Poets of Patchin Place was a unique event of musical settings of Village Poets. It was held at Salmagundi Arts Club on September 24 and was part of The Village Trip festival in collaboration with Welltone New Music, Cutting Edge Concerts, and The Coffee House Club.
The musical poetry event was separated into two parts with a 20 minute intermission. Most of the pieces were played on piano, guitar, harp, and mandolin.
Eight Rhythms
The opening piece called Eight Rhythms was composed by music director William Anderson. Anderson’s Djuna Barnes Settings were commissioned by Zaidee Parkinson in 2015.
This entire work was composed of eight poems in six songs, with the first and fifth songs set to two poems at once. The cycle appears on the Furious Artisans CD, Der Weg Ins Feie. The original version featured a theorbo, but for this performance it was replaced by a harp.
This night’s instrumentation featured Sharon Harms, soprano, William Anderson on mandolin, Oren Fader on guitar, and June Han on harp.
Barnes once called her poems “rhythms,” therefore two songs are polyrhythmic. In her novel Ryder, and no less in her short stories, Barnes takes comfort in animals. This cycle treats a panoply of Barnes’ primal scenes and arch double-takes, in rhythm, before concluding with animals in “pastoral.”
This multi-layered piece composed by Anderson is contemporary classical music with interesting dissonances, harmonics, and exotic sounding intervals, showcasing the brilliant guitar work by Fader. Anderson and Han complimented on their respective instruments very nicely. Lyrically, Harms emphasized “animals” such as cats, frogs, and horses.
Leopold Bloom’s Homecoming
The second piece, Leopold Bloom’s Homecoming composed by internationally acclaimed composer and conductor Victoria Bond, is a technically demanding yet hilarious, dry and factual dramatic and operatic treatment (sung and acted by Michael Kelly, baritone) with an external narrator (played and acted by accompanying pianist John Arida) asking questions.
The work was inspired by Molly Bloom’s monologue at the end of the book Ulysses where Bond first composed a work called Molly ManyBloom. The current work is part of a larger plan to set other sections of the book as separate works.
Bond set many of the passages as recitative or spoken in rhythm, which Kelly executed very well with both vocal power and comedy. The best way this mood could be described is Kelly’s first line after the piano introduction begins –
He kissed the plump, mellow yellow, smell-o, mellow rump!
Kelly continues with a series of humorous -ation rhymes – some of which are not even words in the English dictionary — after pianist John Adria narrates the sentence “the visible signs of post satisfaction.”
In an operatic voice Kelly replies with powerful words such as contemplation, elation, recog-nation, excitation, modification, interrogation, erection, and ejaculation!
This was indeed a powerful operatic yet tongue-in-cheek vocal performance by Kelly and Adria.
Chansons Innocentes
Part Two of the program began with Chansons Innocentes. This piece was composed by Laura Schwendinger, composer of Artemisa, and the winner of the 2023 American Academy of Arts and Letters Opera Award.
The Chansons Innocentes are dedicated to Dawn Upshaw who performed In Just-Spring in her Carnegie Hall debut in 1997 and subsequently recorded it for a TDK Naxos DVD, Voice of Our Time.
Chansons Innocentes featured Zoe Allen, soprano and Christopher Allen on piano.
Oceans Always Lead to Some Great Good Place
The final piece of the night was composed by Nehemiah Luckett called Oceans Always Lead to Some Great Good Place. Inspired by James Baldwin’s Another Country, this piece has four vignettes, where the composer claims that for each he draws upon Baldwin’s texts as both anchor and compass.
Luckett is a composer working at the intersection of sacred and secular music. For over 30 years he has performed, composed, music directed, and conducted in genres ranging from pop/rock to choral and orchestral pieces.
On this night baritone Luckett performed his own composition vocally. Music director William Anderson accompanied on electric guitar with Joan Forsyth on piano. This piece was commissioned by The Village Trip for the James Baldwin Centennial.
The first vignette, Stranger, is a brooding piece where the protagonist repeatedly pleads in a somber voice, “I’m a stranger, don’t drive me away.”
The second vignette What Were Their Terrors is a contemplative poem set to music where Luckett speaks the words while the music played on piano vacillates between somber modern classical music and jazz.
The third vignette A Wall Between Them and the World begins with a single guitar line by Anderson. Luckett here is once again singing. The piano and guitar interplay lines in a call/response and then the vignette concludes with quizzical dissonances.
The fourth and final vignette A Vast and Friendly Ocean is hymn-like where Luckett powerfully sings completely in archipelago. This last vignette clearly showcased Luckett’s powerful and rich baritone voice and thus received the biggest ovation of the evening.
Read this article Poets of Patchin Place: Village Poets Set to Music where I originally wrote it in The Village View:
Kaju Roberto is an accomplished musician, singer/ songwriter, journalist, and an award-winning producer. He is the artist Rad Jet on Spotify.