Parlando - Where Music and Words Meet

This is the concluding movement of my Halloween four-part musical setting of Conrad Aiken's "The Vampire." As with all the other parts, each posted here this week soon after I completed them, I urge you to listen to the four sections in their proper order so as to follow on with Aiken's narrative.

I will also offer this this advisory: "The Vampire" is an intentionally disturbing work of dark fantasy.

I'll also mention that this Project's musical settings vary in musical style. The four pieces that make up my "The Vampire" started with a simple piece using a handful of orchestral instruments. Today's concluding section is entirely orchestral, though with a different density and energy.

The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 900 of these combinations, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

Continuing with this Halloween themed experiment: I've set out to write and perform a suite of songs (or a longish, multi-movement musical piece) setting Conrad Aiken's poem "The Vampire," making each of the parts public as I finish them, before I've envisioned the entire work, or before I know if I can complete them effectively.

Scary?

Yes, but after completing Part 2 late last night, I worked continuously today to create part 4 today. Once again the mode of the music changes as Aiken's narrative of the world's discovery of a strange creature continues. In this segment the creature finally speaks intelligibly and the world comes to understand its fate.

As I've done so far when each section has been released I urge you to listen to the parts in order, starting with part 1. I plan to work on the final part tomorrow to complete the whole thing by Halloween.

The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 900 of these combinations, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

I'm continuing with my Halloween serial musical presentation of Conrad Aiken's frightening poem "The Vampire" with this second part. Since Aiken's poem is a narrative that tells a developing story, I urge new listeners to listen to these parts in order, starting with the Part 1 posted earlier. I'm already working on the concluding two more parts that complete the tale.

Oh, by the way, this one was recorded and mixed loud to be heard loud. I did check the recording on a small tablet's speakers, but there's only so much that can be done a song like this part of the "The Vampire."

The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 900 of these combinations, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

I'm going to be out there on a limb in this Project's treehouse of horror this Halloween. I'm going to attempt a longer musical piece presenting all of Conrad Aiken's poem "The Vampire" this week, though I don't even have that music for that half complete. Here's the first part, as the poem's world comes upon a mysterious distressed creature. What happens next? Well, Aiken already wrote his poem, but I'll need to scramble to get the next part of my musical piece completed, and you'll need to remember to subscribe to the podcast or to check back to hear the rest of it.

The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 900 of these combinations, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

I vaguely knew Hans Arp (also known as Jean Arp) as an modern 20th century artist before this month when I found out that he was also a life-long poet. And I found out with a poem that struck me on first reading when I saw Herbert Read's English translation of this poem. After that I quickly obtained Read's book on Arp and read through it. In discussing Arp's poetry, Read helpfully supplied the original German text* of the poem ("Dem Ausgang zu") so that I could make my own English verson that I used for today's musical performance.

The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 900 of these combinations, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

*Read also included Arp's own translation into French of this poem, which helped me in doing my version.

It's a cold morning where I live today, and here's an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem I set to music to sing with the chill.

The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 900 of these combinations, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

This is likely the most obscure Bob Dylan cover ever. Likely written about, perhaps even during, the young songwriter's visit to England in 1962, it uses a traditional tune and a rambling plot emulating the style of circa 1800 broadside folk ballads to tell a story of an encounter with a woman by a visitor to London. Dylan scholar Sean Wilentz believes the woman may be modeled on the tragic young English artist Pauline Boty who Dylan stayed with on his UK trip.

The song itself was never officially recorded or performed by Dylan, and for years the only circulating version was from a single BBC radio performance by an obscure group in the'90s where it went by the title "Liverpool Gal," despite the song taking place explicitly in London. After reading and writing about Boty this week, I recorded my own interpretation of this song. There's a longer essay on Boty, the surviving short Ken Russell documentary that shows her creating her visual art, and this song at the Parlando blog linked below.

The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original musical performances in differing styles. We've done over 900 of these combinations, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

Here's a poem by John Keats, his notices about the theater of the seasons. I performed it with my "voice of subjective quality," the one I have handy, accompanied by cello and acoustic guitar.

The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 900 of these combinations, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

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

Fenton Johnson's poetry does speak at times of hardship, even hopelessness, but he also wrote of persevering through adversity, and I think some of his poetry shares elements with the Black Gospel music tradition which was forming up in Chicago while he was actively publishing just before WWI.

His poem "Revery" may have a little of that latter: it might even be a hymn to the Creator. Or one could read it as a recounting of the "oversoul" that passes in an out of human lives, which is how I cast it when I revised Johnson's literary poem for my sung performance. My version could even be performed at a funeral or memorial service.

The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 900 of these combinations, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org

In writing about Sara Teasdale last time over at the Parlando Project blog I mentioned that she has been grouped with a set of 20th century female poets as a "Songbird Poet." The implied charge here is that these poets are less concerned with the deep meaning of poetry and are content to just make pleasant word-music.

Upholding up the deeper meaning school I'd have an opening to report that the songs of birds are not all pleasant and meaningless. They sing for desire, for companionship, and for defense, among other things; though as a person in this Project I have to say that making a song, something one appreciates uttering, might be a worthwhile thing. Here's another minor poet who I'm sure we've kept in a parlor cage as a songbird, one William Shakespeare. This tidy little song from his play The Merchant of Venice talks about idle, surface-deep, love ("Fancy"). But wait, like is often the case with the Songbird Poets, there's a more complex message inside it.

The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 900 of these combinations, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org