Bringing Poetry into Song | Brian Moll, instructor

This class will involve bringing text and music to life through improvisation and experimentation. Students will explore ways to meaningfully discover established compositions as well as to create musical drama performances of an improvised nature, or to be part of the process of producing newly composed songs.
Students will choose from two pools of texts: one that has musical settings and the other from texts never set to music. Once students have chosen their texts from the first pool, the poetry will be discussed in class and spoken in the tradition of poetic musical dramas, where the poetry is performed with and another instrument. All texts will be explored with sung and played improvisation before a previously composed musical setting is chosen.
In addition, texts never set to music will also be chosen and used to improvise with pianists, instrumentalists and singers. In some cases, these new texts will be used for new songs composed by class members. The class will culminate with performance of some of the pre-existing songs as well as improvised performances.