Parlando - Where Music and Words Meet

Today, a poem that I've turned into a song for second post honoring two Irish-American poets who led an annual St. Patrick's Day poetry reading in Minnesota for several years before their death. Of the two, Ethna McKiernan had more direct ties to Ireland, having spent some time living in Dublin, and eventually in Minnesota running an Irish arts store in the Twin Cities for many years.  When she wo...

Two Irish-American poets who Dave Moore and I knew and worked with (Kevin FitzPatrick and Ethna McKiernan) used to give an annual St. Patrick's Day poetry reading in the Twin Cities, a tradition that was ended by their final illnesses and death a few years back. It's occured to me that I can carry on that tradition here, and so, here's a poem of Kevin's, and like a lot of his best poetry, it seems...

Here's an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem of complicated love, or something somewhat like that. Millay's original text deals with the moment where two people, two consiousnesses, meet and sepearate.  She wrote a weave of images, and as I made her poem into a song I decided to refrain one line from her text to emphasize the two consiousnesses present. The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly l...

Do you think of Edna St. Vincent Millay as a poet of wistful love poems? Well, yes, she wrote those. She also wrote poetry like this example that stands up pretty well as a punk-rocky declaration of public disgust over war and its civic decorations and deodorizers shouted over electric guitars. Who's going to supply the noise for this? That our job today. The Parlando Project takes various words (...

Around 100 years ago, Jamaican-American poet Claude McKay wrote this poem about a poet's hope for posterity. I was taken by a pair of lines in his poem where he prophesies that "Modern kings will throttle you to greet/the piping voice of artificial birds." I composed a rich and strange musical setting for the poem: a piano trio playing simply augmented with an oboe, viola da gamba, and a hurdy-gur...

A second poem (now song)  by Jamaican-American poet Claude McKay on winter, following up from our last example. The last time McKay embraced winter as reflecting his own moods, but in this one emmigrant McKay imagines a warm island respite. 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 combi...

Continuing in our celebration of the poetry of Claude McKay, here's a short, bittersweet song made from his poem "To Winter."   As a Jamaican emmigrant who lived much of his American time in the northern U.S., McKay here outlines a complex set of feelings about this time of the year. The Parlando Project takes various words (mostly literary poetry) and combines them with original music in differin...

Continuing in our series this Black History Month focusing on the work of Jamaican-American poet Claude McKay. Here's a sonnet of his published The Liberator magazine in 1921, now performed with a new musical accompaniment. Long-time followers of this Project may remember that I've proposed something I call "The Sandburg Test:"  does any substantial collection of the a poet's work include at least...

For Valentine's Day and Black History Month, here's Claude McKay's poem of desire "Flower of Love" from his 1922 collection Harlem Shadows after I turned it into an exuberant 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 en...

The year for Black History Month I've doing series of song-settings of the poetry of Claude McKay, and today's piece has McKay expressing the hope that his poetry might survive the particulars of his life.  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 t...

Starting off our Black History Month series this year featuring musical presentations of poems by Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay with this one about the immigrant experience, "The City's Love." 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 an...

Here's a short poem by Robert Frost that I made into a song and sang this month. Like the bird song Frost hears in his poem, it's in a minor key. 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...

It's been more than a week since I could begin to think of putting out more work on this Project. As I continue, this note is going to read like propaganda, but I'm not much for that, and as best as I can this is an attempt at a objective summary. Our home state of Minnesota is currently subject to a intentionally vindictive incursion by the secretive armed forces of our mad and illtempered ruler,...

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 encou...

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...

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 yo...

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 p...

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 poe...

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 takin...

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 an...

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...

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...

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 bac...

Edward Thomas' poem about the lost wildness of love made into a little song. 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

Here's a piece for Armistice Day - Veteran's Day: a song made from a poem written by Irish poet Padraic Colum. 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