The Bird is an Alphabet
The Bird is an Alphabet is an album of new settings of American poets (Jorie Graham, BJ Ward, Wallace Stevens, Melissa Range, and Marlanda Dekine). All the poems are interrogations of language, of the word, and its role in life, and in the creative life; the music draws upon art-song, medieval music, modernist chamber music, and the energy and freedom of hip-hop. The album takes its title from one of the poems I have set, A Feather for Voltaire by Jorie Graham, in which the images presented in the poem become part of contemplation on the act of writing: poetic, grammatical, orthographic, and philosophical.
In toto, the album connects to many themes of my work; A Book of Songs (recorded by tenor Robert Baker (tenor) and Molly Orlando (piano)) links the European 19th-century art-song tradition of technical virtuosity and poetic ekphrasis with the explosive excession of Modernism. Scriptorium, written for Byrne:Kozar:Duo, sets four poems by Melissa Range (Lawrence University) puts forward an evocation of the medieval ars veterum practices, but more severe in its result. Ars Poetica was written for counter)induction and the poet, Marlanda Dekine, and provides musical spaces for the spoken performance of her poetry of personal history, and cultural emplotment.
The complete booklet can be found HERE.
Some fun clips from interviews with my collaborators can be found HERE.
To purchase and for more information on The Bird is an Alphabet, CLICK HERE.
A Book of Songs
A Book of Songs is a collection of settings of works by American poets Jorie Graham, BJ Ward, and Wallace Stevens "A Feather for Voltaire" deploys birds and flight as extended metaphors for the energy and chance-filled process, as designed aleatory generates dizzying rhythm and harmonic clashes; the poem and its song shift, language falls apart, returning to the quill of the poet at work. Mortality and loss pervade B.J. Ward's "The Apple Orchard in October;” meditative and somber, the music develops from a few cells to a more expansive being, only to be reduced again. In "Cy Est Pourtraicte, Madame Ste Ursule, Et Les Unze Mille Vierges" we find shuffling of the real and the mystic, of the divine and the profane, as devotion creeps towards eros.
This small cycle of large songs continues the expansive, formally intricate art-song tradition inaugurated in Europe in the 19th century, but is also deeply embedded in the aesthetics and technics of the modern; songs of love, loss, and the nature of writing and composing are here connected to the severity and fragmentation of the Now.
Scriptorium
Visual artist Maryam Faridani and composer Douglas Boyce have collaborated to create an AI-generated film set to premiere in early 2024. The filmmaker uses the poetry of Melissa Range and Boyce's musical setting as the origin of prompts images and video, producing a method of controlling the AI to generate dynamic and aesthetically resonant footage that complements the artistic intents of the creators; in the music and poetry, isorhythm and polyphonic evoke the subtle play between poetic theme and musical form found in the Ars Nova, while amplifying the dark philosophy of Range's poetry.
Scriptorium (tracks 4-7) pushes more deeply into the 21st century, through novel instrumentation and a modernist counterpoint evocative of the medieval Ars Veterum practices. Written for Byrne:Kozar:Duo, the work sets four poems by Melissa Range. The poems (selected from the book of the same name) explore mortality, divinity, and faith using the written page and the ink required by sacred texts as a core metaphor for explorations of divinity. The described mechanics of medieval ink production are beautiful and disturbing in the same gesture, with vibrant colors, destruction at a vast scale, and perduring doubt inter-threaded Throughout the collection, isorhythm and polyphony counterpoint evoke the subtle play between poetic theme and musical form found in the Ars Nova, while amplifying the dark philosophy of Range's poetry.
Ars Poetica
Ars Poetica is a collaborative work, developed with poet Marlanda Dekine, resulting in a hybrid collection of text and music drawing from the poet's cultural and biological roots as a Gullah-Geechee person, juxtaposed with the shifting textures, dense harmonies, and rhythmic energy of the North Atlantic Modernist concert tradition. Here we see a paratactic resolution to the tension of text and music; the congruences here in affect and in structure are both enriched by the delicacy of their interplay Written for violin, guitar, cello, and spoken word, the piece surfaces 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. Ars Poetica consists of a long poem in five parts, with four substantial, sometimes virtuosic intermezzi between each. Speech, music, and poetry from different traditions are braided together, an endeavor to resuscitate dormant artistic traditions predating modern musical or literary categories, reconstituting a multi-dimensional “ars poetica” for the Now.
The complete text can be found HERE.
A version of the text with links to particular moments in the studio recording can be found HERE.