’t encounter in school or standard literary surveys.

When looking for words I only ask to find some interest in them and that they are of a length and focus that can work with music, and that they are free for me to use (typically this means pre-1923 work that is in the public domain).

And you, the audience? If you’ve stuck with our efforts here, you’re broadly curious, or at least ready to wait for something to come along that strikes you. I’m so pleased to have you listening and reading, because, like me, you’re ready to have encounters with the unknown or new aspects of the known.

And look at what most captured your attention this fall. Four poems by well-known authors (Sandburg, Cummings, Blake, and Dickinson). Two by influencers/”poet’s poets” (Edward Thomas and Paul Blackburn). Two that are from classical Chinese poets (Du Fu and the unknown author from the Book of Odes).   And one observation I wrote myself (though I also arranged the short quotation from Blackburn and did my own translation of Du Fu).

This past fall’s most popular piece is yet another English translation from the Chinese Confucian Book of Odes.  Even though the words appear to be an inaccurate translation, they’ve gathered their own place in English-speaking culture in the same way that the King James version of the Bible, or FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat,  or Ezra Pound’s own take on classical Chinese poetry have, despite disputed translation accuracy.

Wild Plums scroll

A mid 12th century Chinese scroll illustrating another plum poem in the Book of Odes

 

Someone first wrote, and likely sung, this poem nearly 3000 years ago in some southern province of China. Given that it’s another of the Odes  written in the voice of a woman, we may assume it was a woman. English translations I have read generally portray the speaker as a well-born eligible woman who is more or less saying “Hey suitors. I’m a catch. If you want to marry me, get your proposal in quickly.” A minority contrastingly represent the woman as being too picky, rejecting too many suitors, and in that view, she needs to stop fiddling around and choose. Either reading is interesting. At least on the face of it, it’s reflecting some (though likely upper-class) female empowerment in bronze-age China. But these are not the translations I used.

Here’s the text of the translation I used for my performance. It can be found all over the Internet, but more importantly and intimately, it was known by my wife who sent it to me.

ripe plums are falling

now there are only five

may a fine lover come for me

while there is still time

 

ripe plums are falling

now there are only three

may a fine lover come for me

while there is still time

 

ripe plums are falling

i gather them in a shallow basket

may a fine lover come for me

tell me his name

When I first posted my performance as “Wild Plums”  I didn’t know who did this translation, and despite several hours of reading and searching, I still don’t. Translators generally are attracted to and retain the poem’s litany of plums* decreasing in number, regardless of how they render the situation, but the outlook presented by this version is different. The woman has less agency, or at least in this matter of desire and longing over the course of the poem, she is willing to cede for the moment her power (other than hope). And that is one of the things lyric poetry allows: no one need expect that the moment of emotion or perception in a short lyric is a person’s whole thoughts and feelings on a matter, or themselves. We only ask that it shows us something vital that we wish to have shared between ourselves. As such, this version strikes a chord in our time and our culture.

I still don’t know who this translator is. I have a theory. If that writer didn’t write the translation herself, she popularized it, as I can find no references to this version of the ancient poem before Susan Sandler’s 1985 stage play and then screen play for the 1988 movie Crossing Delancey. Here’s how the poem was used in the movie:

I saw the movie when it came out, and I remember liking it. A different take on the RomCom formula.

 

The woman in this scene (played by Amy Irving) is the movie’s unmarried heroine, and the somewhat smarmy dreamboat across the table (Jeroen Krabbé) captures the heroine’s attention immediately with the personal resonance she feels with this version of the poem.

The person who posted the movie’s poetry scene on YouTube says the translation was by Arthur Waley, but I’ve already found other references to a completely different translation that begins “”Plop fall the plums; but there are still seven” by Waley. So, what’s my mystery translator theory? Could it be by Susan Sandler herself? If anyone knows, please give me info in the comments.

Well after all that, here’s my performance of this piece. If you haven’t heard it yet, the player is below.

 

 

*Poets and writers seem attracted to the plum when choosing their imagery. The wild plum is referenced elsewhere in the Book of Odes, and Horace, Laura Ingalls Wilder, James Joyce, Mary Oliver, and William Carlos Williams (meme-worthy, if non-wild, plums). I even decided to use wild plum blossoms in my own ode about my son.

Introducing National Poetry Month to Music

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s what we do here, usually a couple times a week: we combine original music written for the occasion with some words, which are usually poetry someone else has written.

Of course, poetry. The compression of poetry lets us fit the words into shorter pieces and leave room for some notes. And, of course music, because every poem has a music within it, even when hidden, that wants to come out.

There are lots of ways to do this, and we do many of them. The reader will speak the words, sing the words, chant the words. The music can be simple spontaneous band recordings or more elaborate compositions recorded a track at a time until the larger sound-field is filled in.

There’s something about that push and pull of combining words that want to sing with music that wants to say something. Even when I’m doing it casually and off the cuff as a musician or a reader, I can feel the two parts wanting to connect, asking to connect, demanding that the other half listen!

If you look at the over 190 audio pieces we’ve already published here you’ll see that we don’t usually feature our own words, though Dave and I have written poetry for decades. Even when we do use something we’ve written, it’s usually about someone else.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with poetry about your own experience, but I’ve often felt that something extra is felt when the poetry tries to cross that gap from one person’s head to another person’s lips—that kiss you feel with the momentary connection that begs you to find its meaning. And music too, created silently inside the shadowed choir-loft of a musician’s head, becomes itself only when touching a little membrane of sensitive skin inside another’s ear before it can become part of the dancing bones.

krimmel-quilting-frolic-1813

The Internet’s shown up with poetry again, and there’s them musicians with’em this time!

 

Using other people’s stories, other people’s words—this lets us experience the poems with you. Encountering poetry with music lets us meet them with only the expectation that something will happen.

I’m planning to present more audio pieces here during April’s National Poetry Month (#npm2018) than ever before, so check back often. And don’t forget there are lots of poems with differing music, from the most familiar to the unknown, already here in our archives to check out.

March 2018 Parlando Top 10 Part 2

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

An artist named Linnea Hadaway made a book earlier this year. It had no words in it. She said it had no words because it was about listening.

Today is International Women’s Day, an arbitrary thing like all special days, months and years. I can hear some grumbling off in the distance as some read this: “Another one of those special-interest things. I go to poetry and music to get away from that faddish nonsense.” There’s consistency in that opinion: if one is upset at “identity politics,” dividing the world in halves is just as deplorable as dividing it into tenths or smaller.

Are there dangers in division? There certainly are. But I don’t see these sorts of things as division, but as requesting attention—and attention is what art, and this Parlando Project is about. You see, life is incarcerated in the ultimate special interest group, the ultimate identity, political and otherwise: our own selves. Breaking the cellular barrier to spill our selves, or enticing us into opening a tiny pore to stare across at the skin holding another self inside another world, the still unexplored world we share, is the whole of art.

There is no apportionment so small as to be smaller than that. There is no way out but the way of art, to pay attention. Our ears cannot see, they can only listen.

No planning in this, but the next three audio pieces in our Top 10 count-down of the most liked and listened to pieces this past winter use words written by women.

Carrington 3

Surrealist Leonora Carrington captures the Parlando Project recording another audio piece

 

7. We Grow Accustomed to the Dark

I think I’ve used more Emily Dickinson pieces for words here than any other writer. I didn’t plan it that way. I’m not sure that Dickinson planned it that way either. Obviously, she meant what she did, assiduously creating and collating the more than a thousand short and engagingly enigmatic poems that we now see as a cornerstone of American poetry.

But as a careerist she’s a mess. She showed some of her work to friends and family, but like most friends and family they probably saw them as artifacts of the ordinary Emily, that stubborn particular. Perhaps they understood or didn’t understand her poems better than we do; but we, her current readers, believe it’s the later.

She had a lucky break with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the critic and social activist who answered her letter and saw something there. Even in the intellectual ferment of Transcendentalist New England, how many would have? The posthumous publication he shepherded, made possible the Dickinson we have today. But did he understand her art? We, as posterity, think otherwise.

So, like the woman in “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark”  Dickinson pressed on, walking, almost straight, and like the bravest, aware that the comedy of striding face-first into a tree was possible.

 

The Emily DIckinson Internal Difference

I was there! What a concert! The music was good too.

6. A Certain Slant of Light

I didn’t think about this while writing the music for and performing “A Certain Slant of Light”  and “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark,”  but these two Emily Dickinson poems are companion pieces. The Dark poem is more clear, even comedic, the Light poem more mysterious.

In my original post I decided to not talk about what I think the poem means. In some ways, I think that’s true to the poem’s “Where the Meanings, are.” I had fun with the mock psychedelic rock poster I created to illustrate it, but I think the core experience of the poem is the same that some were seduced into having by ingesting drugs, the insight that the universe’s meaning may be unknowable and its substitute only available by fiat.

Cure the cod-sitar sounds, and stereotyped sparkle-eyed hippie whooshing “Oh, Wow!” Of course, we must laugh. This is an insight available even to the young that can apparently be induced by mere intoxication.

But it’s true. It may be easier to see the borders of truth if one comes upon it without chemical aids; but even true, it’s an insight that’s hard to integrate into an active life and compassion. Dickinson integrated it with these little packets of poems. “None may teach it,” she says, but I can let you see my experience of it.

 

5. In the Bleak Midwinter

And one slot higher in the countdown, a woman who isn’t Dickinson, but is roughly her contemporary, English poet Christina Rossetti. Her’s is a Christmas and Christian poem, faith is her fiat; and a shaped and received story is her poems plot.

As this post talks about division, opposites—and how, if one distrusts them, one must cross them, sometimes listening, rather than shouting at them to come down—“In the Bleak Midwinter”  is all about divisions and opposites, and where they fail to hold.

In the moment of Rossetti’s beautiful song, even if earth is iron and water stone, heaven cannot contain God, nor can the earth sustain winter or meagre poverty.

I remember someone asking one of the earnest folk-singers of my generation (alas, I can’t remember who) if a song could change the world. Their reply was something like, “Of course not, but during the time the song is being sung the world is changed.” Perhaps an argument for longer songs, better memories, or us slowly learning how to integrate the experience of art into the rest of our lives.

 

I plan to return tomorrow with the next three in our Top 10 count-down of the most popular pieces over the past Winter.