Search - Confluence;J.D. Scrimgeour;Philip Swanson :: Ogunquit & Other Works: Spoken Poetry with Piano and Trombone Accompaniment

We are both artists, and we are both teachers, and Confluence originated from a teaching idea. We wanted to bring our respective students, in writing and music, together and expose them to collaboration across the disciplines. In our conversations, we decided that we should try the process ourselves first, and so, without realizing the ambitions of the project, we set out to integrate J.D. s long poem, Ogunquit and Phil s music. Much of the artistic process involved collaborative decisions about how the music and words should fit together what the character of the music should be, when the music should be present, when not. We didn t quite know what we had until we tried the piece out on a few friends and family. Their stunned faces confirmed what we had suspected; we had created something rich and moving. All the poems on this CD, whether elegiac or celebratory, refer to music and acknowledge its power to move listeners. They explore the relation between words and sound, an exploration that is at the heart of Confluence.