song

We Grow Accustomed to the Dark

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

It’s hard to escape the pull of Emily Dickinson here in the Parlando Project, and I keep finding that her poems ask for that unheard music in them to be made audible. So much is remarkable about Dickinson. She’s so original in poetic expression, and yet she’s kept a substantial audience of readers from the time of her first posthumously published collection in the late 19th Century.

Here’s yet another striking fact about her: she wrote over a thousand poems, the majority of her poetic work, roughly around the time of the American Civil War, in a burst of creativity less than a decade long. Can one even imagine what that might have been like? For this means that, on average, over twice a week a new Emily Dickinson poem, a new and unprecedented type of poetry, emerged from her pen.

Emily Dickinson's desk

Where she created a new way to write American poetry over a thousand times

 

She shared them somewhat, some of them anyway, with family and friends. She informally bound many of them into little booklets. But did she know what she was accomplishing? What faith drove her creativity?

Today’s words are drawn from a Dickinson poem she wrote halfway into that burst. Unlike some Dickinson poems, the “plot” of the poem is easy enough to follow, and it concludes with a moral, like a conventional poem of moral uplift might. However, like a lot of good art, the experience and meaning of it changes as you bring your own time and times to it.

“We Grow Accustomed to the Dark”  starts off in that pre-electric outdoors that we last talked about with Frost’s “Stopping by a Wood on a Snowy Evening.”  On a new moon or overcast night, that old dark is darker than any we routinely experience in modern urban America. Yet, then or now, eyes indeed adjust, and make better use of what weak light may be present. Dickinson next changes the scene and speaks of “Evenings of the Brain” where even moon and starlight are extinguished. Other than Dickinson’s near, but not quite, “slant rhymes,” this is a conventional poem up to this point. But wait there’s a small warning that she’s not going to develop this conventionally. Those evenings inside the brain are a larger thing than the whole of the outdoor night.

Her next metaphor is not Victorian sentiment, but outright slapstick farce. Moving forward in the dark earnestly, the nobly brave—smack!  Faceplant themselves into a tree trunk.

This brings ambiguity to her concluding moral. Is becoming accustomed to the dark a good thing? We think we’ve adjusted. We think we’ve steeled ourselves to “Brave”—or maybe we’ve just added that outer darkness to our brain, and we agree to pretend it’s normal. “Life steps almost straight” she concludes. Somehow, at least this week, as I watch our dark world, I don’t think Dickinson intends this as a consolation.

For today’s music I tried to underscore that from the first note. I wrote this orchestral piece based around an F minor to D progression that should leave the listener unsettled from the start. I chose to experiment with this cadence after reading Alex Ross’ short piece about pioneering Afro-American composer Florence Price earlier this month. If you’re new to the Parlando Project, let me remind you that our goal is to present the words with music as varied as I can make it. If you like one kind of music that works one way, we may puzzle you with what we do in any single piece. If so, try another. We are fast approaching 200 audio pieces in our archives, so take a listen around a few of them.

To hear my performance of Dickinson’s “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark”,  use the player below. Please remember that this Project continues because listeners and readers pass the word around about it.  Mentioning us, tweeting about us, linking to us, telling a friend about us, helps grow the audience and encourages our efforts.

 

 

My Childhood Home I See Again

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Tomorrow is celebrated in the United States as Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday—or rather, it was in the past. In 1971, a uniform Monday holiday, often called President’s Day, centralized what had been in the past dual, separate, celebrations of Washington’s Birthday and Lincoln’s.

Washington (as poet Phillis Wheatley’s motto for him said) was first in war and first in peace, and we owe him a great debt for being the rare revolutionary leader that did not try to crown his success with dictatorship. But Lincoln’s achievements are every bit Washington’s equal; though his central achievement, a US government that no longer enforced chattel slavery throughout the country has in recent decades been somewhat obscured for complex reasons.

But here at the Parlando Project, where we combine music with words, Lincoln gets extra props for being as great a wordsmith as any US Chief Executive. While taking the various roads that lead to this piece I read his famous Gettysburg Address, or rather refreshed myself with the words in manuscript form, for as a child I had memorized it.

At this site it’s possible to trace the slight revisions that Lincoln applied draft by draft to polish this concise statement of dedication. And the same site linked to another site that let me read (for the first time) Edward Everett’s main speech at the same Gettysburg dedication.

Perhaps you’ve heard the story of how the two speeches that day in 1863 contrasted. It’s no legend. Everett’s speech lasted over two hours. Lincoln’s could have fitted his into a linked series of five Tweets today, and it takes a couple of minutes to read. Go ahead, read as much of Everett’s speech as you can. It’s the kind of grand utterance that could have caused the 19th Century to invent TLDNR 140 years sooner.

So, Lincoln could fashion a memorable, resonant phrase and express complex things concisely. That’s the kind of literary talent that leads one to ask if he wrote poetry. He did, but as far as we know, there’s not very much of it. He wrote some occasional, short, light verse. His serious poetic works consist of an attributed poem with a narrator speaking of suicide, and a three-part poem recalling his hometown.

Abe Lincoln in 1847

Abe Lincoln in his mid-30s, 1847, around the time he wrote today’s words.

 

It’s from the first part of that later Lincoln poem that I created today’s piece, “My Childhood Home I See Again.”  It was published anonymously through the efforts of a friend of his in 1847. Lincoln was in his troubled 30s when his longer poems were written, and he seems to have been suffering from depression, the depth and length of which is subject of much discussion among historical scholars.

The parts I used from “My Childhood Home I See Again”  tell much the same story as English poet Thomas Hardy’s “The Self Unseeing,”  but Lincoln’s poem is more melancholy, even if he tries to make some pretense of it being only wistful. By the final couplet, Lincoln’s own words put in him the situation of George Saunders’ “Lincoln in the Bardo.”   I suppose one could also compare Lincoln and Hardy’s poems to my own piece “Homeopathic Hometown.”

For today’s music I used an acoustic guitar and my semi-acoustic Jack Casady bass guitar for the main accompaniment. I try to stay away from instrument-geekery most of the time here, but that bass was actually designed by the musician, it’s not some “paint it a different color and slap on a decal” marketing gimmick. I love its sound, as you may be able to tell from the mix today. To hear too much (or just enough) bass guitar, and Lincoln’s sad words as I set them to music, use the player below.

 

 

Ozymandias

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I came upon Percy Bysshe Shelley and this poem like many have, a teenager with a school poetry anthology on my desk. It is a good teaching poem, what with its readily accessible irony—and so, “Ozymandias”  came to me, nestled with poems by Keats and Byron, within the handy “The Romantics” chapter.

Stepping outside the poetry, even briefly, into biography, I found them a glamourous bunch of young men to my teenaged heart. The original “live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse” crew. Political and sexual revolutionaries, aesthetes with groupies. Should I study them, or seek to be them? Well the former was on offer, the latter harder to obtain for someone of my looks and stature.

Oxford-University_Shelley_Memorial

One Romantic depiction of Shelley’s drowned corpse, which looks better than some of us do alive.

 

In the 1960s Byron, Keats and Shelley were the rock stars in my textbooks. To the generation before the coming of the 20th Century Modernists, they seemed that too, even if “rock star” wasn’t yet a metaphor in the shops. So, Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites wanted to be Byron, Keats and Shelley too. In America, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Paul Laurence Dunbar showed that you didn’t have to be male or white to feel that urge. Even unique figures like Rabindranath Tagore were touched by their model.

Well, despite the notoriety, the tangled amorous relationships, and the requirement of a tragic early death—yes, in spite of this—in the end the romantic, idealist stance doesn’t remove the poet from the mundane tasks of writing poetry any more than drugs and sex remove from a rock star the need to come up with, well, some music once in a while.

Such is the case here of “Ozymandias.”  Did this poem strike Shelley’s poetic soul in a flash of hashish inspiration while adventuring in the Middle East? Well, no. If we were to continue the musical analogies, it instead came from a silent, slow-motion, written-poetry equivalent of a Battle of the Bands, a Rap Battle, or a songwriter’s Song Pull, a friendly contest undertaken with another poet, Shelley’s contemporary Horace Smith. They both were working off the same short passage from 1st Century BC Greek historian Diodorus, which gives both of them the plot. Here’s Smith’s “Ozymandias:”

Horace Smiths Ozymandias

Horace Smith’s version of “Ozymandias.” Not found in schoolbooks.

 

After they finished their competing works, I wonder how Smith felt. If one goes to poetry for meaning, these two poems make near the same point. Imagery-wise, Shelley’s choice and portrayal of the broken statue on a barren desert does have better selection of detail. And Smith, trying to make his rhyme, has one particularly awkward line, the one ending “holding the Wolf in chace” (“chace” is an Old-French word that was once used in English to mean hunt). But where Shelley kills it here, is his word-music. If you look at Shelley’s manuscript of “Ozymandias”  you can see some of how he worked on these things, so they wouldn’t be “lifeless things.”

Art is not a competition. Criteria are slippery things, and what works in one poem, fails in another. Even day to day, within our own singular selves, what we seek from, or need from, art differs—but Smith’s “Ozymandias”  was rightfully eclipsed by Shelley’s.

In my music and performance of “Ozymandias”  I went counter to other presentations I’ve heard. The poem’s lyricism and the later 19th Century acceptance of Shelley as a portrayer of ideal beauty has masked the Shelley that was a political radical and iconoclast. As a result, many read it lightly, bringing out its sonic beauty or its pathos. I don’t know how Shelley, the radical, would want it read, but I’ve always felt that the traveler who’s telling this tale knows all too well, in non-historic terms, about living under a hand that mocked them with a sneer of cold command.

Therefore, I emulated the spirit of another English iconoclast, Kevin Coyne, for this piece. I love the probably apocryphal story of Coyne being approached about replacing Jim Morrison in The Doors, that rock star/poet hybrid. In Coyne’s telling, he turned them down because he “didn’t like the leather trousers.”  To hear my sans culottes performance of “Ozymandias,”  with more disgust at tyranny and less pathos at time’s ravages, use the player below.

 

The Wild Swans at Coole

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Let us for a moment consider length in English language poetry. Despite the customary inclusion of one or two very short poems in most American poetry anthologies (“The Red Wheelbarrow”   or “In A Station of the Metro”  typically), one can easily derive from them an accumulated mainstream judgement that poems shorter than a sonnet’s 14 lines are judged slighter expressions of less merit.

Similarly, in music, for all the glories of the mid-20th Century’s two minute and forty second 45 RPM single, serious composed music demonstrates greater regard for pieces of at least middling length, and the 20 to 70-minute symphony is still regarded with reverence. And so on with improvised music practice, which seem to find the five-minute mark as a minimum. Even the later 20th Century movement that got called “Minimalism” worked the idea of fewer motifs considered at greater length.

And so it is when we consider swans, the largest waterfowl, in words. Our last post and audio piece used Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Wild Swans,”   a fine poem, but if one looks at the accumulated attention gathered in the roughly 100 years since each was written, Millay’s “Wild Swans”  is overshadowed by William Butler Yeats’ “The Wild Swans at Coole.”

Yeats’ poem is worthy of this attention, and he does pack a lot into his mid-length 30-line poem, written by a late middle-aged poet as his colonized country has experienced a failed revolution and his world has seen the shocking mechanized slaughter of the original World War. All that violence is subtext—not once is it mentioned—and as we read or listen to it now, that violence may no longer be apparent, though the background of disappointment remains.

Millay presents the swans as something she cannot comprehend as they fly over her, with her disappointment, her heart at present “a house without air.” Yeats on the other hand presents an almost OCD-level attention with the swimming swans at the beginning of his poem. He has apparently been counting them on each visit for 19 years. He’s going to count them again. And then they fly off in clamor before he can finish his count even though he reports an exact number.

The specificity of those two numbers is curious. Is the 19 years of visits to Coole in Ireland a mere biographical fact? Are the “nine-and-fifty swans” he’s counted an actual census he took regularly? I do not know. Given that Yeats had a long interest in occultism, there may be some occult significance in one or both of those numbers. They are both large numbers for the things they measure: anything one has done for 19 years has a resonance for that long a duration, and given how magnificent the sight of a few swans gliding on the water are, the idea of 59 of them viewed together is an image of overwhelming swan-ishness.

What strikes me most about the two numbers subliminal effect is that both end in 9, and so, seem to be almost at an ending. As the poem develops, Yeats returns to that effect.

These details, written in Yeats typical lyrical fluency, accumulate throughout the poem. The lake and sky repeating each other. 59 swans. The “bell-beat” weight of their wings as they heavily swing them into flight, equally straining, equally coalescing into aerial rings. Their companionable swimming on the cold water “lover by lover”—ah, there’s that 59 again, an odd number—at least one swan has no mate.

But he doesn’t say that. The poem is all its music, the image after image, the beauty after beauty mixed with the undercurrent of impossibility of its permanency. The world will change, the poet or the swans will not return.

19 years of repetition does not mean 19 years of repetition to come. 59 swans is all but too much beauty, but one swan is without a partner.

Davis Coltrane Yeats Millay

John Coltrane: “Sometimes when I’m playing there are always new sounds to imagine, new feelings to get at. There’s never any end.”

Miles Davis: “Try taking the f’ing horn out of your mouth”

 

So, do the 30 lines of Yeats mean it’s a greater poem than the 8 lines of Millay, an objective judgement causing its greater fame?

Why do I have to choose? If Yeats had written 60 or 6,000 lines would “The Wild Swans at Coole”  be better? If Millay had written 80 lines, would her “Wild Swans”  have shown greater skill? We can derive from how anthologists, poetry critics and audiences respond what their preferences are, even those they never articulate explicitly, but in the end it is the longer poems that make the short poems concise and the short poems that make the longer poems seem overwhelming.

How many times have I listened to “Kind of Blue?”  Does Miles Davis need to play more notes? Does John Coltrane need to play fewer? Looking at these two poems about swans, they illuminate each other.

The gadget below will play my performance of Yeats’ “The Wild Swans at Coole.”

 

Wild Swans

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Let’s return again to Edna St. Vincent Millay as I start a short series of pieces using words by more well-known poets, each of whom considers the book of nature as played out by birds.

Millay’s “Wild Swans”  may be somewhat overshadowed in the Cygnet Committee by William Butler Yeats’ “The Wild Swans at Coole,”  published only a few years earlier than Millay’s poem. The birds of these poems’ central image, the largest waterfowl, are known for white and graceful beauty while at rest or swimming on the water, which contrasts with their somewhat overburdened flight and strangled hinge-in-need-of-oil song.

Other than their pure color and size, it may be the swan in flight that makes them something of the ornithological model for angels, as for such a large bird to have enough strength and wingspan to fly is practically miraculous.

an_angel_playing_a_flageolet-Burne-Jones

No matter how hard you blow on that horn, not enough wingspread to get airborne

 

In “Wild Swans”  Millay presents that miracle in flight, but by misdirection or misapprehension. The swans are flying as the poem opens, but Millay is instead looking inward—and furthermore, the poet thinks this introspection is bringing no insight.

Swan taking off

Headlong effort transcends grace

 

But in this short poem’s second part, the images and insights come anyway. In an apostrophe to her heart, Millay addresses it as a “house without air”—an acute metaphor there for despair—and she now asks for the swans to fly over us again, trailing their ungainly legs, crying unselfconsciously their sad and awkward calls.

Wildness, movement, flight beyond bounds, the miraculous after grace, the next day flying over the weeks, then the months and the years.

This is a surprising poem, it’s titular image, those wild swans, are missing, until they are called for in the last five words; not to be beautiful, but straining to be possible.

To hear my performance of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Wild Swans”,  use the player below. And remember I rely greatly on readers/listeners helping spread the word about the combination of various words and music here. Tweeting, linking, including in Facebook posts and on other social media, helps this project reach it’s audience. If you don’t do social media, that’s fine too, the amount of work it takes to do this makes that a practical impossibility for me; but if you like this, hitting the Like button for this post helps keep me going.

 

 

 

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.

There is Always Time

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

It’s a new year, and here’s a piece that is not representative of most of what we do here. First off, it’s a piece where I wrote the words, when one of the Parlando Project principles is “Other People’s Stories.” So, the words we use here are normally from others, often originally written as page poems by their authors. The Parlando Project adapts, recasts, and performs these pieces with various combinations of original music. Today’s audio, “There is Always Time”  was conceived as a song to be sung from the start.

It’s been a busy last couple of weeks for me, so my ability to work on new pieces has been slightly curtailed. I’ve had this one done for a month, saved for just such an occasion when I’ve fallen behind in the work that goes into this project—and well, it does seem like a good piece for the day of New Year’s Resolutions.

Woody Guthrie's 1942 NY Resolutions

Woody Guthrie’s 1942 NY Resolutions. He didn’t keep all of them—still glad we had a Woody Guthrie.

 

“There is Always Time”  is a “carpe diem” song about dreams and desires deferred, so it’s perhaps the precursor to those lists of “shoulds” for the coming year.

Goals and focus are good things. Approximately three years ago I set out on just such a goal, to create and present 100 or so audio pieces combining various words and various music. I needed to learn a bit about how to syndicate these pieces via podcasting as well as how to stream them from a blog. Once I started this, I soon found there was even more to learn, more things that will ask to be needed by the work. Since the Parlando Project was launched in August 2016, we’ve exceeded the original goal, and we now near 170 audio pieces published.

Goals, focus, drive, desire to learn, audacity mixed with humility—all were necessary. However, I think today, as I present this piece, of Karen Horney, the innovative early psychoanalyst, who developed a concept as she looked at personalities and the goals they set. She called it “The Tyranny of the Shoulds.”

Karen Horney

Karen Horney. Beavis and Butthead’s favorite Adlerian psychoanalyst?

 

Who was the tyrant, the oppressor, who is in this phrase? Parents? Society? Government? Natural Law? Racism, sexism, ageism, gender roles? Well, they all could contribute to the tyrant’s powers, but in her formulation the mad dictator is specifically “The Ideal Self.”

Wait—what? The Ideal Self is what is going to get me out of those old-year patterns, get me doing those things that I need to do. The Ideal Self will make sure I commit to my art. The Ideal Self will fix those things about myself that keep failing. The Ideal Self will make me a better person, a better co-worker, a better partner, a better parent, a better son or daughter, and so on.

What’s wrong with that? Look again at Horney’s formulation: “The Tyranny of the Shoulds.” What if that Ideal Self behaves as a tyrant does? What if instead of being the loving, supportive partner, parent, boss, or teacher that we may or may not have had, the Ideal Self acts as a dictator would: the executions, the inquisitions, the scape-goating, the banishments, the wars of aggression, all waged by the Ideal Self against the poor Real Self, who beaten-down will eventually fail the tyrant or overthrow it.

So yes, seize the day, seize the year. Do more and better art this year. Love your partners and your families and your friends while they are here. Repair the world, slowly and little-by-little if you can be patient and brave. Clean out the closet. Ride your bike more. Learn a new instrument. Read more. But be the loving partner to that struggling Real Self. It knows it’s limitations, it’s failures, it’s shames, but it is only your Real Self that can do these things.

To hear “There is Always Time,”  use the player below. If you like it, go ahead and click the like button, and it’s very helpful if you share the audio pieces or this blog on your own site, or on social media. We’ll be back with more pieces using words by other authors soon.

Ring Out Wild Bells

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

This guy was once famous. Not just writer-famous, but Beyoncé or Beatles famous. In England, and to a large degree in America, he was the face of, and the center of, Victorian poetry. And poetry in Victorian times, the written-down and printed in books kind, was still a force in mass culture.

tennyson

Once an empire’s most famous poet, now reduced to modeling a Slanket.

The town I grew up in was platted and settled around 1880, its success achieved by the industrious Swedish-American farmers around it and the railroad that went through it. The town was named Stratford, after Shakespeare’s birthplace, and so it was that the town’s main street, with it’s block of stores, was named Shakespeare Avenue. Shakespeare Avenue was met just north of the shops by the town’s central cross street, Tennyson Avenue.

That’s a remarkable piece of trivia isn’t it? Think of how many suburbs and housing developments were similarly planned and platted in the centuries since in the United States. How many of them had main streets named for contemporary poets? Milton and Byron had their streets along with Shakespeare in Strafford, but even Byron was 50 years dead; but here was Tennyson, a man still in his career across half a continent and one ocean away, and here this proud avenue in a farming town was written down to bear his name.

The problem with being a big-thing Victorian, as Tennyson was, is that our Modernists came after them. Came after them in time and eventually, opposition. Even though you can see the influences of the Victorians on the early work of some Modernists, you can also see the things they came to reject in search of an art for their own time. In those scattered small settlements where page poetry is still read or studied, we are now more likely to be reading Hopkins or Hardy for the English, or Dickinson or Whitman for Americans, or hinge figures like Yeats who spanned the eras, than Alfred Lord Tennyson, the once leading poet of his age.

Besides the street in my tiny town, Tennyson lives on in a handful of phrases from his poems that have become commonplace mottos such as “It’s better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all”—words well-enough known even as their author’s fame and esteem has faded, that many people think they must be Shakespeare’s.

Today’s words come from another section in the same long poem or collection that premiered the “loved and lost” phrase, Tennyson’s broad meditation on loss and perseverance “In Memoriam A.H.H.”  If we’ve forgotten Tennyson, this makes it possible for him to be new again, and this is a piece, as I recast it, that seems very appropriate for our age—even for this year. The New Year’s bells ring in a new year, but they also chase away the devils of the old one.

So, enjoy the music I wrote and recorded for “Ring Out Wild Bells”,  but you may be surprised at how well Tennyson’s sentiments fit as you sing along with them while 2017 ends. The player for the audio piece is right below this for many of you. Don’t see a player? This highlighted hyper link will also play my performance of a new setting for Tennyson’s words.

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Solstice Featuring Dave Moore

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday’s post and audio piece had Dave Moore combining the poetry of William Blake and Christina Rossetti, but today we have him singing the work of yet another English mystic as well as his setting of a lyric by Emily Dickinson.

For those readers and listeners in the Northern Hemisphere, tomorrow is Winter Solstice. I write from Minnesota, fairly far upward and north in latitude. Winter Solstice is the darkest day of the year, with the sun not rising until almost 8 AM and the sunset clocking out of work early at 4:20 PM. Despite our colder climate, that’s about the same as London’s solstice daylight and a hour longer than Edinburgh. Minnesota’s famous Scandinavian immigrants, as one comic once put it, traveled across the whole wide ocean just to find the one place as cold, dark and miserable as the place they’d left—well I checked—they picked up 2 to 4 hours more midwinter light.

Of course the new year is less than two weeks off, and solstice is the shortest  day—not the entry into a dark season, but the beginning of a gradual expansion of daylight, cold daylight though it may be. For this reason it’s been a fairly widespread feast day across cultures.

However, for writers and musicians, the cold and the dark is no great hindrance. Sure it may blunt our moods, and stunt some mitigating outdoor activities, but our products are part of the festive in the darkness, and they can be like the shared quilt or blanket on the coldest night. Yes, before indoor lighting technology, scholarly reading was curtailed, but the poets of that dark time could recite from memory, needing no light bulb on their lectern. The sounds of strings, the dunest drum and the golden cymbal, travel without light.

And our partners and families don’t need light either to be known to us. They don’t even need poetry or music, their plainest word in the darkness is song enough, if we can hear that as one note in the slowest song that is our life together.

So, for today and the Midwinter Solstice, here is Dave Moore singing Robyn Hitchcock’s “Winter Love.”

The LYL Band tackles the darkest time of year

 

 

And for the short passage of the daylight, here’s Emily Dickinson’s sublime lyric about the transit of a day, “I’ll Tell You How the Sun Rose,”  also sung by Dave.

And don’t forget, we have over 160 audio pieces here, available in the archives on the right. Why not check out some from before the time you first heard of us?

A Song in the Garden of Love

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today we offer a respite from my voice and the return of alternate Parlando Project presenter Dave Moore. And since it’s been a few days since the last new audio piece, today’s piece combines a lyric written by William Blake with one by Christina Rossetti. Two great poets in one piece! Ladies and gentlemen, there is no greater value you can find today in the poetic words mixed with music marketplace!

Both pieces are stated by their authors to be songs, either in the name of Blake’s collection where “The Garden of Love”  first appeared, “Songs of Experience,”  or in the title itself for Rossetti’s piece, which she called just “Song.”

So of course, both pieces have been set to music and sung before this, but it was Dave Moore’s idea to combine the two pieces; and one can immediately see once he did this, how tightly they fit, with Blake sorrowfully reporting the graves in the garden, and Rossetti musing on the grave and its landscape.

Rossetti wrote her “Song”  while still a teenager. Unlike Blake who was born in a religious dissenter family and grew increasingly distrustful of the corruptions of organized religion, Rossetti would become one of the most graceful and modest of the poets of the Victorian Christian revival. Strange, isn’t it, that the two poems mesh together.

Christina Rossette on staircase

“If you listen very hard, the tune will come to you at last”
Christina Rossetti listens for inspiration, or puzzles over her holiday gift list

 

Speaking from my poet/musician duality, the version of “The Garden of Love”  that I most recall is the one recorded by Allen Ginsberg in December of 1969. Ginsberg’s recording is played, followed by a 20-minute discussion of the poem and performance here. The four speakers in this discussion mull on the country music waltz feel Ginsberg performed the Blake too. If I were in that room, I could have replied from the musician side of that duality, that in 1969 there was a bloomlet of counter-cultural figures essaying country-music tropes to the puzzlement from the hippie audience as to what level of irony was intended. Two musical figures close to Allen Ginsberg had taken part in that move earlier that same year: Bob Dylan with “Nashville Skyline”  and Ed Sanders with “Sanders’ Truckstop.”

Wm Blake The Garden of Love

“A dominie in gray…led the flock away.” Blake’s self-illuminated song.

 

Our performance of this mixes Dave’s somewhat church-hymn organ (Ginsberg often used a hand-pumped harmonium organ in his live performances) with my country-ish Telecaster electric guitar, so perhaps Ginsberg’s country move was stuck in my memory as we performed this. Here’s what Dave Moore said about his performance:

“Wayback Machine time.

This song goes back to the early days of the Reagan years, which he ended up forgetting but we can’t.

Probably this is my first attempt to put music to classic poetry, I just thought they fit together so well & expressed both despair and hope so well. This one is my favorite vocal of all attempts at this piece. My introductory verses for each poet are new & I wish I’d separated them from the two little poems better, but that’s what you get with one-takes. Ah, sweet death, we can still sing.”

Dave points out a contrasting benefit of the pieces here performed as the LYL Band, which are not only “one-takes,” but are often pieces that only the composer-vocalist has any sense of the structure of, leaving the rest of us to follow and create parts on the fly. This leads to a certain roughness, and yes, at times, tentativeness too—but I believe there is a corresponding sense of the undiscovered and its discovery that may come across to the listener.

To listen to the LYL Band perform Dave Moore’s pairing of these two beautiful, yet sad, English lyrics, use the player below.