Silver Songs

Silver Songs, Griffin Candey (2024) 23'Six songs about movies for mezzo-soprano, tenor, baritone, and pianoPoetry by Rae Armantrout, Richie Hofmann, Rebecca Hoogs, Jeanne Murray Walker, Kate Northrop, and Frank O’Hara 1. Ave Maria2. The B Movie3. Scene from Caravaggio4. Another Plot Cliché5. The Difficulty6. The Film Silver Songs (2024) explores our fascination with and relationship to movies — how we see ourselves in them, how we use them as symbols, how we use them as a social space and currency. The cycle really began with Frank O'Hara's Ave Maria, a poem I'd loved for a while for being a quintessentially O'Hara bon mot of American culture, knowing it would make for a big, flashy, campy marathon of a song (beginning, as it does, with a command: "Mothers of America: let's your kids go to the movies!") Several years later, I encountered Kate Northrop's warm and nostalgic The Film, and the theme seemed too rich to resist. These six texts run the gamut from sly and biting (O'Hara) to p