performance

The Dumb Soldier

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I spent Thursday recovering from a brace of winter vaccinations. I was tired and achy enough that I even missed attending my treasured monthly Midstream Poetry reading, but besides whatever mojo the shots might give me from winter respiratory crud, it made me grateful upon waking up Friday with my usual level of old-guy energy. I took a crisp 34 degree F. bike ride for a veggie sandwich and tea at a local bakery, and then spent a good deal of the day finishing some live LYL Band recordings from last September. Only then did I recall that I should do something for Veteran’s Day — or Armistice Day as it used to be called here in the United States. Armistice Day is still the name in much of the rest of the world that experienced WWI, and perhaps because I’ve been thinking a bit more about British poets this week, I quickly settled on two poems by British authors.

The post just before this one, Housman’s “Soldier from the wars returning”  was the first poem I wanted to do, and it’s a straightforward poem of simple gratitude for a veteran’s service. The second one is a little stranger, and I made it stranger yet. Can we be sure Robert Louis Stevenson wished his poem “The Dumb Soldier”  to be read as a whimsical piece about a child’s toy? He published it in A Child’s Garden of Verses  after all.

There were no sensitivity readers for children’s books then,* but the nature of the poem’s story is not benign. It starts right out with the poem’s speaker burying a soldier, which from the text alone we don’t know yet is a toy. When we read “leaden eyes” we might get the hint that it’s a cast metal toy soldier — but if we were to hear this poem as I performed it, without context, sung by an adult, even that detail might not tell us clearly what is going on.

I leaned into that strangeness. I trimmed a couple of stanzas for better performance length and chose to truncate the final one, leaving off the reveal that this is a toy soldier that will return to the child’s shelf. This left this a more ambiguous buried soldier then unable to tell us anything about what they’ve seen.

The Dumb Soldier

Here’s the chord sheet for my version of Stevenson’s poem. To read his original text, here’s a link.

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Although written decades before the first Armistice Day in 1918, this mode of the silent war dead is clearly apt for that holiday as celebrated outside the U.S.**

It was late Friday night before I was ready to perform these two poems as songs. I had music written, and for practicalities sake, I was able to quickly use my studio space to record the pair of songs with just acoustic guitar for accompaniment. Neither of these are perfected or sophisticated performances, they are more or less what you’d hear if I was to present them off the cuff. You can hear my version of “The Dumb Soldier”  with an audio player below, unless you don’t see any such player. Some ways of reading this blog won’t display that, so I give you this highlighted link that will open a new tab with an audio player in those cases.

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*”Dumb” used as a term for someone who cannot speak is now a highly impolite term. Given the sacrifice and suffering of war, that term’s objectionableness might be a lesser concern.

**Since the U.S. had an existing holiday, Memorial Day, for remembering those who died in military service, the U. S. Armistice Day became Veteran’s Day to celebrate all who served, particularly the living. Housman’s poem, couched though it may be in the particulars of WWI, speaks to that element of the holiday. As a mid-century child, I can recall Armistice Day was still used occasionally in my youth for November 11th since veterans and others who had experienced that war were numerous.

Soldier from the wars returning

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I’m going to present a pair of poems which are more related to Armistice Day, the former name for the holiday now called Veteran’s Day in the U. S. Here’s the first one.

Earlier this month I was confessing to Lesley Wheeler that I haven’t read much of English poet A. E. Housman, a poet who I believe retains more readership in the UK than here in the States. Well, no matter how little I know of him, his poetry has qualities that attracts musical composers like myself.

Soldier from the wars

Here’s a chord sheet for today’s song. I recorded this with a capo on the 2nd fret, sounding in the key of D

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This poem, which may not have had a title as I saw it with just the first line in quotes, is clearly a poem for Armistice Day and its veterans, first published a few years after the end of WWI. I don’t find it a complicated poem, but that doesn’t hurt it when one seeks to be comprehensible in an immediate performance such as I gave it. It’s hope, contemporary with Housman and his listeners when he wrote his words, that “wars are over,” now has sort of cruel quaintness, but it was an earnest statement then. Here’s a link to Housman’s words, and then below this is an audio player gadget to hear my performance of the song I made from them.

No audio player? Clicking on this highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player in that case.

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All Souls’ Night, the conclusion of our Halloween Series

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

You may wonder if our Halloween Series has continued past Halloween — but in pedantic fact,* the calendar date referred to in this poem’s title is November 2nd. Halloween has no particular religious element for most these days in the US, but originally it was All-Saints’ Day Eve (saints=hallowed people), the day before that observation.

That Halloween was for spooky, eerie, and likely non-Christian things was kind of a “get that all out of your system before the day for all saints comes around” proposition. So, if All-Saints’ day is on November 1st, what is this next-up All Souls’ Day? It’s a day for all the dead souls who aren’t  saints — that is to say, for most of us. The ubiquitousness of the total of all those who’ve ever lived, minus those few that were saints, is a likely cause for this holiday to fall into obscurity. It’s the Participation Medal of the holy calendar.

Similarly, the author of today’s text, Hortense Flexner, is not a famous poet, though she spent her entire life working in the field of literature and education. For some reason, probably the effectiveness of the poem and its continued relevance, this single poem out of her life has survived her to be passed around the Internet and in publications as a Halloween poem.**  She subtitled it “1917” on publication, no doubt in reference to the suffering and casualties of WWI — but it’s since needed no dated subtitle. I’m risking little to suggest few read it now as a historical document of situations more than a century old.

All Souls Night

Once more I present a chord sheet so that other singers can spread the singing of this.

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Today, to anyone her words reach in times of fresh suffering and a glass separation between those comfortable and those afflicted with new death, “All Souls’ Night”  requires no further instructions from me. I’ll just say there’s an audio player gadget to hear it below, and if you don’t see that, I supply this highlighted link that will open a new window with an audio player in it.

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*I have family members who were Protestant ministers. I’ve had friends who had at least passing familiarity with the Catholic religious calendar — but I’m evidence in that I knew Halloween in its devout practices of costumes and candy, and vaguely its religious connection to All-Saint’s Day, but nothing at all about All Souls Day.

**Although this poem is the last in my Halloween Series this year to get a blog post, a previous post here presenting “All Souls’ Night”  has gotten steady visits throughout the past few weeks.

A Winter’s Tale: A cold mystery for Halloween

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Having done over 700 audio pieces in the more than 7 years of the Parlando Project, I take pride in the variety of the original musical settings I’ve supplied for them. Oh, there are more than a few of the performances over the years that embarrass me: stuff were my problematic vocals don’t deserve parole, or arrangements where I can’t now tell how I ever thought they worked, or those where it would have been better if I’d had access to better musicians than my overdubbing, but many of them still sound good to me.

None sounds better than this one as we near the end of my Halloween Series presenting some of the listener favorites from those 700-plus pieces. “A Winter’s Tale”  sets a should-be-better known poem by D. H. Lawrence. For some of you that poem’s climate is going to seem premature — and you may even wonder why it fits a Halloween theme. I assure you in Minnesota, in the northern parts of North America, this poem is not out of season. We’ve had no snow yet, but my morning bike ride was –5 Celsius. And tomorrow? Those thin polyester costumes sold at stores for trick or treating are not right for many a Minnesota Halloween. And any creativity in making one’s own costume is suppressed by the eventual need for an overcoat which will cover it. And what of Lawrence’s poem — here’s a link to the text of the poem — what’s Halloween about it?

Winters Tale 1080

A long way between houses just for some candy.

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Well, it’s quite mysterious. This is the third time I’ve presented it, and I’m still not sure what the specifics of the described wintery mystery are. At times it seems like a breakup or strained love poem. Other times it seems like a hunting poem, metaphorical or not. It may have some connection I’ve not fathomed to Shakespeare’s play concerned with virulent mistrust. If it’s a hunt, I can’t even say who the speaker/singer and the hunted are. One or the other may even be Winter itself. That mystery and the air of danger are enough to make it a Halloween poem, and after my musical work, a Halloween song.

You can hear it with the audio player gadget you should see below. No player to be seen? This highlighted link is a backup that will open a new window with its own audio player.

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William Blake’s The Poison Tree

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

There’s much commerce between fantasy and fable — and William Blake, as literal as he may have drawn the angels of his visions, was one such trafficker. In this poem a metamorphical form of pomology creates out of anger a beautiful, attractive, and cursed fruit, so I thought this poem suitable for our Halloween Series.

One question asks for an answer in Blake’s poem: what makes the poison apple grown from wrath, fear, and tears “bright” and “shining,” and eventually so irresistible to the poem’s enemy?

Many readings concentrate on the poem’s singer, the one who instead of forgiving as he had done with a friend, grows their anger, sorrow, and fright into the Poison Tree. But let’s consider the other party, their enemy. Let’s look at the song from their view.

The emotions that grow the Poison Tree are often stronger than the more positive emotions like trust, love, and mere happiness — and the alloys of these negative emotions can be made into purer metals. Thus the human reaction, however unacknowledged, to envy the tactics of our enemies. Oh, what great evil they use, how powerful that is, how greatly we’ve been hurt by it — so, shouldn’t we be allowed at least some of the fruits of that tree? No, not all the root and trunk of that evil —for we are not like our enemies, — we are just owed a little of that power, maybe one apple?

The poison apple “shines” because it seethes with the power of hatred. It’s “bright” because the dark fruit becomes reflective the moment we reach to pick it. A convex apple is a strange mirror. We see ourselves magnified, we see our enemies too, we see wrath distorting us.

Blake’s fable in that reading says then: do not plant that poison tree from the injustice done to you, as the poem’s singer does, for the fruit will be impossible for your enemy to resist. “Oh, that’s not so bad,” you may first think, “the foe ‘is outstretched beneath the tree” as the poem ends. But beyond the poem’s ending there’s another refrain: the foes survivors have wrath, fears, and tears — and a seed poison apple for another tree.

One thing I admired about Blake was his multiple skills, out of which he created the poetry, the book design, and the artwork for his Songs of Innocence and Experience. Indie!

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My performance of Blake’s “A Poison Tree”  is full of the sound of an American invention most often used by British bands of the late Sixties and early Seventies, the Mellotron. The Mellotron was supposed to be a home or light theater/salon entrainment device. It had tape recordings of instruments, including recorded sections of orchestral strings and woodwinds, one recording for each note to be triggered by a keyboard. When it was discovered by rock bands they found they could saturate their recordings in these orchestral textures. Because the articulations of the taped instruments were “canned” not freshly played, the result was a little ersatz — but eventually this was embraced and the output of the polite Mellotron was sometimes patched through overdriven amplifiers like an electric guitar might be. That’s part of the sound in the LYL Band performance of “The Poison Tree”  that you can hear with the audio player gadget below. No player?  This highlighted link is an alternate way to hear it, as it will open a tab with its own audio player.

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The Listeners: a classic of mystery

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Judging from the numbers of its inclusions in Internet lists of spooky poems, Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners”  comes to mind to more than just me when people are asked to think of Halloween poems. Yet it has no monsters, no sudden scares, no wicked battles, no fully-described supernatural events.

It creates its strange effect in this strange way: it gives us lots of details which may seem inessential, and next to nothing of its central situation. The plot is simple: a man travels to a building on horseback. He knocks at the building’s door. No one answers. He leaves. As an elevator pitch summary, it has little to call us in or disturb us. Why does it leave us with a wondering chill? It’s those details. Here’s a link to the poem.

First off, there’s a supporting character in the poem which seems to have only one for sure, the Traveller. That character: his horse. We meet the horse right at the start, noticing that it is unconcerned and grazing as the Traveller opens with his door-knocking announcement of arrival.

We’re also told it’s night. Only slightly unusual, in that one generally doesn’t schedule appointments at night. The Traveller knocks again. We’re told the building has a turret. Castle or fortress, or just a decorated Victorian era house? We know by this it’s not a small hut or cabin. The listeners that are spoken of soon are something of some means.

The Listeners Illustration 1080

Our two characters: the Traveller, and the horse he rode in on. One thinks it’s very important to be there, the other couldn’t care less.

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We’re told the Traveller has grey eyes. What an odd detail! We’re not filling out his driver’s license after all. Grey is a quite rare eye color in de la Mare’s Great Britain or Western Europe. Does the poem mean to suggest the Traveller is coming from a far distance?

Is there anyone inside the house? The poem mentions “phantom listeners” and these listeners are in the title. “Phantom” says they aren’t in the house at present in the way the Traveller and the horse are outside the door. We learn that the house has a hall, reinforcing by detail that the building isn’t small. The Traveller senses these whatevers, their “strangeness.” How are they strange? Nothing is said — but our second character, the horse, remains only interested in grazing.

The Traveller is insistent, pounding louder, shouting the intriguing line “Tell them I came…that I kept my word.” This is the plot’s climax, we don’t know what duty brought the Traveller there, perhaps from a long way off. Of course, we wonder what the bargain is, what the promise was. Is our wonder stirred by not knowing? Mine always is.

Another detail: we’re told the Traveller is “the one man left awake.” How are we to take that statement? That the “phantom listeners” are asleep and can’t be awakened? Or should we take it more catastrophically: that the “phantom listeners” aren’t human, never were, and that the Traveller is the last man at all, anywhere, awake? I never considered this latter reading until typing this tonight —perhaps I’m over-reading — but if so, is the Traveller coming to ask them to lift that spell, the only man still with agency to plead?

I love the final quatrain of this poem. Our horse returns, and the listeners, we’re told, can hear the creak of the leather from its saddle stirrup — a lovely detail, and a quieter sound compared to the pounding and shouting that has preceded it. Finally this sound: the evocation of the horseshoes ringing on hard stone inside a world of otherwise silence. The horse may be unconcerned by the silence, perhaps even the lack of any other awake people is not of any matter to it.

My music for this features the electric 12-string guitar, an instrument that I love. You can hear me perform Walter de la Mare’s “The Listeners”  with the audio player below. If you can’t see that player, no need to knock louder, use this highlighted link which will open a new tab with its own audio player. Thank you for being The Listeners for this Project!

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Does your garden have ghosts, part 2: Hardy’s “The Shadow on the Stone”

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

Yesterday in our Halloween Series I mused on the appearance of ghosts in a garden with Millay’s blithe apparition. As I present today’s musical piece adapted from literary poetry, Thomas Hardy’s “The Shadow on the Stone,”  let me start by asking questions. Many others will follow.

Do you want to see a ghost? Is that wanting part of what makes it appear?

Hardy’s poem is poised in that first question. As I have performed it as a song with music that I wrote for it, I should wonder if the words are clear enough in themselves to tell us what the situation is. Looking at the text of Hardy’s poem, I think it’s mostly self-sufficient in that regard, though some mystery (possibly useful mystery) remains if nothing else is explained.

When I first presented this in 2021, I went into the biographical specifics that engendered this poem, but for today let me just say that the “she” that the ghost is supposed to be is Hardy’s dead wife who was completely estranged from him before her death.  Nothing in the poem spells that out, nothing tells us that when living she had grown to find Hardy completely unsuitable. Well nothing, save for a line that we can hear as modern idiom that Hardy may have intended only as a brief metaphor: “Her behind me throwing her shade.”

The Shadow on the Stone illustration 1024

Ghost from a machine: illustration from Adobe Firefly, the AI engine that proclaims it doesn’t use uncompensated artists work.

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Such a complex ghost, or a wish for a ghost, this is!

Does Hardy want to see the ghost? Does Hardy fear to see the ghost? Can either of them speak? Are either of them changed from what they once were? Is he haunted by her, or haunted from her? All the answers are all the answers here. The curly shape of the question mark the shifting curve of an ghost manifesting.

Spontaneously when doing the vocals for this piece I decided to throw in some more answers at the end of my song in the form of “inline epigraphs” that Hardy didn’t include with his poem, but this performer did.

You can hear my performance of Thomas Hardy’s “The Shadow on the Stone”  with the audio player gadget below. You don’t see a player?  This highlighted link will make one appear in a new tab.

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Millay’s “The Little Ghost.” Does your garden have ghosts?

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Last time in our Halloween Series, an A. E. Housman poem combined with music had death on a knife edge. Placed at the end of the growing year in northern places, Halloween comes at a time in a yearly cycle that suggests death. Note: that statement includes the word “cycle.” Humans have memory, and song, and eventually writing, so we know the turning round — the end of the growing comes before the white none of winter and before the regreening of spring.

Should it be so with death, that full nothing? Some hope and believe that so, though we can have no memory of that. But even one life has many turnings, places we pass through and leave. Today’s piece ends by portraying that we open and close gates of memory, gates that are no longer there.

Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote this poem of a non-threatening ghost. It’s an earlier work, and some see the ghost as a wisp of her not-long-departed girlhood. I’ll add that the choice of having the ghost appear in a garden speaks to the placement of Halloween in a harvest/leaving time of the year. Gardens have needs: nutritious soil, water, sun, and care. Perhaps they need ghosts from time to time as well?

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“She paused—then opened and passed through a gate that once was there.”

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The music I composed and played for Millay’s “The Little Ghost”  shows South Asian influences, what with harmonium, tambura, and my vibrato note electric guitar playing. You can hear that combination of words and music with the audio player below. No player to be seen?  This highlighted link is an alternative, it’ll open a new tab with its own audio player.

A fantasy wherein death and death predicted is balanced: “Her Strong Enchantments Failing”

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Today’s piece in our Halloween Series is clearly fantasy. What value has fantasy?

Well, it’s often fun; it exercises the imagination by giving it an unlimited field. This potential has a natural limit however — humans are uncomfortable with the unlimited. We are animals quite tied to limits, to the actual, the particular. Even fantasy not intended as allegory must reference those things inside the everyday limits of our world, of our time. The SF of the past is often quaint with those make-dos, specifics that seem anachronistic to the stories unknown time. Watching a Sixties Star Trek TV show we see the family on the Enterprise bridge, the patriarch in an easy chair, the subsidiaries at kid’s-height tables, mom at the Radar Range — and all are watching one screen in front of them. Their haircuts are all in style for our now past mid-century. The warfare tactics: broadsides and boarding parties, already obsolete when freshly filmed. Watching it now, the other side — our present-day watcher’s side of the screen — we are farther into the future than these characters are.

I don’t believe poet A. E. Housman retains the readership in the U.S. that he retains in Britain. His best-known poetry collection A Shropshire Lad  is as series of poems considering rural adolescence and youth in the 19th century. UK readers might likely find that place in cultural memory more easily than Americans — but Houseman was not just local color. He was a classical translator and scholar of achievement. He knew how to put classical restraint, objectivity, and concision to work in poetry, like in this fantasy poem I set to music a few years ago, and will present today: “Her Strong Enchantments Failing.”

Her Strong Enchantments Failing

I like to include these chord sheets here from time to time. It’s my hope that better singers will improve on my own performances. Lot of suspended chords here, as this song’s moment is suspended.

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The poem is set in a timeless place, though time still has days and death. There’s magic and spells there, laid out in a sharply chiseled first verse. I love the cinematic zoom from falling castle towers, to empty potions, to a knife at the titular her’s neck. And as page-poetry it’s eminently singable; and for a performer, the compelling force of the storytelling is what every singer would want in a lyric.

The situation violently balanced in the final two verses may just be plot for the author. The Queen’s slayer is about to process his knife’s edge. The queen, who’s emptied her spells and potions knows that they will work in magical or biochemical time by the next day. I have no idea if Houseman had any intended allegory to a situation here, something that might have been clear and present to his contemporary readers. When I performed this in 2020, it was then a fine fantasy poem, so well-drawn and easy to sing. Today, I can look at this autumn’s news and find easy parallels to current events.

You can hear my performance of A. E. Housman’s “Her Strong Enchantments Failing”  with the audio player gadget below. Can’t see a player? Not a spell, just the limits of some ways to read this blog. Here’s a backup highlighted link that will open its own audio player.

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Exit the were-fox, chased by the land-holding patriarchy, “Reynardine"

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Did T. S. Eliot for Halloween* suffocate our audience with too much of the musty air of the classroom? I hoped those loud synth fanfares would set such terrors to run. Maybe not. Well, I’m ready to tempt you back with a bit of love and seduction, a song set away from graveyards and into castles. Our Halloween series continues, and this time with 100% wooden music I played on an acoustic guitar.

So, ladies in nightclothes flaunting impossibly flowing but still in good array hair, running through the forest under a moon over the branches kind of stuff? Maybe. First some literary history. Don’t worry, I won’t take long with that, and there’s a good creature-feature song at the end.

We started our Halloween series with Frost and Eliot, poets that many will know even if poetry isn’t an interest. Today’s piece uses words from a well-known name that when applied to a poet isn’t well-known: Belfast writer Joseph Campbell is that name. Yes, every cursèd time I mention his name here I’m required to say “No, not the Power of Myth guy.” Poet Campbell was a contemporary of Yeats. And like Yeats he visited London when F. S. Flint, T. E. Hulme, and the “What’s with the initials guys?” Yank-transplant Ezra Pound were taking up their make-it-new idea to be called Imagism. Several years before Pound and Flint published their famous essay on the tenants of Imagism, Campbell published some of the earliest Imagist poems.

Campbell’s relationship with Yeats is complex. They both were heavily into valorizing Irish culture. Campbell was even more so into Ireland throwing off its exploitative English colonial status. Both seemed to have an interest in the faerie and spirit realms, though Yeats had an interest in practicing wizardry, while Campbell, AFAIK, didn’t. Both had interest in music, but Yeats was specifically resistant to having his poems sung conventionally, while what of Campbell’s work survives (underrecognized) is as a lyricist** for songs better-known than he is.

As a song, today’s piece, “Reynardine,”  became oft-performed in the British 20th century folk revival. When those performers would present it, they would introduce it as an old song — which is true in part. Its melody is largely based on an old air. The name of its main character, and something in the general trope of “I’m in love with a mysterious bad boy” did have old ballad antecedents. But those revivalist performers would usually want their audiences to know that the main character, the haunting love interest the singer knows but society doesn’t, is a shape-shifter, a were-fox.

Campbell’s words as printed in “The Mountainy Singer” are better, more direct, than the lyrics usually used for performing this song. I made one change: Campbell has “took me for his leman” in his, and I translated this to “lover” for clarity.

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As I discussed briefly when I first presented this one a couple of years ago: that doesn’t seem to be so in the extant pre-20th century versions of this song. In 1909, our “Reynardine,”  now a were-fox eluding the patriarchy and foxhound driving hunters, was published in two books: as a collected Irish folk song from Belfast, and as a page poem in Campbell’s poetry collection The Mountainy Singer.  This idea of the song’s dark hero emerged that recently, and I have every reason to believe it was the little remembered Joseph Campbell who cast him that way.

I did my best with my performance of this one, thinking I was emulating those folk revivalists whose work I greatly admire. The one special thing I did was use Campbell’s set of words as printed in his poetry collection. With one small alteration, I think they work well to sing to modern audiences, and his version has the compression and specific mystery that can make Imagist poems and short lyrical songs compelling when contrasted with lengthy poems and discursive sung ballads. Audio player to hear the performance below. No player? This highlighted link will open a tab with a player.

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*Unlike the other pieces I’ll present in this series, my settings of Eliot are not listener favorites. I watch the stats here while not spending much time trying to maximize them. Eliot draws some interest outside the U.S., and very, very little from here in the States.

I also want to say that I want to celebrate Halloween this year (more about why later in this series) and I want to do it as Emily Dickinson once wrote she did in approaching some topics in her poetry “I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I am afraid.” But writing as Eliot did of his unreal city of corpses that can’t be hidden, and casting it as a song of fantasy, vision, or delusion, can be offensive in a time where real corpses are piling up not from natural death, but from human intention.

If I offend you, you likely aren’t reading this far. I assure you I offend myself in doing so. “You! hypocrite lecteur! — mon semblable, — mon frère!” “You! Hypocrite reader! — my fellow, — my brother!” quoted Eliot, quoting Baudelaire, quote I.

**Even as the composer part of most of the Parlando Project, I want to say that a pet peeve of mine is folks crediting a song solely to the music composer. I hear this all the time with contemporary songs, particularly when the melodist has sung the piece: Brian Wilson, Carole King, Elton John, and so on. Besides his unacknowledged work in recasting “Reynardine,”  Campbell is the lyricist for “The Garten Mother’s Lullaby”  and “My Lagan Love.”