Textual

I'm not a textual editor, so take this cum grano salis, or with several. Textual editing can be oriented toward

*the creative process. Here the interest is in the process of the text before the definitive version, or the revisions among several editions.

*the final product, representing the author's final say about what the text should be.

(Other factors can also intervene, like readability or textual convention.)

My interest in primarily in the text's reception, so I tend to gravitate first to the text that the first readers would have seen, or to editions that have had a wide diffusion. Maybe that's why I'm not a textual editor.

More monk

I remember reading in a book on Monk, by a German scholar (whom I should forgive because this was one of the first serious books on Monk) that Monk wanted to look at the sheet music before recording his Ellington album. The author thought that this was an indication that he didn't know Ellington's music very well. It wouldn't occur to him that Monk would want to study Duke's music, one serious composer to another, before recording it. Here's the thing. Monk would play the same songs over and over, not just his own, but also the standards that he liked the most, at any given time. I doubt he would just go into the studio without studying the music he was going to play, and just jam on Caravan or Sophisticated Lady.

"If you're a theory nerd, Jonathan Mayhew's Apocryphal Lorca rocks"

Or, I hope, even if you're not a theory nerd.



In writing a series of poems that entered into dialogue with Lorca, whose work has been so been so instrumental to me as a poet, I considered the boundaries between reading and writing, and history and myth. How has Lorca’s biography intersected with interpretations of the dynamic body of work he left behind? Furthermore, how does my own cultural and historical perspective inflect my engagement with his work? As a PhD student at Florida State University, I read Jonathan Mayhew’s Apocryphal Lorca: Translation, Parody, Kitsch, which makes a pretty convincing case for the invention of ever-shifting “American Lorca(s)” via 20th-century English language translations, apocrypha, and the claims made on his legacy by the purveyors’ aesthetic and theoretical movements like Ethnopoetics, Queer Theory, the Black Arts Movement, the New York School, the Beat Generation, and Deep Imagism. Through the Lorca persona poems in Spectator, I try to get at the unstable boundaries between emulation and imagination, and influence and invention.


Kara: Historically and culturally, Lorca’s sexuality was taboo, but to the contemporary reader, it seems so evident, I think. I’m fascinated with ways in which self and (social) world intertwine, and Lorca seems to me an embodiment of this overlap. So yeah, it also became a question of how to enter into Lorca’s persona while still making the mask obvious. I mean I can’t and didn’t want to mime Lorca (who did it first and best). So the whole thing was a challenge.

Brian S: He’s someone I wish I’d read more of. I’ll have to make time for it. You’ve re-piqued my interest in him.

Kara: Excellent. Poeta en Nueva York is a great place to start.

Jennifer: Those were some of the most powerful poems in the book for me… maybe because they speak so well to the other poems that wrestle with desire in more contemporary situations.

Kara: If you’re a theory nerd, Jonathan Mayhew’s Apocryphal Lorca rocks, too.

I find it wonderfully gratifying when I find poets and dramatists who have continued the tradition of engagement with Lorca after reading my own book about the subject.

More Monk

Very simple forms, and sing-song, singable melodies. Kitschy stride patterns. Percussive, repetitive patterns. Physicality. Humor.

Intellectual eccentricity. Harmonic complications. Dissonances. Weird vacillations.

So complexity and simplicity. It's cerebral on one level but deeply moving, with emotional depth and a variety of other emotions, humor, tenderness, melancholy.

The melodic gift is undeniable. That is primary, with distinctive approaches, as well to harmony, rhythm, and timbre. A lot of original compositions by jazz players, well, they are not melodically distinctive. You wouldn't remember them. I saw on you tube part of a concert, and the leader announced that they would play an original composition called ... and then they proceeded to play "Sophisticated Lady" with a disguised melody.

The Recovery

I played a wrong chord on my recording, in one the better takes so I had to use it. What I did was to play another chord right after, making it seem like the wrong chord was an intentional dissonance that led to a resolution. The trick is to make even wrong notes seem appropriate in their context. Similarly, a hesitation before a chord, I prefer to see as Monk-like, even though it was actually the result of my inability to remember what the chord was supposed to be.

I also find that my playing does not swing. In fact, I don't hear most of my songs, even in my own head as I imagine others might play them, as swinging. That might be too bad, because I like swing in music I listen to, but I don't really want to force the issue either. I have rhythmic patterns in my head that are simply not those. You will notice in Monk's playing that he doesn't use the same bebop rhythms as Bud Powell, or the countless Bud Powell knock-offs. Each player, whether Oscar Peterson or Monk, or Powell, or Evans, has a kind of template for how they are hearing and producing rhythms. When you hear someone say that a musician does not swing, it could be that they are like me (incompetent) or else maybe they do swing, but in a way different from the template you associate with swing. For example, one jazz critic was driven crazy by Peterson's rhythmic conception. Many think Bill Evans couldn't swing, although they are obviously wrong. Swing is not the most evident quality of Duke Ellington's piano playing for that matter.

Monk had several rhythmic conceptions. For example, a deadpan, singsong stride imitation that he would use to play "Lulu's Back in Town" or "Sweet and Lovely." A hesitating, halting, vacillating style that I hated the first time I heard, that he would use in solo work especially on his own tunes and slower ballads. And a bebop style.

Playback

In addition to being able to hear the flaws in my playing (at least I can hear those with come clarity), when listening to a song I've recorded I can also hear the chords as chords, without the intervention of my fingers which play individual notes. I know what the chords are, because I came up with them and played them, but I couldn't identify them as such if someone else were playing them, so I can hear them more purely, as colors.

If I can hear what I'm doing wrong with some precision, then I can correct it. I can hear that connections can be more legato, or that I rush in certain places, or hesitate too long for a fermata. Isn't listening a more important skill than playing, then?

Legato

My playing should be much more legato, I noticed. I never use pedal even when I play a real piano, because I have a hard time coordinating that, but I should be able to play very legato even without that. I need good phrasing, dynamics, and articulation. I don't need to worry about speed, though. I'll inflict this first effort only on close friends and family.

I should work on two songs at once, and then record them.