soul

A song made from Fenton Johnson’s “Revery”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Longtime followers of this Project will know that I’m a proponent of early 20th century Chicago Afro-American poet Fenton Johnson. The “elevator pitch” for Johnson is that he slots in between Paul Laurence Dunbar and the slightly later Harlem Renaissance. Back then, prominent contemporary Black critics such as the remarkable polymath James Weldon Johnson categorized Fenton Johnson’s work as altogether “radical” and “full of despair,” enough so that they were of mixed feelings about the value of his verse.

Fenton Johnson’s poetry does speak at times of hardship, oppression, even hopelessness, but upon further reading of his overlooked work, there’s a side of him that’s aspirational. In his short-lived attempts to establish an Afro-American focused journal he presented himself as a conventional Black Republican, perhaps hoping that the Reconstruction era of his elders could still be invoked.*  In addition, there’s another facet in his poetry: elements redolent of the modern Black Gospel music tradition which was forming up in Chicago while he was actively publishing just before WWI. The folks creating that music were attempting to fuse decidedly Black secular music like the Blues  and Jazz with the older (slavery era) strains of spirituals and preexisting hymnal songs. If the somewhat younger Langston Hughes gets due credit as a premiere Jazz poet, Fenton Johnson seems to me to have been trying to do the same thing with his poetry and Afro-American gospel.**

I could go on about Fenton Johnson, but instead I’ll try your attention by finishing up today by talking about making a musical piece out of his poem “Revery.”  Earlier this month I for some reason saw the text from which I adapted this week for my performance. Published in 1915, “Revery”  is one of the small number of Johnson’s poems available at the poets.org site. Reading those words, it struck me immediately that they could be a hymn to the Creator – or one could read it as a recounting of the “oversoul” that passes in an out of human lives. Having gone through September anniversaries for death and birth associated with Jimi Hendrix and John Coltrane, this poem attracted me. I started by thinking I’d condense Johnson’s published text to more succinctly bring out that sense of soul essence passing through our human lives. While I think I retain the “The Creator Has a Master Plan”  sense of the poem***, in a human-limited lifetime I could see the result being used at a funeral.

Revery

The link above will show you Johnson’s full poem, which I shortened in my adaptation for performance.

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Beginnings of musical pieces have quite a variety of first movers for me. This one started when I saw a new-to-me voicing for a Csus2 guitar chord. Sus is short for a suspended chord, a favorite of mine. The sus recipe is to drop the 3rd of a chord, the note that makes a chord major or minor – even in a basic simple 3-note triad – but then put something else in its place. In a Csus2, it’s the second degree of the scale, D. From what I understand in classical harmony, sus chords are considered an unstable, transitional chord, one that traditionally asks for a quickly following major or minor 3rd decision to resolve it. Me? I don’t mind sounds staying out there in an unresolved fog for a good long time. I began to write the whole song with three sus chords and one minor 9th chord. To better fit my voice, I used a capo to shift the Csus2 voicing and the rest up two semi-tones, and if the minor9th is the resolving chord and key center, the recording of the song is in Bminor.

Revery Chord Diagrams

The alt-tuning and easy to finger guitar chord forms I used for this song. That A7sus4 could be given other names, and I think it has some sort of G flavor as I sound it. The 3rd chord in the picture, the one that started off the composition, has a so much deeper sound that the common conventional tuning Dsus2 voicing.

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I’ve been doing a great deal of work in my studio space in the past month or so. Lots of multitudinous clean up and organizing work – rejiggering what goes where recording-wise and seeking a richer environment for my keyboard playing compatriot Dave to record there.**** All the bending and crawling around really challenges my elderly body – and my memory taunts me, recalling running some of the connections I was changing when I was a much younger man for whom diving under a desk or contorting myself to work in the backside of a low equipment rack was routine. I took a break, not even half-way done in this, and told myself I should allow my aching body a creative vacation day. And that was the day when I recorded this setting of Fenton Johnson’s “Reverie.”

I was feeling tremendous gratitude when playing this. I was using equipment accumulated slowly over decades arrayed in an ugly looking space that still had piles and boxes of stuff from the re-org to sell, give away, or store properly – but that ugly looking place sounds fine. In my monitoring headphones and when listening to the recording tracks later I was pleased as how well my space sounds. Some famous studios with envied sounds were not purpose-designed and architected rooms. Motown was a residential basement. Its reverb chamber was the house’s attic. Sound Techniques where Joe Boyd and John Wood produced the recordings of Nick Drake  and the cream of British folk-rock was upstairs in a former dairy with a naturally reverberant high vaulted ceiling and slate-lined walls. Stax in Memphis was a neighborhood movie house, the floor still slanted to accommodate the now absent movie chairs. Bert Jansch and John Renbourn’s first significant LPs were recorded in an ordinary London flat, the sound treatment: whatever the odd furniture was in it.

My space? Low ceiling, and noise from those in the floor above can easily be an issue, but it’s irregular in floor plan without any complete parallel walls. Sound treatment? It’s frankly clutter and happenstance. Today’s piece is a simple, unadorned recording. The recorded solo acoustic guitar has no reverb or delay, what you hear is just it and the microphones in this odd shaped room where I’ve recorded since the 1990s. You can hear me rebroadcast the soul of Fenton Johnson from there with the audio player gadget below. No player to be seen? Has it passed over the horizon in the meat-wheel of rebirth? No, it’s just not displayed within some ways of reading this blog, and so I supply this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.

 

 

 

*It may be confusing to 21st century readers, but before the New Deal era, the businessman oriented Republican party that was already associated with some conservative cultural stances was in the matter of Black Civil Rights still the Party of Lincoln, however weak that association had become.

**This working theory of mine is not (AFAIK) supported by any deep scholarship – it’s just a reasonable supposition by someone like myself with wide interests in music, poetry, and history. Remarkably little seems to be extant regarding Fenton Johnson’s privately expressed thoughts over his lifetime, and even those who knew him later in his life are now likely dead. A younger scholar interested in Afro-American culture could well take up investigating him.

***If you click on the link you’ll get a 34 minute Pharaoh Sanders spiritual Jazz piece that eventually meets up with an unforgettable vocal by Leon Thomas. Do your ears feel like praying for half-an-hour? I’m listening to it now as I finish formatting this for the blog.

****His keyboards can now be more often recorded in stereo. I now have a different vocal mic that may better suit his voice. When we record “live in the studio” we use loops I create with sequenced drums and bass, and these are now going to be separated tracks in my new plan and routing. We’re not going to start sounding like a Steely Dan record or anything, but the plan has promise.

I felt my life with both my hands

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

The occasion for today’s post and audio piece is Emily Dickinson’s birthday, but I chose this poem of hers to set to music for other reasons. It’s been quite the year since spring for my little family, and this past month has had some additional things to deal with. I keep meaning to find a way to write about those things, but despite the large presence of I-own-my-part-of-the-story writing on the Internet and elsewhere, I can’t feel comfortable writing for the public about personal journeys of others I love and are close to me.

I’ve read through various collections of Emily Dickinson’s poetry over the years, and I even attended online a reading this past September of all 1,789 of her poems from one ascribed complete edition. Here’s one thing I notice about reading or listening to Dickinson: while I’m always ready to wave my hands in the air for her greatest hits, each time you dive into that alternate hymnal of hers some poem will seem new to you, will grab you with a fresh surprising turn of phrase or thought.

And so, it was a few weeks ago when someone shared today’s poem on the Internet. I wished I’d taken notes, as I have that person to thank. Even before I finished reading “I felt my life with both my hands”   I said to myself “Is Dickinson talking about what I think she’s talking about — and if she isn’t, has she written a poem that accidentally speaks to certain things we think of as modern concerns?” I think the question comes around to if this is a spiritual poem about immortal souls, or if it’s a body image poem — and then, if we must necessarily divide those things, if Dickinson wanted us to. On the outward level this poem speaks of our inner spirit, of consciousness of selfhood, but the metaphors are often physical things one can touch and see, and since Dickinson has shown in other poems that she is comfortable writing in incorporeal abstracts, I can easily believe this imagery is a choice here.*  In short, before I finished that singular reading of this poem this fall, I thought “Dickinson is writing a poem about body dysmorphia, or plausibly gender dysphoria.”

Both of those things weren’t named until after Dickinson’s death, and discussion and understandings about gender dysphoria are still somewhat new in our century, so it’s a leap to say that our mid-19th century poet means to write about those things. So let me go through the poem and try to extract a gloss of what Dickinson wrote.

Both my Hands

I added an “inline epigraph” to the text of Dickinson’s poem. It appears in quotes above.

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The first stanza refers to an antiquated test for life, holding a mirror up to a subject’s nose and mouth to see if it mists over from respiration — but she’s also portraying by association looking in a mirror. Of course in our day the glass we hold up to our faces is likely the screen of a smartphone with a selfie camera, but the image retains.

I don’t think one needs to insert much into the second stanza to see body dysmorphia. Sure, she could  be reaching for a rhyme for “round” when she uses “pound.” I’m not knowledgeable enough to know what weight ideals were for Dickinson’s time and place, but what’s clear here imagistically is that the poem’s speaker is examining their body and feeling like they are not that body. Is it because they, their self, are philosophically a soul — or because that body doesn’t agree with their soul?

Third stanza. More body examination. “Jarred my hair” is a particular image. Is this some kind of pomade or other cosmetic? I think Dickinson has chosen jarred to pun on “jarring” here. The dimples image would again speak perhaps of weight concerns/dysmorphia.

The last four lines, Dickinson’s final stanza, indicates again the spirit or soul as essential self. Having left off with knowledge that the self/spirit and the body are not the same, the new place, the new home, the poem’s speaker finds themselves in is Heaven.

Nowadays speculations learned and affinititory about Dickinson’s sexuality have become common, yet I don’t see any first page search hits on her and gender dysphoria. The case for that here in this poem may well be accidental, if none-the-less striking, as the narratives of folks experiencing gender dysphoria might well fit into these poetic lines: the separation of the spirit and the body, the disconnection of the body from the authentic self, the feelings of relief when expressing outwardly their inner conviction. The third stanza’s jarring of hair and pushing in dimples takes another vivid incarnation if viewed in that frame.

Now those with the patience to read this far may still be interested in what I did with this experience of the poem — though if you’re a patient reader who is muttering “Balderdash” as you read the above, you are excused to go do something worthwhile. My impression from my encounter led me to alter Dickinson’s text with a sort of in-line epigraph from the song “Candy Says,”  written by Lou Reed for the opening track on the LP eponymously called The Velvet Underground.* *  The unpredictability and distress of the past couple of weeks has, I fear, given forth a less than ideal performance — but perhaps it’s imperfection has a certain authenticity to the times it was composed and recorded in. You can hear it with the player gadget below (where seen) or with this backup highlighted link.

May you find your joy and help others find theirs too. Production of new pieces and new blog posts here may be erratic, or they may be therapeutic, in unpredictable proportions, but there are the over 650 pieces in our archives here.

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*Another choice is her use of “both my hands” in the first line. It’s not like the body would slip out of one’s grasp if you didn’t grab it with two hands. I think this is a choice to highlight duality.

**This song from 1969 opens with a clear dysphoria statement: “Candy says, I’ve come to hate my body, and all that it requires in this world.” I’m sure there are clever thinkers among spiritual people who can consolidate the idea of an inner soul which is not the physical body with a disbelief in gender dysphoria.

Archaic Torso of Apollo

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

New Year’s is a time to look at where one’s been and to look anew, to make resolutions and changes. So, let’s look anew at a 110-year-old work by Rainer Maria Rilke.

That’s appropriate, because Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo”  is about looking at something old, something that many others have looked at. And Rilke’s poem too has been read and listened to by many, both in it’s original German and in several translations into English. Each translation differs from the others as there are several problems of understanding and reconstruction into a new language that each translator had to solve. So I started by doing my own English translation, working with Rilke’s German words and trying to understand what he’s getting at.

What’s the over-riding observation about the statue that is Rilke’s subject? That it’s broken and incomplete. This is past obvious, but because Rilke spends some time in this brief poem talking about how drawn he is to it, I think it’s possible to misunderstand this point. He says wonder-filled things about it, and this leads many translators and readers to believe that he’s making a case that it’s artistically perfect in some talismanic way.

Torso of Apollo

Worst New Year’s party ever. Woke up without head, arms, legs…

My reading is that he’s making a contrasting case. This is a legless and headless statue. Rilke makes us see right off that the head is missing. Describing that missing head Rilke uses the German word “unerhörtes,” unheard—which we take in the sense of “unheard of.” Translators have translated it into “fabulous”, “legendary”, and so on. There are certainly good German words for those things, but Rilke chose otherwise. Does he want the double meaning that this statue of the Greek god of poetry and music is missing its ability to hear?

What do I make of the remarkable, surrealist-sounding image near the start of the poem that the missing head is surmised to have eyes ripened like apples? Everyone is struck by the audacity of it, but what does it mean? I don’t think Rilke means this in a René Magritte way, as even a small apple is too large for an eye socket. My wife had a suggestion: ripened apples eventually fall and rot, just as the head has been harvested or fallen from neglect.

Magritte Son of Man

Eyes ripened like apples, René Magritte’s way.

Another hard to translate line is the poems eighth, which dips down to the naked statue’s beltline and makes reference to genitals that should be there if we were to continue in the path of the gaze. I suspect the statue has been fractured above them. My translation breaks with most others on the following “beast’s pelt” reference. Some translate that fur as a wonderous quality of the entire remaining stone torso, which seems to make no sense imaginative or otherwise when referring to Greek statues of Apollo*. My translation reads the German as saying that the wild beast’s pelt is missing, that is to say that the statue ends above the pubic hair. So blind, deaf, headless, and also without his sex organs.**

What’s left after these amputations, this incompleteness? First, Rilke is drawn to this torso. He is a poet, and Apollo’s the god of poetry. He’s also spent a couple years working as a young assistant to the great French sculptor Rodin, so statuary is an interest. I think what he sees as still there is the soul, the heart, the essence, which he portrays as that mysterious flame-like glow in the marble and the remaining curves that smile at the damage.

Which brings us to the poem’s notable surprise ending, which I won’t spoil in my explanatory text if you don’t know it already. I think Rilke is drawn to this torso because he senses this soul, that which eternally remains, that which is without borders and broken places, can heal or transcend this: the lack of fulfilled desire, vision, mind, and music. Perhaps he is drawn to this broken statue so intensely because he feels he and his art are broken and incomplete too.

To hear my performance of a new translation of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,”  with its conclusion that many readers/listeners find unexpected, use the player gadget below. And to all the brave readers and flexible listeners here: an exploring and improving New Year!

*Rilke may not have known it, but something else was missing on that statue. We have become accustomed to viewing classical Greek statues as glowing white marble, aesthetically we may have even absorbed the idea that this monochromatic paleness is the timeless ideal. However, the Greeks painted their statues, even the nudes got skin tones and hair color. Oh, and they were Southeast Mediterranean people with interchange with Africa and the Middle East, those skin tones weren’t pasty white, as examination of pigment remnants on classical Greek statues reveal.

**Of course, I must be modest. My knowledge of German (like my knowledge of French and classical Chinese which I’ve also translated here) is lacking, which can lead to translation errors. The only skill I can bring to this is that I read, perform and write poetry.

Aretha Franklin has died

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

This blog isn’t really a news source, even if poet Ezra Pound famously said literature (and this can be extended to art generally) is “news that stays news.” And given my age, I could make this elegies all the time,  and I don’t want that.

But I cannot let this horseman pass by, even though I never saw Franklin perform, even if I (like many record buyers) haven’t gone to the record store to purchase a disk with her face on the cover for decades. You could do that now I suppose, or you could open that glowing palm thing and press to search. What are  you searching for? If you’re searching, you must need something.

Maybe you know. Maybe you don’t. But what you will find, if commerce allows, is that  voice, and on some of her best records, perhaps her own gospely piano chords and her sisters singing along. Maybe there’s some small-town white guys, working, like her, on their shared art. What will you receive is, what? Energy, sublime expression, healing force—oh, you might as well just call it “soul.”

Fire and Sleet and Candlelight

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today’s piece, like my recent setting of Margaret Widdemer’s “When I Was A Young Girl”  reframes a folk song from the British Isles. Widdemer took a song traditionally about a life cut down by youthful excess and reformed it into a poem about finding love outside the realm of adventurous, romantic fantasy. However, today’s words are from Elinor Wylie, whose poetry retains its allegiance to romantic excess, even if it’s frank about the cost of that.

“Fire and Sleet and Candlelight”  takes its title from a transcription of an old English song, collected in the 17th Century, but likely much older: the “Lyke Wake Dirge.”  The “Lyke Wake Dirge”  is a striking song, even though its antique dialect is nearly as hard to understand today as “Summer Is Icumen In.”  As this blog post recalls, you’d be hard pressed to make out the lyrics to “Lyke Wake”  in present-day English from hearing it, but the simple yet stately melody grabs you anyway. That is an illustration of a Parlando Project idea: the presence of music allows one to defer decoding a text’s meaning, to appreciate something before you understand it. The line Wylie extracted for her title, in fact, is likely a common misunderstanding of the line in the old song. “Fire and Sleet and Candlelight” makes an easily available winter image, and so that’s what some heard. Scholars are now of the opinion that the middle item is actually “fleet,” not sleet; fleet being an old word meaning floor, and by extension, standing for home. The line’s word-music is beautiful with either word in it, and Wylie was very good at word-music.

To summarize “Lyke Wake,”  once you’ve died your soul will be tested on an arduous journey, which will be made easier if you’ve lived a life of charity. In the long-standing Christian debate between salvation from faith or works, “Lyke Wake”  favors the works side. The soul’s journey may still be strange and testing, but charitable goodness in life is rewarded as a way through.

This is not the poem that Wylie writes however. There’s a soul on a journey in her poem, yes, but salvation is nowhere achieved or even promised. “Lyke Wake”  is foreboding, but it may only recount two or three tests on the soul’s journey, and the refrain reminds us every verse the possibility that “Christe receive thy saule.” Christina Rossetti wrote a jauntier, more modern version of “Lyke Wake”  with her “Up-Hill,”  to give one example of how this could  have been restated in modern English.

Wylie’s poem instead piles on the soul-struggles until you lose track of the number depicted. Nearly every pair of lines is a fresh torment or test, some of pain, some of discouragement.

Wylie’s images for the soul’s tests are in general straightforward, nothing too esoteric. The only one that caused me pause was “trysted swords.” Tryst derives from a Middle English word for agreed hunting place. Imagery-wise I was reminded of the Tarot deck’s three of swords. What would be hunted, and injured, would be one’s heart here, and trysted puns to twisted, as in the intertwined piercing blades of the three of swords.

Three of Swords

Tired of clattering swords making a racket at your castle?
Use this easy idea to store them securely.

So, Elinor Wylie’s “Fire and Sleet and Candlelight,”  presents a more arduous and unrewarded journey than even the spooky “Lyke Wake Dirge.”  As a 20th Century poet steeped in the Romanticism of Shelley, Byron and Keats, Wylie would hold that suffering is not to be avoided if it’s a cost for a passionate rush toward truth and beauty. I said at the start, Wylie was honest about the cost of such a journey—and in words she is—but in putting it into such singing word-music she makes the sufferings easier to bear while her word-music undercuts the real pain and danger.

Lonelysoul

Wikipedia uses this picture to illustrate “Lyke Wake Dirge,” calling it “Lonely Soul.” I can only think of it as the back cover of “Songs of Leonard Cohen.”

 

I therefore tried to emphasize the sorrowful experiences of the words somewhat when performing this. For music I went with a fairly full-fledged orchestral-folk setting this time. The vocal and acoustic guitar is actually a “scratch part,” a quick recording used to lay the blueprints for later finished tracks, but due to recent events my voice has been out of commission for a few days, so I had to leave those parts in. To hear my performance of Elinor Wylie’s “Fire and Sleet and Candlelight,”  use the player below.