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Kansas City's Online Journal of the Performing Arts

Composers are inspired by others for ideas.  This weekend, the Kansas City Symphony with the Kansas City Symphony Chorus will perform The Singing Rooms, a recent work by contemporary composer Jennifer Higdon.  Higdon won the Pulitzer Prize for music composition a little over a month ago, so she obviously gets ideas from good sources. 

Last week, I interviewed Jennifer Higdon and this week, I talked with the author of poems which inspired the composer, as well as two members of the Kansas City Symphony Chorus for their perspective of this work as musicians and performers.

Dr. Jeanne Minahan McGinn is the Department Chair of Liberal Arts at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. What makes this unusual is that one doesn't usually think of the Curtis Institute as a "liberal arts" college, and in fact, it isn't.  It is a renowned music school. 

So, what is it like to teach music students something other than music?  And for that matter, what is it like to work with Jennifer Higdon?  

David Peironnet:  Poetry is the product of your alter-ego.  By day, you are the hard-charging Dr. Jeanne Minahan McGinn who chairs the department of liberal arts and teaches English literature.  In your spare time, what little there is of it, poet Jeanne Minahan writes poetry.  How do you make time for your writing, and what do you use as inspiration for your ideas?

Jeanne Minahan: Thanks for noticing the eternal struggle with time!  Everyone faces it, I know, and yet I don't seem to tire of writing about it.  I write in the morning before I go in to Curtis to teach.  Most days, every day, I write -though occasionally an early morning meeting can put those first moments of the day under extreme pressure.  Then, on train trips and during the summer months, I transfer the work to the computer and try to shape each poem, each manuscript.  Work that is more urgent finds its way to the computer soon after I've written it.

Inspiration? That could be anything: this cup of tea, the sound of the surf, hum of a bee, hearing an oldster sing a snatch of a song, recalling the feel of skates carving turns on the frozen ponds of childhood. Sometimes there's just a line in my head and I have to get it down, see where it wants to travel, where it wants to take me.  

DP:  Some people believe that to be effective as a professor and an educator, you have to be an active part of the arts community.  Performances of The Singing Rooms has been all over the country.  In what way has this helped you become a better professor?  A better poet?

Jeanne: The Singing Rooms has been a tremendous learning experience for me.  My students had to teach me how to bow!  Suddenly, I was, I am, speaking their vernacular.  And yes, I hope that travelling with a piece of music helps me to understand their lives as performers.   Certainly, in my teaching I want to convey to my students the necessity of listening and reading and writing with alert engagement-in response to books, life and music - so that they become articulate regarding their own ideas and interpretations.  I want them to be street smart and savvy.  I also want the students to enjoy what we read even when it doesn't seem "relevant"- there's a deep pleasure to reading, and that's worth noticing.

We can read and write to enjoy the ecstatic in art.  Art can send us out of ourselves: ex stasis, out of place. Sometimes we read for the transportation - perhaps it's the same with music. I want them to think about the intersections of music, literature and art, because beauty lies at the nexus. There's a gleam there, without which, we may be lost.

The experience of collaborating with Jennifer Higdon, and watching her work with integrity and honesty in her own life, as a composer, and in her interactions with others, has been inspiring.  Devotion to the long work of craft and art is a joy and it's been very encouraging to meet others who share that devotion to their work.

I think my relationship with music has been changed utterly by working at Curtis, and that has found its way into what I write.

DP: The Singing Rooms has a delightful lyrical quality.  Did you ever think how it might serve as inspiration for a musical composition as you wrote this set of poems?

Jeanne: Never!  It never occurred to me.  Jennifer gleaned these poems from a few different manuscripts.  When she told me her choices, I thought she was, well, mad as a hatter!  But then, when you read the poems together, or hear how she links them with her idea of a day, and the violin as a guide, they make new sense as a whole.  She has, I think, translated the poems into another tongue; the voice of music.

DP: Do you have a personal favorite poem from The Singing Rooms?  

Jeanne:  No, not exactly a favorite.  Each one hums for me at different times.  It's funny to me which poems she chose.  I thought for sure she'd select a sonnet or a villanelle or something with regular or traditional meter or form.  So each poem in The Singing Rooms has its own history and genesis and I think of each one and hear each one with separate resonances.  Seamus Heaney talks about trying to "glean the unsaid off the palpable," and that seems a fine aim to me.

DP: What's next for Jeanne Minahan, the poet; and Jeanne Minahan McGinn, the department chair?

Jeanne: I hope to keep assembling quiet mornings for writing and not so quiet afternoons and evenings!  And I hope to keep the liberal arts a vital place of engagement for the students at Curtis; it's a gift to work at a place that supports the nurturing of curiosity and the unleashing of art.  And, I'm very fortunate to be learning from the great artists who attend and teach at the school.

DP: What question should I have asked but didn't?

Jeanne: Blue (my favorite color).

DP: Ahhhh. The secrets of poet Jeanne Minahan revealed!

PREVIEW:
The Kansas City Symphony
with Jennifer Koh, violin
Bolero!
Friday, May 21 at 8 p.m.
Saturday, May 22 at 8 p.m.
Sunday, May 23 at 2 p.m.
Lyric Theatre
11th and Central Streets, Downtown Kansas City, MO
For tickets call 816-471-0400 or online at www.kcsymphony.org



The Singing Rooms
by Jeanne Minahan McGinn

Three Windows: Two Versions of the Day
Three windows offer two versions of the day,
the first: cool and sweet, a blue cascade
of watered light,
the second: bright heat barely held back
by the venetian blind.
Inside, the blue falls across
the small kitchen (a breeze
at your back), and angles
into the living room where
the table and two chairs swim.
The couch, the desk, bookshelves,
the bed, they submit
each morning to the thin cloths of light
that drape, linger and slide
across them; its shape their shape.
Both are here, though you
cannot be:
that heat, that long shade of blue.

Things Aren't Always
Not every newborn cries in hunger,
not every dog barks in alarm.
Musicians, on a whim,
break our hearts,
lovers take the blame.

The Interpretation of Dreams
If I told you my dream
(the one on a boat);
if I told you how I read
your dream with a cello:
a new laugh
an old hush.

Confession
Once I slept all night without dreaming
in the body of a small summer flower:
buttercup, yellow and damp,
circling me with warmth.
And I've taken tears from an earthen bowl,
clay pressed in a curve of bone:
a basin borne of rib and hip.
I drank and sang in sweet drunkenness.
Once I dressed in luminous dust
and set myself spinning in the Pleiades
just to be unseen among the seen.
I admit I've listened to the whistling of God,
kissed lips that were not mine or yours.
If I tell you these things now,
you must hold them in your palms
as I have seen you hold water:
cupped and uncontained.
give me such forgiveness
as that:
liquid, poured out,
uncondemned
for being so clear.

History Lesson
How brief the pause
between despair and comfort.
How eternal.
How small the space
between window and frame.
How cold the wind.
[Teach me which of the stars have shifted.
Tell me where error crept in. Show me
the overlooked weed, infection, accounting mistake.
Adjust my glasses, hearing, fingertips.
Point me to the abandoned faith.]
When the day dims
light the largest fire, cliff high.
And when they tell the story
of these sad times
Remember
We lit that fire
to spare the other ships
these treacherous rocks.

A Word with God
And, finally, we ask ourselves,
where did we spend our days, whose voice
turned our heads, hushed, thrilled,
entered, lingered, left us?
(Standing on a far shore,
uncertain of the hour or day
in a quiet not quiet.)
I walk towards you, I walk away;
my feet pull me back.
Wild One, your magnetic love
draws me (polar eclipse and warm),
you are the paradox towards which
I tend, you are the ache,
I don't need to speak,
you are the name of all names.
"Your feet will bring you to where your heart is." (Irish Proverb)

Three Windows: Two Versions of the Day
(reprise)

By David Peironnet

Special to KCM

David Peironnet has been a concert-goer for more years than he would care to admit, and can clearly recall hearing the Kansas City Philharmonic under the baton of Hans Schweiger. This comes from someone who admits to be only 24 years old though acknowleges that his undergraduate degree was not in math but rather political science -- a group of people who are notoriously able to see only those facts they want to see in statistical data.

David has churned out the newsletter for the Friends of the Symphony - Kansas City for six or seven years. He doesn't recall and really doesn't care how many years it has been because the only thing that's important is the next deadline -- and the one after that.

This is one of a series of interviews he runs periodically usually consisting of five open-ended questions which reveal answers which can give information to the person walking into a concert hall for the first time, or like himself have been enjoying concerts for many years.

David and Kathy Peironnet frequently work at the Friends of the Symphony gift shop which is located in the lobby of the Lyric Theatre. The next time you come to a concert, stop by and say, "hello." Ask for a copy of the current FoS newsletter. If a copy isn't available, just ask and one will be mailed to you.