WordSong Symposium

WordSong Boston’s premier interactive concert organization (One Text, a Collection of Composers, a Public Conversation), is celebrating its 10th anniversary!  In 2008, we began with multiple settings of William Blake’s The Tyger.  More than 50 concerts later, we’re still roaring.  So, to commemorate our first decade, we’re looking to gather a “circus of Tygers” from New England’s best music schools.

For our program at NEC, we will be combining an on-campus WordSong with a seminar/workshop featuring student and faculty composers and student performers.  In the context of a forum (see description below of how a forum works), we will be guiding a more in-depth conversation among composers, performers, and listeners about creating point-of-view in music and poetry—a behind-the-scenes workshopping of the new settings to explore the relationship between process and product.

Additionally, the works featured on this forum will be included in WordSongs’ final 10th-Anniversary concert at First Church Boston in April of 2019.  It will be a public concert, featuring the whole circus (all the new works from each of the schools) performed by WordSong’s wonderful musicians, including mezzo-soprano Krista River (Emmanuel Music) and pianist Linda Osborn (BMOP).

A WordSong Forum

WordSong’s goal is to reconnect musicians and audiences through shared, active, artistic experiences.  Here’s how a forum typically works: After a brief introduction, the composers ask the listeners to consider the text and share their points of view on it; the listeners, rather than the composers, lead the discussion. This is followed by performances of the songs, during which listeners write down their reactions to the music. Following a short break (for refreshments and individual conversation), the discussion resumes based on the listeners’ points of view on the music just heard; listeners, composers, and performers all engage in a conversation about the music, the words, and the interaction between the two. Each work is performed a second time, in an order spontaneously determined by the course of the discussion.  It is a public conversation about intuitive musical understanding. 

WordSong

Founded in 2008 by composers Howard Frazin and Tom Schnauber, WordSong is a Boston-based music presenter that has created a new concert format focused on public conversation about intuitive musical understanding.  We aspire to reconnect musicians and audiences through shared, active, artistic experiences.  In its 10-year history WordSong has produced 12 forum series and various other programs based on texts as diverse as Theodore Roethke’s My Papa’s Waltz and Langston Hughes’s Harlem. We have presented over 50 performances throughout New England, as well as in New York, Minneapolis, and Washington, DC, and as far away as Vancouver and Bulgaria, premiering over 60 new works by living composers.