by Elisabeth Eliassen
I woke up from this lovely dream, one morning last week: I was standing at the top of one of those fantastic mountains you often see depicted in Chinese landscape paintings. I was intoning a monotone chant, and the sound of my intonation was billowing forward, like the movement of a cloud. When the intonation was finished, I stood breathing in crisp, fresh air and enjoying the feeling of sunshine on my upturned face. Unexpectedly, echoes of the intonation returned, as a song. But the song was now in multiple parts.
When one wakes from a dream like this, one feels compelled to write. Or, that is, this one does, namely Me (with a cup of coffee near by and fingers poised on the keyboard, as the children get ready for school).
One day, very nearly two years ago now, I received a mysterious package from a friend. Inside was a spiral bound music score, entitled "Songs of a Soul Journey." Handwritten on the cover was this "SURPRISE!!! XOXOXO, Ken." I was stunned! My friend had taken eight of my poems (seven from the published collection and one unpublished poem that I had sent around to friends one Thanksgiving…) and set them as a song cycle for mezzo-soprano and piano. WOW!
Ken Malucelli, what can I say about him? An accomplished musician, entrepreneur, impresario, composer, a man of wit and warmth and joie de vivre. Our birthdays, in October, are a few days apart. When you are with Ken, things are lively and fun. Those eyes always have a sparkle in them.
It is an odd experience seeing one's words move off the page of the manuscript to take on a new life as sound, as music. But I must confess, there is something very zen about it: as if there is no need for ownership, but that something created out of love must take on new life in the hands of loving others. That we all influence one another to creativity is natural, and one of the most fabulous aspects to the chain of being.
I can honestly say that I do not know how this particular commission came about, but what I can tell you is that "Fellow Traveler" was one of the songs in Ken's song cycle, and that a few members of our group came to the concert where I sat in the audience and heard the songs sung for the first time. One of those members must have thought, gee, that song would be neat as a choral number. And so then somebody got in touch with Ken, and asked him to set it for the group to sing. And so, here we were, this past weekend, having a World Premiere!
All of this I find quite amazing. I write mainly, though not exclusively, in blank verse and many of the poems I write I would think are anything but lyrical. However, in the hands of a loving other (in this case, my friend Ken), the lyrical line can be perceived embedded in the clumpy, spiky clot of words, and gently carved out into a bird that can take flight. And, in the hands of many loving others (PME), it did, and my poem, and Ken's song, came back to me as a choral landscape with sonorous harmonies.
Thank you, Fellow Travelers. You know who you are…
Elisabeth Eliassen
[Elisabeth's poetry is collected in "Songs of a Soul Journey" ( ISBN 1-4010-2585-4, Xlibris Corp. 2002)]