Tuesday was Election Day in the United States, and I had a lot of hopes and fears. As a matter of displacement for those fears, it was also the day I’d scheduled to get back together with Dave Moore to make and record spontaneous musical performances. Like the election, an event I was looking forward to, while retaining some worries. I’ve spent the entire summer rewiring and repatching the recording system in my studio space with the goal of improving captures of this kind of performance. But as the months passed, both Dave and I were getting older. We first started doing this kind of playing and recording over 45 years ago to cassette tapes, and now we have to deal with the frailties and energy levels of old age to continue this.
Monday I tested the new scheme out, as best I could by myself. Everything seemed to be working. Dave would arrive at our accustomed mid-day hour Tuesday. That morning I repeated a quick sound-check and left everything powered up and ready for his arrival.
Dave carefully traversed the rickety stairs and I greeted him. I explained that there was now a computer system at his position running Mainstage* that would allow him to load a variety of soundbank instruments for his main keyboard. I said I’d show him how it worked after we tried an opening song.
So here was yesterday: a country (and to some extent, a world) awaiting to find out what would happen with America’s current ruling cabal and this more localized concern about two older poets/musicians trying to create something with sound and words. I stepped over to my microphone position wearing a Telecaster electric guitar strapped across my body and began to play the first few notes. Dave was looking at a new keyboard setup, and as is our customary scheme, neither of us would have forethought of what were going to play. I quickly told him what key center we’d start in. We were beginning – we had to begin, even not knowing more than that. I had a serious poem of tyranny and the end of empire to present. Heavy stuff.
You can read the entirety of Stephen Vincent Benét’s harrowing poem at this link.
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I keep a stool near my mic, just as I do at Dave’s position in the studio space, so neither of us has to stand for the whole recording session. I stepped back to sit on it –
But I’d moved the stool a few feet away, probably to check or adjust something during my soundcheck. So, there was no stool where my butt was heading. My fat ass sat down on thin air, which I would then traverse much more rapidly than Dave took to the entryway stairs. An utter comic pratfall.
And like any good comic pratfall, no injury, other than the illustration of pride in serious intent. Dave asked if I was all right. I said yes, got up and kept playing. Telecasters are a 76-year-old design, but they aren’t fragile – the guitar, as I, was still intact and in-tune. Five minutes or so later, there was the performance you can hear below with the audio player gadget of a portion of Stephen Vincent Benét’s “Litany for Dictatorships.”
Are you thinking that any such audio player must have fallen off your computer screen? Well, some ways of reading this blog suppress showing the player, but this highlighted link will order a recount and pop up returns of a new browser tab with its own audio player.
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*Mainstage is an app sold by Apple that allows computer hosted instruments and effects to be selected and controlled from a simplified user interface during live performance or recording. As these things go, Mainstage is getting a bit long in the tooth, and there are more sophisticated systems that more sophisticated modern stage computer musicians might choose to use these days, but it allowed Dave to use the menu I’d set up with only a couple of minutes of instruction.
This is the final section in our Halloween series this year, a setting of Conrad Aiken’s narrative poem “The Vampire.” It’s the longest section of the four parts as I’ve divided it, and I find it by far the most disturbing. As I have done when releasing these movements in the musical piece, I urge you to listen to them in order, starting with Part 1.
I had this post all written and ready go before I finished mixing my recording of the last part late this afternoon. Before hitting publish, I decided to check to see if Aiken himself may have suggested some context when he published it. I had found Internet statements that the poem was first published in 1914, which I assumed was a simple uncontroversial fact. I even jumped to the conclusion that this publication must have been in Aiken’s first book-length poetry collection published that year. I got a copy of that book, Earth Triumphant and – it was not in it!* Another web search gave a variant publication date: 1916. I downloaded copies of all public domain Aiken poetry collections before 1931. Searched each one of them. No “The Vampire” in any.** I even searched for distinctive words to see if the poem the Internet calls “The Vampire” had another title or was only a portion of a longer poem. No winners. By this point I could even wonder, did Aiken even write this poem?
After supper I did more searching and found this tiny listing on The Internet Speculative Fiction Database that led me to the archives of The New Republic for April of 1924 where Aiken’s poem appears as “The Vampire (subtitle line) 1914.” In context that subtitle is almost certainly a reference to the beginning of WWI, that first great war of mechanized and chemical slaughter, not the Internet-mistaken date of the poem’s publication. It turns out that Aiken’s “The Vampire” is yet another poem where 1914’s world-wide war inspired eerie and apocalyptic poetry, some of which escaped their specific inspiration to become more generalized poems brought out on Halloween.
That plowman that ends Aiken’s poem made me think of William Blake’s “Drive your plow over the bones of the dead.”
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So it’s apparently a 1924 poem from the time when Modernism was fully in ascendence, which makes its archaic (if effective) prosody and its unusual narrative style more anachronistic. Aiken knows this. He edited the Harvard literary magazine with T. S. Eliot for example and was an active critic and anthologist promoting current American poets – but he expressly admired a lot of French symbolist poetry. Perhaps he was thinking too of that American antecedent to those 19th century French poets he admired, Edgar Allan Poe? In my childhood, some Halloween costumes were made from old clothes, and if this poem’s storytelling is old-style, its terror might still come through, particularly in today’s section. Further violating Modernist rules, Aiken is mostly telling here, not showing what exactly occurs when the mysterious creature arrives and reveals that the world’s populace will either love and worship her or suffer ignominious death. Throughout the poem, he mostly treats this situation with eldritch Lovecraftian rhetoric reflecting how strange and horrific the apocalypse strikes those experiencing it – but as today’s section gets underway, he adds the most horrific detail of all: many (most?) of the world’s people not only accept this deadly tyrant, they find her erotically attractive. In my last post I wrote that Aikin’s choice of a female gendered villain here is problematic. Thinking again this morning, and considering the erotic charge in the words of the subject populace’s reaction to the tyrannical “love me or die” vampire he portrays, and assuming Aiken assumes hetero-normative readers, then it’s possible (though unstated) that the hetero-normative women in the poem’s world are seeing a male identified vampire simultaneously with the female villain he’s describing.
Beyond the costume it wears, how old-fashioned and fantastic is this poem?
At the beginning of this series I wrote that when searching for a text to use for a Halloween piece this year I wanted to find something playful, because I have an overstock of disgust and fear for my country and the world right now. I did find pieces that might have fit the bill: benign ghosts, saucy witches, mischievous spirits. And then I read Aiken’s poem. I read a poem of the arrival of a deadly and narcissistic tyrant proclaiming that those in thrall to them must love them amid widespread devastation. This is what is most horrible – as savage as extra-judicial killings, dire mocking leadership, needless and cruel wars and callous destructions are, that express expectation that we love and bow down to its bringer disgusts me more. Or maybe the supreme horror is this: the sight of some of my fellows accepting – nay, even cheering such a creature on. And that’s what I ended up portraying today as I completed presenting Conrad Aikens poetic tale.
Happy Halloween. Enjoy your costumes, your microscopic candy-bars, and the twilight will-o-the-wisp fancies of wonderous spirits. Celebrate the treasures that are the memories of the ancestors. The grown men with masks and guns citing unilateral laws, such as they are, that apply to you but not them, expect at least your grudging acceptance, if not your loving worship of their faultless goals and grandeur. Set your Halloween joy in the first against the dire schemes of the latter.
Oh, and you can listen to my musical performance of the final section of Aiken’s poem with the audio player below. Out of candy-bars? No player? This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player then.
*Given that the Earth of this poem is utterly devastated, it would have made an ironic inclusion though.
**This included his Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winning Selected Poems of 1929. I checked out a copy of the later 1961 edition too. No “The Vampire” there either. I also quickly checked a 1961 book length consideration of Aiken’s life and work written by Frederick Hoffman. “The Vampire” didn’t appear in the index. Checking out Reuel Denney’s 1964 Aiken book, no mention, though it does note the vampire that appears in Aiken’s 1916 “Jig of Forslin.” What remains a mystery? There’s no indication I’ve seen that Aiken was especially fond of the poem. No sense that it once stood out in regard from within the large corpus of work that the long-lived and prolific Aiken wrote and published. Someone is responsible for the many modern Internet occurrences and performances of this more than 100-year-old poem. My working theory there: someone in fantasy and horror fandom put it forward before literary scholars caught on to it.
In the U.S. this Monday is Labor Day. I’m not sure how often it occasions particular observances these days. To some degree, it’s the unofficial end of Summer, and is observed as that. I suppose there will be some celebrations of work and workers, even among the workers in song, our musicians and poets – but they will not overwhelm the American zeitgeist. The important things of the world, irregardless of our political philosophies, we ascribe to the powerful: politicians, oligarchies and the individually famous; or to nameless fate or divine will. The minor things of our enjoyment and sustaining survival we may well do this weekend, but we won’t make odes about it.*
I’m going to call on the words of Kenneth Patchen for the day, though his poem “In Order To” isn’t strictly speaking a celebration of work and workers. I love its slyness in observing some asymmetrical things about this matter. It opens with something workers may recognize: we can take, even perversely, pride in getting some assigned job done, while laughing at the ignorance of our taskmasters. We think, after all, that such forbearance is survival. Patchen wants us to note: that’s not necessarily so, the survival part.
Patchen ends on a killing joke. The damn fool stuff we put up with, because that’s “the way of the world” or a bill of work we can’t see our way to change, we endure – but we (or our fellow workers, feeling similarly) may not endure from it. Does that make those things, as they slide from idiocy to cruelty, from callousness to killing, our fault? Would he, would I, would you, say that, in part, that is so? Patchen wrote this poem in the 1930s, gave it its title, before the plea “I was just following orders” became infamous. The strongmen and monsters of history may give the orders bourn from their evil notions, but even as machines and mechanisms increasingly, inhumanly, carry them out, we are still asked to do our part, or to look away.
For those who’d like to read the text of Patchen’s poem, here’s a link to it.
My apologies to those looking for something merely restorative during this long weekend. I’m no consistent model of noble actions, and I know you can’t be that either, what with the burdens you carry. As summer ends, I think back to what I called out to the young men wearing their irregular uniforms and masks, deployed on the broad urban avenues on either side of my home last Winter: “Go home. You can quit your jobs, and go home. We’re already home – this is where we live, and we don’t want you here.” Some of them seemed to just be standing around, unsure of what to do. The more senior, perhaps more experienced, among them had a work plan: tear gas and flash-bangs. Other times the work was incarceration, or yes, bullets.
On this Labor Day, Minnesota crowds might be at the State Fair or in a park, but at the beginning of the year ordinary workers – not on holiday, but in dismay, – chose to stand together. When you saw captions then writing, “activists,” that would be inexact – mostly just folks who didn’t want to say “yes” to governmental activists.
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This blog has a small audience. I think of it, I’m grateful for you, I’m not here to hector anyone or say I know better than you do with your best thoughts, best knowledge, best hearts. I imagine some will just nod in agreement as they read this. Others have tuned out before reaching this paragraph, tired (as I often am) and having no mood for civic matters, and this Project doesn’t intend to make you endure that instead of its usual inexact attempts at beauty and wonder. And maybe, even after reading this far, someone is reading this and saying “You don’t understand. It’s complicated. There’s this, and this, that you’re ignoring or don’t know.”
Yes, the things I think are evil, some may think are “complicated.” They are. They are. Evil – and even more certainly, even more so, is the restoration of things after evil acts. As I look toward the next Thirties that are to come after previous Thirties when Patchen wrote his poem, I can’t see how the great work of fixing evil and ineptitude can be imagined into plans, much less attempted, much less accomplished. I think of this as I laugh at the killing joke at the end of today’s piece.
You can hear my musical performance of Kenneth Patchen’s “In Order To” with the audio player below. If you think I’ve forgotten the work-order for that player, I assure you I haven’t, but I know you might be reading this blog in ways that won’t show the player, so there’s this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*What about art on Labor Day? I think about the duties of artistic workers toward other workers, but in my observation many artists, and specifically poets, don’t reflect this in their poetry. Since most poets (and increasingly, many musicians) are not solely employed working in poetry, I suspect this is due to embarrassment at that lot – or it may be a hard-bitten escapism, a choice to do, and separate, their art work as respite from the everyday context of the “day job.” Joy is resistance! Beauty is opposition! Or you may not be called to be evangelists, you may be called to be saints. You may take spiritual pride in not writing dreary tracts in the costumes of poetry, and this may be blessed work. Anger, even righteous anger, can scare away the muses. Or you could simply need the commercial art paycheck to make ends meet.
Remember, I said there was a bias in the top ten most listened to stats for the Parlando Project toward older pieces from the first three years of this Project. That’s due to a long tail effect: a quick bunch of listens when first published, followed by an accumulation in smaller daily numbers over the following years. Poetry – and the art I seek to meld with it, recorded music – is “The News that Stays News.” After completing the top ten run-down on this 10th Anniversary month of its public launch, I wondered today about the converse, about what was the least listened-to piece.
I scrolled down the hundreds of lines in the table of the reporting stats to see. Surely, it’d be some piece from this summer, and I’d have to explain that I must ignore the lowest listened-to piece because it wouldn’t have had a decent chance to find an audience yet – but it turns out I need no such adjustment.
The least listened to piece was from the very first month of the Parlando Project, published September 5th, 2016. Just 19 officially audited listens in ten years! 19.
Why would that be so? Well, it was one of those live LYL Band performances – something that makes up a substantial portion of the Parlando pieces over the years. None of them made it to the highest popularity levels. Musically, those are almost entirely first-thought-best-thought first-takes with no preparatory work at arranging the music. And this one’s got the limited technology of its time: the drums are just a canned loop. Keyboardist Dave Moore’s playing on a somewhat cheesy Casio rendition of an organ. I checked my recording dates: it was recorded a couple of weeks before release. I mixed it down and was considering it a only few days after that. I’ve got a number of Parlando pieces here (still available to stream, I’ve “unpublished” nothing) that seemed better in some fresh moment than a retrospective consideration says they are.
But listening to this piece, “The School Year Begins” again, I don’t find it all that bad. My embarrassment-meter is calibrated to my personal enjoyment scale, and I don’t mind unpolished musical performances. In this day and age of highly processed “real” recordings and uncanny valley AI simulations of that, I’m hardly less receptive now to this performance than I would have been then.
So, I figured I’d share it today in the Parlando Project’s anniversary month. I went looking for the document file of the words so that I could include them in this post. I got a surprise – it doesn’t exist. I’ve never been careless about such files, there’s almost no chance that any such was lost due to some computer accident or event. I searched my wrinkled wet grey-matter memory next, and this result came back: that would mean that I likely improvised the words while improvising the music. As a younger person I would do this sometimes. A few Beat poets did this sort of thing, though I don’t know how much preparatory material they brought to spontaneous live performance. Some of my other personal influences sound in performance like they might be improvising their text: Ken Nordine and his fellow Midwesterner Laurie Anderson. I don’t have detailed knowledge of how they worked – but my guess is that those two want to give the effect that they are improvising while working largely or entirely from script. Patti Smith in her younger years would improvise poetry in performance regularly, though referencing some basic premises and lines while Lenny Kaye improvised in musical “fields.” Two songwriters dear to my heart: Leo Kottke and Robyn Hitchcock will regularly go into fractured-facet spoken monologs on stage between songs, and these sound improvised to some level.* But in this case, I know how I would have done it. I would have had an image or situation in mind, and some trust that the words I’d choose to depict it would come out. I might have had a starting line, but the rest would be pure improvisation. This morning I had to transcribe the words I performed back in 2016 to present them to you today as if it was a page-poem.
Old as I am, whenever I pass a schoolyard at any school I look at the very-much-the-same worn grass and I’m into a Whitmanian reverie.
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Does my improvisation work? Who can say – well, an audience, even a small one, like 19, determines that I guess. Could it have been better as a poem worked on in succeeding drafts? “Better” varies. Some poems are better in different ways. Those of us who enjoy improvised music often do so with a heightened empathy for the improvising musician, and in doing so our appreciation of their performance is bolstered by knowledge of the risk of their working without a net. That feeling simultaneously meshes with our own risk-taking, of time and attention. Improvised words are not exactly the same, but something of this might apply.
I certainly appreciate your risk of time and attention here. You can hear the LYL Band’s 2016 performance of “The School Year Begins” with the audio player below. No player? It hasn’t plummeted to the sawdust, it’s likely suppressed by the way you read this blog. I supply this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player for you.
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*The only artistic place performed word-improv is widely practiced is in comedy. From the same Fifties as the beat poets who tried to Word-Jazz improvised poetry, an entire school of think on your feet that are resting on banana peels emerged. It’s now highly common for modern standup comics and comedy writers to have formed their craft-skills doing improv.
Returning now to our countdown of the ten most listened to Parlando Project musical pieces, already in progress. Today we pick up at the fourth most-listened-to song.
Number 4 is Jean Toomer’s “Her Lips are Copper Wire.” I’m in the middle of doing a series on founding Surrealist Paul Éluard, known for his Modernist love poems. Now, I believe Best! And GOAT rankings should remain silly exercises – but as much as I like Éluard and want more English-speakers to be aware of him, it’s entirely possible that the greatest Surrealist love poem is this one, written by this American, Toomer. Musically, I use acoustic guitar and spare piano, a combination I see in several other of this Parlando Top Ten – and there’s what I think is a more successful electric guitar solo at the end here.
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Moving to the podium steps, we have the third-most-popular song in the decade of this Parlando Project, Robert Frost’s “The Aim Was Song.” This one is an outright electric guitar song. That statement should go double, as I played the synth part that weaves with the guitar using a second guitar with an added MIDI pickup which lets my fretboard fingers work with electrically-generated instrument sounds and control virtual instruments.
I went to a store to look for a guitar to host the MIDI pickup, seeking the cheapest thing with a neck I liked on their wall of low-end used instruments. This battered Samick fit the bill. The red strap is a string damper, as I don’t want any open string overtones to confuse the MDI signal.
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Runner up in this list of most popular Parlando musical pieces? “Backyard” by Carl Sandburg. What a great piece for a late August evening in America. Sandburg, this child of immigrants, listens from his porch as darkness starts to come earlier now in his Chicago, and hears the sounds of other immigrants under a benevolent moon-universe above all borders and clocks. I know I played the synth and string parts here with my little plastic keyboard because those parts use volume and modulation wheels on the keyboard to modify and shape the notes. Vocally I add what I call “inline epigraphs,” little quotes from other songs that I hear echoing with Sandburg’s poem.
This Little Plastic Keyboard replaced an even smaller one that I wore out over the decade of this Project. I have a cousin who teaches piano and she’s agast that I put a scribble-strip with the white notes names above the keys. The two wheels to the left of the keys are volume and modulation controller wheels. The Novation MIDI controller is one of the least expensive currently sold with both of these implemented as real wheels.
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What was the piece with the most listens among the more than 900 audio pieces I’ve published here over the past ten years? Check back soon as I reveal that one in my next post.
I can’t let the anniversary month of August go by without doing a summary of what have been the most popular of the more than 900 musical pieces and more than 1,000 posts since the Parlando Project publicly launched in 2016,
I’m going to do this Top Ten in a 6-3-1 format to keep these posts from running too long. Another difference: I tend to talk most about the words we use here and their authors, but the next few posts are going to be more about the music we compose and play as part of this Project. So, let’s not waste any time, on to the countdown.
At position 10 we find pioneering Imagist H.D.’s “The Pool.” This is a personal favorite of mine, not only for the enigmatic poem that provides the words, but for the early use of an arpeggiator to let me incorporate the – what is it? – mandolin or zither or oud virtual instrument here along with low bowed string riff that I played with a little plastic keyboard or my MIDI guitar. Maybe I should note here that “virtual instruments” (VI) does not mean AI by any definition of the term. They are databases of recorded notes, often with a range of articulations that can be called up instantly and played, just as “real” instruments are played or scored and played.
At position 9 we have another set of early Modernist initials: E. E. Cummings’ “Crepuscule (I Will Wade Out). I had forgotten that Bjork had already set a version of this poem when I did this setting in 2018. The instrumentation chosen is a favorite of mine: acoustic guitar and spare, sustained piano. The way the strings on a small wood box mix with the strings in large hardwood coffin struck with hammers as their overlapping waveforms combine never fails to please me. Here, as I often do, I’m playing single notes on the piano so as not to challenge my nearly non-existent piano skills. The piano is doing what a simple electric bass or solitary low bowed-string part might do in the arrangement.
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At number 8 we get Arthur Rimbaud’s “Eternity.” I try to mention the influences on this Project from time to time. They are many, and they are strong. They need to be strong because I’m not a “natural” as musician or performer. While I think I have some talent, however simplistic, as creator of musical ideas from the composer’s side, no one is going to pick me as the best choice for a vocalist – and even on “my instrument,” the guitar, I have inconsistent and varying skills. Patti Smith then is one of the influences, partly because she took her poetic vision and then went on will and audacity to become the frontperson in a band. Her championing of Rimbaud led me to consider that poet, and in my setting of “Eternity” I’m sort of emulating the sound of the Patti Smith Group, phrasing the vocal somewhat like she would.
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7 is held down by William Butler Yeats’ “The Stare’s Nest at My Window,” one of his poems about the Irish Civil War. A few weeks after I presented this poem musically, a man, George Floyd, was killed by callousness and negligence on the part of my city’s police force a few blocks south of where I live, and remembering this Parlando piece, I felt Yeats was speaking to my time and place. Listening to my musical setting now more than five years later, it still evokes that time for me. I can’t remember exactly how I treated the ominous string parts in it to get that sound, – some kind of delay or reverb I think – and the same spare sustained piano playing that I’ve use elsewhere in other pieces chills to the bone here.
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Place 6, “Pied Beauty” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Once more listeners seemed to like, or at least try, my writing for bowed orchestral strings. Here the spare strangeness of the parts and the odd note choice, leaping interval, electric guitar solo over the top intends to evoke majesty of rustic nature – but I’m somewhat surprised at this one reaching this level of popularity, as I’m not sure the piece succeeds.
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Not that anything in today’s group of songs explicitly references Jazz…
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Last one for today, number 5, returns to a piece that is a favorite of mine and one that I think represents elements of what I do well: Emily Dickinson’s “We Grow Accustomed to the Dark.” Another piece largely composed with orchestral instrument parts. I fear serious orchestral composers and aficionados think these compositions of mine simpleminded – and furthermore, practical necessity dictates that they are implemented by virtual instruments making up the orchestra, and so no matter how well recorded and implemented these approximations in software are, they lack the full detail of their real counterparts. In my defense, I’ve taken to calling my approach here “Punk Orchestral” – trying with that name to make the point that I’m using the tools, ideas, and opportunities that I have to make what music I can make now, without deferring to the prerequisites of virtuosity and more theoretical knowledge. Let me make this clear as I wrap up today: I recognize my limits, respect those skills and the dedication to practicing and perfecting them that I lack, but I persist in doing what I can with what I can marshal none-the-less.
If you’re a long-time reader or listener here, you probably already know that one of the principles of this Project is “Other People’s Stories.” That usually means that the words used here are literary poetry that has reached public domain status. Every so often I do use my own words – but even then, it can still be “Other People’s Stories.”
I mean, it should be clear right at the start that I’m not a daughter whose mother has fallen deep in Alzheimer’s disease. Again, long-timers here may recognize today’s piece is part of a series of sonnets on this topic which have appeared here over the past few years. Yes, these poems are based on real events, some of which I observe, others which I hear some details of second-hand – but either way they are poems, not journalism. The poem may suggest its own details, and I’ll listen.
While I’m talking about guiding principles here, there’s another one: “Music in Differing Styles.” I’ve always had trouble with the common, innocent, “conversation starter” question: “What kind of music do you like?” The idea that I (or even we) should have a ready-to-hand specific genre label for the music we like seems bizarre to me. “Oh, dark post-rock neo-shoegaze emo. How about you?” might keep the conversation rolling, but for an old man like myself who listened to and appreciated a lot of different music over many decades it might better be limited to what kind of music are you enjoying this week or this afternoon. You see, I think that one of music’s strongest elements is the variety of how it expresses itself. Even music I’m not presently in the mood for can be valuable – it might guide me toward musical opposites, and by that highlight the value of that contrasting form of expression.*
The problem here is that I do believe a great many folks have strong musical dislikes in genres or performance articulations. With but a hint that I might fail to meet a listener’s performance expectations, or that I’ve chosen some disliked ways of organizing sounds, some will drop my music from further consideration. I shouldn’t object to this: there’s a glut of music out there, no reason to expend time on unrewarding music. And because I’m audacious, some of my music here may be more than just a hint.
As I compose and play music for the Parlando Project I do hope that some listeners will appreciate some of what I do. I also expect that every potential listener here – yes, every single one – won’t care for a least some of what I present. If I’m composing for acoustic guitar one day, adding cello to that the next: some will like it, some not so much. If I work with synths and arpeggiators, some will like it, others suspect it not organically raised and locally sourced. If I play loud electric lead guitar, some will like it, others will pull the plug. If I avoid my “of subjective quality” singing voice, some will be glad, and then others would prefer that there would be a singer, however rough-hewn. I could wish that this variety of plausible likes was additive, but I think it’s most often subtractive. One “bad” piece where I don’t execute well, or choose the wrong kind of execution, and I may well be excluded from further musical consideration.
Sometimes I think I could “pick a lane” for Parlando Project music, or split my musical expression into a variety of separate projects each with a constrained/predictable musical style – but I haven’t yet done so. In the meantime, I sincerely appreciate those that have stuck with this effort.
The T-shirt I’m wearing today. The complexity of the Jazzmaster electric guitar’s design doesn’t really like playing into a loud, high-gain amp without being subject to idiomatic artifacts. You can hear some of it’s spring-loaded vibrato bridge and extra string length above the nut and below the bridge resonating and pinging in today’s music.
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So, here’s today’s piece. No acoustic guitars. No singing, just spoken word in half the song. Yes, synths. Yes, loud lead guitar. A couple of notes on the music today: there’s a persistent glitchy riff in this one that’s a happy accident. After successfully playing the digital synth melody that weaves in an out of the piece, I went to play a Mellotron virtual instrument using the same MIDI guitar as a controller, and something went wrong. Instead of the evocative lo-fi sound of a Mellotron’s tape samples, all I got was this stuttering sputter. Staying in creative mode, I just kept playing, producing that line of organized noise you can hear today.**
But it’s not all synths and mistakes one finds in the faults of electronic machinery, there’s a long wordless response to the daughter living with her mother’s chronic dementia expressed with electric guitar at the end of the piece. You can hear it with the audio player below. Have the glitches of brain matter or computer interfacing obscured this player for you? It’s most likely a matter of some ways of reading this blog not showing the graphical audio player. For those in that situation this highlighted link will open a new browser tab with its own audio player then.
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*I think the same thing is true of the variety of expression in poetry, particularly in the shorter, lyric poem. While I admire the extraordinarily literate who’ve read a thousand novels or have mounted hundreds of full-scale dramatic plays, that much of those things is a heavier lift. A 14-line poem or a 3-minute song is not some sole-authoritarian demand for one’s time.
**I remain too frightened to consider using guitar-controlled MIDI in any kind of live performance. Despite MIDI guitar controllers being decades old technology, only a handful of braver and more skilled musicians have done so.
It’s winter, outside of Freehold New Jersey. An old man is walking home.
He’s not going to make it. Darkness, confusion from old age or infirmity, perhaps drink – I don’t know, I wasn’t there, but I’m going to ask you to imagine you are there with him. His clothes are worn-out, he still wears an old-style tricorn hat like some Yankee Doodle – and it’s 1832. Does he know enough to know that he’s in trouble? The man’s certainly not a stranger to trouble. Back during the American Revolution, he was imprisoned in the fetid hold of a docked British prison ship. Every morning, dead prisoners would be hoisted out of that darkness, hauled out to be thrown into a common grave. He wrote too, that after an escape attempt, jailors opened the hatch and fired indiscriminately down below killing four of his fellow prisoners in the close quarters of their oppression.
While there’s no one to talk to as he walks in this winter night, he once knew a certain kind of recognized eloquence. He wrote about his imprisonment. Wrote about other outrages of the empire’s powers, and wrote too of those resisting them. After the resulting celebration of American independence there’s recognition of what he wrote. They called him “The Poet of the American Revolution.” A high honor, but a small group – there aren’t a lot of poets in the running, or readers thereof, in the new country. He endeavors to make a post-war living with his pen. One of the most fluent and literary of the Revolution’s leaders, Thomas Jefferson, selects this poet to promote his new Democratic-Republican political party by founding and editing a newspaper, but eventually Jefferson leaves the political stage. In 1815 the old man’s home burns down, all is lost. He makes what little living he has repairing clocks, fixing time, which can’t be fixed.
Like I said to begin, he doesn’t make it home – the old man, Philip Freneau, freezes to death on the outskirt streets of his hometown. Then, all the lucky men from 1832 are gone now too, and poets leave behind books which nobody reads, but could.
The preface to the collection of Freneau’s poems I read says there are no depictions of Freneau made during his lifetime, so this one was made based on recollections of those that knew him.
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Last week I decided maybe I should start to look into that pioneering comprehensive anthology of American Poetry that Conrad Aiken edited in 1919. I don’t have to get in very far, for I find Philip Freneau just a couple of pages past Anne Bradstreet in the order of things. I’d never heard of him, and his poetry looked interesting. I spent the weekend reading about Freneau and working on the musical presentation of part of one of his poems.
As one might expect for someone involved in radical anti-colonialism and politics, Freneau wrote a lot of civic poetry. Besides his prison ship poem, he wrote a good deal of satiric verse tagging the British – but there are also some nature poems which some have seen as predecessors to the Transcendentalist movement that bloomed just after Freneau crossed over on that winter’s night. After independence, and even after his journalistic efforts for Jefferson’s new political party, he continued to publish poems regarding civic matters in verse. Looking further and into a volume of Freneau’s collected poems, portions of one in particular struck me. Titled “Reflections,” with a long subtitle “On the Gradual Progress of Nations from Democratical States to Despotic Empires.” The poem warns of “embryo monarchs” who sacrifice a nation’s strength and renown “to prop a tottering throne,” who would “seize on nations with a robber’s view” and “breed eternal hates” to distract the populace. Such a quaint antique poem. It will take an effort to cast one’s attentions and thoughts back to such a time so different from our own – but let’s try. I selected the last portion of Freneau’s poem for performance.
Last time we had a nocturne featuring two cellos and a quiet piano accompaniment. Let’s wake up for declaring Freneau’s poem! I rapidly built today’s rock ensemble: sequenced some drums, laid down the grounding electric bass, put in a droning Hammond organ pad (about all I can play), and ginned up a few phrases on electric piano, but both of them are sparce and quiet in the mix – that bass line is the tune’s load-bearing structure. I wanted to get all that out of the way because I really wanted to play some cranked electric guitar.
Which I proceeded to do. First a left-channel track with a Telecaster, then a right channel lead with a weird flat-black Les Paul Studio that I picked up some years back in an overstock sale. Indulge me listeners: there’s a two-minute coda of those guitars working out my co-signed statement on Freneau’s warning to the citizenry. You can hear it with the audio player gadget below – and if you listen quietly you won’t get what I was intending.
What, were the guitars so loud they blew out the audio player gadget? No, it’s just that some ways of reading this blog suppress showing the player – but the man can’t bust our music! I provide a highlighted link that will bail out a new browser tab that has its own audio player.
*About 120 years after Freneau’s last night in Freehold, it would become the New Jersey hometown of the young Bruce Springsteen. I wonder if he knows about Freneau? This is, after all, a Springsteen who toured this year with his shouting band speaking explicitly about the duties of citizenship. While a web search finds nothing, I have my suspicions he just might.
Close readers will notice that I’ve slipped into my sparser (and sometimes weirder) summer publishing schedule with this Project. After a few years of doing Parlando, I noticed that summer readership/listenership predictably dropped off, so as a result I’ve come to treat summer as something between a vacation and what-the-hell-write-about-odd-topics season.
However, as spring was ending this year two different things had a combined effect on this changeover. The first was the increase in the number of young lovers and their friends staying and visiting at our house. All in their early 20s, this group is dealing with the fledgling era of life, trying to figure out how to live as whatever adults they will invent themselves as, with additional particularities secondary to being neuro-spicey and gender fluid. If this were to be a complete and well-written account, this statement would be followed by acutely-observed detail layered with statements of social analysis. This putative writer (who is not myself) would also be weaving into their account tales of how they are acting as a wise elder guiding the youth with articulate interventions and life lessons.
I’m not acting thus, nor writing my observational accounts here. My own memories of that era from my life years ago says I wanted to – and generally believed I was the best to – make my own life decisions, though later I also regretted never hearing from my elders how they felt about and solved these tasks of young adulthood in their fledgling time. I sometimes feel ashamed; sometimes feel I should make that effort – even if it would be likely rejected, or that my advice would be poor or based on misunderstanding of the specifics of their lives. I feel this, even though I’m not acting on it. My wife, already carrying burdens of a mother suffering dementia, tries to reach out to indifferent results, acts of hers I generally admire.
As to writing about my observation of their lives, I’m circumspect. If I were not an old man, I’d say I would write about those things 20 years from now when we’re all older and past this, but that’s demographically unlikely for me.
Two of the young lovers have had a parting in their relationship, but not a parting (yet) in their residence. This complicates things. The work of this Project is crowded out by this crowd in our small house. Objectively I should be paying more attention to helping or meddling with this situation – I wrote that deliberately: “helping” and “meddling” is a dichotomy.
And also now, strangely, with a level of importance that seems selfish and self-absorbed, I sometimes feel worried that I haven’t finished a new audio piece here for a couple of weeks. An interval that was planned in other Junes now has some anxiety around it.
Late last week I whined to my wife “I haven’t done anything creative in so long that I fear I’ve forgotten how to start.” I call this whining because regardless of no new pieces, my nature has had me trying to learn in small ways various new things while I await some future time when I might have opportunity to implement them. How grateful I am, and yet how insufficient is my gratitude that I have such opportunities!
An answer to not having done anything creative is not to observe that situation and whine about it, but rather to do it. Blow through or ignore the pre-requisites. Ignore fears about quality, for whatever care and resources one brings to making something – that’s never assured anyway.
I decided all I needed was a set of words that I felt said something about where I’m living in my life. Will it be by someone of my generation or life-stage? Perhaps another disappointed American facing a hollowed-out public anniversary presided over by a cruel and diminished King?
No, I found this: Gitanjali 58 from a 1912 English translation of a selection of song lyrics by the remarkable Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore. This work quickly earned Tagore the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 and the praise and introductory preface to an edition of it by William Butler Yeats. Though Tagore was, even more than Yeats was in his Ireland, involved in the anti-colonial movement in India, I recall no overt politics in this book. There are pieces in it with elements of erotic love, but within the overall spiritual cast of the work it would be arguable that they are (as, for example, some scholars say about the Hebrew Song of Songs) metaphors for broader, even mystic, desires. Yet this was the text that attracted me when I needed some words to express.
Among the changes I made to the text as printed in 1912, I arranged it on the page as if it was a poem
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One problem with Gitanjali is that Tagore did the English translation himself, and chose (presumably to emphasize the spiritual lessons in his lyrics) to publish them as English prose. As a person who has done translations I can see why he might make this choice. I almost never try to do rhyming translations or emulate the elements of prosody from another language. I’d rather concentrate on what the poet is observing and wants to transfer to contemporary readers in English, rather than play a game of Twister with another syntax and tactics of word sounds. Yet, I’m not alone in thinking he took the magic and incantatory power away, doubling the problem of song lyrics seeming dehydrated and without weight when deserted silently on the page. For reasons of my own life situation, and for greater musicality and clarity in performance, I lightly edited Tagore’s English prose text for today’s use. I admit this was an audacious thing to do, and here’s a link to how Tagore had it.
Given the length of this post, only one short note on the text: in Hindu and Buddhist symbology the red lotus mentioned here is the aspect of compassion, which could be cast as a painful burden. Is it painful to empathize with the suffering and struggle around one? Perhaps, but one has (however temporarily) whatever level of peace, understanding, and contemplative opportunity to do so.
If (as is likely) Tagore had his own melody to this, I don’t know it. It was necessary to move to making, both from lack of time and need to overcome inertia. I played and recorded the music quickly, having come up with a couple of motifs the electric guitar sounds over a quickly written cadence I had played on another guitar and electric bass, a harmonic framework also followed by my piano .* There’s no sung melody. I at first wanted to compose one, but that would delay finishing this, and I made the get-it-done spoken word choice. I’m avoiding 4/4 time more often these days, odd meters seem to express the unbalance I’m feeling, even though my computer drumset sequencer doesn’t express odd time signatures very well. You can hear the performance with the audio player gadget below. There’s no player visible? The first of the Four Noble Truths says getting what you want on the Internet can involve Suffering, and so some ways of reading this blog will not display the player. Aha! I provide this highlighted link that with meditation (or clicking, just clicking!) opens a new browser tab with its own audio player.
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*I hadn’t played a Telecaster plugged into a classic Fender amp in a while. “This sounds way too thin and bright!” I was thinking, while also reminding my guitar player self that I didn’t have much time to fiddle with settings or try another setup. What the chordal guitar plays is, very roughly and impressionistically, taking the role a drone instrument might take in South Asian music, though this song uses Western-style harmonic movement; and the lead/melody guitar occasionally touches on my simplified approximation of some South Asian melodic moves. Even though they are traditionally acoustic instruments, while I was doing the mix on the recorded tracks I subsequently recalled that the sitar and the lower-register tambura are often bright sounding instruments compared to the thicker timbres of western acoustic guitars.
One of the things I liked about the early English language Modernists when I began to examine their pioneering works was their clean unshowy language. While they sometimes slipped into colloquialisms (Sandburg, Langston Hughes) their time and place was close enough to my own that I never felt they were trying to talk over my head and state of learning, even if the things they were portraying were extraordinary or profound, and even if they might choose to use inflection and inference to portray a great deal “off screen” from the frame of their poem. Poetry tends to remind itself to do something like that every so often. I can still remember reading Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and agreeing quite readily with his charge to poets of his time to write using the language of ordinary people.
But then too, Poets are always falling back into “poetic diction,” that uncontemporary and artificial language that signals what is being written is a poem, you know, real art asking you to pay special attention. The reasons for this are several. First, of it’s fun to play dress up – fun to wear crowns, put on capes and formal ball gowns, or try on suits of shining armor. We already have slipped from the pitch and timbre of ordinary speech when we are moved to sing, and when words want to dance, we don’t ask them to settle down and walk straight. Those are innocent, even childlike, reasons, but of course there are others that can be in the mix for those choices. One could make the choice as a poet hoping for an eternal audience, believing that one must speak in the language of many ages and epochs to help stake out that claim. Or there can be elements of simple insecurity: these words, that antique cast of phrase, will show that I’m not ordinary and my works are not either.
Young poets are prone to the latter, sometimes thinking their verse must sound like some old poem anachronistically written to sound like a poem and nothing else, to demonstrate that they have risen to poetry. Old poets can sometimes speak extraordinarily plainly. Perhaps they’ve worn all the costumes, engaged in all the playtimes, and have no future to gain with pretense.
Today’s poem, as are all of the poems this month, is from the pages of Louis Untermeyer’s between-the-wars “Modern American Poetry” anthology, and is by a poet that never got to be an old poet, Hart Crane, who died at age 32.* A man who spent time in the tropics, Crane writes here about one of that region’s storms, where winds whip waves and rain until the two are one, blowing down and inundating nature and man’s constructions. Here’s a link to the full text of “The Hurricane.” Or, here’s the text of the poem and an interesting discussion of it and Hart Crane by Allen Ginsberg.
Things modern will soon seem quaint. As terrible as the news conveyed in this circumspect newspaper report reads to me today, with it’s sea voyage delays, creaky “wireless,” and a “Captain Blackadder,” it seems of another age. The father mentioned had disowned Hart Crane, and that family wealth involved was based on a type of candy: the round hole-in-the-middle Lifesavers.
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Had he witnessed one or more hurricanes in his young life in the early 20th century? I don’t know any details, but he doesn’t write his poem as if he’s seeing Model T Fords floating down streets as asphalt shingles are scaled off roofs and telephone and power wires play double-Dutch in flooded ditches. Nope. Crane’s poem is written in language made up of parts Anglo-Saxon epithets and alliteration, parts Marlowvian bombast. Why? I don’t know, but his poem is fun to read, even when my vocabulary’s pride is bruised by “levin-lathered” and “gambade.”*
I performed Hart’s “The Hurricane” as spoken word backed by a rock quintet, two cross-current electric guitars, pelting piano chords with the drum sets levin-gambade, and an electric bass undertow. You can hear that performance with the audio player gadget below. No audio player? It hasn’t been erased by a storm, it’s just that some ways of reading this poem won’t show the player, and so I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*Reading about Crane’s life this week I’m both sad and exasperated, and this Monday is the 94th anniversary of his throwing himself off a boat sailing from Mexico. There’s plenty of reasons for his inability to find his place in the world: a dysfunctional family, society’s lack of acceptance of his sexuality, likely bipolar depression, the innate difficulty of establishing a writing career, alcoholism; but reading accounts from folks who tried to help him he seems quite a handful. I’m probably being uncharitable – the storms inside Hart Crane would take more than this poem to describe.
**Levin is a word for lightning, something I didn’t know. I assumed gambade might be a variation of gambol, which is pretty much correct, a leap – and like Parlando, I think I might have run into it as description of a musical articulation, as used here describing thunder.
