Charles Baudelaire
Tag Archives: Compositions
Baudelaire premiere
“Correspondences,” my song cycle on the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, will premiere at the Thursday Musical series in Saint Paul. Brad Bradshaw, tenor and Tom Bartsch, piano. They’re both great musicians. It’ll be fun!
a quick update
The blog has been shamefully neglected recently.
Here’s a summary of past and current activity:
I’m working on a musical theatre adaptation of the impossibly wonderful comic “Josh and Imp” by Jon Bernhardt and Diana Nock.
The Picnic Operetta has one more performance, October 1st, on Nicollet Island. It’s been a smash hit, and I’m happy to have been the MD.
Fidgety Fairy Tales is in rehearsal and performance. Most of the performances will be at non-public locations this fall, but there will be a big Fidgety Festival November 6th at the Children’s Museum, featuring all three plays and a sneak peek at the fourth (to be written…ay!)
I’m teaching a couple classes at Children’s Theatre this fall, and more in winter, spring and summer. So far, just doing other people’s music, but I am planning for several lovely original bits this summer. You can now look at the class schedule and see who the teacher will be.
I spent a month overseas, mostly hanging out. A dear friend in Amsterdam passed away while I was there, so it was not an entirely joyous occasion, but it was good to get away.
My house is a mess. There are piles of books and papers all over the place.
This Friday, I have a one-night revival of Margo McCurry’s Diggity Dog Days, a benefit for Dreamland Arts.
I understand the links to my music samples are broken on this site. I’ll be fixing that soon.
Oh, and I read a couple books on my To-Be-Read list, Max Havelaar and The Maias. They were good, and I’ll have more to say about them later. I’ve read a lot of other things of course, but I can’t say this year has been the greatest one for books. I haven’t read anything that has slayed me recently. I’m thinking about cracking open Don Quixote.
That’s all for now.
vid of “Women of Troy”
iDreamTV, which documents all of Frank Theatre’s shows, has put up a clip of excerpts from Women of Troy. My, it looks a little gloomy, doesn’t it?
anthropocentrism, reconsidered
I’m writing music for a play by Margo McCreary which prominently features a dog.
I haven’t had many dogs in my life. There was a lovely Bernese Mountain Dog–Bosco–who lived downstairs. He wasn’t the smartest dog, but he was affectionate and kind-hearted.To show you how much he liked you, he sat on your foot. Ah, Bosco. He’s been dead a few years now. Cancer, I think it was.
But now, I’m trying to write songs for a dog to sing, and hence am researching doggie thought and behavior. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas writes in The Hidden Life of Dogs:
[T]he general assumption that other creatures lack consciousness is astonishing. After all, thoughts and emotions have evolutionary value. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have them. Thought is an efficient, effective mechanism that we, and many other animals, would be hard put to do without. With intellect, which is to say the ability to learn and reason, an organism such as a person or a dog can cope with a variety of problems that would require an enormous amount of hard-wiring if the behavioral solution to each problem were pre-programmed.
When we relegate animal thought to instinct, we overlook the fact that instinct is merely an elegant matrix for the formation of an intellect, a fail-safe device that guides each species to form thoughts. When shaped by education, our thoughts enable us to do what we do, and even to be what we are, not only as members of our species but as individuals.
This idea has merit.
Anyway, below is a picture of the dog for whom I am writing, a puppet by the name of Jack.
Fidgety 3 premiere
The first performance of Fidgety Fairy Tales Part 3 will be this coming Sunday, April 3rd, 1:00 pm at the Saint Paul Jewish Community Center. This is the first in a series of ten performances funded by the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, all of which are free and open to the public.
Reservations are recommended, and can be made at the MACMH website.
We have a dynamic and sensitive group of young performers working on this piece. I’ve been impressed by their ability, their imagination and by their willingness to stretch themselves. I’d be very interested in what you have to say about the show after you’ve seen it.
new works
I’m struggling away trying to write a Litany of Satan for Brad Bradshaw to sing. I’ve taken three or four cracks at making a translation/lyric adaptation and I don’t want to start on the music until I have words I really like. Right now what I have is serviceable and somewhat beautiful but I don’t think I have gotten to the bottom of what Baudelaire means in his poem. So I am waiting, picking up the poem every few days, and seeing what is there for me.
The impossibility of translation…French has a lot of prepositional phrases. When you translate those directly into English you begin to sound as though you are circling around what you mean. Baudelaire writes real French and it’s real poetry. So there’s that obstacle, and in addition the problem of making it into a lyric which means I must eviscerate the poetry.
Terry Eagleton, in his book On Evil quotes Henry James to the effect that Baudelaire’s Evil doesn’t really come up to snuff–too much shock factor, James would say. I say James didn’t get it. The opposing concepts of Evil and Good, like the concepts of Death and Life or Sacred and Secular, don’t really matter in Baudelaire’s philosophical universe. Baudelaire’s Satan is one who consoles, has pity, adopts mankind, shields and protects us, conceives hope in union with Death. This may be shocking in these hyper-religious times, but it is worth thinking about.
"Pornocrates" by Félicien Rops
The song cycle will be performed next on the morning of Thursday, December 2nd, at MacPhail.
Next weekend, I am going to a party and concert celebrating the 40th wedding anniversary of my piano tuner, Shirley Kysilko and her husband Tom. She plays cello and Tom plays viola, and they have commissioned several new pieces and arrangements for the occasion. I wrote a five-minute duet based on a two short melodic fragments. It begins with a lyrical call and response section which evolves into some gnarly counterpoint, and concludes with a very long slow quiet section con sordino in which the cello is accompanied by double stop viola. I’ve been over to their place twice to listen to them play it and give them my thoughts about it. My thoughts are that the piece is about their communication. They’re making something of it.
After not knowing what to call the duet, I finally decided to title it Hephaestus and Aphrodite, out of my great admiration for Shirley’s craftsmanship. The blacksmith god was noted for his lameness and ugliness. Shirley is neither lame nor ugly; she is beautiful. But every woman who chooses an autonomous and independent career–especially one who works with her muscles and her hands as Shirley does–is challenging traditional notions of feminine beauty and in the process, making beauty new. As Tom noted tonight, he is Aphrodite.
A rendition of the Shield of Achilles
Finally, Southwest State Theatre Department held auditions for Pine Creek Parish at the end of August and is commencing rehearsals this week. I’m going to travel down to Marshall in a week to see what they have made of the music. I’ll have more to say about this later. It looks promising.
waltz
I wrote a tune in honor of Bill, with Daithi Sproule’s admirable contribution, and am messing around trying to post it to my music page. In the meantime, you can find it on the internet archive right here here. This recording features Tom Schaefer on violin, Daithi on guitar and Laura MacKenzie on flute. Willie Murphy engineered and mixed the recording. Many thanks to all of them.
There will be a memorial service for Bill Hinkley at the Nicollet Island pavilion in Minneapolis, Wednesday, July 7th, 2010, from 5:00 to 11:00 p.m.
Saint Anthony Falls, 1865
One of the difficulties the organizers of this event faced was finding a place big enough to hold all the people who loved Bill. The trade-off for having a lovely location with enough room is that it’ll be a catered affair, no potluck. However I have some friends on the Island, so maybe we can hang out on their front porches.
“Pine Creek” reading
If you are in Duluth June 12th, you are invited to attend a reading of my latest endeavor, “Pine Creek,” with book and lyrics by Bart Sutter. I’ve written some original music and some arrangements.
It will be held at 7:30 p.m. at the Quaker Meeting House at 1802 East First St, Duluth. As you can see from this-here map, it’s not far from Lake Superior. Admission is free.
I’d be interested to hear what you think.
Beaverdance? Check
Beaverdance is written…I don’t know why I thought my Next Big Project would be something I would take my time over. I believe I wrote all the music in three weeks. Never again. But…it is fun. I stopped by rehearsal last night and the cast is funny and cute, in the Bedlam tradition
That’s Heather, aka Foxy Tann, running the rehearsal there. See what I mean about how cute the cast is?
The show opens December 3rd and runs through the 20th. Dinner-theatre packages are available. A Marxist disco extravaganza about the fur trade is the perfect way to celebrate the holidays. Go see it!
Beaverdance sneak preview
Beaverdance, for which I am furiously writing music right now, will exhibit some of its charms at Nautilus Music Theater’s Rough Cuts works in progress series this coming Monday and Tuesday evening.
Admission is a paltry five bucks and milk and cookies are served at intermission.
I’m so hung up writing the darn thing that I wonder if I will get over to see it.
