Word: songs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...major problem in presenting an experimental cornucopia of new music is one of continuity. Lieberman and Kushnick seemed aware of this: they integrated Kushnick's five songs with Lieberman's virtuoso a capella opening song, "Poly Waly," and Lieberman's own version of the Stevie Winwood tune, "Can't find My Way Home." The Lieberman-Kushnick segment of the program began forcefully, and later drifted to the ethereal with "Holes in the Sky," a 32-bar rendition of a poem by Louis NacNiece. The next four songs formed a cycle beginning with the straightforward harmonic piece, "Velvet Sportcoat," followed...
...emotional jiggler" who asks herself "deep root questions," and expects the listener to do the same. She uses her voice as an instrument, experimenting to discover the right texture, color and feel. The rising glissando in the second verse of "Velvet Sportcoat" abruptly alters the mood set by the song's first verse, and underscores the words: Haze like juice spilled slowly formless/Scent of citrus in my ears." In one of Johnson's compositions, "Instrumental," Lieberman makes bird like sounds that are almost primal as they echo above Joynson's gentle electric chord-picking...
...DEMANDS the musicians make on the listener's untrained ear are substantial but not unreasonable. Consider "Ode to the Apocalypse," which is, in Kushnick's words, a "surrealist love song" about two lovers spending a last night together in the face of the apocalypse; it has seven verses, each of a diffegent mood, meter, and key. It also contains many of the purposely electic elements of Kushnick's "surrealistic neo-class avant garde jazz/rock and roll" music: in this case, a basically straightforward key progression beginning and ending in G minor, and a Beethoven-like hand-over-hand arpegio accentuated...
LOVE IS a plaintive song, and its object in Patience is the aesthete. A band of smitten maidens troops around the stage, fluttering their arms, striking desolate poses and sighing for one Reginald Bunthorne: poet and poseurpar excellence. Bunthorne's dedication, you see, is not so much to his art as to himself. His aestheticism, which issues in a poetry devoted to colocynth and calomel, is mere affectation, a ploy designed to elicit the admiration of his gullible Victorian public...
...devotion to duty. Her scenes with Archibald, particularly when she alternately begs him to "think of me sometimes" and warns him to "think of me sometimes" and warns him to "advance at your peril," are especially fine. But Gustafson's talents are most in evidence when she launches into song. Her strong, pure soprano elevates Patience's plight to operatic heights, her superb diction rarely obscuring Gilbert's lyrics...