Dr. Jonathan Bailey Holland
On January 1, 2014 AfriClassical posted: Imani Winds: 'The Rite of Spring' single released to acclaim and on 'iTunes Best of 2013 list'!
Today we received a tweet from composer Jonathan Bailey Holland, whose home town is Flint, Michigan where we lived for a couple of years in the 1960s:
#VCFAwriting visiting #VCFAmusic faculty #JonathanBaileyHolland speaks RE: new works from finished works @AfriClassical @VCFAMusicComp
We asked Jonathan to explain his presentation so we could pass it on to our readers. He graciously and immediately replied:
Hi Bill,
Sounds like you were in Flint during it's hey day. It is a much different place these days.
I am actually giving a talk at Vermont College of Fine Arts (where I am
on the Composition Faculty) about writing songs. I am giving the talk
to the students (and faculty) in the Writing (as in
fiction/poetry/creative non-fiction) Program. The title of the talk is
"From Manuscript to Manuscript: Creating Works from "Finished" Works.
Here is the blurb:
Much
of the music I have written incorporates text, from art songs for solo
voice and piano using poetry by Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes,
Sandra Cisneros and others, to a chamber opera with a libretto from a
one-act play by Christopher Durang, to works using narration drawn from
prose, including children’s books, and more. The act of combining text
with music has been interpreted by composers in numerous ways, from
conveying the text directly to using the phonetic sounds as an extension
of the composer’s sonic palette without regard to the meaning of the
words. As a student of Bernard Rands, composer of Pulitzer Prize
winning song cycle Canti del Sole, which combines texts written
in multiple languages, and a student of Ned Rorem – the preeminent and
prolific American composer of art songs, I am acutely aware of the irony
and responsibility of creating a work of art – i.e. vocal music – by
starting with a presumably finished work or art – in this instance
someone else’s text. My presentation will include primarily sharing
some of my various musical works that incorporate text, as well as a
discussion of my process for setting text and my philosophy behind the
setting of other artists’ work.
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