“In these 101 poems Norbert Krapf explores the richness of his ancestry . . . a book that confirms Krapf’s status as one of America’s finest living poets.” —Benjamin Hedin, author of Under the Spell A collaboration born of a shared love of music, photography, poetry, and Indiana, this book celebrates the history, literature, and art that informs the present and shapes our identity. Richard Fields’s black and white photos are evocative imaginings of Norbert Krapf’s poems, visual metaphors that extend and deepen their vision. Krapf’s poems pay tribute to poets from Homer and Virgil to Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Wendell Berry, and to singer-songwriters such as Woody Guthrie and John Lennon. They also explore the poet’s German heritage, question ethnic prejudice and social conflict, and praise the natural world. The book includes a cycle of 15 poems about Bob Dylan; a public poem written in response to 9/11, “Prayer to Walt Whitman at Ground Zero”; “Back Home,” a poem reproduced in a stained glass panel at the Indianapolis airport; and ruminations on the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, “Questions on a Wall.” “Pursuing a tri-fold creative concept that unites poetry, art in the form of photography, and music is certainly not a light challenge. Norbert Krapf has mastered it with remarkable virtuosity and once again reinforced his reputation as the pre-eminent German-American poet of the English language.” —Yearbook of German-American Studies “Some of Krapf’s poetry is breathtakingly moving. Most of it is very insightful . . . The way he joins history and emotion is wonderful.” —Englewood Review of Books

Why do we find it hard to explain what happens when words are set to music? This study looks at the kind of language we use to describe word/music relations, both in the academic literature and in manuals for singers or programme notes prepared by professional musicians. Helen Abbott's critique of word/music relations interrogates overlaps emerging from a range of academic disciplines including translation theory, adaptation theory, word/music theory, as well as critical musicology, métricométrie, and cognitive neuroscience. It also draws on other resources-whether adhesion science or financial modelling-to inform a new approach to analysing song in a model proposed here as the assemblage model. The assemblage model has two key stages of analysis. The first stage examines the bonds formed between the multiple layers that make up a song setting (including metre/prosody, form/structure, sound repetition, semantics, and live performance options). The second stage considers the overall outcome of each song in terms of the intensity or stability of the words and music present in a song (accretion/dilution). Taking the work of the major nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-67) as its main impetus, the volume examines how Baudelaire's poetry has inspired composers of all genres across the globe, from the 1860s to the present day. The case studies focus on Baudelaire song sets by European composers between 1880 and 1930, specifically Maurice Rollinat, Gustave Charpentier, Alexander Gretchaninov, Louis Vierne, and Alban Berg. Using this corpus, it tests out the assemblage model to uncover what happens to Baudelaire's poetry when it is set to music. It factors in the realities of song as a live performance genre, and reveals which parameters of song emerge as standard for French text-setting, and where composers diverge in their approach.

This collection, written since Two Wives Ago: Selected Poems, includes poems on Isaac and strong-willed Abraham, King Lear and his troublesome daughters, the mysteries of choir practice, the historical prominence of male decapitation, a boy shot by the cops, searching the lake for a missing boy, a hippo in the bed (with the poet's wife?), old age and decay, death-timely, too soon, too late, sweet love in youth and in old age, lilac blossoms in an outhouse, a gardener's hopes and joys and failures, elephant dung, a skunk, a quite day at the frog pond, the history and esthetics of tattooing, a Japanese woodblock print moon, a Robert Frost tool, an E.M. Forster story, and a message which may have gone astray. Cover engraving by J.G. Posada

A description of the character and music of birds, intended to assist in the identification of species common in the United States east of the Rocky Mountains.

Intersecting Film, Music, and Queerness uses musicology and queer theory to uncover meaning and message in canonical American cinema. This study considers how queer readings are reinforced or nuanced through analysis of musical score. Taking a broad approach to queerness that questions heteronormative and homonormative patriarchal structures, binary relationships, gender assumptions and anxieties, this book challenges existing interpretations of what is progressive and what is retrogressive in cinema. Examined films include Bride of Frankenstein, Louisiana Story, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Blazing Saddles, Edward Scissorhands, Brokeback Mountain, Boys Don't Cry, Transamerica, Thelma & Louise, Go Fish and The Living End, with special attention given to films that subvert or complicate genre. Music is analyzed with concern for composition, intertextual references, absolute musical structures, song lyrics, recording, arrangement, and performance issues. This multidisciplinary work, featuring groundbreaking research, analysis, and theory, offers new close readings and a model for future scholarship.