Poetry Meets Music

A Scottish friend told me tonight, "You are nauseatingly perky." I'm in my almost-bouncing-off-the-walls-because-I'm-so-excited-and-JOYfully-Happy mood :) Life is absolutely, wonderfully amazing!!

Partly it's that I'm still on a high from the Tuesday night Messiah, partly it's that my performance commitments for the semester are done (a big relief from worrying about how much sleep I'm getting or whether I'm getting a cold), and partly it's that my opera workshop in-class final sing went really well.

Mostly, however, it's this Incredible Project that I get to be a part of.

Every year, through a grant from a lovely woman here, the school brings in a living artist to collaborate with composers and singers. Some years it's a sculptor, some a painter, some a filmmaker. This year, it's a poet.

Lia Purpura is an American poet who writes wonderful vivid work that reminds me in part of William Carlos Williams "This is just to say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox" poem.

The composers are current students here. Tonight, we met with Ms. Purpura in a roundtable discussion to hear her read some of her work and have the opportunity to ask questions. It was fascinating. Here's this woman, offering her inflections of a genre that usually remains on the silent page. We get to hear where she was when she was inspired to pen these words, what came to mind, whether there are any associations we should be aware of. She's a huge proponent of seeing the playfulness in poetry, not letting it be a "tricky little machine" that needs to be taken apart. Very accessible. A sense of a conversation between her and the reader. Ideal for singing.

The composers asked about how amenable she is to repetition - do they need to respect the words as written? She's very flexible and in fact has already begun editing her work with an eye towards song. She'd even be open to changing beats. And repetition is fine by her.

At one point, Ms. Purpura commented that she'd placed one poem in the "no" pile in her mind because she thought the words "In fact, indignation" might not be easy to sing. I was the only singer who came to the seminar tonight, so I spoke up.

"Actually, juicy consonants can sometimes be really fun. The words themselves aren't inherently difficult to sing. What makes something hard to sing is really how the words interact with the music. For instance, for a woman, it's much easier to sing an "ah" vowel up high than an "ee" vowel. We'd need to modify an "ee". But really, the words themselves are fine - it's all about the combination of the music and words."

She was very interested in that, and I think she is intrigued at the intersection of sung words vs. read words. (She intends her poems to be read silently on the page, although she does speak them aloud when writing to hear the rhythms.)

The composers then asked more about certain works. They were concerned, too, with the tension between how much to respect her inflections and interpretive ideas and how much to take the work alone and infuse their own ideas. Several spoke of the need to "ignore" her readings, while another liked hearing her sense of the sounds. Ms. Purpura celebrated the tension and basically enthused that the composers should revel in the friction since "That conflict is where your response will spring from."

It's an interesting question, a passing of a baton or a layering of a cake in a way. The poet provides the text. The composer layers on top his or her own sense of the atmosphere by creating notes and instrumentation colors around these words. The singer takes the composer's piece and adds her own interpretation to it, bringing some of herself. In a way, the singer almost brings it full circle, becoming the human instrument of expression that mirrors the way the poet was the original human instrument of expression.

I'm so amazed that I get to be a part of this. At the outset of tonight's event, the professor supervising and coordinating it introduced himself to me. "Ah, you're Hope! I've already had several students request to work with you!" Since I knew none of the composers in the room, I was really surprised. At the end, one composer introduced herself and complimented me on the Messiah performance. "I really love your voice!" she said. So I guess some of them might have come to hear that. Pretty cool :)

I don't yet know how much I'll really be a co-creator in the composition process. The spectrum could be anything from "Tell me your vocal range and tessitura, and I'll go write the piece that you'll sing" to "Let's sit down together and figure out what kinds of things your voice likes to sing, what your ringing notes are, what qualities are unique to your voice, and I'll write something that suits you." The latter is the model from the 19th century opera world, and I would really be thrilled if that were the case. How neat would it be to have something tailor-made, tailor-written just for you, where your voice really shines?

Well, enough rambling. Most of you know that I talk a blue streak when I'm delighted with something. I guess this long blog entry shows that.

Happy Friday!

~Hope