Love Addict Blues

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

This week is the 10th anniversary of the launch of the Parlando Project. While I had completed some of the early musical pieces and even did a couple of test blog posts before summer 2016, I chose August 6th as the official start date because it’s the anniversary of my late wife’s, Renée Robbins, death.

I’ll talk more about the Project, and my life since those two events in upcoming posts, but today’s post is about my life-partner and the unlucky turn that made that so only for a little more than 20 years. To young people, I’d expect 20 years to seem a long time. To old folks like me, the same 20 years seems less – but then too this post won’t be nearly long enough to memorialize Renée. To some degree this whole Project is a memorial to the dreams of poets and poetry, music and musicians, that surrounded two young people who fell in love in that unloved and less-remembered decade, The Seventies. Dreams of my youth? Yes – and that would be a shared youth with Renée. It’s also wider than that: I’ve long harbored a romantic belief: that the dreams of the dead continue to exist out there somewhere, and we can call on, call in, those flickering things.

I met Renée in a writer’s group, specifically not the Lake Street Writer’s Group that I participated in until half the remaining members died within a few months of each other five years ago. At the time I was frustrated with the LSWG founder-poet-editor’s insistence on tamping down expression around eroticism. That fine man, Kevin FitzPatrick, wanted a big tent working-class literature and poetry, and his fear was that explicit sex and gender passages in our Lake Street Review little magazine would be problematic for a wide audience in the mid-1970s. I on the other hand looked at my pig-in-the-python generation and saw them embroiled in an entire barnyard of working out those things.

In protest, for a couple of years I decamped to another group of young writers, and one of them was Renée. She’d studied with a poet and writing professor Philip Dacey (and taken literature classes with poet-humorist Howard Mohr) in college, had published a few poems, and I was immediately impressed with her sense of humor.*  The range of human erotic turn-ons is astonishingly wide-ranging, but for me, a primary one is an alluring sense that someone might laugh in bed, and Renee had those vibes. We fell into a passionate and complicated relationship. The next couple of years would deserve at least two lengthy and unwritten chapters I won’t be asking you to read today. One of those chapters would describe that she was involved with someone who presented himself as a musician. He wasn’t, but the chancer was a bit of a con artist. This one still puzzles me – the Renée I knew was a savvy judge of character, and that blind spot may have been a folie de la jeunesse thing.**

We moved in together in 1979. Ten years later we married, with intent, on April Fool’s Day. 11 years later, she was dying of pancreatic cancer, diagnosed only a few months earlier. I’m an old man, remembering that partnership as a young man. Those 20 plus years we had together therefore seem alternately long and short, flashing as to recall moments when it seemed as long as any forever, and then the retrospective surety of knowing it wouldn’t be as long as we thought then.

Renee at Powerderhorn

Renée in Powderhorn Park, about the time we moved in together.

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Long and brief as what I wrote above is, I wanted to write this to present today’s musical piece. Its genesis was earlier this year when I was doing some old man “Death Cleaning,” the getting rid of stuff so others won’t have to do that work when I die. It was a page found in with Renée’s saved stuff from her youth, some of it going back to her college years before I met her – stuff that her short, brutal, illness never allowed her to clean out. I can’t say exactly when it was written – and if it was written “from life,” who is the lover in the situation it describes.

It looks like an intended song lyric, and although Renée was a competent basic pianist, she never practiced that skill nor (as far as I know) set anything to music. She was a fan of several Seventies singer-songwriters however. Did she intend it as a song, or was it a “literary ballad” from her youthful poet self that was meant to refer to popular music, but on a silent literary page?

Love Addict Blues lyrics

Lyrics for today’s song. I didn’t write out a chord sheet, but the recording is a two-chord vamp between D minor and C, though there’s some variations in both chords.

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The ambiguity in the situation described is hard to summarize. Lyrics may exaggerate love situations with extravagant metaphors not meant to be taken literally, but the references in the lyric to depression and “you’re making me sick” convince me that that love addiction it portrays isn’t just a playful trope. Later in her life, after Renée had gotten her Masters in Counseling Psychology, she worked as a professional counselor in a gambling addiction program. At least once when a client wondered what she knew about addiction, she would gesture toward her overweight body and say “Well, I show my addiction externally, for anyone to see. Let’s talk about your hidden one.”

The page I found titled “Love Addict Blues”  was from a younger version of herself. Would its youthful expression have embarrassed the older Renée? I could see it either way, but I’m now the living one, and like those floating dreams, I chose to see it as a surviving artifact of this woman I loved. And so, earlier this summer, I made an effort to set her “Love Addict Blues”  to music. Though her words aren’t in the classic 3-line stanza/12-bar-verse blues structure, I aimed for an electric blues feel, something vaguely in the BB King area. Early summer wasn’t giving me a lot of chances to play electric guitar though, and the page of her lyrics with my chords sat in my WIP stack, un-played.

Then, at the end of July, I was listening to a new song on the radio by Joyce & Tutty Moreno, modern Brazilian samba masters. I suddenly remembered one of Renée’s favorite LPs – not a singer-songwriter exactly, but instead Flora Purim, another Brazilian singer-composer who is usually filed under Jazz-Fusion genre-wise. I don’t have the chops to cop what Purim can do, not even close, but I immediately went about getting a Latin Jazz percussion module for my drum software so I could try for that feel, only with a much less animated and virtuosic vocalist like myself. This style would usually call for nylon string guitar, but the opposite problem prevented me from recording that – there would be too much environmental noise jumping into the sensitive mic. I made do with recording my fretless electric bass plugged directly into my recording software with the fresh percussion sounds arrayed in a basic syncopated groove, and finally a MIDI virtual-instrument-sound sampled piano to outline a simple two-chord harmony. But if there was noise about, how would I record the vocal? I used an Electro-Voice RE20 microphone. This mic is something of a rare bird: it’s a dynamic microphone, but it’s designed to not have as much “proximity effect” as other dynamic microphones.*** This means I can work right next to the microphone’s grill and greatly reduce any unwanted environmental sounds. You might notice that the resulting recording has audible breaths. Normally I’d address the RE20 slightly off axis to prevent that – and there’s even modern post-facto software that does a good job of removing breath sounds – but I was imprinted in my youth on Astrud Giberto’s breathy and intimate Bosa Nova vocals, and the breathy sound today is intentional.

You can hear my performance of Renée Robbins’ “Love Addict Blues”  with the audio player below. If you are grieving over audio player unleaving, Márgarét (or anyone else) can use this highlighted link to open a new browser leaf – ah, tab – that will have an audio player that isn’t viewable on this main page because some ways of reading this blog won’t display such a thing.

 

 

 

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*One of Renée’s party tricks: she could recite the entire 15 minutes plus of The Firesign Theater’s “The Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye”  from memory. And yeah, Old Possum, she do the voices too.

**Or it could have been part of Renée’s kindness and generosity, the other facet of her fierce understanding of the tricks and deceptions of the less than kind. I mentioned this to my living wife, telling her I was worried that including it might be seen as disrespectful to Renée.

“Well, she was generous enough to see the worth in both of us” she offered.

***Dynamic microphones are by their nature less sensitive to short, quiet, subtle sounds, and so are generally less than ideal for recording quieter acoustic instruments or vocalists with quieter voices and attractive upper-range timbral elements. My rough-hewn voice has less attractive upper level detail, so no great loss – and the RE20 preserves that detail better than other dynamics mics. Other popular “Cardioid Dynamic Microphones” – used nearly universally for club-stage-stadium vocalists – boost the lower range on the vocals being picked up from them when the mic is very near to the singer’s mouth. That’s the “proximity effect”, an artificial deepening. While that’s sometimes attractive, and can even give the impression of added power, it isn’t something I usually want in my recordings.

I often recommend the Electro-Voice RE20 to people that want to record vocals in untreated or less-than-ideal rooms. I also find it good to try when recording lead vocalists with a live band playing together in a room. Price-wise, this guy who started recording with Radio Shack microphones would still call the RE20 expensive, but in the great “professional” scheme of things it’s a mid-low-priced mic.

From Philip Freneau’s “Reflections” or Darkness on the Edge of Town

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

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.

Philip Freneau

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.

Nocturne of Remembered Spring

~ Frank Hudson ~ 5 Comments

So, who is Conrad Aiken? I don’t fully know yet, but I came upon one of his poems this spring, and found out that as a critic, anthologist, short-story writer, and poet, that he’s one of those first-part-of-the-20th-century Americans who helped establish American poetry in the Modernist era. He graduated from Harvard University in 1912, and before that decade was out, he’d established his literary footprint. In 1919 he published what he claimed was the first comprehensive anthology of American poetry, explaining in the book’s introduction that previously there was no clear call for such a collection as American poetry was such a small part of world literature. Here’s what I found most interesting about that anthology: he would retain only a smattering of poems by Longfellow and the Fireside poets, though using Poe, Dickinson,* and Whitman to fill out much of the 19th century section – and here’s the boldest part: he would give his early 20th century contemporaries a great deal of space.

In things like this I sense that Aiken is reflecting or creating a canonical moment that lasted well into his 20th century. His choices are similar to the choices I was presented later with the mid-century textbooks of my youth, but I recall being frustrated back then: why were the poets and poetry worth studying ending with Eliot and Frost? While that pair were still living as I began to study literature, their anthologized poems were 30-40 years old then, seemingly ancient to my teenage self. OK, Aiken’s canon may have been much like the one I was later presented, but back then his 1919 book included poems not even 5 years from publication.  Not just a handful, some appendix set aside as a gesture, but around a third of the anthology!

By that year Aiken had published five books of his own poetry, one of which shares its title with its lead-off poem inside: “Nocturne of Remembered Spring.”   The nocturne is a musical form, and references to musical forms and the experience of music abound in the Aiken poetry I’ve read so far. Oddly, I don’t consistently fall under the spell of his word-music off the page. His poems do have some lyrical moments, but they are obscured by a problem I’m having: his long windiness. As I page through Aiken’s early books many poems span a dozen pages or more, and while he did try his hand at sonnets, they don’t seem to be is métier. Perhaps I’m not appreciating the sense of the tune behind the poems. Unlike many of his contemporaries, I rarely hear strains of American folk musics in these early poems. I can’t help but think that his evident attraction to the related art of music is more conceptional or one-abstraction-layer-removed impressionism than simply producing dancing words and prosodical earworms.

conrad aiken young

Aiken at around the post-graduate age when he was helping form the canon of American poetry.

 

Luckily for your composer/presenter here, he will often break up his longer poems in shorter, numbered, sections. So, the seven pages of the poem “Nocturne of Remembered Spring”  are split in six sections, each obsessively recalling the same youthful love affair, each going over memories of it. Given the length of the poem I’d have liked to see more contrast in the sections, but for page after page it remains inside the head of the poem’s voice as it goes over memories. This psychological internalism may have been a novel effect in 1916 when the poem is dated, but it tires me. Aiken’s work is new to me, but I can’t help but compare his theme here unfavorably to early work by Mina Loy (her extravagantly expressive “Songs to Johannes”)  or Neruda’s extraordinarily popular “Twenty Love Songs.”**

My choice for a musical setting of Aiken was to select out only the final section, numbered “VI.”   It sufficiently summarizes the poem, and I think it has more chance of listener impact by compressing its expression and it highlights there a musical device by refraining lines about remembrance.*** As so often in this Project’s choice of texts, this was the section with words that “asked” to be sung. I’m a composer who tends to bagatelles due to lack of time and sophisticated skills. The length was right. I wrote a simple cello line, quickly extrapolated a series of chords for nocturnal piano and improvised a second cello top line melody to be played via my MIDI guitar sounding a good cello VI**** which would also help guide my rough-hewn vocal. As I wrote earlier this month, a musical piece like this would seem to be Art Song of a type, but one which classically trained and skilled singers would find outrageous. My hope, aware of my limitations, is that it can still communicate something and help vivify a presence for writers like Aiken who have fallen into the cracks in the canon.

You can hear my performance of part VI. from Conrad Aiken’s “Nocturne of Spring Remembered”  with the audio player gadget below. What no player? I, or rather some ways of reading this blog, haven’t forgotten it, it just won’t show in every kind of reader. I provide this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player so it can still be heard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Though Dickinson wrote her remarkable work in the middle of the 19th century, none of it was publicly known until it’s posthumous publication began with three book-length volumes in the final decade of the 1800s. This means that even when including Dickinson in his survey of American poetry in 1919 that Aiken was featuring poems less than 30 years from publication date. In 1924 Aiken published a selected poems of Emily Dickinson, a step in establishing her place in the American poetic canon. Last time, when I presented a Dickinson poem, I almost presented a capsule history of the tangled provenance of Dickinson’s poems, using “A Something in a summer’s Day” as an example. Tight summary: decendents of Susan Gilbert Dickinson (Emily Dickinson’s sister-in-law, neighbor, friend, and presently oft-assumed lover) and of Mabel Todd Loomis (the mistress of Susan’s husband/Emily’s brother) each had a tranche of Dickinson poems and claimed rights to them, and each was publishing them as well as letters and recollections of the poet. Both sources were editing the poems, normalizing their distinctive language and punctuation, and ordering them in chapters of common high-minded themes. Aiken’s Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson issued from his seat as a critic and anthologist offered additional canonical approval to the poet who he judges in his introduction is “among the finest poets in the language.” At the time he was drawing from less than half of the now known poems of Dickinson! And the Dickinson that we know today – all dashes and abrupt leaps of thought – only became available when I was a schoolboy!

**A decade later Aiken’s Selected Poems won a Pulitzer. That book didn’t include any of Nocturne of Remembered Spring. The author himself may have moved on.

***As I enter into the month of August, I’m in my annual period of personal remembrance of the summer now long ago when my late wife was dying. The refrain in section VI. of “Do you remember” coincidentally brought to mind the translation in English of the name of the Twin Cities based indie rock trio Hüsker Dü. I missed my chance by not setting Aiken to reflect that.

****A pun, and with Roman numerals! A “VI” is a “virtual instrument.” These are made when a company records snippets of a real cello playing its range of notes in a variety of performance articulation and puts the result into what is in effect a database of all those sounds which can be played with an otherwise silent device – most often a piano style keyboard, but it can be another instrument control surface such as my MIDI guitar which tells it what to play in notes, timing, and expression, all of which are retrieved in real time.

A Something in a summer’s Day

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

A wonderful something about Emily Dickinson’s large body of poetry is that there are always “new” poems to discover just by paying attention to them. Take this one for example. It’s not one of the Greatest Hits, yet despite being an early poem – the estimated date of its manuscript is 1859, a few years before Dickinson’s most productive years in the 1860s – it already demonstrates her poetic strengths. Today I’m going to catalog some things I note in it, but if you’re not into such details, feel free to skip down the page to the performance.

Let’s start with some Dickinsonian unusual word choices, since she hits us with a couple right off. Uncountable poets have described the light of sunrise, but her choice of “flambeaux” to describe it seems novel. What’s a flambeaux?* It’s a big torch, often with a rank of multiple flames. To Dickinson it’d be a feature of a parade. Did she see or read of such? In her day, marches were a significant part of political campaigning. Her father was a politician, did his Whigs or the more raucous Democrats march with such torchlight? There are other parades that might feature flambeaux. Far from her largely Protestant Massachusetts, flambeaux were (and still are) part of New Orleans Mardi Gras. That’s something she wouldn’t have seen, but her poems sometimes gather exotica taken from her reading – perhaps this is one?

And “solemnizes me.” As a choice, a more active way to describe a change in outlook or mood. A reaction of mine here is a stretch, but my looking for connection ear also hears “Solomon-izing me.” Would the famously herbaceous Emily recall the line about the nature of field lilies from the Gospel of Matthew: “…not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed like one of these.”

Something in a Summers Day

A chord sheet for today’s musical performance, included because I believe there are others out there who might like to sing this poem.

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Word sound-music is rich in the poem. Besides this poem’s rhyme — none of her slant or off rhymes here, though I love the sound of that apostasy elsewhere in her poetry — but the sounds of inline words are constantly resonating and chiming with each other, a “shimmering grace” in sound.

Her famous 4-foot/3-foot hymn or ballad meter is present here, but with a twist: all save the last stanza have two 4-foot lines and then a concluding 3, which gives them a feeling of conclusion, much like the line/repeat/different sequence of the classic 3-line Blues stanza.

The plot of the poem is the procession of a day from dawn through day, then night, then the next dawn, but the middle of poem explicitly promises ecstasy.**  The episodes contained there, I experience as such. There’s a nighttime wash of bright stars or moonlight.***  Dickinson’s voice here turns transported acolyte, clapping in my mind, dancing as well, like some Amherst Sufi.

What does she see, and want us to see, in the 4th stanza? Its transport is somewhat mysterious. It could be something like wispy clouds drifting over the stars and moon, but as a fellow northern-parts American with Dickinson, I suspect that “fluttering,” subtle–shimmering” grace is the Northern Lights.

And what’s being described in the 5th stanza? On the face of it, a little brook in nighttime – but I see something else in metaphor being developed here: the constrained “purple brook” seems to me to be veins. Veins in plants, veins in animals, coursing blood-vessels in ourselves. And the red, the next dawn’s red, that follows is as if the blood life-force within all of Gaia is bursting forth in this ecstatic vision beyond venous constraints.

And finally, there’s another switch-up: we get a concluding 4-line stanza, this time in the conventional hymn/ballad quatrain. And what does it present after this mystical vision? That vision’s mundane container: (just) another day. Is Dickinson trying to conventionalize herself here? Calm a possible reader that she’s not a wild-night, wild-eyed mystic, but just another twenty-something 19th century upper middle-class young woman who indulges herself in some daily nature thoughts in verse? Could it be a smile at a sense of contrast: that we attend to and then not attend to the great eternities of things throughout our lives? Or is she in addition reminding us that ordinary, ongoing, oh-so-daily, life is the stage, the ground, the staff upon which any visionary song of experience is scored?

I chose to stay calm in my solemnized performance of Dickinson. I used a small half-broken parlor guitar (the size of guitar Dickinson would have known) and also played a restrained upright bass part. In the background I allowed a shimmering modulated electric piano which I’m playing with one or two fingers to flutter for the fathomless stars. You can hear the sum of all this with the audio player below. If that’s not there, it’s only veiled by some ways of reading this blog – and you can click on this grace-granting highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player gadget.

 

 

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*It’s not a term relating to your friend who’s dating a drummer. Sorry. Not sorry. The mystic has written that the road of puns leads to the palace of wisdom.

**Earlier this summer I read Wild Poets of Ecstasy  compiled by D. J. Moore, a near-400-page anthology collecting poems of erotic and spiritual passion. Capsule review: it promised more than it consistently delivered, but I appreciated the attempt, and it probably put me in the mood for this understanding of Dickinson’s poem today.

***An overwhelming wash of starlight would have been mundane to Dickinson in her time and place, as it still was for me in the tiny rural town I grew up in a century later. Whenever I return on some clear night to such skies over and outside of dense collections of lighted buildings and roads, I am star-drenched.

Art Song and Me

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

OK, I told you this is my summer plan: fewer readers, fewer listeners, and some of the posts are going to get weirder and deal with specialized topics that diverge from the usual stuff I write about here. Let’s start today with some personal history, something I worry about running on too long about, but I’ll try to keep it brief:

I have no formal musical training, and I even hesitate to call myself “self-taught,” as to me that infers that I have self-studied music and could demonstrate some organized mastery of it. One of my inspirations, Frank Zappa, for example, liked to recommend “Go to library, find some books, and learn how to compose.”* This is not the way complex, particularly orchestral, composition has traditionally been taught, but it made sense to me. I tried it. It didn’t stick. Though when younger, I made an effort for a couple of years to learn basics of theory and notation, but as soon as things got to examples I started to play with those examples which distracted my orderly hierarchical learning. This still happens: I’ll read some deconstruction of a musical piece, or I’ll come upon an explanation of a musical technique, and I’ll drop studying it and go off and try to use it for my own purposes.

In summary, I learned to compose music largely by playing with music. Complex or orchestral music has few examples of composers who learned in the absence of ordered instruction, but there are more examples of vernacular and popular music musicians who learned this way. Many/most of those musician/composers are effective musicians in the style they are composing in – and if large ensemble works are rarer, otherwise the complexity and sophistication of music by such composers is not necessarily limited. And now here’s the next limitation I have use ingenuity to deal with: I honestly don’t think I’m a competent musician. I’m an inconsistent guitarist with some ideas and techniques I can execute on good days. I started as a terrible singer and with improvement I hope my rough-hewn singing can rise to the level of eccentric stylist.

But – even as a child I had an appreciation for “classical music” – that highbrow stuff made with educations and exacting training. In 1960 or 61 I got an Airline transistor radio: one of those little chrome-plated trim plastic boxes a little larger and thicker than a cigarette pack that otherwise might occupy a mid-century pocket. This was in the interregnum between Rock’n’Roll’s emergent artists and the Beatles, and I listened largely to WOI-AM. Run out of a university, it could claim to be one of the first American “public radio” stations, and one that broadcast large blocks of classical music. Around this time, the wife of our little town’s public school superintendent tried to teach my classmates, farm kids, about orchestral music, and they wanted nothing to do with her seriousness about it. The besieged teacher appreciated my appreciation and likely strained herself tolerating my off-key signing in her school choir. I liked the pieces she played the class off records, often remembering them as snippets of the same pieces that were played as underscore in animated cartoons on TV. Any underground, prog rock, punk, indie, goth, etc kid from younger generations may appreciate: my peers not digging the Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms stuff was part of the attraction.

Then for two years I went to college, at a small school south of Des Moines, which, oddly enough had an ambitious opera program. Eventually the director behind this would have a nice, newly-build concert hall for his productions, but back then it was a tiny college theater or the flat-floor hall over the top of the college lunchroom. There I had the experience of hearing my classmates, kids my age, along with a few imported “ringers,” singing the classical repertoire, sometimes less than 10 yards away. This is human music, made by creatures like myself, even if I wasn’t – and wouldn’t be – able to duplicate their sound.

I promised you weird. Have I delivered? I at this point didn’t play any instrument, but I was enamored of and writing poetry. Somewhere around then I was introduced to art song.**

The same Willa Cather poem as our last Parlando episode has been set by two modern composers working in the classical tradition. This one is by William Bolcom, a composer whose breadth and aims I admire, even if I don’t think this works particularly well.

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If I was to describe the Parlando Project it would sound like a definition of art song: “Literary poetry (generally not intended for musical performance when written) set to music by a composer who normally is not the adapted lyricist. From what I can see, art song pieces tend to be “audition” or “resume” pieces for classical music singers. Many are written to be sung with just piano or other solo instrument accompaniment, or at best, a small backing ensemble, and so are low-budget and logistically undemanding. Complex orchestrations can be added, large-scale opera and oratorio are the grander relations of this tradition.

Long time listeners here will not need me to say that a typical Parlando Project piece doesn’t sound like art song, even if it sits inside the definition. More on that soon – but art song ought to be right up my alley, right? I’ve listened to a fair amount of art song in the decades since. If my energy and life avails, I’m still amendable to hearing more of art song in concert, particularly by modern composers. And…

…I don’t care much for a lot of it. Oh, I almost always admire the training and skill of the singers and their competent musicians. I observe and admire the composers’ shared goals with my own. It’s easy for me to see them as fellow strivers intending to bring the expanded palette of music to the sound and dance of poetry. The whole enterprise, singers, accompanists, composers have resources objectively beyond those I can marshal – which should be a good thing. In thinking about this paradox, I think that’s part of the problem. And no, I’m not talking about jealousy. I genuinely want them to succeed every time, and if it’s only sometimes that I think they do – well, batting averages and shots on goal percentages come with the effort. They certainly do with my art.

Here’s a setting by Libby Larsen. Notice how the singer increases the level of ornamentation after the opening verse. I’ve briefly met Larsen, a couple of times., and like Bolcom I admire the aims of her work.

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First off, the composers often write complex melodies. Hampered by my lousy singing talents, I feel my pieces should have more melody – but with the art song composers I often think their elaborateness obscures the impact of the words rather than reinforcing them. The “word-music” and phrasing of the poetry can be contorted to fit the melody’s interest, and only sometimes will that contortion produce interesting effects by abstracting the flow an actor would use rendering the words, with unexpected phrasing being applied from the notes. In these matters I sometimes think of the stillborn dream of one of the most musical of English-language poets, William Butler Yeats: to create a para-art-song tradition that would preserve more of his “word music.” I’m just a naïve composer, a nobody, but I’d suggest that harmonic or timbral elaboration might better stand in for over-reliance on melodic complexity in art song with significant poetry.

Another performance of Larsen’s setting of Cather’s poem. Would this singer be judged as lacking the technical polish of the ones above? Even if so, I preferred it. Sung at a slower tempo and I sense the singer wants to inflect more meaning into the words.

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The singers or conductors, working from score, are asked to faithfully reproduce the composer, but I believe they are allowed some freedom in ornament. Given that constrained outlet, there’s a temptation to over-exercise this. Even from my limited knowledge, I know that some of the vocal articulations are traditional techniques in classical singing to express emotional states. Like all conventions (even contemporary ones in vernacular music) they risk being misunderstood or even taken for cliches when the convention isn’t correctly “translated” by the listener.

And now for someone else doing something with the same “The Hawthorn Tree” poem, using an approach much like mine. The performer (and, I believe composer) David Ellis has done nothing I can locate since issuing a set of 4 poem settings similar to this one, and they don’t seem to be widely available.

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Does a thru-line become apparent as I wrap this up? I probably come to art song believing in the power of the words to work for an audience with less adornment, and this may be the prejudice of a poet who later composed music and preforms it with their personal limited skills.*** I suspect all these dangers and detriments are already known to trained composers and performers, just as I know intimately the limitations I work with in making my pieces here. I respect their hard work and knowledge.**** How some of their work is experienced by this listener may well be my limitations, though I suspect (however muffled inside my own makeup and experiences) I’m more amenable to traditional classical art song than large portions of its potential audience.

 

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*This is a paraphrase from an interview I read, and a report of what he himself did. Flavorful quotes I can grab from Zappa: “Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you’ve got any guts” and “If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.” Generally lacking money for college, this iconoclasm was promising to me, but let me point out empirically that sustainable non-academic orchestral composing is even more unlikely than following the thin odds of a conventional academic route.

**I also worked in my adulthood for more than 20 years for a radio network with a 24-hour classical music service. Kind of like I was saying about SF literature and fandom a couple of posts back: I’m not an expert in that field, but I’ve hung around with folks that where.

***Some singers in the folk music field, performing with single or sparce accompaniment can do this, but with more melodicism than my voice can provide. One of the more enthralling concerts I’ve experienced was June Tabor and a keyboardist. I felt the meaning of every single word she sang that night.

****The Parlando Project is designed, and has met its goals so far, as a non-revenue thing, despite my putting serious effort into it. Most classical-tradition performers and composers receive very little revenue for all their efforts, study, and hard work invested in their art. If we hear each other’s results differently (as I suspect we do) I recognize that difference/similarity.

The Hawthorn Tree

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

You could put Willa Cather within a group: writers known as novelists who also wrote some worthwhile poetry. I didn’t know she wrote verse, but this poem of thwarted love, “The Hawthorn Tree”  charmed me when I read it in an anthology this summer. Furthermore, I had sense immediately that it wanted to be sung.

Cather’s best-known prose deals with European immigrant pioneers settling in the rural American Great Plains; but though they’ve been recommended to me, I’ve never read her novels.*  Cather’s family moved to Nebraska when she was 9 and she attended college there. After college she moved east, and she lived most of her long life in New York, where she wrote of Nebraska while living far from it – a distance that has fueled many a novel.

willa-cather-when-she-was-a-student-everett

The young Willa Cather in her student days

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“The Hawthorn Tree”  poem doesn’t tell us where it takes place on any state map — it refrains instead on the titular tree somewhere, a location of a tryst between two people that the poem’s voice will tell, and not tell, us about. Since the hawthorn tree is a very widespread species, it’s not a clue about what state or time it occupies – but let’s ask: why is it a hawthorn, not an ash, maple, or apple tree? Perhaps it’s an accident of biography – a specific tree in some incident Cather herself experienced or knew of. I can’t rule that out, but it’s given such importance within this short poem I think the author made a choice to name it.

Here’s a link to the text of Willa Cather’s poem.

As the name implies, a hawthorn has thorny branches, a prickly botanical feature which is a common trope in poems and songs of thwarted love. Likewise, it has blossoms and sweet fruit in season, more reasons for it to be in a love poem. Not knowing Cather’s work, or much detail of her life, I can’t say what she might know about the myths, legends, or herbal-medicine knowledge regarding the hawthorn. I read that it’s a tree sacred to fairies, it’s thought to be a sentinel or guardian of gateways between worlds, and that the fruit can cure a broken heart.**

So, invention or memoir incident? That mystery accompanies the mysteries in this story’s telling. It could be rendering the common folk-song plot of a couple who briefly meet (and perhaps make love) somewhere while out in nature, and who are then parted. Cather could be taken with such folk songs and tales, could be writing her version of that – or it could be autobiographical.***  One other thing: we’ve been exploring poems of the faery world recently, it could be slyly fantastical – the unnamed creature who meets the poem’s singer from out of the mist could be from the faery realm. Cather’s poem happens in spring-time, another marker found in many of the folk-songs – which often start with some variation of “one morning in May” or the like – but Cather’s mysterious tale says its tryst happens in the night-time.

Whatever the exact and unsaid details, the poem had captured my attention, and those references to folk-song elements drove me to write music for it. I used an unusual open tuning here, one called Csus (CGCGCD), and the lower pitch of the tuning and the chord voicings I used caused me to break out my less-used larger-bodied dreadnaught guitar for this one.

I followed Cather’s text for the resulting song, but then at the end of the performance you can hear with the audio player below I adlibbed my own short variation expanding on the mysterious details of the meeting under the hawthorn tree. What ho? There’s no audio player for you? Ah, I have provided a gateway to a dimension that will show the audio player that’s hidden to you, mortal – likely due to the method you’re using to read this blog. Use this hawthorn branch – no, this highlighted link – which will open a new browser tab manifesting its own audio player.

 

 

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*I’m far from well-read regarding novels. Poetry captured me in my youth, and that art meshed so easily with my love for music that I can easily be embarrassed in any literary crowd which takes “literature” to largely mean “fiction.”

**Besides folk-medicine, there’s been some modern pharmaceutical investigation of the hawthorn fruit’s ingredients. This video explains a bit about the hawthorn and the beliefs surrounding it.

***Cather’s love life is not an open book, but her life partner was a woman. The one from the mist who the poem’s voice meets under the hawthorn tree is a “he.” I made a choice not to alter the genders here, perhaps because this spring my home has been full of gender-dynamic visitors and residents. Or perhaps I’m following the example of famous gender-crossing singers like Eric Burdon and Ringo Starr.

Drunkboat, Lenny Kaye, Patti and Cordwainer Smith, Rimbaud

~ Frank Hudson ~ 3 Comments

OK, I warned you. It’s summer, this is where I get weird, maybe even self-indulgent, since the poetry audience consistently drops off for some reason during this season. We’re going to travel time and space a bit before we get to poetry – but we’ll get there.

This morning I saw that writer and musician Lenny Kaye was a recent guest on Aquarian Drunkard’s Transmissions podcast.  Kaye has a long career mixing writing about music as well as making it. When writer Patti Smith wanted to inject some rock’n’roll into her poetry back in the early 1970s, it was Rock Critic/Musician Kaye that she recruited. Their earliest performances as a duo were highly improvisational. He describes them as “fields:” where Smith would start off in some direction and he would then respond on guitar, and the interaction would go off wherever it seemed to want to go. The results are one of the inspirations for this Project.*

As a podcast guest, Kaye talked about the things that shaped his life, his approach to the arts. Within this conversation he brings out this historical point: the “Rock Press,” that strange spontaneous birth in the Sixties,™ was significantly an outgrowth of Science Fiction fanzines. Kaye himself started one before he was a Rock Critic, Paul Williams who founded the seminal Crawdaddy  was a SF fanzine veteran. Same for Greg Shaw, who founded Mojo Navigator and then Bomp,  all magazines writing seriously about Rock! These efforts proceeded the founding of Rolling Stone  by about a year.**

OK, a little digression. I promise I’ll keep it short. As a young person I read some SF, liked some of it, but couldn’t call myself a full-fledged fan. I never subscribed to the several monthly midcentury pulps that were publishing SciFi regularly back then. Never attended a Con of any form. Never wrote for an SF fanzine or even sent a letter to an editor. By my late teenage years, poetry and music was my thing. None-the-less, because I liked smart folks with interests, I had friends who were intelligent and committed SF enthusiasts.

I’m not sure of the Transmission interviewer’s SF interest level. The SF feeding into to the critical writers/rock-is-an-art-form case was made and then petered out in the discussion – but as the interviewer redirected, Kaye uttered the name of an SF author, “Cordwainer Smith.” He said nothing more than the name, then the conversation moved on.

Longtime readers here may sense what I thought at that moment: “What does Cordwainer Smith have to do with this Rock/Lenny Kaye connection?” Cordwainer Smith isn’t an obligatory big name, a bust carved into the SF pantheon, but he was a writer in the Midcentury SF scene whose name I recalled. I called up my friend and Parlando contributor Dave Moore (who is much more SF knowledgeable). “I don’t think he wrote all that much,” Dave said. “He wrote stuff about interplanetary diplomacy.”

Summary overviews I’ve now read backup Dave. A couple of novels, a few book-length collections of shorter pieces. Cordwainer Smith was not one of those prolific pot-always-boiling writers who made a living out of pennies-a-word publishing. The distinctive name I could remember was a pen name, and the author who used it closely guarded his identity. That man, Paul Linebarger had a Political Science doctorate from Johns Hopkins, had professorships at the college level, rose to the military rank of colonel in the reserves after serving in WWII, and had continued hard-to trace-ties with US government diplomacy and likely spycraft.

Looking at the list of his works I see this story “Drunkboat. ” Huh? Now we touch the Venn diagram edges of the poetry and music nerd writing this. Could this be connected to “Le Bateau ivre” (The Drunken Boat”) – the wild, visionary poem written by the teenage French poet Arthur Rimbaud? In 1976 I bought my first Rimbaud collection, which included that poem, partly because Patti Smith spoke highly of Rimbaud. Back to our other Smith, Cordwainer, and his SF story: a quick Internet search said there is a connection with the poem. Of course, many a story, SF or otherwise, might just steal a title or a quote from high lit to class-up the joint.

Drunkboat Cover

October 1963. John Kennedy was President, he was welcoming the original Mercury 7 astronauts at the White House to celebrate the wrap up of the first US Earth orbit flights. Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet” was the top record on the pop charts. “Drunkboat” is published and I wonder how many readers of Amazing Stories knew who Arthur Rimbaud was. In the future this will all make sense.

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This afternoon I found a copy of “Drunkboat.”  As has happened to me before when I read Midcentury pulp magazine SF, I’m a little surprised by how clunkily it’s written. “Drunkboat”  is told in a roughly implemented sort-of-fairytale mode. The dialog, while plentiful, is as awkwardly bad as a midcentury SF B-movie script, and there’s barely any attempt at characterization. The hard-science aspect sometimes seems applied as mere decoration for the genre audience, but it involves a farrago of space-time continuum hand-waving within a medical setting that might be a choice taken by an author with lengthy connections to Johns Hopkins.***

So why am I expending our shared time if this is simply a crappy 1963 pulp story? Be patient, the connection isn’t just casual, it’s integral.

Although the story references a multi-lightyear multi-planetary universe set thousands of years into the future – world-building Cordwainer Smith utilized for many of his SF pieces – one could easily see this story being intended as a prose rhapsody on the themes of Rimbaud’s poem. Given the elevated education and “day job” positions Smith/Linebarger held, I can suspect that he’s making a conscious choice to tell his story the way he does. Is he speaking down to some limited supposition of his pulp magazine audience, academically code-switching so to speak? Or does he like the artifice of telling a fantastic story in a way that subverts any chance of it portraying mundane reality? Was the writer reaching for an Orwell parable? Smith/Linebarger was fluent in German, and in places story elements remind me a little of Bertolt Brecht. The story drops in a number of Dada-level children’s rhymes as asides, and he’s constantly having fun with degraded homonyms. Our story’s hero is “Artyr Rambo.” The Earth location is “Meeya Meefla,” (say that last one aloud). And here’s another thing you might not expect (I can’t even fully explain its effect on me after reading it): the story, despite its flagrantly bad prose and poorly drawn plot, can still work.   There’s a section when a doctor trying to understand our comatose hero orders both of them to be covered with a wire mesh “pain net” that dispenses agony to those beneath it, believing the shared pain will allow them to communicate. It’s not told in vivid prose, but the image is unforgettable.

Finally, at story’s end, our hero, at last given back his ability to speak, has a longish speech in which he extensively paraphrases or quotes Rimbaud’s wild and fantastic poem as if it’s his own spontaneous account. I looked at a couple of English translation of “Le Batteau ivre”  and they aren’t exact matches to the speech in the story, but Smith/Linebarger was multilingual, it’s even possible he did his own translation. The story still accretes at that moment – as a furious and mysterious energy arises, it justifies itself, for it gives a context to Rimbaud’s wild poetry. And there it is: the moment of plausible connection that I hope you stuck around for: Lenny Kaye, the guy that Patti (not Cordwainer) Smith chose for her to weave her “Sea’s the possibility…go Rimbaud!” verse performances with, just said the name “Cordwainer Smith” – and I wondered.

Want some poetry and some music today too? Here’s a performance of a translation I did of Rimbaud’s poem “Eternity” a few years back. The music in this one, in tribute to Lenny Kaye and company, intentionally references the Patti Smith Group kind of vibe. Audio player gadget to hear it below. Has any such player disappeared into Space3? No net of pain required, I supply this highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own player.

 

 

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*Patti Smith was also writing some for the Rock press at the time, and I think both were working day jobs in retail in NYC: Smith at the Strand bookstore, Kaye at the Village Oldies record store. On a visit to NYC in the late Seventies I once saw Kaye behind the counter at Village Oldies. I was too starstruck to embarrass myself by saying anything. Besides the Patti Smith connection, the Kaye-curated 1972 compilation LP Nuggets was a formative influence on the Farfisa and fuzz-tone guitar sound of the initial electric version of the LYL Band.

**Williams’ intelligent Rock criticism helped set the format for those that followed. His SF connections never went away, and he became the executor of Phillip K. Dick’s literary estate. Later Shaw also worked in artist management and A&R roles. In the Seventies he was an important force in bringing forward Punk and New Wave aligned acts.

It’s also true that Jazz and folk-music magazines proceeded these Rock publications, and contributed some folks to Rock journalism, but the rise between late 1965 and 1967 of serious consideration of this new “Rock” music that was taking from and supplanting those genres was a new idea.

***”Drunkboat’s”  hospital setting doesn’t seem all that richly observed to me, one who spent many midcentury years working in hospitals – but the discussion and dissention on medical treatments between doctors in this story may be some “inside baseball” that Smith had picked up.

Sara Teasdale’s “A Prayer”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Just time for a short post presenting a short musical piece made from a short poem by Sara Teasdale. Teasdale’s “A Prayer”  goes over some of the same ground (or gravely, below ground) as her better-known poem “I Shall Not Care,”  each poem ending a telling stanza with a variation of and end-of-life caring not.*  But of the two, “A Prayer”  is more positive and less bitter. “I Shall Not Care”  posits the grave’s lack of care as justice for lack of care from a lover, “A Prayer’s”  poetic voice vows careless love throughout a lifetime regardless of the elusiveness of mutual love.

A Prayer

Simple enough music for this short piece, though the F Major 7th is a favorite alternative flavor of mine. I also enjoyed coming up with the snap modulation in the little section between the two verses.

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While working with this poem this past week I thought too of Teasdale’s contemporary Robert Frost’s proposed epitaph that he wrote at the end of a much longer poem of his:

I would have written of me on my stone:
I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

You can hear my musical performance of Teasdale’s poem with the audio player gadget below. If you can’t see that gadget, I shall not care, because I’ve provided this highlighted link for you that will instead open a new browser tab with it’s own audio player.

 

 

 

 

 

 

*”I Shall Not Care”  was my introduction to Teasdale’s work, as I recount it this post from early in the Parlando Project about how a musical performance of it helped inspire how I do these things.

Gitanjali 58

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

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.

Gitanjali 58

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.