Orphic Machine

Based on poems by the late Allen Grossman, *Orphic Machine* by his former student Ben Goldberg is filled with delicately nuanced, chamber music–like pieces performed by a rotating all-star jazz band led by Goldberg on clarinet with Carla Kihlstedt singing the adapted lyrics. Highlights include the increasingly expansive “Immortality” and the title track, as well as the elegant episodic pop of “Care.” “What Was That” (which swings deeply on the strength of Greg Cohen’s bass) and the swirling “Line of Less Than Ten” are more concise but no less arresting. It\'s rare that jazz this ambitious is so fully realized.

In 1978 I attended Brandeis University for one year as a freshman. It was my good fortune to get thrown into a dorm room with Tass Bey, a young man from Montreal who believed in the transformational power of literature to a degree beyond anybody I had previously encountered. Tass introduced me to pre-White Album Beatles and the writing of Leonard Cohen. Later he was to introduce me to some other things, but first he instructed me to enroll in a literature course entitled The Representation of Experience taught by a man called Allen Grossman. That course hit me very hard. We read old books – The Bible, Gilgamesh, Moby-Dick, etc., and Professor Grossman showed us into a world where reading, thought, meaning, action, and understanding came together. I wouldn’t say he taught us – it’s more like he embodied the business of knowing. Years later, finding my way out of a dark period of life, I developed a sudden thirst for poetry. I got in touch with the poet Susan Stewart after I heard echoes of Allen Grossman in her work. Susan invited me to attend a 2006 gathering in honor of Professor Grossman’s retirement from Johns Hopkins where he read powerfully from his poems. I began studying a book of his called Summa Lyrica: A Primer of the Commonplaces in Speculative Poetics. The book is constructed as a set of interrelated aphorisms whose purpose is “to bring to mind ‘the poem,’ as an object of thought and as an instrument for thinking.” Around this time I discovered an affinity for writing vocal music, when my group Tin Hat embarked on a project of songs using poems of E E Cummings as lyrics. I found I enjoyed the push-and-pull between words, melody, and harmony. (The Rain Is A Handsome Animal, with six of my songs, was released in August, 2012, on the New Amsterdam label.) Chamber Music America commissioned a composition for large ensemble based upon Summa Lyrica. I had been reading the book for five years, and I intended to compose music based on its structure. But, as a poem cannot be restated in other words (for then it would be a different poem), the book would not allow me to summarize or map it. I got stuck in that useful way of getting stuck that suddenly opens up new possibility: the aphorisms in the book had been working on me, and I needed to let them work directly on the music, by using them as lyrics for songs. Something about the craziness of the idea - not a book of poems, but statements about poetry - writing about writing - really got me going. So I found myself writing songs with words like “The function of poetry is to obtain for everybody one kind of success at the limits of the autonomy of the will.” Orphic Machine, an evening-length work of ten movements, premiered in March 2012 at the Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse in Berkeley, and at the Blue Whale in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles Times, in a review, called Orphic Machine “knotted and occasionally spooky composition marked by dazzling interplay.” With a 2013 grant from the Shifting Foundation, I was able to record Orphic Machine in September 2013, for release in 2014. Professor Grossman speaks of poetry as an instrument for the conservation of value across time. His work created work for me. Now I hope that you will find something of value in the act of listening.

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