“An aria is a weather event” <em>(an excerpt)</em>
2018; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 92; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.7588/worllitetoda.92.5.0060
ISSN1945-8134
Autores Tópico(s)Theater, Performance, and Music History
ResumoCOVER FEATURE MUSIC & LIT An aria is a weather event” (an excerpt) by Kevin Simmonds Weather Event: Leontyne Price, a life in verse is a biography of the legendary African American soprano who turned ninety-one in February. The collection details her childhood in Mississippi during Jim Crow, her early studies at the famed Juilliard School, and features the voices of some of her lifelong champions and collaborators such as composer Samuel Barber, conductor Herbert von Karajan, and soprano Grace Bumbry. The protégée of the great Marian Anderson, the first African American to sing at the Metropolitan Opera House, Price is considered one of the most revered sopranos of the twentieth century. Spin America, I couldn’t have sounded like this anywhere else Grooves cut down to bone A terror A reprieve I constitute an order through sound men imagine but could never make What you hear is an other matter yes technique as ladder but already the summit of my sound Salome with soprano Ljuba Welitsch The Metropolitan Opera House, 1949 Her seduction reaches standing room Nothing lost in the velocity of her tide & I want to do that but like this I will undress them Note An aria is a weather event My voice both creates the conditions & withstands its forces above Bradley Phillips, Leontyne Price (1963), oil on canvas, 127.6 x 92.1 cm, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, gift of Ms. Sayre Sheldon, npg.si.edu “ 60 WLT SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2018 Samuel Barber I’ve never been to Laurel & likely never will I only know Leontyne & the scythe of her sound Have you heard her Even on radio her decibels my god! Mississippi banned her Tosca 1955 not long ago & such crimes continue But she is their Movement a credit to Negroes everywhere a diplomat to the whole white world My muse my Cleopatra ~ Men like me wish we had her sound the clearing it makes to be whole or eunuch unhidden possessed by sound that began before a mother made it hanging laundry even before then before the cushion of amniotic fluid the congregation of a girl raptured by sound she too would make for men who scratch out notes first to build a throat & then to hold its breath when this soprano sings ~ a singular steel whose modesty belies its range such surefooted mettle such joy in its atomic number its silvery gray Porgy and Bess 1952 tour Catfish Row is home for now Halfway right about the Negro situation & every night I play midwife until it bears more of a family resemblance It’s all we’ve got & not all bad But easy? Never easy Raced other people’s problems token. black. achievement has no color that space given to me by my country the Man Upstairs I don’t mean en couleur it was broader than that always was now get on with it Kevin Simmonds is a poet and musician originally from New Orleans. His full-length collections include Mad for Meat and Bend to It, the edited anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality, and, most recently, the chapbook The Noh of Dorian Corey. He lives in San Francisco. WORLDLIT.ORG 61 ...
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