Mississippi State’s Department of Music will present its 10th annual poetry and song collaboration program Tuesday evening in the Robert and Freda Harrison Auditorium of the university’s Giles Architecture Building.
Free to all, the 7:30 p.m. event will conclude with a reception sponsored by Sigma Alpha Iota International Music Fraternity.
Karen Murphy, instructor and coordinator of collaborative piano, and Nancy D. Hargrove, William L. Giles distinguished professor emerita of English, cofounded the interdisciplinary program of poetry and song in 2008.
This year’s program is a memorial to tenor Guy A. Hargrove, who died Sept. 4, 2016. A 25-year member of the MSU music department, he performed in the United States and Europe and served for 16 years as conductor and music director of the Starkville-MSU Symphony Orchestra. He also founded and served for many years as director of the MSU Opera Theatre.
For this year’s program, Murphy will serve as the pianist, and Hargrove will give a commentary with illustrations. Singers will be faculty and students of MSU’s music department.
“We had a wonderful time choosing crowd-favorites from past programs and feel certain that the audience will enjoy this delightful retrospective,” Murphy said.
The program’s first set will feature three choral pieces performed by the Schola Cantorum Women’s Choir, directed by lecturer Gail Kopetz. These pieces are Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing,” Robert Frost’s “Choose Something Like a Star” and Langston Hughes’s “I Dream a World.”
The second set will feature songs set to Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” and “Kindness” and Emily Dickinson’s “I’m Nobody” and “Heart, We Will Forget Him.”
Five songs from “Cats,” Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit Broadway musical based on T.S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats,” will be performed in costume.
The third set will include musical settings of Langston Hughes’s spiritual “Feet o’ Jesus,” “Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed” from the musical “Street Scene,” e.e. cummings’s “I Carry your Heart,” “Buffalo Bill’s Defunct” and “In Just-Spring,” and Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” Other song selections include William Shakespeare’s “O Mistress Mine,” as well as “I Hate Men” from the hit Broadway musical “Kiss Me, Kate,” based on Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew” with music and lyrics by Cole Porter.
The final set, performed in costume by the entire cast, will feature four songs from “Cabaret.”
Soloists
Faculty soloists include Assistant Professor Jeanette Fontaine, Instructor Ryan Landis and Assistant Professor Matthew Daniels. Instructor Sheri Falcone will play the clarinet for “Lady Lazarus.”
Student soloists are Cori Reece, Callie Ellis, Haylee Glenn, Blake Breedlove, James Rusthaven, Christon Bertrand, Joe Lindamood, Jordan Dobbins, Samantha Evangelista, Grant Lackey, Kourtney Holmes, Abby Weinstein and J.J. Haight.
For additional information, contact Murphy at 662-325-6641 or [email protected]. Hargrove may be reached at [email protected].
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 36 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.