Slider Section

Guest Post: Julie Clement

This spring the Eastman/University of Rochester Women's Chorus will be performing a work arranged by Moira Smiley, entitled “Bring Me Little Water, Silvy,” a song originally written and performed by Huddie Ledbetter, known as “Lead Belly.” Ledbetter (1888-1949) was an American folk and blues musician who was active in the 30's and 40's. The song is said to have been inspired by Lead Belly's Uncle Bob and his wife, Silvie (sometimes spelled “Silvy”). On hot days, Uncle Bob would be ploughing the fields a long way from their house and would yell up the hill to his wife to bring him some water to drink. When Lead Belly would perform outside of the south, he would provide his audiences, who often knew little of the culture of the rural south, with the background of his songs.

Smiley's a cappella arrangement of the work (arranged for SSAA), which is inspired by Sweet Honey in the Rock's version of the song, is a soulful rendering of Ledbetter's upbeat and folksy duet, with added body percussion adapted from the choreography of Evie Ladin.

The Women's Chorus, under the instruction of teaching assistant Kari, has had a lot of fun preparing the work. The work is effectively an exercise in multi-tasking, as the singers must sing from memory, keeping in mind the form of the piece while simultaneously performing an involved body percussion sequence.

The Eastman/University of Rochester Women's Chorus will be performing Smiley's arrangement of “Bring Me Little Water, Silvy” on April 17th at 8:00 PM in Kilbourn Hall. Be there!




Guest Post: Rachel Hammelman


Chris Lastovicka is a composer that set Kay Ryan’s Say Uncle to music in her composition Ryan Songs. Lastovicka’s third movement added to her piece is the second song named “Gaps” from Kay Ryan’s poem. The song begins with an alto solo, followed by a soprano finishing the thought of the first.

“Gaps don’t
just happen.
There is a
generative element
inside them,” (Ryan “Gaps” 1-5)

The alto soloist’s first line, corresponding to the first 5 lines of the poem, brings to light to the audience the idea of a gap. Lastovicka sets Ryan’s first line of text in a way where the word “happens” simply falls into the rhythm of natural order. Ryan says that gaps don’t just happen naturally; something stirs inside to make it from a small crack to a large gap. The gaps Ryan may have been referring to when she wrote this poem are the gaps that form between people as life goes on.

“a welling motion
as when cold
waters shoulder
up through
warmer oceans.” (“Gaps” 6-10)

Lastovicka creates the welling motion Ryan talks about in line 6 by having the soprano soloist crescendo into the word motion as to simulate what is stirring inside this gap that is forming. The comparison to colder waters pushing aside warmer oceans seems to parallel the change in feelings between people as this gap forms. The warm feelings of love and happiness are violently replaced by cold anger.

“And where gaps
choose to widen,
coordinates warp,
even in places
constant since
the oldest maps.” (“Gaps” 11-16)

The last phrase of the poem reflects what Ryan feels happens when the gaps that are created stay and widen. She views them as part of a landscape, as they grow wider, they change everything around them. This symbolizes the change that occurs when two people grow apart. Things change between them, even if they had been close for many years beforehand. Lastovicka takes the meaning of the last line of the song, “the oldest maps,” into her composition by making the alto’s last note and the soprano’s last note when they sing the word “maps” a note that comes as a surprise to the listener. This note that seems out of place signifies the effect of the gap that has been created, that in the end it will not be the same as it was before.

Lastovicka makes Ryan’s poems come to life as she takes the words and gives them a stronger meaning in her composition. She parallels the visual gaps Ryan put in her writing with auditory gaps made by pauses and rests, takes the words Ryan writes and sets the music to do just as the poem says. The combination of these two amazing artists creates an unbelievably beautiful piece that makes the listener look at the world with new eyes.

Guest Post: Alison Harper


Gaps don't
just happen.
There is a
generative element
inside them,
a welling motion
as when cold
waters shoulder
up through
warmer oceans.
And where gaps
choose to widen,
coordinates warp,
even in places
constant since
the oldest maps.

This poem always seemed the odd one out of the three, largely because it doesn’t seem to deal with people as characters or human interactions. Dr Silvey in an earlier rehearsal compared it to the previous set of Kay Ryan poems we have sung as a choir, which featured poems that were ‘observational’: recording the minutiae of water forming in a bucket, or the biological structure of a songbird. However, while this poem does seem to discuss material objects in the same way, I think that these function in the poem as metaphor for much broader and more intangible human concerns.

To start with: the obvious. Gaps are generally associated with loss, with an absence of something specific - a gap in a bookshelf signifies a missing book, for example. But here Ryan embodies the idea of a ‘gap’ with a great sense of presence. The gap is an actor, and agent, moving and growing on its own. It has power, and it has a mentality. In line 12, Ryan notes that the gap ‘chooses’ to widen, as if conscious. We could imagine the poet taking the poem in several different directions following the first line. ‘Gaps don’t just happen’: they could be created by people, in recognizing absence and loss. Instead, humans are excised from the picture, and the gaps, by being given power and mentality, replace them.

This is where the second association with ‘gaps’ comes into play. This is a word also identified as dangerous, a liminal space from which something unknown might appear, or into which you might fall. The gap between the train and the railway platform, for example, or a the gap between two buildings where you have to walk late at night. Ryan also emphasises this sense of menace and danger surrounding the gap, through lines like ‘as when cold / waters shoulder / up through / warmer oceans’ (lines 7-10). While ‘warmth’ is traditionally associated with positive attributes such as comfort, safety and happiness, ‘cold’ is traditionally associated with the opposite.

So far, the poet has described her new conception of ‘gaps’ as overturning the two main ideas we have of them: instead of absence, they are presence. Instead of providing a place from which something might come, or into which something might go, they are themselves that moving force from the outside which threatens to swallow us up. So assuming that Ryan isn’t describing a science-fiction horror scenario, what do these gaps represent?

After having established this new idea of ‘the gap’, I think Ryan suggests a meaning in the last few lines (also the lines which get repeated most often in the solos), where the gaps are charged with disrupting coordinates and therefore the legitimacy of our maps. This is a very powerful image. What do we use maps for? To visualize our world. Domestically, we can visualize specific places, but any attempt to imagine larger areas - your state, your country, your continent - requires imagining how they appear as on a map. And we trust, as we trust to those things which we learnt in childhood, to the constancy of those images. I know my country because I know where it is in relation to other countries, its allies and enemies and the millions of networks which connect and separate us. But if coordinates are no longer stable, if we can imagine gaps as actively disrupting that neat world-visualization, then how can we be certain of our place within it?

Think about ‘the oldest maps’ and how they were first created: by explorers physically moving over the land and waters and recording what they saw. Now we don’t physically discover new territory, but we do constantly learn new, potentially dangerous things about the world we live in. Maturity is a progression from simplistic understanding to complex appreciation, and our understanding of the world, of the political relationships the US has with countries in the Middle East, for example, is always changing. Out of simple faith in stability and the belief that we can know/acquire/keep everything we see, into a frightening awareness that the world is not mentally mappable, and is full of conscious, active forces which we cannot entirely see and cannot at all control.

This poem, as I see it, is an articulation of that understanding.

Guest Post: Milagros Luna

Chris Lastovika is a music composer. Lastovika’s compositions are minimalistic. Minimal music is a unique blend of ethnic, western and jazz music styles. The purpose of the genre is to provide complex counterpoint in a simplistic fashion.

At age 14, Lastovika became the youngest winner of Chicago’s Gruenstein Memorial National Organ Competition. At 15, she won the Otto B. Schoepfle National Organ Competition. Lastovicka studied composition as a teenager at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts. Lastovika studied organ with Edmund Shay. During college Lastovika studied composition with Frederick Bianch, Joel Hoffman and Allen Sapp. After college, she studied orchestration with Dominick Argentto. Chris Lastovicka attended the Cincinnati College conservatory of Music on full scholarship and graduated summa cum laude.

Lastovicka is the recipient of a Presser Award, a Hatz Award, a CAP Award from New Music USA, and grants from the National Alliance for Youth Sports and New York’s Foundation for the Arts. Lastovika is currently composing a set of choral pieces for the Eastman School of Music Women’s chorus.

Kay Ryan is a writer. Her literature is poetry. Ryan's poems are logical teasers of everyday life events. Ryan's awards include a 1995 award from the, Ingram Miller Foundation the 2000 Union League Poetry Prize, the 2001 Maurince English Poetry Scholarship for her collection Say Uncle, a fellowship in 2001 from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2004 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2004 Ruth Lily Putler Prize. Her poems have been included in three Pushcart Prize anthologies, and have been selected four times The Best American Poetry; "Outsider Art" was selected by Harold The Best American Poetry Since 2006, Ryan has served as one of fourteen Chancellors of The Academy of American Poets. On January 22, 2011, Ryan was listed as a finalist for a 2011National Book Critics Award. On April 18, 2011, she won the annual Pulitzer Prize of Poetry. On September 20, 2011, Ryan was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship or "genius grant". Finally in 2013, she received a 2012 National Humanities Medal.

Kay Ryan states that her poem “Why Must We Struggle” was inspired upon the writings of author Italo Calvino. Italo Calvino is a novelist who is known to blend fantasy, comedy and tragedy to give an illuminated depiction of modern life. Calvino entered the University of Turin to study science but dropped out to join the Italian army during the German occupation of Italy. Latter Calvino did not continue studying science and entered the Faculty of Letters instead. Calvino began writing a collection of stories based on his experiences during the war.

In 1975, Calvino was given an honorary membership of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1984, Mount Holyoke College awarded an honorary degree to Calvino.

“If we had not struggled
as hard as we can
at our strongest
how will we sense” (Ryan “Why We Must Struggle” 1- 4)

The poem “Why We Must Struggle” when analyzed through a superficial lens is about a speaker who is going through tough times and recites a mantra to himself in order to cope with whatever it is that is affecting him.

“saying how strange
it is that one sector
of the self can step in
for another in trouble,
how loss activates
a latent double” (Ryan “Why We Must Struggle” 9-14)

Knowing that the poem “Why We must Struggle” was inspired upon the poesy style of Italo Calvino allows me to deduce that the deep meaning of the poem is about a soldier saying that the pains that come with war both physical and physiological are worth going through because without pain there is no gain.

Composer Chris Lastovika has found a perfect way to marry two universal forms of communication- music and creative writing through her musical rendition of “Why We Must Struggle.”