Meeting Ourselves
Parlando - Where Music and Words Meet
This hiking poem by Vachel Lindsay seems appropriate for January as many look back and foreward at the beginning of the year, and in the Parlando manner I've made it into a song. The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 850 of these combinaitons, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at
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Susan Partain Hudson's Anniversary Poem
Parlando - Where Music and Words Meet
This is a song I made for the new year from a poem written on another New Year's Day, in 1927, by my great-great-grandmother for her 61st wedding anniversary to her husband David Hudson. The couple met during the American Civil War, and the song is that story. I plan to write more about those poeple, and the poem now song. soon at the Parlando Project blog. The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 850 of these combinaitons, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the...
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The LIfe
Parlando - Where Music and Words Meet
Here's a fresh English translation of Paul Éluard's poem "La Vie" performed with original music. Éluard was one of the prime Surrealists and this poem casts its heroine as living dreams seriously, or life as if it's a dream. The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 850 of these combinaitons, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at
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The Burning Babe
Parlando - Where Music and Words Meet
I've recently made this 16th century poem into a song, but then I hesitated to present it this week – because Robert Southwell's "The Burning Babe" seems both inappropriate and appropriate for Christmas. Inappropriate because it's an intentionally harrowing, visionary poem. If what it describes was made into a film, its horror might ask it to be kept from children who are, after all, a central part of modern Christmas. And for whatever audience, at whatever level of understanding of Christian dogma that it expounds, it's a stretch to call "The Burning Babe" celebratory – and...
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The Sunset Stops on Cottages
Parlando - Where Music and Words Meet
Here a new-made song from the poetry of Emily Dickinson. The music is jaunty, and I think that fits the language of the poem as I read it, but best as I can determine this is a poem that fits into the genre my wife calls "Cozy Gothic." Gothic? What? There's sunsets, mornings, cottages in this little 8-line poem made into a tidy 2 minute song. Don't you mean Cottage-core? Nope. Listen to this poem, now song, again. I think the cottages are graves. I'll write more about this at our blog and archives later this week. The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary...
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Adapting Michael Strange: "To Claude Debussy's La Grotte"
Parlando - Where Music and Words Meet
I've long wanted to do a piece using the words of early 20th centery American poet Michael Strange, if only because her life story is so interesting. But there was one problem: her poetry wasn't very good, or at least it wasn't "good" in the ways I appreciate poetry. This week I came up with a compromize between this poet and my own sense of poetry: I revised and adatpted one of her poems by taking as my guide a principle I use when translating poetry written in other languages, to seek to convey the images the poet was portraying in their own language into vivid contemporary English. I'll...
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Before the Snow
Parlando - Where Music and Words Meet
The Parlando Project is predominently about its encounter with other people's words, but I do occassionally use my own, Today's piece is a setting of a sonnet (this poetic form's name means "Little Song") for acoustic guitar and piano. If the words are mine, my encounter with them is not unlike what we usually do here. How so? I've been doing a big cleanup of old boxes and shelves this autumn and I came over a notebook of mine with the first 9 lines of this piece in it. I can't date the notebook for sure, but I'm guessing 1990s. It seemed like it was a fragement of an unfished...
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The Pumpkin
Parlando - Where Music and Words Meet
19th Century American "Fireside Poet" John Greenleaf Whittier wrote a Thanksgiving ode to pumpkin pie. I took the conclusion of his poem and made this little song out of it. The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done over 850 of these compositions, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounter with the words at our blog and archives, located at
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Forum
Parlando - Where Music and Words Meet
This is a loud electric Rock band performance of a piece memorializing the "Flame Wars" of the early days of the Internet when it was largely made up of Usenet groups, interest group forums, and email lists. The Parlando Project combines various words (usually literary poetry, though not this time) and original music in differing styles. We've done over 850 of these combinations, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounter with the words and process of setting them to music at our blog and archives located at
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Langston Hughes' Jazz Poetry "Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret"
Parlando - Where Music and Words Meet
Poet Langston Hughes was an early and fervent exponent of combining the music of Jazz and the lyrical expression of Blues with literary poetry. Here he draws us a scene with various characters in it, each of them relating to the experience of live Jazz in differing ways. I felt compelled to perform Hughes' poem with music that is related to the Jazz that is silently sounding in the imagined background of his page poem, and this is the result. The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done over 850...
info_outlineThis hiking poem by Vachel Lindsay seems appropriate for January as many look back and foreward at the beginning of the year, and in the Parlando manner I've made it into a song.
The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differing styles. We've done over 850 of these combinaitons, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounters with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org