The Parlando Project is predominently about its encounter with other people's words, but I do occassionally use my own, Today's piece is a setting of a sonnet (this poetic form's name means "Little Song") for acoustic guitar and piano. If the words are mine, my encounter with them is not unlike what we usually do here.
How so? I've been doing a big cleanup of old boxes and shelves this autumn and I came over a notebook of mine with the first 9 lines of this piece in it. I can't date the notebook for sure, but I'm guessing 1990s. It seemed like it was a fragement of an unfished poem, and so while resting near bedtime after a day of dust and toting off stuff for disposal or donation I added the final 5 lines to fufull the sonnet, based on a incident I observed while biking this month. Later in the week I did a couple of revision sessions and produced the text you'll hear performed. So, if the text today is my poem (not another's), the bulk of it was an encounter with someone's work I haven't seen for a few decades. I'll write more about this at the blog later this week.
The Parlando Project combines various words (usually other people's literary poetry) with original music in differing styles. We've done over 850 of these combinations, and you can hear any of them and read about how we came to make the piece at our blog and archives located at frankhudson.org
