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Digging Up the Scythians (Version for Voice & Chamber Ensemble)
Princess Clothing (Version for Voice & Chamber Ensemble): No. 1, Too Many People
Blizzard (Version for Voice & Chamber Ensemble)
Read the Review
Hannaford Street Silver Band, Zombie Blizzard, March 3
I don’t know if there’s a medical name for the maddening condition I have, or how common it is. What it amounts to is a complete inability to simultaneously absorb words and music that I am hearing for the first time. If I give up on trying to decipher the words, I can probably hum you a bit of the music after the fact. But if I focus on absorbing the meaning of the words as they are sung, then whatever magic is in the music goes straight into my auditory spam folder.
So what do I usually do? Either I make sure to at least read the texts and/or translations in the house program before the house lights go down, especially in halls where I know it’s going to be too dark to read; or I obsessively read along – surtitles or program text, whichever. I used to think it was a perfect compromise, and then something happened at Zombie Blizzard that reduced to dust the idea of program texts and surtitles as an acceptable two-state solution to placate both halves of my divided brain.
As a phrase, Zombie Blizzard is the title of a Hannaford Street Silver Band concert I attended this March and of a recording (from Leaf Music in Halifax). So in a sense, the concert was a CD launch event. As individual words, Zombie and Blizzard are the titles of the first two of seven poems, each of which is recited and then sung in the performance, before moving on to the next.
The Hannafords commissioned Zombie Blizzard from composer Aaron Davis specifically for Measha Brueggergosman-Lee who had latched onto Margaret Atwood’s anthology Dearly during the pandemic, and turned to Davis, her partner in musical crime for the past several years, convinced it had the potential to take their jazz-focused musical partnership into as yet unexplored musical realms.
The resulting poems/songs are described on the program cover as “concert arias by Aaron Davis & Margaret Atwood.” Atwood recites each poem (more accurately the voice of Margaret Atwood is heard reciting each poem), and each recitation is followed by the equivalent “concert aria” sung by Brueggergosman-Lee, with the backing of a 12-piece Hannaford and a jazz trio (piano, drums and bass) with composer Aaron Davis at the piano.
But there were no written texts for the poems anywhere: not in the program, and not on the big screen at the back of the stage, which is where I told myself they were bound to appear if they weren’t in the program. But nope. All we got on the screen was the title of each poem as Atwood’s voice, previously captured for the Leaf Record, rendered each poem in turn.
And oh what beautiful readings Atwood gave. Completely free of the declamatory, angsty bullshit that poets often succumb to when asked to perform their work – afraid that their listeners might get something different from what they wrote than they intended.
Instead the poet somehow gave the words permission to speak for themselves, landing like arrows or silk in the mind’s eye. At peace, fully possessed of all the intelligence it needed, the literary mind could let go, so the heart could listen fresh.
From Brueggergosman too, freed of the responsibility of having to mail words to the mind, we got what felt to this listener like the performance of her life.
