Humorist and poet Dorothy Parker presented this sly account that I suspect many other creatives will recognize. Well, I got around to setting it to music.
The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done over 850 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
The Indian Pipe or Ghost Flower serves as the initial image in this strange late Emily Dickinson poem, In this musical performance using acoustic guitar, tanpura, and tabla drums I try to carry forward the elusive feeling of this work.
The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with music in differing styles. We've done over 850 of these combinations, and you can hear all of them and read accounts of our encounters about doing this at our blog and archivers located at frankhudson.org
Each year, on the anniversary of Jimi Hendrix's death, I play guitar to remember him. In the last decade this has led to a public piece each September, and this is this year's.
The words for today's piece are taken from mermaid and siren poems written by Tennyson, Beckett, De la Mare, Symonds, Eliot, and Yeats. The music and guitar playing is mine.
The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with 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 at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org
This is one of D. H. Lawrence's most esteemed poems, yet I found it exists in two versions, and the one I perform today is the lesser-known of the pair. This version differs from the other by a more raw and disturbing utilization of the Persephone myth where the sexual violence in that story is less smoothed over. If you feel you might need a content warning for that, please consider this note one.
The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. This is the 850th officially-released example, but you can hear any of the others and read about our encounter with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org
English poet Anna Wickham wrote "To be sung" under the title of this, so I wrote music for it and did so. My appreciation for the poem about the transience of beautiful things deepened as I worked with it for performance.
The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done almost 850 of these pieces, and you can hear any of them and read about our encounter with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org
No fair-minded person would say the thoughts in this piece's lyrics justify its title, but then that's part of the point it makes.* Edmund Vance Cooke wrote this in 1917, and after all these years I thought it might be appropriate to make a song out of it for today.
The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. This one has wailing electric guitars, but even I can't tell you what the next one will sound like. We've done almost 850 of these combinations, and you can any of them and read about our encounter with the words at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org
*Cooke says in his lyric after all "you can't convict conviction."