By Art Edelstein
ARTS CORRESPONDENT
Aaron Marcus could have released an album of solely piano music and it would have been a lovely addition to the world of instrumental piano. Marcus’ knowledge of musical styles is vast, with forays into classical, light jazz, folk and world music.
The musical well Marcus pulls from is deep with a touch that is light but also full of tension when needed. This would have been an album of solo music to savor on a dark early winter’s eve with a mug of hot coffee, tea or other soothing beverage in hand. But add the spoken voice of Sam Sanders and the poetry of several Vermonters to this recording and we have a very different experience, one that is musically and vocally fairly unique to the Vermont recorded sound stage.
Marcus’ playing is familiar to Vermont and New England audiences for the music that comes from piano, concertina and banjo this versatile musician plays with a variety of groups performing at dances with New England and Celtic lands music. We’ve reviewed several albums with the Marcus imprimatur and found them all well worth the listen and purchase.
“Garden Dreams” gives exposure to Vermonters whose writing you may not have encountered before. The CD opens with “Cat’s Morning Song” and “Sled” both written by Montpelier-resident Susan Reid. Reid is well known in these parts as a contra dance and traditional Swedish music fiddler with a vast repertoire of tunes. She is close to Marcus and Sanders as their landlord, but that’s not why they included her poetry.
“Cat’s Morning Song” by Reid will ring a bell with cat owners, or more accurately people whose cats allow to feed them. The poem reflects a keen study of cat behavior personified by Reid’s wit. She must have spent years watching her own black cat Hendrix at the window. Her poetry is front stage here as her writing fills seven of the 16 tracks.
For his part on this opening track and the subsequent tracks, Sanders spaces the lines to give a lot of room for Marcus’ music to fill the vocal gaps. Sanders is a smooth operator. As a former NPR/VPR sound engineer and reader, the spoken word is delivered with ease, grace, and subtle humor. The pitch of voice never seems forced; the words are spaced as if written into a script of word and music containing a goodly amount of reflective time between sentences.
The poems are by mostly local authors, some published, and some not. Along with Reid, Sanders reads poems by Ama Peyman, Danny Dover, April Ossmann, Noble Chute, David Stauffer, Michael Kiesow Moore and Martha Postlethwaite. There is also a poem each by Tennessee Williams and Emily Dickinson.
Both Marcus and Sanders acknowledge that this album represents a relatively new or different approach to poetry reading. “We hope people who think they don’t like poetry can find another portal into liking poetry,” Sanders said.
The music for the album, explains Marcus, required a lot of different musical and piano techniques to achieve the proper aural background for the poems. “There were a lot of techniques for writing,” Marcus said, “some I composed that I wrapped around the poem.” For other poems both performers “read the poem and waited for the music to take shape around it.”
According to Marcus, “We arrived at the poem and music in a lot of different ways.”
Melodies for each poem relied on emotion, and mood. As Marcus explains, “We’re thinking about a lot of emotions beside happy/sad.” Marcus said sound tracks for movies create a mood: “The question we asked was how the music served the poem.” With each poem “so individual, we looked at trying to convey feelings besides happy and sad.”
“We felt the poems also produced emotions of longing, fear, comfort, love and humor,” Sanders said.
Choosing the poems that are included on the CD involved some serendipity. While Reid often posts her poems on her Facebook page, other poems were discovered during the Montpelier’s Poetry Month in April when many of the storefront windows around the city are plastered with poems. They chose several for this album from those.
“We really focused on poems that are not public,” said Sanders. There were also two “from our past that moved us,” said Marcus. These include a short poem by Dickenson and an obscure poem by Williams.
Marcus and Sanders hope this unique album will strike a chord with the public. “We are making something new. It is hard to sell something the public is unfamiliar with,” Marcus said.
“We hope for word of mouth to reach poetry lovers,” Sanders said.
Marcus summed up the impact the album will have this way: “We hope this CD will be a balm for our communities during these anxious times. And we hope these pieces also serve as refuges and companions in our journeys of healing during a lot of the late collective trauma. It’s been hard for us to share and feel emotions through Zoom, and it’s not an accident that nearly all the poems in this album relate to the outdoors and the Earth in some way — because Sam and I have found the embrace of the woods and waters to be so healing.”
Poetry lovers will like the fact that the accompanying booklet contains the poems.
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