RPO Project

RPO Project and Contests

The next RPO project/contest is for the November concerts. These have a Spanish/Latin theme.

Please listen to the following recordings and think about creating poems inspired by the music. The winning poems will be read at the concerts, just like the postcards in September.

 

 Arild envisioned the poetry to flow off of Ravel's Bolero and/or the Gabriela Lena Frank Three Latin American Dances (Spanish/Latin elements).

Bolero is a form of slow-tempo Latin music and its associated dance and song. There are Spanish and Cuban forms which are both significant and which have separate origins. The term is also used for some art music. In all its forms, the bolero has been popular for over a century.

 

Bolero

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-4J5j74VPw

WRITERS: step one: listen to Bolero. Close your eyes (I'll darken the room). Listen to the music and the rhythms. When you have finished listening, jot down images or memories that came to you when you listened to the piece. Make a list of images and memories you had. 

Then listen to the piece again. What strong image or idea forms in your mind? Focus on this topic or theme.

After listening (at least twice, although you can keep listening...which may become maddening) and brainstorming, select an image and write about it using imagery. Feel free to organize your poem into stanzas or keep a fluid rhythm going (cadence). See: all that learning is helpful for something...

 

Some facts and info: Bolero rhythm.

The bolero is a 3/4 dance that originated in Spain in the late 18th century, a combination of the contradanza and the sevillana. Dancer Sebastiano Carezo is credited with inventing the dance in 1780. It is danced by either a soloist or a couple. It is in a moderately slow tempo and is performed to music which is sung and accompanied by castanets and guitars with lyrics of five to seven syllables in each of four lines per verse. It is in triple time and usually has a triplet on the second beat of each bar. 

A triplet in poetry is either a three line stanza (tercet) or the anapest or dactyl. See LINE AND METER (post below).

 

What might a sample poem look like? Take a gander at this free-verse poem by Jane Clark:

Interpretation: Ravel's "Bolero"

Softly, slyly, flute and drum begin to weave their net Of notes; the slow seductive beat evokes the stomp of gypsy feet Inside some smoky dim cantina, where a woman's silhouette Is dancing with abandon to the pulsing, pounding the Of the flamenco or fandango...the bolero or beguine. It's unremitting rhythm, darkly sensual in tone, Restrains a fierce and frenzied spirit in it's own Measured meter...persistent and alone Beneath the sultry overtones Of the trumpets and trombones, Echoed closely by the throbbing of the strings In which the melody continuously, sinuously sings A refrain that is almost overcome By the passion and the power of the drum, Of the drum. Now, in the same obsessive cadence, and without accelerando, It mounts to it's finale in a thunderous crescendo With the crashing of the cymbals and the gong! And the hot, erotic beat of the drum, Of the drum, of the drum.

Bolero by Gerald Stern b. 1925 Gerald Stern

 

So one day when the azalea bush was firing

away and the Japanese maple was roaring I

came into the kitchen full of daylight and

turned on my son’s Sony sliding over the

lacquered floor in my stocking feet for it was

time to rattle the canisters and see what

sugar and barley have come to and how Bolero

sounds after all these years and if I’m loyal

still and when did I have a waist that thin?

And if my style was too nostalgic and where

were you when I was burning alive, nightingale?   

 

In "Bolero," for example, the rhythm of the dance is duplicated visually on the page, with one extremely long line followed by two short lines in an approximation of the "slow / quick-quick" of this very slow and sensuous dance. I wanted the reader to be stretched out to the limit of the page, and only then snapping back to the left margin--to reality? back to earth?--where he is allowed to take a breath (i.e., the stanza break) before returning to the fray. 

Bolero 
 
   Not the ratcheting crescendo of Ravel's bright winds 
   but an older, 
   crueler 
 
   passion: a woman with hips who knows when to move them, 
   who holds nothing back 
   but the hurt 
 
   she takes with her as she dips, grinds, then rises sweetly into 
   his arms again. 
   Not 
 
   delicate. Not tame. Bessie Smith in a dream of younger, 
   (Can't you see?) 
   slimmer 
 
   days. Restrained in the way a debutante is not, the way a bride 
   pretends she 
   understands. 
 
   How everything hurts! Each upsurge onto a throbbing toe, 
   the prolonged descent 
   to earth, 
 
   to him (what love …)