Ars Poetica

The texts for the piece will be built from Marlanda’s new collection of poems, surfacing insights into the powers of being itself: into the gift of heritage, and spiritual technologies which defy any terrifying ‘thrown-ness’ of subjugation, technologies that speak to us through myth and history and the world-transforming action of art.

At the same time, Ars Poetica is a piece of chamber music, a continuous, single-movement of shifting textures, harmonies, and instruments. Composed for violin, guitar, cello, and poet, this work integrates spoken poetry, composed and improvised music, virtuosic performativity, and a subtle choreography of the players and the poet. Over the course of the piece, voice and instruments will couple and de-couple, compete and support, seeking solitude, and craving unity. 

It's a twenty-minute intersection of worlds, with violin, cello, clarinet, guitar, and poet, thinking on what it is to live, to love, even to merely be in the Zerrissenheit of this world, maintaining this 'how' in the mystical and sustaining energies of craftiness and the art it makes. Marlanda's collection of poems will draw from the author's cultural and biological roots; mine connects to Western Art Music from high Modernism to Medieval and Renaissance practices.

The excerpt below shows two minutes from the first of nine movements in the work in its premiere performance at Soapbox Gallery in Brooklyn, NY on 20 Feb, 2022.

Ars Poetica seeks that which is forgotten, connecting us as artists first, through forgotten practices, strategies of being destroyed by time and savagery: Griot and jongleur; poet and player. Ars Poetica is a ritual in action, an aural and rhetorical architecture for spoken embodiment, a shifting and mobile performative space in which musicking and poeting play together. A sharing of the strange beauty of these words and sounds to the multiple communities we hope to reach.