home | contact | sound samples | discography | calendar | reviews and testimonials | photos and press materials | site map | mailing list sign-up |
||
|
||
|
||
|
|
|
a talk by pianist Michael Arnowitt
“The Music of Poetry,” Michael Arnowitt’s newest lecture-demonstration, explores the musical aspects of poetry, song lyrics, and literature. The talk offers a musician’s insights on the elements of sound and time in literary composition and the parallels he hears between the creations of great writers and the music of past and present classical composers and jazz and pop songwriters.
Topics include how poets and lyricists build momentum, tension, and resolution; the rhythm of syllables in poetry lines; alliteration and other sequences of consonant and vowel types; the use of punctuation, capitalization, and white space on the page to give a sense of time in writing; how songwriters decide the best order of words; and a humorous look at what makes a good fictional character name.
The presentation will also venture into more esoteric subjects such as modern poets’ peculiar one word lines and strangely-placed paragraph breaks in the middle of sentences, and how to better understand these oddities through analogies to music.
Michael Arnowitt will discuss these topics through brief excerpts drawn from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth, and the Tempest, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” Wordsworth’s “A slumber did my spirit seal,” Thomas Pynchon’s novel “Gravity’s Rainbow,” poems by e.e. cummings and Dylan Thomas, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony finale, Chopin’s Prelude in A-flat major, a Fischer-Dieskau recording of 19th century romantic German art song by Robert Schumann, Rodgers and Hart tunes, oratory by an African-American minister, pop songs by the Beatles and James Taylor, and a poem by Carol Maillard of Sweet Honey in the Rock called H2O Flow.
Optionally, Michael Arnowitt can bring his electric keyboard (or use a piano if there is one on site) to demonstrate a few musical points to supplement the use of CD recordings.