Tag: poet

Thomas Moore: “His Songs Are Timeless”

On November 30, 2017

Portrait of Thomas Moore (1779 – 1852), Irish poet, singer and songwriter, by Martin Archer Shee (National Gallery of Ireland)

When it’s discovered I lived in Dublin, I am always asked, since I have no Irish ancestry or family, why I chose to live there.

Romantic as it sounds (and romantic as it was at times), it’s because so many of the artists I admired in my youth were from Ireland; some chose to stay, some chose to leave, but I felt, as a young woman hungry for art, adventure, and love (and some magical combination therein), that it was important to be in the place of my artistic heroes and heroines, as if by some magical osmosis their genius might seep into my own work. I was fortunate to have spent good amounts of time working with and around artists of all kinds during my time there, and though it wasn’t quite what I’d been expecting, to quote Danish photographer Krass Clement (who himself spent a good deal of time in Dublin in the 90s), “I was a bit scared, but also drawn to the atmosphere.” Amen.

I seriously contemplated a trip to Ireland on my way back from Berlin recently. The timing meshed beautifully with the last third of the Wexford Festival Opera, an fest I have long wanted to attend, and which holds particular fascination for its blend of Irish culture and rarely-done work by famous composers. One event, The Thomas Moore Songbook, especially caught my interested. I’ve loved the work of Moore for many decades; the 19th century writer was one of the figures firmly in mind when during my initial move to Dublin decades ago. As my exposure to the music, movies, literature, theater of Ireland expanded, I became especially fascinated by such a small country, with such a difficult and very painful history, producing so very many great artists of all stripes, some wildly divergent in terms of their thoughts and feelings around the notion of Irish identity. Moore was one of the very first widely-acclaimed Irish artists to examine this question in a way that was inspiring, enchanting, and important, all at once. His work seems more important than ever now, in light of current news around borders and Brexit.

As well as being an acclaimed singer, songwriter, poet and entertainer, Moore (born in 1779) led an incredibly interesting, accomplished, and occasionally tragic life; he was one of the first Catholics admitted to Trinity College Dublin, had a brief stint living in Bermuda, and outlived all five of his children. The Poetry Foundation (who publish Poetry magazine) describes him as “a born lyricist and a natural musician, a practiced satirist, and one of the first recognized champions of freedom of Ireland.” His best-known work is Irish Melodies (1808-1834), which came to span over ten volumes and cemented Moore’s reputation in the poetry/music worlds. Composers (including Berlioz) set nine of them to music, and the works were translated into several languages including Czech and Hungarian.

Volume 2 of Moore’s biography of Lord Byron. (Book and photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without permission.)

Moore was also good friends with Lord Byron, who described various Moore works as his “matins and vespers.” The two had a long association, and Moore wrote a biography of his famous friend (who died in Greece in 1824), one Mary Shelley particularly admired. My intense love of the work of the so-called “dangerous-to-know” poet in my university days led me to Moore and made me a forever fan. This love expressed itself most clearly via loss; when a very close friend of the family’s, passed away in the late 1990s, my grieving mother asked me what should be carved on his gravestone. With nary a hesitation, I choose a few passages from a poem of Moore’s, words she loved. When my mother herself passed away in 2015, I couldn’t imagine the words of any other poet on her gravestone.

Wexford wasn’t in the cards this year, alas, but when I return to Ireland, it will be for a lengthy visit; there’s so much to see, to rediscover, to reconnect with and to explore anew. The Wexford Festival Opera is at the top of that list, and I am hoping there will be more of Moore’s work presented — that is a given if Una Hunt has anything to do with it. Hunt is an accomplished broadcaster, musician, coach, and scholar, and is a leading authority on Irish music history, particularly within the realm of forgotten composers. She has been at the forefront of the new Archive of Irish Composers at the National Library of Ireland and has taught at many of Ireland’s most prestigious music academies. She was Executive Producer of My Gentle Harp, a six-CD compilation (released in 2008) that is a complete recorded collection of all 124 songs from Moore’s Irish Melodies. In 2010, she presented the Melodies at Carnegie Hall (to two standing ovations, no less) and a year repeated the concert in Russia as part of the unveiling of a sculpture honouring Moore at the University of St Petersburg. Along with extensive publishing and performance work, Una has also produced a number of documentaries for Irish broadcaster RTÉ, including a tribute to French composer tribute to Claude Debussy.

The Thomas Moore Songbook was a huge hit at this year’s Wexford Festival Opera; both of its presentations sold out, something Una wasn’t surprised by, but, as you’ll hear, led to more questions, and more opportunities. As you’ll hear, Una has very strong opinions about the role Moore has played in Irish culture as well as identity. Why should you care about Moore? What does his work say to us now? How can a country forget (and/or ignore) its classical composers entirely? Blame not the bard...

Loss And Magic

By Catherine Kustanczy

On October 30, 2013

In music, remembrance, writing

It’s a strange experience, to mourn someone you never knew.

To write of the horrible shock I felt Sunday morning would be too easy. In public, amongst a throng of people on the Lower East Side, I had to swallow my grief and wait -hours – until I had the privacy of my room and the quiet half-lit space of familiar wood floors and white walls to fully mourn. Tears came -and appreciation. And love.

Along with a bevy of beautiful songs streaming through my mind – hell, my heart (because for all of Lou’s impressive, deep intellectualism, he was, above all, a musician of the heart for me) -my thoughts all through Sunday turned back to my first night of living in New York City. I’d been on a bus all night, and had arrived at Port Authority on a grey March morning, bleary-eyed, coughing, exhausted. But I summoned the energy to scamper off to Le Poisson Rouge that very evening for a Japanese earthquake benefit concert featuring Yoko Ono and Patti Smith. The special guest -a poorly-kept secret as I waited in line, stomping feet to keep warm outside -was Lou Reed. Performing a raucous, gloriously loud and chaotic version of “Leave Me Alone”, he focused intensely on the performance, directing the backing band with a nod or cock of the head, a small frown, a vague hand gesture.

But it wasn’t all dark moods; more than once, this legend, this King of New York, this Factory Poet, this Velvet Transformer, was just a man thrilled to be playing to people in an intimate setting, sharing his work and feeding off the love and appreciation we so gladly provided. He smiled gently at us tiny women rocking out in the front row, and, more than once, our eyes met. His warm smile, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, the soft mouth, the sincere gratitude, the joy of sharing this sound, this moment, this rock and roll, this magic… taken together, it was intoxicating, holy, beautiful.

There’s a kind of intimacy that happens between artists and admirers of their work; words, melodies, voices, the colors chosen, the textures conjured, the shapes and shadows dance and smudged and murmured of, the breathing and sighing incantations with a through-line to divinity, striking chords individual, collective, intimate, epic, to rejoice, to contemplate, to worship. From artists’ bearings in live settings to the way they behave alone, bending and shaping lights, shadows, notes and soon-to-be familiar phrases, the thorny-rosy path of creativity always has overhanging clouds that whisper of the intangible connection between artist and audience.

Something I really enjoy about Lou’s work, no matter what it is, is its insistence on being itself -whether that’s noisy, strange, uncomfortable, irascible, or, alternately, beguiling, thoughtful, romantic, dreamy. His artistry defied easy categorization, definition, or labeling. From the rocker-cool of Transformer to the static chaos of Metal Machine Music to the tender poetry of Magic And Loss, Lou was nothing like anyone, but entirely, unapologetically himself. His genius lay in his ability to fuse pop culture with the avant garde; he could capture the most abstract ideas sonically or in words, and simultaneously write very, very genius, and usually very catchy, music. “Walk On the Wild Side” and “Waiting For My Man” are perfect examples of this fusion, painting a debauched portrait of a seedy situation, while nonchalantly mainlining a catchy, earworm-ish rock sound. It takes real skill to integrate like this -but Lou wasn’t merely a skilled technician; he actually liked -identified -with his cast of characters. He was one of them. That didn’t make him “cool,” as he has been reductively described since his passing; it made him Lou.

There are plenty of articles posted now, from a variety of famous/impressive music and culture sorts: Sasha Frere Jones, Michael Musto, Legs McNeil. There’s also a lot of curiously reductive stuff being written, nay, proclaimed; everyone has a version of Lou, a little box they want to put him in. But his body of work, his sometimes spiky nature, his occasionally contradictory statements throughout the years, they all lend themselves to a sort of Rorscach- like interpretation, as if one could create a Lou-Identi-Kit, piecing him together with any of the pieces that gelled with one’s tastes and beliefs: a dash of Berlin, a dollop of “Dirty Boulevard”, a slab of Bowie, a crumb of Warhol. “The First Openly Bisexual Rock Star“, a male (perhaps wannabe) Patti Smith, his Spotify lists, what and where he ate — everyone has a tidy category or click-friendly angle (hiding a dull cultural cliche) in which they want to slot him. But as Los Angeles Times book critic David L. Ulin wisely noted,

Poet, songwriter, singer, guitarist: the labels don’t matter. They never did. “But you know,” he wrote in “Street Hassle,” “people get all emotional and sometimes, man / They don’t act rational / They think they’re on TV.”

There it is again, that intention, pop culture blurring into something deeper, something darker, something that tells us who we are.

As a teenager, I immediately attached to Lou’s rebellious spirit, clever lyrics, and dark-shaded image. Growing older, I find image matters less, and poetry matters more. Lou’s music and words made me accept age and all it brings, good and bad; he understood “passing through the fire” happens at all stages of life. Lou’s was a wisdom of acceptance and rebellion simultaneously existing and manifesting in the most authentic way possible, whether in the ballsy experimental Lulu with Metallica, or in writing about his intense admiration for Kanye West’s Yeezus.

On Sunday night, all of New York City’s evening news reports reported on his passing. Like many, I identify him with this city. Walking around the Lower East Side earlier that day, everyone seemed to have a connection: one woman did his assistant’s hair; another woman is friends with Laurie Anderson; another woman organized a private event he was booked to play in November. Everyone in NYC has a memory, an opinion, an idea of who or what Lou Reed was: he was kind, he was arrogant, he was grumpy, he was generous, he was full of himself, he was jovial. No matter the opinion, one thing is certain: his work proclaims its innate authenticity, of being one’s self without excuse, and asks -nay, demands – one manifest that authenticity within one’s own life. That is sometimes a tall order, and yet it feels like the right one, as I wake up every day to a time and place asking for masks, images, lesser, more pliable versions of myself. Authenticity is easy; it’s our need to be liked that sometimes gets in the way. Lou didn’t seem to feel the need to be liked much. Yet he understood gratitude, and the intesne connection between an artists and admirers. That intimacy expressed itself beautifully in the silent / loud rock and roll moments we shared in March 2011 at Le Poisson Rouge. It was and remains the best welcome ever: welcome to the city; welcome to your next life; welcome to You.

When the past makes you laugh and you can savor the magic
that let you survive your own war
You’ll find that that fire is passion
And there’s a door up head, not a wall…

…There’s a bit of magic in everything
and then some loss to even things out…

– “Magic And Loss: The Summation“, 1992.