Sonnet Ascent! (a teaching adventure)

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Students ascend Century Tower

Imagine arranging your students in vertical rather than horizontal space. Imagine them traversing the tower stairs in iambic rhythm, working the meter into muscle memory. Imagine composing a carillon piece from sonnet forms, and parsing sonnet forms through musical notation. Crossing artistic media–and crossing the street from our classroom building to UF’s Century Tower–my Modern British Poetry class recently embarked on a Sonnet Ascent with carillonneur-composer Mitchell Stecker, a graduate student in Musicology. You might say we took poetry from the ivory tower to the bell tower.

Carillon clavier. Photo by Joselliam Urbina
Carillon clavier. Photo by Joselliam Urbina

Proposition A: Inviting poetry survey students to become sonneteers expands the experience of reading formal poems. This is an especially effective pedagogy for British poetry because modern British poets tended to stay in form more often than their American counterparts. (The sonneteers on our syllabus are W. B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin, and Carol Ann Duffy.)

Photo by Joselliam Urbina
Photo by Joselliam Urbina

Proposition B: Generating a musical composition from traditional sonnet forms expands the possibilities for sequencing 21st century music. The aim is not to set a poem, but to transpose a poetic structure into a musical one. The challenge for this carillon piece is to avoid monotony, as the musical equivalent of rhymed words would be repeated notes. How to rethink sonic repetition in patterned forms?

Proposition C: Hearing a musician talk about the creative process of working with sonnet forms can inspire poetry students with their sonnet-making.

Proposition D: Constraint does not close off creative expression.

Excerpt of Stecker's compositionSonneteering and sonatinas. My students had already acquired sonnet-Slide Lecture excerptmaking gear in the form of technical resource sheets. Now they needed to think about form itself in an unexpected way. Why would someone write new music based on old literary forms? Did the constraint present obstacles or limitations?

On Sonnet Ascent day, we warmed up by marching in place as students spoke in impromptu iambic rhythm when I pointed to them. Stecker then discussed his carillon composition in our classroom, focusing on the Shakespearean sonnet movement he would play for us in Century Tower. (The other movements are based on Dantean and Petrarchan sonnet structures.) Here are excerpts from Stecker’s slides. Students asked him questions about his creative process, the layout of the carillon clavier, and how one plays the instrument. We all made an expedition to Century Tower, learning more about UF’s carillon and exploring the soundscapes we made in the 11-flight stairwell. (Later, I recalled the 11-line English stanza form called the roundel.) At the top of the tower, Stecker debuted his composition for my students.

Stecker performs the new composition. Photo by Joselliam Urbina
Stecker performs the new composition. Photo by Joselliam Urbina

 

Claire, MB & Stecker. Photo by Joselliam Urbina
Claire, MB & M. Stecker. Photo by Joselliam Urbina

After making their Sonnet Ascent, my students have gained their rhythmic feet. I look forward to hearing them perform their summer sonnets on our last day of Modern British Poetry.

Never had I more
Excited, passionate, fantastical
Imagination, nor an ear and eye
That more expected the impossible
—  
W. B. Yeats, “The Tower” (1927)

Sources:
Digitized Polaroid photos by Joselliam Urbina.
Lecture slides by Mitchell Stecker.
W. B. Yeats, Selected Poems and Three Plays.
All recognizable people pictured gave permission for this post.
*The linked YouTube video is Benjamin Britten’s setting of Wilfred Owen’s Shakespearian sonnet “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” from War Requiem (1962).
–MB

Alma Maters & Varsity Verse

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MB at PhD Commencement, 1989. U. of Illinois

If you could make a cocktail from the lyrics to American university Alma Mater songs, you’d shake one part praise hymn with one part lofty love poem–and one part Mother’s Day Card. Elevated and everyday, varsity verse sounds from freshman convocation to football chorus, from inauguration to graduation. Wherever a university may be, its Alma Mater song likely has glorious walls or halls bathed in more light than a Thomas Kinkade painting. Its sons and daughters are valiant, and its great name is ever victorious. However generic or dislocated, varsity verse binds generations of college graduates with a timeless past and a beckoning future.

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“A Florida Suite,” by Mitchell Stecker (2015). Debut performance score posted by permission.

On this Fall Commencement weekend here at UF, I’m thinking about my three Alma Maters and the dynamics of varsity verse. The University of Tennessee’s Alma Mater grounds its opening line in “a hallowed hill,” a fitting site for a campus in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. My second Alma Mater song, from the University of Illinois, bears no trace of the surrounding prairie in “Hail to the Orange. Hail to the Blue.” Here at UF, the Alma Mater locates our campus in the vibrant subtropics:

Where palm and pine are blowing,
Where southern seas are flowing.

Perpetually grounded in a state of flux, UF’s Alma Mater is especially fitting for commencements and other ceremonies that mark new beginnings. Composer Mitchell Stecker, a UF graduate student in Musicology, captures this dynamic in his new carillon composition “A Florida Suite,” commissioned for UF’s recent Presidential Inauguration.

Stecker’s four-part composition is not a setting of UF’s Alma Mater. Rather, the Alma Mater becomes a starting point for generating musical motifs from key phrases: Thy glorious name we praise (I); thy noble Gothic walls (III); A joyous song (IV); and the subtropical lines quoted above (II). Stecker thinks of his composition as “impressions” on these phrases. He weaves in allusions to the Alma Mater melody and other UF campus music (including Budd Udell’s “Florida Chime” and the “F-L-O-R-I-D-A” from “We Are the Boys”). Unmooring the Alma Mater, “A Florida Suite” reinvents its varsity verse into new soundscapes that are in turn regal, evocative, and boisterously joyful. Stecker has designed a carillon suite that carries traces of our campus life and landscape while remaining transportable–one could perform it anywhere. What sounding of our Alma Mater could be a better sendoff for our new graduates?      -MB

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Mitchell Stecker and the first movement of “A Florida Suite” in Century Tower. 12/4/15