Music & Poetry

Abstract

The following conversations with contemporary classical composers demonstrate how music and poetry speak much the same language, and even understand themselves in each other's terms regarding rhythm and sound, time and structure, address and listeners, recitals and recitation. Kate Soper, Matthew Aucoin, and Seth Parker Woods are three very different American composers working today. Soper also writes her own libretti—syncretic texts that engage classical and medieval verse and contemporary literature. An excerpt of her recent work, Romance of the Rose, is included here. Aucoin, an erstwhile poet, whose Eurydice was performed this season at the Metropolitan Opera, has set to music poems and other writings by Walt Whitman, Paul Celan, and Jorie Graham. Woods, a cellist and performance artist, often interweaves archival recordings and live poetry recitation on stage, while also engaging visual arts. The work of all three composers is set to be featured this year at the 76th Ojai Music Festival in Ojai, California. (American Modern Opera Company, or AMOC, co-founded by Aucoin, is the first collective to be chosen as the festival's music director.) These discussions consider the spoken word, voice types, and silence; lecture-performance, the academy, canons, and avant-gardes; the interplay between history, material texts, and graphic notation; in addition to the creative cycle of dreaming, composition, and decay.Geoffrey Lokke