The Chain of Inspiration

 

Vocalist Dawn Upshaw got the chance to commission a work of music.  She chose Jazz artist Maria Schneider that she was inspired by.  She says she heard her album "Concert in the Garden" and "went nutso."  She went to see Schneider whenever she could.  

 Schneider, in turn, was inspired by the poet US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser. "I just fell in love with his poetry... something felt like home" in his poems.   He is "so expressive.  He captures humanity."

What emerged from this chain of inspiration is a Grammy Award winning song-cycle based on poems by US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser.  She wrote the poems with Dawn Upshaw in mind.  

I like to think of this chain of inspiration.  I'm inspired by, recognize it, and use it in my own life. 

Emily Grosholz, in The Hudson Review article, "The Poetry of Ted Kooser," shares a this long reflection by Schneider about the process of that creation.  I love how she's thinking of music that would honor the honesty and beauty of the poems:

I was so in love with all of Ted Kooser’s poetry but was especially drawn to his poems in Winter Morning Walks while thinking about setting his poetry to music. As a composer, you have certain practical parameters to consider, like length and language—and how it all might translate into song. Winter Morning Walks had so many poignant poems and some that were short: both those aspects were great from a practical stance. So, I chose about 25 or 30 that I particularly loved and could imagine speaking effectively as music. I xeroxed them, cut them out, and taped them all over a huge sheet of paper so I’d have every one in front of me, and then I just sat at the piano with them for weeks: me with the sound of Dawn Upshaw in my head (she has in her voice the same kind of humanity I feel from Ted’s poems), and me just jotting down sounds as they came. I muddled my way through, feeling out harmonic colors and melodic contours that seemed like a natural outgrowth of the poems, and some started to emerge like contestants in a pageant. There were a couple of poems I so wanted to use, but I didn’t come up with the right sound for them. However, I still have those in my head for the future: maybe I’m just meant to love them as poems, or maybe I’m waiting to become good enough, or simply to find that right sonic expression. As I worked, I spoke the poems aloud and sang lines with the poetry and the lines of poetry had a rhythm and contour that I tried to honor in the music. I didn’t want to do some crazy deconstruction of poetry that has so much humanity in it, and I didn’t want to appear as the “composer.” I wanted the poems to emerge in song form—to reach people the way they reach me. I wanted purely to honor the honesty and beauty of these poems. I love this man’s poetry, and he’s made my life so much the better: that song cycle is one of my favorite things I’ve written—maybe my favorite. Well, it’s half Ted’s, so I only had to take it half the way to the finish line.

I also love how she says that his poetry has "made my life so much the better."