Shakespeare

Orpheus with his lute made trees, or springtime ambiguous

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Here’s a song about springtime and wonderous music. The author of the words is William Shakespeare, and it was written to be sung* as part of a play, an art that invites instant appreciation of itself simultaneously by a crowd and a group of people who present it. To merely read a play is like looking over the score of an orchestral work. If you are musically literate you may appreciate the ingenuity of the notes and musical parts, but it’s only a map or tool guiding musicians to the creation of the actual, momentary, and simultaneous thing.**

Late Winter Zen Garden crop

Stuck in the melting ice/snow, a tiny stick hosts some March fungi trumpeting spring! photo by Heidi Randen

.

So, as we await the onset of spring and its ancient and age-tested paradox of everything fresh and new, let us return to another warm day that was once fresh and new. It’s 1613, and we’re in London where there’s a new Shakespeare play opening at the Globe Theater, that wooden O that has made his career, the entertainment center that the Bard himself is part owner and begetter of.

Yes, Shakespeare at this time was an established force in English entertainment — but this play has a tough balancing act to perform. The new piece is entitled Henry VIII, or All is True”  and unlike Shakespeare’s older history plays, this one deals with events within the childhood memory of the oldest inhabitants of London. The time Henry VIII, or All is True  is set in is no more past than the first season of The Crown  on TV is today. The theater and his company, The Kings Men, exist partly on the support and permission of the royal family.

The Globe is an entertainment business. Of course, Shakespeare uses his prodigious artistic talents as a draw for this enterprise, and much has been made about how Shakespeare used words uttered by actors alone to do what modern movies and TV shows spend a small nation’s budget worth of money to make with computers and craftspeople now—but the Globe company is not beneath practical special effects to boost the spectacle.

Near the end of Act 1 of the play, there’s a scene where Henry VIII enters with a celebratory cannonade to announce his arrival. If we were there, in that simultaneous artistic moment in 1613, beneath the bang and above us, some sparks from the cannonade equipment (located off-stage near the thatched roof attic of the theater) set the roof afire. For a short time, the play continues until the fire lapped around that wooden O*** and interrupted that moment before the play would come to its third act where today’s song would have been performed.

So, let us leave the simultaneousness of 1613, and ask about what context today’s piece would have been presented in if they had gotten to the third act. At the end of Act 2, Queen Catherine of Aragon has just begged Henry VIII and the play’s chief villain Cardinal Wolsey to not divorce and cast her out. As the third Act would have begun (if that theater fire hadn’t broken out) she asks a servant — who in what seems to be musical theater logic, is also a skilled lutenist who has her instrument at hand — “Take thy lute, wench. My soul grows sad with troubles. Sing, and disperse ’em if thou canst.”

In the course of the play, the song doesn’t work. At the end of the song, Wolsey appears to further seal Catherine’s fate.

Orpheus

Simplified map, not the thing itself: the Esus4 riff is repeated twice, and I think I played a CMajor7 over the final “die”

.

Taken out of this context today’s lyric may seem like a simple song in praise of music — one that references the mythological character of Orpheus, who the Greeks held as the first and finest lyre player, and one whose music was so powerful that it was said to cause trees to travel to be nearer to his music.**** The poem includes more examples of this most well-known power of the marvelous musician Orpheus, but even as the first section ends there’s a subtle undercurrent introduced. Orpheus’ song can control nature the poem says, double-stating a claim that he has “sprung…spring” — but there’s some fine print, or rather a promise is made that we know nothing can fully deliver: it’s a “lasting spring.”

We who sit today in the North on the verge of spring know spring will come. We also know it will go. There’s no such thing as a lasting spring, or a never-ending song. Shakespeare’s new play can start, we can all watch as it occurs before us, but in an instant we might be hot-pantsing it out of the moment and dowsing it with ale. We can be a faithful lover and be denied.

I may be misreading, but the end of the poem seems to add further ambiguity. The servant singing Shakespeare’s song to the soon to be deposed queen says music can kill care and grief, but the sentence continues into the next and final line of the poem: “Fall asleep, or hearing, die.” Is care and grief killed, or is it just beguiled and sleeping for the length of the song? Is the listener to the song — the other hearer besides care and grief — distracted only for a time, for a moment of spring, as one asleep? And then the song ends on that most falling of notes, the word “die.”

Shakespeare’s play can have cannons. And then it can have little 12-line songs.

Today’s song performance has bass and acoustic guitar, organic instruments that have known trees, and then one of my favorite fakeries: the Mellotron. Long time readers here will know my fondness for the Mellotron, a primitive yet overly complicated approximation of orchestral instruments that was used around 50 years or so ago to suggest a bigger recording budget for certain vinyl records. It’s a failed approximation of the things it suggests, but there’s a tragic richness to that failure for some. To hear my performance of “Orpheus with his lute made trees”  you can use either this highlighted hyperlink to play it, or if your blog reader favors us with the appearance of the player gadget below, you can fire it off with that.

.

*Alas, the music to which the songs in the plays were sung during Shakespeare’s time is lost, though today’s lyric has been set to music by a number of composers.

**As we approach a year into our current pandemic, doesn’t this art, the art of live performance in one crowded place, seem even more strange and marvelous?

***Art and time passed aside; you may wonder: three thousand people in a packed wooden theater with at most two exits. How many died? Apparently, no one. Eyewitness accounts include this detail of one notable casualty, “One man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broyled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit, put it out with a bottle of ale.”

****I wonder if Willy Shakes wasn’t engaging in some wordplay with the songs opening line. As a player of the guitar, an instrument that is something of a successor to the lyre and lute, we know the reverse of his opening: our “lutes” are largely made of trees. And rather than having musical power to enchant trees we sometimes think as that wood shifts and changes the playing action of our instruments, or it boggles tuning stability, that our wooden guitars have not quite gotten over being wild trees, ones not totally enthralled to our powers.

Song from Love’s Labour’s Lost

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

When I select which texts to present here it’s most often an informal, beneath the consciousness, process. This week I thought I’d follow on from my last post and continue on the theme of a poet’s experience of age, but instead the events and times we live in overcame me.

Earlier I was beginning to translate a French poet, but I couldn’t concentrate on that task. Thrashing about, I eventually found myself working on this song from a Shakespeare play. After all, songs in his plays are usually diversions: a little light variety to help entertain the audience or something to help bridge a scene change. So OK, a diversion—but when I check for the context of this song in the play that uses it, Love’s Labour’s Lost, I find that it comes at the very end of the play.  Could it be a diversion then, or is it an unusual summation?

On one hand it’s a very simple song isn’t it? A short nostalgic seasonal scene, though in Tudor-England times perhaps not so old-fashioned. Winter. Log hearth fires. Warm milk from the cow freezes in the pail. Icicles. The way-paths all fouled-up with snow and ruts.

But to throw it in at the very end of a play—a comedy yes, but one that I’m told is full of reference to all kinds of political events of Tudor times—that makes me ask if more attention is required.

One thing I notice is that although written centuries before the early 20th century Imagists, it operates just like an Imagist poem: it’s short, nothing is an elaborate metaphor developed over many lines. If it’s about winter and the cold, it never says “I’m sick of this lousy winter” or “It’s so cold!” Though a sense of palpable cold and wintertime stress pervades the poem, it’s only through physical images that this is portrayed.

A few minor language tweaks and it could have been written in 1915 not 1595 or so. Robert Frost could have hauled those logs. Ted Hughes could have witnessed the herdsman blow on his hands for warmth. The song could’ve appeared in Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth.

Scene from The Skin of Our Teeth2

“The ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in.” A scene from the first act of Wilder’s  1942 “The Skin of Our Teeth.” That’s Tallulah Bankhead who’s broken up the chair for kindling.

 

 

Shakespeare’s winter song here is immediately preceded by another song in his play (the first song invoked spring.) Each song of the pair features a symbolic bird, and for this winter song we’re given an owl in its refrain,* a bird omen of unseen dread whose song, breaking with the Imagist show/don’t tell rule, is described as “a merry note.”

Merry? A little dark humor there I think. But even if that bird’s a bad omen, the fact that it’s singing means that it’s enduring. And the poem’s second and final stanza continues that theme of endurance. Everyone in church is sick and you can’t hear the sermon for the coughing (but coughing means you’re breathing, and who can tell how useful the sermon’s lesson might be anyway). The visible birds are hunkered down in feathers. There’s some crabs** sizzling in a bowl. There’s a fire. Tom’s brought more wood. There’s someone there to see greasy Joan cooking.

That refrain repeats and the song ends. Shakespeare’s play’s characters are kings, courtiers, and princesses and the plot their fancies. His actual world was full of war and deadly factions, brutal executions; a world of connivers, fools and tyrants, and even those who could combine all three. Yet, here he ends his comedy not with a wedding but with a song about modest endurance.

I think I lucked into this one this week. If one pays attention to this little song, it says something about those of us who are not kings or principal ministers.

Those who’ve endured my singing may be glad to hear this one is spoken word. The music is drums with a mix of four wintery synths played with my little plastic keyboard and MIDI guitar. The player to hear it is below. The full text of this short Shakespeare poem is here. I wish you the sustaining fires that are warm and illuminating, instead of the flames of fools.

 

 

 

 

*The refrain also features one of the more obscure words in the piece: greasy Joan is “keeling” the pot. I thought “stirring,” and there is some sense of that, though it may be particularly skimming fat off some stew.

**I thought of steamed crabs hissing, but if Shakespeare is remembering his rural Warwickshire it might not be seafood, but crabapples. Hot ale punch with floating crabapples was apparently a thing.

Parlando Spring 2018 Top 10-Part Three

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

We now come to the top half of our count-down of the most listened to and liked pieces during the past three months. But what if you’re new here, and you wonder what this Parlando Project does?

In short, we take various words, mostly poetry, combine them with original music, and perform them. My intent at the start was not to do this the same way each time, to vary our approach as much as we could. We’ve been doing this for a couple of years, and there are now over 220 Parlando Project pieces available here if you search through our archives. From time to time, as I look at what we’ve done, I seem to notice a “style” developing, and while I have no objection to that arising organically from my predilections and limitations as a musician, performer or composer, when I hear that I usually ask myself “What can I try that’s different?”

The poems are not always the famous ones, I like to mix in some “deep cuts,” but it just so happens that these three recently popular ones are all pretty well-known, but maybe we can bring something new to them?

In position number four we have Emily Dickinson’s “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark.”  Last time I talked about how I’m finding that Modernist poetry in English moved from a recognizable natural landscape freshly observed in it’s early poems to a more interior landscape, another darker country where new dialects of language and syntax seemed the natural tongue of that region. It may well be that WWI, with its unstoppable socially-accepted murders, was a cause for this change. The rise of Freud contributed too. But more than half-a-century before WWI, and decades before Freud published, Emily Dickinson, spurred by American Transcendentalism and her own individual genius, was exploring some of those same places.

When Dickinson gets furthest inside her own head and tries to use her mutation of mid-19th century language to describe it there, she can be inscrutable; but when she’s half-way there like in this little masterpiece, she’s exploring poetic areas that won’t be visited again until the 20th Century.

This is another of the pieces where I think my music works particularly well. Perhaps you’ll agree. Player below:

 

 

 

Funny how these count-downs seem to form a sequence. From Dickinson’s dark we move to the  third place piece, by that little-known poet William Shakespeare, with one of his sonnets about The Dark Lady, “My Mistress’ Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun.”  When we wasn’t supplying titles for late 20th Century Sting CDs, or writing a play here and there, Shakespeare wrote a collection of sonnets that are full of ideas woven of memorable phrases.

Emilia Lanier Nothing Like the Sun

Emilia Lanier, musician, poet and possibly Shakespeare’s Dark Lady.

 

I’ve always loved the sonnet, even shared a few of mine here. It just seems the perfect length for a lyric poem, long enough to develop two or three ideas costumed as images, but not so long that one will find them frayed and soiled at the cuffs before it’s done.

Hear my performance of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130, “My Mistress’ Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun”  with the player gadget below.

 

 

 

And now we’re up to the second-most popular piece this past quarter, Marianne Moore’s “Poetry.”  Shakespeare’s poem in slot number three declares his love by saying the things his beloved isn’t. Poet Moore’s poem about poetry starts off famously by saying she “too dislikes it,” and goes on to tell us what she feels works an doesn’t work as poetry, including the poem’s other famous line about poetry’s goal, to show “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” I think here again of those early Imagist poems, with their unromantic and ordinary things made into central images: T. E. Hulme’s red-faced farmer standing for the moon or Aldington’s poplar tree as a young woman or F. S. Flint finding the moon taking on the terror of a WWI Zeppelin raid. Toads all, ordinary nature, not the battalions of classical gods or the obligations of sentiment.

This piece’s popularity on Spotify continues steadily, as with “Sky”  from earlier in the count-down, I wonder if it’s the short, somewhat generic title that brings in curious listeners there.

My initial idea of the Parlando Project did not have my voice as the only reader, and the first voice you hear in this version of “Poetry”  is Dave Moore who’s been the voice in a number of pieces over the past two years. The other voices in this performance are two fine poets who’ve spent a lifetime raising toads to see what works in their gardens: Kevin FitzPatrick and Ethna McKiernan. Hear them read Marianne Moore’s “Poetry”  with the gadget below.

 

That leaves us only the number one to count-down, the most popular piece this past spring. It’s not a well-known poem, and it’s not by a well-known poet. See you back here soon for that.

Tom Rapp has died

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Isn’t it odd how you know, and yet don’t know things, even in this world of instant communications and webs world-wide. Yesterday I started work on a new Parlando Project piece, and this morning I returned from a brisk ride to breakfast on a cool sunny April day to write about this piece whose words were written by Sara Teasdale.

I would have said that I was introduced to Teasdale from an LP record by one of my musical influences, Tom Rapp. I figured I’d link to something about him…

…and there I learned, that he had died more than two months ago.

So, I’ll link to this, his performance, Parlando Project-like, of Shakespeare’s song “Full Fathom Five”  from The Tempest combined with Teasdale’s “I Shall Not Care.”

Even though that’s an example of the Parlando Project principle: “Other Peoples’ Stories,” that is to say, it is words Rapp didn’t write, it conveys something of the impact Tom Rapp can have if one is open and receptive to his presentation. He didn’t need  to use Teasdale’s words or Shakespeare’s, because Rapp is one of the best singer-songwriters you likely don’t know about.

Let me not inflict too much biography on you. Rapp is another child of the Midwest, born on the Dakota plains, raised some in Minnesota. While still a grade-schooler, he bested a teenager from Hibbing— kid named Bobby Zimmerman —in a talent contest in Minnesota. That Zimmerman kid moved to New York and changed his name to Dylan. Rapp ended up in Florida in the middle 1960s and formed a band with other kids in his high school. He named the band from a phrase from the Sermon on the Mount:  Pearls Before Swine. Their first LP from 1967, with a cover taken from Hieronymus Bosch painting was the only one with any appreciable sales, and Rapp issued a handful of albums afterward to ever declining audiences. Why?

As you’ve heard me proclaim here “All artists fail.” Even the most successful, have multitudes remaining who couldn’t care less what they have done; and unique ones do not get any advantage. Rapp wrote fewer songs about romantic love, and his best songs did not offer any easy comforting. And he’s as far from get-down, party until you forget as any musician who ever lived. Rapp is a writer of look, and then look deeper, and remember.

Unique can mean mostly that the audience is not shouting for more like him or her. Yet, I’m sure there are in this troubled world a great many who could find solace, as I did, in Tom Rapp.

You can be the 82nd person to listen to this since 2014.

 

When I found that link to the LP cut of the song he made from Shakespeare and Teasdale on YouTube, I saw that it had exactly 80 views since it was uploaded four years ago. Let that sink in for a minute. 80 views. The clumsiest unboxing video for some appliance will easily garner more. There have been a few successful “songwriters you should have heard” stories this century, where decades-old work becomes better known—Nick Drake or Rodriquez come to mind—but to succeed in finding an audience, such things require luck, and we’ll only allow a few to win when we re-spin Fortuna’s wheel. Pearls before swine indeed.

Feb. 22nd 2019: Thinking about Tom Rapp again today for no particular reason. Here’s a link to an excellent late 20th century run down of his story by Gene Weingarten.

My Mistress’ Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Last time we made some fun of Shakespeare’s honest love poem, his Sonnet 130, “My Mistress’ Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun.”  Well today, let’s give it it’s due.

The fun was that if was a poem meant to attract or hold a lover, it’s, well, not complementary—but there’s no evidence internal to the poem or external to what little we know about its writing, that says that was its intent. It’s one of Shakespeare’s sonnets that was written to “the Dark Lady.” Great title that. We may feel put off if the meaning of a poem isn’t clear to us right away, but in love and biography, most of us love a mystery. Let’s examine that mystery a bit.

First bit of mystery: it’s not clear exactly how autobiographical the typical Elizabethan poet, such as Shakespeare, intended their poetry to be. The idea of art as a mode of direct self-expression has become increasingly more common in the past 200 years, but it wasn’t necessarily the mode of the 16th Century poet. Showing off one’s language skills and elaborate allegorical metaphors while speaking of popular and entertaining subjects scored points in the game then, and it was less about biography that rhymed.

Poets of that era liked to revisit the same subject over and over, because playing on the same topical court let them measure themselves against each other. And so it was when writing a series of sonnets about love troubles.

But no author can avoid the personal entirely. This has lead to the detective game to identify the “Dark Lady.”

A leading solution is Emilia Bassano Lanier. Like a lot of Elizabethans, a fascinating character of which only scattered but intriguing facts are known. She may have been Jewish, North African, or Italian. Family described as “black” in Elizabethan times. Had connections to the same theater and artistic world that Shakespeare did in London. Musical family. Her father helped Queen Elizabeth with her lute when she was a young girl. Emilia wrote the first book of poetry published by an Englishwoman, and she seems remarkably independent and kick-ass. She even makes it onto the lists of the people who “really wrote Shakespeare.”

Nicholas Hillard possible Emily_Bassano
This may be a portrait of Emilia Bassano Lanier

Shakespeare wouldn’t be the first writer to use a person they knew as a model for a literary character as an in-joke that his crowd would get, or just as a handy way to gather a matrix of characteristics. And yes, Shakespeare and Lanier might have been a thing.

It’s fairly clear that Sonnet 130 is another answer record/dis cut like our dueling shepherd poems from the same era. However biographical or invented, the poet is telling us that as far as his love is concerned, all the bullcrack about white skin, golden hair, and rosey cheeks doesn’t get his motor running. There is that breath “reeks” thing in his poem, but I’m not sure it was automatically funky in Shakespeare’s time. The word comes from the Middle English word for smoke or steam—so not necessarily stinky breath, just not literally like perfume.

Elsewhere in the “Dark Lady” sonnets Shakespeare praises “black beauty.” Was the Dark Lady Black in the modern sense of the term? I don’t know if we can say for sure. Sub-Saharan Africans were in England in those times, including a trumpeter who was part of Elizabeth’s father’s court.

Meeting of Henry VIII and King Francis 1 c1520 with John Blanke shown

Birth of the Crewel? Henry VIII and the king of France take in a WWF tag team match.
In the upper left of this tapestry, on trumpet, is John Blanke, also spelled Blak

Was Shakespeare “answering” one particular poem? One doesn’t have to look far for targets, but some point to a poem set to music by William Byrd “Of Gold All Burnished:”

Of gold all burnished, brighter than sunbeams,
Were those curled locks upon her noble head
Whose deep conceits my true deserving fled.
Wherefore mine eyes such store of tears outstreams.
Her eyes, fair stars ; her red, like damask rose ;
White, silver shine of moon on crystal stream ;
Her beauty perfect, whereon fancies dream.
Her lips are rubies ; teeth, of pearls two rows.
Her breath more sweet than perfect amber is ;
Her years in prime ; and nothing doth she want
That might draw gods from heaven to further bliss.
Of all things perfect this I most complain,
Her heart is rock, made all of adamant.
Gifts all delight, this last doth only pain.

The poem’s 9th line might be a mondegreen, as it makes sense if the last words aren’t “amber is,” but the perfume “ambergris.” Who wrote the words? That’s not stated in the book which published Byrd’s piece in 1589, but a modern musician and relative of Emilia has put forth the idea it’s a poem by Emilia Bassano Lanier, though I can’t access any cite for his evidence.

Maybe I should have tried to make a lute sound here for the music, but it’s 12-string guitar, bass, a small string section and just a bit of recorder back in the mix for Sonnet 130. To hear it, use the player.

Twelfth Night

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

As we near 170 audio pieces posted here, we now get our second set of Shakespeare’s words, but instead of one of his sonnets, here’s a short scene from one of his plays (Twelfth Night)  which, by his design, includes a song.

The play’s title indicates it was an occasional piece for an English holiday that takes place on the 12th day after Christmas. I read that the traditional English Twelfth Night partakes of various “floating” winter/winter solstice traditions, some dating back to Roman Saturnalia, with much party-play acting of role-reversals, selections of short-term random royalty, eating, drinking, and song.

Here in modern commercial America, the extending of Christmas is via a prelude, with ever extended shopping days before the holiday; but in the past, Christmas was instead broadened after the December 25th date, with the “Twelfth Night” being the end of the “12 Days of Christmas”—yes, those same 12 days the famous listing song counts off. Given the dreary length of winter in northern climes, the holiday season was sometimes extended even further to February 2nd, Candlemas.

And it was on Candlemas, 416 years ago that Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night  was first performed. The play has a complex series of plots, but the one central to today’s audio piece is that of a young woman, Viola, who’s been shipwrecked in a foreign land, has taken to dressing as a man, Cesario; and while still disguised and cross-dressing, she has fallen in love with Orsino, an older Duke of the foreign land. Orsino is sad because he’s in love with Olivia, a local lady, who refuses his attentions. Only one thing keeps Orsino going in his melancholy: music.

As we enter into the play with today’s audio piece, the “meta” gets laid on thick. Orsino, though unlucky in love himself, seeks to give the “young man” Cesario advice in love. And Cesario (infatuated Viola in disguise as a young man) tolerates this mansplaining in hope that Orsino might someday see something in her/him. And in Shakespeare’s time the young woman passing as a young man would have been played by—well, a young man passing for a woman. To simplify things, I read both actors’ parts myself in the audio piece.

As the scene ends, Orsino asks for an “old song” to cheer him up.

The song Orsino requests “Come, Come Away Death”  is so dour I wonder if Shakespeare is making more comedy against the excess of melancholy and the foolish suffering of unrequited love. It’s a cheery little ditty about refused love causing or requiring death, and the spurned lover wishing only that his grave be unknown so that there’s no chance his unresponsive sweetie will ever hypocritically mourn there.

Representative lyrics: “On my black coffin, let there be strown./Not a friend, not a friend greet/My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown.” If Judas Priest had recorded this, it certainly would have been brought up in the 1990’s trial where the heavy metal band was accused of driving listeners to suicide.

But, after all, Twelfth Night  is a comedy. No spoilers here, but despite multiple love triangles and more disguises and misunderstandings, fate is kind to multiple sets of lovers, something we can all wish for lovers this upcoming year.

twelfth night by Walter Howell Deverell

Melancholy Duke Orsino bids Feste to Kick Out the Jams while Viola/Cesario ponders gender roles

Since Orsino in the play’s text asks for “Come, Come Away Death”  to be sung, we know it was indeed sung with music in Shakespeare’s time, and there are several extant settings of it. The ones I’ve heard are in the Elizabethan style, usually for a high, plaintive tenor—and even when Elvis Costello sang it, it was in that manner. I went counter to this, taking a more rock stance, allowing the singer to mix some anger into his self-pity. To hear that, use the player below.

Fall 2017 Parlando Project Top 10

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

It’s time to report the most popular audio pieces posted here over this increasingly busy summer. Before I get to this season’s Top 10 countdown, I want to thank everyone who has listened, followed, liked, or shared our posts and audio pieces on social media or on other blogs. I don’t have time (or perhaps the talents) to do all the promotion that some other blogs do, so it’s the kind words and enthusiastic work that you readers/listeners do that has spread the news about this combination of various words with various music.

Lots of changes from our last Top 10, so let’s get started. There should be a player gadget after each piece on the list, so you can easily hear the audio combining those words with music we create and perform as part of the Parlando Project.

10th place? Turns out it’s a three-way tie for 10, and since the three pieces demonstrate the variety I seek to present here, let’s just dispense with tie-breakers and list all three audio pieces that are tied at number 10..

“Sonnet 18”  is, so far, our only Shakespeare selection. Shakespeare is, or course, inescapable, and setting Shakespeare’s sonnets to music isn’t a rare thing either, but one of the good things that comes from the Shakespeare phenomenon is that a listener can hear a lot of different takes on one text. I choose to bring out the brag in this one.

“A Summer’s Night”  uses a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first widely published Afro-American poet who died tragically young in 1906. A lot of Dunbar’s success during his lifetime was with dialect pieces which he had ambiguous feelings about. He sometimes said that he wished to be known more for his poetic work in standard English, something that “A Summer’s Night”  demonstrates.

 

“On the Troop Ship To Gallipoli”  demonstrates a small bit of artistic courage on my part to pay tribute to the real-world courage of Rupert Brooke, who died in service to his country in WWI. The “Great War” redrew the world’s maps, overturned several empires, and it also drew a literary dividing line, as post-war poetry embraced Modernism which made the poetic stylings of Brooke seem decades old only a few years after he wrote them. Those who lived through that time often adapted to the new ideas of modern poetry, but Brooke never had that chance. So, in this piece I recast a late fragment of Brooke’s words as if it was an Imagist poem.

In 9th place, we have “Zalka Peetruza (who was christened Lucy Jane),”  which uses a poem by journalist and poet Roy Dandridge, who coincidently like Dunbar, was another Ohio Afro-American. By evidence of this poem, Dandridge deserves to be better known than he is, as it’s a tart observation of the art of getting over while Black, in this case by passing one’s self off as exotic.

8th place goes to a bit of a surprise, my slightly Beefheartian musical setting of two sections of Gertrude Stein’s “Tender Buttons.”  Don VanVliet (Capt. Beefheart) and Gertrude Stein were both uncompromising artists who hoed their own rows, so I viscerally made the connection in creating this piece.

7th is Sir Walter Raleigh’s damning litany “The Lie.”  It’s a poem I’ve loved since my youth and I don’t think one has to add much musical vengeance to amplify Raleigh’s words. 400 years old, and still pissed off.

6th slot goes to one of my translations, Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Dark Interval.”  I did this translation a few years ago, and it was intended to be a somewhat freer variation. As I learn more, I think my assumptions on what the poem was getting at were wrong, but this looser version got 20 more listens that it’s more literal translation I also presented here this summer.

Halfway to number 1, at number 5, is Parlando Project alternative reader Dave Moore’s tale “I Was Not Yet Awake.”  Dave also plays many of the keyboard parts you hear here, including the organ part on this.  “I Was Not Yet Awake”  is short for a story, but longer than many pieces we present here. Dave’s story is so well told that it still managed to pick up a lot of listens this summer.

At number 4, dropping down from two straight appearance as number 1, is “Frances,”  a teenaged George Washington’s acrostic love poem. That’s still a marvel, as week after week I look at stats and see that it’s still getting listens, long after its appearance here last February.

Top 3 time! In position 3 is “The Death of Apollinaire,”  my translation of Dada principal Tristian Tzara’s surprisingly sincere eulogy for the multi-national poet and critic Guillaume Apollinaire, who invented the term “Surrealism” and helped weave together many of the strands of European Modernism before he died from complications of wounds he suffered in WWI.

And in position #2, up one place from 3rd in the last Top 10, is Dave Moore enigmatic song “Love and Money.”  It may offer an American answer to the question the Beatles once asked in “Can’t Buy Me Love.”

adlestrop Station

“The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat. No one left and no one came…”

Position number 1 is another return, and an even higher rise in the chart due to the large number of listens over this summer: “Adlestrop,”  British poet Edward Thomas’ famous moment on train platform on a hot June 24th 1914, were nothing much happens, but everything palpably is.

The poem portrays the train’s stop as unscheduled, but research into train schedules (see them here in this blog post at The National Archives) says otherwise. Adding this element was a conscious choice by Thomas.

It’s a much-loved poem for many reasons. Some find extra resonance in the lines describing calmness in the tiny village train stop, the literal calm before the storm of WWI, and that’s a fine thought for those that hold it, but I believe the poem exists beyond those associations. “Adelstop’s”  closing lines are sublime even without that particular war, that particular trauma to that specific nation, and as it was, to the ending of the life of its author Thomas, who became another of the poets killed in that war.

Like John A Dreams

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today’s selection was also recorded a few years back, and is more conventionally in that “poet reading beat poetry while a band backs the poet up” school of performance. While that’s one of the influences that has led to the Parlando Project, I didn’t want to confine myself to that style, and if you’ve been following along here with what we’ve done over the past year, you’ve heard some of the other approaches we’ve taken.

As I’m in a busy end of August, I don’t have time for much commentary on this piece, but I don’t think it needs it either, which is part of why it’s here today.  This is a story set distinctly in South Minneapolis and the early 21st Century, and it talks obliquely about the time of falling in love with my wife. The Riverview Theater mentioned in the poem is still a going concern, a neighborhood single-screen movie house that shows movies near the end of their theatrical release without concentrating on any one cinema genre, leading to marquee billings like the one the poem mentions, a series of titles that often seem like little Dada poems to me.

Riverview Theater 1

Minneapolis’ Riverview Theater: Dada poem generator or movie house marquee?

  
Outside of the localism of the poem, the main obscurity in it is the title: “Like John A Dreams.”  That’s a reference to one of my favorite speeches in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.  In the play’s Act II, the hero Hamlet is asking why he cannot take action on the death of his father, and he rebukes himself as “Like John A Dreams, unpregnant of my cause, and I can say nothing…” John A Dreams was apparently a stock folk character in Shakespeare’s time, a foolish character who lived in his imagination and ignored more pressing reality—a character flaw all writers should be able to appreciate.

Blues and Haikus Jack Kerouac record cover

Parlando influence Jack Kerouac. “Beat poetry while a band backs the poet up”

Allen Ginsberg once recalled Jack Kerouac reading Hamlet aloud, and in particular this speech, with special emphasis in his voice when he landed on the “John A Dreams” charge.
 
So, if you’re a writer or other artist, Hamlet’s speech is for you. Your life is quite possibly bifurcated between that artistic thing you do and the life you press aside to do it. Art is often about making “and” choices. Life is often about making “or” choices.

To hear the LYL Band perform “Like John A Dreams,” use the player below.

Sonnet 18

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

We’ve made it to more than 90 posts into the Parlando Project without doing any Shakespeare, which I believe may be some kind of record. It’s not an intentional slight, it’s just that we’ve been busy with other words.

I grew up in a little Iowa town named Stratford, the same name as Shakespeare’s birthplace, and this coincidence instituted by land speculators a hundred years or so before, impressed on me the importance of poetry. This was not the only misapprehension of my youth, but it was long lasting one, as here I am countless decades later, delighting in words being costumed in music.

Avon RiverBoone River

Two summer’s days: one of these is the Avon river through the forest of Arden in England,
and the other is the Boone river near Stratford Iowa in the U.S.

 

Today’s episode uses the words from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day.”  Like many Shakespeare pieces, there are lots of performances of it around, which is one the of the values of Shakespeare—you can contrast your performance against others. Many performers of Sonnet 18  like emphasize the wit in it; and wit there is, with it twisting around the idea of comparing one’s beloved with the beauties of nature, which is developed further as the idea that the inconstancies of nature necessarily include aging and death.

Others like to embody the sensual in the poem, the lush language. The third line ends with “the darling buds of May,” a phrase, good enough to be swiped for the name of a fine Welsh 90’s indie-rock band. I don’t think you can escape from that musical language. The entire second quatrain uses near and exact rhymes for each line, a sound that rubs and slides against the ear.

I made two choices in emphasis that differ from others. First, I wanted to bring out the brag in this. The speaker in this poem, who the author is at the least pretending to be, is claiming that he can make his beloved immortal by the power of his verse. No small claim—but in Shakespeare’s case, it’s not bragging if you can do it. And to add to the swagger, I stressed the beat a bit more than I might usually. I made the speaker a little less coy, a little less playful, and little more assured that he’s more than the “upstart crow” that he was seen as by some early in his career when he was writing his sonnets.

Musically I declined to use my main instrument, the guitar, this time. Once I had the drums and bass down, I thought they were enough to support the words on their own, so I added only some scattered piano chords to help outline the harmony.

To hear my performance of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18, Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”  use the audio player that appears below. Today’s piece is quite short, less than two minutes long, so it’s a good way to sample what the Parlando Project is doing. If you like it, we have more than 90 other audio pieces available here using various words combined with various music.