GUILFORD — Friends of Music at Guilford's annual Midwinter Musicale begins at 3 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 17, in the sanctuary of Guilford Community Church, 38 Church Dr.
Appropriately for Valentine's week, the program is a multimedia consideration of love, as it is woven inevitably through the weft of life and loss, and it includes elements of music, movement, and the spoken word.
Last summer, Jessica Gelter, a former trustee and occasional soloist for Friends of Music, proposed performing David Lang's Death Speaks song cycle.
Lang won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2007 Little Match Girl Passion, a choral work based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. To create this 2011 companion piece of five love songs in the voice of Death, Lang combined excerpted texts from a study of more than 600 lieder by Franz Schubert.
Mezzo-soprano Gelter will perform the resulting 25-minute work with violinist Michele Liechti, guitarist David Ross, and pianist Keane Southard.
To build a concert-length program around the Lang piece, four gravestone epitaph settings by Putney composer Tom Baehr will be reprised by the reconstituted RIP Singers, who presented a full concert of similar works in 2014.
They will also perform Baehr's recent setting of Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas, with piano accompaniment by Southard. The RIP Singers include Tom Baehr, Amy Cann, Christina Gibbons, Tom Green, Jenny Holan, Steve John, Bruce Landenberger, and Andrea Matthews, all members of other regional choral groups and choirs.
To complement the music with other expressive arts, Friends of Music at Guilford administrator Joy Wallens-Penford envisioned including the literary arts, particularly poetry that offers solace and inspiration in the face of death, which can seem to signify not only the end of life but of love.
A few selections expanding this limiting view will be read by actors Adrienne Major and Tom Green. Poets include Kahlil Gibran, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Henry Scott-Holland, as well as Valerie DuBois of Chicago, whose post on a poetry site in early January was found just a few days later and selected for this event.
Relevant prose possibilities began to rise to the fore one by one as well. Jess Gelter asked for a version of The Little Match Girl, so a summary of that heart-rending tale awaits the FOMAG audience.
Then FOMAG member Valerie Abrahamsen offered to read from her 2015 book Paranormal: A New Testament Scholar Looks at the Afterlife, based on research into near-death experiences. Listeners will note that these two works share some common themes and offer an element of hope.
Other published viewpoints on the topics of death and love and moving forward include the first chapter of Robin Truelove Stronk's irreverent memoir Vet Noir: It's Not the Pets, It's the People Who Make Me Crazy, which deals with the euthanasia of a beloved cat. Guilford veterinarian Laurie Schneski will step in as reader for this down-to-earth and entertaining episode.
When Guilford-based poet and author Verandah Porche lost her husband Richard Coutant in 2015, just six weeks after a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, the decision was made to bury him on the property he loved and tended at Total Loss Farm in Packer Corners.
She will read her essay on their story, published in the Spring 2016 issue of Northern Woodlands magazine.
Blending poetry and movement will be interpretive dancer and hand-signer Beverly Miller, who lost a grown son a few years ago. To move through her own grieving process, she began writing daily haiku and taking nature photographs to pair with them.
Various resources on death and dying will be made available for attendees, and Beverly Miller, coordinator of the local chapter of The Compassionate Friends, a national organization serving families grieving the loss of a child, will be glad to speak to anyone interested in participating.