I’ve always been interested in how creative people deal with limits and barriers. The pandemic-related restrictions on public gatherings have caused great disruptions for performers like myself and many in my circle. I want to highlight one friend and colleague who has successfully brought his skills to a new medium….
Time held me green and dyingThough I sang in my chains like the sea. Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill I’m not the only performer who has struggled with identity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Entire weeks of creative paralysis have gone by. I didn’t feel like singing or writing and couldn’t begin…
The last installment of posts about the Hermit Songs ends with a huge party, but not before study time… There used to be subject GRE tests (the test you take as a college senior that helps place you in graduate school). I took the music GRE, and one of the…
“… the light birds, with no soul but air …” 11th century, translated by W. H. Auden I am a serious birder. (I call my hobby “birdlookingfor” rather than “birdwatching” because often I’m just staring at a tree.) When people start talking about sports statistics or videogames or however else…
As many pixels as there are on the internet dedicated to cats – and cat-a-day calendars before that – I’ve always been surprised at the lack of songs about them. I am intimately familiar with the kind of companionship that this monk feels with his white cat, Pangur (though I’ve…
The Hermit Songs are spiritual without being liturgical. One of the most peculiar is “St. Ita’s Vision.” I don’t know much about St. Ita, but at least in this snippet of her life, she feels that she has been put on this earth in order to physically nurse the infant…
“But not a tear can I squeeze from my eyes…” 13th Century, trans. Sean O’Faolain, from “At Saint Patrick’s Purgatory“ In January of 2016, I cancelled all my commitments and stayed for a week at The Hermitage, a tiny house on the grounds of the Franciscan Monastery in Washington, DC….
Ah! To be all alone, in a little cell, with nobody near me…” from “The Desire for Hermitage,” tenth of the Hermit Songs. Words 8th-9th century, trans. Sean O’Faolain Isolation and solitude and loneliness seem to be the buzzwords of the COVID-19 pandemic, but those words describe the opposite of…
I recorded the Hermit Songs of Samuel Barber (1910-1981) in 2011 in collaboration with Andrew Earle Simpson on the piano. Besides putting the recording on a demo CD, I didn’t really do anything with it. (Some of you have that CD – I gave them away on a “donations accepted”…
