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.
Here’s another new translation of a poem by pioneering French Surrealist Paul Éluard that I made in order to perform it with music. This one, “A La Minute,” which I’ve rendered as “At This Minute,” also lacks the extravagant imagery that one might expect in a poem associated with Surrealism. I hear its language as informal speech, though this could be a mistake – remember I’m far from a fluent French speaker, nor am I an expert on early 20th century France. The only solid objects referred to in the poem are the eye and a more vague “instrument.*” There’s also the pronoun “it” present, and from the poem’s title and inference that may refer to the abstract concept of time.
Éluard’s original French, and my translation to English. That translation may still be a WIP. This morning I was thinking I should revisit the penultimate line.
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What the poem is talking about is elusive. Like the Éluard poem last time, the greater context and situation are left out of the poem, leaving a set of statements about it. At the time I performed the poem – as with “The Naked Truth” – I had decided that my performer’s subjectivity was going to use my dissatisfaction with my country’s current regime to animate the words. On deeper reflection afterward I’ve begun to think that both of these poems are complicated love poems. Perhaps if this series continues, I’ll write more about Éluard’s complicated love life, but even in the absence of that biographic information I remembered that Éluard is famous in his native France as a great love poet.
Those two frames can become congruent in poetic expression. If one loves one’s country and residents, one can have a complex relationship with its civic actions and outlook. Similarly, the intimate relationships between erotic partners cannot escape political and power questions. If early 20th century, or modern French readers, are expecting a poem about the affairs of love from this poet, they will likely hear it as such. As to the political reading? One thing I often see myself here in America: those women who carry experience with incompetence, reflexive lying, and lack of responsibility from intimate partners see immense resonance in my country’s current leadership. That is not a happy feeling, but it’s a clarifying one.
Éluard had a lifelong political side, and so consciously or unconsciously he may have intended this ambiguity. The poem seems to me to be addressed in hopes that a relationship will change, perhaps with the ending of it. What a speaker in the poem is declaiming then is that they are aware, can clearly see, what is wrong there. It may be a “who do you believe, me or your lying eyes?” situation.
Since I’m accustoming you to link two seemingly disparate worlds when hearing this poem, let me jump now to the music I made for performance. There’s a producer/musician and music theory teacher, Rick Beato, who has a very popular YouTube channel. One of his regular segments is to listen to the top 10 contemporary pop music streaming songs. This sort of thing is red meat for older listeners who eagerly click on those episodes wanting to hear Beato’s declarations of the lack of merit in modern pop music which will include objective reasons for that lack of achievement.** In one recent episode he noticed that many of the streaming hits didn’t “go anywhere” – meaning that they didn’t modulate to new keys, change tempo or time signature, or even change chords very much. Since there is a universe of sophisticated things that a composer or performer can do with all that, there’s value in pointing out the potential of using those musical tactics. But what he doesn’t stop to ask himself (or his audience) is: why might acts make that choice, and are then rewarded with large contemporary audiences for doing so?
Two putative answers that quickly come to mind: we are seeking something that seems stable and comforting – and conversely, we may be quite frustrated by the lack of positive change in our world and want to express that.
There’s a great, complicated, love song made famous by Aretha Franklin, written by Don Convay: “Chain of Fools.” Lyrically, that song may be a cousin to Éluard’s poem, and the song’s harmony is an interlocking one-chord riff, broken only for a few bars where all the instruments fall away and only voices and handclaps carry on in the same key. Whenever I hear someone make a statement that assumes that harmonic complexity is the key to effective music, I will call Aretha Franklin to testify.
Now I’m not Aretha Franklin – as far as I can determine, no one is – but my music for “At This Minute” is based on one chord (Em) with the tiniest movement in how it’s voiced. I built this composition starting with the rhythm, a pair of related and repeated broken chord piano arpeggios expressing that chord, underlaid with a simple bass part I played on my U-Bass.*** To drive home the statis, I plucked my kalimba (thumb piano) right up next to the microphone so that it sounded almost like musical hammer blows.
Rather than performing my translation from Éluard’s French straightforwardly, I decided to improvise repetitions of phrases in it. While it doesn’t sound like ecstatic Afro-American gospel a la Franklin, conceptionally, it’s akin. You can hear that performance with the audio player gadget below. No audio player? It hasn’t said goodbye, but I hope and hope you’ll see this alternative:a highlighted link that will open a new browser tab with its own audio player.
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*What is that “instrument?” A clock or watch face perhaps? Or since the poem wants to riff on the eye and seeing – the spider face of Éluard’s poetry is as full of eyes as Emily Dickinson’s is of bees – the instrument could be the instrument of vision, the eye. If one was to create a Surrealist painting to illustrate this poem, both of those instruments should be melded together.
**To Beato’s credit: while he savvily promotes these run-downs (both senses of the word) as disparagement of modern pop music, he’s got a wide enough musical taste to offer praise for things he hears and likes in these top-tens. His grasp of music theory and enthusiasm for how it can be deployed is infectious, and that’s a good thing. As to how good or bad modern pop music is compared to the golden era that (just coincidently) happened when the oh, so, objective evaluator was a young person, I’ll call to the stand Mr. Theodore Sturgeon with his law that “90% of everything is crap.”
***The U-Bass is the size and construction of an ukelele, but with very thick nylon strings meant to be tuned to the same notes and register as a bass guitar (EADG). I love the upright bass, but I can’t afford, store, or play one well-enough – but I have three or four ways to make something like that instrument’s sound, such as today’s U-Bass.
Last time I had a chance to record a new piece using guitar, I rattled the bones of a Jazzmaster amid synth keyboards played with the same guitar. Monday I had another chance. My studio space was quiet, I could have made it loud – or I could open a sensitive microphone. Organic, wooden music? I uncased an acoustic guitar. I do like the directness of that instrument. I have microphones setup for recording in my studio space, so it’s as simple as opening a preset template on my computer recording software, arming the tracks, and clicking the red screen button.
The contrast that resulted could have been even greater. I tend to attack the strings on an acoustic guitar pretty hard. I use a flat pick, but I’m most often not strumming the way other plectrum players do. Instead, I skip from string to string, not striking them consecutively or with a “boom chuck” alternative strum either. I use that single flat pick’s point to do in succession what a “finger picking” guitarist does.* Many years ago when I tried to learn how to finger-pick, I noticed that many patterns didn’t strictly require that you strike two or more strings simultaneously, and I just spontaneously started to move the single point of a flat pick around to play what I would have done using thumb and fingers.
I had a new song to record – really new. Over the weekend I decided to crack open my old paperback of Paul Éluard’s Capitale de la douleur, Mourir de na pas mourir , Éditions Gallimard, 1966. The book’s entirely in French, and I can’t remember what bookstore I found it at in Iowa. As I’ve mentioned occasionally here, I had the impression that French poetry was an important influence on English Modernist verse, and living in a state (Iowa) that retained some French place names and seeing French on signs and labels when I visited Canada for fishing trips as a kid made me feel that French was a logical second language for me.**
Somewhat like finger-picking, I was a washout studying French in school. I had a terrible time pronouncing the words anywhere near correctly, and the introductory classes I took in high school and in my foreshortened college years had nothing to do with the French poetry I wanted to get ahold of.
So, kind of like guitar playing, I just went self-taught. Back in the 20th century I brute-forced my way through a handful of poems with a French-English dictionary and vague memories of basic French syntax and grammar from my school-room failure. Eventually, it was just easier to get the poetry already translated, where and when available.
It was only once the Parlando Project got underway in the twenty-teens that I returned to translation. Nearly all the English translations I had read are not in the public domain and free to reuse. And furthermore, I found that not every poet’s work I was interested in had even been translated extensively into English. This was true for many of the Dadaists, and I was also somewhat surprised that it was true of Éluard.
Éluard, as best as I can tell, is a big deal in Modernist French poetry. Present at the creation of Surrealism. Not just an important avant-gardist, admired for his love poetry too. Patriotically valorized for being a stalwart member of the anti-fascist Resistance during WWII. But none of that makes him all that important in America.
I wanted to go through the early poems collected in my book that would be in the public domain. Many of them do not have English translations I can find propagated on the Internet. I used my limited French vocabulary to scan them for what looked like interesting lines, and concentrated on the shorter ones that fit this Project’s needs.
I took the ones I picked out and put them through machine (computer) translation. Machine translation has gotten much better in the past few years,*** but it still doesn’t produce poetry. What it does produce seems, to my inexpert eyes, to be mostly accurate glosses of the literal poem. My job is to take those words, discern what they are trying to represent, and to make that into a poem that will seem vivid to a modern American reader.
In that process I would find even a pristine word-for-word translation inadequate. I want to translate the sequence of images as much as the words, and I want the result to have some musical or incantatory power (even if I don’t usually go so far as to try to duplicate a meter or rhyme scheme).
The poem, “Nudite De La Verite,” in its original French
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Éluard’s “The Naked Truth” was not hard to work with. There’s not much wild imagery to it. There is the image of the incorporeal state of despair that has no wings in the literal translation. I decided to sharpen that to “no flight,” both to link it with the rest of the short catalog of always-present no-action and so that the sound of “no flight “ can better flow into the “no face” that follows.
I really wanted that negative flow about resistance to despair, and for that I made the most significant choice to change the sentence structure of Éluard’s text, which has the line stating despair at the start followed by the line about love. I reversed the order, putting the line about love first, almost as an interrupted side-thought that prefaces the statement about despair that we will momentarily think is what all the adamant stubbornness is about – until we get to the payoff at the poem’s end.
Perhaps this isn’t the best choice? It’s not the order Éluard wrote down in French, and I want you to know that I changed that order. I may have been influenced by the way I, and many others feel – particularly in my town – with the current regime and its performative cruelty and callousness. Goddammit, we might see this through this little poem: a hope that our level of our despair at those things must be equal to a level of love.
My version in English, presented as a chord sheet for those that want to sing it themselves.
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You can hear my musical performance of my translation/adaptation of Paul Éluard’s “The Naked Truth” with the audio player below. What? Has any such audio player taken wing the way your despair or love hasn’t? Well, I offer this consolation: a highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
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*For the added volume and sharp attack, some guitar finger-pickers use picks too, but different ones than a flat pick – typically a plastic thumb-pick that fits ring-like, but over the distal part of the thumb, and metal or plastic picks somewhat like half-spoon thimbles on one to three fingers. Others use some combination of fingernails and flesh. I have terrible nails and my skin can only allow me to play a limited amount of time with my thumb or fingers on bass. I tried to use fingerpicks as a guitarist, but found them finicky to manage.
**If I was a kid in my present residence, it would be natural to have gravitated toward Spanish. While my town has a significant number of Francophone African-Americans, Latin American Spanish is often in the air around here, and whenever I delve into Latin American poetry I find great riches.
***I suppose these computer-translations could be called Artificial Intelligence of a kind. The AI label gets thrown on a wide range of things these days both for promotion and disapproval. In my defense I’ll point out that computer translations aren’t “generative AI,” the thing that (deservedly) gets the most heat. When I type Éluard’s French into a machine translation entry box I’m not asking it to generate some reheated reprocessed slop of other, uncredited, artists’ work in order to present the pretense of originality. I’m asking it to do what I did when thumbing through my French-to-English dictionary, along with making some effort at producing an understandable syntax order for the resulting words. As for other AI issues: I casually assume my request to render a 35-word poem has a modest carbon footprint.
I still end up working with French-to-English dictionaries to check significant words, to see examples of the words or phrases in use, and to make at least an effort at understanding possible idiomatic usage. Would it be better if the poetry was translated by a bilingual poet with extensive knowledge about early 20th century France? Yes, but I’m not sure that Éluard’s fate has given us that – and so I make my efforts.
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.
I’ve written briefly, here and there, about the time leading up to my late wife’s death, so let me write today about the days immediately afterward. Because this is a blog, and readers’ attentions are limited by that format’s expectations, it’s going to be brief again.
Most people have had experience with death before coming to the death of a spouse, but the qualities of that experience have their own specifics, felt by us one to another. My first feelings were of a very tangible physical absence. A skin-covered shape that was not there. The missing fingerprint sound of her voice. Isn’t that odd, I felt so intensely what I could not hear, could not feel. I was setting out into a life in silhouette.
Renée’s mother handled the funeral arrangements entirely, which was a blessing. That went by in a blurred quickly, and I remember little of it. I decided to go back to my demanding job right away. I thought it would be good to stay connected to those parts of my world that still existed, that carried on without – but I had a great deal of vacation time banked, and for a while set aside a day each week to do post-death tasks. Renée must have left me info on things like accounts, she was organized about such things, and I made a long list of the transitional stuff that needed to be done. I had a folder with lots of copies of her death certificate, and one-by-one I checked off the tasks. I think the very month she died was the last payment on our home’s mortgage, which I sent off thinking that she had just missed that milepost.
One of a couple who were in Renée’s large circle of friends started calling me, asking how I was, and listening to me express the little things, those grief specifics that flickered around me.* They would invite me to get-togethers and events, keeping me engaged in society at large. I was numbed or preoccupied to think about this at the time, but I now suspect this was something Renée had asked them to do before she died, but whether they did this on their own or at a friend’s request, it was an extraordinary blessing. For a few months this couple (and my job) were my tugging connection to the ongoing world.
In a short interval after Renée’s death, I also began spending much time playing music, by myself or with two or three others. I spent time searching out low-priced but unusual guitars, a not all-together-admirable spate of “retail therapy.” I began to compose and record music I made with them. Here’s the odd part for those who’ve followed this now more than a decade old Parlando Project: it was predominantly music without words, the stuff that would be genre-categorized as “instrumental guitar music.” Here I was, this poet, who had married this young poet, who was missing her voice intimately, making music with no words in it.**
And then during the next year, I met and started going out with the woman who’d become my living wife. This was welcome and yet a little strange. Like many people with loved ones who’ve died, I would have intense dreams of the departed, and sometimes those sensations would slip over into waking hours where I’d have this palpable demi-sense that Renée was present. I can remember one such time when I was awaking in my empty bedroom and I had the strong sense – no apparition, but just as when your “object permanence” knows what’s behind you or beside your peripheral vision – and without hearing in a vibrating ear-drum way, I was hearing my dead wife’s voice. I was embarrassed, and I thought I should try to explain that I was seeing this other woman.
How did this conversation resolve? There were no actual words, no transcript that could be recorded on some spirit-device, no ghostly pronouncement. Just a sense that some sense of Renée (or my own sense of Renée) knew, and that we acknowledged this new thing together.
Returning now to this present August. Like a lot of folks this summer I saw the new movie of “The Odyssey.” One controversial thing in this elaborate (and IMHO, successful) take on the old tale was Matt Damon’s performance of a haunted Odysseus. This is not everyone’s view of the character, and auteur-school critics tell us it’s a repeating trope in the director’s work. But what was resonating with me as I viewed the movie was that same flattened-and-its-opposite facets in Damon’s portrayal. And what an odd thing to see: a cost millions, makes millions, IMAX spectacular movie version of a poem. Makes the Parlando Project seem so modest in comparison.
During the movie, a song, a favorite of mine from The Sixties™, kept going through my mind: Tim Buckley and Larry Beckett’s “Song to the Siren.”*** I decided I wanted to record it.
One problem with setting off on that odyssey? It’s a song that’s been done by many much-more talented singers than I am, and it’s the sort of song that calls for a vocalist capable of a bigger more dramatic sound than my voice can manifest. I thought I’d try. And I did. I made multiple attempts to sing Beckett’s words even if I knew I couldn’t portray Buckley’s vocal melody. Take my word for it, they were all bad. Even trying to “comp” a best of the bits vocal track was a failed effort.
But I was left with this arrangement of “Song to the Siren” that I still liked, subdued electric bass, sweetly keening fiddle, and the Guild 12-string acoustic guitar that I bought as Guild was closing it’s Rhode Island factory and the store where I bought it at a deep discount was going out of business. Today’s musical piece has become an instrumental, presented here in “The Place Where Music and Words Meet” – and the words are, this time, absent.
Since Larry Beckett’s words are so important to the resonance of “Song to the Siren” for me, this video displays them.
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*One thing I can remember telling them about: every workday morning I would buy the daily papers at a convenience store near work. With the long-practiced eye of a veteran 20th century newspaper reader, I’d read them quickly in the early morning hours at my desk before the rest of the staff in my technology section would arrive, and then fold them and set them aside. At night I’d bring them home, and Renée would read them in the evening. In the first days after I’d returned to work I realized that there was no one at home to take the papers back to. This is the strange alternating contrast of grief: flattening at times and then at other times you can feel the textures of the smoothest surface, the tiniest detail.
Here’s a contrasting thing. One of the reasons I read the papers each morning, other than general habit, was that the radio network I worked for had a 24-hour news operation, with a large newsroom a couple of floors above me. Reading those papers was a way to keep appraised of what my coworkers there would be dealing with.
One morning, just over a month after my wife died, a tech coworker came back to the desk next to mine and said the newsroom was in an uproar, that a plane had flown into a skyscraper in New York. I told him (engage history-nerd tone) that this’d happened before: that an errant bomber had hit the Empire State Building in the Forties. “If you Google it, you can probably see photos of the aftermath.” “No, this is different.” my desk-neighbor said. I went up the newsroom. Yes, this was different: it was September 11th. That morning thousands of people died, and many more had risks and new realities to deal with. We had employees on airline flights in the air at that moment, the newsroom had an extraordinary news day, and we had offices in a nearby tower across the street a half-a-continent away – and the name of that tall Minnesota building was also “The World Trade Center.” I was heads-down in the technology logistics, my professional area. But here’s my specific thing: I felt no grief. Like a vaccine, I was inoculated, all my grief receptors were still occupied.
**I had one epiphany that helped me begin making music with words again. That benevolent couple who helped me bridge over my transition took me to a concert by Le Tigre at First Avenue. Le Tigre was a follow-up project led by the Bikini Kill principal Kathleen Hanna. They were non-virtuosic musically, and the lyrics were sharply funny/social analytical – and served as a punky early-21st-century reminder of the promise of bands like The Fugs or my own LYL Band work with Dave Moore.
***This song is one of several The Sixties™ musical efforts that refer to “The Odyssey.” Another fine song, “Tales of Brave Ulysses” was inspired not just by Homer but by it’s lyricist listening to Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” with its doomed sailors. A more oblique one: The Zombies magnificent final LP “Odessey and Oracle.” No sailors, no sirens, in it – and the epic poem’s title is famously misspelled on the echt Sixties™ cover. I’m unfamiliar with how the title was chosen for this album recorded in another summer, the one in 1967 just before the group that made it broke up from lack of commercial viability, but it’s a suite of songs about loss and separation that ends in the celebratory song “Time of the Season.” Remarkably, that final song became a hit nearly two years later, when there was no band remaining to tour behind the hit. The suitors at the banquet recruited some chancers from Texas to pretend to be this British group. That bogus bunch of Zombies included 2/3 of what would become ZZ Top.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Frank Hudson 