Parlando - Where Music and Words Meet

A sonnet from a series I've been writing about Alzheimer's disease, recorded as the LYL Band has traditionally done this kind of spoken word performance: live in the studio with the band's two poets improvising on their instruments as the poem is performed. 

This kicks off your summer series where the Parlando Project will be doing things somewhat differently than we do the rest of the year. What kind of things? I'm not entirely su...

I've turned this late William Butler Yeats poem about worldly and spiritual battles into a song, because, at least to this one reader, this poem from another era of ravenous authoritarianism seems to speak to today's world and heart. 

The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done over 800 of these combinations, and you can hear any of them at our blog and ar...

We may think of English poet Willam Blake as the writer of majestic mystical visions, but here he is simply observing the civic use of children of poverty on a religious holiday in this first of a pair of poems with this title. I've turned this poem from his Songs of Innocence  into what it says on the tin: a song. 

The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've d...

This is Edna St. Vincent Millay's bald statement of mortality and grief performed with music. Her title says it's without music, because she wished to express that beauty does not mitigate loss, and perhaps my far-from-bel canto voice here follows her intent.

The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done over 800 of these combinations and you can hear any of...

The great Afro-American poet Langston Hughes was a pioneer in Jazz Poetry, so it is appropriate that managed to finish this piece for International Jazz Day and the last day of National Poetry Month:  a performance of a short poem of his about Jazz, "Cabaret."

The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done over 800 of these combinations, and you can hear any ...

Celebrating National Poetry Month and  International Jazz Day with this new sonnet about poets and poetry performed along with original music I composed for a Jazz quartet. 

This is what the Parlando Project does regularly: we combine various words (usually literary poetry) with music we create in various styles. We've done over 800 of these combinations, and you can hear any of them at our blog and archives, located at frankhudson...

Emily Dickinson wrote these words in The Sixties, the 1860s. I just got done with this song performance of her poem as if it was the 1960s and this was a West Coast Folk-Rock band. I think Dickinson here is writing about those things left behind, missing, even in the delights of Spring.

The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done over 800 of these combinat...

I set Emily Dickinson's "I dreaded that first Robin, so" to this music for National Poetry Month. Dickinson's poem casts a skeptical eye on Spring, at once alienated from it and yet closely, wittily, observing.

My music mutates throughout to carry forward the coming of Springtime. The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in varying styles. We've done over 800 of then combinations, and...

An odd notion I had while planning for this year's National Poetry Month: could I perform an Amy Lowell poem with a rock band in the spirit of the Patti Smith Group? 

Well, the result still sounds like me, but sections of this Amy Lowell poem do presage methods of later poetic expression.

The Parlando Project performs various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in different styles. We've done over 800 of these combin...

William Butler Yeats wrote this oft-quoted poem of the rise of evil in the world. I found it more challenging that many other Yeats poems to put to music and to sing, but tonight I've judged this full-rock-band version complete. 

The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done over 800 of these combinations over the years, and you can hear any of them and read...

This is a song made from a section of Carl Sandburg's 1928 poem "Good Morning America"  which I sang this month in order that it shed some light on the nation's current state.

The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done over 800 of these combinations and you can hear any of them and read about our encounter with the words at our blog and archives located a...

I started doing an English translation of a poem from Chilean poet Pablo Neruda's youthful series of love poems, and in that process I thought of something else on my mind, and so began to connect the poem with two husbands taken from the US and their families based on dubious charges this Spring. 

This poem from Neruda's series speaks of lovers separated. It was not so wild a leap to finish the translation and set it to music as a...

Our National Poetry Month celebration continues with a musical presentation of this sensuous Edna St Vincent Millay poem. Since I awoke this April morning to tree branches covered with wet April snow in my northern clime, I felt part of "the shared world" with this poet as I completed this song setting today.

The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done ove...

I might think of this as the first piece of my National Poetry Month observance this year, or as a piece the follows on from my Alice Dunbar Nelson "I Sit and Sew"  performance earlier in March.  "She Dreams of Sewing Machines"  is part of my set of Memory Car sonnets dealing with a daughter's experience of her mother's dementia. 

The Parlando Project combines various words (mostly literary poetry) with original music in differing ...