An illustrated reading of Wallace Steven’s “Sunday Morning” by Peter Ludwig and a slide choreography of Hubert Howe’s INHARMONIC FANTASY #3. The images of the one become the artifacts of the other.
THE POEM
“Sunday Morning” consists of eight stanzas of blank verse, each fifteen lines long. The stanzas are all self-contained; the glue, if you will, is the main character, a “she,” who of a Sunday morning, when one normally goes to church, prefers to stay at home ruminating about her lack of religious belief and death with coffee and oranges and her pet cockatoo.
The blank verse of this poem is remarkable as such in that the lines consist almost entirely of ten syllables; there are no short lines, and all of the longer lines consist of eleven syllables.
THE MUSIC
Of INHARMONIC FANTASY #3, composer Hubert Howe writes:
“Inharmonic partials are sounds that are not the overtones that we hear with most instrumental or vocal sounds because they do not combine to create a sense of pitch. Another way of describing them is that they are sounds that have a spectrum but not a "timbre" in the way that we usually think. This work was conceived from a desire to create complex, evolving inharmonic sounds that include many different components that fade in and out over the course of a tone. The sounds were created by combining the pitches that occur in many different octaves and compressing them into the interval of an octave and a fifth, or a twelfth. The work consists of numerous short passages that include different numbers of notes, densities, and rhythmic distributions. The inharmonic components are presented in ways that both fade in and out over the course of the tone or are attacked and decay separately. At the climax of the work, these two processes are combined. The piece was a commission from Nancy Bogen, written in 2014, and synthesized using csound.”
THE VISUALS
These are basically digitized photos taken by me hither and yon over the years with my Canon EOS 7D and my earlier Nikon D-90, both with a 20 x 200 zoom lens. Once I scanned the photos, I edited and in some cases composited them in Photoshop, and then assembled the resultant digital images along with a video clip into a “show” in Proshow Producer.
