I found this unpresupposing poem as the 5th one within a series of short poems by 20th century American poet Conrad Aiken called collectively "Variations." As the title suggests, Aiken often had musical forms in mind, and so I then set out to compose some music to sing his poem.

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