3. RadiOM.org takes on National Poetry Month

Celebrate National Poetry Month on radiOM with song cycles, sound poets, and an incredible reading of Chaucer in Middle English.

Inverness Music Festival 1974: A Centennial Tribute to Charles Ives
A program of music by Charles Ives, performed at the San Domenico School in San Anselmo, California as part of the 1974 Inverness Music Festival. The program begins with a brief biographical sketch of this important American composer, offered by the concert host and narrator, James Frush. The concert proper then gets under way with Ives's Sonata No. 4 for Violin and Piano. This is followed by a selection of songs, either written or arranged by Charles Ives. Some of these songs are settings for a variety of 19th and 20th century poets, ranging from the German Romanticism of Heinrich Heine to American cowboy poems of D J. O'Malley, while others use Ives's own words. Additional works heard include the Piano Study No. 9: The Anti-Abolitionist Riots in the 1830's and 1840's and the Trio for Violin, Violoncello and Piano. Held a hundred years after the composer's birth, this concert helped reawaken American audiences to the many varied works of Charles Ives.


Ode To Gravity: Bob Cobbing (1972)
Bob Cobbing, a dynamic gentleman with a sonorous voice and lovely accent, was one of the best known sound poets in the world. Cobbing also was a producer and collector of concrete or visual poetry, and his bookstore, Better Books of London was a leading distribution point for avant-garde poets during the 1960s and 70s. In this program, recorded in 1972, Cobbing talks about his early work as a teacher and later as a publisher of visual poetry, as well as his opinions about the field of sound poetry. You will hear a selection of his sound poems and an engaging interview recorded in Cobbing's home as he talked with Charles Amirkhanian. Bob Cobbing died in 2002 at the age of 82. (Photo by Charles Amirkhanian)

A Reading from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
Professor Jess B. Bessinger, Jr. reads the general prologue and the concluding retraction of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. One of the foremost experts on early English poetry, Bessinger offers a masterful recitation of this seminal work of literature, all in the original Middle English. The lyrical quality of Chaucer's masterpiece is best appreciated when read aloud by someone fluent in the archaic form of English in which it was written. While most students have read at least one of these tales in a High School English class, those often belabored readings, replete with many mispronunciations and frequent interruptions, as various footnotes are investigated, often remove much of the beauty, and mask the humor, that is the hallmark of the original poem. It is therefore a marvelous opportunity to have all the various characters of the book so vividly brought to life by this recording.

And, unrelated to Poetry Month, check out this Informance sponsored by ROVA:Arts, now available on radiOM.org.
Improv:21 Bob Ostertag
As part of the Improv:21 series sponsored by ROVA:Arts, Derk Richardson interviews composer, performer, author, and musical theoretician Bob Ostertag, before a live audience at the San Francisco Museum of Performance & Design on May 27, 2007. Ostertag concentrates his remarks on the evolution of electronic music, what constitutes a performance, and the inherent tension between body and machine. He begins by referencing the essays of electronic music pioneers Edgar Varèse and Karlheinz Stockhausen, both of whom predicted the future preeminence of electronic music because it would free the composer from the interpretation of their creations by third parties. Ostertag suggests that a problem not foreseen by those early advocates was the difficulty in devising a truly electronic instrument, one that performers would be able to practice playing for years on end, eventually becoming virtuosic. According to Ostertag the very nature of electronic music is based on automated processes and electric circuits that by definition can not be touched directly, but only adjusted by altering various parameters, typically using a modified keyboard or other traditional acoustic instrument based interfaces. Ostertag relates his various experiences trying alternative controllers and his eventual acceptance that this interface dilemma was not likely to be solved anytime soon. He also comments on the growing popularity of electronic dance music with its machine perfect rhythms, and the prevalence of "laptop concerts," two phenomenona that raise questions about what constitutes a performance, and the role of improvisation in electronic music. The depth and range of Ostertag's analysis, as well as his open and warm personality, make this a rewarding program for anyone with an interest in the influence technology has had on modern music, and society at large.