||8ve: the parallel octave chorus

We will meet
on Tuesday, July 9th
at 7 PM
in Mattin Center room 105
on the JHU Homewood campus

to record poems and also to have the first open public rehearsal of the Summer Theater & Music Laboratory–of which, more information, below! There will be pizza and a piano with no keys or action. Bring your own instruments, your voices, your choruses.

THEATER & MUSIC LAB;
FOR THE EXPERIMENTAL PERFORMER!

For performers–actors, musicians, singers—
who want to use their training
to work on improvising as a group—
in a chorus or orchestra/band–this summer.

We’ll be speaking, singing, and playing, in a format inspired by Greek choruses. Performers of all backgrounds are welcome.

We actually have quite a few classically trained musicians improvising with us–but we also have people who don’t read music.

Schedule conflicts are not a problem–we can work with anyone who can come to even part of these rehearsals. There is no memorization. The time commitment is low.

Read on for our schedule:
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Ten poem-recordings for the first rounds of “Auteur 101” student films–from Poe to Stephen Crane to Marceline Desbordes-Valmore. Downloadable and listenable on SoundCloud now.

You can follow the filmmakerly antics of our students at http://auteur101.wordpress.com. Their first films, based on these recordings, will appear on Wednesday!

Herewith, Parallel Octave’s first album, directed by the venerable Danny Schwartz. It contains jazz, choruses, singing, poetry by Heine and Coleridge in both German and English, and obstruse (obtuse + abstruse) criticism of poetry, including portions of the Preface to “Lyrical Ballads.” 16 tracks; 20 minutes long. It is awesome.

This album is FREE! We’ll be giving it away all summer, but you can also listen or download right now on SoundCloud.

(One note: these tracks are not available for ANTHOLOGY filmmakers. The team that made Albatross Tree is planning some kind of massive filmopoetic extravaganza.)

Venerable Octaves! We have resolved to meet
to record poems chosen by the erstwhile students of “Auteur 101: Short Film Laboratory”
on Tuesday, July 2nd
at 7 PM
in Mattin Center 105
on the JHU Homewood campus.

There will be a piano in the room. Otherwise, BYOInstruments. Also, #ThereWillBePizza

These poems will be used by the students for their films for the class, which will become part of the glorious compilation which is ANTHOLOGY III.

Did we mention that the Call For Filmmakers is up, by the way? It is! You can read the guidelines and rules here, and check out the available sound files…here. Choose your poem, and make your film. But do it quickly–because ANTHOLOGY III is a speed filmmaking project, and you only have 21 days in which to do it.

Our last open session of the Spring 2013 semester will be
Sunday, April 28;  2-3:30 PM;
in the SDS Room of the Mattin Center on the JHU campus, in Baltimore.

We will record poems, with live improvised music, on an as-yet-unspecified, mysterious theme. Perhaps something about the bitterness of endings, and the promise of return.

Spring! Spring! Spring! Spring…spring is upon us; and with spring, its incumbent regrets. All those birds, and all those flowers–depressing, disturbing. Unsettling. Deeply unsettling. As Robert Herrick once said, of daffodils, ” We die / As your hours do, and dry / Away…”

Ten poems of the Twisted Spring:

Frightening, these daffodils. Frightening.

We met to record poems related to this subject, the Twisted Spring,
on Sunday, April 7th, 2-3:30 PM, in the SDS Room in Mattin Center on the JHU campus. Sound files from this session can be found here on SoundCloud.

“Sun, leprous flowers, foul child. The asphalt burns.
The garrulous sparrows perch on metal Burns.
Sing! Sing! they say, and flutter with their wings.”
– John Gray, “Poem”

Poems included the following works of Gray, Herrick, Millay, Thomson, & Clare…& Nashe, & Shakespeare:

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This is the choir teaching the audience a few choruses from the show, in the gallery next to the theater, right before the performance. Picture by photographer Rami Shaya. More pictures will be posted here as soon as they are uploaded.

Improvising choristers and Parallel Octavians of the global variety are invited to join us this Wednesday, March 27 at Fabryka Sztuki in Łódź, for a new version of TO DIE IN ATHENS, the show we presented at the Homewood House Museum in Baltimore in July. Now with 100% more Polish!

Parallel Octave will perform as a guest act
at the Maryland state finals of the Poetry Out Loud competition
on this Saturday, March 9th
at the Baltimore Museum of Art,
at the Meyerhoff Auditorium.

2012 winners and finalists from the Poetry Out Loud competition.

We’ll be drawing on ParOct favorites for this event:
we will read Wallace Stevens‘s “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” at 1:30 PM,
and Gertrude Stein‘s “Stanzas in Meditation,” with audience participation, at 3:00 PM.

Followed by free food for all, performers and audience, at Gertrude’s!

From the Poetry Out Loud website:

Please join us at the Maryland Poetry Out Loud State Finals, March 9, 2013, 1:00 pm, at the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Auditorium. The competition will be hosted by Aaron Henkin, host of WYPR’s weekly arts and culture radio magazine, The Signal, with performances by Emmy-nominated singer/songwriter ellen cherry and Baltimore-based improvising chorus, Parallel Octave.

The event is free and open to the public.

“But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.”
– Ernest Dowson

We will meet
on Sunday, March 3rd
in JHU’s Mattin Center, in the SDS room
from 2-3:30 pm
to record poems
with live improvised music
upon the theme of Tercets N’ Dregs.

I have been faithful to thee, Ernest Dowson, in my fashion.

In keeping with this session being on 3/3/13, we have chosen to focus on the triplicative, triangular, three-sided tercet–a three-line stanza. (The one we have shown you above is actually half of a six-line stanza, but, you know…who’s counting…not us.)

In keeping with the dreaded month of February finally being over, we have taken Ernest Dowson’s poem “Dregs” as the second half of our theme, and also sampled some poetry from him, Robert Graves, and others, that relates to things having dragged on longer than they should.

Those things might be relationships, life, human existence, Phil Jackson’s coaching career, or somebody or other’s long, long poem in tercets (ahem, Wallace Stevens, ahem).

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