Alum Sets Poetry To Music

Soprano Carolyn Pratt Sings Works By Women Poets

Last Friday evening at Kulas Recital Hall, soprano Carolyn Pratt, Conservatory and College alum, sang the poetry of Emily Dickinson, Anna Akhmatova, Jane Kenyon and Maya Angelou in a performance entitled Womens' Words: The Poetry of Women Set to Music.

Accompanied by Daniel Michalak on piano, Andor Toth on violoncello, and Peter Slowik on viola ‹ all Conservatory faculty ‹ Pratt's performance explored the discoveries made when two mediums converge. At the opening of the show, Pratt encouraged the audience not to read along to the poems, but rather, to experience them in this context as pieces of music. Indeed, attached to melodies, the language assumed a different pathos.

At times, the music matched the words predictably. Late composer John Duke had set Dickinson's playful "Bee! I'm Expecting You" to a quick, bouncy rhythm which Pratt sang with child-like enthusiasm, prompting laughter from the audience at the closing line, "Reply or better, be with me ‹ Yours, Fly."

However, applying music to more ambiguous poems, like Jane Kenyon's "Who," more forcefully colored their tones. The character in "Who" sits in awe of the poetic process: "Who is it who asks me to find language for the sound a sheep's hoof makes when it strikes a stone?" This awe sounded more like profound fear, however, when the eerily creeping notes of William Bolcom's composition were added, forcing the listener to rethink the language and the character's situation.

Many of Bolcom's pieces carried this sense of foreboding. Setting Kenyon's "Otherwise" to a tense, clock-like rhythm and minor chords augmented its sense of precariousness in daily activities: "I got out of bed on two strong legs. It might have been otherwise."

Bolcom's song cycle of Kenyon pieces, Briefly It Enters, was the night's most recent composition, written in 1996, and the centerpiece of the show. Currently, Pratt is preparing a celebration of Kenyon, showcasing exclusively pieces by the late poet laureate of New Hampshire, set to music and read by her widower, poet Donald Hall.

When asked how she balances her roles as a singer and reader of poems, Pratt said, "I come to [the poetry] through the music. I like to look at where the line breaks are." Backed by an impeccable vocal delivery, Pratt's facial expressions and gestures placed the poems' characters and speakers on stage. During Dickinson's "An Awful Tempest Mashed the Air," her eyes darted anxiously. At the start of "I'm Nobody!", she sat near the edge of the stage, as though sharing a secret with the audience.

The music grew somber with Pratt's performance of pieces by 20th century Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. Here, Pratt's voice reached its widest range, dipping down nearly to tenor pitches, then crescendoing up to startlingly high notes.

Singing "Let Evening Come" by Maya Angelou, Pratt adhered to nearly every line break, demonstrating the musicality of the poem's original form. She even interrupted the melody to speak, with poignant, startling disgust, the word "ignorance." Near the end of the poem, referring to the death of "great souls," the subject of Angelou's poem, Pratt whispered twice, "They existed."

For a moment, it was difficult to tell whether one was listening to a poem or a song, but such revelatory confusion seemed to be just what Pratt had in mind.