I’m a classical music fan, but not a big opera fan. Oh, there are operas I do enjoy (“Carmen,” “The Barber of Seville,” a handful of others), but overall, I’m not an opera fanatic – and it turns out that the word “parlando” means “A piece of music to be sung or played in the style of a recitative” (in other words, dialogue in an opera that, rather than being sung as an aria, is reproduced with the rhythms of normal speech, often with simple musical accompaniment or harpsichord continuo).
So what brought me to a place where I encountered “parlando”?
Yesterday, a friend of mine came over, and we began to plan this December’s birthday celebration for Emily Dickinson. We get together with friends, and I play original music on the piano based on the poems of Dickinson (and other poets too), and she sings. The concert is always well received (at least, no rotten eggs or tomatoes have ever been thrown). LOL.
Later, after our planning session, I sat down to whip up today’s #DickinsonDaily post, and I checked the online Dickinson archive for poems Dickinson wrote about the month of July, and there’s exactly one – one poem with the word July. I compared the poems in the Johnson, Franklin, and Miller editions of “complete poems,” and they’re all the same – so no interesting stories on various versions of the poem to report. I then ran a quick Google-search on the poem, and I encountered an active blog (which was launched in 2016) with a reasonable and thoughtful analysis of the poem. When I got toward the bottom of the post, I encountered this statement: “Musically I had some fun with this one. On one hand the harmony is simple, a I V progression, but I used some less-common voicings for the Ab (it’s an AbMaj13) and Db (a DbMaj7) and I played sitar.” Say what? The writer, one Frank Hudson, had put the poem to music, and there’s even an audio link to hear his composition. |
The WHAT project? LOL. That’s when I looked up the word “parlando,” and that’s when I wrote today’s post!
The link to The Parlando Project’s take on “Answer July" is HERE.