Original Music set to poetry: "The Raven"
Happy Halloween!
We love to integrate music and poetry. Andy has written original music to poetry by James Weldon Johnson, Emily Bronte and Shel Silverstein. One of the reasons we are passionate about combining words with music is because we want to go into schools and communities as part of arts integration with learning areas such as literacy.
While COVID-19 has impacted how we can reach audiences in person we’re still keen to create what we can and interact through social media and our YouTube channel. Halloween is the perfect backdrop to have fun with spooky sounds! We knew we wanted to create something for Halloween back in August, and Andy jumped at the thought of choosing a work by Edgar Allan Poe. We narrowed down options between “Tell Tale Heart,” and “The Raven.” As the “Tell Tale Heart” is a short story, we decided to stick with poetry and so we finally selected “The Raven”.
Andy was excited to create spooky and intense music. After reading the poem several times, the musical ideas that came to mind included:
dissonant harmonies (such as the tri-tone)
12-tone serial sections
some extended techniques - playing close to the bridge for distorted effects, tapping on the instrument, Bartok pizzicatos (slapping the string against the fingerboard)
tremolos (fast tremors of the bow)
col legno (hitting the stick of the bow against the strings)
using mutes to soften the sound.
As always with the creative process, Andy sometimes felt like he was on a roll writing the music…and some parts felt really stuck, like major writing block. At one point, he thought of scraping the whole idea! However, after skipping ahead to the end of the poem to get somewhat of a fresh start, it helped to work backwards after that.
Finally after writing it and going back through to make edits, we were ready to begin practicing it! First, we played through it together, to hear it and to make changes. After initially reading through it, we then began our individual practice phase. For a few weeks, we went to separate rooms and practiced our parts! After becoming familiar with our individual parts we then began rehearsing together, figuring out bowing coordination and intonation with some pretty funky sounding chords!
One other important part of the project is the voice. We needed a narrator! We asked Andy’s brother, Eric, and we were thrilled that he accepted our request! One of the activities that has blossomed for us during COVID-19 has been online D&D with Eric (who lives in Ohio) as Dungeon Master. We love how he voices different characters and it’s always so much fun! We knew he would be perfect to narrate any project.
Andy sent instructions to Eric for his audio recording. Eric needed to know the timing for sections to sync with the faster and slower paced music composed by Andy. We decided to premiere it online October 29th and we completed our recording of the music a few days beforehand.
We are proud of what we have created and sincerely appreciate the feedback we have received for this project. We are also excited that Fox8 did a little feature on our take of “The Raven”!
Winston-Salem couple performs eerie musical take on Edgar Allen Poe classic ‘The Raven’
We really had fun on the day of recording where some last minute thoughts came to mind. Andy dropped by Home Depot to pick up red and orange light bulbs. We took all the pictures off the wall and we love the shadow play that you can see in the video.
We hope you get lots of (good) thrills while watching our original music set to “The Raven”!