Author Archives: weinberg

Text: W.B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming“: three versions.

Version 1: Trouble on the Wagon Train.
A caravan moving across the desert; people pacing in between the wagons; horses pawing the dust.

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Text: Christopher Smart’s “For I Will Consider My Cat Jeoffry,” an excerpt from his longer poem, “Jubilate Agno.”

Version 1: I Sing the Cat Electric.
(A joyous, riotous celebration of the cat, lapsing into occasional moments of meditative contemplation of the cat. Structured around unison choruses.)

Version 2: Live From Debtor’s Prison.
(Shifting from one solo, isolated voice to another.)

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Parallel Octave performs tonight, November 3rd, at the Bell Foundry, as part of the Wham City lecture series. We’ll perform some Stevens and Crane, and then invite the audience to join us in creating an improvised chorus based on the text of Ted Hughes’s “Agammemnon.”

$2 admission gets you two 45-minute lectures: Caroline Marcantoni speaking on Kierkegaard’s Metaphysics and Dara Weinberg with Parallel Octave speaking on The Greek Chorus: Performance Approaches.

Location: Bell Foundry, 1539 N. Calvert Street
Doors: 7 pm.
Event begins: 7:30 pm

This is what happens when you convene a chorus on Halloween: you record Poe, Pound, Berryman, Amy Lowell, a Kraftwerk Dickinson, and Stevens.

To begin, two versions of John Berryman’s very Shakespearean Dream Song 147, in which Henry talks of Gertrude. “He looked on the world like the leavings of a hag.”

Dream Song 147, anguished tornado version:

Dream Song 147, stoical version (more of the “surveying the troops” spirit of Animula):

…It’s not Parallel Octave unless the core group does another performance demo of “Emperor of Ice-Cream.”

But wait! There’s more:
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Robert Herrick’s “The Hag“:

The first three stanzas of William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence“:

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Text: The first three stanzas of William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence,” with guests from New York City.

A partial pop music “Auguries of Innocence”:

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Text: Robert Herrick, “Delight in Disorder.”

Pleasantly imprecise voices in overlapping conversation:

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Text: “My Grandmother’s Love Letters,” Hart Crane.

Crane A: Octaves and rainwater

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Three different versions of T.S. Eliot’s “Animula”:

A: Eerie unresolved guitar. Resignation. Frustration. “I told you so” voices. Stark. Ending without music.

B: Gentle contempt, sadness. “That’s the way the cookie crumbles” voices. Darker, lower chords. Hymnlike sung ending.

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Text: Kenneth Koch’s “To Various Persons Talked To All At Once.”

Koch B: Rolling, ramshackle waves. (Text starts almost a minute into this recording. Long segment of dreamlike, scene-establishing initial wave sounds.)

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