Jared Hedges

Jared Hedges (b.1993) studies music and English literature at Bethel University (St. Paul, Minnesota). His compositions have won awards from the Oregon Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, the Music Institute of Chicago and Webster University, and his piece The Wanderers was heard on Chicago's fine arts and classical station WFMT 98.7. His song cycle, Nellie Bly at Blackwell’s Island was recently selected as part of the inaugural Source Song Festival, where he participated in workshops led by Libby Larsen. This past summer he partnered with musicologist Stephen Self on a project funded by a research grant to transcribe a fifteenth century music manuscript from the British Library. Jared is a music composition student of Jonathan Veenker.

Leigh Matthews

Leigh Matthews is a queer, British-born writer who lives in Vancouver, BC, with a sharp-eyed border collie who is both her biggest fan and harshest critic. Leigh supports her tea-drinking habit as a freelance medical copywriter, regularly attends queer literary events in the city, and greatly admires those in possession of the courage to shout out their poetry to the world.

Leigh's first novel, The Old Arbutus Tree, was published in July 2013. Her second novel, Don't Bang the Barista!, was published in October, 2014.

Kaley Lane Eaton

Kaley Lane Eaton is an award-winning composer and vocalist currently based in Seattle, WA. Her work has been performed across the US and internationally, in venues ranging from Hong Kong concert halls, to the streets of Skid Row in Los Angeles. Eaton’s work is gaining a reputation for its unusual treatment of the vocal mechanism along with its use of electronic media, improvisation, and audience interaction. As a performer herself, Eaton believes deeply in the role of composer as collaborator, and strives to create works that include performers, audiences, and artists of diverse media as equal partners. Honors include a Boston Metro Opera Advocacy award, a Boston Metro Opera International Contempofest festival award and placement as a top ten finalist in the NATS Art Song Composition. Currently, Eaton is pursuing her DMA in Composition at the University of Washington School of Music and is a composition teaching artist with Seattle-based Arts Corps.

Felicia Klingenberg

I taught in the English Department of Langara College for 20 years before recently taking early retirement. My specialty was creative writing: memoir. I have published personal essays and have written an opera libretto, part of which has been scored and workshopped.

Brian Topp

Brian Topp is a first year doctoral student in composition at the University of British Columbia studying with Keith Hamel. Currently he is working on developing new software and technologies for use in the performance of live interactive electroacoustic music. Brian holds a Masters in Music Compsition from the University of Western Ontario studying with David Myska and Paul Frehner and received his Undergraduate in Music Theory and Composition from Acadia University with Derek Charke.

Heather Haley

The Siren of Howe Sound, trailblazing poet, author, musician and media artist Heather Haley pushes boundaries by creatively integrating disciplines, genres and media. With writing published in many journals and anthologies, Haley was an editor and reviewer for the LA Weekly and publisher of the Edgewise Cafe, one of Canada’s first electronic literary magazines. She is the author of poetry collections Sideways, Three Blocks West of Wonderland, and debut novel, The Town Slut’s Daughter. Haley has toured Canada, the U.S and Europe in support of two critically acclaimed AURAL Heather CDs of spoken word song, Princess Nut and Surfing Season.

Katya Pine

A published composer/arranger, Katya Pine has composed music for production studios, independent films, documentaries, television, musical theatre, opera and the concert stage in a variety of styles, ranging from solo to full orchestral. A recipient of the prestigious Floyd Chalmers award, Katya received a composition degree from the University of Toronto, with postgraduate studies in London, England and also in Calgary Alberta, where she completed the MRU Jazz and Contemporary Music program. An affiliate composer of the CMC, the Association of Canadian Women Composers (ACWC), the Screen Composers Guild of Canada (SCGC), BCRMTA and SOCAN, Katya writes extensively for the voice. For more, visit Katya Pine’s website: www.pineproductions.ca.

Mary Elizabeth Aitken

I am a poet. Over my lifetime I have been published as poet, playwright and journalist. I made a living, however, teaching high school students. In March 2013 I had a stroke and it has been challenging to recover. I have been to the Banff Centre 6 times as a poet: participating four times in Writing with Style workshops, and twice in the Feb. 2014 and the upcoming Feb. 2015 Writers' Guild of Alberta retreats. I am excited and intrigued by the tabula rasa aspect of the creative process involved in the Art Song Lab experience. Let the games begin.

Wylie Ferguson

Wylie Ferguson is a composer based in Squamish, British Columbia, influenced by the music of Frank Zappa, Gyorgy Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis, Anton Webern and many others. He attended Capilano University's composition program, studying under Bradshaw Pack and John Korsrud. His music has been performed by the Erato Ensemble, his own chamber ensemble the Pocket Orchestra, and Capilano's various student ensembles. He also plays guitar for the avant rock band Big Evil.

Matea Kulić

Matea Kulić is an experimental writer and performer. Her work investigates questions of identity and representation through language, rhythm and ‘the tongue’ as a radical site of transformation. Since discovering sound poetry she experiments with recording her voice and translating noise onto the page. Her work has been published in The Capilano Review, RicePaper, Emerge, In/Words Magazine, Impressment Mag and The Maynard Review among others. She studied under the mentorship of poet Jen Currin at Simon Fraser University's Writer's Studio.

How much can a composer change a poem?

Composers differ on this point: some are willing to change a poem as necessary in order to make a good art song, while others want to preserve the poem in making an art song. Poets need to know how they feel about having their poems changed in collaboration and make these feelings clear to the collaborator. It’s possible that the collaborator might not feel comfortable significantly altering a poem even if a poet is open to it.

While being flexible with one's poem helps, part of the issue is that collaborators may feel precious about the poem and resist altering it even when it is to the benefit of the collaboration that they not put the poem on a pedestal. I think about how poets can be proactive about making their collaborators feel like poems might be materials to be played with rather than well-wrought urns, as one critic put it.

Sometimes the rarified cultural pedestal on which a lot of people place poetry means that composers might hesitate to ask for changes. If you have a composer who understands that the poem is not set in stone and is instead as alive as you might feel it to be, then the possibilities can really open up in terms of a back and forth.

Live Poets Society

Composers often work with poets who are either dead or otherwise inaccessible (e.g. famous). This can lead to very different responses: some aren't used to asking for changes to the poem when the poet is alive (and may disagree), whereas other composers may feel tremendously free to change a poem having been used to working with poets who can’t protest changes (because they’ve been dead).

There is much to say about why composers tend to work with dead poets (e.g. prestige, intellectual property, funding structures), but these are topics unto themselves. What you're doing here--writing poems and collaborating, all while being alive--is already a major challenge to the way things have been done.

These are a few of the challenges of doing art song as a poetic collaborative practice, different from the norms by which we evaluate poems in other contexts (e.g. publishing lyric poems in magazines). Were we to collaborate with, say, visual artists, the points that I mention above would be different. As perhaps they should be. It’s when I work with artists who don’t identify as poets that I learn radically new ways of understanding my poetry.

Let us know what you think in the comments below!

What makes a good art song poem?

Poems that best fit with "traditional" art song (more on this adjective in a moment) tend to meet the following criteria:

• shorter poems, fewer lines
• more vowels, less consonants, especially "hard" sounding ones
• shorter words (the fewer syllables the better)

Shorter poems can be a good place to start thinking about as possible candidates for art song. In terms of consonants and syllables, the ones that have fewer on both counts would be a better fit.

The shorter the poem is, the easier for the composer

The longer the poem, the more the composer and the music must "chase" the words in order to complete the poem (unless the art song draws from an excerpt of the poem). The shorter the poem, the more the composer is able to play with it, expanding her/his palette (e.g. repetition).

Poets sometimes choose longer poems to submit so that composers have more to work with. While this choice makes some sense, it also runs into two issues: longer poems can be harder to arrange and composers may not want to excerpt the poem if it means “cutting up” a work of art. There's nothing wrong with having a longer poem so long as the poet feels okay with either having it excerpted or having the music chase the words (the latter is usually not ideal).

Shorter words and more vowels are easier and more beautiful for the singer

In terms of sound, vowels are more mellifluous to sing than consonants and multi-syllabic words lead to fewer possibilities from a compositional and singing perspective. The fewer the syllables, the easier it is for collaborators to play with them. 

While vowel and consonant use might be interesting to think about in standard poetry, thinking about vowels and consonants is crucial for art song poetry. There is not usually a reason to pay special attention to vowels and consonants (e.g. in poetry workshops), which is why a poem that might be a good poem in one context may fit differently into art song.

A caveat about "traditional" art song

These are the features of a good, "traditional" art song poem. Yet these tips come with caveats: composers and performers can rightly pride themselves on being able to meet the demands of a challenging poem on these counts (i.e. one that is long, consonant-heavy, and/or polysyllabic). They can identify with wanting to meet the poem where it is rather than being handed a poem that is easy, so to speak. Some can believe that a poem is something that should be autonomous and static, like a bug preserved in amber.

Ultimately, we need to make informed decisions as poets as to what we believe we are offering collaborators: a poem that is a "good" art song poem or one that is more challenging to turn into art song. As poets, we set up pre-conditions for collaboration with our poems.

Let us know what you think in the comments below!